The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a Womanly Woman in a Man's World

 

                                                           Andrew Garfieid and Jessica Chastain

 

I didn't expect a biopic of Tammy Faye Bakker, powerhouse Charismatic Christian woman who was the subject of caricatures and comedy of the 1970s and 80s, to be so entertaining--much less so illuminating. Her addiction to garish makeup and tacky-expensive clothes made her a difficult human being to take seriously, but somehow this new movie, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, manages to do that--and engage the audience with sympathy, empathy, and, of course a trace of outrage.

We learn, first off, of humble origins, but that was no surprise. As a child, this Tammy Faye (played by Jessica Chastain, who has never been better) was trapped in a poor family, but more importantly, a religious one. Her mother looked on her as a source of shame, since she was a child of divorce and the hardshell religion had expelled her from services until she was needed as a pianist. The cold mother, portrayed by Cherry Jones, rejects the daughter and wants her out of sight while she provides music for the emotional congregation. Young Tammy Faye, almost literally with her nose to the glass window of the church, will not be daunted, and attends a revival-type meeting where she is immediately saved and falls to the floor, speaking in tongues. 

Grown up, Tammy gets herself to a Bible College where she meets a floundering young would-be preacher named Jim Bakker and they immediately fall in love and get married because in their minds, God wants them to have sex. They start an itinerant ministry with Tammy's inspiration of using puppets to spread Christianity to children. Jim buys a big car, falls behind on the payments, and through this initial situation, we see the beginning of the pattern that will take them to the highest heights either of them could imagine. Tammy Faye has the creativity, charm, and common sense to sell them as a couple--and Jim is the impractical, greedy partner, who hopes to tame her spirit enough to find the fame and fortune he believes God has promised him.

When broke, they fall on their knees as ask God to intervene. A stranger appears who has seen their puppet presentation on a local Christian TV channel and offers to introduce them to Pat Robertson, who is looking for new talent for his budding Christian television enterprise. From there the only way they go is up, with Tammy Faye attracting the audience while Jim plays the carnival barker for Christ. It's an unsavory story at best. In real time I admit I paid little attention to it--but in the film, which sees Tammy Faye as wise and dopey at the same time, always deferring to Jim, it becomes a cautionary tale I should not have ignored. Even when Jim asks her to bare her soul on TV--the donations always pour in when she does this--she obeys and ends up weeping profusely at her humiliation.

The Bakkers build an empire (a television empire anyway) by asking for donations to one scam or another, and invite the envy and scorn of other powerful "televangelists." Ronald Reagan congratulates them for their "charitable" work. All the while they are living beyond their means, Jim is avoiding Tammy Faye in the bedroom and blaming her, of course, and she is at sea in a world where her talents are not appreciated. Jim takes credit for being holier, which he is not, and is clear to everybody else.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye doesn't have much to do with her eyes, but lets the audience in on the underpinnings of the political power of the Evangelical movement and how conscious its leaders were of what they were doing at the outset. It is hilarious at times, slightly serious at others, and a most valuable movie to see.  Its larger-than-life characters, settings, costumes and makeup make it better on the big screen, so go to a cinema palace for this one. But don't miss it.

THE BLUE GARDENIA: Women Are Not Much Like Men

In many ways The Blue Gardenia looks like a typical American film of the 1950's, three young women room who work as telephone operators share an apartment in Hollywood, one of them obsessed with her fiance´ who is serving in Korea. They are supposed to be in their early 20s, but look to be in their mid-30s. They wear cocktail dresses on dates, wisecrack with each other, and don't take their lives a bit seriously, apparently each expecting better things when the right man takes them away from all this. 

Ann Sothern and Jeff Donnell fit right into this picture, with Sothern being the slightly-older and far wisest of the three. The story kicks off when Anne Baxter, more upscale and decidedly less worldly-wise, gets a Dear Jane letter from her serviceman and is devastated. Alone, she is despondent and desperate, when the phone rings. The caller is a wolf-about-town (unknown to Baxter) who, thinking he has Ann Sothern character on the phone, invites her to join him at The Blue Gardenia for dinner. Baxter dons her glad rags, in this case a glamorous black taffeta dress and even a hat, and takes herself to the Polynesian watering hole to drown her sorrows. Raymond Burr is the suave roue´ who cannot believe his luck. He sees to it that the young beauty downs the requisite number of tropical cocktails with her meal and takes her to his apartment where he proceeds to keep the drinks coming. What follows is a harrowing scene that, although it predates "Me Too" by about 50 years, gives a pretty clear picture of coming events.

