2023 Reading Roundup

The best new teevee-related book that I read last year was Patrick Stewart’s Making It So: A Memoir.  Wince-inducing title notwithstanding, it’s about as far from the anecdote-after-anecdote, ghost-written-plot-summary-padded celebrity victory lap that I expect by default whenever I pick up a big star’s autobiography.  Stewart writes about his real-life adversities, from his abusive, alcoholic father to the affair with a Star Trek guest star (Jennifer Hetrick, who recurred as a love interest for Captain Picard) that broke up his family, with a thoughtfulness that makes those stories as compelling as good fiction.  Writing about yourself with candor and insight isn’t that hard – any glib egomaniac can entertain a reader that way for a few hours – but what Stewart pulls off here, a rich, literary evocation of the time and place that produced him, is much rarer.  The actor was an avid, if not always humble, learner, genuinely curious about art and other people, and his prose exudes that quality in an infectious way.

Out of the hundreds of television professionals I’ve interviewed, maybe only three (Norman Lloyd, Del Reisman, and Ralph Senensky, for the record) have had what seemed like total recall, and Stewart might belong in that company.  His evocation of the nondescript Yorkshire town where he grew up in poverty – he devoured the classics in an outhouse, the only place he could find any peace and quiet – was so vivid and flavorful that I plugged the address of the Stewart family’s modest row house, 17 Camm Lane (still there), into Google Maps and spent a bit of time wandering virtually through the streets of Mirfield, which appear almost unchanged since the teenaged Patrick roamed them.  Reading Making It So is like walking around in a vintage Ealing or Rank movie, or maybe even one of Terence Davies’s trapped-in-amber recreations of the past.  The poetry of Davies may not be on these pages, but the descriptive clarity certainly is.  I was sad to see Mirfield recede into the past as Stewart launched upon his career, thinking we’d inevitably end up in more familiar territory, but no: his journey through regional, touring, and finally the most prestigious of Shakespeare companies supplies an equally fascinating glimpse inside an unfamiliar world.  Even if this account were written by someone you’d never heard of before, you’d want to read it.

A minor detail that stayed with me is that Stewart is a car buff – an amateur racer who was more impressed with Paul McCartney’s MG than with Paul himself when he met the Beatle in 1964, and who decades later tooled around L.A. in a vintage Jag, shaking his fist at the traffic, at a point when he’d had enough success to hire a driver if he wanted to.  Gene Roddenberry and Paramount’s colossal misread of Stewart wasn’t just cultural – the shiny pate as a signifier of middle age (I’m older, incidentally, than Stewart was during the first few months in which he played Picard); the intimidating RSC pedigree and the English accent, the populist aspects of the former and the Northern undertones of the latter both lost on your average American – it was a fundamental misunderstanding of his personality.  This was not a captain who was going to sit behind a desk, and if the producers hadn’t yielded and let the star’s alpha energy shape the character, I’ll bet Jean-Luc Picard wouldn’t have lasted much longer than Tasha Yar.

Stewart’s oft-repeated Star Trek: The Next Generation origin story of arrogant priggishness loosened up by his fun-loving castmates is front and center here and, as usual, it scans more as a subtle reassertion of who’s boss – leadership through grace rather than force – than the exercise in self-deprecation it pretends to be.  Also repeated from many an interview, and couched within a superficially respectful portrait, are the subtle digs at Roddenberry, more interested in talking about golf than Stewart’s problem of bringing his character to life; Sir Pat was a good fencer in Shakespeare school, and he’s still deft with the blade.  (And he validates my pet theory that golf is a great tell for exposing presumably interesting people – Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Barack Obama – as bores.)  Like most of us, Stewart is the hero of his own stories; he clearly enjoys stardom, and I suspect he craved fame, and sought the center of attention even before he had achieved it.  Yet somehow the modesty that is his default stance in Making It So doesn’t feel feigned.  I’d surmise this is because Stewart is the atypical actor who has his shit together, who figured out who he was as a person before he had success in his profession.  But then maybe that’s my fundamental misread; if I ever hang out with him (and frankly, I’d like to), I reserve the right to decide that he’s insufferable, and just cannier than most at playing a down-to-earth bloke.

