Blandness with a Touch of Paprika

“People must be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow…

they can’t be alwayth a working.”  

 

Charles Dickens’s lisping, golden-hearted circus proprietor Mr. Sleary gets it, epigrammatically, right, when he goes up against the coldly rationalistic Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times. Amusement is not only a relief and release from daily chores and anxieties; it is also woven into the fabric of life as a necessity. The circus has all but vanished as a popular pastime (cruelty to animals, for one thing), replaced by—sequentially—the music hall and other forms of stage entertainment, radio, film, television and the Internet. The sources of amusement may alter; the need for it does not.

Tastes, like media, change with the zeitgeist. The following pages celebrate, or at least offer two cheers for, middlebrow, middle class, and (mostly) American mid-century taste. You might call my celebration “In Praise of Squareness.”

The 1950s ended, I think, on November 22, 1963, when the events in Dallas shattered most of the idealistic dreams and confident optimism of the younger generation. Then, shortly after the Kennedy assassination, a little known intellectual unintentionally helped to usher in the succeeding era. She made her name with a sweeping, breathless evaluation of a phenomenon—itself not exactly new, but under her microscopic analysis, about to assume a heightened visibility—that she took as a counter to Victorian high seriousness, moralism, abstraction and the sheer plod of “meaning.”

She was Susan Sontag; her subject was Camp; her method was mere “notes,” a combination of obiter dicta, pronouncements from on high, personal opinions, efforts at scrutiny and taxonomy, and a general obliteration of the distinctions between high and low culture. She was anything but square.

In her vatic way, Sontag was turning away from many of the pieties of mid-century American tastes and culture. She paved the way for Richard Poirier’s “Learning from the Beatles” and the liberating promotion of pop culture as a worthy and serious intellectual subject. What, whom, did she leave out? Swanning her way brashly and breezily between the highbrow and the lowbrow, she deliberately avoided everything that Mr. Sleary might have loved. She omitted the middles. “Notes on Camp” is a snob’s manifesto. It may tell us something about certain modes of artistic engagement, performance and the very concept of “performativity”; it tells us even more, implicitly, about its author and her engagement with questions of taste. It registers, in a slightly different key, a pronouncement by another post-War arbiter, Diana Vreeland: “Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity––if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash [sic] of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste––it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”

Sontag would have agreed. “Notes on Camp” throws down the gauntlet to anyone or anything without “sophistication,” “sensibility,” “artifice,” exaggeration,” “stylization,” words that appear at the start of her essay and then, with variations, throughout it. She is, in part, rebelling against the 1950s (the decade in which she came of age) and everything bland, vapid, somnolent. Robert Lowell used the word “tranquillized” for those years, but he was wrong. He—the excitable bi-polar poet—was often tranquillized, but his decade was “tranquil,” not tranquillized. And it was tasteful in a way people have condescended to ever since.

A condescension to the middle classes had been proclaimed decades earlier, when Harold Ross declared that his punchy new magazine (The New Yorker) was not designed for the little old lady from Dubuque. He, too, was wrong: she was exactly the perfect audience. Sophistication came to the provinces. That midwestern lady could fancy herself, from afar, a participant in Manhattan swank. The maligned and overlooked 1950s had a sophistication of their own.

Sontag was certainly condescending. Her love of exaggeration, of androgyny, art nouveau, “flamboyant femaleness,” and of camp “as a mode of seduction” that “refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling” surely puts her at odds with many kinds of sobriety, although no one was, or would become, as high-minded and highbrow a grandee, sober and judgmental, as Sontag at later points in her career. For someone who extolled the pleasures of theatricality and frivolousness, Susan Sontag paradoxically lacked a sense of humor.

