TV broadcaster Bill Moyers regarded the elite as the enemy

By Ray Bennett
Veteran TV newsman Bill Moyers,  former New York Newsday publisher and press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, has died aged 91. As a broadcaster, he often spun off bestselling books from his TV productions and in 1989 he produced a documentary series with accompanying book titled ‘A World of Ideas’. I did a phone interview with him about it for a short-lived national U.S. magazine called Inside Books. I admired Moyers greatly and I was extremely pleased after my story was published when he wrote to say: ‘I don’t know how you managed to get in so much detail so accurately from a phone interview but I am very impressed and grateful.’

Here’s the story:

Bill Moyers talks candidly with Ray Bennett

Bill Moyers has the well-deserved reputation of exploring important issues and themes on his PBS-TV programmes that the rest of television ignores. But don’t accues him of appealing to an elite audience. He doesn’t buy it.

His series ‘Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth’, he says, has been seen by thirty-four million viewers and the accompanying book spent more than forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Rolling Stone magazine says it is the most popular book on college campuses.

His new book book, ‘A World of Ideas’, also is based on a TV series that aired last year. He has received thousands of letters in praise and gratitude from teachers and judges and from housewives, single mothers and prisoners.

‘The response suggests,’ Moyers says, ‘that it is not just a small slice of the American elite who are interested in those deep questions of life. There’s a large audience out there not satisfied with the tabloid TV and sensastionalism that has gripped us today. The American mind is not only open but it’s yearning for, and seeking, something else.’

If anything, he regards the elite as the enemy whether it’s television, politics or religion. He created ‘A World of Ideas’ – a series of interviewes with an extraordinary collection of scholars, historians, philosophers, artists, writers and activists – specifically to air during last year’s presidential elections.

‘So few voices get heard in a political campaign and on TV it means that tens of millions of people are at the mercy of the brain cells of a very limited and narrow circle,’ he says. ‘We’re at the mercy, in a political campaign, of a relatively small handful of media advisers, politicians, pundits and journalists who say, “This is what the issues are about and if you don’t agree with us then you’re outside the pale.’

He chose people – from the late historian Barbara Tuchman to author Tom Wolfe to pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton – who could illuminate issues he believed would be treated poorly in the campaign. The danger of following blindly one school of thought, he says, is everywhere.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s five-million dollar murder contract on British author Salmon Rushdie is a horrying example of what he means. ‘What the Ayatollahs and Jerry Falwells – because Christianity has its ayatollahs too – show us is the great danger of dogmatism, of the doctrine,’ he says. ‘That’s where the mind closes, when it’s told, “This is the truth and you will either accept it or die”.’

Moyers says he hopes the Rushdie affair will bring people up short and make them think about the intolerance of religious dogma. ‘What the Ayatollah’s contract on Rushdie says,’ he insists, ‘is that religious dogma can be blind, malicious and murderous when all the great scriptures suggest that God does not fear the truth.’

As he makes clear on every page of ‘A World of Ideas’, Moyers is passionate about freedom of speech. ‘Americans are not more intelligent, more virtuous or wiser than other peoples,’ he says. ‘What separates our society from others is our constitutional guarantee of free speech – the First Amendment. That means nobody may have a monopoly on the concersation of democracy. It enables us to crawl up onto the bridge of the ship, grab the captain by the arm, shake him and say, “That’s an iceberg out there”. Is is the First Amendment that allows the lonely dissident to say, “Wait a minute, is that true? Is that right? Is that just?”’

Moyers has been hammering this theme since his first book, ‘Listening to America’, almost twenty years ago, His conclusion was that civilization is a thin veneer of cooperation above a seething ocean of conflict, self-interest, fear and chaos. It is a fragile crust, he suggests, that can be destroyed under the boot of ignorance, prejudice and meanness as easily as the crust of life on the surface of the planet.

He holds the media responsibile for two great sins that endanger the crust – consumerism and forgetfulness. Moyers has worked in commercial television (in two stints with CBS) and he says his counterparts there are decent people who want to be serious about their work and who know that television has a role to play in the quality of democracy.

‘And yet,’ he says, ‘out of a fear that the American people have no attention span they keep going deeper and deeper into sensational subjects and titilating stories that they think will arouse viewes for one more minute until the next commercial.’

Moyers believes TV producers can be divided into those who see Americans as a society of citizens and those who them only as consumers. ‘If you see them as consumers, you go at them trying to divest them of their money,’ he says. ‘If you see them as citizens, you go at them trying to empower them to act in the public interest.’

Television today has seen an explosion of chatter from talk shows to tabloid TV. Broadcasters insist they only give the people what they want. ‘What they’re really sayin is that consumers will tell them sells,’ says Moyers. ‘That’s the ethic at the heart of this mania over tabloid TV and sensationalism. Everyone’s out there to sell something. On TV in general, and in political campaigns in particular, ideas mean what you have to sell, what you have to hustle – the point of view, the product, the ideaology, the position paper.’

As a result, TV concentrates on what’s happening this very minute and forgets the past. ‘I worry greatly that we, as Americans, know everything about the last twenty-foud hours and nothing about the last twenty-four years,’ he says. ‘The Iran/Contra scandal was as dangerous a breach of democratic ideals as has happened since Watergate and yet we’ve relegated it already to a footnote in history.’

He cites Czeslaw Milosz (the Polish writer who won the 1980 Nobel Peach prize for literature and now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley) who said this era has seen such a proliferation of mass media that sociery is characterised by a refusal to remember.

