Southern Bookman

Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and other women found New York City sanctuary at Barbizon Hotel

If I could travel back in time, I'd sit in the lobby of the Barbizon Hotel.

Grace Kelly or Joan Didion might pass by, or a Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School student, wearing a hat and white gloves.

The Barbizon Hotel, at the corner of East 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue, was the sanctuary of young women seeking careers, or husbands, in New York City.

Occupying one floor, the Gibbs school offered charm classes and secretarial courses, along with lectures by academics such as Columbia poet Mark Van Doren.

A modeling agency signed young ingenues hoping to appear in department store catalogs and magazine advertisements. After years of discrimination, a resident started her own agency that protected models' rights.

Historian Paulina Bren in "The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free" tells the stories of the famous and anonymous women who called the hotel home from 1927 through the 1980s. The women enjoyed a variety of amenities, including a pool and beauty parlor. Men couldn't go past the lobby. The place was like one of those romantic Manhattan movies.

"The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free" is one of the few new books that entice me. According to so-far positive reviews, it evokes 1950s-era New York style and an age when women were gaining economic and social independence.

New Yorker writer Casey Cep in a review in the magazine's current issue praises Bren's colorful account and gives her own expansive history of the hotel.

Sylvia Plath, like Didion, was one of the college students selected by Mademoiselle magazine to live for a summer in New York City at the hotel and work as guest editors. The aspiring journalists also received etiquette training and met literary and political luminaries.

Plath based her posthumous novel, "The Bell Jar," on her depression-shadowed Mademoiselle experience, and Didion recalled the hotel in her essay, "Goodbye to All That."

Women have not yet achieved full freedom. Bren shines a beacon for the future in "The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily Nemens leaves Paris Review editorship to pursue career as novelist

Paris Review editor Emily Nemens announced Wednesday that she's leaving, three years after being the surprise selection to take over George Plimpton's venerable literary journal.

Nemens, the author of the successful baseball novel "The Cactus League," said she's moving on to write a second book. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “The Cactus League” drew critical praise. 

In her farewell letter, published on the Paris Review's web site, Nemens cited the journal's record circulation, web site and podcast development, and publication of several anthologies during her tenure.

An accompanying announcement from Mona Simpson, head of the journal's board of directors, revealed no signs of displeasure with Nemens, who took over from disgraced editor Lorin Stein, who replaced Plimpton after his death. Simpson lauded Nemens' leadership and announced a search for her successor.

A native of Seattle and a graduate of LSU's MFA writing program, Nemens vaulted into the prestigious position after serving as co-editor of LSU's lauded Southern Review.

After her move to Manhattan, she maintained her Baton Rouge ties, recently recommending the rhythm and blues, swing and jazz programs of WBRH, the Baton Rouge High magnet school's public radio station.

Along with editing and writing, Nemens has also contributed illustrations to the New Yorker and other magazines.

While Nemens didn't rule out a return to editing, she's brimming with talent to develop a lucrative writing career in a  publishing industry more and more dominated by women authors.

Nemens' departure follows a flurry of national media turnover, including the retirement of Washington Post editor Marty Baron last week. The New York Review of Books recently announced editorial changes.

Paris Review aficionados will keenly wait to see who fills one of American literature's prime jobs.

 

 

Shaquille O'Neal opens new door for media diversity

Former NBA star Shaquille O'Neal, one of the most successful black TV personalities, has made a major commitment to increasing media diversity.

O'Neal announced the creation of a new ad agency that will expand opportunities for minority creative professionals.

Based in his adopted hometown of Atlanta, the agency will be called "Majority" because it seeks a talent pool that's 75 percent "black, brown, women and LGBTQ," co-founder and CEO Omid Farhang told the Wall Street Journal. 

“Most agencies still struggle to meet a 25% diversity target,” Mr. O’Neal said in a telephone interview with the WSJ. “We want to flip that diversity ratio to turn the minority into the majority.

