Tag: Budapest

Posted on

I Was a Communist for Tallulah Bankhead

Memento Park, Budapest

Radio has always promoted other media, despite the competition it faced from print and screen. To some degree, this led to its decline as a dramatic medium. Producers made eyes at the pictures, neglecting to develop techniques that would ensure radio’s future as a viable alternative to visual storytelling. Television had been around the corner virtually from the beginnings of broadcasting; even in the 1920s, radio insiders were expecting its advent. So, the old wireless was often seen as little more than a placeholder for television, an interim tool for advertisers eagerly awaiting the day on which they no longer had to spell out what they could show to the crowd.

One of the last big hurrahs of radio during the early 1950s was The Big Show, a variety program hosted by actress Tallulah Bankhead (last revisited here). Sure, Bankhead promoted the movies—but on this day, 29 April, in 1951, she doubtlessly had something else in mind when she expressed herself “privileged to hear a portion of a truly great new Warner Bros. picture, starring Frank Lovejoy.”

According to Joel Lobenthal’s biography of the actress, Bankhead had a “phobia about communism,” largely owing to her Catholic upbringing. Yet, as George Baxt, a theatrical agent involved in booking talent for the program, tells it in The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case, a mystery set during those Big Show nights, her show struggled as a result of this anxiety and the forms it took.

Not Bankhead’s anxieties—the measures taken by fierce anti-Communists to blacklist (or at least graylist) allegedly subversive players. By the early 1950s, even comedienne Judy Holliday was considered suspicious, which did not stop Bankhead from welcoming her on the Big Show on several occasions.

By playing a scene from a soon-to-be-released spy thriller titled I Was a Communist for the FBI, Bankhead fought for the life of the Big Show, now that even she, the fierce anti-Communist, had come under attack. As Bankhead pointed out, I Was a Communist was a dramatization of the Saturday Evening Post stories based on experience of counterspy Matt Cvetic, whom Lovejoy “deem[ed] it an honor” to portray.

“It certainly brought home to me the patriotic devotion and the sheer guts that Matt needed to take that nine-year beating.” At this point, a voice is heard, off-mike, telling Lovejoy that “someone had to do it.” That someone, speaking to the listening audience, was none other than Matt Cvetic:

Well, Frank, maybe we’d better wait until the job is done before we start taking bows.  The job is far from finished.  We’re just beginning to fight back against the deadly, ruthless, highly organized Soviet-controlled conspiracy.  So, we’ve got a lot of fighting yet to do before we can rid ourselves of this greatest threat to the world of free men.  We’ve got to fight.  All of us.  All the time.

“Amen to that,” Bankhead responded enthusiastically as the crowd in the studio applauded. Threatened by the blacklisters and the menace of television, Ms. Bankhead knew she had to fight—for the good of the country and the good of her show. The Big Show went off the air a year later, just as the aforementioned radio version of I Was a Communist began its syndicated run . . .

Posted on

The "universal language of mankind"; or, Do You Verstehen Surtitles?

According to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, our “universal language” is music. This might account for the international crowd at Budapest’s splendid opera and operetta houses; or perhaps it is ticket prices, which the locals are less likely to tolerate than the visitors in town for a good time. It is like that the world over, I suspect. New Yorkers are hardly the main audience for Broadway shows. What is on offer in any cultural center is largely owing to centrifugal forces. Is it the music that is universally understood? Or is it just that money talks without an accent?

Longfellow—who made above remark while on the subject of “Ancient Spanish Ballads”—is often quoted out of context. The “universal” is not meant to imply the absence or insignificance of regional or national idioms. We might all share a love of song without necessarily trilling the same tune:

The muleteer of Spain carols with the early lark, amid the stormy mountains of his native land. The vintager of Sicily has his evening hymn; the fisherman of Naples his boat-song; the gondolier of Venice his midnight serenade. The goatherd of Switzerland and they Tyrol, the Carpathian boor, the Scotch Highlander, the English ploughboy, singing as he drives his team afield—peasant, serf, slave, all, all have their ballads and traditional songs.