‘A refusal to remember. I think that’s a horrifying reality,’ Moyers says. ‘In Orwell’s “1984”, Big Brother says everything must be flushed down the memory hole and washed away into that vast sea of ignorance out there. What the Iran/Contra scandal showed was an administration that wanted to play tennis with the net down so that it could decide what was foul and what was fair.

‘By consigning Iran/Contra to a footnote, by flushing it down the memory hole, we are leaving ourselves at the mercy of rulers who will tell us what is important and what we should pay attention to. The press seizes upon the moment, forgetting yesterday.’

Still, Moyers, married with three grown children and a confessed movie nut, believes that talk can save the day. ‘I think of democracy, particularly our democracy, as a long-running conversation beginning back in the revolutionary days,’ he says. ‘We talked this nation into existence and we’ve been talking about American ever since.’

He views television as the heart of the global village that Marshall McLuhan defined where people will occasionally come together and sit around the campfire not just to stay warm but to hear the tales of the tribe. He says the response to his TV series and books shows that there are millions who recognise that education doesn’t end with a high-school diploma, that it’s only just begun with a college degree.

‘I look at television as the largest evening class ever offered the American people,’ he says. Paraphrasing Saul Bellow’s observation that adults who attend evening class are seeking culture only ostensibly, that they are really seeking common sense, clarity and truth. ‘People are dying for something real at the end of the day,’ he insists.

While Moyers has achieved his greatest success as a broadcaster, he is at heart a journalist. He worked on the newspaper in the small Texas town of Marshall when he was 15. His books include ‘The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis’, a powerful indictment of the Iran/Contra scandal published in 1988. Invariably, his books contain much more material than the television programmes that inspired them.

Betty Sue Flowers, of the University of Texas, who edited ‘A World of Ideas’, says, ‘Editing these 41 conversations was like participating sentence by sentence in a seminar on our changing American values and how they affect our lives in an increasingly global culture.’

Flowers edits from the raw tape of Moyers’s conversations, which often run longer than an hour but for TV are edited down to 24 minutes. Interview subjects also are invited to amend or add to their remarks and Moyers himself approves the final printed version. Readers, therefore, have a richer abundance of information that viewers of the TV version.

Moyers says he chooses his guests with an for both TV and print. ‘I read constantly,’ he says, ‘and I’m always running into ideas whose authors intrigue me.’

For years, he’s kept a file of fascinating people he’s encountered in print that he would like have to dinner or spend a weekend with. ‘People have asked me what book would I most want to take on a desert island,’ he says. ‘I always say I wouldn’t take a book unless I could take the author too. I can’t read a good book without wanting to talk to that person, to find out what he or she means and explore ideas further.’

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Lalo Schifrin on his love of the music for ‘Tango’

By Ray Bennett

Argentinian composer Lalo Schifrin, who has died aged 93, is known for his concerts, recordings, film scores such as “Bullitt”, “Cool Hand Luke” and “Dirty Harry” and TV shows such as “Mission: Impossible” and “Mannix” but one of his most treasured works was for Carlos Saura’s Oscar-nominated musical “Tango”.

“I feel very proud of being involved in that movie,” Schifrin told me in 1998 just before the film had its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Directed by Carlos Saura and shot by three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, “Tango” meant so much to the composer because of the way the film connected music and film to the terrifying period of dictatorship in his homeland.

During the years of repression in the Seventies when the military and Argentinian dictators were in power, they kidnapped people for any reason, he reminded me.

“It started as a civil war but then, like all these things, it got out of hand and the military became very fascistic and very brutal. Constitutional rights were finished,” he said. “They were torturing people and they were playing tangos very loud in order to cover up the screams of the victims. They used electric prods and any method of torture and they killed many people. They calculated that 40,000 to 50,000 people disappeared in that period. In the movie, there is a tango that I did with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires titled ‘The Repression’. It’s a very, very strong moment.”

He contributed around 45% of original music for “Tango”. Source music was used for the ballroom dance scenes but Schifrin supervised the orchestration of the traditional tangos and one titled ‘Calambre’ by Ástor Piazzolla, with whom he had performed: “I did the score in the rhythm of the tango. The movie is a musical without songs as Carlos tells the story through dance. It’s not a documentary; he tells a story through the tango.”

Schifrin explained that what happened to tango music in that period in Argentina was similar to the swing era when bands led by Glenn Miller, Harry James, Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington were popular: “They were playing for dance but they sounded different. The same thing happened in Argentina for tangos. Each one of the bands had a style. Some of the arrangements we could retrieve but very few. The others had to be reconstructed from records. I had to supervise the hiring of different orchestrators and ensure that the arrangements were exactly the same style as those orchestras.”

He recorded the score in Buenos Aires, he said, because the best tango musicians were there: “I used very good soloists, in comparison, going back to jazz, with Charlie Parker. I had the best bandoneon player, Nestor Marconi. That’s the instrument that Piazzola played. It’s a concertina but it’s big and very difficult to play. It was invented in Germany in the 16th century. In poor churches, they couldn’t afford an organ so they had a portable bandoneon. I had some of the best violin players, all-stars. There’s a pianist named Horatio Salgan who is like an Argentinian Oscar Peterson. He’s 80 years-old and he not only plays but he appears in the movie.”

Schifrin’s musical reputation reaches far beyond Hollywood. Born in Buenos Aires into a musical family, he received classical training there and in Paris and then ventured into jazz in Europe and South America. He performed with Piazzolla and later Dizzy Gillespie, Xavier Cugat and Johnny Hodges. His own works range from concert music to jazz and he has recorded with artists ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes.