She probably would not care for Mr. Sleary and his circus. And I wonder what she would have to say about Jack Benny, my main focus, a man who maintained international popularity for more than five decades. He was middlebrow for mid-century. He looked like all my great-uncles: the same Vitalis-slicked hair, the same suits and ties. His wit was dry but not acid; his manner was almost effeminate but never flamboyant or dangerously effete; his voice distinctive but not exaggerated. He had mannerisms galore, becoming almost a parody of himself once he perfected his persona, but he lacked, by Sontag’s standard, a “sensibility” (by which she meant something edgy, raffish, far out, outré, uncontrolled). He may have been the only star of vaudeville, radio, screen, or television—in all of which spheres he shone—to have lacked sex appeal, a star that generated light but not heat. In his quirky ordinariness, Benny belonged to a different species from Sontag’s cynosures of Camp like Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, I. Compton-Burnett and Barbara Stanwyck. He was more mayonnaise than vinegar or paprika.

How this all came about deserves our attention in a new millennium, when outrageous drag queens have replaced more anodyne and amateur Hasty Pudding theatricals; gender bending in several directions is regular stuff; high and low have lost all meaning; an entire American middle-class that embodied the best and worst aspects of our society and economy has shrunk into nothingness; and articulate speech as well as conversational politeness on television has become something of an oxymoron. Good taste? No taste? Every era gets the taste and the stars it deserves.

 

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Benny (1894-1974) seems to have been permanently middle-aged. He did not grow; he did not change. Several biographies, all neutral, none hagiographic, paint a picture of a well-loved man with no secrets, no dirt to hide, of a performer who claimed “I am never nervous.” Let us assume their accuracy, or at least their plausibility.

Born Benjamin Kubelsky, he played his violin with local dance bands at fourteen. He was courted by Minnie Marx (mother of Groucho et al.) to come with her boys on the road, but not allowed to do so by his parents; instead, he joined the Navy in 1917, performed for the troops with his fiddle but, when he got booed, decided instead to ad lib. By 1921, the violin had become a prop. He met Sadie Marks in 1922, married her in 1926. She became his radio and television wife, Mary Livingston. He appeared on Ed Sullivan’s radio show in 1932, stayed on the radio until 1955, made his television debut in 1949, and for a while worked in both media simultaneously. He refused to work in night clubs, but he did almost everything else: he made movies, he did some stand-up, he performed as a fund-raiser for classical music. Isaac Stern remarked of his playing that “he didn’t know the notes that well, but he played in their general vicinity.” At 61, he resumed music lessons. They must have paid off: at the concert to save Carnegie Hall, October 2, 1956, he was a star. His final television appearances were with Johnny Carson on January 1, 1974, and with Carson’s sit-in Rich Little in August of that year. Later in the fall he was too ill to work on what would have been his final movie, The Sunshine Boys, so his oldest friend, George Burns, stepped in as a replacement, and won an Oscar.

This is, more or less, the Benny story. His persona was both innate and created, worked on, and polished, over the course of a lengthy career. It is that persona—a little bland, unthreatening, lacking charisma but possessing an edge so slight as to be charming but never cutting—that made him beloved and perfect for the tastes of the American midcentury. (Gregory Peck called him “the most likable man I’ve ever known.” Susan Sontag would probably grimace at the thought of likeability as a criterion for any kind of performative excellence.) And two other things: his physical stage presence and, even more, his voice—perfected on the radio—that was, according to a 1936 magazine poll, the most recognizable one in America. Coming in second and third: FDR and Bing Crosby.

Sontag was alert to bodies, physical gestures, and the visual arts, but she was deaf to “voice.” And she seems to have been also resistant to charm, of which many cultural figures from mid-century had plenty. As human traits, charm and voice held little interest for her in her explorations and wanderings in the Fields of Camp. Jack Benny’s vocal as well as his theatrical mannerisms gave soothing comfort, not confrontational explosiveness. Sontag liked art that challenged.

 

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Today, courtesy of podcasts as well as old-fashioned radio, the voices of Ira Glass and Garrison Keillor, like those of Terry Gross and countless others, are instantly recognizable after one or two hearings. In Benny’s first radio appearance, as the emcee of a kind of vaudeville variety show, his flat but calming voice makes half-baked jokes and offers pitches for “that champagne of ginger ale, Canada Dry.” As the seasons roll out there’s more talk and less vaudeville, and his regular cast of characters begins to appear—Mary, Don Livingston, and at last the irrepressible Rochester (Eddy Anderson)—with jokes that to us seem dated or cringeworthy. At the Automat, someone asks “Where’s the ham?” To which the answer is “You were just talking to him.” Jack, chastising Rochester who claims to have been at his best friend’s wedding, asks, “What’s your best friend’s name.” Answer: “I don’t know … he just got married and changed his name.” (In later years, as the Civil Rights movement gained steam, the figure of Rochester was more or less spared resentment. He was always tough and sturdy, no Stepin Fetchit; instead, he played Jeeves to Benny’s Bertie, Sancho Panza to Jack’s Quixote.)

