It is early January in a new century and a group of technicolored-Victorian gentlemen are awaiting the return of their friend from the future.I’ve always loved the 1960 film of HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Drawing inspiration from the two headed Roman God Janus, that gives this month its name, the film, like the book, looks backwards and forwards with a game of subjunctive history. Asking What if… questions about alternative futures. What if there were an atomic war in 1966 as the film, made at the height of the Cold War, imagined?
Applied to your own life what might you find if you explored in fantasy the path you didn’t take? My inspiration for this year is one of HG Wells’ best friends, Arnold Bennett – just as much a man who looked to the future. He’d been born a pawnbroker’s son with a terrible stammer in the Staffordshire pottery town of Hanley at its grim sooty Victorian economic best and humanitarian worst. He started out as a rent collector and clerk, but escaped to Belle Epoque London and Paris and the world of journalism and art. He became a global celebrity, a bon vivant with Escoffier creating an eponymous omelette for him, still on the menu at the Savoy Hotel and a blockbuster screen writer of the great silent film Piccadilly.
The Card (1952)
The most successful novelist of his era he often explored subjunctive history in his best novels. Imagine two sisters. The bold one elopes and the dull one stays at home. They meet again in old age. That’s The Old Wives’ Tale. What would it be like to escape fame and live an ordinary life instead? In Buried Alive a famous artist fakes his death and does just that. What if Bennett had never got away and, as in Clayhanger, and Anna of the Five Towns, stayed under the burden of his bullying father’s demands? Or, as in The Card, proved a confident charmer who stayed but exploited the hypocrisy and snobbery of his small town world to rise to be Mayor? Bennett even gave The Card, Denry Machin his own birthdate. The story was memorably filmed with Alec Guinness in 1952 and it is a fantasy as delightful in its own way as The Time Machine.
Arnold Bennett’s prodigious hard work (he wrote up to half a million words a year) meant he could afford to dress like a dandy; he bought a yacht and loved luxury hotels. But he admired and empathized with the people who worked in them, right down to the waiters and chambermaids, and how they organized their tips. Bennett’s biographer, the novelist Margaret Drabble, told me recently how London’s rich artistic elite such as Virginia Woolf, sneered at his stammer and what they called his “Cockney” accent (he was from Stoke-on-Trent, remember) and in doing so, Drabble pointed out, revealed not his vulgarity, but their own. Crucially Bennett never forget where he came from. He was constantly looking back.
On January 2nd 1910 he wrote in his journal: “We came down to Brighton by the 1.55 on Saturday, to the Royal York. Our first stroll along the front impressed me very favorably, yesterday afternoon. But I am obsessed by the thought that all this comfort, luxury, ostentation, snobbishness and correctness, is founded on the vast injustice to the artisan class. I can never get away from this.”
Arnold Bennett
Like Janus, Bennett looked both ways all his life. What if I had never escaped? What about those who haven’t had the chance? Who benefits from this exploitation? Bennett was frustrated with politics. But he was optimistic; an futuristic man in a Victorian gentleman’s body, who delighted in how cinema and even the vacuum cleaner might liberate from drudgery and enrich ordinary people’s lives.
And he was generous; sharing his knowledge with his self-help books, some still in print today, such as How To Live On 24 Hours a Day and How To Become An Author.
Most of all, Bennett had a sharp eye for hypocrisy. He would have loved the story of Cooperative Bank chief and so-called Crystal Methodist the Reverend Paul Flowers. And the hypocrisy of independently wealthy MPs declaring they don’t need a pay-rise, which might stop them claiming much larger expenses from the taxpayer. Perhaps the best advice we could take for the year ahead, is to follow Bennett and keep looking both ways, connecting not just our own past and future, but asking where those in charge have come from and where they are taking us?
My documentary Arnold of the Five Towns produced by Alice Bloch, airs on BBC Radio 4 later this year.
This column first appeared in The Big Issuemagazine.
“This official UK £2 coin remembers one of the most significant moments in British history with a design that recalls the spirit, and with hindsight, the poignancy, of the rush to enlist encouraged by Lord Kitchener. This £2 coin, a fitting tribute, is available now housed in an informative folder that brings to its iconic design to life.”
The Royal Mint’s own description of its controversial new coin to mark the anniversary year of the outbreak of the First World War. Since Jeremy Paxman began expressing his concerns about the Prime Minister’s plans for commemorations comparable to the Diamond Jubilee, a political argument has intensified over the tone and purpose of events. Does the choice of Kitchener, rather than, say Edith Cavell, for the £2 coin count as “nostalgia”? Or, as the Royal Mint says, a legitimate visual symbol of the war which the Mint’s committee agreed most people would recognise?