He has written many commissioned works and arrangements for orchestras around the world and for such events as the Three Tenors World Cup celebrations in Rome, Paris and Los Angeles. In 1996, he arranged and conducted a major concert in France to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first cinema images by the Lumiere Brothers. Some of the tree-hour concert is available on a CD titled “Film Classics”.

With four Grammy Awards and six Oscar nominations to his credit, many of Schifrin’s recordings are available on his wife Donna Schifrin’s record label, Aleph Records, and via his own website.

He chooses not to name a favourite: “I like all of them because it’s like asking a father which of his children he likes better.”

Schifrin also declines to categorise film music. He told me, “In the whole history of talkies, since sound started in movies, you cannot talk about the state of the art in terms of music because it changes according to the movie and the composer and the style. Sometimes B-movies have great music, so it depends. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to make a generalisation because movies have one aspect that is artistic and the other aspect is industrial. It is an industry and because of that, it depends on fads – wide lapels, you know? Basically, the composers who have personality, they do what they do. Bernard Herrmann, when he did ‘Psycho’, he was not going by fads, he was inventing things. The best composers are the ones who try to make a contribution by inventing things.”

The photo of Lalo Schifrin at the top was taken when he was awarded BMI’s Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award for his outstanding contributions to film music at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna on October 22, 2012. Afterwards, David Newman conducted the Vienna Radio-Symphony Orchestra in a selection of Schifrin’s compositions during the annual Hollywood in Vienna Concert, which celebrates classic and current masterpieces of film music. 

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The look on Anne Murray’s face was one of sheer terror

Anne-Murray x650

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – One of Canada’s most successful singers, Anne Murray, who turns 80 today, became a huge international entertainer but she told me two things had made her nervous – performing in Las Vegas and at the Quebec Winter Carnival.

Murray had plenty of hits after “Snowbird” in 1970 became the first recording by a Canadian artist to go gold in the United States. She became a regular on “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” and Burt Reynolds, who was a big fan, talked about her often on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show”. Hits followed throughout the following decades including “He Still Thinks I Care”, Lennon & McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me”, “You Needed Me”, “Shadows in the Moonlight”, and “A Little Good News”.

Murray was a major attraction in Las Vegas and when I saw her perform in the Riviera Hotel’s Flamingo Room in 1983 with a tight seven-piece band behind her, she sang a string of hits and commanded the stage with an easy line of patter.

It didn’t start out that way. “Vegas sharpens the tools,” she told me. She had been playing the Riviera for two weeks every year since 1978: “The first time I played here, I was so scared that I couldn’t eat. I lost 10 pounds in two weeks. Couldn’t even get soup down before the show. But I made myself go back, over and over, until I got it right. Now, I can’t think of anything that would intimidate me.”

She did have concerns, though, ahead of two concerts she taped in Quebec City that winter for a CBS and CBC television special. The next time I saw her she had left her glittering Vegas garb at home in favour of a down jacket and army-issue boots. It was Winter Carnival time and Murray was nervous.

“I was very reticent to be involved in it,” she told me, “because I thought, ‘These people don’t know who the hell I am’, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed. I was worried about that English-French vibe that I’ve gotten in Montreal many times. I’ve tried to speak French on TV shows and such in Montreal and they just laugh at you. It’s horrible when you’re doing your best to try.”

It turned out to be as easy as a Las Vegas catwalk: “I walked up there and the place went wild. I don’t know why I didn’t think people in Quebec knew who I was. I just assumed they didn’t because I thought they listened to French singers and I’ve never recorded in French. But they surprised me; they couldn’t have been nicer.”

Anne_Murray

Dionne Warwick was a guest on the special along with Glen Campbell, who flew in from a California golf tournament to stand in the snow with Murray as peewee hockey players skated around them as they sang “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Hockey Players”. The singer’s longtime producer, Alan Thicke (who also was a talk show host), wrote special lyrics for the Ed and Patsy Bruce country song.

Despite all her success, Murray seemed very down to earth. Thicke, who had written eight TV specials for Murray, also contrived to have her shimmy down a huge slide at Quebec’s Palais des Enfants. “It was cold enough doing the song with Glen and the kids,” she told me. “Their mothers finally took them home. We had one more shot to do but they left and I don’t blame them. They were freezing.”

She still had to do the slide. “It’s huge and you get on, just on your bum, and you come down. Well, first of all, I don’t like heights, and it seemed I had to climb 50-feet. Three-year-olds are whipping up, no problem, but me, I’m a nervous wreck. I put a piece of cardboard under me and I came down with a kid on my lap. The look on my face is one of sheer terror.”

Ten minutes before showtime at Quebec’s Grand Theatre, in the closest dressing room at the side of the stage, Murray has on a white terry-cloth robe and brown ankle socks.

Suddenly, it’s curtain time and the singer appears in her dazzling Vegas outfit as she steps over cables and strides to the stage.

Thicke calls out to her: “Sing like Anne Murray!”

“I’ll do my best,” she says.

That’s all it took.

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Frederick Forsyth did more than write great thrillers

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – English writer Frederick Forsyth, who died today aged 86, not only wri0te  clever and exciting thrillers such as ‘Day of the Jackal’ (starring Edward Fox, above)  and ‘The Odessa file’, he also was prescient about world affairs.

In the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution and Zbigniew Brzeziński, then U.S. National Security Advisor, declared that communism was dead. Many believed the Cold War was over. ‘I’m not, I’m afraid, quite that sanguine,’ Forsyth told me back then.

