Professional Entertainment – People Pay to See or Hear It – Page 8

Wait Till Next Year

The Book of the Week is “Wait Till Next Year” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, published in 1997. This is the first portion of an autobiography of a New York female baseball fan who grew up in the suburb of Rockville Centre, Long Island in the 1940’s and ’50’s.

During the author’s childhood, there were three baseball teams in New York: the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. Between 1949 and 1957 inclusive, one or another of these teams played in the World Series. The author’s father inspired in her a diehard Dodgers fandom. She was taught to keep score, and did so for every regular season game for years and years, starting in the late 1940’s. It was a time in history in which men played for their love of the game. The greats at that time included Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Peewee Reese, Gil Hodges, Enos Slaughter, Robin Roberts, Richie Ashburn, Allie Reynolds, Phil Rizzuto and many others.

Kearns Goodwin was raised as a Catholic, but attended public school. Nevertheless, the nuns struck fear in her heart in many ways, one of which was pressuring parishioners to refrain from entering any house of worship other than a Catholic one. So when Campanella was coming to her area to speak at a non-Catholic church, she faced a moral dilemma. The priest reassured her that she would not be going to hell, because the event was not a religious service.

Baseball was so popular in the author’s community that in 1955, a radio broadcast of the seventh game of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series was piped through the public address system of her high school. The kids were willing to stay after school to hear it. Back in the day, World Series games were played in the afternoon. When the Dodgers won, thousands of people danced in the streets. The baseball players came back to a Brooklyn restaurant that evening for their victory dinner, interacting personally with fans without any security at all.

For the first twelve years of her life (before the neighborhood changed), Kearns Goodwin’s family was quite close with all of the different (white) families (of different religions) in her community. Their homes were as open to her as her own home.

Read the book to learn more about the author’s coming of age in a bygone era of baseball and Postwar suburbia.

Wild Ride

The Book of the Week is “Wild Ride” by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach, published in 1994. This is a long story largely similar to many others in which one person acquires and abuses too much power in an organization that eventually comes to a bad end.

The horse racing industry is largely a playground for the wealthy, as it costs big bucks to purchase, stable and train horses for racing. There is only a tiny probability of profiting, considering all the different risks, and the factors required to produce a winning horse.

Major racing sites are located in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky; New York City, Saratoga Springs in New York State, and Hialeah in Florida.

Calumet Farm was the site of the training and spawning of racehorses. It was owned by the Wright family, whose patriarch’s goal in the 1980’s was to turn it “… into a bustling assembly-line style breeding operation, hellbent on producing winner after winner.”

In the early 1980’s, J.T. Lundy wed a Calumet heiress with the aim of inheriting the large horse farm. He inherited it at 41 years old. He immediately engaged in excessive spending on farm renovations, the purchase of a corporate jet and additional horses, and paying more workers. In the industry in general, new systems were created by financiers to cash in on the horse-racing boom.

Lundy spent other people’s money (namely the Wright family’s) to fund his wheeling and dealing, while also commingling personal and business funds. The family (who knew nothing about horse racing) trusted him and his colleagues (who had numerous conflicts) to run the business and do what was in the family’s best interest.

The chief financial officer of Calumet attempted to duly inform Lundy of the farm’s mounting debt service, the unpaid insurance premiums and dwindling resources, etc. at the end of the 1980’s.

By November 1990, Calumet had approximately two hundred thoroughbreds and one hundred employees. Its fifteen-year-old stud Alydar, accounted for a large part of its revenue.

Sadly, the industry would reach its saturation point within a decade of Calumet’s soaring reputation as the premier place to breed winning horses. Read the book to learn the details of how the farm had gone from owing not a cent with the death of an heir prior to Lundy’s takeover, to the largest instance of debt explosion in the history of bluegrass.

My Life So Far

The Book of the Week is “My Life So Far” by Jane Fonda, published in 2005. This insightful autobiography describes an actress, activist and exercise instructor whose childhood family life was psychologically challenged. Throughout her life, she has been continually working through various emotional, moral and gender issues.

Born in the Santa Monica Mountains in December 1937, Fonda was lavishly raised alternately by a nanny and her parents, who were absent on and off. Her father was a famous actor on Broadway and in movies; her mother, until she suicided, was in and out of mental hospitals. Fonda was close with her younger brother, Peter. She became a bulimic and developed an “appeaser” personality.