When the Raymond Burr character winds up murdered by a fireplace-poker, and Baxter has blacked out all memory of the evening, the film becomes a mystery with no solution in sight. Richard Conte, playing a newspaper columnist hot on the story, falls hard for lost little lamb (or is she?). Conte was a fine actor who went unheralded in his lifetime.

The Blue Gardenia fits into the category of film noir because it's a "B" picture in black and white in the right time frame. I see it as a "woman's" picture however. I looked through the IMDb viewer reviews and found a pithy one submitted by "Judith 333" which summed up my own response better than I could have. Judith called it a masterpiece and said, "I am surprised that so many people who review it here seem not to grasp it. They complain about lack of suspense because it doesn't use hackneyed noir film devices, but the film is not about that. It's about Anne Baxter, the world through her point of view. Her life is a beautiful dream of hopes of love and happiness for the future, which turns into a horrible nightmare that spirals downward with sickening realism and pathos. Snappy characters throughout, but they are not "wasted", miscast or otherwise ill-used. They are perfectly balanced in a skilled script that is not about actors chewing the scenery, but is a real film, an art film, by the master Fritz Lang, whose every decision in creating this film up to the smallest detail seems to me to be highly intentional. Highly recommended."

Judith 333 was surprised that so many people reviewing it seemed not to grasp it. I myself am not surprised. Most movie reviewers--even amateur ones--are men. I'm not saying all men are wrong all the time, but they see everything differently than women do.
 

The Novel I Wrote

I grew up in Utopia, in a simpler time

 

 

 

A few weeks ago I was having coffee with a friend who is a poet and a teacher of literature and writing. I found myself telling him about the novel I wrote--and self-published--and lamented that I should have held it longer and done more rewrites before releasing it. I found I was embarrassed that it wasn't a better book. 

My novel, That Was Tomorrow, was set in my hometown in Alabama. Its protagonist was a young teacher, and I based her on what I knew about a real person who had moved to the town in 1920 to learn from the visionary teacher Marietta Johnson, who ran a school to demonstrate her theories of educating the whole child. I had a heavy mission in writing this work; I wanted to realize the power and charm of Mrs. Johnson herself, and to capture the essence of the Utopian community in which she lived, and bring them all to life. I knew much of myself would work its way onto the pages in the character of the young teacher--although I have never been a teacher, and only know second-hand what it was like to be young in the 1920s. There was fairly good response to the book, but sadly, historical novels do not sell, and even in a town that is quite infatuated with itself, there is little interest in learning what it was at its creation. In short, there was little market for my book, even had it been the brain child of a famous and successful novelist, much less a little-known local would-be writer.

I had also set a high bar for myself in the writing. I wanted to capture the style of writers of the day. I was, you might say, going for the tone of Edith Wharton. I didn't know the basics of novel writing, even that the omniscient narrator is no long acceptable. I did work with an editor who helped me in shaping it, and her best advice when I considered it finished was to leave it six months and then do a rewrite. But I didn't. I've been over my mistakes many times, and the clearest one was that if I had done that, I would not be ambivalent about the product. 

But I haven't reread the book in years, and something told me to pick it up today. I was looking for a certain chapter about a picnic on the beach. However, the book opened itself to an earlier page, and this is what I found, in the chapter when the heroine, Amelia, is a five-year-old child being taught by a cruel and sanctimonious nanny: 

                "Amelia learned to keep her fears hidden. The surface of serenity concealed that in her heart, there was a fear of almost everything."

                I was struck, reading that some nine years after I wrote it, that it was more me than I'd ever thought at the time--and that it was good. Maybe I was a better writer than I knew. More from the same section:

"Miss Pritchart imposed her doctrine of original sin on the child. It was her contention, and that of many childhood educators of her day, that children would do anything to outwit the adults in charge of them, and that the devil lurked near them at all times to lead them into sins of misbehavior and ultimately seduce them into lives of debauchery. Only by constantly relating to a child what was wrong and impressing upon him how deficient he was could an adult gain the proper respect of a child and get him to focus on work, the most important facet of his young life...

