At The Habit, York: -
Ron Elderly: -
Tell Me
I'll See You In My Dreams
Can't Help Falling In Love
Da Elderly: -
Tell Me Why
I Believe In You
The Elderly Brothers: -
When Will I Be Loved
Baby It's You
Without You
Proud Mary
I Saw Her Standing There
He'll Have To Go
Back after last week's enforced absence (Da was ill), the Elderly Brothers chipped in to a packed schedule with two 'new' songs: The Shirelles 1961 hit covered by The Beatles on their first LP Baby It's You (a Bacharach/David song) and Harry Nilsson's 1972 smash Without You (written in 1970 by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger). The venue was busy from the off, with some very talented players and singers on show and one chap gave us a lively rendition of Diamond Dogs!
Thursday, 31 March 2016
Wednesday, 30 March 2016
The Genesis of Joseph Heller's Catch 22
Joseph Heller (centre) with bomber crew in Corsica, 1944
The War for Catch-22
The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph.
In terms of cultural impact, no single issue of New World Writing was more dazzling than No. 7, published in April 1955. A subheading on the front cover said, “A New Adventure in Modern Reading.” The contents included work by Dylan Thomas, who had died in November 1953, poetry by A. Alvarez, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, prose by Heinrich Böll, and two startling, unclassifiable pieces, one titled “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” by a writer called Jean-Louis, and Catch-18, by Joseph Heller.
Heller knew how valuable the exposure was in New World Writing. He wrote to Arabel Porter, “I should like to tell you at this time that it was with great delight and pride that I received news you were interested in publishing a section of Catch-18.” In fact, it was the only section he had written so far. “And I should like to express my thanks for the recognition implicit in your decision and the encouragement I received from it.” As for Jean-Louis, this was the nom de plume of a writer named Jack Kerouac, who had long been disgusted with his treatment by publishers. He felt New World Writing had done him a great disservice while editing his piece by splitting an approximately 500-word sentence in two, according to biographer Ellis Amburn. “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was part of a larger manuscript called On the Road.
Only 10 pages long in the journal’s small print, Catch-18 introduces us to a World War II-era American soldier named Yossarian, in a military hospital “with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.” Yossarian is happy to be hospitalized and excused from flying bombing missions, and has not told the doctors his liver pain has gone away. He had “made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital,” where “the food wasn’t too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed.”
Sharing the ward with him are his buddy Dunbar, a man “working hard at increasing his life span … by cultivating boredom” (so much so that Yossarian wonders if he is dead), a Texan so likable no one can stand him, and a “soldier in white,” who is “encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.” A slim rubber tube attached to his groin conveys his urine to a jar on the floor; another pair of tubes appear to feed him by recycling the urine. Outside, there is always the “monotonous old drone of bombers returning from a mission.”
One day, Yossarian receives a visit from a chaplain. A chaplain is something he has not seen before: Yossarian loves him “at first sight.” “He had seen reverends and rabbis, ministers and mullahs, priests and pairs of nuns. He had seen ordnance officers and quartermaster officers and post exchange officers and other spooky military anomalies. Once he had even seen a justification, but that was a long time before and then it was such a fleeting glimpse that it might easily have been an hallucination.” Yossarian speaks to the chaplain—a slapstick and meaningless dialogue. Eventually, the Texan’s friendliness drives his comrades batty. They clear out of the ward and return to duty. That’s the story.
The charm and energy of the piece, its originality, lay in its playful language: There is a “vortex of specialists” swirling through the ward; a patient has “a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma … [and] a pathologist for his pathos.” “Catch-18”—an arbitrary phrase—is a rule requiring officers who censor enlisted men’s letters to sign their names to the pages. In the hospital, Yossarian, a low-level officer, spends his days editing letters and signing them, out of boredom and glee, “Washington Irving” or “Irving Washington.” Instead of deleting sensitive information, he declares “Death to all modifiers.” He scratches out adjectives and adverbs or, “reach[ing] a much higher plane of creativity,” attacks everything but articles. “A,” “an,” and “the” remain on the page. Everything else, he tosses. At one point, the army sends an undercover man into the ward. He poses as a patient. His job is to suss out the prankster. In the end, he catches pneumonia and is the only one left in the hospital when the others leave.
A year would pass before Heller finished drafting a second chapter of his novel. He was working for Timenow. At home and at work, the index cards piled up. Very early, Heller imagined most of the major characters in the novel and devoted cards to them, with detailed notes about their backgrounds, characteristics, and fates. He outlined each potential chapter and studiously catalogued each mission he had flown during the war, intending to use them as structural elements in the story.
Ideas rejected. Structure shuffled. Small changes: eventually, a character named Aarky was re-christened Aarfy. Bigger changes: an entrepreneurial soldier, Milo Minderbinder, “exposed” as a ruthless, moneymaking crook in an early vision of the novel, developed into a more nuanced figure, amoral rather than simply villainous. Metaphysical considerations: “Yossarian is dying, true, but he has about 35 years to live.” How thick to make the irony? “[Yossarian] really does have liver trouble. Condition is malignant & would have killed him if it had not been discovered”—a thought soon discarded. “Big Brother has been watching Yossarian,” says one card: a controlling idea that remains implicit, rather than explicit, in the final product. Heller axed a potential narrative thread in which Yossarian and Dunbar try to write a parody of a Hemingway war novel. Heller always knew that the death of the character Snowden, on the mission to Avignon, would be the novel’s central scene, and that it would be glimpsed in fragments until its full horror was finally revealed.
Also, early on, he developed the catch. In New World Writing, Catch-18 is a regulation about censoring letters. With his index cards, Joe began to shade the idea into something grand enough to support a novel thematically. One card reads, “Anyone who wants to be grounded can’t be crazy.”
III. “Funnier than Eighteen”
Robert Gottlieb was just a kid, really. And the company was his to play with.
“At that moment in the demented history of Simon & Schuster, there was no one in charge—which is often the case in publishing, but it was never acknowledged,” he later recalled. In August 1957, at about the time Candida Donadio sent Gottlieb a roughly 75-page manuscript entitled Catch-18, Jack Goodman, Simon & Schuster’s editorial director, had passed away unexpectedly. Poor health forced founder Dick Simon to retire later that year. According to Jonathan R. Eller, who has traced Catch-22’s publishing trail, six S&S executives died or moved to other firms in the mid-1950s, leaving the 26-year-old Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, a young advertising manager with whom he worked, with remarkable editorial pull.
In Turning the Pages, a history of the company, Peter Schwed notes that the personnel manager who first interviewed Gottlieb wondered “why this applicant, assuming that he had the money, didn’t seem to have the inclination to buy and use a comb.” At the end of a lengthy interview session, Goodman told Gottlieb to “go home and write me a letter telling me why you want to get into book publishing.” According to Schwed, Gottlieb “brooded about this on his way home and exploded in telling his wife about it. ‘What in heaven’s name is Goodman telling me to do? The last time I had an idiot assignment like this was in the sixth grade when the teacher made us write a paper on “What I did in my summer vacation”!’ ” The following morning, he delivered a letter to Goodman. It read, in full, “Dear Mr. Goodman: The reason I want to get into book publishing is because it never occurred to me that I could work anywhere else. Sincerely, Robert Gottlieb.” Goodman hired him on a six-month trial basis. At the end of the probationary period, Gottlieb walked into his boss’s office and told him that the six months was over and he had decided to stay.
Gottlieb’s younger colleague Michael Korda remembers a morning when “a tall young man, looking rather like one of those penniless perpetual students in Russian novels, squeezed his way into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames, and his lank, black hair was combed across his brow rather like the young Napoleon’s.” Gottlieb kept flipping his hair off his forehead with one hand; immediately, the hair resumed its old spot. His glasses were “so smeared with fingerprints … it was a wonder he could see through them.” Korda says Gottlieb’s eyes “were shrewd and intense, but with a certain kindly, humorous sparkle that I had not so far seen at S&S.”
After studying the room for a moment, Gottlieb told Korda, “You’ll never meet anybody if your back is all they see.” He pointed to the desk, which faced away from the door toward an outer window. He grasped one end of the desk and told Korda to take the other side. Together, they turned the desk around so it faced the door and the outer corridor. Gottlieb left, nodding with satisfaction. “Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop,” Gottlieb has said. “I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly—I want it towork, I want it to be happy I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if I’d been at all religious.”
By February 1958, Heller had completed seven handwritten chapters of Catch-18 and typed them up into a 259-page manuscript. Donadio sent it to Gottlieb. “I … love this crazy book and very much want to do it,” Gottlieb said. Candida Donadio was delighted by his enthusiasm. Finally, someone got it! “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off,” she often said to describe her happiness when negotiations went well with an editor. Despite the firm’s weakness at the top, Gottlieb was not completely free to publish whatever he pleased. Henry Simon, the younger brother of Dick; Justin Kaplan, an executive assistant to Henry Simon and Max Schuster; and Peter Schwed, an administrative editor, also read Joe’s manuscript and discussed it with Gottlieb. Schwed and Kaplan expressed reservations about the novel’s repetitiveness. Simon thought its view of the war was offensive, he said, and he recommended against publishing it.
Gottlieb strongly disagreed. “It is a very rare approach to the war—humor that slowly turns to horror,” he wrote in his report to the company’s editorial board. “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent. The whole certainly suffers somewhat by the two attitudes, but this can be partly overcome by revisions. The central character, Yossarian, must be strengthened somewhat—his single-minded drive tosurvive is both the comic and the serious center of the story.” He conceded the book would probably not sell well, but he predicted it would be a prestigious title for S&S, “bound to find real admirers in certain literary sets.” The board deferred to him. Simon & Schuster offered Heller a standard first-book agreement: $1,500—$750 as an advance and an additional $750 upon completion of the manuscript. The contract listed 1960 as the pub date.
