Happy Birthday, Jerry Herman!

Today is the 77th birthday of Broadway composer-lyricist Jerry Herman, whose first big hits were almost fifty years ago (Milk and Honey opened October 10, 1961, and Hello, Dolly! -- which was once the longest-running show on Broadway -- opened January 16, 1964).

Herman -- whose other hits include Mame and La Cage aux Folles -- is now being introduced to a whole new generation of listeners with the soundtrack of WALL-E, the Pixar animated film currently in theatres.

WALL-E includes songs from the film version of Hello, Dolly! and opens with "Put on Your Sunday Clothes." On today's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR, WALL-E's director, Andrew Stanton, reveals that, in high school, he once played Barnaby Tucker in a production of Hello, Dolly!, and that is why that song was in his head as he was searching for an appropriate number to set the tone for the movie. It turns out (as I understand it, having not yet seen WALL-E) that Hello, Dolly! -- the film -- plays a pivotal role in the plot.

Like his contemporary, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman is that among that rare breed of musical theatre professionals who write both music and lyrics. (Almost every other hit musical of the past half-century is the product of a collaboration between a composer and a lyricist, most notably John Kander & Fred Ebb but also such teams as Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, or Howard Ashman and Alan Menken.)

I am one of those who thinks that, despite receiving accolades like multiple Tony Awards and Tony nominations, Herman does not get the critical credit he deserves in comparison to his peers. While not as complex or intellectually challenging as Sondheim's, his music is harmonically distinct, almost idiosyncratic, yet it is also accessible, in the sense that it's "hum-hum-hummable" for the average theatergoer. His lyrics are often clever, often touching, always literate, and help define character and advance the plot; what more can you want?

When I was a kid, I wore out my vinyl copy of the OCR of Hello, Dolly! (it was the first Broadway show I ever saw in a legitimate house, rather than in its motion-picture adaptation) and I used to belt "Before the Parade Passes By" while mowing the front lawn. (Try not to imagine what an 11-year-old boy sounds like as he pushes a lawn mower and channels Carol Channing.) In high school, the late T. Brennan used a recording of the title song from Mame to audition dancers for Senior Follies and the spring musical. It was easy for non-dancers to adapt to the rhythms without feeling (too) awkward.

The sad thing is that the movie adaptations of Herman's biggest hits -- Hello, Dolly! and Mame -- turned out to be such disappointments. Many people know his work only from the screen, and thus may leave the cinema with a lesser opinion of his work than he deserves.

The good thing is that virtually every day, if not every hour, there is someplace around the globe where a Jerry Herman musical is being performed. Herman's work makes it possible for small-town kids to believe, truly, that "there's a world outside of Yonkers."

While there may not be any of his shows that will be mounted by the New York City Opera, they still offer hours of pleasure to audiences at every level: high school, college and community theatre, semi-professional repertory companies, and even revivals on the Big Stem.

'Chris and Don: A Love Story'

Those of you who are literarily or theatrically inclined may be most interested in this information, but there is plenty to chew on if politics and society are your topics.

Thanks to a segment on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, I have learned of a new documentary about writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, who had a 33-year relationship that began when Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood was 49, ending only with Isherwood's death in 1986. Later, Bachardy began a 10-year relationship with a man 26 years his junior, but now is in a relationship ("for the first time in my life," he says) with a man almost precisely his own age. (Bachardy was born in 1934, the same year as my father.) The documentary film is called Chris and Don: A Love Story.

The summary of the interview on NPR's web site notes:

Bachardy speaks with Terry Gross about his career as an artist and his relationship with Isherwood, who penned the Berlin Stories, which served as the basis for the musical and film Cabaret.

Bachardy and Isherwood collaborated on a number of projects, and Bachardy's illustrations often appeared in Isherwood's work.

As an artist, Bachardy achieved recognition outside of his relationship with Isherwood, creating portraits of such celebrities and notables as Jack Nicholson, Mia Farrow and Dorothy Parker. His book Stars in My Eyes describes the subjects of his works and was a best-seller in Los Angeles.