Murray Melvin in the 1963 production
And a more overt battle over the representation of the war is also underway with Education Secretary Michael Gove’s assertion about “left wing academics” and satire from Oh What A Lovely War! to Blackadder Goes Forth feeding “myths” about the war “as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.”
All these rows were anticipated a few months ago. Original Oh What A Lovely War! cast member, Murray Melvin described the pressure from the political and military establishment on the show back in 1963 in a special programme we recorded in October about the creation of the production, on stage at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Dialogue was carefully sourced from actual quotes of generals and politicians, the new historical books such as Alan Clark’s 1961 revisionist The Donkeys, and controversial arguments were presented in the show about the vested interests of transatlantic munitions magnates and the fortunes which were made supplying weaponry to all sides. (Interestingly this last aspect was dropped entirely from the Hollywood film version directed by Richard Attenborough). But Melvin recalls the tension back stage as they saw General Haig’s family lawyers in the audience looking for any aberrations from the script to justify legal action. Together with historian David Kynaston, theatre critic Michael Billington and RSC deputy artistic director Erica Whyman, the programme places the show in context, not only of its relationship to WW1 in 1963, but its legacy today, as a new production prepares to open.
It looks like a kind of over-engineered Victorian executive toy: A semicircle of metal with carefully marked grooves and two long wooden arms with padded covers like two giant matchsticks. Curator Phil Loring and I are having a go at the Fechner sound pendulum that tried to measure the speed of thought, through timing the “just noticeable difference” heard in each arm hitting the base.
It’s incredibly complex to use and hard to see what useful data they would have obtained. But it is a fascinating example, like all of the exhibits in this new show, of the unique challenge of psychology through the ages and the huge efforts that have gone in over the centuries to quantify scientifically, physically, the hidden processes of our minds.
There’s a historical journey through human attempts to explain the mind’s makeup, searching for physical not just mystical explanations. Medieval Europeans looked to the fluids of the body; the physical power of the four humours to explain character. You can imagine Chaucerian Englanders saying “He’s always really moody. That’s typical black bile, that is.” And it’s comparable to the strangely enduring hold in many cultures today of astrology.
The most dramatic displays are of the physical beauty of a 17th century Italian nerve table. Here we see human nerve strands dissected, stretched out and varnished like an intricate bare-leafed tree, as if in detangling the physical form, one might detangle the intricacy of psychology.
Going through the Science Museum’s storage vaults while making the introductory film (above) for this exhibition, I was struck by how rich the history of mind study is with physical objects. Particularly frogs. On show you’ll see anthropological curiosities like the amuletic dried frog in a silk bag from early 20th century south Devon (to cure fits).
And German scientist Emil du Bois-Reymond’s “frog pistol” in the 1860s. Frogs are certainly featured in the work of the 18th century Italian pioneer whose work forms the highlight of Mind Maps: equipment and sketches belonging to Luigi Galvani of Bologna – who gave his name to galvanism and has inspired everything Gothic and re-animated from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Douglas Trumbull’s film Brainstorm.
Luigi Galvani and his wife, Lucia, a trained anatomist, got through a lot of dead frogs as they explored the relationship between nerve activity and electricity. In an interesting link back to the medieval humours, Galvani saw electricity as a fluid. And as with the Fechner thought-measuring pendulum, you can feel the frustration embodied in Galvani’s sandglass that could measure fractions of an hour, but not the fractions of a second needed for the speed of nerve movements in his experiments.
Freud, shellshock and modern psychiatric medicine are placed for the first time for me, in a scientific continuum: I see in this exhibition a tale within a tale – the story of human thinking stretching ambitiously beyond the technology of its time. The exhibition is the story of nothing less than the human quest to find the elusive quintessence of human existence: the soul and its torments.
TV archiving is, it turns out, a lot like classic archaeology.
“What archaeologists want to find most is the midden – [the dump] full of waste, and ephemera which tell you the most about a society.”
Chris Perry ofKaleidoscope Television, has over 25 years turned his love of TV archive salvage into a professional business. And his observation during a panel discussion to celebrate the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped 20th Anniversary Special earlier today, was the most astute comment about the archive business.
“The perception was that it’s plentiful,” Perry observed. “It’ll always be plentiful so no one bothers to keep it.” Ads, continuity – the ephemera that captured the reality of social aspiration and attitudes. In Rory Clark’s fascinating preceding documentary The Native Hue of Resolution the audience was treated to wince-inducing ads featuring Tudor Queen luncheon meat that smells like real pork and Stanley Holloway making weak My Fair Lady puns about Mace Supermarket special offers. The most historically fascinating recovery screened last night was a sales film made for the now long gone Westward Television ITV franchise, about the demographics of the West Country in 1961. Its audience, the fruity voiced presenter informed us weren’t just “peasants”. Among the statistics: the fact that (slightly higher than the national average) only 28% of the population had a fridge, compared to nearly 100% who had a television.