I was talking to him about his latest novel ‘The Negotiator’ in March of that year. ‘The end of communism; the end of the Soviet Union … it’s a lovely idea; a lovely thought,’ he said. ‘Empires don’t usually go away that fast. It took the British Empire probably fifty years to die and that was a fairly graceful death, at least without anything like the French wars.’

Moreover, he noted, the Soviet Union was not an oceanic empire. ‘It’s easy if the British want to give Cyprus back to the Cypriots because it’s a long way away,’ he said. ‘If, however, you’ve got a land-based empire and your colonies, so to speak, are on your very borders, that’s very different.’

Many of the bordering states, of course, did achieve independence from the Soviets but Forsyth predicted correctly that it was going to be ‘a hell of a struggle’ to persuade the masters of the Kremlin to give it to them.

‘They’re just not going to stand by and witness what they would see as the dismemberment of the homeland,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be over in a puff of smoke. As long as you have dedicated communists in control of Moscow, you’re going to get a very high level of scepticism about us in the West. One knows beyond a doubt that there is a school of thought inside the hardest of hardline clubs in Moscow that regards any concession whatever to the west as anathema. They will always be with us. The question is whether or not they ever take charge.’

Born in my home town of Ashford, Kent, Forsyth’ had a long career as a newspaper reporter and columnist, often for the Daily Express. After his third novel, “Dogs of War”, was published in 1974, it was reported that he planned to quit writing thrillers. He was quoted as saying, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ve done the three I wanted to do. I don’t like writing anyway and I’m quitting.’

It wasn’t quite like that, Forsyth told me. ‘I found myself in the summer of 1973, having prepared, researched, written, edited and promoted three novels in forty months, absolutely knackered. When someone asked about a fourth book, I said I had no plans to write any more novels. At the time, I didn’t. I was taking a break, taking a rest. I didn’t quite say never again; I said no plans. It was five years before I put pen to paper.’

That was in 1978 with ‘The Devil’s Alternative’ and he went on to write more than a dozen more. An RAF pilot during World War II, he became a reporter for Reuters and the BBC with stories including an attempted assassination of then French president Charles de Gaulle, which inspired him later to write ‘Day of the Jackal’. He gained fame as a freelancer covering the civil war involving Nigeria and Biafra and with a non-fiction book titled ‘The Biafra Story’ published in 1969. Then he turned to fiction.

‘As far as I was concerned, the whole “Jackal” phenomenon was a total surprise, a real turn-up for the books,’ he said. ‘I more or less dashed it off in a space between assignments, as I thought to make a few quick quid and get back to journalism. It just took off and the sums involved were such that I’d have been crazy to go on working for pennies when people were waving contracts at me.’

His first three books were all made into movies. Veteran British director Ronald Neame made ‘The Odessa File’, starring Jon Voight (pictured above) and Maximilian Schell. John Irwin, known best for the TV miniseries ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ made ‘The Dogs of War’ with Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger.

I’d heard that Forsyth hated the film version of ‘Dogs of War’ and he said, ‘Yeah, well, no need to deny it.’ He loved what Austrian filmmaker Fred Zinnemann, who was nominated for nine Academy Awards as best director and won three, did with ‘Day of the Jackal’ starring Fox and Michael Lonsdale.

‘I think it’s universal: it’s a wonderful film,’ Forsyth told me. ‘Zinnemann, who’s obviously a giant in film, really stuck closer to the story than anyone else ever bothered to do. The guys who snafued it were the ones who rewrote their own stories.’ What about John Mackenzie’s ‘The Fourth Protocol’ with Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan? ‘Well, I produced that one,’ he said. ‘It’s alright. Not as good as “Day of the Jackal”.’

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When US TV censored hip-swinging Tom Jones


Tom Jones then x650

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Fans of “The Voice” might not suspect that the venerable Sir Tom Jones, who turns  85  today, was censored on American television when he was younger.

His show “This is Tom Jones” aired on the ABC network for three seasons until 1971 and his electrifying performances made him a huge sex symbol that terrified his network TV bosses.

When Jones first appeared on U.S. television – in 1965 on “The Ed Sullivan Show” – the cameras moved to facial closeups when his pelvic thrusts began as they had when Elvis Presley appeared on the show.

Later, on “This is Tom Jones”, ABC sent a female censor to monitor his performances. He told me, “She used to sit there and watch me. I remember once singing ‘Satisfaction’ and she said, ‘You can’t move like that and sing that song, it’s too suggestive.’ I said OK, but I did sing it and I did move like that, and we got away with it it.”

Jones was always a genial interview. I was a fan from the days he used to jam on British TV shows with Little Richard, John Lennon and Jerry Lee Lewis and others, and demonstrated that he had the chops to stay with the best of them.

He used to play at the Elmwood Casino, the nightclub in Windsor, Ontario, that was the biggest such venue in the Detroit area in the seventies. He had  emerged in the sixties on the strength of the hit song “It’s Not Unusual” from the obscurity of Britain’s workingmen’s clubs. He told me, “That’s where entertainers start there. It’s a great training ground in front of a tough audience. If you can make fellas that are drinking beer listen to you then you’re getting across.”

Jones had developed his from-the-hip singing style even then and there would be the occasional over-excited woman in the audience with an annoyed husband. An occasional bottle would be thrown: “I never got hit, though. If it got ugly, we’d close the curtains and get the hell out.”

Tom Jones performance - Newbury

Later in his career, he would be bombarded by hotel-room keys and knickers thrown on stage by adoring female fans. When I interviewed him in 1981, he told me his style wasn’t really something he had much control over – “I can’t lay back on a song” – and he viewed his macho strutting with humour: “You can’t take it seriously. I laugh at myself a bit. If it’s an up-tempo number, a sexy number, then you do it. People want to enjoy themselves but they don’t want something thrust at them.”

