Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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Dancing with Franchot Tone: Tenth Avenue Girl Gets to Be “Lady for a Day”

Fancy that, Florence Farley! You were one lucky teenager, when, early in March 1939, a photographer from the ever enterprising Hearst paper New York Journal American came to see a fashion show planned by you and the kids in your neighborhood—the none too fashionable Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. Subsequently, you were chosen to go to Hollywood and become a “Lady for a Day.” What’s more, on this day, 1 May, you got to tell millions of Americans about your experience, dutifully marvelling at the “simply swell” Lux toilet soap in return. After all, you were talking to Cecil B. DeMille, nominal producer of the Lux Radio Theater, and there had to be something in it for those who made you over, young lady, and made your day.

Mr. DeMille was in New York City for the premiere of his Union Pacific, while Leslie Howard took over as narrator and host in Hollywood; so, C. B. didn’t really have to go out of his way (or send you back, all expenses paid, to Tinseltown) to meet up with you. You had returned by then from your West Coast adventure, the title of “Lady” being bestowed upon you “with the understanding” that you would return to your “own workaday world.”

“I was just another girl,” you told the famous director, just as the script had it. “Gee,” you exclaimed, as anyone should, having had a break like yours. When prompted to do so, you told listeners of going to your “first nightclub,” where you met Dorothy Lamour and “danced with Franchot Tone.” He probably felt like dancing, too, considering that he was single again, his marriage with Joan Crawford having recently ended in divorce, which might not be as bad as going back to the tenements. By the way, I’m watching Harriet Craig tonight and wonder what it must have been like, living with Crawford. But never mind that now.

While in Hollywood, you also got to make a screentest, go for a “bicycle ride with Bob Hope,” and appear in a Paramount picture. Not that I could find your name anywhere on the Internet Movie Database. Who knows just how much of your dream come true is true, Florence Farley. Tell me, were you really glad to return to the tenements to live with your grandma and go out with boys who only dream of being Errol Flynn? Did you get to keep those “Cinderella slippers,” never having “paid more than $2 for shoes” before?

Yours was another thin slice of Hollywood baloney, a West Coast diversion from the butchery about to commence in the east to the east of you. It’s no coincidence, either, that the Lux Radio Theater presented an adaptation of Damon Runyon’s ”Madame La Gimp” (later aired under original title on the Damon Runyon Theater program and remade as Pocketful of Miracles starring Glenn Ford, who would have celebrated his 91st birthday today, had he not died last August). Nor is it surprising that your fairy tale fits so well into the scheme of selling things, of carving the mess of life into neat bars of soap.

You know, Flo, listening to your voice (more real than the hooey you were asked to repeat) and wondering about the life behind those lines of yours—the life behind the “human interest” story and the publicity act you were that spring—sure beats following the sentimental play on offer that night. Now let’s wash our hands of the whole affair, without so much as thinking about lathering with the sponsor’s product . . .

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"Round and Round Hitler’s Grave"

It took a while before the news got around the world; but on this day, 30 April, in 1945, Adolf Hitler got around facing trial and execution by committing suicide in his bunker. It would take another six decades until that hideout was opened for public inspection, when, in 2004, the Führer’s final days became the subject of a German film Der Untergang (2004). The Great Dictator had often been the subject of caricatures and crude character sketches, which are so much easier to accomplish than a life-size portrait. They are so much easier to take, as well, considering that a realistic image forces us to acknowledge that, far from being super- (or sub-) human, Hitler was one of us.

Throughout the Second World War, parodies and revenge fantasies boosted the morale of the Allies, comforted by way of comic deflation or enraged through violent melodrama. Radio popularized songs like Spike Jones’s previously mentioned “Der Führer’s Face” and Pete Seeger’s “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.” If he could not be assassinated, potshots had to do:

I’m-a going to Berlin
To Mister Hitler’s town
I’m gonna take my forty-four
And blow his playhouse down.

This is how, a few days after the Führer’s death, the Almanac Singers modified those lines of Seeger’s original song when they performed it for a live broadcast of Norman Corwin’s celebrated VE-Day tribute “On a Note of Triumph,” the highest-rated American radio play of all time:

We’re gonna tell the postman,
Next time he comes ’round,
That Mr. Hitler’s new address
Is the Berlin buryin’ ground.