It is not local color you are likely to discover when stepping inside the larger venues, painted as they are in the color of money. What, I asked myself as I walked past a Finn in the foyer, is the intended audience for productions mounted by the National Hungarian Opera, where last year we took in the bewildering spectacle of Gone With the Wind, staged as a ballet to the music of Czech composer Dvořák, a pop-cultural miscalculation meant to foster good relations between Hungary and the United States. On offer this time around was Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, in Czech, with Magyar surtitles. Is it any wonder I am getting Prague and Pest confused as I try to recall our adventures in theatregoing?

In such moments of cultural confusion the Pontevedrian embassy can generally be relied upon as a refuge for the historically challenged. Yes, the Pontevedrian embassy is always open for business. Said Graustarkian edifice was set up for our convenience at the Budapesti Operettszínház, where the ever popular Lustige Witwe (heard here in a 23 January 1950 broadcast of Railroad Hour starring Gordon MacRae) once more saved her make-believe nation (or was it Montenegro?) from bankruptcy and waltzed off with the less-than-patriotic Danilo (portrayed with brio by Dániel Gábor) into the bargain—all in Hungarian with German supertitles, which, much to my irritation, I caught myself editing.

Finally, we went to the ballet, where “universal” meant lissome girl dancing with scrawny boy . . . to canned music. “Can real friendship exist between a man and a woman, and if so, why not? Happiness and pain follows each other again and again until death comes,” choreographer Antal Fodor comments in his note on “A nö hétszer” (“Women Times Seven”). Sometimes, you just have to provide your own translation . . .

Posted on

The Great Dictation: Milton, Munkácsy and the Blind Medium

I did not know what to expect when I stepped inside the Hungarian National Gallery, a war-battered royal palace turned into a public museum during the days of Communist rule in Budapest. Somehow, Hungarian culture has remained a closed book—or rather, a neglected volume—to me; and looking at rooms filled with art depicting scenes from Magyar history made me come face to face again with my own ignorance.

How welcome a sight was “The Blind Milton Dictating ‘Paradise Lost’ to His Daughters.” Yes, that face was familiar, as was the composition, even though I had never troubled myself to note, let alone pronounce, the name of its artist: Mihály Munkácsy. I was surprised to reencounter “Blind Milton” there, knowing it to be on permanent display at New York Public Library on 42nd Street (where it is currently the centerpiece of an exhibition celebrating Milton’s life and works). As it turns out, there are two version of Munkácsy’s painting, the one in New York City being the larger of the two.

This year marks the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth, so we are likely to come across “Blind Milton” in the arts and literature sections of our newspapers or the pages of magazines on history and culture. Even in the 19th-century, the image was frequently reproduced on paper. Indeed, we happened upon such a reproduction at a second-hand bookstore in the Hungarian capital not long after our gallery visit, on the very day it was featured in The New York Times arts section online.

The image became so familiar that, by the twentieth century, the

usual conception of John Milton in the imagination of America’s school children has been a misty mezzotint of a blind man sitting in a dark room dictating Paradise Lost to his bored but dutiful daughters.  That Milton was one of the most fearless and most revolutionary thinkers of his century few youngsters have ever been permitted to know.

.This is how, in 1939, Max Wylie prefaced “The Story of John Milton,” a script from the radio series Adventure in Reading (NBC; 1938-40). The play (by Helen Walpole and Margaret Leaf) tells of blindness, vision, and the specter of persecution as the monumental struggle of the beleaguered poet is being recalled by the voices he called forth in his art.

For twelve years, Milton’s ideas had been in the service of the Commonwealth, until the Restoration threatened to obliterate his words and legacy. Awaiting news from his friend Sir Harry Vane, Milton tries to dictate Paradise Lost to his daughter Mary:

Milton.  You aren’t writing, Mary, you aren’t writing!

Mary.  How can I father? How can I do anything … while we’re waiting for the coming of Sir Harry!

Milton.  Write.  Take down what I say.  “Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves, / Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav’n / To their own vile advantage shall turn. . . .”