Both Perry and ex-BBC archivist Sue Malden observed how light entertainment and music shows like Oh Boy! (so central to so much of British pop and rock history) and genre programmes were dumped on an industrial scale, as middle class executives made the decisions. “The BBC consciously would keep the ballet or politicians speaking,” said Malden, commenting on the snobbery at the top about “common” entertainment. The reality of having to clear 3rd party and more complex artists’ rights in entertainment may have played a part, too, she said. “But of course, if they valued it they’d see it as something they just needed to do.”
“Why would anyone want to keep The Animals performing on 10 different shows?” was, Perry reflected, the logic of bosses at the time. “Just keep one.” Hence much of that rich musical TV archive history is lost.
Steve Bryant, the BFI’s Keeper of Television, added: “The view of genre TV was that it was low art – Comedy, entertainment [and therefore not worth keeping]. But comedy is where history is, like the old Punch cartoons from the 19th century.” Bryant also pointed out, “some performers didn’t want their content kept” – because they wanted to preserve the exclusivity of their live performances for earning. He gave the example of Benjamin Britten, whose publishers, he said, insisted that a performance of The Turn of the Screw could not be archived.
It was Dick Fiddy, coordinator of the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped initiative who explained in the documentary the importance of making the campaign “a treasure hunt and not a witch hunt”. Looking to blame individuals wasn’t going to help recover anything. But at times watching the clips that featured in the documentary and the following “new discoveries” screening, one couldn’t help but feel sadness and occasionally stronger emotion. The first clip in the documentary of the night was a delightful moment of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only.. But Also. It was counterpoised later by Moore’s bitter aside, from a Parkinson interview, on the BBC’s cavalier decision to wipe the series.
Alan Bennett also featured – only a tantalizingly exquisite 4 minute sketch survives from his entire comedy series On The Margin. Interviewed in the documentary about it, he referred to the “vandalism” of BBC tape destruction with quiet dignity, blaming the attitude of the time. Veteran children’s producer Joy Whitby, who made Play School, recalled a Kafkaesque system in which tapes were labelled with numbers, not descriptions of content. So producers were asked to select tapes by number to keep or record over and found, in one case, that he’d recorded over his own material.
Terry Jones’ early ITV work “The Complete and Utter History of Britain” was itself missing believed wiped. A fair amount still is. The show is uncannily similar to the more recent Horrible Histories (though with rather more rape jokes, it being the 60s and all). Ironically Jones said he had always wanted and tried to hold on to copies of his programmes, initially for personal rather than financial reasons. “I insisted on getting all of the film inserts. I’ve got them in my cellar.”
In addition, “the BBC were going to wipe the first series of Python,” Jones said. BBC colleagues tipped them off and they hatched a plan to smuggle the tapes out. It was only the sale to a US network that changed the BBC’s mind. And in a third horror, around a legal dispute over the film company ownership of the second Monty Python film Jones told the audience, “We had all the rushes of The Life of Brian in storage. Then RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland] took over and wiped them all.”
We learned from the documentary that it cost £7,000 for the tape to store an early TV drama in the 1950s. That was nearly a third of the programme budget, which helps us appreciate the harsh wiping culture of the early days. Hollywood was the same in its early years, the LA Times’ film critic Ken Turan once told me, regarding films as disposable, and obsessed with the new. But what about now, when many broadcasters know the commercial value of re-releasing their archive material? And what to do about changing formats?
Malden spoke of the challenge of keeping old players, like old Route Master buses, perhaps, in operation: “You have to keep all the spares and the heads and the guys who know how they work.” Eventually you just can’t anymore and then “it’s like having the rosetta stone and no one can read it.”
At ITN more than 2 years ago, executives had, much to the dismay of many staff, announced a plan to computerize all the tape archive and then destroy the tapes. What about the unknown unknowns of potential damage and computer failure? Parry, Bryant and Malden, all urged caution on jumping to transfer to new formats which could prove short lived. In some cases new formats had proved unreliable or faulty. Film and certain video tape formats, including the recent digi Beta are, they said, much more stable and enduring. Malden urged keeping the original masters.
