Tag: Budapest

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Hungary to Hollywood; or, "seven maids with seven mops"

Well, this is it. My last entry into the broadcastellan journal before I’m off to Budapest, from which spot I hope to be reporting back on 12 April with a snapshot of Roosevelt Square, in commemoration of FDR’s death in 1945. Supposedly, our hotel room has wireless access; so I might not have to share my impressions retrospectively (as I have done on almost every previous occasion, after trips to London and Madrid, Istanbul and Scotland, Cornwall and New York City). This time, perhaps, I won’t have to catch up with myself as well as our pop cultural past.

Preparing for my trip, in an experiment you might call method blogging, I devoted the last few posts to connections between broadcasting and Budapest, between Hollywood and Hungary. Today’s association was not so much forged but found; and it is rather more remarkable for that. You’ve probably experienced it too from time to time: the feeling that, once you begin to engage with something you haven’t much thought of before, everything seems to point or relate to it. Suddenly, life is just a bowl of goulash.

Let me give you a for instance. Last night I watched a Hollywood non-classic I assumed to be entirely unrelated to our Hungarian adventure: the Ginger Rogers-starring fantasy romance It Had to Be You (1947), one of the fifty-odd movies I’ve been taking in so far this year (all listed on the right). It is a daft romance about a gal who can’t say “yes” (leaving three guys at the altar) because she cannot get her dream lover out of her head—until said dream enters her life to tell her how to lead it. Her dream lover, whose waking double eventually turns into her true love, is played by Cornel Wilde, who spends much of the picture walking around dressed like a Hollywood Indian. Anyway . . .

I generally follow up my viewings by checking out the filmographies compiled on the Internet Movie Database, which is how I came to speculate about Mr. Wilde (pictured above). Is he, or ain’t he? Hungarian, I mean. It would never have occurred to me, considering that, unlike Paul Lukas or Peter Lorre, Wilde does not have a readily distinguishable accent. Whereas most other online sources will tell you that the actor was born in New York City to Czech-Hungarian immigrants, the Database claims that he not only studied in Budapest and spoke Hungarian, but was indeed Hungarian by birth. Apparently, there are census reports confirming the former.

Wilde’s early screen name was Clark Wales. That alias does not make him Welsh, of course, but might have been chosen to suggest the foreign and rebellious. What would make him Hungarian, though? What is left of your national identity after Hollywood, like an Ellis Island checkpoint for Tinseltown hopefuls, changes your name or compels you do so? Hungarian, of course, was not a highly valued heritage in 1940s Hollywood, given the country’s suspicious proximity to the volatile Balkans, and, as the 1944 propaganda play “Headquarters Budapest” drove home, its alliance with Nazi Germany (“Admiral Horthy of Hungary, or people like him, will help to start World War III in the Balkans”).

I have long tried to get away from such a past (and, after seventeen years, am running still); but I could not hide my national origins, as much as I resent being defined by them. In stubborn grains of truth, the fatherland keeps sticking to my tongue (as you might have gathered from my podcasts). No matter how loudly I declare my past to be water under the proverbial bridge, it won’t wash. It is too prominent to be swept away or brushed aside:

“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.”

Those lines, from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” were recited by Mr. Wilde—in a broad Southern accent, no less—as he played an innocent American falling through the looking-glass in “Allen in Wonderland” (27 October 1952), a Suspense thriller involving an assassination plot, a crisis in the Balkans, and a case of mistaken identity. Earlier, in the same series, Wilde attempted an Eastern European accent playing the villain in “A Ring for Marya” (28 December 1950). It must be wonderful to have a tongue that can be twisted as readily as a broom handle.

Cleaning up the inconvenient pasts of their most valued players, Hollywood swung a lot of mops back then. It was left to the journalists to inspect the buckets. I envy those who get to sweep for themselves or learn to live with the sand.

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Night Falls on Budapest: An Experiment in Broadcasting

I’ve been told to stay away from district eight; but I don’t suppose I’ll return home with impressions so graphic or lurid as to feel compelled to pen a thriller titled Murder in Budapest. BBC radio producer Val Gielgud did just that, back in 1937, after his return from the Hungarian capital. Val, brother of famed thespian Sir John Gielgud, was in town in the early fall of 1936 to accompany his colleague and friend Eric Maschwitz (both pictured above, on location) to “give a broadcasting impression of night-life in the Hungarian capital.”

Now, as I shared in one of the earliest entries into this journal, I have always been fascinated by these portraits in sound; and I intend to take my Micromemo iPod recorder around town to capture the city’s voices and noises, considering that there are plenty of photographers better qualified to supply the images; Zsolt’s splendid photo journal, for instance, to which I was referred after reading the impressions of an American visitor (attending an Arthur Miller play in Hungarian, no less).