The Führer was dead, all right. Some eager radio writers had already killed him off, in fantasies like the aforementioned “Death Comes for Adolf Hitler.”  And yet, did that “playhouse” of his ever shut down only because its director, its producers, sponsors, and select members of staff were found dead, along with an audience of millions or, as discussed here, tried and executed in the spectacle of Nürnberg?

Corwin cautioned the American public, asking listeners to “fix [their] eyes on the horizons” and swing [their] ears about.” The old regime did not simply expire, no matter how many rounds had been shot to silence the enemy or how loudly one went “Round and Round” the problem of facing the aftermath.

Lately, I have been watching a number of German post-war films that dealt with the recent past of the fallen Reich and were less than sanguine about the Wunder of the nation’s reinvention as a republic. That is, they dealt with the inconvenient truth that the Nazis were not all below ground. Some had gone underground. They went on to make it big during the US-financed Wirtschaftswunder (or economic boom). Both Wir Wunderkinder (1958) and Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (1959) comment on the big fascist business and bureaucracy behind Germany’s capitalist society and its corruption by Nazi big shots who, rehabilitated without remorse, managed to get high up by keeping a low political profile.

It is this sense of a hidden presence, of an unresolved, let alone conquered past, that, many decades after Germany’s surrender, made it difficult for me to face life in that country, a country where fascists old and new still dance round and round Hitler’s grave as if in hopes of a resurrection; where those in denial of the past or in support of its policies still trample on the graves of millions; and where the radical left not only opened wounds, but fire, perpetrating acts of extremist terror.

I have not been back these seventeen years. We all have our baggage, you might say. Sometimes it weighs so heavily on our souls, it keeps us from dancing . . .

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Shutting Private Eyes; or, the Day Spade Kicked the Bucket

When is it ever the right time, the moment to call it a day after all those years and retire that greasy old trenchcoat—or whatever fashion-defying trademark you might have worn out long before your welcome? Who’s to say, or decide? Peter Falk, apparently, is having a tough time convincing executives that he’s still kicking anything but the bucket. He simply can’t get them to greenlight another Columbo mystery, not even one that closes the book on the four-decades old franchise. I was reminded of the booted gumshoe when, walking around Pest (as in Budapest), we came across that dive in the doctored snapshot.

Columbo is a legend, all right; but to those with an eye for fresh blood, that’s just a fancy way of saying “past it.” Those bags under your eyes sure can get you sacked. These days, wrinkles don’t give a guy character; they take it away from him. And unless you can pass yourself off as Miss Marple, your days in the business are numbered if you can still manage facial expressions.

It wasn’t a matter of putting a stud out to pasture, though, when Sam Spade was kicked out of the radio branch of his office on this day, 27 April, in 1951, after solving what those who got paid to put words into his mouth called, “for obvious reasons,” the “Hail and Farewell Caper.”

Spade wasn’t too old, see. Just ask his secretary, Effie, who would have loved to straighten more than his tie. Besides, on radio you’re as old as your voice can make others imagine you are; and tough-talking Spade was a good enough egg to make you think hardboiled rather than rotten. It was his father who got him axed. Dashiell Hammett, I mean, who got blacklisted for being so un-American as to exercise his right to a political position. After Washington started to dig and got red dirt on Hammett, no broadcaster dared to touch his Spade. That’s when they got out the axe.

There was some retooling, initially. But dropping Hammett’s name just wasn’t enough to appease the network, just as giving Spade a new voice (Stephen Dunne taking over for Howard Duff) did little to please prospective sponsors, the old one (Wildroot Cream Oil) having defected. What was left of Spade after the blunt instruments in the business of commercial broadcasting had operated on his larynx just wasn’t enough to convince listeners, who had fought to get their favorite detective back on the air and lift Spade’s two-month suspension in the fall of 1950.

Radio was a queer racket in those days. You could be a a Communist for the FBI, but not a pink private eye. As I said, a new agenda called for a new kind of scouring agent. It mattered little that Hammett had nothing to do with the writing of the show (he just collected the royalties, which is pretty good business sense for a Commie), or that the Spade on the air was about as red as the greenbacks he was after but always short of.