Easy puns and sound effects make the ears alert; they help the ears to see. They come with a downside. Physical comedy is eternal—a banana peel is always a banana peel, no matter who slips on it—but language and intonation metamorphose. Not only satire, in George S. Kaufman’s estimation, closes on Saturday night: everything in the realm of language, of linguistic style or verbal mannerism, has a shelf life. Tastes in voice change like any other fashion.

Radio, like music, depends on timing, and in this Benny had few equals. When his writers put their weekly show together, they handled timing to the second. (I am reminded of Igor Stravinsky who, when approached about a possible commission, asked three sensible questions: “When do you need it?,” “How much do you pay?,” and “How long do you want it to be?” And he meant to the second). The most famous Benny punchline, his reaction to the hold-up man who requires “your money or your life,” was achieved largely through a deliberate delay: “I’m thinking it over” follows a nine-second silence, an audience laugh, and then a repeat of the question. Harry Truman, a guest on Benny’s television show, asked his host why Lincoln was his favorite president. The response: “Any man who would walk five miles through the snow, barefoot, just to return a library book so he could save three cents … [here, a long hesitation] … that’s my kind of guy.” The producer Goodman Ace said that Benny was “like a Swiss watchmaker with a joke.” Benny himself knew that he had to play for both a small, live studio audience and the vaster one composed only of listeners. Timing meant knowing not only when and how to speak, but when to pause. And Benny acknowledged: “We wrote and acted to be heard.” This is surely the opposite of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