"When left alone in her room, Amelia closed the door and talked with Nicodemus [her stuffed bear], creating extremely passionate scenarios for her little friend. In these dramas he was in grave danger of being tortured by giants who sought to do him tremendous harm. He fell off cliffs simulated by the old highboy in the corner of her room; he was trapped in dark caves occupied by bats and frightening flying things; he was tortured by a wicked witch who threatened him with the fires of hell. All the while, the stoic soft stuffed toy stared with his shoe-button eyes at Amelia, the one kind heart in his stuffed-animal life. He could take anything, knowing she would come to his rescue and hug him until he fell asleep every night. Amelia had no one to do the same for her."

See what the author did there? The toy becomes as complex and lovable (and loving) as any human being, and he is transformed simply through the little girl's imagination. The last sentence smacks of the voice of an omniscient narrator--but let's just say the writer didn't know that omniscient narrators are no longer acceptable. I think it works. 

Of course the book takes Amelia into adulthood, and out of that stifling home into a larger world where she finds interesting and challenging people. She never quite gets over the damage done by Miss Pritchart, but she finds romance, friendship, and a magical utopian community where she will gain the strength to take charge of her own life. This little fragment is just a taste of the novel I wrote, and I rather like it. I hope you might too.

Finding Myself in the Movies

La Strada

The Seventh Seal

Annie Hall

 I grew up watching movies. I was influenced by so many of them--from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind, Gigi, Singin' in the Rain, Cyrano de Bergerac, and even Anchors Aweigh when I was about five and watched with fascination as Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the Mouse. My interest only grew as I grew up and saw movies that were designed to do more than entertain. Looking back, I can think of many that literally changed my attitude toward life.

Ninotchka was my introduction to the phenomenon that was Greta Garbo. I knew about her, of course. She was the subject of jokes and parodies throughout the 1940s, following her iconization as the queen of cinema for being distant and inaccessible. I had heard she was great, but when I saw this one I was astonished at her acting ability. I was a student actor at that time, sincerely hoping for success onstage and in films, so when the local arts society offered a look at this movie I attended happily and with great anticipation. I was not disappointed; Garbo showed great ability in creating a real, amusing character, and, although later I was to see many of her earlier films in which she was more than beautiful--she was always luminous, graceful and somehow the essence of femininity. In Ninotcha she was bold, playing a cold Russian leader whose life is opened up on a trip to Paris. I had seen Melvyn Douglas before, but not as he was here, dashing, sexy, and totally smitten by the Soviet creature Miss Garbo portrayed. Her scene drinking her first sip of champagne was like a master class in acting, and her playful approach to the serious nature of her character was a delight. This one made me want to be that kind of an actress--determined, wise, and full of wondrous surprises.

Fast forward a few years, when I was a young wife living in New Orleans with a sweet young husband who was a full-fledged cineaste. Tommy was also from a small town in Alabama, and he had spent his life escaping from a smothering life by going to the movies. He'd graduated from Tulane, and wiled away many hours going to movie after movie. If a movie was bad he'd go to the theater next door to see if what they were offering would "get the bad taste out." He took me to La Strada, a tale that I suspect might make any young wife question her choice of mate, but one that made me weep openly and relentlessly. I had seen Lili years before, and Leslie Caron was my idea of an innocent attracted to the circus. I had identified with Lili--but Giulietta Massini as Gelsomina knocked me off my pins. Anthony Quinn, the heartless strongman who bought Gelsomina from her mother for $10 (or maybe it was ten lira, which would be about a dollar, I guess), denied her her humanity as she charmed his audiences and did his bidding. Richard Basehart was never better than in this part--the whimsical tightrope walker who tried to advise her. All this hit me very hard at the time and I've never stopped thinking about this movie. It colored my thinking about everything. I've seen the movie several times since and even went to a costume party as Gelsomina a few years ago--only to learn that few people had seen the movie or had any idea what my costume and makeup was.

The Seventh Seal was a movie I saw in the same time period. I have never seen it again, but it was unforgettable--stark and symbolic--and unlike all other movies I'd ever seen. I remember the chess game with DEATH, and the traveling circus (I do love to see a traveling circus in a movie). I have this one recorded and shall watch again when the mood arises. I remember it as dark, bleak, and beautiful--but challenging. I'm seldom in that mood these days.