Right away, Gottlieb hit it off with Heller. “I suppose our convoluted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work the same way,” he said. He detected in Joe “two great qualities,” and they appeared to exist “in such strange discord. First, there was anxiety. That, to me, is the subject of Catch-22. It must have welled up from the most profound anxiety in him. And the other part was appetite and joy.”
“I think I was [Bob’s] first writer. Not his first published writer, however, because I worked so slowly,” Heller told an interviewer in 1974. “It came so hard. I really thought it would be the only thing I ever wrote. Working on Catch, I’d become furious and despondent that I could only write a page [or so] a night. I’d say to myself, ‘Christ, I’m a mature adult with a master’s degree in English, why can’t I work faster?’ ”
The various stages of the novel, housed now in the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Brandeis University Libraries, reveal that, at one point, Joe was working with at least nine different drafts, both handwritten and typed, often cutting sections from one draft and pasting them into another, leaving blank spaces in some of the handwritten drafts for typed paragraphs to be inserted later. A typed section was no closer to being finished, in Joe’s mind, than a handwritten one; some of the typed paragraphs had been revised as many as three different times, in red ink, green ink, and pencil. Generally, the handwritten passages relished the intentional redundancy of expressions and images, which revisions tended to erase, largely by replacing proper nouns with pronouns.
He tried to temper the humor as well. Comedy came easily to Heller. He didn’t trust it. In an early passage labeled “Chapter XXIII: Dobbs,” Heller originally wrote, “Yossarian lost his guts on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts on the mission to Avignon.” Later, Joe decided the pun on “guts” lessened the horror of Snowden’s fate; he was using the gunner’s death to serve a cheap joke. He changed the passage to read, “That was the mission in which Yossarian lost his balls … because Snowden lost his guts.”
From draft to draft, most of the major changes were structural. Heller shuffled chapters, finding more effective ways to introduce the large cast of characters. “I’m a chronic fiddler,” he would observe. Left on his own, he’d “never finish anything at all.” He said, “I don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that … ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon I don’t produce them at will.”
Catch-18 had more than doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from 7 to 16 chapters, and Heller had added a whole new section consisting of 28 more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Heller’s precise and rather crabbed handwriting. Though Gottlieb recalls editing sessions with Heller as “calm,” Michael Korda remembers passing by Gottlieb’s office and seeing parts of Heller’s novel “endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Heller, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do it.”
Joe prepared a 758-page typescript from this jigsaw puzzle, deleting digressive episodes and expanding other chapters. He and Gottlieb plunged in again. Gottlieb inspected paragraphs for what he called “impoverished vocabulary,” and asked Joe to stir things up with more active language. He caught places where Joe seemed to be clearing his throat, dawdling, in Joe’s characteristic way, and not getting directly to the point.
Within the hallways of Simon & Schuster, an “aura of myth hovered around the book,” recalls Korda. It was a literary Manhattan Project. “Nobody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay.” The occasional appearance in the office of Heller’s “Sicilian Earth Mother” agent also increased the book’s mystical status. Donadio “had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant,” Korda says, which included just about everyone but Bob Gottlieb and Joe Heller. Eventually—though not before the 1960 deadline had passed—Joe dropped 150 pages from the manuscript. The remaining typescript, heavily line-edited, became the printer’s copy.
And then one day Heller got an urgent call from Gottlieb, who said the title Catch-18 would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called Mila 18, about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Uris was a well-known writer—Exodus had been a huge best-seller. Two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal. The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Heller, Gottlieb, and Bourne had long thought of the book as Catch-18, and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else.
“We were all in despair,” Gottlieb recalled. In his office, he and Heller sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. They liked the sound of “Catch-11”: hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Ultimately, they decided it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie,Ocean’s Eleven. They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.
On January 29, 1961, Heller sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you’ll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)” Gottlieb wasn’t sold.
Candida Donadio would one day attempt to take credit for retitling the book with the name that eventually stuck. The number 22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was her birthday, she said. “Absolutely untrue,” Gottlieb later told Karen Hudes. “I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, ‘No, it’s not funny,’ which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it’s funnier than eighteen.’ I remember those words being spoken He said, ‘Yes, it’s great, it’s great.’ And we called Candida and told her.”
Finally, the revisions were done. The fall book season had arrived. Catch-22 was about to be launched. One day in Midtown, a young man named Sam Vaughan agreed to share a cab with another man who was traveling in roughly the same direction. In the backseat, the men fell into conversation. Vaughan said he worked as an editor at a publishing house. The other man did, too. His name was Bob Gottlieb. After a moment’s silence, Gottlieb turned to Vaughan and said, “Tell me about popular fiction. I really don’t understand it.”
IV. Yossarian Lives
Nina Bourne had worked hard on Catch-22. She saw herself as “the demented governess who believed the baby was her own.” Her conviction that the novel was a work of literary genius led her to stand up in the book’s first promotion meeting. With a tremor in her voice and tears in her eyes, she announced, “We have to print 7,500”—instead of the standard 5,000-copy first printing. No one argued. Bourne was not one to make a scene or issue demands. Since 1939 she had done her job quietly and efficiently. She said what she meant, and if she was willing to take a risk on this book, then the company would fall in behind her.
Bourne attached a quirky disclaimer to the cover of the pre-publication proofs:
A funny and tragic and tonic book that says what is on the tip of the tongue of our age to say.
If a single word, thought, or overtone in the above sentence rubs you the wrong way, blame us, not the novel.
Together with Gottlieb she wrote “crazed” cover letters to distinguished readers, hoping to elicit comments from them for possible use in advertising. She mailed pre-pub copies of the novel to James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Art Buchwald, Graham Greene, S. J. Perelman, and Evelyn Waugh, among others. To each, Bourne wrote, “This is a book I’d get a critic out of the shower to read.” The “crazed” strategy seemed to backfire when, on September 6, 1961, Evelyn Waugh wrote:
Dear Miss Bourne:
Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading
You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.
Much of the dialogue is funny. You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”
Bourne was relieved when a telegram arrived from Art Buchwald in Paris:
PLEASE CONGRATULATE JOSEPH HELLER ON MASTERPIECE CATCH-22 STOP I THINK IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WARBOOKS STOP SO DO IRWIN SHAW AND JAMES JONES.
In the September 11 issue of Publishers Weekly, a full-page ad appeared with a photo of Heller—casual, confident, handsome—and a picture of the book’s cover. The copy, written by Gottlieb, read: “The growing ferment of interest in Catch-22 confirms our faith that Joseph Heller’s outrageously funny, powerful, totally original novel will be one of the major publishing events of the fall. Oct. 10. $5.95.”
That autumn, Joseph and Shirley Heller “spent many an evening running from one bookstore in New York to another, putting Heller’s novel on display when no one was looking, or moving copies of Catch-22 from under the counter of numerous Doubledays and placing it on display while burying other best-selling books,” their friend Frederick Karl recalled. Heller’s delight in holding the physical book, spotting copies of it in stores, was unbounded. Early reviews clashed—Newsweek favorable, Time tepid—but the promotional campaign succeeded. The first printing sold out in 10 days. Nina Bourne readied a second and third printing, all before Christmas.
Then came the paperback. “The success in the first few months was astonishing,” recalls Don Fine, Dell’s editor in chief. He had purchased rights to the novel from S&S’s Pocket Books for $32,500. “This was a book lovingly and carefully prepared by Bob Gottlieb. But the book did not take off in hardcover I remember when I sent the contract information to Bill Callahan [Dell’s vice president in charge of sales], he wrote to me saying, ‘What the hell is a Catch-22?’ I wrote back and said, ‘It’s a World War II novel.’ We so-called ‘packaged’ it so it could pass as a big important World War II [book] We had an aviator’s head—not very good art—for the cover instead of [Paul Bacon’s] dangling man, which was the trademark of the hardcover. It would have destroyed the paperback with that on the cover. And this was the magic of paperback publishing in those days. We didn’t have any television spots. We probably didn’t have much point-of-sale stuff. But people read it. Young people read it and war veterans read it and, goddammit, it worked!”
The Catch craze began. “Not since The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies has a novel been taken up by such a fervid and heterogeneous claque of admirers,” Newsweek announced in October 1962. “The book obviously inspires an evangelical fervor in those who admire it It has already swept the cocktail-party circuit where Catch-22 is the hottest topic going and Joe Heller himself is the hottest catch.”
Heller appeared on NBC’s Today show with interim host John Chancellor, projecting congeniality, confidence, and an adman’s smoothness. He talked about the universality of his characters and said, “Yossarian is alive somewhere and still on the run.” After the show, “in a bar close by the studio, where I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life,” Heller said, “[Chancellor] handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.”
Eventually, similar stickers appeared on college campuses along with copies of the paperback. Professors assigned the book, using it to discuss not only literary modernism and World War II but also current American policy in Southeast Asia, which dominated the news more and more. The war that he was really dealing with turned out to be not World War II but the Vietnam War, Heller once told an interviewer.
With stunning swiftness, the term “Catch-22” slipped into daily conversations nationwide—in corporate headquarters, on military bases, on college campuses—to describe any bureaucratic paradox.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” [Yossarian] observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed
Catch-22 … specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. [A bombardier] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. [A bombardier] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22.
Eventually, The American Heritage Dictionary sanctioned the term, defining a Catch-22 as a “difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.”
By April 1963, the paperback had sold 1,100,000 copies of the 1,250,000 in print. By the end of the decade, Dell had taken the book through 30 printings. In sales as well as critical acclaim, Catch-22 had broken out of its literary trappings and its East Coast box to become a perennial American classic.
“For sixteen years I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce,” Stephen E. Ambrose, writer and historian, wrote to Heller in January 1962. “I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong. Thank you.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/08/heller-201108
The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph.