Another word for such exquisitely attentive timing is politeness. Benny was sly, therefore durable. On television, the give-and-take of conversation on talk shows has him at his nonchalant best. Earlier in the century, vaudevillians, like today’s rock stars, were raucous and loud. (They also wore funny, baggy outfits.) Benny was slow, never rushing into the punchline. According to Irving Fein, his manager, “he didn’t do jokes, and he wore subdued, conservative clothes.” On the Carson show in 1973, an old man, he is still in peak form. There is perfect communication, no “uh”s or “like”s, but complete sentences, with musical cadences and timing. Many people spoke this way decades ago; Benny could talk non-stop, and deadpan, for many minutes. At one point, he explains his popularity: “I always play up to my audiences. I never play down.” He injects obiter dicta discreetly and appropriately: “Mark Twain once said … [here another pause] … not to me! … age is a matter of mind, and if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” He had only a half year to live. When Benny made the transition to television, his audience already knew him and his radio family. Then they got to see him every week. The voice was supplemented by physical gestures that audiences of his stage performances would have known. Now, everyone in America did: the askance look, the rolling upward eyes, the fluttering hands, fingers in motion as if itching for a violin. In 1953, Marilyn Monroe made her first television appearance on his show. Her skit with Jack takes place on a Hawaiian vacation cruise. (Alfred Kinsey—don’t ask—is also in the sketch.) He dreams of seeing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and then there she is, in a strapless ball gown, confronting him and claiming “I’m mad about you.” She sings “Bye, Bye, Baby.” They make the least sexy pair one can imagine. “Well … ” as Jack might say. The bombshell meets the fantasizing Walter Mitty vacationer. Other possible mismatches that possessed their own odd harmony were Benny and Liberace (a dry martini and a flaming, fruity drink?); Benny and Jayne Mansfield and Vincent Price; Benny and practically anyone with glamor, heat, or mystery. Humphrey Bogart also made his television premiere on the Benny show, as did Helen Hayes, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper and many others. They needed Benny as much as he needed them. On Liberace’s television show (1969), Lee and Jack are wearing identical glittering dinner jackets, but Jack’s is ill-fitting. Liberace sports a glittery bow tie, and fashionably long sideburns, a bouffant hairdo, and perfectly glittering capped teeth. Jack wears a four-in-hand tie. They make an odd couple, and they proceed to a performance of Benny’s signature song, “Love in Bloom” in which Jack is, probably deliberately and shriekingly, off-key, while Liberace, the nominal accompanist, hogs the spotlight with rolling arpeggios and flamboyant gestures. Las Vegas, Liberace’s natural venue, meets Waukegan Illinois, Benny’s birthplace. It’s all Middle America, in slightly different registers. The collaboration also says something about an audience’s ability or willingness to accept some but not all kinds of un-masculinity—if that is the appropriate word. Liberace was sui generis, not part of a horde of drag queens threatening national stability. And, for all his flutterings and the suggestion of a quasi-gay sensibility, the message Jack delivered had mainly to do with a flatness and normality so weirdly and improbably heightened or underlined as to seem a caricature of itself, and thus a form of self-satire appealing to the taste for the bland and safe, but also to the taste for self-satire—a more sophisticated taste not wholly beyond the capacities of a popular audience In 1963, the young Johnny Carson appeared as a guest on the Benny show. He noted his host’s effeminate hand gestures, and his ever so gentle swishiness as well as limp-wristedness. Thirteen years later, Jack at eighty is a little slower, but his voice and timing are the same as ever. (Perhaps he really was, eternally, thirty-nine!) He has longer sideburns, per the fashion of the times, and a little less hair. The lapels on his suit may be wider; otherwise, his fashion has not changed. He says matter-of-factly to Rich Little, “I was like a dame, anyway … I do everything like a girl … Loretta Young stole her walk from me.” And he adds, “I don’t go overboard.” He thereby disqualifies himself from even the lowest perch on the Ladder of Camp, however stylized and perfected his often Kabuki-like movements and quirks may be. He belongs to Mr. Sleary’s producers of amusement, not to Sontag’s camp of Camp performers. This was a man who according to his manager, was made fun of at school for not being good at sports, and for throwing a baseball like a girl. He was square. One can find on YouTube countless moments of Benny. My favorite: his (second) appearance on the long-running Sunday evening television show “What’s My Line?,” the epitome of middle-brow adult entertainment composed of equal amounts of Whitmanian, democratic generosity (in the sheer variety and wonder of the occupations and the people who performed them; Studs Terkel would have been proud) and breezy, New York-centric sophistication, elegance, and charm. No one has ever beaten Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf and John Charles Daley as repositories of quick-witted politesse. On June 21, 1959, Jack appeared as the “mystery guest,” who signed himself in as “Heifetz” to the cheers, laughter and wild applause of the studio audience. Over sixty, he looks handsome and square-jawed, all smiles, his hand caressing his chin, and his voice pitched up in an effort to confuse the blindfolded panelists. The young Steve Allen and his alluring, bejeweled wife, Jayne Meadows, joined Cerf and Francis on the panel. One question—“would anyone call you a glamorous figure?”—elicited howls and whistles, and a response by the moderator: “glamorous in the connotation of great reputation.” Another question, from Miss Meadows—“would this glamorous comedian be a romantic figure?”—impelled Benny to tiptoe across the floor and plant a kiss on her cheek. (The Me-Too Age, and the fear of harassment charges lay decades in the future. This was a more innocent as well as a gentler time, at least on the surface.) After only four or five minutes, Bennett Cerf nails it: “Do Mischa Ellman and Jascha Heifetz scream with horror at the mere mention of your name?” The audience howls. Jack exclaims with mock, exasperated disgust, “Oh, shut up.” This was adult entertainment intended for the entire family. His characteristic movements, gestures, and intonations were perfected and drawn out in Benny’s two most impressive films, both from the early 1940s, To Be Or Not to Be and Charley’s Aunt. In them, he confirmed his persona. In some ways he outdid himself. In other ways, he undoes our expectations, playing against type, and thereby increasing his allure. The figure of an effete stage or film actor, the slightest bit “light in his loafers,” approaching the borders of camp but never violating the dictates of good taste, has a long history. In Behind the Screen, a compendious record of queer Hollywood, the film historian William J. Mann never mentions Benny, in part because he was a heterosexual leading man, and not a secondary “pansy” figure along the lines of Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton, and Eric Blore, all of whom were gay and played gay. Horton said he was “a mouse. As long as it pays, I’m going on with my mousing, just as long as the producers ask for it.” Clifton Webb was the only one of these figures who actually was a leading man, playing essentially himself, “urbane, caustic, arch, and decidedly homosexual” in the mid-to-late 1940s. His most famous character, Mr. Belvedere, became part of American folklore, a character—like the actor who played him—whose “very queerness … made him box office gold in Hollywood after World War II … the one leading man who seemed bored by the very idea of leading ladies.” Benny, too, became part of our folklore. In the 1942 To Be Or Not To Be, as Joseph Tura, the Polish actor “doing” Hamlet, he is all but unpersuasive as a Shakespearean, and equally unbelievable as a romantic lead caught in a love triangle that includes his beautiful wife (Carole Lombard) and a young, handsome military officer (Robert Stack). Its variety astonishes. The movie’s plot is that of a screwball comedy, with twists and turns, mistaken identities, assassinations, on-stage and back-stage shenanigans; a play-within-a play; disguises including wigs, mustaches, and beards; Nazi soldiers jumping to their deaths from an airplane. But then also a grim reminder of the times, including a stirring performance by a Mr. Greenberg, a Jewish member of the theatrical troupe (the actor playing Greenberg was Felix Bressart, a German who fled after the Nazi take-over in 1933), of Shylock’s “If you prick us do we not bleed?” The film races with nervous energy, with the thermostat turned up, and the stakes high. The tone is almost incalculable: the Holocaust, Hitler, and World War II meet drawing room comedy. Springtime for Hitler and The Producers were decades in the future. And they were musicals. To Be Or Not To Be is Ernst Lubitsch at his best, weird, cunning, quicksilver. A comedy about the War? About the Fascist ruination of Europe? The movie makes one nervous. Weirdest, but ultimately most appropriate, is the casting: the dead-pan Benny as a matinee idol, paired with one of the most talented and beautiful comediennes of the age. (Lombard died, tragically, in a plane crash one month before the movie’s premiere.) Ginger Rogers gave Fred Astaire “sex” in their partnership, in the famous quip of Katharine Hepburn, but no one could ever say the same of this duo. Benny is too old to play Hamlet; his costume is ridiculous. And he is too old to be a matinee idol, or anyone’s lover. Astaire was “sophisticated,” that is, a little unmanly; Ginger straightened him out. Neither Lombard, nor Monroe, nor any other femme fatale, could do that for Benny. Even when he was young, he was over the hill. Benny was no he-man. Nor was he, as Hamlet, an Olivier or a Gielgud. He was unconvincing in many guises, middling in both appearance and affect. The matinee Shakespearean idol was one. And the cuckolded middle-aged lover? An equally complicated issue.