“I’m just motivated to do this in a way to create new opportunities,”  he told the newspaper. “A lot of people talk about it. I’m tired of talking about it. I want to do something about it. I just want to make progress.”

While identified as an ad agency, Majority is well-positioned to expand into marketing and public relations, drawing from Atlanta's music, film and media businesses, as well as image-savvy corporations like Delta, Coca-Cola and UPS.

If successful, Majority could revitalize Atlanta's ad industry, which has withered since the 1960s.

O'Neal will not involve himself in Majority's day-to-day operations but will participate in conference calls, give advice and generate deals using his contacts as a TV pitchman. Farhang, an industry veteran, says the agency's diversity will build business opportunities.

The ad agency is the latest venture for O'Neal, one of the most successful entrepreneurs among former pro athletes. Along with endorsing a variety of products, O'Neal owns a number of Papa John's Pizza and Auntie Annie's pretzel franchises.

The owner of Midtown Atlanta's iconic Krispy Kreme restaurant recently destroyed by fire, O'Neal endeared himself to the city by vowing to rebuild the beloved doughnut shop.

O'Neal's also looking to purchase Reebok from Authentic Brands group, according to the WSJ article. Last fall, he participated in the launch of a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, to make media and technology acquisitions.

Along with fellow former Laker Magic Johnson, O'Neal is gaining recognition as a business legend as well as an all-time NBA great.

Pro basketball fans love the former LSU All-American's jousts with Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson Jr. on TNT's NBA show, often more entertaining than its accompanying game.

An all-star center for championship teams with the Lakers and Heat, O'Neal stands out for his witty sallies with Barkley and Smith, and his astute understanding of the game.

While O'Neal has expressed political ambitions and explored a law enforcement career, he has not spoken out on black issues as much as Barkley, and current Laker superstar Lebron James. O’Neal’s new agency shows he’ll be more engaged in widening the playing field for minorities. 

 

 

 

Norman Lear, Jane Fonda steal the show at Golden Globes

Norman Lear and Jane Fonda received special Golden Globes awards Sunday night, nostalgic nods to a vanished entertainment environment.

The 1950s and 1960s are revisited in many of today's productions that received Golden Globes recognition. Lear and Fonda rocketed to fame in that era of media uniformity, now as distant as that of the silent movies.

Yet, the Lear and Fonda career retrospectives broadcast Sunday night showed their defining work as more revolutionary than anything in the Netflix era.

Lear's "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" and "Maud" changed American culture, unlike "The Queen's Gambit," "Emily in Paris," "Schitt's Creek" and "The Crown." Fonda's "Klute," “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” and "Coming Home" excel over "The Trial of the Chicago 7,"  featuring Fonda's ex-husband Tom Hayden, and the overrated "Mank" and "That Night in Miami."

Yes, kids, my boomer arrogance strikes again.

The 98-year-old Lear flourished in an era when three networks produced all of American television. The 83-year-old Fonda gained stardom when the big Hollywood studios still ruled, although the films she appeared in were among those that shattered the old Hollywood model in which her father, Henry Fonda, rose to fame.

While NBC broadcast the Golden Globes, touting new and established network productions, not one show or star from NBC, CBS, ABC and late-comer Fox received a Golden Globes nomination. All of the TV honorees came from streaming services, dominated by Netflix, which has supplanted HBO as the leader in "quality TV."

Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon's Prime Video, HBO Max, Hulu and Apple now control the movie business. The Covid shutdown of theaters has made streaming services the primary distribution model for films.

Now, Time Warner puts its movies directly onto HBO Max as well as showing them in theaters, making HBO as much of a player in film as TV. All of the movies favored to receive Oscar nominations have much bigger audiences on TV screens than in movie theaters.

Even with Covid slowdowns, the streaming services are churning out a glut of new productions, often more artistically challenging than the superhero franchise flicks that now dominate Hollywood.

But Lear and Fonda's shows and films still stand out for their originality and breaking of barriers.