The interview is wide-ranging, touching on what it was like to be openly gay in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, how the age difference affected (or failed to affect) the Isherwood-Bachardy partnership, how Isherwood felt compelled to adopt Bachardy legally late in life (in the absence of legal gay marriage), and Bachardy's techniques as a portrait painter. (Gross asks a lengthy series of questions about the drawings Bachardy made of Isherwood on his deathbed, and of Isherwood's corpse on the day he died. Bachardy's answers are direct but no less emotional for that.)

There is also a discussion about same-sex marriage and a brief conversational sequence about Isherwood and Bachardy's friend, actor Anthony Perkins, who rebelled against his homosexuality and who, despite years of therapy, was never able to escape it. (For his part, Bachardy says "everything wonderful in my life is the result of my being queer.")

The Fresh Air interview with Don Bachardy -- who sounds much older than someone of 73 or 74, but perhaps his voice has had these qualities for many years -- can be found here, at the NPR web site.

I recommend listening to the whole thing. There's not a dull moment anywhere in the piece. (Theatre buffs may be surprised at how negative was Isherwood's reaction to Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in the film version of Cabaret.)

IMDB has information about the new documentary film. This is a film I definitely plan to see, and I hope I can see it on a big screen rather than on television via DVD.

The "cast list" of the documentary (directed by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, who are unknown to me) is remarkable itself, as it includes Gloria Stuart, Michael York, Leslie Caron, Jack Larson ("Jimmy Olsen" from TV's Superman), and Liza, as well as Isherwood and Bachardy.

Fresh Air also reran an interview today, originally from 1988, with the late Thomas Disch, a gay science-fiction writer who is perhaps best known for the children's story, The Brave Little Toaster. That archival interview can be found here.

(To tell the truth, I had never heard of Thomas Disch until he died. I'm sure the science-fiction aficionados among my readers will berate me for that.)

All in all, Fresh Air had a gay hour today.

Update: I have discovered that Chris and Don: A Love Story has an official web site, which includes two video extracts from the film as well as photographs and background information about Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, and the filmmakers.

Language and Assimilation, Then and Now

The fuss over the Spanish-language version of the "Star Spangled Banner," which I wrote about earlier, continues and may even be picking up pace.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday:

After an emotional debate fraught with symbolism, the Senate yesterday voted to make English the "national language" of the United States, declaring that no one has a right to federal communications or services in a language other than English except for those already guaranteed by law.

The measure, approved 63 to 34, directs the government to "preserve and enhance" the role of English, without altering current laws that require some government documents and services be provided in other languages. Opponents, however, said it could negate executive orders, regulations, civil service guidances and other multilingual ordinances not officially sanctioned by acts of Congress.

According to a public-opinion survey released on March 30 by the Pew Research Center on the People and the Press,

One of the continuing sources of conflict over the assimilation of immigrants is language, as seen in recurring battles over English-only policies and statutes. A sizable majority of the survey's respondents (58%) said they believe that most recent immigrants do not learn English within a reasonable amount of time; slightly more than a third (35%) say that they do.

Within the case study communities, the belief that immigrants lag behind in the adoption of English ranged from a high of 66% in Phoenix and Las Vegas to 51% in the Washington metro area.

As linguist Geoff Nunberg said on "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" this week:

What's the Spanish for "poppycock"?

The fact is that the vast majority of Hispanics in America already speak English, and the rest are learning it much faster than the Germans, Italians, or those Norwegian bachelor farmers did a century ago.

Back then, after all, the economic incentives for learning English were nowhere near as great as they are now. Most immigrants lived in isolated rural areas or urban ethnic enclaves, and a lot of cities had separate public school systems for immigrants -- not like today's transitional bilingual programs, but schools where all the instruction was carried out in German or other languages.