Tracy Daugherty
August 2011
Vanity Fair
I. Prologue
Joseph Heller crawled into the transparent womb at the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of the day. That morning, he and the rest of his crew had been ordered to attack enemy gun positions at Pointe des Issambres, near St. Tropez, in France, but heavy cloud formations had prevented them from dropping their bombs. According to military reports, flak cover at the target was “heavy, intense and accurate.” Just one week earlier, over Avignon, on the morning of August 8, Heller had witnessed flak bursts cripple a bomber. “I was in the leading flight,” he recalled, “and when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane began spiraling downward, and that was all.” Two men died.
Now, on this follow-up mission a week later, the goal was to destroy the Avignon railroad bridges on the Rhône River. As he had done 36 times before, he slid down the narrow tunnel beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl—the crew called it “the hot house”—he always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He put on his intercom headset so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.
As his squadron began its approach to the Rhône, German anti-aircraft guns let loose and flak filled the air. Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal of a damaged bomber fall. A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the co-pilot had taken their hands off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to ensure a steady approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about 60 seconds, no evasive action would be possible, just a sure zeroing in.
Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, about 20, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was about to stall the engines, seized the controls, and the plane went into a sudden steep dive, back to an altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak. In the nose cone, Heller slammed into the ceiling of his compartment. His headset cord pulled loose from its jack and began whipping about his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move.
Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upward, away from the flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next. Now Heller was pinned to the floor, looking for a handhold, anything to grasp. The silence was horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? He noticed the cord to his headset lying free near his chair. He plugged himself back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and I’m all right.” But the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him wonder if it was true.
II. Love at First Sight
‘The novel, you know,” people whispered whenever Joseph Heller and his wife, Shirley, left a party early. From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertising. In later years, he floated various stories about the origins of his first novel. “There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing,” he said on one occasion. But then something happened. He told one British journalist that “conversations with two friends … influenced me. Each of them had been wounded in the war, one of them very seriously The first one told some very funny stories about his war experiences, but the second one was unable to understand how any humour could be associated with the horror of war. They didn’t know each other and I tried to explain the first one’s point of view to the second. He recognized that traditionally there had been lots of graveyard humour, but he could not reconcile it with what he had seen of war. It was after that discussion that the opening of Catch-22 and many incidents in it came to me.”
The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hašek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.
But the most common account Heller gave of the hatching of Catch-22 varied little from what he said to The Paris Review in 1974: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars … the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor.”
In all likelihood, each of these scenarios is true; they don’t contradict one another, and they probably occurred at some stage in the process of imagining the novel. But we also know from a letter to Heller in California from the editor Whit Burnett that, as early as 1946, he’d been considering a novel about “a flier facing the end of his missions.”
The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.
Back in his short-story-writing days, he had corresponded with an editor at The Atlantic Monthly named Elizabeth McKee. She had offered to be his first agent. With Mavis McIntosh, McKee founded her own business; in 1952, her agency consisted of McIntosh, Jean Parker Waterbury, and a woman originally hired to do girl-Friday work, Candida Donadio.
“The agents were not impressed” with Catch-18, Heller recalled in a 1994 preface to a new edition of Catch-22. In fact, they found the story incomprehensible. But Donadio was quite impressed and began sending the manuscript around. The replies were at first discouraging. But then, one day, Donadio received a phone call from Arabel Porter, the executive editor of a biannual literary anthology, New World Writing,distributed by New American Library’s Mentor Books. She raved about Heller. “Candida, this is completely wonderful, true genius,” she said. “I’m buying it.”
Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller’s new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on people she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across,” says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to “polish silver.” She claimed she would have loved to have been a Carmelite nun. She smoked and drank heavily, indulged heartily in Italian meals, and disliked having her picture taken. Perhaps her conflicting currents enabled her to be an intuitive appreciator (as she put it) of truly original writing. In time, her client roster came to include some of the most prominent names in American letters: John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, and Peter Matthiessen. “She really was the agent of her generation,” a young co-worker, Neil Olson, recalled. And Catch-18 started it all.
According to her boss, Victor Weybright, co-founder and editor in chief of New American Library, Arabel J. Porter was “a Bohemian Quakeress, with inspired eyes and ears which seem to see and hear all the significant manifestations of the literary, dramatic and graphic arts.” Weybright hired Porter to select content and work out royalties for New World Writing, which would “provide a friendly medium for many of the young writers who have difficulty in finding a market for their work because, in some way or another, they ‘break the rules.’ ”
I. Prologue
Joseph Heller crawled into the transparent womb at the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of the day. That morning, he and the rest of his crew had been ordered to attack enemy gun positions at Pointe des Issambres, near St. Tropez, in France, but heavy cloud formations had prevented them from dropping their bombs. According to military reports, flak cover at the target was “heavy, intense and accurate.” Just one week earlier, over Avignon, on the morning of August 8, Heller had witnessed flak bursts cripple a bomber. “I was in the leading flight,” he recalled, “and when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane began spiraling downward, and that was all.” Two men died.
Now, on this follow-up mission a week later, the goal was to destroy the Avignon railroad bridges on the Rhône River. As he had done 36 times before, he slid down the narrow tunnel beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl—the crew called it “the hot house”—he always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He put on his intercom headset so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.
As his squadron began its approach to the Rhône, German anti-aircraft guns let loose and flak filled the air. Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal of a damaged bomber fall. A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the co-pilot had taken their hands off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to ensure a steady approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about 60 seconds, no evasive action would be possible, just a sure zeroing in.
Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, about 20, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was about to stall the engines, seized the controls, and the plane went into a sudden steep dive, back to an altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak. In the nose cone, Heller slammed into the ceiling of his compartment. His headset cord pulled loose from its jack and began whipping about his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move.
Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upward, away from the flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next. Now Heller was pinned to the floor, looking for a handhold, anything to grasp. The silence was horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? He noticed the cord to his headset lying free near his chair. He plugged himself back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and I’m all right.” But the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him wonder if it was true.
II. Love at First Sight
‘The novel, you know,” people whispered whenever Joseph Heller and his wife, Shirley, left a party early. From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertising. In later years, he floated various stories about the origins of his first novel. “There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing,” he said on one occasion. But then something happened. He told one British journalist that “conversations with two friends … influenced me. Each of them had been wounded in the war, one of them very seriously The first one told some very funny stories about his war experiences, but the second one was unable to understand how any humour could be associated with the horror of war. They didn’t know each other and I tried to explain the first one’s point of view to the second. He recognized that traditionally there had been lots of graveyard humour, but he could not reconcile it with what he had seen of war. It was after that discussion that the opening of Catch-22 and many incidents in it came to me.”
The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hašek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.
But the most common account Heller gave of the hatching of Catch-22 varied little from what he said to The Paris Review in 1974: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars … the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor.”
In all likelihood, each of these scenarios is true; they don’t contradict one another, and they probably occurred at some stage in the process of imagining the novel. But we also know from a letter to Heller in California from the editor Whit Burnett that, as early as 1946, he’d been considering a novel about “a flier facing the end of his missions.”
The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.
Back in his short-story-writing days, he had corresponded with an editor at The Atlantic Monthly named Elizabeth McKee. She had offered to be his first agent. With Mavis McIntosh, McKee founded her own business; in 1952, her agency consisted of McIntosh, Jean Parker Waterbury, and a woman originally hired to do girl-Friday work, Candida Donadio.
“The agents were not impressed” with Catch-18, Heller recalled in a 1994 preface to a new edition of Catch-22. In fact, they found the story incomprehensible. But Donadio was quite impressed and began sending the manuscript around. The replies were at first discouraging. But then, one day, Donadio received a phone call from Arabel Porter, the executive editor of a biannual literary anthology, New World Writing,distributed by New American Library’s Mentor Books. She raved about Heller. “Candida, this is completely wonderful, true genius,” she said. “I’m buying it.”
Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller’s new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on people she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across,” says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to “polish silver.” She claimed she would have loved to have been a Carmelite nun. She smoked and drank heavily, indulged heartily in Italian meals, and disliked having her picture taken. Perhaps her conflicting currents enabled her to be an intuitive appreciator (as she put it) of truly original writing. In time, her client roster came to include some of the most prominent names in American letters: John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, and Peter Matthiessen. “She really was the agent of her generation,” a young co-worker, Neil Olson, recalled. And Catch-18 started it all.
According to her boss, Victor Weybright, co-founder and editor in chief of New American Library, Arabel J. Porter was “a Bohemian Quakeress, with inspired eyes and ears which seem to see and hear all the significant manifestations of the literary, dramatic and graphic arts.” Weybright hired Porter to select content and work out royalties for New World Writing, which would “provide a friendly medium for many of the young writers who have difficulty in finding a market for their work because, in some way or another, they ‘break the rules.’ ”
Wilbur Blume filiming Joseph Heller, as 'Pete', during the filming of Training Day Combat. For the full story behind this, see https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/09/17/the-reel-catch-22-pt-2-joseph-heller-and-training-during-combat/
In terms of cultural impact, no single issue of New World Writing was more dazzling than No. 7, published in April 1955. A subheading on the front cover said, “A New Adventure in Modern Reading.” The contents included work by Dylan Thomas, who had died in November 1953, poetry by A. Alvarez, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, prose by Heinrich Böll, and two startling, unclassifiable pieces, one titled “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” by a writer called Jean-Louis, and Catch-18, by Joseph Heller.
Heller knew how valuable the exposure was in New World Writing. He wrote to Arabel Porter, “I should like to tell you at this time that it was with great delight and pride that I received news you were interested in publishing a section of Catch-18.” In fact, it was the only section he had written so far. “And I should like to express my thanks for the recognition implicit in your decision and the encouragement I received from it.” As for Jean-Louis, this was the nom de plume of a writer named Jack Kerouac, who had long been disgusted with his treatment by publishers. He felt New World Writing had done him a great disservice while editing his piece by splitting an approximately 500-word sentence in two, according to biographer Ellis Amburn. “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was part of a larger manuscript called On the Road.