As for the topics the fanboys will make a beeline for – Dune, Star Trek, the X-Men franchise – Making It So is candid but undeniably perfunctory.   At times, Stewart’s efforts to engage with his most famous credits are hilariously perfunctory, as when he settles in for a full ST:TNG marathon, inviting the reader to re-watch along with him, then gets bored after covering three or four episodes (including such milestones as “11001001”) and meanders, without ever getting back on track, into several affectionate pages on guest star David Warner, whose mid-sixties stage Hamlet had a huge influence on the future Sir Pat.  If your only reaction to this endearing book is to get mad about Stewart’s comparative disinterest in the projects that made him famous, well – look, when I watched William Shatner’s “Get a life” sketch on Saturday Night Live, I didn’t see the humor in it at all.  How dare Captain Kirk dismiss his legacy and his fans (meaning me) with such a thoughtless, self-indulgent gesture?  I was furious!  The thing is, though, I was ten years old.

At the other end of the celebrity memoir spectrum, and somehow bearing an even worse title, sits To the Temple of Tranquility … And Step on It!, by character actor Ed Begley, Jr., whose nearly sixty years in television stretch from My Three Sons to Better Call Saul.  First of all, I’m still processing the revelation that Ed Begley pere could, as they say, get it: that the growly character actor who looked 68 when he was 48 (his age when Ed, Jr. was born) was a serial philanderer who enjoyed longterm relationships with several much younger women.  One of them, an NBC page, was Ed’s mother, although nobody bothered to tell Junior this until he was a teenager and the woman was dead.  Juicy as that is, it’s all downhill from there, as Ed loses the thread of his perhaps-parental-trauma-triggered slide into addiction and undistinguished acting, both of which he overcame in the early eighties (via AA and some good teachers, respectively), for a series of self-indulgent forays into name-dropping and star-fucking.  Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and Eve Babitz and Ed Ruscha and many more are in here, but Begley finds little of substance to say about them.  Begley’s laudable social and environmental activism presents itself mainly in the form of rueful “yeah, I’m THAT guy” quips; when Cesar Chavez turns up, all we learn about him is that Chavez somehow managed to tolerate the presence of Ed Begley, Jr.  The one insight I’ll retain from this book is that Victor Ehrlich – the talented but preening, glib, and unbearably obnoxious doctor Begley played with great verve on St. Elsewhere, his breakout success – barely existed on the page when Begley was cast; the writers assured him that they would build up the character in response to his performance.  Talk about telling on yourself.

Speaking of St. Elsewhere: Because it’s slim, badly copy-edited, and from a tiny publisher, I assumed Bonnie Bartlett Daniels’s Middle of the Rainbow would be just a footnote to her somewhat better-known husband William Daniels’s thorough and very entertaining 2017 autobiography, There I Go Again.  Call me sexist, then, because Bonnie’s account is just as vital as Bill’s.  It is legitimate, I think, to look at them as complementary, perhaps best read in tandem, and not just because Bartlett (unlike in her acting work) adds her married name to her byline.  I remember There I Go Again as a terrific read, honest and mature, but Bartlett is so unsparing in her depiction of her spouse – his emotional repression and unthinking sexism, his phony New England-ish accent (an affectation adopted off- as well as on-screen), the infidelity and alcoholism that led to their move to Los Angeles and the revival of her dormant screen career – that I felt the urge to go back and see how much of all that Daniels had fessed up to.  (I did check to see if Daniels mentioned the affair, with an unnamed Broadway producer, that almost split the couple up in the late sixties or early seventies.  It’s not in there, and in that and other instances, it’s hard to intuit whether Daniels was being discreet about details that might have embarrassed Bartlett, or if Bartlett is punishing Daniels for soft-pedaling his bad behavior in a way that cast her own choices in an unflattering light.)

Like Daniels, and pretty much every other performing artist active in the immediate post-war era, Bartlett spent a lot of time in analysis, and that experience informs her perspective on her personal life as well as, I suspect, her approach to her craft.  If Daniels’s domineering stage mother provided his foundational trauma, then Bartlett’s seems to have been a father who was inappropriately sexual around his kids.  In the family tradition, Bartlett herself teeters on the verge of oversharing on matters of intimacy, but her still-seething contempt for the various industry men who harassed her (and worse) feels earned and timely – even though, maddeningly, she opts in most cases not to divulge their identities, even of the Edge of Night co-star who raped her at the peak of her early stardom in television.  A shame that this fellow will go to his grave, or already has, with his legacy untarnished.