 

Declining sperm counts a threat to human survival, scientist warns

More threats to the human race: declining sperm counts and a weakening gulf stream.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof last Sunday sounded the alarm about epidemiologist Shanna H. Swan's findings that human sperm is disappearing.

That's just part of reproductive system disruptions caused by chemicals found in common household products and other environmental factors, Swan says.

Swan, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, "warns that the impending fertility crisis poses a global threat comparable to that of the climate crisis," the Guardian said in an article Friday.

In a new book Swan co-authored, "Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race," she says “The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival.”

Swan in a 2017 report released her disturbing findings that sperm counts in western countries had fallen by 59 percent between 1973 and 2011.

By 2045, the median sperm count could reach zero, she said in media reports, not elaborating how that could happen unless some males have a negative sperm count.

The plunging sperm count is just one reason for declining fertility rates.

Economic difficulties, changing gender roles and fears about the planet's future are also causing women to have fewer children.

If the reproductive apocalypse is not enough to worry about, the Atlantic Ocean's circulation system that underlies the gulf stream is at its weakest in a millennium, according to media reports.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system moderates temperatures. The system's collapse because of warming ocean temperatures could exacerbate climate change's extreme weather and the flooding of coastal cities, according to media reports.

From moments of human intimacy to oceanic systems, the world's intricately connected. One part depends upon the other. The carbon-based economy threatens patterns of life that developed over millennia.

 

 

Novelist Tim O'Brien's reckoning with Vietnam experience, late fatherhood

As the last World War II veterans pass away, the Vietnam generation enters its final years.

Tim O'Brien, as Norman Mailer did for World War II, defined the Vietnam experience in his novels "The Things They Carried" and "Going After Cacciato" and his memoir, "If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home."

At age 74, O'Brien is aware of his mortality not only because of his Vietnam service. He's the father of two teenage sons born when he was in his mid-50s, and he's haunted by the fear that he won't live long enough to know his children as adults.

How O'Brien's war experience and late fatherhood shaped his life are examined in the documentary "The War and Peace of Tim O"Brien,"  which will be streamed on cable TV's on-demand service beginning Tuesday.

Previewing the film, 'Fresh Air's" Terry Gross interviewed O'Brien Wednesday in one of the show's most entertaining episodes recently.

O'Brien told Gross that he's not haunted by the Vietnam War, echoing a claim he made to her in a 1980 interview.

Gross played an excerpt from the earlier conversation, and it was striking how much aging has changed O'Brien's voice. It's clear that the war shadows him.

After the birth of his sons, O'Brien stopped writing for several years to help his wife, Meredith Baker, raise them. In the 2019 memoir "Dad's Maybe Book," O'Brien recounted the lessons he learned as their father.

O'Brien disclosed to Gross that he is writing again, desperate to finish new books and share his sons' lives.

In an amusing/harrowing segment, O'Brien was taken aback by Gross admonishing him for not stopping smoking, although his lungs have been ruined by two serious bouts with pneumonia, one of them almost fatal. O'Brien says he fears he won't be able to write if he gives up cigarettes, admitting the irrationality of his stance.

The interview was conducted soon after the announcement that former Senator, presidential candidate and World War II veteran Bob Dole is suffering from advanced cancer.

Dole, who received life-threatening wounds as a young soldier, is one of the last members of a generation extolled for defeating Fascism.

In contrast, O'Brien's generation faced years of condemnation. O'Brien in his "Fresh Air" interview said that he's not proud of his Vietnam service because he opposed the war, like so many of his contemporaries.

When drafted, O'Brien considered fleeing to nearby Canada, but chose to go to Vietnam because he knew his small Minnesota town would disparage him as a traitor. He believes going to Canada would have been a more courageous decision.

That's "One of the Things They Carried" as O'Brien elaborates in the interview. May the title of the documentary prove true, and O'Brien find peace at last.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

City Lights Bookstore shone through the fog and darkness of the San Francisco night, a beacon that made me think I was dreaming.