Although Fonda had a leg up in her career due to her famous father, she chose to engage in activities that she felt were societally beneficial. The media and the U.S. government, however, treated her like a criminal. She was put under surveillance by the FBI, CIA, State Department, IRS and Treasury Department, which created dossiers of thousands upon thousands of pages just about her. In 1979, she settled a lawsuit against them in which the government admitted its guilt.

In 1972, Fonda visited Hanoi to gather information and inform the American people about Nixon’s evil Vietnam-War schemes, a few of which were already in progress. Later that same year at the Academy Awards ceremony when she won a Best Actress Oscar for “Klute,” she maturely did NOT make a political statement, having been told it was the inappropriate place for doing so.

Fonda believed that presidents made war due to their feeling pressure from society to prove their masculinity. She herself was a product of this same environment, judging from her taste in men. Her third husband– media billionaire Ted Turner– “…was unable to experience intimacy because there just wasn’t room in his brain for words other than his own.” He was an emotionally needy narcissist.

Read the book to learn how Jane overcame her eating disorder, achieved success in acting, exercise-business enterprises and political activism, and how she improved her relationships with family and friends.

The Franchise

The Book of the Week is “The Franchise, A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine” by Michael MacCambridge, published in 2009. There were two attempts to publish a magazine called Sports Illustrated in the late 1930’s and again in the late 1940’s, but both failed after a few years.

In summer 1954, Sports Illustrated (SI) was launched for wealthy men who engaged in golfing, croquet and yachting. Time, Inc. was able to arouse significant interest in its new magazine venture by soliciting existing subscribers of Time and Life.

Sidenote– The New Haven line leased out private rail cars to wealthy Westchester-County New York commuters. Rye was one train stop of the 1950’s Sports Illustrated’s first project manager, who got his shoes shined and was served ice water on his way to work.

Postwar prosperity and more leisure time allowed Americans to do more ping pong, softball, bowling, roller skating and boating. The original goal was for the publication to project a brand image of superiority in quality and comprehensiveness in coverage. However, target readers– athletes and spectators– were not thought of as intellectuals, so there was doubt as to whether they would read a magazine, even if it was about their hobbies.

The 1960’s saw television decrease the intellect of the nation as a whole, but it caused the popularity of such spectator sports as baseball, football and basketball, to soar.

The main competitive advantage of the magazine was full color photos. The publishing of those photos, even when generated with the latest technology, was very expensive and had a lead time of days. Nevertheless, in those days, publishers were willing to spend lots of money to ensure quality, and gave new projects lots of time to develop into successful ventures. SI was losing money for ten years before it turned the corner.

Long lunches and greatly exaggerated expense-account claims were also rife then. As were excessive alcohol consumption and bloated staffing. Starting in spring 1974, at SI, there was a team of four editors for every single article in every issue.

In September 1979, the magazine’s major area of dominance (college football and basketball recaps) was attacked with the introduction of ESPN.

Beginning in the late 1980’s, staffers “…willfully blurred the line between… edit and business, publicity and journalism.” The ethics conflict peaked during the 1996 Olympics, when “… the effect of having the business side of the magazine promoting an event that the editorial side was covering was profound and distracting.”

Read the book to learn of the other obvious contrasts between Sports Illustrated‘s early history and the current climate in magazine publishing in general in terms of sloppiness, illiteracy and lack of fact-checking, not to mention lack of ethics (mostly due to unwillingness to spend money on quality, and too much focus on the big dollar sign); the people who ran SI; their office politics; and their ability to change with the times.

Jim Henson, The Biography

The Book of the Week is “Jim Henson, the Biography” by Brian Jay Jones, published in 2013. This large volume describes the life of a super-successful puppeteer who brought innovation to the genre of puppetry.

Born in September 1936, Henson grew up alternately Mississippi and Maryland. He was best known for creating “Muppets”– a cross between puppets and marionettes. Henson took his time about finishing college at the University of Maryland studying set design. Initially, he thought he wanted to develop a behind-the-scenes career in theater. But he was an early adopter of the new medium of television and wanted to do puppet shows on it. In 1955, he made his Muppets TV debut with Jane, the woman who would later become his wife and bear his five children. He fell into a brilliant puppetry career instead.

Henson’s performances extended to the talk-show circuit, during which the early Muppet characters he created, lip-synched to songs and mimed comedic storylines. The skits would usually end with an explosion or one character’s eating another. Very quickly, he became a highly paid entertainer. In the summer of 1958, he went on a research expedition to Europe, where puppetry was much more popular than in the United States. Americans thought of puppet shows as appropriate mostly for children.