Julia Bricklin’s concise and very useful biography of Hannah Weinstein is the first new book in a while that belongs on your blacklist shelf – wait, you do have one, right?  My fellow blacklist nerds will recognize Weinstein as the impresario behind Sapphire Films, which kept many of the best blacklisted writers gainfully employed, amid a tangled thicket of noms-de-plume, on several action series made on the cheap in England between 1955 and 1960. Those shows, especially the first one, The Adventures of Robin Hood, were configured on purpose to incorporate some basic leftist tropes (steal from the rich, etc.) while remaining ideologically po-faced enough to sell to American networks.  I can’t attest to how much lefty propaganda Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, Ring Lardner, Jr., and others may have smuggled into Weinstein’s quintet of derring-do half-hours; I hope it was a lot, but I confess I’ve been defeated by the talky, formulaic storytelling any time I’ve taken a whack at them.  Most recently it was the swashbuckler The Buccaneers, and I lasted exactly three episodes, even with pirate captain Robert Shaw on board.  (Get it?  “On board”?  Because boats.)  Four Just Men, the last Weinstein series to launch and the only one with a contemporary setting, remains untouched but close to hand, thanks to the DVD set from Network Distributing, the abrupt collapse of which – sorry for the digression, Hannah – was a major blow to anyone interested in British television history, and certainly the biggest bummer (even more than the end, apart from streaming, of Netflix) in a year of depressing milestones in the home video landscape.

Anyway: The handful of producers who stuck their necks out and succeeded in throwing work to starving leftist writers in the fifties and early sixties are a fascinating lot.  They’re often mentioned in the artists’ accounts of the era but none of them has been at the center of one until now.  Charles Russell, the failed Hollywood actor turned New York CBS staffer who kept a different constellation of writers (including Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky) working in secret on live shows like Danger and You Are There, is probably more asterisk-famous than Weinstein, just because that tale was turned into a popular movie, Martin Ritt’s The Front.  I’d love to know more about the unlikely profile in courage that was Russell, who after his one great moral triumph slid into an epic personal and professional decline.  Yet Weinstein’s story may be even more compelling, if only because she did it backwards and in high heels.

If Weinstein has been unjustly neglected by blacklist historians, it’s probably less because of her sex than because she seemed to come out of nowhere.  Neither a Hollywood or a Broadway figure but a labor organizer and political operative, Weinstein fled the US with her three daughters (but not her husband, who bailed as soon as HUAC circled) and learned everything she needed to know about production by hanging around a few French film sets.  It wasn’t, but she certainly made her entry into television producton look easier than anyone else ever did.

At first Bricklin’s book is a little dry, at least relative to its hot-stuff title – Red Sapphire! – and part of that may be because she had no access to relatives or family accounts and thus confines herself to a uniformly external perspective on Weinstein and her work. (Indeed, if I’m interpreting a few cryptic asides correctly, Bricklin may have faced active opposition to a more authorized biography.  She even seems, and perhaps I’ve simply been infected the paranoia of the McCarthy era here, to have avoided mentioning Weinstein’s daughters by name as much as possible; one of them, Paula, whose fame as a movie producer has far eclipsed that of her mother’s, is listed in the index exactly once.)  This proves less of a handicap than you’d expect, although I think it’s at the root of my only major qualm about Red Sapphire, which is an inclination (signaled in the introduction by some wide-eyed and already dated asides on Trump and 1/6) to smooth over distinctions between Weinstein’s radical activism and the liberal mainstream.  In the maddening absence of sources charting Weinstein’s own intellectual evolution, Bricklin’s evident disapproval of Soviet communism (a position ultimately adopted by a majority of blacklistees, but by no means all of them) risks standing in for her subject’s point of view.  Who knows; Weinstein was a pragmatist, and she may well have joined the Vote Blue No Matter Who crowd had she been unfortunate enough to live into the current century.  But would she really have seconded Bricklin’s brief, dismissive assessment of Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party presidential run – which, in her most high-profile pre-television job, Weinstein managed and may have been the real power behind – as having “suffered from ill-defined, or mixed, or even absent messaging”?  To my mind, the Wallace campaign is one of the most optimistic moments in American electoral politics.  But we simply don’t know what conclusions Weinstein chose to draw from its defeat.