That was my first of several visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore in the city's North Beach neighborhood. Each time, I felt a special sense of reverence and grandeur, as if at a World Heritage site.

Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the bookstore in 1953 as a mecca of free expression, died Monday at 101 at his home in San Francisco. His City Lights Publishing Co. gave the world "Howl" and other revolutionary literary works.

The cause of Ferlinghetti's death was interstitial lung disease, a scarring of the lungs, rather than Covid. But Ferlinghetti's the latest exemplar of American freedom and creative spirit lost during the pandemic. The covid era has brought a devastating toll on American culture. 

Associated with the Beat generation, although Ferlinghetti called himself the last of the generation of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," after Ginsberg's electric reading of the poem at San Francisco's Six Gallery in October 1955.

Ferlinghetti's City Lights Publishing won a court case upholding "Howl's" literary value,  a landmark for freedom of expression.

An acclaimed poet, novelist, travel writer and painter, Ferlinghetti was a major culture figure whose death deserved front-page recognition in The New York Times rather than display at the back of the Business section.

Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind" is one of the few poetry books to achieve best-seller status. Last spring, he published a charming memoir, "Little Boy," capping a multitude of works written during his career. He also was a tireless activist for progressive causes.

The Times' obituary, while noting his Navy service during World War II, shamefully neglected to mention that he was a veteran of D-Day. It also failed to note that he visited Nagasaki after the United States' nuclear bombing of the Japanese city at the end of World War II. Seeing Nagasaki's destruction inspired Ferlinghetti's lifelong pacifism.

When the pandemic threatened City Lights' survival last spring, supporters rallied with contributions to keep the bookstore and publishing company going.

In his later years, Ferlinghetti lamented the high-tech industry's corporate forces ravaging his beloved San Francisco. Soaring housing prices, income disparities and gentrification sapped the social freedom and economic diversity that first drew him to the city.

Ferlinghetti's gone but the soul of San Francisco will keep beating at long as City Lights shines on Columbus Avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

John Keats' poetry lives on, 200 years after his death

Young American tourists like me, clutching their copies of "Europe on $5 a day," packed the Spanish Steps on a splendid midsummer morning.

I was the only visitor to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House next to the Roman landmark where the young backpackers gathered like a flock of birds above Bernini's Barcaccia fountain. 

Adjacent to the Spanish Steps, the two-room apartment where John Keats died on Feb. 23, 1821, was faithfully recreated, down to a replica of Keats' deathbed. After the 25-year-old poet's death from tuberculosis, Italian authorities had burned everything that remained.

When I entered, a severe English woman stroking a cat held in her arms came out from a back room, looked me over, and retreated.

All alone, I inspected the impressive collection of rare Romantic and Victorian books and artifacts, and stood for a moment beside the tiny bed in Keats' room before exiting into the brilliant sunshine and my contemporaries' palpable erotic energy.

In hopes that the warmer climate would improve his condition, Keats had traveled to Italy from England in the fall of 1820 on the Maria Crowther. After the ship docked in Naples, Keats was quarantined before making an arduous journey to Rome.

English artist Joseph Severn, who had nursed Keats during his final three months, drew a death portrait. Severn, in one of history's most encouraging humanitarian gestures, had agreed to accompany the dying Keats to Italy, although he'd barely knew him in London.

After a successful career as an artist and diplomat, Severn died in 1879 at age 85, and was buried next to Keats in Rome's Protestant Cemetery.

I was at the same age at which Keats died when I visited Europe. Now, 50 years have passed away. An epidemic has cost the lives of 500,000 Americans in 51 weeks. At times, it feels as if the world has made little progress in the 200 years since Keats died. Humans have ravaged the natural world that Keats celebrated in his poems. Those 200 years have been marked by endless wars. along with amazing accomplishments. Keats' poems are everlasting.