Two marriages later I was still in my 30s, and a film called Annie Hall came along. I was dating the man I would marry next, and this romantic comedy elevated the genre, probably more than its star and creator Woody Allen ever realized. It was sophisticated, clever, full of topical jokes and tender emotions, and featured a young actress named Diane Keaton in a role she was born to play. She introduced a style of dress that many of us tried to emulate--but I couldn't quite pull it off--and she had an offhand approach to this part that was unique and the character she created was indelible. There was an element of mutual joy in the script. Woody and Diane were forever caught in time in the film, although their own love affair was in the past and they were just friends enjoying a romp when they made it. Its effect on me was to cement the love I had for my upcoming husband, even though it could have been deceptive. He and I both loved the movie, and there's no doubt the movie itself was a factor in our romance; however, as I was to learn, he was not really a fan of almost-all movies. I was.

In the 1990s, I had relocated to my hometown in Alabama, had a new best girl friend, and was reviving contacts with people from my past. The movie Passion Fish, a gentle heartbreaker, captured the sense of place, time and circumstances, and still resonates with me. I'm not sure it changed my life but it helped me examine what I was going through. Like Mary McDonnell in the film, I had once performed in soap operas, (but for me, only as an extra) and was retiring, in a way from the larger world, while confronting the ghosts that surrounded me. The McDonnell character had one of those impossible Southern double-first names, as I do, and she was cantankerous and profane, as I can sometimes be. She has lost the use of her legs in a NY taxi accident and is having to reevaluate her life when the wondrous Alfre Woodward comes in to help. In the complex story, McDonnell meets up with a man who, years ago, had a crush on her but was too shy to approach her. As played by David Strathairn, he warms her heart (and won mine completely). My new friend said, "Mary Lois, is it just me, or did he somehow get better looking?" and indeed he had by the time of the dream sequence. I won't reveal any more spoilers here; this is a John Sayles beauty that should be seen, and seen again. It validated so much of my life that had gone unexamined and touched my heart in a special way.

The documentary Searching for the Sugar Man was a film I saw about six years ago, once I had moved to my new digs in upstate New York, at the Rosendale Theatre. It was a powerful story about an extraordinary singer who lived like none other. It is breathtaking to watch--entertaining, educational, spiritual, and delightful in every way. One way it changed my life was that I reacted to it exactly like my friend John Wackman did, and we began a bond that will literally never die. Scroll down this blog to see who John was, if you don't know, and if you can get your hands on it, see the movie.

I was going to title this post "Movies That Changed My Life." But that would have required more space, more time, and more motivation that I have just now. Movies themselves change my life and I'm never sure I can see the ways or accept that it was a movie that did it. I wouldn't say every movie changes my life, but I experience some of them down to my toes and never forget them. These are a few examples.

Apropos of Something: An Artist and His Enemies

                                                                         Woody Allen

Filmmaker, comedian, writer, and unique American voice Woody Allen has re-emerged in the news, as a new HBO series is raking him and his wife of 20 years over the coals once again. The producers of the series went to his ex-partner and two of the children she had with him, and got the same old story they've all been pushing since his banishment--and the filmmakers bought it hook, line, and sinker. When they were almost finished, they approached Allen and his wife, who refused to participate as they assumed it was going to be another hit job from the trio who have made it a life's work to destroy his career and his life.

I write this, because I never did accept their version of the story. At the time the sordid events unfolded, I was incredulous and read everything I could about it. Woody Allen had been singular presence in the American film scene in the 1960s and 70s, and his work shone in a special way to those of us who loved movies.

Allen wrote a memoir which had been due to be published at about this time last year, but his son, Ronan Farrow, effectively slated that venture by writing an open letter to his publisher--also Allen's--that he was so hurt he would withdraw future work from them if they went forward with it. A critical mass of employees of the publisher sided with Ronan, and Woody found another publisher. When the book did come out, it got undeservedly scathing reviews from book critics of the major news outlets, who not only took it upon themselves to trash the man and all his work, but especially to vilify the man for living the life he did. I read it and published the following review on this blog: 

Apropos of Nothing, a memoir by the almost-reclusive American film director, writer, actor, and comedian Woody Allen, outlines the narrative of his existence before and after the debacle that threw him off the pinnacle of acclaim and under the bus. At age 84 he is ignored, reviled, and his place at the talbe has een all but cleared. Something happened, and in Apropos of Nothing he has had the unmitigated gall to open up about it all. Critical reaction is that he has little of no right to do this, or perhaps that it's a bore that he has chosen to. I think he has not oly a right to defend himself, but a responsibility to tell his side of the story in no uncertain terms. I think, also, that Apropos of Nothing is a good book, important to read if one has any interest in examining the art of film making--or looking at the culture of the United States from the middle of the 20th century through the present.  