That’s one reason Lubitsch wanted him for the part. His very ordinariness deepened as well as vexed his performance. He was an anti-lover as well as an anti-Hamlet. By casting against type, Lubitsch was paradoxically acknowledging the strange glamor his so-called leading man presumably lacked. Benny as a young English gadabout Oxonian-in-drag was another odd casting choice, another implausible disguise at best. There are photos of a young Benny in drag. Everybody did it (Bob Hope, for example and, most notoriously, Milton Berle on his television show) just as everyone did blackface, but drag has bloomed while blackface has faded, for obvious reasons. Verisimilitude was the last thing anyone would have tolerated: a man in a dress and a wig, with a string of pearls, is just a man in a dress. To go further is to risk being caught on the dangerously cutting edge of Camp. If you cannot know that what you are seeing is just a man, you are in trouble. Which is where Camp and Sontag would wish you to be. In 1941, when Benny starred in the much-revived late Victorian farce Charley’s Aunt (originally done on the London stage in 1892), he was forty-seven. His character is supposed to be about twenty-eight, an Oxford undergraduate who is still hanging around in his tenth year. The plot is easy and ridiculous: Lord Fancourt Babberley is persuaded by two friends to impersonate the aunt of one of them. The real aunt arrives; an old fortune hunter woos the fake aunt, and the play ends with identities revealed, lovers matched, the whole world having moved from Gilbertian topsy-turvy to a recommitment to the status quo. In the film, Kay Francis and the very young Anne Baxter are lovely. Benny is supposed to be sexually attractive? Hardly. His accent is preposterous. He manages an occasional long “A” (“OSK,” not “ask”, or “you CAHN’t do this”). He is no RuPaul. Much is made of Babbs having to shave in order to fool the ladies. The premise of disguise leads into Some Like It Hot two decades later, in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are more persuasive in drag than Benny ever was. I ask “Don’t say Gay”? But what would Rick De Santis call this? Farce is usually tame and easy. Charley’s Aunt has been an international hit for more than a century. A Soviet television version was mounted in 1975; in 2015, a Chinese musical, La Chia’s Aunt appeared on stage, and was made into a film three years later. Perhaps the best version of the twentieth century was done for Playhouse 90 in 1957, directed by Arthur Penn. Art Carney, born in 1918, was actually thirty-nine when he played Charley’s aunt. Like Ray Bolger, he is rubbery, lithe, graceful, even buttery. Carney had physical comedy under his belt—Benny did not—and his Babbs agrees to the ruse proposed by his mates because the guise will train him in the balance and athletic poise he will need in order to make the varsity team of any sport. (At the end, having been promised a spot on the teams, he lands in a pond and his last line is “I can’t quite get the knack of it.”) If anything, Carney as Babbs is much gayer than Benny, in part because his voice predicts Julia Child’s, who came along several years later. Jack Benny was an Everyman, with wit to balance his sobriety, ordinariness and steadiness. He attended high school for a single term, to which he attributed his lack of “such habits of mind as concentration and logical reasoning” (as if these were necessary for his kind of artistry). He claimed never to have planned anything in his career or his life. Things just came to him: it was “always the audience that tells you what to do. It was the people who told me they wanted stingy jokes, and ‘39’ jokes,” and so he gave them what they wanted. His three hallmarks—his eternal age, his fabled stinginess, and his violin as prop—never altered once he had established them. Predictability was part of the charm, as it was, according to our myths of the 1950s, of an entire period which hankered for normalcy following a world depression and a world war. Ordinary, agreeable, Benny was seemingly ageless, and he had quirks that offered no challenge to an audience’s complacency. In fact, this famously stingy man was generous in real life. His tastes ran to the simple: corn flakes for breakfast, Chop Suey in Chinese restaurants, chicken fried steak in diners. (Might we hope for a splash of paprika on the plate?)