Only 10 pages long in the journal’s small print, Catch-18 introduces us to a World War II-era American soldier named Yossarian, in a military hospital “with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.” Yossarian is happy to be hospitalized and excused from flying bombing missions, and has not told the doctors his liver pain has gone away. He had “made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital,” where “the food wasn’t too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed.”
Sharing the ward with him are his buddy Dunbar, a man “working hard at increasing his life span … by cultivating boredom” (so much so that Yossarian wonders if he is dead), a Texan so likable no one can stand him, and a “soldier in white,” who is “encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.” A slim rubber tube attached to his groin conveys his urine to a jar on the floor; another pair of tubes appear to feed him by recycling the urine. Outside, there is always the “monotonous old drone of bombers returning from a mission.”
One day, Yossarian receives a visit from a chaplain. A chaplain is something he has not seen before: Yossarian loves him “at first sight.” “He had seen reverends and rabbis, ministers and mullahs, priests and pairs of nuns. He had seen ordnance officers and quartermaster officers and post exchange officers and other spooky military anomalies. Once he had even seen a justification, but that was a long time before and then it was such a fleeting glimpse that it might easily have been an hallucination.” Yossarian speaks to the chaplain—a slapstick and meaningless dialogue. Eventually, the Texan’s friendliness drives his comrades batty. They clear out of the ward and return to duty. That’s the story.
The charm and energy of the piece, its originality, lay in its playful language: There is a “vortex of specialists” swirling through the ward; a patient has “a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma … [and] a pathologist for his pathos.” “Catch-18”—an arbitrary phrase—is a rule requiring officers who censor enlisted men’s letters to sign their names to the pages. In the hospital, Yossarian, a low-level officer, spends his days editing letters and signing them, out of boredom and glee, “Washington Irving” or “Irving Washington.” Instead of deleting sensitive information, he declares “Death to all modifiers.” He scratches out adjectives and adverbs or, “reach[ing] a much higher plane of creativity,” attacks everything but articles. “A,” “an,” and “the” remain on the page. Everything else, he tosses. At one point, the army sends an undercover man into the ward. He poses as a patient. His job is to suss out the prankster. In the end, he catches pneumonia and is the only one left in the hospital when the others leave.
A year would pass before Heller finished drafting a second chapter of his novel. He was working for Timenow. At home and at work, the index cards piled up. Very early, Heller imagined most of the major characters in the novel and devoted cards to them, with detailed notes about their backgrounds, characteristics, and fates. He outlined each potential chapter and studiously catalogued each mission he had flown during the war, intending to use them as structural elements in the story.
Ideas rejected. Structure shuffled. Small changes: eventually, a character named Aarky was re-christened Aarfy. Bigger changes: an entrepreneurial soldier, Milo Minderbinder, “exposed” as a ruthless, moneymaking crook in an early vision of the novel, developed into a more nuanced figure, amoral rather than simply villainous. Metaphysical considerations: “Yossarian is dying, true, but he has about 35 years to live.” How thick to make the irony? “[Yossarian] really does have liver trouble. Condition is malignant & would have killed him if it had not been discovered”—a thought soon discarded. “Big Brother has been watching Yossarian,” says one card: a controlling idea that remains implicit, rather than explicit, in the final product. Heller axed a potential narrative thread in which Yossarian and Dunbar try to write a parody of a Hemingway war novel. Heller always knew that the death of the character Snowden, on the mission to Avignon, would be the novel’s central scene, and that it would be glimpsed in fragments until its full horror was finally revealed.
Also, early on, he developed the catch. In New World Writing, Catch-18 is a regulation about censoring letters. With his index cards, Joe began to shade the idea into something grand enough to support a novel thematically. One card reads, “Anyone who wants to be grounded can’t be crazy.”
III. “Funnier than Eighteen”
Robert Gottlieb was just a kid, really. And the company was his to play with.
“At that moment in the demented history of Simon & Schuster, there was no one in charge—which is often the case in publishing, but it was never acknowledged,” he later recalled. In August 1957, at about the time Candida Donadio sent Gottlieb a roughly 75-page manuscript entitled Catch-18, Jack Goodman, Simon & Schuster’s editorial director, had passed away unexpectedly. Poor health forced founder Dick Simon to retire later that year. According to Jonathan R. Eller, who has traced Catch-22’s publishing trail, six S&S executives died or moved to other firms in the mid-1950s, leaving the 26-year-old Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, a young advertising manager with whom he worked, with remarkable editorial pull.
In Turning the Pages, a history of the company, Peter Schwed notes that the personnel manager who first interviewed Gottlieb wondered “why this applicant, assuming that he had the money, didn’t seem to have the inclination to buy and use a comb.” At the end of a lengthy interview session, Goodman told Gottlieb to “go home and write me a letter telling me why you want to get into book publishing.” According to Schwed, Gottlieb “brooded about this on his way home and exploded in telling his wife about it. ‘What in heaven’s name is Goodman telling me to do? The last time I had an idiot assignment like this was in the sixth grade when the teacher made us write a paper on “What I did in my summer vacation”!’ ” The following morning, he delivered a letter to Goodman. It read, in full, “Dear Mr. Goodman: The reason I want to get into book publishing is because it never occurred to me that I could work anywhere else. Sincerely, Robert Gottlieb.” Goodman hired him on a six-month trial basis. At the end of the probationary period, Gottlieb walked into his boss’s office and told him that the six months was over and he had decided to stay.
Gottlieb’s younger colleague Michael Korda remembers a morning when “a tall young man, looking rather like one of those penniless perpetual students in Russian novels, squeezed his way into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames, and his lank, black hair was combed across his brow rather like the young Napoleon’s.” Gottlieb kept flipping his hair off his forehead with one hand; immediately, the hair resumed its old spot. His glasses were “so smeared with fingerprints … it was a wonder he could see through them.” Korda says Gottlieb’s eyes “were shrewd and intense, but with a certain kindly, humorous sparkle that I had not so far seen at S&S.”
After studying the room for a moment, Gottlieb told Korda, “You’ll never meet anybody if your back is all they see.” He pointed to the desk, which faced away from the door toward an outer window. He grasped one end of the desk and told Korda to take the other side. Together, they turned the desk around so it faced the door and the outer corridor. Gottlieb left, nodding with satisfaction. “Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop,” Gottlieb has said. “I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly—I want it towork, I want it to be happy I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if I’d been at all religious.”
By February 1958, Heller had completed seven handwritten chapters of Catch-18 and typed them up into a 259-page manuscript. Donadio sent it to Gottlieb. “I … love this crazy book and very much want to do it,” Gottlieb said. Candida Donadio was delighted by his enthusiasm. Finally, someone got it! “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off,” she often said to describe her happiness when negotiations went well with an editor. Despite the firm’s weakness at the top, Gottlieb was not completely free to publish whatever he pleased. Henry Simon, the younger brother of Dick; Justin Kaplan, an executive assistant to Henry Simon and Max Schuster; and Peter Schwed, an administrative editor, also read Joe’s manuscript and discussed it with Gottlieb. Schwed and Kaplan expressed reservations about the novel’s repetitiveness. Simon thought its view of the war was offensive, he said, and he recommended against publishing it.
Gottlieb strongly disagreed. “It is a very rare approach to the war—humor that slowly turns to horror,” he wrote in his report to the company’s editorial board. “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent. The whole certainly suffers somewhat by the two attitudes, but this can be partly overcome by revisions. The central character, Yossarian, must be strengthened somewhat—his single-minded drive tosurvive is both the comic and the serious center of the story.” He conceded the book would probably not sell well, but he predicted it would be a prestigious title for S&S, “bound to find real admirers in certain literary sets.” The board deferred to him. Simon & Schuster offered Heller a standard first-book agreement: $1,500—$750 as an advance and an additional $750 upon completion of the manuscript. The contract listed 1960 as the pub date.
Right away, Gottlieb hit it off with Heller. “I suppose our convoluted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work the same way,” he said. He detected in Joe “two great qualities,” and they appeared to exist “in such strange discord. First, there was anxiety. That, to me, is the subject of Catch-22. It must have welled up from the most profound anxiety in him. And the other part was appetite and joy.”
“I think I was [Bob’s] first writer. Not his first published writer, however, because I worked so slowly,” Heller told an interviewer in 1974. “It came so hard. I really thought it would be the only thing I ever wrote. Working on Catch, I’d become furious and despondent that I could only write a page [or so] a night. I’d say to myself, ‘Christ, I’m a mature adult with a master’s degree in English, why can’t I work faster?’ ”
The various stages of the novel, housed now in the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Brandeis University Libraries, reveal that, at one point, Joe was working with at least nine different drafts, both handwritten and typed, often cutting sections from one draft and pasting them into another, leaving blank spaces in some of the handwritten drafts for typed paragraphs to be inserted later. A typed section was no closer to being finished, in Joe’s mind, than a handwritten one; some of the typed paragraphs had been revised as many as three different times, in red ink, green ink, and pencil. Generally, the handwritten passages relished the intentional redundancy of expressions and images, which revisions tended to erase, largely by replacing proper nouns with pronouns.
He tried to temper the humor as well. Comedy came easily to Heller. He didn’t trust it. In an early passage labeled “Chapter XXIII: Dobbs,” Heller originally wrote, “Yossarian lost his guts on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts on the mission to Avignon.” Later, Joe decided the pun on “guts” lessened the horror of Snowden’s fate; he was using the gunner’s death to serve a cheap joke. He changed the passage to read, “That was the mission in which Yossarian lost his balls … because Snowden lost his guts.”