Despite Henson’s desire to become known as a respected puppeteer for audiences of all ages, he became famous for creating some major characters that appeared on a groundbreaking children’s TV show– Sesame Street. Nevertheless, the Muppets appeared in some forgettable skits for Saturday Night Live (SNL) in its first season. True story. Union rules required that SNL writers rather than Henson’s, compose said skits. The SNL people didn’t know the Muppets like Henson’s did. After several false starts and many rejections, Henson finally achieved one of his goals. In autumn 1976, a CBS affiliate in England finally gave the Muppets their first weekly TV series.

Read the book to learn of Henson’s cinematic successes and failures, his management style (or lack thereof), the key people in his organization, other major highlights of his career, his marital infidelity, and what transpired just as he was in the thick of difficult negotiations to sell his company to Disney. The reason for the difficulty was that “In show business in particular, where so much depends on the ruthless art of the deal, Jim’s generosity and genuine respect for talent… made for an unconventional way of doing business.”

The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

The Book of the Week is “The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue” by Robert Klein, published in 1991. This is a compilation of the moments most memorable to the author during the first 25 years of his existence.

The author grew up in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 50’s. He attended P.S. 94 and DeWitt Clinton High School. His first college year was spent trying to fulfill his parents’ dream of having a doctor for a son. However, he possessed much greater talent in the performing arts.

In 1967, after he had been “discovered,” Klein, doing standup comedy, was mentored by Rodney Dangerfield at the Improvisation Club in Manhattan.

Read the book to learn of the author’s career success, of his many sexual encounters, and one during which “She wanted it from every conceivable position, and with such passion and ferocity that I feared the occupants of the adjacent room would call the police or an ambulance.”

Act One

The Book of the Week is “Act One” by Moss Hart, published in 1959.

In his teen years in the 1920’s, the author had a passionate desire to work in the theater on Broadway in some capacity. However, his childhood of dire poverty, limited formal education and dysfunctional family were hardships he had to overcome to achieve his dream.

It was a major triumph for him to snag the position of office boy for a booking agent by a random twist of fate. However, he tempted fate too early. He then tried his hand at acting. He was an eighteen-year-old playing the role of a sixty-year-old man. When that gig ended, another chance occurrence with an acquaintance led him to directing plays in the evenings, and slaving away as a social director at various summer camps for several years, while plugging away at the part of aspiring playwright.

Read the book to learn all the sordid tribulations Hart endured in order to find fortune and fame, as well as the secret to how he fixed the third act of his first Broadway play, and how he came to be assisted by one of the great playwrights of his generation.

Talking Back

The Book of the Week is “Talking Back” by Andrea Mitchell, published in 2005. This is the career memoir of a TV journalist at NBC.

Mitchell started her career in the mid-1960’s covering local politics in Philadelphia. Her desire to cover national politics necessitated a move to Washington, D.C. Through the decades, she witnessed and reported on various presidential campaigns and administrations– good, bad and ugly. She traveled the world extensively, and conveyed lessons on history and politics that the nation’s leaders failed to learn.

“In administrations that lack discipline, or are led by chiefs of staff short on character or judgment… underlings desperate to please the boss [president] start breaking rules.”

There were ironies, too. During the Iran-Contra scandal, the Iranians didn’t know they were paying for an anti-Communist operation whose money was laundered through Israel– a sworn enemy of Iran.

The author’s career had its ups and downs. In the late 1980’s, she was assigned to cover Capitol Hill rather than serve as Chief White House Correspondent. The former position conferred lesser status. However, she had more freedom of movement and topics on which to report, due to her distance from the president– who required an entourage and heavy security. She could pursue important stories on foreign policy, the budget, or energy legislation, rather than public relations events and sensationalism. In 1993, she was named to the latter position, but could no longer be a political analyst on the Today show, as at that time, it was considered a conflict of interest to have the same person both report and analyze political news.

Mitchell covered the Savings and Loan scandal, a common occurrence in American financial history. A pattern of abuse in the private sector, aided and abetted by government, was followed by a taxpayer bailout.

Prior to the First Gulf War, “Dick Cheney and Colin Powell told us that occupying Iraq would saddle America with the burden of running it.” It was difficult enough for people from the three major sects of Islam to live together peacefully in the same country without a foreign power’s attempting to supervise a transition to a different political system.