At the close of the “Hail and Farewell Caper,” Spade makes a final sales pitch, a word to prospective advertisers; but, being that it wasn’t yet time for the obligatory summer hiatus, during which executives decided the fate of radio heroes, the plea sounds out of place. If you ask me, it was a ruse intended to quiet listener protest by leaving some hope for a commercially sponsored resurrection, a denial of the politics behind the show’s death warrant. It was the spirit of the age that dug Spade‘s grave.

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Pride of the Luftwaffe: Guernica at 70

“Well, gentlemen, let’s get aboard,” says the pilot in Norman Corwin’s “They Fly Through the Air.” What a “peach” of a morning. “You couldn’t ask for a better day” . . . to blow up a few hundred civilians. The verse play (discussed here previously), was written in commemoration of the air raid on the village of Gernika-Lumo, perpetrated on this day, 26 April, in 1937. In what words, in which ways can one approach such a monstrosity, reproach such a murderous marvel as modern warfare? How to make sense of it? How to keep from becoming numb, insensitive to the atrocities of war that are being committed even today, when our gardens are peaceful and the pavements busy with people consumed with their own cares or the pleasures of consuming? These are the questions poet-journalist Corwin, who will turn 97 in a few days, tackles in his response to the raid. Picasso’s Guernica, which I got to see at last on a visit to Madrid, is a lament for the dead and wounded; Corwin’s “They Fly” is an attack on the machinery of war and the minds that get it running.

“Gee, that’s fascinating,” exclaims the pilot as he looks down upon the havoc and horror he has wrought by dutifully carrying out his mission, which is merely to test the what is hot from the runways of Germany, the latest line of the Luftwaffe: “What a spread! Looks just like a budding rose, unfolding.” That precious simile is an echo of a remark attributed to Mussolini, who is said to have found floral beauty in mass destruction.

“How can we justly celebrate the odysseys / Of demigods who finger destinies upon their trigger tips?” Corwin’s narrator considers. He has a few suggestions, all of which he rejects as unworthy of the deed:

With wreaths of laurel?
Laurel withers fast.
By sculpturing in bronze?
Too cold; too passive;
Also, in emergencies, it may be melted to make other things;
Rechristen with you names a public square?
That’s vulgar.
Furthermore, no single square is big enough.

A poem, perhaps?
Aha, that’s it! A poem!
A verse or two that will contract no rust,
A bombproof ode, whose strophes will stand stout
Against all flood and famine, epidemic war,
And pox and plague and general decay.
Yes, poetry’s the thing.

Is it? The narrator tries to escape the noise of the motors (“Our meter will be influenced”), but is dissatisfied with his lines:

What words can compass glories such as we have seen today?
Our language beats against its limitations.

How do we commemorate Guernica? Perhaps by listening for and to those engines running, the war machinery that is at work today. The past is often conveniently looked at as if from above, from which vantage point it appears distant, clearly patterned, even negligible or quaint. Perhaps it is best to resist the temptations of flight . . .

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Earwitness for the Prosecution

Being that this is the anniversary of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, a scientist widely, however mistakenly, regarded as the inventor of the wireless, I am once again lending an ear to the medium with whose plays and personalities this journal was meant to be chiefly concerned. Not that I ever abandoned the subject of audio drama or so-called old-time radio; but efforts to reflect more closely my life and experiences at home or abroad have induced me of late to turn a prominent role into what amounts at times to little more than mere cameos. Besides, “Writing for the Ear” is a course I am offering this fall at the local university; so I had better prick ’em up (my auditory organs, I mean) and come at last to that certain one of my senses.

The English lexicon amply documents the western bias against listening, generally “seen” as being secondary to sight. Compared to the commonly used “eyewitness,” for instance, the expression “earwitness” sounds rather unusual. What’s more, it is rejected by my electronic dictionary and, when typed in defiance, promptly marked as a spelling error. That is perhaps the victorious eye thumping its nose at the once superior ear, which, prior to the invention of the printing press, played a greater or at any rate more respected role in the sharing and absorption of information than it does in this our age of gossip and hearsay. If the always favored ocular proof cannot be discovered, it is the eyewitness report that carries more weight than the overheard.

I am going to refrain from channeling McLuhan, however, and concentrate instead on a notable fictional witness whose testimony was brought before an audience in the strictest sense of the word. I am referring to Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom melodrama initially conceived as a short story and subsequently adapted, albeit not by Dame Agatha herself, for US radio, whose early experiments in courtroom dramatics have been previously discussed here.