At that time, Jones was making a TV comeback after 16 years in a show taped in British Columbia. The TV series, “Tom Jones”, was made in Canada for one simple reason, he said, “We wanted to do a series for syndication but it’s difficult to get people to invest in this kind of show in Los Angeles because it’s very expensive there.”

Canada, however, offered tax-shelter investments and a favourable exchange rate on the U.S. dollar: “Our producer, Clancy Grass, is a Canadian and he came up with the idea of doing it here. Canadians want people to come here and do shows, films or TV or whatever, so it’s good for Canada and it’s good for the entertainer.”

The show sold steadily to nations in South America, the Phillipines and China, and was seen across the U.S. in 1982. He had remained popular in concert, playing at Caesars Palace two months a year in two-week stints, and he spent seven months on the road. He also continued to have hit records with releases such as “Darlin’” and “What in the World’s Come Over You?”

Speaking in 1981 when he was 40, Jones had been away from Britain for seven years and he hadn’t been back. He made no bones about why he lived in the United States: Promoters in Las Vegas and elsewhere in North America were eager to pay substantial sums to a man whose vigorous singing put new life into dwindling nightclub audiences – and the U.S. taxman let him keep more of it.

He said, “I daren’t go home for a visit. I like living in Britain and if I go back for a short visit it would just be teasing me, so I’d rather not. I’d get homesick and would want to stay, it would tempt me so much.”

He used to carry a little bit of Wales around with him wherever he went in the form of a bristle dartboard from Caerphilly, just down the road from Pontypridd, South Wales, where he was born Thomas Jones Woodward. There was a larger piece beside the pool at his home in Bel Air but it didn’t travel well. It was the old red telephone box from his end of the street in Pontypridd.

Jones said, “I heard that they were putting in new phone boxes and I thought, my God, I’d love to have the one from the end of our street. That was our phone when I was a kid. It was the only one we had.”

He had it shipped out complete with its lists of British exchanges and it sat in the shade of the Georgian-style home that he bought from Dean Martin. It was similar to the home he had for many years in England in the Surrey town of Weybridge, he said: “I wanted a house that was nearly the same and this is – the red brick and everything. I had all my furniture brought over and all the fittings. I seldom go out when I’m there so really it’s like being in Britain … except that when I’m out by the pool, the weather’s different.”

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Tony Curtis on Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and more

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Nobody loved being a movie star more than Tony Curtis, who was born on this day 100 years ago and who died in 2010, and as he got older he liked nothing more than to talk about it. “Don’t I have great stories?” he said to me. “Don’t you fucking love it?”

Curtis did an hilarious impression of Cary Grant to seduce Marilyn Monroe (pictured below) in “Some Like it Hot” (1959) but he told me that when director Billy Wilder screened the film for him, Grant said, “I don’t talk like that”,  and Curtis said it just as Grant would have. They had starred together in the Blake Edwards war comedy “Operation Petticoat”.

some like it

I spoke to the star of films such as “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957), “Operation Petticoat” (1959), “Spartacus” (1960), “Taras Bulba” (1962), “The Great Race” (1965), and TV’s “The Persuaders” at the Flanders International Film Festival on Oct. 18 2003 in Gent, Belgium, where he received a special Joseph Plateau Holemans Award for lifetime achievement.

Curtis appeared chipper and he was happy to chat about his life and career although, at 78, he said he wasn’t that interested in making more films: “I don’t want to grow old on the screen. I don’t want to play doctors and judges and lawyers, grandfathers and grandmothers, surgeons. I really don’t. I find living such an interesting experience. I don’t believe in ‘seniors’ or ‘juniors’.”

Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, NY, of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, he still hadn’t lost the accent fully but he said he always wanted to be a movie star: “Ray, when I was a kid, I decided I wanted to be in movies. I’d go to the movies and see those images, those shadows, I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s for me.’ So what did I do? I started to jump on the back of trolley cars, jump on the back of taxicabs, climb up the trestles of the subway, climb up walls, chain link fences, jump from one roof to another, we’d put mattresses there.”

Tony Curtis x325Curtis had no formal education in acting but he was a good athlete and he tackled life like an obstacle course: “Everything is an obstacle course. Being in the movies, I know my distance from you to here. I know where the mike is. I know the table lamp. I know everybody moving around me. I catch everything. It’s becoming aware of life, don’t you see? And that helps you in whatever profession you choose. By watching everything, it helped me as a painter, as a psychologist – as a person who reads other people and can read myself.”

To have had his career gave him a great deal of pleasure, he said, and it was a joy to be who he was: “I’m so fucking privileged. I started out – this is not a Horatio Alger story, ok? To have done what I’ve done in my life is really appealing to me. I don’t think of it as some great accomplishment. In an odd way, I expected it. I knew I was going to make it in the movies. I knew I was a handsome kid. I knew I could get all the girls I wanted. I knew I could jump and learn how to swim and fence, dive, ride horses.”

He always preferred physical acting to the kind that depended upon expressing emotion: “For me, an actor’s strength is in his movement and not in his emotional madnesses. You’re jerking off in Macy’s window when you’re playing those parts and your excitement, or your action, is getting angry. Anybody can do that. That isn’t action, that’s just a mental attitude about yourself.”

There was never a movie he made that he demeaned or looked down on: “Nothing. I did a movie called ‘The Lobster Man From Mars’.  The special effects were the worst. It’s still very difficult for me to eat lobster in a restaurant, though.”