Controversy over gender and racial issues came to the fore after the Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas episode. The catch-22 for females trying to build their careers, especially in male-dominated fields (such as TV news) was that if they complained of sexual harassment, they’d be complaining to its very perpetrators. The times, they are a changin’.

In 1992, Mitchell, in reporting on Bill Clinton’s presidential run, pursued an unending series of campaign scandals. Two years later, she was present at a press conference at which Hillary Clinton was responding to Whitewater accusations. “It was a flawless performance, but the first lady still would not admit to any errors of law or judgment in her financial dealings. And behind her calm gaze, I saw a woman still enraged that people would even question her ethics.”

In the mid-90’s, the author was required to have two reputable news sources before she was allowed to go on the air with a big news scoop. Read the book to learn of other ways “news” gathering and reporting have changed through the decades, and Mitchell’s experiences dealing with the changes.

Up Late With Joe Franklin

The Book of the Week is “Up Late With Joe Franklin” by Joe Franklin with R.J. Marx, published in 1995. This is the career memoir of an entertainment jockey.

Franklin started his career in radio, playing old records. He was a compulsive hoarder of them. When he moved to television, he introduced old movies. Then he became a late, late night talk show host. Although Franklin had popular shows that ran for years and years, fewer people have heard of him than of other talk show hosts because his shows ran at 1am or later.

Read the book to learn how Franklin achieved his entertainment success, and a little trivia about tens (out of hundreds) of the celebrity-guests Franklin had on his shows, which ones he interviewed before they were famous, and the ones he claims he made famous.

Reporting Live

The Book of the Week is “Reporting Live” by Lesley Stahl, published in 1999. This career memoir tells how the author clawed her way to the top of the TV news ladder (especially political news) as a female who eventually started a family, beginning in the early 1970’s, when “… the television networks were scouring the country for women and blacks with any news experience at all” to comply with affirmative action initiatives.

In her early 30’s, the author had a couple of years under her belt when she started gathering stories for CBS radio news. Television news people considered themselves superior to those in radio. Stahl worked as a reporter around the clock to prove her worth to everyone around her.

Covering the Watergate scandal was a particularly trying endeavor for all news organizations. The author was assigned, at dawn, to stake out the homes of the accused in order to stick a microphone in their faces and shout questions at them in front of the camera, and attend press conferences. Nixon was reelected despite his treachery, because when the economy is on an even keel, voters are hesitant to change horses in midstream, even when there are rumors of wrongdoing, according to Stahl.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, the author’s crew used new-fangled cameras that weighed 12 lbs, whose batteries weighed 20 lbs and were supposed to last an hour but never did. There was separate unreliable equipment imported from Japan for the soundmen, that weighed 50-60 lbs.

Stahl had no guilt about working her normal (extremely long) hours during her pregnancy and afterwards, due to her mother’s commanding reassurance that her career should come first. In early 1979, when she was named White House correspondent, her bosses asked her whether she was comfortable being away from her infant daughter, given the demands of her job. They would never have asked that of a man.

Reagan decreased taxes for the wealthy and imposed severe budget cuts in social programs. He appointed an anti-environmentalist to run the EPA. He pushed the national debt to an all-time high and significantly increased military spending. His speeches often contradicted what he was actually doing. Nonetheless, his image as Mr. Charisma endeared people to him on a personal level. The charm of the messenger made people blind to the message. They ignored his numerous actions that seriously damaged the country in many ways during his administration. One of the first problems he caused was a deep recession in 1982. His poll numbers sank, so of course his staff: quarreled, tried to plug the leaks, and bashed the media.

When Stahl’s daughter was four, she and her husband had to undergo a laborious preschool application process. “This was far more of a strain than deadlines or prime time news conferences.”

In the early 1980’s, Stahl’s producer had to do extensive planning when her reporting required her to follow the travels of the president for a couple of days from rural Iowa to Des Moines. The producer had to order rotary-dial phones for every stop, large hotel rooms in which to edit video, motorcycle carriers in which to run video, a microwave transmission facility, and a helicopter to fly the video to Des Moines. These resources were pooled with the other networks. Anyway, the White House deliberately pulled the plug on the audio of the reporters during the president’s speech.

In 1983, CBS changed the look of its evening news slot to show one star: Dan Rather. The other networks followed suit. “Now there were three young, handsome men at the three helms… and I [Stahl] was about to turn 42, the age past which newswomen weren’t supposed to survive on television.”

Read the book to learn what transpired when Lawrence Tisch took over CBS, how the “news” changed in terms of content, how Stahl topped off her career, and much more.