According to demographers, the average immigrant family in 1900 took more than three generations to make the complete transition to English dominance. Now it takes just over two. By the third or fourth generation, in fact, most Hispanics are as depressingly monolingual in English as any other American group.

Nunberg's fact-based analysis seems to be reflected instinctively by the majority of respondents to the Pew poll, who think independently of those who are demagoguing the immigration debate:

Most people nationwide (61%) who say they have contact with immigrants who speak little or no English say it does not bother them; 38% say they are bothered by this experience. While people in Phoenix and Las Vegas report more contact with immigrants who do not speak English well, majorities in both cities say they are not bothered by this (58% in Phoenix, 56% in Las Vegas).

My own mother was one of those third-generation descendants of immigrants who became monolingual in English only after an early childhood that was monolingual in another language (in this case, Polish). She decided to speak English exclusively at the age of six when kids on the playground made fun of her accent; she spent the rest of her life able to understand spoken Polish, but unable to read it, write it, or speak it herself. (My grandparents, on the other hand, remained bilingual throughout their lives, while my great-grandparents lost the ability to speak or understand English toward the end of their very long lives -- likely more a consequence of senility than a lack of commitment toward American culture and values.)

Nunberg mentions in his "Fresh Air" commentary an article by Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times, which reports that one of the most popular songs among the pro-immigrant demonstrators is Neil Diamond's tribute to his (East European, Jewish) grandparents, "(They're Coming to) America":

Amid the mariachi music, socially conscious corridos and civil rights hymns at last week's immigration-rights rallies, a surprising voice arose — a strong Jewish baritone usually favored by middle-aged women and retro-hip college kids. It was Neil Diamond, singing his own exodus anthem: "America," from the pop elder statesman's 1980 remake of America's first talkie, "The Jazz Singer."

The recording opened and closed the May 1 speakers' program at City Hall. It's made its way into reports of rallies in Dallas, Kansas City and Milwaukee. Although hardly the official anthem of La Raza, "America's" portrait of travelers "traveling light … in the eye of a storm" is outdoing more standard fare such as "If I Had a Hammer," giving Diamond something like the role Bob Dylan played during the civil rights era of the 1960s. . . .

"It's the immigrant anthem," said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). "Every time I've been at different activities over time, you'll have the Neil Diamond song. It speaks to the experience."

The song is built like a footpath up a monument, the melody swooping downward to rise up again, its key changes and call-and-response elements ("They're coming to America!" "Today!") forcing the tension. Rooted in the Yiddish music of Diamond's Brooklyn youth, the song moves on to Broadway and the Borscht Belt and lands on the edge of disco — a border-crossing trek unto itself. This intentional hugeness, this insistence on being an anthem, makes "America" easy to mock but also impossible to resist.

I find it intriguing, but not incredible, that today's Hispanic immigrants learn English at a faster rate than the immigrants who arrived at about the same time as Neil Diamond's grandparents and my great-grandparents. To learn it tells me that it is never a good idea to simply accept conventional wisdom, but better to explore the facts and use those as a basis for public policy.

Chattin with Chet

On yesterday's edition of "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" on National Public Radio, after an interview with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, television critic David Bianculli reviewed a newly released set of DVDs featuring some of the Dick Cavett TV programs from the 1960s and early 1970s, with the shared theme of rock stars appearing as Cavett's guests.

Bianculli highlights one program among three that featured Janis Joplin, in which she was paired "with fellow talk-show guests Chet Huntley, the soon-to-retire serious half of the Huntley-Brinkley Report anchor team on NBC, and Raquel Welch, the sex symbol whose infamous Myra Breckinridge movie had just staged its grand opening in Hollywood."

He is particularly amazed by Chet Huntley's response to a question from Cavett about Huntley's personal political beliefs:

CAVETT: You know, your leaving will unbalance the news world in one sense, because you’re known to be conservative on some things that your colleagues are not. What are some of those?