As Notre Dame English professor Ian Newman said in a recent essay, Keats' death shouldn't overshadow the cheerful, vibrant young poet of  his marvelous letters, a personality so intellectually and artistically aware.

In the winter of Keats' death, let us remember the glorious spring and summer of 1819, when he wrote some of the English language's greatest poems.

 

 

 

 

 

AP golf writer Doug Ferguson doesn't rest in chronicling sport

The Associated Press' Doug Ferguson upholds golf's tradition of great sportswriting.

As a golf fan and connoisseur of newspaper writing, I savor Ferguson's accounts of tournaments such as last weekend's Genesis Invitational at famed Riviera in Los Angeles. Ferguson has been covering regular tour tournaments, the four majors and events like the Ryder Cup since 1998.

Not only does he write daily articles, he also gives Twitter updates and produces a weekly column, "On the Fringe."

Working under deadline pressure, Ferguson covers 28 tournaments a year. He received the prestigious PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism in 2019, following AP predecessors Bob Green and Ron Sirak.

Not yet 60, Ferguson shows no signs of burnout. With his heavy workload, Ferguson delivers the nuts and bolts with literary style.

After watching young Max Homa's playoff victory Sunday over Tony Finau on CBS, I was eager to read Ferguson's report in the AJC on the tournament's finish.

I wasn't disappointed; Ferguson visually captured the drama of Homa's win. His piece recalled Herbert Warren Wind's reports on major tournaments that used to run in the New Yorker.

Ferguson's work is more prevalent as newspapers devote less attention to golf. He's one of the few writers still following the tour week to week. Even The New York Times and Washington Post have reduced their regular coverage of the sport.

CBS, NBC and the Golf Channel extensively televise golf. But a tournament is not history until Ferguson's story appears.

 

 

Mark Harris gives in-depth portrait of Mike Nichols in major biography

Mike Nichols presided over some of the greatest successes and most spectacular failures in American film and theater history.

Film historian Mark Harris' "Mike Nichols: A Life" exhaustively details Nichols' work on each production from start to finish.

While the testimony of actresses, actors, producers, playwrights and others grows repetitive, Harris makes Nichols' triumphs and disasters compelling.

On the set of each production, he's a dynamic captain either bringing his ship safely home or wrecking it on the rocks.

Nichols, who came to America from Nazi-ruled Germany as a young boy speaking no English, was a Gatsby-like, self-invented personality.

After a reaction to a childhood vaccine, he was unable to grow hair and donned wigs and false eyelashes until the end of his life. His immigrant experience gave him an uncanny insight into American life.

While self-conscious about his odd appearance, Nichols enjoyed unlikely success as a lady-killer. He stole two of his wives from Robert Graves and John Osborne, and squired Gloria Steinem, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Lillian Hellman and Rose Styron. 

Unlike many Hollywodd/theatrical mavens, he wasn't a serial sex abuser. Women collaborators from Meryl Streep to Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman and Emma Thompson testify to his empathy.

Portman says that Nichols was the only director who didn't make her "feel creepy" as a young actress. He mentored Nora Ephron in her film career.

Harris, a New York magazine writer and author of "Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth of a New Hollywood," gives an engaging account of how the aimless young Nichols moved from New York City to Chicago, where he met the equally adrift Elaine May.

They discovered an instant rapport, creating an improv comedy act that rocketed them to fame in the Camelot years of the Kennedy Administration. The duo ended up with a smash Broadway hit, "An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May," before pressures of performing led them to quit at the height of their success.

After an brief separation, Nichols maintained a lifelong partnership with his brilliant, beautiful co-star. May directed several classic films and notorious bombs like "Ishatar" and gained renown as a script doctor and quirky actress. She also worked with Nichols on several projects, and they reprised their act several times.

Nichols after leaving the partnership landed immediate success directing Neil Simon's first hit, "Barefoot in the Park," with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, one of the few actresses who didn't wish to work with Nichols on new projects. Her husband, George Peppard, kept trying to sabotage the play. Nor did Redford seek to work with Nichols in the movies.