“Budapest is—or was—a delightful and lovely city in which to spend a holiday,” Gielgud reminisced in his Years of the Locust (1947), a book I have raided on numerous occasions. He was not on holiday, though, and putting together a four-part radio documentary like Night Falls on Budapest in less than a fortnight proved a challenging undertaking. It “was an elaborate affair” that “began in old Buda, where up on the battlements Eric Maschwitz discoursed on their historic past to the accompaniment of the choir of the Garrison Church.” However enthusiastic and supportive, Hungarian broadcasters were ill equipped to handle the sound collages Gielgud and his crew had in mind.

“There were, of course, compensations,” Gielgud conceded:

It was a new experience to be driven at speed in an official motor-car, with a flag flying on the bonnet, and motor-cyclist outriders clearing the way. Just for a moment one felt it might be fun to be a dictator after all! It was strange and rather exciting to be caricatured in the newspapers, and become a central figure in an anti-semitic “incident,” when a Jewish-owned dance band declined to take part in one of the programmes. It made one feel important to be told so often and so emphatically that one was contributing to an improvement in Anglo-Hungarian relations. And, for a short period, working against time and ‘off the cuff’ could not fail to be exhilarating, especially in such surroundings. But speaking for myself, the time came which I felt that I could not face one more glass of barack, listen to one more tzigane orchestra, nor conceal from one more patriotic Magyar my profound ignorance of the detail of the Treaty of Trianon. I was not exactly encouraged to be told, after the broadcast of the second programme of the four, that the Czechs, regarding the whole affair as a diabolical piece of pro-Hungarian propaganda, had interfered with the land-line carrying the programme through Prague, and most successfully ruined the transmission.

What Gielgud took away from the experience was the “very real camaraderie and mutual sympathy that immediately prevailed between professional broadcasters regardless of nationality.” So, I’m not sure why he ended up writing Murder in Budapest; but then again, even my neck of the woods has inspired a series of neo-noir thrillers, the most recent one being Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce (whose previous Louie Knight mystery I am clutching here).

I’m not sure what I’ll be taking away from my visit to Budapest next week; but I’m sure grabbing the opportunity to be there.

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Things Eve Peabody Taught Me

Well, it is the “Little Paris of Middle Europe.” At least that’s how our newly arrived Eyewitness Travel Guide introduced me to the city of Budapest. Since I am about to visit the Hungarian capital, I’ve been flicking the pages to get acquainted with the place, its people, and its language; but whenever I find myself in need of cultural initiation I go about it in a roundabout way, with a stopover in Hollywood. Or Paris. You know, the really big Paris to the West of Middle Europe.

You can really learn a lot from old Hollywood movies, as long as you don’t get taken in or turned off by fake sets and phony accents. Take Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball romp Midnight, for instance, and profit from the experience of American adventuress Eve Peabody (as portrayed by Claudette Colbert, whose career was the recent topic of an Alternative Film Guide discussion). Eve’s story, the gist of which you can follow in this recording of a Lux Radio Theater adaptation broadcast on 20 May 1940, will teach you a thing or two about traveling on a budget of little more than a centime with a hole in it, about crashing a society party with a pawn ticket, and about the perils of unwittingly impersonating a Hungarian baroness—practical stuff not generally covered by Baedekers.

Now, as the previous entry into this journal will tell you, I have just been in the company of a true Hungarian baroness last night, one with an accent to prove at least the Hungarian part of her past. The misleading lady Eve, on the other hand, has to work somewhat harder to hoodwink her way out of the hood (in her case, the Bronx). After suffering a “nasty accident” in Monte Carlo (“The roulette system I was playing collapsed under me”), down-and-out Eve is forced to depend on little more than her wits, her sex appeal having gotten her into too much trouble already.

She takes the name of the first person she met in Paris, one Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), a Hungarian cabbie who’s been rather too eager to chauffeur her around town in her futile attempt to land a gig as a nightclub singer. “I guess, mine is strictly a bathtub voice,” she concludes, and makes a swift exit before Tibor can make good on his offer of taking her home. “No woman ever found peace in a taxi. I’m looking for a limousine.” However much she really likes the guy, it’s dough, not romance, that this dame is after.

At the swanky soiree onto which she happens when dodging those driving forces (the Hungarian, the rain, and the subconscious), the Czerny handle proves somewhat of a liability. The assembled high society assumes Eve to be one of the Czernys—a baroness, no less. And while it proves a breeze for Eve to slide around the foreign angle by alleging to be a Czerny by marriage, not birth, she slips on a treacherous bit of trivia and soon blows her cover.