For some thirty years and through fom 50-odd original films, Woody Allen was lionized,  His offbeat look at life intrigued us. His self-deprecating humor disarmed and captivated us. His overloaded brain and underestimated self-image personified the Great American Dilemma--are we misunderstood geniuses or just lonely schlemiels? Or is it possible to be both? 

His success at being insightful and funny at the same time made him something of an icon in the movie business in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Starting with gag-laden movies like What's New, Pussycat,  Bananas, and Take the Money and Run--predictable stabs at movie making, perhaps, for a standup comic--through the terrain of Ingmar Bergman (Interiors, 1978), the sci-fi spoof Sleeper, the romantic Annie Hall and thought-provoking films like the documentary send-up Zelig and the innovative The Purple Rose of Cairo, he carved out a place in the history of cinema. He produced and/or appeared in dozens of movies and could, as we used to say, write his own ticket--demand the cinematographers he wanted, choose the material to express his vision his own way. He was serious about his work and was taken seriously by both money men and artists in the field.

In Apropos, he reveals that he is not the intellectual people assume he is (he thinks because of his trademark thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses), yet he casually critiques Kierkegaard,  James Joyce, Aristophanes, Chekhov, and Prokofiev, and displays a vocabulary that sent me to my Webster's more than once in reading this book. He may not be an intellectual by his own definition, but he sounds like one to me.

From his beginnings as a comedian, Woody played a confused, witty, heartbroken Jewish loser. That was based, of course, on himself, but as he says in Apropos, "The public believes the role you're playing is yourself," or words to that effect. We in the audience believed that his relationship with Dianne Keaton was happening in real time when they were making Annie Hall, but both of them have said that, although they had had an affair when working on Broadway in Play It Again, Sam, by the time of Annie Hall they were just good friends and still are. Annie Hall was based mostly, evidently, on his relationship with his second wife Louise Lasser, for whom he is still carrying a low-flame torch.

What he is unable to do, or maybe simply doesn't want to do, in this memoir, is calibrate the magnitude of his talent. He had such a dazzling career it may have impeded his ability to grasp what was happening over the years. His position is that he does not belong among the greats of his generation, certainly not among his heroes in the medium of film. His modesty doesn't serve him well here, even though his ability to crack wise in an unexpected place does remind us who he is. He sees himself as flawed, flailing, and never quite getting what he wants, and when he does, he assumes it was all just good luck.

He is an infinitely readable, facile writer, and this book takes us through the early years in standup through the dizzying fame and fortune of not only making money but also rubbing shoulders with the cinema and theatre figures he most admires. He has a long lunch with Arthur Miller. He meets and bonds with Ingmar Bergman. He attends a ceremony where scenes from Vicki Cristina Barcelona were filmed in Orviedo, Spain, where a statue of has been erected for no discernible reason except that the citizens wanted it.

Through all this, as well as through his cinema creations, we learn he had a weakness for women with personality disorders. His own neuroses gave him the ability to identify, maybe. Or, maybe because of his attraction to a certain personality type he just keeps going there, repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result, which many of us humans tend to do. He married early, a philosophy major who, he says, taught him as she was learning philosophy, which may account for his knowledge of the subject. He was in his early 20s and she was 17 when they started dating. The marriage lasted until she finished college and then he moved on to Louise Lasser, an actress with bipolar disorder, before that illness was widely known. He was thunderstruck, he says, by her physical attractiveness (and later in the book he notes that Mia Farrow looks a bit like her). They had great times together and are still friendly 50 years after the divorce.

Allen goes into great detail about the events that transpired when he broke up with Mia Farrow, the wistful actress who made ten of her (and his) best movies with him. The two had a relationship for a decade, and although they were never married or lived together, he was the adoptive father of two of her children and the biological father of another. He loved her, and loved working with  her, but they had an unusual relationship by any measure. Through a series of circumstances that sound implausible, his relationship to Soon Yi, one of her older adoptive children, turned to a romance,  and Farrow went, what could mildly be called ballistic.