From draft to draft, most of the major changes were structural. Heller shuffled chapters, finding more effective ways to introduce the large cast of characters. “I’m a chronic fiddler,” he would observe. Left on his own, he’d “never finish anything at all.” He said, “I don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that … ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon I don’t produce them at will.”
Catch-18 had more than doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from 7 to 16 chapters, and Heller had added a whole new section consisting of 28 more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Heller’s precise and rather crabbed handwriting. Though Gottlieb recalls editing sessions with Heller as “calm,” Michael Korda remembers passing by Gottlieb’s office and seeing parts of Heller’s novel “endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Heller, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do it.”
Joe prepared a 758-page typescript from this jigsaw puzzle, deleting digressive episodes and expanding other chapters. He and Gottlieb plunged in again. Gottlieb inspected paragraphs for what he called “impoverished vocabulary,” and asked Joe to stir things up with more active language. He caught places where Joe seemed to be clearing his throat, dawdling, in Joe’s characteristic way, and not getting directly to the point.
Within the hallways of Simon & Schuster, an “aura of myth hovered around the book,” recalls Korda. It was a literary Manhattan Project. “Nobody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay.” The occasional appearance in the office of Heller’s “Sicilian Earth Mother” agent also increased the book’s mystical status. Donadio “had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant,” Korda says, which included just about everyone but Bob Gottlieb and Joe Heller. Eventually—though not before the 1960 deadline had passed—Joe dropped 150 pages from the manuscript. The remaining typescript, heavily line-edited, became the printer’s copy.
And then one day Heller got an urgent call from Gottlieb, who said the title Catch-18 would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called Mila 18, about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Uris was a well-known writer—Exodus had been a huge best-seller. Two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal. The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Heller, Gottlieb, and Bourne had long thought of the book as Catch-18, and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else.
“We were all in despair,” Gottlieb recalled. In his office, he and Heller sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. They liked the sound of “Catch-11”: hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Ultimately, they decided it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie,Ocean’s Eleven. They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.
On January 29, 1961, Heller sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you’ll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)” Gottlieb wasn’t sold.
Candida Donadio would one day attempt to take credit for retitling the book with the name that eventually stuck. The number 22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was her birthday, she said. “Absolutely untrue,” Gottlieb later told Karen Hudes. “I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, ‘No, it’s not funny,’ which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it’s funnier than eighteen.’ I remember those words being spoken He said, ‘Yes, it’s great, it’s great.’ And we called Candida and told her.”
Finally, the revisions were done. The fall book season had arrived. Catch-22 was about to be launched. One day in Midtown, a young man named Sam Vaughan agreed to share a cab with another man who was traveling in roughly the same direction. In the backseat, the men fell into conversation. Vaughan said he worked as an editor at a publishing house. The other man did, too. His name was Bob Gottlieb. After a moment’s silence, Gottlieb turned to Vaughan and said, “Tell me about popular fiction. I really don’t understand it.”
IV. Yossarian Lives
Nina Bourne had worked hard on Catch-22. She saw herself as “the demented governess who believed the baby was her own.” Her conviction that the novel was a work of literary genius led her to stand up in the book’s first promotion meeting. With a tremor in her voice and tears in her eyes, she announced, “We have to print 7,500”—instead of the standard 5,000-copy first printing. No one argued. Bourne was not one to make a scene or issue demands. Since 1939 she had done her job quietly and efficiently. She said what she meant, and if she was willing to take a risk on this book, then the company would fall in behind her.
Bourne attached a quirky disclaimer to the cover of the pre-publication proofs:
A funny and tragic and tonic book that says what is on the tip of the tongue of our age to say.
If a single word, thought, or overtone in the above sentence rubs you the wrong way, blame us, not the novel.
Together with Gottlieb she wrote “crazed” cover letters to distinguished readers, hoping to elicit comments from them for possible use in advertising. She mailed pre-pub copies of the novel to James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Art Buchwald, Graham Greene, S. J. Perelman, and Evelyn Waugh, among others. To each, Bourne wrote, “This is a book I’d get a critic out of the shower to read.” The “crazed” strategy seemed to backfire when, on September 6, 1961, Evelyn Waugh wrote:
Dear Miss Bourne:
Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading
You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.
Much of the dialogue is funny. You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”
Bourne was relieved when a telegram arrived from Art Buchwald in Paris:
PLEASE CONGRATULATE JOSEPH HELLER ON MASTERPIECE CATCH-22 STOP I THINK IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WARBOOKS STOP SO DO IRWIN SHAW AND JAMES JONES.
In the September 11 issue of Publishers Weekly, a full-page ad appeared with a photo of Heller—casual, confident, handsome—and a picture of the book’s cover. The copy, written by Gottlieb, read: “The growing ferment of interest in Catch-22 confirms our faith that Joseph Heller’s outrageously funny, powerful, totally original novel will be one of the major publishing events of the fall. Oct. 10. $5.95.”
That autumn, Joseph and Shirley Heller “spent many an evening running from one bookstore in New York to another, putting Heller’s novel on display when no one was looking, or moving copies of Catch-22 from under the counter of numerous Doubledays and placing it on display while burying other best-selling books,” their friend Frederick Karl recalled. Heller’s delight in holding the physical book, spotting copies of it in stores, was unbounded. Early reviews clashed—Newsweek favorable, Time tepid—but the promotional campaign succeeded. The first printing sold out in 10 days. Nina Bourne readied a second and third printing, all before Christmas.
Then came the paperback. “The success in the first few months was astonishing,” recalls Don Fine, Dell’s editor in chief. He had purchased rights to the novel from S&S’s Pocket Books for $32,500. “This was a book lovingly and carefully prepared by Bob Gottlieb. But the book did not take off in hardcover I remember when I sent the contract information to Bill Callahan [Dell’s vice president in charge of sales], he wrote to me saying, ‘What the hell is a Catch-22?’ I wrote back and said, ‘It’s a World War II novel.’ We so-called ‘packaged’ it so it could pass as a big important World War II [book] We had an aviator’s head—not very good art—for the cover instead of [Paul Bacon’s] dangling man, which was the trademark of the hardcover. It would have destroyed the paperback with that on the cover. And this was the magic of paperback publishing in those days. We didn’t have any television spots. We probably didn’t have much point-of-sale stuff. But people read it. Young people read it and war veterans read it and, goddammit, it worked!”
The Catch craze began. “Not since The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies has a novel been taken up by such a fervid and heterogeneous claque of admirers,” Newsweek announced in October 1962. “The book obviously inspires an evangelical fervor in those who admire it It has already swept the cocktail-party circuit where Catch-22 is the hottest topic going and Joe Heller himself is the hottest catch.”
Heller appeared on NBC’s Today show with interim host John Chancellor, projecting congeniality, confidence, and an adman’s smoothness. He talked about the universality of his characters and said, “Yossarian is alive somewhere and still on the run.” After the show, “in a bar close by the studio, where I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life,” Heller said, “[Chancellor] handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.”
Eventually, similar stickers appeared on college campuses along with copies of the paperback. Professors assigned the book, using it to discuss not only literary modernism and World War II but also current American policy in Southeast Asia, which dominated the news more and more. The war that he was really dealing with turned out to be not World War II but the Vietnam War, Heller once told an interviewer.
With stunning swiftness, the term “Catch-22” slipped into daily conversations nationwide—in corporate headquarters, on military bases, on college campuses—to describe any bureaucratic paradox.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” [Yossarian] observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed
Catch-22 … specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. [A bombardier] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. [A bombardier] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22.
Eventually, The American Heritage Dictionary sanctioned the term, defining a Catch-22 as a “difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.”
By April 1963, the paperback had sold 1,100,000 copies of the 1,250,000 in print. By the end of the decade, Dell had taken the book through 30 printings. In sales as well as critical acclaim, Catch-22 had broken out of its literary trappings and its East Coast box to become a perennial American classic.
“For sixteen years I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce,” Stephen E. Ambrose, writer and historian, wrote to Heller in January 1962. “I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong. Thank you.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/08/heller-201108
Tuesday, 29 March 2016
Richard Bradford RIP
Richard Bradford
27 March 2016
The Los Angeles Times has reported that Richard Bradford, the Texas born actor who is best known for the 1960s British series “Man in a Suitcase” has died. He was 78 years old.
Bradford got his training at the actors studio, and began his work on stage before being cast by Arthur Penn in the 1966 movie “The Chase.” It is this film that led to Lew Grade casting Bradford in the British series “Man in a Suitcase.”
Bradford did extensive work in television for the remainder of the sixties and for most of the seventies. He appeared on “Medical Center,” “Marcus Welby MD,” “High Chaparral,” “Kojak,” and other popular American TV programs. He also acted in many movies, including “Goin’ South,” “Missing,” “The Escape Artist,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” and “The Untouchables.” He had a recurring role on “Cagney and Lacey” during the 80s and remained active in film and television through the 90s and into the 2000s.
An actor who began as a handsome leading man and grew into character roles, Bradford remained a solid, steady, accomplished actor who was able to play a variety of parts and in different genres. Mr. Bradford is survived by his son Richard Bradford III, his longtime partner, actress Millie Perkins, his step-daughters Hedy Hutcheson and Lillie Thom, and four grandchildren.
The Los Angeles Times has reported that Richard Bradford, the Texas born actor who is best known for the 1960s British series “Man in a Suitcase” has died. He was 78 years old.
Bradford got his training at the actors studio, and began his work on stage before being cast by Arthur Penn in the 1966 movie “The Chase.” It is this film that led to Lew Grade casting Bradford in the British series “Man in a Suitcase.”