Mary.  I cannot.  I cannot.  Paradise Lost may never be finished.

Milton.  Paradise Lost shall be finished.  I’m not a human being any longer, Mary.  I’m an instrument … a vessel … you don’t understand that … but no matter … I may seem hard to you and your sister … but that’s not important either. . . .

Mary.  I shall try to write.  Dictate it again, father.

Milton.  “Wolves shall succeed for teachers, …”

The war of ideas and the fight for their expression—a challenge as urgent in 1660 and 1939 as it is today—is a fitting subject for the so-called blind medium, a medium capable of conjuring images before the mind’s eye not grown dim from lack of exercise.

Milton is accused of treason. The burning of his books, to be executed by “a common hangman,” have been ordered. “Blind among my enemies…. How can I fight?” the poet cries in near despair, until, roused by his visions, he declares:

If, by my own toil, I have fanned the flame that burned out my eyes … then from that darkness will be born new eyes. All natural objects shut away … I can see clearer into life itself….  My vision will not be blurred or turned aside! And so, O, Highest Wisdom, I submit.  I am John Milton, whose sight was taken away that he might be given new eyes.

It is in the opening lines of the third book of Paradise Lost that Milton comments on his condition:

I sung of chaos and eternal night,
Taught by the heav’nly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled […].
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev’n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

It seems that, in the scene depicted by Munkácsy, Milton is dictating these very lines, at the moment dramatized for Adventure in Reading. His three dutiful daughters look anything but bored. Entrusted with a solemn responsibility and not altogether ignorant of their father’s perilous position, they are rapt and apprehensive as they listen to the dictation, encoded in which is the speaker’s intimate story, a few telling lines in an epic on the fallibility of humankind.

Posted on

Night Bus; or, What Nearly Didn’t Happen

”Go where the hell ever you want. But get that word ‘bus’ outta the title. It’s poison.” That is what Harry Cohn told Frank Capra when the director declared that his next picture would be Night Bus, the comedy we now know as It Happened One Night. I have to agree with Mr. Cohn as to the toxicity of said vocable. After my recent trip to Budapest, “bus” has become a four-letter word in my lexicon, spelling b-u-s-t. The night bus that was supposed to transport us from Wales to England never even turned up. There we stood, in the wind and the rain, wondering how on earth we would get to Luton (about four and a half hours eastward) to catch the early morning flight to the Hungarian capital.

There were about fifty of us, waiting not only for the chartered vehicle but also anticipating the violent storm that was to batter the coastline and move, along with us, to the continent. It was well past 11 PM when we somehow—and, quite miraculously, given our remote location—managed to hire an alternative coach. Little did we know that, when we finally got underway around 0:30 AM, that that heaven-sent conveyance would end up sputtering along at 10 mph—on the highway, no less—and give up the ghost in its machine halfway through the journey. We missed our flight and spent five hours at a truck stop making twelfth-hour arrangements to get all of us to Budapest.

Amazingly, we did secure another flight from another airport, to which the bus, now repaired, transported us. We arrived at our destination some ten hours behind schedule—too late to enjoy the boat trip on the Danube planned for the afternoon. Our hotel, we discovered, was a converted psychiatric hospital; the folks in charge of making the building fit for its new purpose needn’t have gone through what didn’t look to have been all that much trouble. I, for one, was ready to be institutionalized.

Riding a bus—or missing and waiting for same—is about as enchanting as the prospect of digging a plastic fork into a fast food dinner. Hollywood caught on quick, romancing the railroad instead. As I took time to explore in an undergraduate essay “Ladies in Loco-motion: The Train Motif in the Romantic Comedies of Claudette Colbert” (previously mentioned here), that romance commenced as early as 1895—merely a quarter of a century after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in America—when the Lumière Brothers, showing their “Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station” at the first public movie theater in Paris, discovered that the tracks and the camera were indeed made for each other. Sure, some spectators left screaming—but most came back for more.