According to the Wikipedia, the “very first performance of Witness for the Prosecution was in the form of a live telecast which aired on CBS’s Lux Video Theatre on 17 September 1953. Now, this is accurate only if Witness is meant to denote Christie’s stage play, rather than her story. The latter had already been dramatized nearly four and a half years earlier. Produced by NBC’s Radio City Playhouse, it was broadcast on this day, 25 April, in 1949.

Such a hold has visual storytelling on our imagination today that it is difficult to approach this audio performance of Witness without seeing before one’s mind’s eyes the features and the legs of the legendary Marlene Dietrich (of whom I have seen quite a bit this year [see my movie lineup on the right] and to whose voice I intend to devote my next podcast). Then there is that prominent scar in the face of the titular character, more prominent still than Ms. Dietrich’s invaluable German accent. Can a sound-only adaptation without access to Dietrich’s features or voice succeed in rendering Christie’s cheeky deception?

Unlike the character of Leonard Vole, the accused, whose innocence is laid on rather too thickly by David Gothard in the Radio City Playhouse production to escape the listener’s suspicion, the mysterious woman who comes to his aid (ably portrayed by theater actress Lotte Stavisky) might just manage to pull the wool over your ears. The radio dramatization handles the challenges of duping the audience, both the listeners at home and in the fictional courtroom, remarkably well, the scar being made audible in the gasp of its beholder. Like the members of a jury, when called upon to examine accusations and protestations of innocence, the listener deals with interpretations of reality, on someone’s word taken for an otherwise unknowable “it.”

I confess, though, that, as much as I value my hearing, I frequently feel compelled to see for myself; which is why, on the anniversary of Dame Agatha’s birthday, I went up to her room at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul last fall and had a look. There wasn’t much to see, really; not so much as an air of her presence. And, after paying the concierge who escorted us up to room 411, which the enterprising management has shrouded in a mystery of its own, I felt as if I were getting a box on the ear for not having had more sense.

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From the House of Terror

This report from the Terror Háza (or House of Terror) concludes my Budapest diary. Not that Hungary is quite done with me yet, considering that this week’s drama on BBC Radio 3 is The Radetzky March, an adaptation of the 1932 novel, which chronicles the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as a portrait of its author, Joseph Roth, an Austrian Jew. Roth died in 1939, some five years before the Nazis took over Hungary (or Nazi Hungary allied itself with Germany), resulting in the deportation and death of thousands of Jews in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. My visit to the House of Terror, in which these and other stories from Hungary’s none-too-distant past are documented, was one of the most fascinating and disturbing history lessons I have ever received.

Once called the House of Loyalty, the building was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazi Party. In its basement, members of the Arrow Cross interrogated, tortured and silenced hundreds, smothering the voices of the opposition. Like Hungary itself, the premises were soon taken over by the Communists, who, beginning in 1945, continued to use them for such purposes until 1956, the year of the brutally crushed revolution.

The House of Terror is a museum now, an exhibition space at once horrific and beautiful. In its corridors of former power, the art of intimidation survives as art installations. The awful turns awesome, the oppressive impressive. David Lynch might have served as its interior decorator. It is glamorous, you might say. How perverse it was to admire what decency compels us to abhor. The house, it seemed, was designed to corrupt.

It was only when I descended into the cellar, rooms into which visitors are lowered with cruel deliberation on a black and slow-moving elevator, that the oohs and ahhs were choked right out of me. Never before have I experienced such an approach to what must be never again, at least not on this heart-shrinking and spirit sinking scale. This place of dread and despair does not simply document the uses of awe—it provokes and regenerates it.

My throat muscles tightened, my eyes filled with tears, as I solemnly made my way through this desolate underground maze of “detention cells”, “wet cells,” of “foxholes” and “treatment rooms,” of “guard rooms” and “condemned cells”—and the “place of execution.”

“There were no executions” in Terror Háza, the guidebook took pains to inform me, “‘only’ fatal bashings and suicides.” Echoing the distinctions of the extinguishers at work here, the clear and cruel terminology of extermination still reverberates in this orderly house of silencing, a house in which there was no room for grace . . .