HUNTLEY: These labels [that] get thrown around – they’re unfortunate, because I look at myself and I don’t know what I am in terms of “conservative” and “liberal.”

I suppose economically I’m an archconservative. My attitudes toward the federal government, the federal structure -- I’m disenchanted like so many other Americans with that. It’s getting too big and cumbersome and unmanageable, filled with self-serving and self-perpetuating bureaucracy and accomplishes too little for our money.

In terms of humanity, in terms of human beings and the racial issue, I suppose I’m a screaming liberal.

In terms of conservation of our natural resources, now here we get into the ultimate confusion. “Conservation,” “conservatism,” coming from the same root word: What are you if you believe in the conservation of our natural resources, are you liberal or conservative? I don’t know, so we get into terrible confusion here with these words.

Bianculli comments:

He may as well have been talking about red states and blue states, and he was doing it 35 years ago, and given the time to make his point in full. That’s what I love most about this DVD set and why it’s definitely worth watching and owning.

Was Huntley a conservative, a moderate, or a libertarian? It's hard to judge from his brief remarks here, but his words point us toward a type of conservative that is not too prominent these days. (Notice he uttered not a syllable about what we now call "social issues," like abortion, gay rights, marriage and divorce, and so forth.) In 1970, "conservation of natural resources" implied a preference for government action -- the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage of the Clean Air Act, for instance.

Today, however, we can turn to decades of studies that support free-market environmentalism, using market-based solutions relying on property rights and sound economics to achieve the same aims that the environmentalists of the 1960s and '70s assumed could only be achieved through legislation and regulation.

So if Chet Huntley were alive today, would he be a free-market environmentalist who proudly wears the libertarian, rather than "archconservative," label? Given his stated preference for limited government and "conservative" economics, he would surely be happy to have a market-based alternative to government action for preserving natural resources, especially what he cherished in his beloved Big Sky Country of Montana.

Business-Generated Self-Help for Tsunami Victims

I have hesitated to write anything about the December 26 tsunami and its aftermath, since the news of that disaster has filled newspaper front pages as well as the commentary sections of every publication one can name.

Today, however, I heard a remarkable interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The subject of the interview was Geoffrey Dobbs, a businessman who owns several hotels and resorts in Sri Lanka. With other businessmen, he has begun a self-help effort in his section of the island.

In the course of the interview, Gross asked: "Have you ever done anything like this before?" -- to which Dobbs replied:

"I have never done anything like this before at all. I’m a total amateur at it. In some ways, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you just get it done. That is what myself and my colleagues – I have a Belgian colleague here I have a German colleague, I have Sri Lankan colleagues – who all think the same way, totally unselfish, just wanting to get Sri Lanka moving again."

(I like that thought: "In some ways, if you don't know what you're doing, you just get it done." That's spontaneous order if I've ever heard it.)

Dobbs explained that foreign aid was reaching the capital, Columbo, but "to be honest, I have not seen a lot of aid down in the south, particularly in the small villages which are the areas which we have decided to help. Obviously the city of Galle has received a huge amount of publicity for the tragedy they suffered and a lot of aid has gone to them but it still has to trickle down into the villages."

Consequently, Dobbs and his associates have focused their efforts on the villages who have yet to see the aid from abroad. He explained his approach this way:

We are not a charity, we are not an NGO, we are a group of private individuals and companies who sprung up because nothing was happening. We have now spawned a loose coalition of like-minded people spreading [from about 50 km south] of the capital all the way down the coast and all the way up the east coast. We’re swapping information, we’re transferring supplies where supplies are needed. We’re not hoarding, we’re not being squirrels.

We can make instant decisions because we don’t have to make a decision by committee. This is all our own money. Of course we hope people will support us by sending us funds later, but at the moment this is all our own money.

I have a wallet-load of Sri Lankan rupees in my pocket and when I think I see a worthwhile cause,I just pay out the money. I don’t ask for any receipts. I just say to them, I’ll come back tomorrow, if I don’t see any progress, you won’t get any more money.