Bradford did extensive work in television for the remainder of the sixties and for most of the seventies. He appeared on “Medical Center,” “Marcus Welby MD,” “High Chaparral,” “Kojak,” and other popular American TV programs. He also acted in many movies, including “Goin’ South,” “Missing,” “The Escape Artist,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” and “The Untouchables.” He had a recurring role on “Cagney and Lacey” during the 80s and remained active in film and television through the 90s and into the 2000s.
An actor who began as a handsome leading man and grew into character roles, Bradford remained a solid, steady, accomplished actor who was able to play a variety of parts and in different genres. Mr. Bradford is survived by his son Richard Bradford III, his longtime partner, actress Millie Perkins, his step-daughters Hedy Hutcheson and Lillie Thom, and four grandchildren.
Bradford's image was famously used by The Smiths for the cover of their single, Panic, in which Morrissey exhorts the public to 'burn down the disco' and hang the DJ.' If only we'd listened.
Richard Bradford 1934 - 2016
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?n=richard-bradford&pid=179024157
See http://www.freewebs.com/maninasuitcase/
Richard Bradford, actor who starred in British television series "Man in a Suitcase," dies at 82
27 March 2016
Richard Bradford was born in Conroe, Texas and attended Peacock Military Academy and then Texas A & M on a football scholarship. After injuring himself, he transferred to University of Texas to play baseball. When the pro-ball team he played for folded, he, on a whim, auditioned for "Picnic" and won the lead role.
From there, his life was determined.
In 1962, he joined the Actor's Studio in New York and acted in his first movie, "The Chase" (1966) with Marlon Brando.
From 1967 - 1968, Bradford starred in the British television series, "Man in a Suitcase," a show still aired on British television today.
Upon moving to Los Angeles, he had a long and critically acclaimed career, playing in over 80 movies and television shows, amongst them "Looking to Get Out" (1982), "Trip to Bountiful" (1985), "Untouchables" (1987), "Little Nikita" (1988), "Milagro Beanfield War" (1988), "Internal Affairs" (1990), "Just the Ticket" (1999), and "Lost City" (2005).
Many may remember his scene stealing moment as the Irish cop arguing in an alley with Sean Connory in "Untouchables."
Richard cared about the craft to the very depth of his being. He was a source of comfort and love, and friends were always welcomed to his home with barbecued ribs, corn bread, and black-eyed peas. He is survived by his son Richard Bradford III, his longtime partner Millie Perkins, his step-daughters Hedy Hutcheson and Lillie Thom, and four grandchildren.
See http://www.freewebs.com/maninasuitcase/
Monday, 28 March 2016
Andy Paley and Stephen Kalinich talk about their work with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys
Stephen Kalinich and Brian Wilson
Q and As with Beach Boys Collaborators Stephen Kalinich and Andy Paley
Ken Sharp
Rockcellar Magazine
Long-time Beach Boys collaborator and friend Stephen Kalinich holds honors of co-writing songs with all three Wilson brothers. From Little Bird to the previously unreleased tracks California Feelin’ and My Love Lives On, he reflects on the collaborations featured on the Made in California box set.
Stephen Kalinich
Little Bird
Rockcellar Magazine
Long-time Beach Boys collaborator and friend Stephen Kalinich holds honors of co-writing songs with all three Wilson brothers. From Little Bird to the previously unreleased tracks California Feelin’ and My Love Lives On, he reflects on the collaborations featured on the Made in California box set.
Stephen Kalinich
Little Bird
Stephen Kalinich: I was sitting at the piano at Dennis’s house on 14400 Sunset Boulevard, the old Will Rogers Estate which he rented. We were in the main house. There was a nice yard and a guest cottage like a little log cabin on the property. I looked out the window and saw a little bird on a tree branch and the song came gushing out of me (recites lyrics) “Little bird up in a tree looked down and sang a song to me of how it began…”The words started pouring out flowing like a waterfall.
I had a warm feeling inside, a jolt like a revelation. Energy was flowing through me; it was almost electric.
Dennis came out for the shower and I read it to him. He loved it, dabbled a little at the piano and then stopped. We hung out for a while and then I went home. That night around midnight he called me, excited, almost raising his voice like he had seen God and touched Divine Grace. He played me the melody on the phone. A cool chill ran up my spine. I stood up and I was shaken and stirred…I knew it was a miracle of a song. It had a healing vibration and a soothing quality and a longing for me and us as a world to return to our roots. It flies away for a moment and we call it back and we keep singing hoping that bird will return that inspiration.
Brian added the bridge part, “where’s my pretty bird…” In terms of our creative process, I worked differently with Dennis than with Brian or Carl. In every instance I wrote the words first and he was inspired and electricity struck as he felt the notes to the words. He would get excited and inspired.
Be Still
Stephen Kalinich: Be Still is another one of my favorite songs I wrote with Dennis. We wrote it in the evening in the guest cottage on Sunset. We knew we were again on to something and we had tapped into a vein of inspiration. I still get the chill thinking about Dennis sitting at the piano. I lay the card down that says Be Still and Know that I am God from Dr. Sue Sikking. We begin and we are inspired.
I felt a thrill go through me, a shock wave of sweet intensity as if some truth came through…and Dennis captured it.
California Feelin’
Stephen Kalinich: Being from the Binghamton/Endicott, New York area, I’d never seen a lemon or an orange tree. When I moved to California, the whole feeling gave me rush. It gave me a white gospel California Feelin’. Dennis took me to the beaches and I surfed.
I wrote poems about California. I preached it and loved the whole experience so I wrote a song about it and gave it to Brian on a pink sheet of paper. Brian improvised the melody off of the lyrics and skipped a line here and there and picked what he liked. When I heard Brian sing it for the first time I was shaken. It was like Righteous Brothers soul and gospel. I love this song and love that the song describe the experience of a New Yorker who is struck by the beauty of the sun for the first time and gets the religion of California. Wherever I go in the world it keeps calling me back.
My Love Lives On
Stephen Kalinich: My Love Lives On is one of my favorite songs I wrote with Dennis. A total dedication of the power of love to change and save a situation and create a hopeful outcome through unending love. It’s something that can alter the course of a trajectory and reverse the downward trend of consciousness.
Even with the wars and problems, Dennis and I felt there was hope in the world. We wrote the song in Brentwood in a little house near the Brentwood country club. There were pine trees and the scent of pine everywhere. We wrote it in the evening. I drove into the driveway in my white Thunderbird and there was magic and electricity in the air.
You could feel the pulse of enhanced experience without a drug.
My Love Lives On is about how through all problems…all obstacles, pain and suffering and through death – love lives on. Dennis lives on in the song but I miss him in the flesh, his raw, wild, beautiful at times primitive spirit.
Mona Kana
Stephen Kalinich: Mona Kana is about a gorgeous Hawaiian Indian maiden calling across the waters of her undying love. He hears it and that restores the symphony of life. It is love crying out, knowing that underneath it all is bliss.
Dennis and I envisioned a video, a movie, a visual component. (recites lyrics)… “Mona Kana, eeenie Weenie Kana, Oona kan na aneque nanana, my love is in the river calling from a dream, she calling out to me, I flow with the stream Mona Kana Eeenie wenie Kana…”
Andy Paley and Brian Wilson
One time member of ‘70’s power pop duo, The Paley Brothers, Andy Paley shares a long history working with Brian Wilson – both as producer and songwriting collaborator on his debut solo album, Brian Wilson, Imagination and Gettin’ In Over My Head.
Beach Boys versions of two previously unreleased Wilson-Paley collaborations, Soul Searchin’ and You’re Still a Mystery, are unveiled for the first time on the new Beach Boys box set Made in California. Here’s some insight from Paley on those tracks:
Soul Searchin’
Andy Paley: I recorded the song by myself and had the track completely done before Brian ever heard it. I had the hook (sings ‘Soul Searchin’’) but I didn’t have any lyrics. Brian came up with the first line (recites “I was a bum…”) and we worked on it from there. Brian contributed heavily with lyrics on that one.
First, I recorded a version, then Brian did a version and then we went in the studio with The Beach Boys at Ocean Way and Carol sang lead on it. It was his last lead vocal he ever did with The Beach Boys.
The original mix was really good; the way I wanted to sound in my head was like a Philly soul record.
A lot of stuff was added to the Beach Boys track, things that I wasn’t nuts about – like acoustic guitars.
Solomon Burke recorded a version of it on the album Don’t Give Up On Me, which won a Grammy.
You’re Still a Mystery
Andy Paley: Brian had the part, (sings) “Tell me your secrets, don’t try to hide, give it to me straight now…” and I wrote the counter melody (sings) “I thought you were my friend, it’s happening again…”, which ended up being the hook. I used to carry around a cassette boom box and we were over at this house and Brian said, “I got something really good” and it was a part that we wound up using on You’re Still a Mystery.
It was a 50/50 collaboration on that song except for the bridge, which Brian wrote by himself. I was in the studio when The Beach Boys cut it. Jim Keltner played drums, Waddy Wachtel played guitar, Benmont Tench is on electric piano and I played a Steinway grand piano. I also played six-string bass on it too. Brian sings lead and then Carl and the rest of the Beach Boys comes in; Mike’s singing this cool bass part. It’s classic Beach Boys arrangements.
This is the last session The Beach Boys ever did with Carl.
Sunday, 27 March 2016
Jazz album cover art by David Stone Martin
If you're lucky, a good album cover resonates almost as much as the music therein, but, of course luck has nothing to do with it. The most iconic artist in the field of jazz album cover design was David Stone Martin, an extraordinarily talented man who, often using a crowquill pen for the ink lines and a limited colour palette, captured the style of the music, no matter if it were bop or blues or orchestral jazz. Working for Norman Granz's Verve, Clef and Norgran labels, he designed over 200 distinctive sleeves in the 1950s, but his career continued into the 1980s, when he created cover art for various label, including Pablo, also owned by his friend and mentor, Granz.