The personal collections of figures such as Pipkins’ creator Nigel Plaskitt, Bob Monkhouse, and Oliver Postgate’s Small Films – the latter two recently acquired by Kaleidoscope – featured. The BFI had had to turn down the Monkhouse archive because, Bryant and Fiddy said, they couldn’t afford the time and cost to go through such a volume for the 5% of gems that might be on the tapes.
So what of the future? The panel feel small independents are much better at keeping their original rushes, from the programmes they make for the big broadcasters. Sue Malden said in turn, though that “Big broadcasters need to take on the responsibility [of preserving their own programme archives] and not rely on enthusiasts.”
The highlights of the night were 2 of the sketches from the 1960s BBC satire show “BBC-3” that referred to censorship. One is an “uplifting” film about life after a nuclear attack made as an alternative to Peter Watkins’ The War Game, inspired by the BBC’s decision not to screen the drama. The other, a slick parody of the Nativity, followed pop star Jet Crispin, from discovery in the Manger club to downfall via Juke Box Jewry. It had been pulled from the show before a near Christmas transmission date, and never broadcast.
Proof, if we needed it that these finds from the rubbish heaps of TV excavation, have so much to tell us about our own current battles over offence and free speech.
Tony Casdagli with his father’s sampler insulting Hitler in morse code (photo:Samira Ahmed)
My Something Understood for BBC Radio 4 this weekend is all about hand made things. You can listen to a clip of here.And the whole programme here. As well meeting a carpenter who makes fossil-inspired objects about of ancient felled trees, I look at the vogue for Shaker furniture among London’s super rich and my caffeine-fuelled cynicism for the In Praise of Slow movement in the affluent West, in an age of sweat shop garment factories and disposable fashion. There’s also an interview with the director of Fine Cell Work, about the success of teaching fine embroidery skills to prisoners. “You can’t sew when you’re angry,” one inmate explained to her. And what programme about philosophy and spiritual questing made by an 80s teen could not include The Karate Kid? You will find Mr Miyagi’s Wax On Wax Off mantra to young Daniel-san, alongside the hymn Lord of of All Hopefulness, St Benedict and a discussion about wage slaves.
Plus the Buddhist tale of King Kusha, who became a skilled potter, fan maker and cook in a quest to win the love of a princess.
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But the highlight, is of course Tony Casdagli, a retired Royal Navy captain, who is a talented and prolific embroiderer. You can listen to a clip of Tony in the programme here. These photos are all from a magical afternoon in his home, where he talked about his work, and that of his late father, Army Major Alexis Casdagli. Major Casdagli took up embroidery to pass the time during his long, cold years held as a POW in Germany in the 1940s. In his most famous piece, he sewed “fuck Hitler” and “God Save The King” in Morse code along the border. It’s on the wall of the staircase in Tony’s home. But there’s so much more too. All the walls are full of beautiful needlework made separately by father and son. Up the stairs and on the landing are many of the other works Alexis Casdagli sewed in capitivity: Beautiful maps of a green England, lovingly recalled in topographical detail, and in the dining room, a letter from father to son, carefully sewed on a scrap of cloth,and miraculously sent via the Red Cross to Tony, then a young boy, that would have taken a few minutes to write, but how long to embroider?
I noticed Tony’s latest work on his sewing table, just underway.
Something Understood: Made by Hand is on BBC Radio 4 Sunday December 15th at 6am and 1130pm and i-player for 7 days after.The producer is Caroline Hughes and it’s a Whistledown Production.
(Updated December 8th 2014) These are notes for further reading based on my Kingston University film class today about John Waters’ career and its lessons for independent filmmaking.
John Waters
Trailer for Pink Flamingos – (Embedded video above. Based on hype around midnight matinees with no actual footage of film)
Free Thinking Interview (Radio 3)– covering his inspiration & start in Baltimore, funding for Pink Flamingos, the inspiration of Boom! and Hollywood misfires (Cry Baby)
Books:Shock Value – A Tasteful book about Bad Taste (1981 reprinted 2005) – Excellent on the making, funding and marketing of the early films.
Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1983, 2003) – Chapter 9. Original Baltimore magazine article researching into what happened to the Buddy Deane Show dancers (the basis of the 1988 film Hairspray)
Role Models (2010) – Waters’ list of inspiration figures has a particularly good chapter on Outsider Porn & amateur porn filmmaker Bobby Garcia. Interesting to see who actually made money out of his work.
Pink Flamingos and Other Filth (1988, 2005) – screenplays for Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living and the unmade sequel Flamingos Forever. Waters’ trademark combination of high brow but also observational prose with a trash aethestic.
Making money out of YouTube (2011 Fast Company feature on how indy video makers are expanding their horizons. Interesting to see how far that’s already changing)
In one of those re-assess-your-life columns that is the staple of women’s lifestyle magazines you buy in your 20s, I once read that you should write your obituary as if you died tomorrow to force you to confront what you’d actually done with your life so far and whether you needed to change your direction.