Overall, Bricklin’s research is impressively thorough, and her assessments of her subject are cogent and even-handed (especially with regard to the perennial conundrum of the blacklist-breakers, that is, whether they were acting on principle or exploiting top talent at bargain rates).  The course she charts through the convoluted backstory of Weinstein’s unique operation clarified my previously vague understanding of how it came into being and worked in practice.  This was, after all, a British company making television for the American market, with British actors and crew, financed by British entrepreneurs and produced by an American, and written clandestinely by American writers.  Those writers were, in one of the book’s most compelling strands, creatively frustrated by their remoteness from the set and susceptible to paranoia and irritation over the labyrinthine process devised to protect their anonymity (and Sapphire’s foreign sales): every story memo and paycheck had to pass through an absurd Rube Goldberg relay of multiple intermediaries.  One source Bricklin and I shared, the writer Albert Ruben, who was a story editor at Sapphire early in his career, threw up his hands when I presented him with a list of Robin Hood’s pseudonymous credits and asked if he could decode them.  Bricklin was more tenacious with Ruben, and resourceful in response to the problem that nearly all of Weinstein’s other collaborators died before she began work.  Her solution was to track down the children of many of them and press them for second-hand memories, and she incorporates this material into her work more persuasively than I would have thought possible.  (Bricklin also makes excellent use of Weinstein’s FBI file.)  The story of Sapphire eventually turns into a colorful and dramatic one, worthy of screen treatment as a distaff The Front, in which our heroine finds an enchanted forest (actually a woodsy Surrey estate that Weinstein bought and turned into both a residence and a production center, so that she in fact lived among her rubber-armored knights and their flesh-and-blood horses for a time) and runs afoul of a most dastardly villain, who casts her out of it.  (I’m not going to “spoil” that last part.)

Although the Robin Hood section is detailed (even to excess; a ten-page chapter describing a press junket to the real Sherwood Forest seems to exist more because Bricklin found a thorough account of it than because of the event’s significance), there’s a bit of just-get-it-done fatigue following the collapse of Sapphire.  Weinstein’s portfolio as a film producer was modest but it includes a masterpiece, John Berry’s Claudine, and it’s a big disappointment to see that film summarized in a paragraph.  The next ten years of Weinstein’s life – comprising her only other film credits, a pair of Richard Pryor vehicles, and then her death in 1984 – receive only two paragraphs.  If a mother lode of the Weinstein family’s archives ever opens, I hope Bricklin will get the chance to revise and expand her chronicle.

And, some quick takes ….

• Sideways thumbs were verboten for Siskel and Ebert but they aren’t for me, and that’s where I landed on Matt Singer’s Opposable Thumbs.  Singer compiles a lot of funny anecdotes about the production of the show and a detailed account of its gradual evolution toward the argumentative format that seems inevitable only in retrospect.  But the rest feels a bit redundant if you’ve read Ebert’s excellent memoir Life Itself and recall the copious media tributes to both critics following their cruel deaths from cancer.  Instead of the exhaustive appendix of all the films the pair (p)reviewed that I was hoping for, the last 25 pages comprise foofy capsules of sleepers the boys thumbs-upped into prominence; it’s typical of the book’s not-quite-obsessive-enough approach.

• Joel Thurm is gay but his memoir Sex, Drugs, and Pilot Season still manages to be homophobic, as well as misogynistic and consistently crass.  The veteran casting director opens by insulting one of the stars he takes credit for discovering (David Hasselhoff), and describes sexual encounters with the likes of Rock Hudson and Robert Reed with leering romance-novel cliches.  Around the medium-spicy gossip, Thurm paints a comprehensive, convincing portrait of the studio and network politics around casting in the seventies and eighties, but it’s not worth hanging around inside this self-absorbed Hollywood striver’s head for that long.

• Late to the party and dripping with flop sweat, Peter Biskind’s Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV is at least the fifth book I’ve read about HBO and/or television’s 2000s “Golden Age.”  This endless, unfocused sheaf of trees that should still be alive follows exactly the same blueprint as its predecessors of mythologizing or de-mythologizing whichever toxic auteurs, anti-hero(ine) cable dramas, and self-aggrandizing studio execs are in or out of favor with a given author.  Enough already….

• Maureen Ryan’s appalling Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call For Change in Hollywood unearths some significant scoops about workplace harassment (and worse) on recent TV shows, but recounts them in a colloquial, almost jokey, tone, surrounded with frivolous first-person asides.  The sources who shared their trauma with this reporter should be furious that she chose to center herself in their narratives.

• I’ve never watched an episode of a post-Dark Shadows daytime soap and I probably never will, but my friend Tom Lisanti’s Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History is a very digestible primer on what it was like to work in TV’s most under-documented subculture during its heyday.