Born in 1913, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he was heavily influenced by the work of Ben Shahn; in the 1930s and 40s, he worked for the Federal Artist Project and as the art director of The Tennessee Valley Authority. During World war II, he was an artist/correspondent for Life Magazine and when he returned to the States, he became a freelance illustrator, working on many projects such as billboards, magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest, theatre and television.
His involvement with Norman Granz came about as a result of a relationship with the pianist Mary Lou Williams in 1944. By 1950, he had already produced over 100 album covers for a variety of record labels such as Mercury and Dial.
He died in 1992, in New London Connecticut and is work is in collections in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution.
You can read more about Martin here: http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/david-stone-martin-unusual-pictures.html and here http://ephemerapress.com/david-mary.html
Me? I'm off to listen to the Charlie Parker Jam Session...
Saturday, 26 March 2016
Friday, 25 March 2016
Garry Shandling RIP
Garry Shandling, Star of Groundbreaking Sitcoms, Dies at 66
Peter Keepnews
The New York Times
Thursday 24 March 2016
Garry Shandling, a comedian who deftly walked a tightrope between comic fiction and show-business reality on two critically praised cable shows, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 66.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles police confirmed the death but did not give a cause. TMZ, the celebrity news site, reported that Mr. Shandling had had a heart attack.
Mr. Shandling, who began his comedy career as a writer and went on to become one of the most successful stand-up comics of the 1980s, was best known for “The Larry Sanders Show,” a dark look at life behind the scenes of a late-night talk show. It ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998.
Mr. Shandling’s Larry Sanders was the host of a fictional show within the show, interviewing real celebrities playing themselves in segments that were virtually indistinguishable from real talk shows like “The Tonight Show.” (Mr. Shandling had frequently substituted for Johnny Carson as the “Tonight Show” host.)
But the show was mostly concerned with what happened when the cameras were off, especially the interplay among Larry, his bumbling announcer and sidekick (Jeffrey Tambor) and his mercurial producer (Rip Torn).
“The Larry Sanders Show,” often cited as a groundbreaking precursor of shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock,” was the second show by Mr. Shandling to take an unorthodox approach. The first, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” seen on Showtime from 1986 to 1990, freely admitted that it was a show, with Mr. Shandling often breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience.
Garry Emmanuel Shandling was born in Chicago on Nov. 29, 1949, and grew up in Tucson. His father, Irving, owned a print shop; his mother, Muriel, ran a pet store. An older brother, Barry, died of cystic fibrosis when Garry was 10.
He became interested in comedy at an early age, but put his show-business ambitions aside to study electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. In his junior year he wrote a monologue that he managed to get to George Carlin, who encouraged him to pursue a comedy career, but that was still a few years away.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1973, he worked in an advertising agency while writing and trying to sell sitcom scripts. He sold one to the producers of the hit Redd Foxx series “Sanford and Son” in 1975 and went on to write three more scripts for that show and one for “Welcome Back, Kotter” before trying his luck as a stand-up comic.
His rise was rapid, and in March 1981 he reached what at the time was considered a milestone in any comedian’s career: an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” “His name is Garry Shandling,” Mr. Carson told the audience that night. “You’ll hear a lot about him.” Before long, Mr. Shandling had become a frequent guest host.
His comedy was dry, self-deprecating and sometimes a bit absurd. A frequent subject was his sexual prowess, or lack thereof:
“After making love I said to my girl, ‘Was it good for you too?’ And she said, ‘I don’t think this was good for anybody.’”
“I’m dating a woman now who, evidently, is unaware of it.”
Offered his own series by Showtime, Mr. Shandling created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” with the former “Saturday Night Live” writer Alan Zweibel. As suggested by its title, and by a theme song that began, “This is the theme to Garry’s show,” the series simultaneously adhered to sitcom conventions and mocked them by admitting that the characters were just actors on a set reciting dialogue.
“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” ran for four seasons on Showtime and was also briefly rerun on the Fox network. It was nominated for four Emmy Awards and won four Cable ACE awards. Not long after it went off the air, Mr. Shandling was back, this time on HBO, with a show that crossed the line between show business and the real world in a different way.
Playing a talk-show host who was, as Jacques Steinberg wrote in The New York Times, “a too-close-for-comfort amalgam of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jack Paar,” Mr. Shandling offered a jaundiced insider view of the television business.
Mr. Shandling’s Larry was egotistical and anxiety-ridden. His producer, Artie, was ruthless and deceitful. His sidekick, Hank, was eager to please and almost completely clueless.
In its six seasons, “The Larry Sanders Show” won near-unanimous critical praise and numerous Emmy Award nominations. And the real world of Garry Shandling intersected with the fictional world of Larry Sanders more than once.
The actress Linda Doucett, who played Hank’s loyal assistant, was in real life Mr. Shandling’s fiancée. She was fired after they broke up and sued Mr. Shandling for sexual harassment and wrongful termination. That suit was eventually settled, as was Mr. Shandling’s suit against Brad Grey, his former manager and an executive producer of the show.
When CBS lured David Letterman away from NBC in 1993, a year after “The Larry Sanders Show” had debuted, by giving him a show that would directly compete with “The Tonight Show,” NBC offered Mr. Letterman’s former time slot to Mr. Shandling. He turned down the job. It went to a virtually unknown writer named Conan O’Brien.
Mr. Shandling’s profile was never again as high as it was during the “Larry Sanders” years, but the show’s influence has been lasting. “30 Rock” borrowed its unblinking warts-and-all look at how television is made; “Curb Your Enthusiasm” embraced its use of real celebrities to play versions of themselves that were perhaps only slight exaggerations.
Its influence was also felt in less obvious ways. David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” once said that “The Larry Sanders Show” “inspired me to want to do something really good for television.”
Mr. Shandling continued to appear on TV talk shows, notably Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” and Craig Ferguson’s “Late Late Show,” and occasionally acted in movies, including “Iron Man 2” (2012) and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014). In both he played a United States senator.
Mr. Shandling, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors.
Just a few months ago Mr. Shandling was a guest on Jerry Seinfeld’s popular web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” in an episode eerily titled “It’s Great That Garry Shandling Is Still Alive.” Eighteen years earlier, Mr. Seinfeld had praised Mr. Shandling’s comedic instincts.
“Comedians all wait around to hear things that they can use,” Mr. Seinfeld said in 1998. “With Garry, it’s like being in a boat with a guy who’s constantly reeling in fish.”
In 2007, nine years after “The Larry Sanders Show” went off the air, Mr. Shandling spoke to The Times about his post-“Sanders” life.
“It’s very similar to — what is it? — the seven stages of grieving,” he said. “First there’s the shock. Now I’m going to head for something funny here. Then there’s denial, acceptance and” — he paused — “masturbation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/arts/television/garry-shandling-dies.html?_r=0
Garry Shandling, a comedian who deftly walked a tightrope between comic fiction and show-business reality on two critically praised cable shows, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 66.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles police confirmed the death but did not give a cause. TMZ, the celebrity news site, reported that Mr. Shandling had had a heart attack.
Mr. Shandling, who began his comedy career as a writer and went on to become one of the most successful stand-up comics of the 1980s, was best known for “The Larry Sanders Show,” a dark look at life behind the scenes of a late-night talk show. It ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998.
Mr. Shandling’s Larry Sanders was the host of a fictional show within the show, interviewing real celebrities playing themselves in segments that were virtually indistinguishable from real talk shows like “The Tonight Show.” (Mr. Shandling had frequently substituted for Johnny Carson as the “Tonight Show” host.)
But the show was mostly concerned with what happened when the cameras were off, especially the interplay among Larry, his bumbling announcer and sidekick (Jeffrey Tambor) and his mercurial producer (Rip Torn).
“The Larry Sanders Show,” often cited as a groundbreaking precursor of shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock,” was the second show by Mr. Shandling to take an unorthodox approach. The first, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” seen on Showtime from 1986 to 1990, freely admitted that it was a show, with Mr. Shandling often breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience.
Garry Emmanuel Shandling was born in Chicago on Nov. 29, 1949, and grew up in Tucson. His father, Irving, owned a print shop; his mother, Muriel, ran a pet store. An older brother, Barry, died of cystic fibrosis when Garry was 10.
He became interested in comedy at an early age, but put his show-business ambitions aside to study electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. In his junior year he wrote a monologue that he managed to get to George Carlin, who encouraged him to pursue a comedy career, but that was still a few years away.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1973, he worked in an advertising agency while writing and trying to sell sitcom scripts. He sold one to the producers of the hit Redd Foxx series “Sanford and Son” in 1975 and went on to write three more scripts for that show and one for “Welcome Back, Kotter” before trying his luck as a stand-up comic.
His rise was rapid, and in March 1981 he reached what at the time was considered a milestone in any comedian’s career: an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” “His name is Garry Shandling,” Mr. Carson told the audience that night. “You’ll hear a lot about him.” Before long, Mr. Shandling had become a frequent guest host.
His comedy was dry, self-deprecating and sometimes a bit absurd. A frequent subject was his sexual prowess, or lack thereof:
“After making love I said to my girl, ‘Was it good for you too?’ And she said, ‘I don’t think this was good for anybody.’”
“I’m dating a woman now who, evidently, is unaware of it.”
Offered his own series by Showtime, Mr. Shandling created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” with the former “Saturday Night Live” writer Alan Zweibel. As suggested by its title, and by a theme song that began, “This is the theme to Garry’s show,” the series simultaneously adhered to sitcom conventions and mocked them by admitting that the characters were just actors on a set reciting dialogue.
“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” ran for four seasons on Showtime and was also briefly rerun on the Fox network. It was nominated for four Emmy Awards and won four Cable ACE awards. Not long after it went off the air, Mr. Shandling was back, this time on HBO, with a show that crossed the line between show business and the real world in a different way.