In 1903, motion picture pioneer Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery revolutionized American film, since it led to the discovery that, as Ian Hamilton put it, “movies were not just ‘motion photographs’: they could indeed tell stories, defy the unities, move compellingly from A to B.” Bound and gagged beauties left to expire on the tracks, inexorable engines speedily approaching, and courageous heroes dashing to the rescue are quintessential images and sequences of both silent-screen melodrama and comedy.

As moviemaking and film narrative became more sophisticated, the plot-propelling and symbolic potentialities of the Iron Horse—from the far-off soundings of its prophetic whistle to close-ups of its powerful wheels—were explored and exploited in virtually every emerging genre, in mystery (Strangers on a Train) and musical (The Harvey Girls), in film noir (Double Indemnity) and war actioner (The Train), in Western (Union Pacific) and weeper (Brief Encounter).

To Hollywood’s romantic comedies of the 1930s and 40s, train rides, from the daily commute on the el to adventurous journeys on the Twentieth Century, proved vital as well, with trains and stations serving as unstable, mobile communities or pervious social settings in which relationships are as readily forged as foreshortened, as easily enhanced as escaped.

At once liberating and restricting in their scheduled, track-shackled predictability, distinctly modern, pragmatic and everyday, yet steeped in pre-automotive nostalgia, episodes in transit seem ideally suited to a comic rendering of the primal and perpetual boy-meets-girl plot, in which the lovers’ temporary separation, emotionally as well as physically, is an essential device. Consequently, Hollywood’s romantic comedy and its wilder, wackier subgenre, the Hays Office dodging screwball, make ample use of departures, arrivals, and escapades en route.

For all its influence on screwball, It Happened One Night did little to get the bus rolling again; perhaps, the crammed coach began to smell too much of a New Deal gone sour. Bus travel wasn’t so much democratic as socialist, the freedom of the road curtailed by the invisible tracks that are the prescribed route. On the train, at least, the classes could be compartmentalized, and there was ample room for glamour as well as hobo nonconformity. According to Emanuel Levy’s And the Winner Is . . ., even the success story of Capra’s Night Bus concludes with a real-life train incident. Claudette Colbert, not having expected to pick up a trophy for her role as Ellie Andrews,

was boarding the Santa Fe train to New York when she was announced winner. The Santa Fe officials held up the train and she was taken by taxi to the ceremonies at the Biltmore Hotel. “I’m happy enough to cry,” she said, ‘but I can’t take the time to do so. A taxi is waiting outside with the engine running.”

The bus driver did not wait for Miss Andrews. And he drove his vehicle into a muddy ditch, too. Is it any wonder the runaway heiress was such an expert hitchhiker? Buses! Imagine the joys of our shaky return trip, during which the coach’s anti-roll bar fell off and dragged noisily on the road like so many cans proclaiming “Just Married.” Hardly a marriage of convenience, it certainly was no romance . . .

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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 . . .

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Square New Deal?

At one point it was prosaically called Uploading Square. Roosevelt tér in Budapest, that is. I decided to start our visit to the Hungarian capital by walking across the old Chain Bridge to pay my respects to the thirty-second US President who died in office on this day, 12 April, in 1945. As previously mentioned here, FDR owed much to the radio; his voice and views were known to millions of Americans who tuned in to hear his Fireside Chats. Three days after his death, his life was recalled by two special and very different broadcast, one headed by Ronald Colman and featuring an uncommonly yet appropriately somber Fibber McGee and Molly, the other featuring Canada Lee, reciting FDR’s D-Day prayer.

Roosevelt did not get a square deal, I thought, as I approached the spot named after him in 1947. These days, it is little more than a roundabout, a traffic island with a few statues in the middle—and none of them of FDR. Seen from the top of the hill in Buda, however, its prominence in the cityscape becomes apparent. Besides, as Fibber expressed it: “You know, a man is entitled to a lot of credit when people can say his family, and his community, and his country are better off for his having lived; but when a man dies and the whole world was a better place for his living, well, nobody needs much more of a monument than that.”

Meanwhile, the statues of Soviet heroes and leaders from whose rule Hungary struggled to free itself (after having lost the war siding with Nazi Germany) have been relegated to a park of their own . . .