I never really got round to it. Who does in their twenties? But then a couple of decades on, the onset of Winter has started to feel marked by funerals coming round for real — increasingly of parents, older relatives and sometimes friends.
My aunt Archana wasn’t really an aunt. In the tradition of the great Asian aunty she was a friend of my parents. And I got to know her third hand — when her daughter Rita started coming home to ours after school every day while Archana was still at work, and became from primary school to this day, my sister’s best friend. She didn’t define herself by a career, though talking to her friends at the funeral I appreciated all the more my parents’ remarkable generation of young pioneers who came from India in the 1960s, set up home in a strange and sometimes hostile land, and took on whatever work they had to, to make ends meet.
Archana Aunty worked in quality control at the nearby Decca TV & record player plant. It changed hands but she stayed there for 20 years. until redundancy forced her to find another job to keep things going. Rita says she was tired out by the long hours and conditions. But her prime love was making a welcoming home. Archana Aunty would have me and my sister round to her cosy semi off the A3, just off the Kingston by-pass, to play. She had fascinating Kays mail order clothing catalogues to leaf through and, most delightfully, served up traditional Bengali specialities followed by branded Western freezer desserts that my mother specifically considered too decadent or fancy to buy for our own home — Arctic Roll and most memorably Viennetta which, as a result, I still consider the height of sophistication.
I didn’t see Archana Aunty as much as I got older. But I remember turning to her as my ever reliable back up mum, when my own mother and sister were both away (now this is a confession). She was the person I rang for emergency help in tying the pleats on my sari the right way ahead of going to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. I went round with the tin of irreplacable giant nappy pins my mother had saved since the 1970s specially to secure the folded pleats to avoid a diplomatic incident if one should accidentally tread on the fabric. (So much for the garment that famously has no holes and no fastenings). And after several goes and the odd near miss with the point of the pin, I left for the Palace secure in every sense of the word. Talking to my sister while writing this I found out she used to do the sari-securing for Rita and every one of Rita’s friends at their weddings.
30 years on these memories still have incredible power. To a modern child I probably sound like a Monty Python Victorian remembering an exaggerated pre-electric simplicity. But in an age when we are constantly curating our own recent pasts — describing our achievements in updating Linked In and Facebook professional profiles and “About” pages on personal blogs, — trying to mix professional achievements with quirky “likes” and “dislikes'” — I wonder whether we can still truly value the intangible achievements of those who shaped us without leaving any of the visible modern markers of “professional” success?
Perhaps this is the kind of obit one should think about. Were you the person all your daughter’s friends turned to to secure their saris with nappy pins? What could the modern equivalent be? An article I once read (and also ignored) by a professional successful woman about combining career and motherhood, recommended dumping activities that weren’t cost-effective “quality” parent-child bonding time. By that logic sitting in a darkened room not talking probably would be a fail. But I hope my children and their friends might remember the woman who loved taking them to black and white 50s science fiction films in the cinema about incredible shrinking men and giant radioactive ants. “And you know?” I hope they might say. “We were surprised to find we got genuinely scared. And she loved that.”
This article first appeared in The Big Issue magazine.
“The King – the President – is dead. The King has a brother. The brother hates the Vice-President. You have a really Shakespearean struggle for power here.”
Robert Caro, Lyndon B Johnson’s biographer talking to me about the assassination. It seemed timely to re-post this: re-assessing Kennedy’s Vice President and successor, based on my BBC R3 interview with Caro and journalist Michael Goldfarb about events around the 1963 assassination in Caro’s book The Passage Of Power. You can listen to the discussion here. (It starts 27 minutes 17 sec in).
Which US President won an election with the largest ever popular majority? Lyndon Baines Johnson, who took 61% of the vote in 1964. He went from powerful Senate majority leader to powerless and humiliated Vice President to towering statesman in 6 years. This is the story related in Robert Caro’s new book on LBJ. The Passage of Power, is the 4th volume in his biography, covering the most remarkable period in his life — from 1958 to 1964, through the 1960 presidential election, John F Kennedy’s presidency and assassination through to the passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation. It was warnings against Johnson’s plan to try to push through such bold legislation that prompted his famous riposte, “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”.