 

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Benny’s funeral attracted a dazzling array of other performers, from Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda to Goldie Hawn, Jimmy Stewart, (Governor) Ronald Reagan and Johnny Carson. Among the pall bearers were Gregory Peck, Milton Berle, and Billy Wilder. George Burns, delivering the eulogy, broke down in tears. The stars had come to pay homage to one of their own. This was Hollywood at the beginning of the end of the American century. What looks in retrospect like a bland, homogeneous cultural taste actually offered some hope for democratic inclusiveness. This was an age in which entertainment for adults, much of it square by our standards, filtered down to the entire family. That age was in the process of being replaced by another one, with youthful, edgier pleasures rising up and drowning out older sounds and other tastes. Perhaps things change in order to remain the same. Some years ago, I played for my university students excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan, and from Rodgers and Hammerstein. The students said that Oklahoma and South Pacific sounded to them like opera. Of course. Then, hearing G&S, especially the rapid-fire patter songs, two boys shot up their hands: “It rhymes,” they excitedly observed, “like Hamilton.” Hip-Hop avant la lettre! I had to explain that both sets of collaborators had in their day a universal appeal, sort of like Mr. Sleary’s circus. There was nothing at all highbrow about them. Middlebrow and yet universal, all the way. Hard to guess what the kids would have made of Jack Benny.