This resulted in one of the messiest breakups in the history of the world. Incensed that he was in love with a woman 35 years his junior, and one of her adopted children, Farrow concocted a story that he had molested a 6-year-old--his adopted daughter, Dylan. In Apropos of Nothing, Allen gives details of the court proceedings, the judge, the private detectives, and the child psychiatrists and panel of abuse experts from Yale who conducted the investigation. It was determined at the time that no abuse had occurred and that Dylan appeared to have been coached to give answers indicating otherwise. Allen was never tried as there was no evidence he had done anything inappropriate with his daughter. Over the years, however, Dylan occasionally brings up this traumatic time in letters to the press and in television interviews, and Allen appears to have lost the battle in the court of popular opinion. His son, journalist Ronan Farrow, has built a career revealing behind-the-scenes sexual molestation in show business, and his work has brought down long-time executive Harvey Weinstein and set in motion the "Me-Too" movement.

Allen uses his memoir to go over the details of this dark period, and more importantly, more importantly, to tell the reader what has happened to him since. He is still making movies, but because the mood of Americans has shifted dramatically toward believing the accuser and ignoring the evidence,  his recent films have had some difficulty finding distribution in the United States. Actors, and particularly actresses, who had supported him, put out statements to the effect that they regretted ever having been in his films. Allen is puzzled why they changed, and attributes it to directives they received from higher-ups that they had to reject him publicly--their careers depended on it. Apparently some have told him privately that this is the case.

Allen is still hurt emotionally by the situation and his estrangement from the two Farrow children. He acknowledges that in the coutla-woulda-shoulda department,  it would have been better for him to back off before he and Soon-Yi were hopelessly in love and wanting to get married to each other. and he knows he should have handled the situation directly rather than leaving a revealing snapshot of Soon-Yi where Mia could find it. He didn't have to say, "The heart wants what it wants," when asked by a reporter why he was involved with his ex-girlfriend's 21-year-old daughter. But, as he says, he was only quoting Saul Bellow's rephrasing of something Emily Dickinson said. This was over 20 years ago--he is still married to, and in love with Soon-Yi.

However, in 2020, a whiff of an allegation of child abuse is enough to sink a battleship of artistic output, and, as a result of that Woody Allen is seeing his work ignored and his name going down with the ship. Something major will have to occur to effect a reassessment of his place and that of those who set out to destroy him. I don't expect his memoir is going to do this, particularly after its unduly harsh critical reception when it was published a year ago. However, the film industry must give this artist another chance. Something will have to stem the tide of vitriol flowing his way.

That was my review of Apropos of Nothing, which I recommend as light reading, laced with wit of the Woody Allen self-deprecating kind, and for a fresh look at a life that has many facets, and nooks and crannies. If you want to see an interesting rendering of his side of the story, I suggest you check the shoestring budget mini-documentary By the Way Woody Allen Is Innocent on YouTube. It's long (I suggest you adjust the speed to 75.5% and watch it in increments) but it provides much background on the story Woody Allen has been reluctant to tell all these years.

 

 

A Place in Time

Mary Jane ("Dainty") Graham, My Great-Aunt

I know my friend John Wackman, who died suddenly January 8, is somewhere happily reveling in the message of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” especially its inspirational ending,

John Wackman

 

When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid 

The new dawn blooms as we free it 

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it 

If only we’re brave enough to be it 

John was inspirational to all he met, and those of us who cherished him are now emboldened to embrace what he did inspire, to continue with joy the work we know we must do and be brave enough to commit to our best selves. 

I knew him well enough to know what he wanted from me and what he appreciated about me and others. I still feel that mandate from him and will never forget it. When we talked, he encouraged me to express my impulses in writing, and with his encouragement I re-activated this blog, posting about the our mutual interest in movies of a certain kind. A pet project of mine was to start a blog of movie reviews by women. It was clear to both of us that women see totally different things in movies from those which male reviewers praise. He put me in touch with a site that would help promote such a blog, and he was confident it was a good idea. 

Trying to round up other female movie critics, I had come to an impasse, so I began posting on my blog—Feminist notions and reviews, as well as the biographies of many of the first-wave Feminist women from the 19th century. You can find the thumbnail sketches among the offbeat posts about movies on this blog by scrolling down. I had read many books dealing with these women, who were courageous and ahead of their time and wanted to change the lot of their gender for future generations. 