When Caro embarked on the biography, in the 1970s, LBJ, who had died in 1973, was a huge figure in American politics. Nearly 40 years on, as the myth around the Kennedys has continued to grow, and fascination with Tricky Dicky (Nixon) endures in popular culture, Caro has observed his subject shrink and disappear from the national memory. The timing of the book is a fascinating reminder of what we forgot to remember and of lessons for modern American politics. Caro says the more he researched LBJ, the less he believed the adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. “Power reveals,” he believes. Johnson, in his view, revealed himself in office to be a man who seized the opportunity to make America a fairer nation.
With Dr Martin Luther King
LBJ spent time in great poverty in Texas. He picked cotton as a child. His education was limited to a Texas teacher training college, which he had to leave early, and he held a job teaching Mexican American children. He was acutely aware of being the least educated person in JFK’s government. While he often voted with other Southern Democrats against Civil Rights while in the Senate, when it came to the chance to change his nation, he proved powerfully committed to desegregation.
But only after LBJ found his own presidential ambition apparently destroyed. Brought on board as Vice Presidential candidate to secure JFK’s victory, he was sidelined after the election and humiliated. A national joke. Caro reminds us how the TV show Candid Camera went out voxpopping New Yorkers about who Johnson was — not one knew.
Regarded as a great reader of men, who was king of the Senate for a decade, Caro says LBJ totally misread John Kennedy. Intimidated by the cultured and brilliant Kennedy brothers (Bobby was Attorney-General) and their East coast privileged circle in cabinet (LBJ called them the “Harvards”) Caro argues LBJ failed to appreciate the greatness of JFK. So a moving part of the book is Caro’s detailed account of John Kennedy’s remarkable heroism in World War Two. When the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds, it is the Kennedy brothers who calmly restrain the overwhelming urge to bomb. LBJ was among those — when he wasn’t excluded from discussions — who talked tough.
For Goldfarb, who was 11 when the assassination took place, there was a new level of horror in reading the detail of how close America came to launching a nuclear war. For those too young to remember the loss of innocence of that time, the book has rather chilling detail about the scale of vote rigging and corruption that Johnson exploited to secure that narrow 1960 Democrat victory.
Taking the oath of office on Airforce One, with Jacqueline Kennedy to his right
Caro will say of the assassination conspiracies only that “I am convinced LBJ had nothing to do with the assassination” and that the Warren Commission was set up in good faith. But in the book he explores the idea that Robert Kennedy was crippled with guilt, believing the murder was “blowback” for either CIA attempts on Castro’s life, or Robert Kennedy’s own campaign as Attorney-General against the mafia and organised crime.
What dominates this volume though, is LBJ’s mutual hatred of Robert Kennedy which is explored in fascinating detail. There is a Shakespearean power in the telling of the drama that unfolds; their personal battles and the assassination in Dallas which is movingly chronicled. Caro reveals how isolated LBJ was in those first few hours and days, setting up his own government from scratch. But, in an account that cannot help but force a comparison with Shakespeare’s Richard III, he successfully woos each of President Kennedy’s heartbroken Cabinet within hours of the killing, telling each one — many who hated him — “I need you more than he did.”
Although his political voting record would mostly suggest otherwise, Johnson, as Senate Majority leader had pushed through the first modern Civil Rights bill in 1957. After JFK’s assassination he prioritised a major Civil Rights bill, to abolish segregation and enable Black Americans to vote, with the declaration “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”
Caro points out all JFK’s core “dream” bills — civil rights, federal education funding and tax cuts — looked doomed to failure, until LBJ used his masterful knowledge of the Senate’s workings to get them through. It looks now like a rare window of opportunity in a gridlocked system which has continued to kill legislation. Witness the mauling of Obama’s healthcare reforms. Johnson’s State of the Union address (see link above), in which he promised a War on Poverty is a remarkable piece of oratory. His own background meant, argues Caro, that he instinctively identified with the poor and the dispossessed.
Caro describes the period as “a time of violent hope”. In our age of the e-petition and the small scale of the Occupy Wall St protests, the book is worth reading for a reminder of the scale and bravery of the protests that made the headlines, to create the national mood that shamed America into pushing through the laws. Rabbis, priests, preachers, students and local African Americans of all ages who volunteered, getting training on how to deal with a police beating.
Johnson followed up the Civil Rights bill with the essential Voting Rights Bill 1965. There was a federal boost for educating the poorest, Medicare, Medicaid, setting up PBS and NPR — despite threatening and blackmailing Texan media owners in Houston and Dallas to sack reporters or drop investigations into his own financially corrupt dealings around media ownership and advertising. Interestingly it worked then. LBJ was to be the only Democratic presidential candidate The Houston Chronicle backed till Barack Obama. One feels the Press has become rather more free since 1963.