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My Evening with Queen Victoria

Considering that it is St. George’s Day (as well as the anniversary of the birth of the Bard), I am going to stay a little closer to home this time and, forgoing a return to Budapest, report instead on my audience with the Queen. Victoria Regina, I mean, whom last I captured towering over Birmingham’s German Christmas market (pictured) and imagined listening to her Electrophone. Yesterday, we went to An Evening with Queen Victoria, a one-woman show in which British stage, screen, and television actress Prunella Scales, accompanied by a lyric tenor and a pianist (who is also the husband of the play’s creator and director), has toured the new and old world, including England, Australia, Canada and the United States. So, it was bound to make it to Wales, eventually.

Just in time, I might add. Ms. Scales, whose life now spans as many decades as the play, was called upon to read, in character, selections from the queen’s published reminiscences (Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highland) and personal correspondences, from her youthful comments on her German cousins to her reflections on marriage and motherhood, duty, loss, and old age.

Along the way, the star struggled with some of her lines and had to be prompted audibly at one point (Fawlty Powers, I could not help thinking), while the aged pianist, who at one time loudly cleared his throat as if he had quite forgotten that there was a performance going on, played pieces of classical pieces by Rossini, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, which were interpreted with much feeling by the tenor, who thus painted himself into the queen’s portrait. The three of them joined forces to sing “Duties of a Monarch” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers:

Oh, philosophers may sing
Of the troubles of a King,
But of pleasures there are many and of worries there are none;
And the culminating pleasure
That we treasure beyond measure
Is the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done!

The whole royal affair might have faired well on radio, I thought, since it is largely a first-person narrative involving little action, aside from the queen’s efforts to rise from her easy chair to pick up various letters and books, to fetch a cane or wrap herself up as she gradually ages before us. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that An Evening has indeed been produced for BBC radio.

It was on the air that the Her (Imperial) Majesty had been introduced into the living rooms of America, voiced by Helen Hayes, who inhabited the part on the Broadway stage in Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1934), a play initially banned in England for daring to impersonate British royalty yet living.

An Evening was based largely on actual reminiscences of the monarch, as this somewhat unfortunate line from the leaflet that served as a playbill informed me: “The words of this programme are compiled entirely from Queen Victoria’s own journals and letters, together with some additional material from contemporary sources,” which is like saying that a loaf of bread is whole grain, except for a few preservatives and added flavors, natural or otherwise, however difficult to detect.

A similar claim was made by radio announcer Ernest Chapell, who introduced the 2 June 1939 broadcast of Orson Welles’s Campbell Playhouse by declaring that in order to “complete the true picture of this great queen, Mr. Welles has used still another source, one which only a few years ago was still a closed book, locked away in the official archives of the royal family: the personal diary of Queen Victoria.”

Containing the same material and creating a similar effect, An Evening is essentially a non-dramatic version of Victoria Regina, which Hayes revived once again for her Electric Theater on 14 November 1948, the day the queen’s great-great-great grandson, Prince Charles, was born. Intimate without being indiscreet, informal without being vulgar, both sketches create the quiet sensation of familiarity by bringing alive, in her own words, a woman who is more often thought of as an institution or the name crowning an era.

In an age favoring uncompromising exposés and compromising snapshots, close-ups with which we distance ourselves, such personal introductions are a charming and welcome illusion.

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Replications of Life: Kempelen and the Art of "Turking" It

I appreciate a good hoax; and no hoax is any good unless it wrings from you the admission that you have been had. My common sense yields to the artistry of the con, the handiwork of cheeky tricksters who can cheat you out of your trousers by presenting you a with a hook from which to suspend your disbelief. And however desperately I might try to cover up and recover my composure by juggling an assortment of polysyllables, I am just the kind of fall guy you’d love to be around on April Fools’ Day—or any other day, if you are among those who practice their legerdemain without a license.

To cry foul at the art of faking, as Oscar Wilde put it, to “confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem.” Not that such a defense would have done for Orson Welles and his Mercury Players, whose aforementioned Halloween make-believe gave broadcasters cause for alarm after some radio listeners panicked at the announcement of a Martian invasion back in 1938. In the case of the famous Turk, the fakery was comparatively inoffensive and harmless, excepting perhaps for the wretch squeezed into the apparatus, a replica of which (by illusionist supplier John Gaughan) I encountered at the Műcsarnok in Budapest. It is on display there until 28 May 2007, after which time it may be seen in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 15 June until 19 August 2007, over two hundred years after its first appearance in that town.