Back to John. Because I recently was given this photograph and have a nagging need to write something about it,  he would want me to create a post about my great-aunt Mary Jane Graham, whom I never even heard of until a few weeks ago. My grandfather, John Richard Graham, born in 1874, was living an intolerable life in poverty on a farm in Martinsville, Illinois, with three brothers, two sisters, a tyrannical, cruel father and a long-suffering mother. He ran away from home in his early 20s and built a life in a section of the country distant from his family of origin and never revealed to them where he was. He found his way to Mobile, Alabama, married my grandmother and never spoke of his harsh childhood or the family he left behind. 

Mary Jane was about 12 when her oldest brother John Richard left home. She and her sister and brothers saw him ride off on a horse he’d stolen from the barn, all of them waving goodbye to him from the fence. They all were thinking he’d come back in a day or so. But he never did, and they never knew what had happened to him. An incorrigible young man, his parents assumed John had met an early end. In time, each of his brothers also ran away from the farm. One of them named a son John, after his brother. 

I’ve since connected with a second cousin from that side of the family through a popular ancestry website. The cousin, Tony, was interested to learn what had happened to this long lost man, and my side of the family was overjoyed to meet John Richard Graham’s family of origin, although he died in 1950 and so had most of his brothers and sisters. My cousin sent me this photograph, among others, of Granddaddy’s baby sister, along with others. But it was Mary Jane who piqued my interest and set my imagination soaring. She was my great-aunt, and I never heard her name. The photo showed a look of self-confidence and directness that made her seem contemporary. What kind of a life did this beautiful young woman have? Was she as special as she looks in this picture? 

I considered how happy it would make me to learn that she was as intelligent as she looked, and that she was among those influenced by the 19th century women I admired. Born in 1881, Mary Jane, known in the family as “Dainty” because of her diminutive size among the brawny brothers, would have been of an age to have taken part in the Suffragist Movement and other projects of the day that mean so much to me. I wanted to create such a reality for her and turn her into a 19th century woman-hero. Just looking at that face and demeanor, so unlike the frozen, grim appearance of many of the photographs of people of her day, sent my mind to imagining a magnificent life for her. The mythology from my family, descendants of her older brother, was that our penchant for the theatrical and the performance arts came from the Graham side. Granddaddy was a card, and a great storyteller, and my mother and one of her brothers had participated in talent shows and Mardi Gras parades (to my friends in Mobile, her brother was one of the “Comic Cowboys”) in their youth—and my sister, brother and I all yearned for careers in the theatre at some point. Dainty’s looks would have made her a natural. You’ll notice she had a good face for the camera. 

Unfortunately Dainty’s reality did not jibe with my fantasy. In her early 20s she left the farm to marry a Kentucky farmer named John Calvin Walden in Versailles, Indiana. The story gets cloudy here. After one day she returned to the farm, telling her mother that she and John Calvin had fought violently and she was not going back to him. What was the fight about? That is lost to history. I can imagine many things, but I’ll leave it to you to fill in what might have transpired. The saddest part is that Mary Jane discovered she was pregnant and she went back to this husband and had the baby—and nine more babies in years to come. 

The story only reminds me that no matter how I might admire the women of the 19th century, I cannot fathom what their lives were like. They were assumed to be inferior to men and more often than not they bought into that thinking. There was no valid birth control, no sex education, and not even very much education of any kind, especially not for women. In most cases, their only way out of poverty was to marry out of it. Mary Jane was not so fortunate. 

She remained with Walden for the rest of her life. Apparently she adjusted pretty well after all, but what was in her heart was not known. She died in 1935 at the age of 59, and the obituary describes her in glowing terms, stating she was “jolly and bright” and that her principle interests were in her home. Tony asked one of her daughters what she was like and one of the things she revealed was, “She swore like a sailor.” That rings true to me—my granddaddy had a salty way with words and I’m sure her other brothers did too. 

I cannot piece together a picture of the real Dainty Graham, but the photo still invites me to think of her in terms of possibilities, and to wrestle with the few facts I have of her reality. I love knowing I had a foremother who looked like that, and to wish for a few moments of time travel so I could meet her and get at least some of my questions answered.

All You Need Is Love

John Wackman

 

From our first days on a committee for the local art-movie theater I spotted John as a man I wanted to have as a friend. We were both new to the area; we shared an interest in offbeat movies, and he had a natural warmth and joy about him that made him a magnet to people looking for friends. We spoke more and more after every meeting, and occasionally shared a ride to an upcoming event. I lived in New Paltz and he lived somewhere in an outlying hamlet.