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He made two early pictures with “Singin’ in the Rain” star Donald O’Connor including “Francis the Talking Mule” (1950), and he said they became great friends: “I loved him. What a guy he was. What a brilliant, brilliant dancer. You saw what he danced like? How the fuck he never ended up one of the great dancers … I’ll tell you why, because he worked at Universal Studios, like I did. Had they given him the opportunity, he would have danced with every one of the great ones.”

O’Connor danced as well as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, Curtis said, “And he was an excellent boxer, the kindest, sweetest man. I’d go out to visit him at his house in the Valley where he had an 8mm movie projector. He’d put on a porno movie and shoot it out the window onto the garage door across the street. People would drive by and go, ‘What, what?’ and then he’d shut it off. That was my pal. I had a lot of fun with those guys.”

Curtis spoke of his “Some Like it Hot” co-star, Jack Lemmon – “What a man he was; what a life we had together. Cary Grant. Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck.” But when it came to Kirk Douglas, not so much. They made “The Vikings” (1958), “Spartacus” (pictured below) and “The List of Adrian Messenger” (1963) together.

“He’s the only actor that I found more difficult to be around, more neurotic, let’s say. And that’s not a negative,” Curtis said. “He’s an excellent picture-maker. Boy, he sure knows how to get his picture made. He knows exactly how to delineate it; where to put the energy. But every picture he makes is a Kirk Douglas movie, all the rest of us are minor players. I’ll give you a good example, if I may. ‘Spartacus’, OK? Who gave him those crewcut haircuts? Where did he get someone to give him a Beverly Hills crewcut haircut? All of us were fucking walking around looking like gorillas and he comes out with this haircut. I don’t know.”

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Curtis had no illusions about the business of showbusiness: “Hey, my pal, there ain’t no such thing as a movie that doesn’t make money. There’s absolutely no movie in the world that doesn’t make money. The money they spend on making it, when they’re making it, is a deductible item. So, if it looks on paper that it cost $8 million, it really cost $950,000. That’s then. Now, that $950,000 that it costs to make, is nothing. You can’t even build a house for $950,000. And look at the money people make today. And how much they get for theatre tickets. What is it, 10 bucks a ticket? Can you fucking believe it? I was going to the movies when it was 25 cents. Ten bucks a ticket. Twelve bucks. It never catches up to itself, it’s always growing.

I told him that it was a revelation to me to discover that in terms of the big studios, it’s not about profit, it’s about revenue. He said: “Exactly. Look how clever you are, to say that. Those pictures made 50 years ago, if that picture shows on television one night and generates $432, that’s like going into somebody’s wallet and taking out $432 and leaving. How could a movie like that generate that kind of money 50 years later? Don’t you see? That’s why everybody wants to get into the movie business.”

Signed to Universal, Curtis had been in films for seven years before his big break came along. “I never got into pictures that were … well, they were all right but they were made in a hurry; there was no finesse to them; they didn’t try to get a really important director, or get some other actors. They were ‘B’ movies; that’s what we made at Universal. That made it difficult. But when I got ‘Trapeze’, that changed everything.”

curtis claudia x325Curtis and Burt Lancaster played aerial performers opposite Gina Lollobrigida (pictured with Curtis above) in Carol Reed’s colourful “Trapeze” in 1956 and one year later they teamed again for Alexander Mackendrick’s highly acclaimed “Sweet Smell of Success”, which showed the world that Curtis was a fine actor as well as a movie star: “That catapulted me into the major player category. From then on in there wasn’t anything I could do that would be wrong.”

He made another picture with Mackendrick in 1967, an offbeat comedy titled “Don”t Make Waves”about the American Dream sixties’ style with Claudia Cardinale (pictured above left with Curtis) and Sharon Tate: “Now that was a very abstract movie, but he did it. He was a very brilliant man. Difficult to understand and very demanding of his work. Very domineering, you know. He wanted everything to work the way he wanted it. But look at the movies he made, ‘The Man in the White Suit’, ‘The Ladykillers’. Wow!”

Curtis said he modeled himself on Cary Grant more than just in “Some Like it Hot”: “Cary Grant, the most gracious man, extremely intelligent, very perceptive about life. I admired him a lot and I emulated a lot of him. Not in my behaviour so much but so much rubbed off on me. I’m a gentleman now. I’m very appreciative of people’s friendship. I like to be gallant. I like to kiss ladies’ hands. All these little things that I felt Cary Grant did automatically, I decided I would do. Perhaps he learned it from somebody else, Noel Coward or somebody. And that’s the fun of it. It’s just fun. It’s not demeaning or difficult, or anything.”

We would have spoken longer but then Jeanne Moreau entered the hotel lobby and fans surrounded her with cameras. Curtis had appeared with her in Elia Kazan’s “The Last Tycoon” (1976), and he said, “Forgive me, I must say hello.”

Curtis made his way through the small crowd, not much taller than the petite French actress. He seemed so pleased to see her; she just smiled.

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Life wasn’t always easy for Loretta Swit on ‘M*A*S*H’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Loretta Swit, who has died aged 87, is remembered fondly for playing ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan in ‘M*A*S*H’ on TV for eleven years but life on that show wasn’t always easy for her. It was a struggle for a woman to be heard in the midst of an otherwise all-male cast dominated by Alan Alda.