When asked about that “most enchanting” city of Budapest, where she claims to have left her ailing husband, the baron, she is dealt a trick question about the town’s famous subway. “Did they ever finish that?” a guest at the dull get-together she’s managed to infiltrate inquires. “The streets are still a little torn up,” she responds, rather flustered. Her inquisitor did not need to hear any more to know this Eve from Adam. The Budapest metro, after all, is one of the oldest subways in the world, and Miss Peabody is little more than an impersonatrix eager to get away from a past that involved being squeezed each day into the Bronx local.

According to Hollywood justice, Eve gets away with it all . . . and walks away on the arm of Czerny to boot. In fact, having gotten it wrong works out all right for her. History, geography, facts and figures—none of that matters, Midnight suggests, as long as you’ve got beauty, charm and moxie. Considering that I still know so little about my destination, and a gold lamé gown like Eve’s does so little to enhance whatever charm I might have, I’d better cram plenty of moxie into that duffle bag of mine.

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Man of the World (Wide Web)?

Okay, so, I tend to overdramatize. I can’t help it. I was born with a hyperbole on my lips. Turns out, I am still a man of the world wide web, despite the scheduled (and currently ongoing) landline repairs I lamented previously. At least, the prospect of not having access to the internet motivated us to realize some last-minute holiday plans by booking a trip to . . . Budapest. However eager I might be to share my experience, the challenge, as always, is not to drift too far from the format and subject of this journal and yet to make it reflect my everyday life, whether I am spending An Evening with Queen Victoria (as I will be on 22 April) or going back to my old neighborhood in New York City (on 14 May). Still, it is going to be (almost) all about Budapest from now until my royal visit.

“There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, . . . and there is no such place as Bucharest, either,” New England wit Robert Benchley once remarked. Fortunately, especially for someone with a non-refundable ticket, there is ample proof to the contrary on the birth certificates of a number of film and radio personalities; and, as much as I love goulash or views of the Danube, I shall devote subsequent entries in the broadcastellan journal to the exploration of a few Hollywood-Budapest connections, whether prominent or obscure. To director Michael Curtiz, perhaps (whose Mildred Pierce I revisited earlier this year), or matrimonially challenged Zsa Zsa Gabor, whom I spotted not too long ago in Touch of Evil.

Then there are playwright Ferenc Molnar, whose Liliom was spun into a musical Carousel, and director Géza von Bolváry, who made movies starring the glamorous Zarah Leander (recently back in the limelight, in commemorations of the 100th anniversary of her birth). Never mind character actor Paul Lukas, who became a US citizen in 1933, or (soon to be exhumed?) escape artist Harry Houdini, who denied his Budapest birthplace. How could I, as an old-time radio aficionado, resist a few half-hours with “gorgeous” Ilona Massey, whose Top Secret adventures were blurted out on US radio back in 1950.

Now, I don’t question that Ms. Massey was indeed gorgeous; the quotation marks are merely embracing the adjective to suggest that the actress was billed in this manner when she agreed to become incorporeal for the sake of starring in her own thriller series (before materializing on television in 1954, when, years after her meeting with an Invisible Agent (a 1942 comedy-thriller co-starring Austro-Hungarian Peter Lorre) she got to host a variety program named after her).

In Top Secret, the aforementioned Hollywood actress played a Baroness on perilous assignments of “international intrigue and espionage before and during the World War II.” It all began on a “Night Train to Berlin,” in a compartment of which the Baroness found herself locked up with a Gestapo officer who threatens to break more than her silence: “Your fingernails, your knuckles, your beautiful white teeth, that golden hair. I promise you, your hair will be gray as ashes before the treatment is over.”

Not exactly the Beverly Hills spa treatment. How did she get into such a pickle? And how come she carries six lumps of poisonous sugar in her handbag and a radioactive transmitter in her heels, like some “walking Geiger counter” in search of tea or uranium? “It is very simple,” the Baroness explains in an accent thicker than the plots she was dealt. “A long time ago, a man, a very wonderful, brave man,” offered her a job and she took it.

Who would refuse a position that guaranteed “no credit in success, no protection in danger, no recognition even in death,” a career in which “your first mistake will be your last”? The job takes her to Berlin, where the Baroness works . . . as a manicurist. “It is surprising how much one can pick up in a beauty parlor. And I do not mean, er, tips.” A real nail salon-biter.

Massey got out of Hungary for that? I’ll have to study the travel brochures more carefully next time. Anyway. I may not be a Man of the World like debonair William Powell (whom I watched last night, opposite Carole Lombard, presuming to be one); but it sure is swell to be traveling to foreign countries now and again. I get to enjoy all those Hollywood stopovers.