For instance, there’s a person who sells little boats opposite my island whose livelihood has been ruined because there are no tourists coming. I do have some shops in Columbo, so I say, OK, if you make some boats, I will sell them in my shops.

The village opposite my island is famous for ladies who make lace and I said to them, I gave them just $500 today. You clean up your place, you get back to work, I will buy you instruments for you to make your lace, and if I see improvements, I will front you more money. That is the way I think reconstruction should take. The whole point is to get people back to work. That is my message.

It is clear that Dobbs is no sentimentalist. Responding to Terry Gross's query as to how he decides which businesses or fishermen to help, Dobbs said: "Well we’re trying to help all the fishermen. In the bay [nearby], there are 10 fishing communities. We’ve taken all their numbers and then some have been dishonest and overstated their losses. But those people we’re going to give a black mark to and we’ve told them that if that happens, we will not give them aid. And in fact most of the fishermen, they realize that, and they’re being very responsible about it."

People like Geoffrey Dobbs deserve a lot of credit precisely because they are not treating the tsunami victims like, well, like Victims. He views these people as independent agents who can take responsibility for their own fates, who are willing to work hard to put their lives back together, and who should be respected, not pitied. He demonstrates this heartfelt respect when he tells Gross: "I’m very impressed at the way villagers have cleaned up their villages. Of course there’s still this huge mess around and there is complete devastation in some villages [where] buildings have totally collapsed [but] all the roads are open now [and] you see piles of rubbish that have been neatly collected. The villagers have done the cleaning up themselves."

Dobbs -- who happens to be the brother of Washington Post correspondent Michael Dobbs, whose eyewitness account of the tsunami appeared in the Post and on broadcast news outlets as well, including a separate segment of the same Fresh Air episode -- should be held up as a model for efficacy and compassion in the face of disaster. His experience is a living argument for why grassroots self-help is superior to top-down, committee-driven, bureaucratic foreign "assistance" that serves more to assuage Western guilt than it does to build economies and bring people out of poverty.

Of course, this is not a new argument. I discussed it at length in my 1990 book, Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa.

Update: Geoffrey Dobbs' efforts are gaining more notice. I just came across this AP article in the Washington Post of January 9, "Hotelier Launches Tsunami Relief Effort," which somehow slipped past my gaze as I was reading the Sunday papers. It notes:

"The reason why we are quite effective is because there's not a lot of red tape," Dobbs said. "We can make instant decisions. It's our own money, so we don't have to account for it."

Still, the band of businesspeople - which includes a Sri Lankan antiques dealer, a German organic farmer and a Belgian owner of a tire manufacturing company - lack the transport and professional expertise available to the government or established aid groups.

Dobbs said their strengths lie in local knowledge and contacts with village headmen. They have set up a Web site to promote their cause and attract funding, and they telephone each other daily to exchange experiences and suggest solutions.

"If a certain area needs something, and a certain area has got it, we then trade our sources of supply," Dobbs said in an interview on the verandah of one of his colonial-era hotels, the Sun House.

The article also points out some of the concrete, if idiosyncratic, accomplishments of Dobbs and his associates:

"Operation Fish and Chips" was one of the group's most high-profile initiatives. Last week, they urged fishermen in the town of Merissa to fix their boats and catch their first fish since the tsunami generated by an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean.

The goal was to promote fish-eating because many Sri Lankans had no appetite for seafood, believing fish had feasted on the bodies of tsunami victims and were contaminated. Dobbs organized a fish barbecue after the catch came in, then sent a batch in a refrigerated truck for delivery to the Cabinet and the opposition leader in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.

The group also pumped 12 wells in Merissa on Thursday and is providing a daily total of 7,500 lunch packets, including rice and potatoes, to the needy. The town of Weligama is known for its lace, and Dobbs said he is "dripfeeding" money to women to start making it again.

I expect we'll be hearing more from and about Geoffrey Dobbs.



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