‘I’ve had to fight for the growth and development of my character,’ she said when I interviewed her in 1981. At first on ‘M*A*S*H’, as in Robert Altman’s movie (in which Hot Lips was played by Sally Kellerman), Houlihan lived up to her nickname. She panted for the married Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) and suffered mightily at the hands of pranksters Hawkeye Pierce (Alda) and Trapper John (Wayne Rogers, pictured above)

It took time before there was a general raising of consciousness and after Linville left in the fifth year, Hot Lips cooled down. It was in Swit’s nature to look on the bright side of things but she agreed that life on the show wasn’t always tranquil. ‘Nothing simmers on the set,’ she insisted. ‘If we have something that needs to be straightened out, we have a little cubicle off to the side where we work on our lines. We stop shooting and go in there and work out the problem. There’s never been a big problem. There’s never been a horrendous thing that couldn’t be worked out.’

Harry Morgan, who played Col. Sherman T. Potter from Season 4 onwards, tended to disagree. ’There are a lot of strong characters around here and they’re all men,’ he told me. ‘It’s been kind of difficult for her.’ 

Mike Farrell, who played Capt. BJ Hunnicutt from Season 4, agreed with Morgan. ‘It’s fairly clear that she’s felt herself outnumbered at times,’ he told me. ‘Because of her nature, she’s less of a take-charge type and in meetings she doesn’t come on as strong as Alan Alda, for example.’ 

Swit told me she never contemplated quitting the show even when two others in the cast departed after Season 3  – Wayne Rogers and  Mclean Stevenson, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake. Linville left after the fifth and Gary Burghoff, who played Radar (as he had in the movie), quit after Season 8.. 

‘Wayne left for very legitimate reasons,’ Swit told me. ‘He was not getting enough screen time. He wasn’t being exploited fully and he knew it. I thought it was a good move for him. I can’t say McLean’s move was invalid – he wanted to be in his own show – but when he was leaving, he said to me, “I know I’ll never be in anything as good as this again but I simply have to try. I have to go out there and be No. 1.” Larry felt that after five years he’d done Maj. Burns as much as he could. And Gary felt that he’d done everything he possibly could with Radar.’

Executive Producer Burt Metcalfe told me the changes in Houlihan’s character were the result of mutual agreement. ‘We were as interested in changing her as Loretta was. She began as a kind of sex-crazed military martinet. When Larry Linville left, we felt we couldn’t keep playing that same one note so we began to soften her and show more humanity, as we’ve done with a number of other characters.’

Even so, Swit’s screen time began to dwindle and she said she wasn’t sad that ‘M*A*S*H’ was ending. ’Ten seasons are plenty,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to wind up now. I really think it’s time. We may have said everything we need to say or have to say. It is a very hard act to follow. If I do decide to do another series, it will have to be as interesting, as human and as caring. I don’t know whether I’ll find it.’

To her surprise, it looked as if she’d found one right away. On hiatus from ‘M*A*S*H’ in 1981, she was signed to play Det. Christine Cagney opposite Tyne Daly as Det. Mary Beth Lacey in a TV movie ftitled ‘Cagney & Lacy’ (pictured below).. 

Shot in Toronto, where I interviewed Swit, it was a hit and Swit was all set to sign on for a full series until the producers of ‘M*A*S*H’ pulled the plug. They refused to let her go even though that show was nearing its end. 

Swit told me later that she never intended to do the series but Harry Morgan pointed to the fact that she was not very prominent in the last season of ‘M*A*S*H’. Noting that the ‘Cagney & Lacy’ TV-movie got tremendous numbers when it aired on Oct. 8 1981, he said, ‘I’ve no doubt that the spark plug was Loretta. Here, we just finished a script in which she had four or five lines. When you think what you might have done with something like “Cagney” except you’re tied to this, it’s apt to make you feel a little moody.’

The final episode of ‘M*A*S*H’ garnered extraordinary ratings in February 1983 and meanwhile ‘Cagney & Lacy’ had debuted in March 1982 with Daly and Meg Foster as Cagney. The view was there was little chemistry between the two leads and it was cancelled after six months. It came roaring back to life in March 1984 with Daly and Sharon Gless as Cagney. Foster went on to have a great many credits and ‘Cagney & Lacy’ was a hit for five seasons with Emmy wins for Daly and Gless.

Loretta Swit was nominated for Emmy Awards ten times as outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for ‘M*A*S*H’ and won twice. She never found another series but she has numerous credits in TV-movies and shows including ‘Murder She Wrote’, ‘Burke’s Law’ and ‘Diagnosis Murder’.

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Bernard Slade: From ‘Bewitched’ to Broadway

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Bernard Slade, who was born on this day in 1930, created TV shows such as “The Flying Nun” and “The Partridge Family” but he had his greatest success with the smash hit Broadway play “Same Time, Next Year”.

When I interviewed him, he had funny tales about his time as a Hollywood television writer and my favourite was from when he was story editor on “Bewitched”. He told me that in a script session, one of the studio suits queried a line of dialogue. Slade said he wanted to know: “Would a witch say that?”

bsladex 325The Canadian writer was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 1978 movie version of “Same Time, Next Year”, which was directed by Robert Mulligan and starred Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn (pictured below), who had won a Tony Award for the stage version and was nominated for an Osca as best actress for the movie.

I interviewed Slade in 1976 for The Windsor Star when the play was on tour even though it continued to run on Broadway for three-and-a-half years. He told me: “You know, it’s odd. I wrote television comedy for the money. I wrote the play for myself because I wanted to. And yet, it’s the play that’s made me the most money. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.”

Slade had no illusions about his work in TV in the 1960s: “When you’re working in television, you can’t think, well this is crap. You’ve got to do the best you can. But you have no control; you are controlled. The networks have approval at all levels of production from casting down to individual lines.”