The chess-playing automaton was the creation of Austro-Hungarian baron Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), who, according to Edgar Allan Poe, “had no scruple in declaring it to be a ‘very ordinary piece of mechanism—a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion.'”

The marvel of the Turk was that it kept audiences guessing, not so much what his next move might be, but how he moved and whether he actually contemplated the movements of the pieces in the game. What was the ghost in this machine? Was it some precursor of “The Automaton” that, on 27 July 1953, stalked radio’s Hall of Fantasy? Might the Turk have a mind of his own (a thought to cause suspicious westerners unease)?

Poe became intrigued by the mystery of the Turk when this player of mind games toured America after having been acquired by a German inventor-showman who shrouded the creation in further mystery by refusing to say whether it was “a pure machine or not.” As Poe speculated in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” the “notoriety” and “great curiosity” of the Turk were “owing more especially to the prevalent opinion that it is a pure machine, than to any other circumstance.” It was, therefore,

in the interest of the proprietor to represent it as a pure machine. And what more obvious, and more effectual method could there be of impressing the spectators with this desired idea, than a positive and explicit declaration to that effect? On the other hand, what more obvious and effectual method could there be of exciting a disbelief in the Automaton’s being a pure machine, than by withholding such explicit declaration?

Being in the know without having had the courage of falling for it or the virtue of rising to the occasion by exercising one’s imagination is a profligate waste of curiosity. It means to reduce a philosophical problem to a mechanical one. More compelling than the matter of its nuts and bolts was how the Turk worked on the minds of those surrounding him. “For, people will naturally reason,” Poe argued, that it is

Maelzel’s interest to represent this thing a pure machine—he refuses to do so, directly, in words, although he does not scruple, and is evidently anxious to do so, indirectly by actions—were it actually what he wishes to represent it by actions, he would gladly avail himself of the more direct testimony of words—the inference is, that a consciousness of its not being a pure machine, is the reason of his silence—his actions cannot implicate him in a falsehood—his words may.

To this day, Germans refer to what they deem forged, false or fake as being “turked” (“getürkt”), which, I am pleased to say, explains nothing.

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Monumental (S)care: A Walk in Statue Park

No matter how hard I tried to make light of them, by pulling their fingers or sitting on their boots, the colossal statues gathered in the ideological leper colony that is Szoborpark made me feel (and, as you can see, seem) rather small. They were intended to awe, of course, to impress those looking up with a sense of being overmastered rather than represented, of being conquered and compelled to surrender their personal aspirations along with their cultural identity. Removed from the public squares in which they towered over the multitude, the statues of the communist regime imposed on the Hungarian people have been relegated by them to the outskirts of Budapest, to a forlorn place called Memento or Statue Park.

Never completed as conceived on paper in the early 1990s, the park has already fallen into disrepair. Weeds now triumph over concepts, mocking at once the old order of terror and this new method of detaining it, of quarantining a body of unsettling memories by setting it apart from the everyday. The past needs tending to; but, as the grounds of Statue Park suggest, we balk at beautifying what amounts to pathology, at manicuring a disease known to have corrupted intellects, choked incentives, and smothered lives.

As those monuments went up in 1940s Hungary, the US took monumental care in tearing down communist and socialist ideals, many of which had been shared and endorsed by thousands of upright, patriotic Americans during the 1930s. After years of economic hardship, of rationing and sacrifice, Americans seized the chance of raising picket fences, those monuments to sovereignty, which they were encouraged to set up as individual tributes to American virtues, to the pursuit of personal happiness and the proper boundaries of its expression.

Yet the straight and clean domains of the home frontier were argued to be under attack, compromised by wayward doubters and their doubtful ways; and it was on the air that the infiltrations and contaminations of the social fabric by the newly branded un-Americans—who were argued to have their designs on the dream they questioned as fabrication—were mass-circulated as cautionary tales of anti-communist propaganda.

Aside from the common weed of crime, once rooted out with precision and glee by superheroes like The Shadow (reportedly slated to be recast for the screen that could never contain him), the fungus of homegrown communism at home threat of mushroom clouds over America demanded a new breed of secret and sanitary agents, men like Matt Cvetic, who infiltrated the infiltrators and spread his cleansing mission statement by boldly declaring I Was Communist for the FBI in a series of espionage thrillers that premiered on US radio back in April 1952.

Throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, US radio assisted in setting up new statues and dismantling old, in forging idols and fostering ideals while pronouncing others fallen or rotten. It created images in the mind more persuasive, invasive and pervasive than prominently displayed sculptures in stone or steel. The United States did not require monuments to steer and stir, to guide, goad and guard its citizenry. It had microphones.

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Tara on the Danube; or, The Ambassador Wore Ballet Shoes

Well, that didn’t last long, did it? The wireless connection in our hotel room in Budapest, I mean. It pretty much collapsed after about 48 hours, even though we had paid a small bundle to be online for the week. Not that I find it easy to keep this journal, to keep up with the out-of-date while being out and about on my travels. Our days were filled with taking in the sights; our evenings (and bellies) with goulash, goose liver, and Hungarian wines—from which culinary excesses arose the most curious and vivid dreams. I was paying my respects at the bedside of the by me previously pooh-poohed Zsa Zsa Gabor, shared a moldy piece of decades-old cake with Madonna, who told me my gray roots needed a fresh coating of dye, and was set to teach “My Fair Lady” (whatever that might entail) at a soberingly conservative village school. Those subconscious night flights of fancy were not nearly as strange, though, as the experience of going to the Budapest Opera House to see Gone With the Wind transformed into a Hungarian ballet.

“I bet you, if it was handled right, that picture would make a great book.” That is what the aforementioned Fibber McGee told his wife Molly after watching the premiere of Gone With the Wind at their local theater in early 1940. And there I was, 67 years later, hundreds of miles from my local theater, asking myself whether it could make a great ballet. I had never considered the question; but when we walked into the magnificent Operaház to find out what was playing, we could not resist snatching up what might have been the last as well as the best tickets to the pop-cultural and historical confrontation that was the world premier of Elfújta a Szél.

In her introduction to the piece, US ambassador April H. Foley made a somewhat desperate effort to stress the connections between Gone With the Wind and Hungarian culture, reminding readers of the playbill that the novel was awarded a prize named after Hungarian-born newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer; that the production of the movie had involved Hungarian-born director George Cukor; and that it starred a leading lady once “under contract to Hungarian filmmaker Alexander Korda.” Such connecting-the-dottiness rather reminds me of the treatment I am giving American radio drama, which I am wont to work into just about any conversation; especially into this one, given that a scene from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller had been dramatized for radio more than three years before it hit the big screen in December 1939.

But, back to the ballet. The last time I exposed myself to the spectacle of cinema gone tiptoeing, my response was less than rapturous. Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands seemed to rely overmuch on fanciful costumes and fantastic sets than on the footwork that had made Bourne’s earlier Swan Lake such breathtaking theater. Choreographed by Lilla Pártay (to the music of Anton Dvorak, whose “New World” was not the bygone one romanticized by Gone), Elfújta was decidedly more traditional in its approach to ballet, even though its retelling of the contrived melodrama that is Gone often felt like a danced synopsis—a series of tiptoe tableaux. However charming or thrilling the moves, it was the tiptoeing around American history that had me wriggling in my seat.

Commenting on Gone’s depiction of the American Civil War, Foley remarked that the “attitudes toward slavery and stereotypes of African Americans are consistent with the historical era” and that “[a]lthough we certainly do not share these views today, we appreciate Gone With the Wind for what it is: an icon of American historical fiction that is still enjoyed by millions the world over.” Now, aside from feeling that Scarlett’s struggles are so much less interesting than the period in which they are set, I was disconcerted to see that there was next to nothing “historical” about Elfújta, that its love story might as well have taken place on the banks of the Danube—had it not been for those three white actors grinning and swaying in unconvincing dark makeup that was nearly as cartoonish as blackface.

I am not sure in which way Elfújta could “enrich an already close and thriving bilateral relationship” between Hungary and America, other than celebrating a mutual dumbing down of the social sciences. Having long been oppressed and subjected to foreign terrors under the communist regime, Hungarians might be better equipped to identify with the suppressed stories of the slaves than with tales involving Scarlett, Melanie, and Rhett. Now, I don’t know what the role of ballet should or could be in today’s culture; but, for all its splendor, the frivolous Elfújta struck me as an ambassadorial misstep.