 

When I bought a house in Kingston, a pleasant if somewhat neglected Victorian, John stopped by to visit. Workmen were renovating the kitchen and the bathroom, but the charm of the house was evident, and John was taken by the whole enterprise. He walked all around the house, inside and out into the street in front, and seemed transported.

 

“I have been saying for years I’d never buy a house again, but this is wonderful!” Something about my house and its neighborhood struck a real chord with him, so I suggested he do a little house hunting of his own. A few days later I got a call from him on my cell as I was picking up groceries at the supermarket.

 

“I’ve found a house!” John said. He was excited, but then he usually was excited, so I assumed that he and a realtor had snagged an old Victorian for him to renovate, maybe near my own. Actually the story was different. He had met a couple, nice people in their 80s,  who had recently bought and renovated a 1950s ranch in a pleasant upscale neighborhood in Kingston, and no sooner had they moved in than they realized it was a mistake and they yearned to move back to the town they’d come from. They offered to sell him their house, and he took it as karma, because he was thinking of buying a house. I kept telling him things don’t happen that way, but he ignored me and bought the house after brief negotiations.

 

John loved that house, and over time I came to see that things happened to him that just didn’t happen to others. He always started with something personal, for example, people he respected and loved turned up and shared some talent, object, or even a house, and if it felt right, he made his move. He was able to sense when serendipity was tapping on his shoulder. At that time he was spearheading a three-year project to solarize our area, so soon enough he had solar panels added to that house and installed other environmentally sound improvements that reduced his payments for energy and put him in the vanguard of the local movement for renewable energy, recycling, and sustaining the environment. He was on committees advocating for all, and worked with arts groups, theaters, libraries, and music groups. He was a young teenager when the Beatles came to America and he was overwhelmed with their music. He collected their records and in college started a rock band, writing some of the songs and attacking his music with youthful gusto, writing sensitive lyrics about better ways of life. He played piano by ear and after he retired, he vowed to learn to read music as soon as he had time.

 

His real gift was his way with people. He took joy in the accomplishments—and potential for accomplishments—of everybody he met. He focused in on me in our conversations, and I found myself revealing my heart to him more and more, telling him of my life before retirement and sharing long-lost bits of myself. We made dinner for each other from time to time, him making his favorite camp food—lentils—or his mother’s recipe for vegetable soup, and I would show off my cooking skills of years past with shrimps Florentine or some remembered casserole. I discovered Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream, which sent us both into ecstasy. Once when I told him what I was planning for dinner he said,  “Don’t worry about it. The conversation is food at your house…”

 

When the pandemic hit, we had coffee on my porch every Friday until it became too cold. After that we moved inside and had masked conversations between sips of coffee. We would talk of many things, laugh a lot, and make plans for projects for the future. There was no agenda, just a sense of cherishing the time we had together—and he never left without telling me how much these weekly meetings meant to him. I hope I told him it was mutual.

 

He was on a number of civic committees, and was a ringleader in all of them. It would be hard to find anyone with more enthusiasm for doing good. Some of this came from his Methodist background, which meant a great deal to him, but much of it was innate. He was an optimistic, forward-looking person committed to making the world better with all the energy he could muster. Repair Café was his pet project, a do-good endeavor which floated to various venues, mostly church halls, in the county, and it was part of a movement that was growing around the world. He organized a dynamic branch in this area, the Hudson Valley of New York State, and he organized and participated in all of them. He visited The Netherlands, where the Repair Café movement had started. Communities organize get-togethers of people who know how to fix inoperable objects and appliances (or mend torn clothing), and those who have items they don’t want to throw away, even though broken. The repairers work for free and those with broken objects get them mended at no cost. Win-win, which was John’s favorite thing.

 

We lost John when he died suddenly a week ago. The many communities in which he had a presence gave a small memorial two days later. Over a hundred people showed up and more than half of them told their personal stories. Grown men wept openly as we all tried to cope with our loss. All the stories told of John’s personal effect on the life of the speaker, how he made him or her feel beloved and special—and as I listened I realized I was becoming a bit jealous because I had kinda thought I was the only one. His ability to boost someone’s ego certainly did not stop with me, and now I knew it.

 

Without him, what will we do? The Repair Café and other projects and committees he inspired will continue and grow, but we—the people who benefited from his kindness and joy—will have to find our best selves on our own now, and remember the light of his that he gave away so freely. We know we are the lucky ones, to have been able to call him a friend, and that it’s up to us to keep our love for him alive and to keep doing what he would want us to.