His tolerance level became lower and lower, he says: “These people with a background in sales and their mechanical testing techniques. I got into a row over a pilot I’d written and in a huff I got on a plane to Hawaii.”

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On the plane, he began to write his play: “I write well on planes; there’s nothing else to do. By September 1974, the completed play was in the hands of a producter. It was cast, a director chosen and rehearsals began the following January. Within weeks it was previewed in Boston. In the spring, Bernard Slade was the toast of Broadway and his play, “Same Time, Next Year” was the biggest comedy hit in years.

He told me, “The main difference between writing plays and writing for television is that in the theatre you have control. I annoy my friends in television by saying that in the theatre you know you’d have to do it again next week. Television is a producer’s medium. A director is simply a traffic director. It’s not how good he is; it’s will he be done by Tuesday?”

In television, you write to order, he said: “In the theatre, you put something in and you get something back. Now, with the success of ‘Same Time, Next Year’, I have the freedom to write what I want. It’s a validation of your point of view of life when audiences will sit still for three hours for something you’ve written. It gives you confidence to go on.”

Slade went on to write more plays, notably “Tribute”, which starred Jack Lemmon on Broadway and in the 1980 Bob Clark movie version for which he was nominated for an Oscar as best actor, and “Romantic Comedy”, which starred Anthony Perkins and Mia Farrow on Broadway with Dudley Moore and Mary Steenburgen in the 1983 Arthur Miller film version.

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Stephen Sondheim was grateful for London’s ‘fresh eye’

By Ray Bennett

It wasn’t only Broadway that Stephen Sondheim loved. In London in 2011 to mark his 80th birthday, the Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist who was born on this day in 1930, accepted a Special Laurence Olivier Award for his outstanding contribution to the stage. ‘I want to talk about the contribution British theatre has made to me,’ he said. ‘I am so grateful.’

He listed a string of productions including ‘A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum’, ‘Follies’, ‘Into the Woods’, ‘Sunday in the Park with George’, ‘Passion’, ’Assassins’, and ‘Sweeney Todd’.

Presenting his award at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane were Angela Lansbury, who starred on Broadway in ‘A Little Night Music’ and ‘Sweeney Todd’, and British theatre mogul Cameron Mackintosh (pictured above with Lansbury), who produced ‘Follies’ in London and in 2019 renamed Queen’s, one of his venues on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Sondheim Theatre. 

Mackintosh sat with Sondheim on stage as Lansbury sang the nostalgic number ‘Liaisons’ from ‘A Little Night Music’ and the three-hour production ended with a massed choir of theatre students who sang ‘Our Time’ from ‘Merrily We Roll Along’.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, Sondheim said that he treasured what he called ‘the fresh eye’ of British directors. ‘Having your work re-imagined is what makes theater immortal,’ he said.

Sondheiim’s distaste for critics was well-known but in 2012 he accepted the U.K. Critics’ Circle Award for Distinguished Services to the Arts. Friendly and approachable, he noted drily that he had some affection for the London critics because they had given him his first decent reviews. The presentation took place during a luncheon at the theatrical venue still named the Menier Chocolate Factory after its previous occupants in London’s East End. Maria Friedman, who won the Olivier Award for best actress in a Musical in 1997 for ‘Passion’, performed several Sondheim songs.

The setting was appropriate because in 2006 the Menier company’s production of ‘Sunday in the Park With George’ (pictured) was impeccable. Directed by Sam Buntrock, it revealed the true beauties of a difficult show and fulfilled  Sondheim’s ambition to meld his music with the artistry of Georges Seurat’s sublime paintings.

Caroline Humphries’ musical direction was sharpness itself while the singing was glorious. Daniel Evans, as an artist who marched to a different drummer but led a solitary life, delivered some of Sondheim’s most inventive lyrics masterfully. Jenna Russell, as the beautiful but neglected Dot used a northern English accent that gave a deeper resonance to words such as ‘Sunday’.

It remains the finest stage musical that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen plenty. It went on deservedly to be a West End and Broadway triumph.

Sondheim died on Nov. 26, 2021.

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When Canadian actress Alberta Watson was just Susan

Alberta Watson - Version 2 x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – I knew Canadian actress Alberta Watson, whose birthday was today, a long time ago when she went by her first name, Susan. To meet Susan Watson in 1977 was to fall in love. She was 21, beautiful and a force of nature.

We stalked each other around a CBC party when we first met and went out a few times. Then she took her middle name and was Alberta Watson and became a star.

Sadly, our paths never crossed again but you never forget someone like that. Susan Watson 3 x325I still have the edition of TV Times from January 22 1977 when we put her on the cover. What’s amazing is that she had no TV show to plug. Colleague Wessely Hicks mentioned her role as Aspasia in something titled “Honour Thy Father” and a bit part part in a CBC drama called “Sara” and that’s about it.

Hicks wrote that she is “still aspiring to be an actress despite the dearth of work in the profession” and Susan said, “Right now, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing – not even auditions.”

In spite of that, such was her charisma that we put her on the cover of a national magazine. She told TV Times: “I catch glimpses of what I want to be as an actress. It has become very serious for me. I’m losing the street urchin in me. It bothers me.”

Fortunately, she always stayed in touch with that street urchin and it was part of what made her such a fine actress.

She starred in movies such as “Spanking the Monkey”, “The Sweet Hereafter”, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “A Lobster Tale” plus TV shows including “King of Kensington”, “Hill Street Blues”, “The Equalizer”, “Law & Order”, “La Femme Nikita” and “24”.

She died in 2015 aged 60. I wish we had stayed in touch.

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