It was Kennedy and then Johnson who initiated taping of conversations and phone calls; Johnson on a significant scale, helping provide records for Caro’s detailed reconstruction of key meetings. Caro relates how, on moving into the White House one of Johnson’s daughters was relieved to find the White House phone system means her father couldn’t listen in on all her calls, as he used to at home.
It was Johnson who pioneered the relaxed and deliberately lowbrow “authentic'” American presidential style that has dominated the office ever since. Harvard-educated, Connecticut blue blood, George W Bush’s re-invention as a real cowboy owes everything to LBJ’s Texan barbecue hoe down for West Germany’s Chancellor Erhard over Christmas 1963. Johnson was the real deal and made a virtue of his difference from the elegant French cuisine and European-style of the Kennedys.
Reading the book from our perspective, long after the novel power of television defined Kennedy’s election, presidency and assassination, the corrosive effect of the media soundbite on political culture, in Britain as much as in the United States is freshly apparent. Perhaps the greatest puzzle about Johnson for our age is that he comes across as mostly a deeply unlikeable man, who perhaps only because of his intimate knowledge of the Senate’s dark arts, was able to push through into law the now cherished liberation of civil rights.
The shadow of Vietnam hangs over the book from the start and will occupy Caro’s next volume. It’s a developing problem in the early 60s. Caro says President Johnson was the man whose time in office was bookmarked by two famous protest slogans; the first that marked his zenith — “We Shall Overcome” and the second “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” — that destroyed his hoped-for legacy in the War on Poverty and marked his doom.
There’s a very famous scene in one of John Waters’ early films Female Trouble (1974) when a well meaning Aunt Ida tries to coax her straight nephew Gator into become gay. “I worry that you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries. The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.”
Gay audiences cheered it in cinemas – but like his most famous heroine, Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad, Waters has always been against segregation; by race, gender or sexuality:
“What I wanted was bohemia…The first time I went to a gay bar was in Washington and it was called the chicken hut and there were telephones on the tables and everyone had on little fluffy sweaters. It was very 50s gay. And the phone would ring and they’d say, hi you look v cute, can I buy you a drink? And I thought you know, I might be queer, but I’m not this. I wanted bohemia, which was mixed. I’m still against separatism. I hate separatism… There won’t be any gay bars eventually.”
Waters says he worries that homosexuality remains taboo for too many non-middle class families and in an surprising part of the interview, talks about both the trauma of losing 70 percent of his gay friends to AIDS within a period of about five years, but also how none of his friends went to Vietnam:
“When I was in the 60s I went down the draft board to have to go to Vietnam I knew how to get out of it. All the other people on that bus probably went to Vietnam and many of them died. Those people on the bus probably didn’t know anyone who died of AIDS. So I’m not sure that every generation doesn’t have some terrible thing that happens. (Pauses) And it was different..I didn’t know anyone that died in Vietnam. No one. And I grew up in the height of it. And that was because everyone I knew, knew how to get out of it.”
He also discusses frankly his use of drugs – his Dreamlanders bonding through pot and LSD (he doesn’t recommend it now); the joys of Douglas Sirk films and his work discipline. His screenplays are rich with word play and the savouring of transgressive or period jargon from the 1950s: retard, mulatto, high yellow, Negro, skag. Favourite lines include: Mount me if you must, but not a kiss.” (Mink Stole protesting a sexually harassing traffic cop in Desperate Living). And: “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to let retarded people into your house?” (Divine’s evil mother in Polyester).
Watching the first 10 minutes of Female Trouble (1974) – is a fascinating alternative version of Hairspray. Divine (complete with 5 o’clock shadow) plays the 15 year old “hairhopper” getting into trouble in class for her outrageous beehive before attacking her parents for failing to give her cha-cha heels for Christmas.
“Originally Divine was going to play Tracy as well as her mother like in The Parent Trap. And would any of this happened if New Line had let me get my way?”
Waters was talking there about the commercial failure of Cry Baby with Johnny Depp – his Hollywood commission after the success of Hairspray. Perhaps there’s a part of Waters that misses the non-PG fun of his early films.
Fruitcake – his children’s screenplay – was due to start production in 2009 but stalled. Though he still would like to make it, with Johnny Knoxville committed to playing the father. But in the meantime there are books to write, lectures to give, his photographic art to make and trials to follow. The crime reporter in me recognizes a kindred spirit. Talking while we waiting outside the studio to record I found him erudite and thoughtful about the facts and ethical issues in various disturbing cases we’d both covered or been following: OJ Simpson, to Ariel Castro, Jimmy Saville to Hackgate.
So what is this avowedly avid book reader and art collector reading at the moment: The new Norman Mailer biography, the new Donna Tartt novel and he admits a “trashy” new book about River Phoenix’s death at the Viper Room, that “I’m ashamed to say I’m reading.”