Insisting on the laughs coming naturally from the script rather than from the actors mugging for the audience, Nichols set a new standard for Broadway comedy.

Guiding Simon's "The Odd Couple" cemented Nichols' reputation for directing popular middle-class comedies. In making "The Odd Couple" a success, Nichols withstood the rancor of Walter Matthau and the fragility of the alcoholic Art Carney.

To counter his image as the master of superficial fare, Nichols later in his career took on more challenging plays, from Chekhov to Beckett, Miller and Stoppard. He apparently didn't care much for Shakespeare. 

Although he had no knowledge of the technical side of movie-making, Nichols in his first at bat scored a major hit with the film version of Edward Albee's landmark play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," pushing Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to scorching performances.

Then, he directed "The Graduate," considered one of Hollywood's most accomplished films. As with Elizabeth Taylor, he persuaded Anne Bancroft to play a much older woman.

Still in her late 30s, suffering from cramps, Bancroft delivered a convincing Mrs. Robinson, seducing the young college graduate Benjamin, played by the then unknown Dustin Hoffman, accused of sexual harassment by co-star Katharine Ross.

In retrospect, "The Graduate" doesn't seem as revolutionary as it did when it burst upon the scene. Considered satirically fatuous and insensitive at the time, the pompous businessman's advice to Benjamin to go into plastics turned out to predict the future.

After the well-publicized failure "Catch 22," Nichols rebounded with the Jack Nicholson/Art Garfunkel/Candice Bergen rendering of Jules Fieffer's "Carnal Knowledge." From then on, Nichols had a steady film career of moderate successes and box office failures. His Broadway career also rocked along. Yet he never reached the heights of his earlier work.

At the top of his fame, Nichols suffered a major collapse brought on by a failing marriage to Annabel-Davis Goff, depression and addiction to cocaine and halcion. Harris, in a searing interlude from the production dissections, examines Nichols' despair and recovery.

Cocaine is a constant presence on Nichols' sets, as was the case with other Hollywood productions of the era. While the work is often brilliant, a sense of waste underscores those years.

Nichols kept going through a range of successes and failures, leading an opulent New York City/Los Angeles lifestyle. Tutored on how to live while rich by Richard Avedon, Nichols enjoyed fine meals, travel to exotic places, and social appearances.  Outside of the theater, his passion was raising Arabian horses. Avedon claims he had a sexual relationship with Nichols, but Harris expresses his skepticism.

Late in life, Nichols found joy and peace in a loving marriage to the TV news star Diane Sawyer. He finished with a smash of successes, most prominently the HBO production of "Angels in America," written by Harris' husband, Tony Kushner. Kushner is among those who give warm memories of Nichols, countering the withering criticism of others.

Nichols epitomized the Hollywood/Broadway legacy of white privilege, continually receiving new projects after failures that would have wrecked the careers of black and women directors.

In the exhaustive litany of actors and actresses who worked with Nichols, only one black is mentioned in the book: Morgan Freeman. He's maligned for lack of preparation in a failed production of Clifford Odets' "The Country Girl," which also starred Frances McDormand, one of the few actresses who didn't find bliss with Nichols.

Harris succeeds in restoring Nichols legacy, which had faded even before his death in 2014 at age 84. "The Graduate" was fresh and vital when it appeared in 1969, but falls short of movies like "The Godfather."

Unlike Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, Nichols didn't contribute as a writer to screenplays, but built upon the scripts of others.  In the theater, he polished the work of Simon, David Rabe, Tom Stoppard, Eric Idle and other playwrights.

And, May is credited as the main creative force in Nichols and May, in which he already played more of a director's role. But his improvisations  displayed verbal inventiveness, and he showed strong acting talent in several roles.

At times giving a fractured portrait of Nichols, Harris at last reveals the depths of the showman's personality. Nichols' power to entertain comes through, in each of the nearly 600 pages.