Robert Maier’s website – worked with Waters on many of his early films has some fascinating insights into the world of the Dreamlanders. These are two picks:
In my interview you’ll hear Waters talk about watching Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk with his friend David Lochary. This is a thoughtful piece about the actor who died tragically young: The mystery of David Lochary
I have been pre-occupied with offence these past few weeks. Preparing to interview the Pope of Trash (copyright William Burroughs) ahead of his Nov 8th appearance at Liverpool’s Homotopia festival, I have been starting each day with a John Waters film. On day one I finished watching Pink Flamingos – sex involving chickens, castration, cannibalism and most famously dog turd eating – and then turned on the radio while I had lunch (vegetarian cocktail sausages, by coincidence). And I found myself feeling genuinely offended for the first time that day.
Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz, that bastion of middleclass cryptic crossword- obsessive, unashamedly top-of-the-class contestants, began with a throwaway reference to the setting: “Hello and welcome to our rural interrogation centre in North Yorkshire for another session of cerebral waterboarding.”
I felt a bit sick. And it wasn’t the cocktail sausage I was finishing off. Was this PC- gone-mad in my head? How did I square my discomfort at a throwaway line with the joy of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketches? Was it about the passage of time? Anyway Britain’s history of Hitler jokes was part of the war spirit and hasn’t demeaned the truth about the Holocaust since.
Perhaps my unease lay in where it was said and why. In the early 2000s innocent citizens found themselves snatched at airport transit gates at the behest of British and American security services, and tortured for months in compliant Middle Eastern regimes. Men like Canadian software engineer Maher Arar who was snatched at JFK airport in 2002 on his way home from holiday, transported to Syria where he was tortured for nearly a year as a suspected Al-Qaeda operative, and then released without charge. His appalling story inspired the 2007 film Extraordinary Rendition with Meryl Streep. He’s still waiting for an apology from the US government.
So back in my kitchen, listening to the radio, I think the offence came from the lack of thought about it. The nagging sense that no one would have broadcast that flippant line if they could ever imagine something like that happening to themselves.
So now the Advertising Standards Authority’s decision to ban a government billboard campaign aimed at illegal immigrants as misleading but not offensive is intriguing. As with the waterboarding joke, perhaps rural Yorkshire will not have been offended by this. The billboard was driven on lorries around areas of London known to have many illegal immigrants. It said: ”Go home or face arrest. 106 arrests in your area last week.”
The ASA’s ruling upheld the complaint of inaccuracy. That 106 figure was well dodgy. The ASA “acknowledged that the phrase “GO HOME” was reminiscent of slogans used in the past to attack immigrants to the UK, but that in that context it was generally used as a standalone phrase or accompanied by racially derogatory language.” They suggested that different wording, such as “RETURN” rather than “GO” HOME might have helped avoid concern. “However, we concluded that the poster was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence or distress.”
Given that legal immigrants can be among the most fiercely opposed to allowing illegal immigrants to stay, they may well be right. The worst of the Go Home chants and graffiti was in the 70s and 80s. 30 years on perhaps we should take comfort in the widespread outrage generated. Britons have moved on. Even Tommy Robinson has left the EDL. It has clearly given the Home Office food for thought.
Now a new political battle over offence is just gearing up: about the obscene squandering of soldiers’ lives in the First World War. Recording a special Radio 3 programme about the 50th anniversary of Joan Littlewood’s savage anti-war satire Oh What A Lovely War!, original cast member Murray Melvin told me how Field Marshall Douglas Haig’s family lawyers sat in the audience many times, looking for any tiny aberration from the script for an opportunity to shut the show down. The battle to control the War’s image and rehabilitate Haig’s continues. Despite his controversial war of attrition, Haig was runner up in a 2011 National Army Museum poll of greatest British generals ever. Jeremy Paxman has most recently voiced his concern that David Cameron’s plans for commemorations that say “something about who we are as a people” might turn into a “celebration of war”. A focus on the heroic, obedient Tommy, that conveniently draws attention away from the military and political establishment’s shame.
A century on and the idea that obscenity might be hidden under a celebration truly is offensive.
A version of this column first appeared in the Big Issue magazine: Journalism worth paying for
John Waters is appearing at Homotopia in Liverpool on Friday 8th November. Tickets and info here.
“What is this witch going to ask me next?” Oliver Stone
“We chose Samira Ahmed as MC of #thetestaments launch at National Theatre, webstreamed to 1500 cinemas worldwide, for her expertise and high professionalism. She was flawless. She is a star!” Margaret Atwood
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