Playing a talk-show host who was, as Jacques Steinberg wrote in The New York Times, “a too-close-for-comfort amalgam of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jack Paar,” Mr. Shandling offered a jaundiced insider view of the television business.
Mr. Shandling’s Larry was egotistical and anxiety-ridden. His producer, Artie, was ruthless and deceitful. His sidekick, Hank, was eager to please and almost completely clueless.
In its six seasons, “The Larry Sanders Show” won near-unanimous critical praise and numerous Emmy Award nominations. And the real world of Garry Shandling intersected with the fictional world of Larry Sanders more than once.
The actress Linda Doucett, who played Hank’s loyal assistant, was in real life Mr. Shandling’s fiancée. She was fired after they broke up and sued Mr. Shandling for sexual harassment and wrongful termination. That suit was eventually settled, as was Mr. Shandling’s suit against Brad Grey, his former manager and an executive producer of the show.
When CBS lured David Letterman away from NBC in 1993, a year after “The Larry Sanders Show” had debuted, by giving him a show that would directly compete with “The Tonight Show,” NBC offered Mr. Letterman’s former time slot to Mr. Shandling. He turned down the job. It went to a virtually unknown writer named Conan O’Brien.
Mr. Shandling’s profile was never again as high as it was during the “Larry Sanders” years, but the show’s influence has been lasting. “30 Rock” borrowed its unblinking warts-and-all look at how television is made; “Curb Your Enthusiasm” embraced its use of real celebrities to play versions of themselves that were perhaps only slight exaggerations.
Its influence was also felt in less obvious ways. David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” once said that “The Larry Sanders Show” “inspired me to want to do something really good for television.”
Mr. Shandling continued to appear on TV talk shows, notably Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” and Craig Ferguson’s “Late Late Show,” and occasionally acted in movies, including “Iron Man 2” (2012) and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014). In both he played a United States senator.
Mr. Shandling, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors.
Just a few months ago Mr. Shandling was a guest on Jerry Seinfeld’s popular web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” in an episode eerily titled “It’s Great That Garry Shandling Is Still Alive.” Eighteen years earlier, Mr. Seinfeld had praised Mr. Shandling’s comedic instincts.
“Comedians all wait around to hear things that they can use,” Mr. Seinfeld said in 1998. “With Garry, it’s like being in a boat with a guy who’s constantly reeling in fish.”
In 2007, nine years after “The Larry Sanders Show” went off the air, Mr. Shandling spoke to The Times about his post-“Sanders” life.
“It’s very similar to — what is it? — the seven stages of grieving,” he said. “First there’s the shock. Now I’m going to head for something funny here. Then there’s denial, acceptance and” — he paused — “masturbation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/arts/television/garry-shandling-dies.html?_r=0
Garry Shandling: the standup who changed the sitcom forever
The creator of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show gave US comedy two of its most original series and influenced everyone from Judd Apatow to Larry David and Ricky Gervais
Brian Moylan
The Guardian
Thursday 24 March 2016
Garry Shandling, who died on Thursday at the age of 66, doesn’t have the name recognition of superstars such as Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey or Larry David, but without him none of the landmark shows they created might have existed. Shandling was a standup, host and comedy writer, but his legacy will really be felt in the two sitcoms that he made – It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show – both of which pushed the envelope in terms of the tone and direction that sitcoms can take.
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show ran on Showtime and Fox from 1986 to 1990, when both were still nascent forces on TV. They were the only places brave enough to let Shandling experiment with a show where he plays himself, a comedian named Garry Shandling, and often spoke directly to both the studio audience and the audience at home. Though this was a trick employed by George Burns when Shandling was younger, all the characters on the show knew that they were on a sitcom. It’s the sort of meta comedy that now pervades the likes of Community.
The first show about nothing was never huge with audiences but was nominated for four Emmys and was a hit both with critics and comedians who used what Shandling was doing and sanded off the edges, creating shows that might have tested very poorly with audiences but became huge mainstream hits, such as Seinfeld.
The success of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and Shandling’s stint as the “permanent guest host” of The Tonight Show while it was hosted by Johnny Carson set him up perfectly to create his masterpiece, The Larry Sanders Show. This time Shandling was playing the vain and difficult host of a late-night talk show. The HBO sitcom, which ran for six seasons from 1992 to 1998, took viewers backstage to see just how awful and bumbling the people behind the talk show’s velvet curtain can be. While it was never as absurd as 30 Rock, it paved the way for the show about a show.
To add that special ingredient, The Larry Sanders Show featured real celebrities playing versions of themselves, something that has since been employed in all sorts of shows such as Entourage, Extras and, of course, Curb Your Enthusiasm. A famous example is when David Duchovny plays a gay version of himself who is obsessed with Larry in the last episode of the series (which, in the It’s Garry Sandling’s Show tradition, is about Larry Sanders’s final episode).
The behind-the-scenes footage on The Larry Sanders Show was shot in a documentary style with hand-held cameras, something that would be taken on by everything from The Office to Modern Family.
The Office and its ilk also share the tone and pathos that Larry David made acceptable and palatable for modern comedy audiences. Like the bar on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Larry Sanders’ office was full of awful people lying, cheating and stealing their way to success or, more often, failure – such as when Larry gets embroiled in a tabloid scandal because his PR rep told him to lie about pushing a woman over in a supermarket.
“It taught me that flawed characters can be compulsive viewing – seeing them squirm and get their comeuppance,” Ricky Gervais said about the show in 2010. In the same year the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver said, “This is where it all began. The whole postmodernist, self-reflexive fact-fiction sitcom thing – loudly claimed by the likes of Alan Partridge, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm and 30 Rock.”
Another direct influence was on Hollywood heavyweight Judd Apatow, who worked as a writer and producer on the show and made his directorial debut with the episode Putting the ‘Gay’ Back in Litigation, in the show’s final season. “One thing Garry used to say that had a big impact on me was that the show was about people who loved each other but show business got in the way,” Apatow said on the DVD extras for The Larry Sanders Show. He said the difficult schedule and Shandling’s demand for excellence made him better when he made his first show, the cult classic Freaks and Geeks.
Though it never had a Game of Thrones-sized audience on HBO, Larry Sanders was the network’s first Emmy bait, receiving 56 nominations over the course of its run and winning three, one for Shandling and Peter Tolan for writing the series finale, one for Todd Holland for directing it and one for Rip Torn, who played the show’s producer, Artie.
Even for those who know Shandling only for his appearances in the Iron Man movies making a few cracks at Tony Stark’s expense, the innovations that he pioneered in comedy can still be felt every time we turn on the tube. TV was never the same after him, and it won’t be the same without him.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2016/mar/24/garry-shandling-comedy-sitcom-legacy
The creator of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show gave US comedy two of its most original series and influenced everyone from Judd Apatow to Larry David and Ricky Gervais
Brian Moylan
The Guardian
Thursday 24 March 2016
Garry Shandling, who died on Thursday at the age of 66, doesn’t have the name recognition of superstars such as Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey or Larry David, but without him none of the landmark shows they created might have existed. Shandling was a standup, host and comedy writer, but his legacy will really be felt in the two sitcoms that he made – It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show – both of which pushed the envelope in terms of the tone and direction that sitcoms can take.
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show ran on Showtime and Fox from 1986 to 1990, when both were still nascent forces on TV. They were the only places brave enough to let Shandling experiment with a show where he plays himself, a comedian named Garry Shandling, and often spoke directly to both the studio audience and the audience at home. Though this was a trick employed by George Burns when Shandling was younger, all the characters on the show knew that they were on a sitcom. It’s the sort of meta comedy that now pervades the likes of Community.
The first show about nothing was never huge with audiences but was nominated for four Emmys and was a hit both with critics and comedians who used what Shandling was doing and sanded off the edges, creating shows that might have tested very poorly with audiences but became huge mainstream hits, such as Seinfeld.
The success of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and Shandling’s stint as the “permanent guest host” of The Tonight Show while it was hosted by Johnny Carson set him up perfectly to create his masterpiece, The Larry Sanders Show. This time Shandling was playing the vain and difficult host of a late-night talk show. The HBO sitcom, which ran for six seasons from 1992 to 1998, took viewers backstage to see just how awful and bumbling the people behind the talk show’s velvet curtain can be. While it was never as absurd as 30 Rock, it paved the way for the show about a show.
To add that special ingredient, The Larry Sanders Show featured real celebrities playing versions of themselves, something that has since been employed in all sorts of shows such as Entourage, Extras and, of course, Curb Your Enthusiasm. A famous example is when David Duchovny plays a gay version of himself who is obsessed with Larry in the last episode of the series (which, in the It’s Garry Sandling’s Show tradition, is about Larry Sanders’s final episode).
The behind-the-scenes footage on The Larry Sanders Show was shot in a documentary style with hand-held cameras, something that would be taken on by everything from The Office to Modern Family.
The Office and its ilk also share the tone and pathos that Larry David made acceptable and palatable for modern comedy audiences. Like the bar on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Larry Sanders’ office was full of awful people lying, cheating and stealing their way to success or, more often, failure – such as when Larry gets embroiled in a tabloid scandal because his PR rep told him to lie about pushing a woman over in a supermarket.
“It taught me that flawed characters can be compulsive viewing – seeing them squirm and get their comeuppance,” Ricky Gervais said about the show in 2010. In the same year the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver said, “This is where it all began. The whole postmodernist, self-reflexive fact-fiction sitcom thing – loudly claimed by the likes of Alan Partridge, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm and 30 Rock.”
Another direct influence was on Hollywood heavyweight Judd Apatow, who worked as a writer and producer on the show and made his directorial debut with the episode Putting the ‘Gay’ Back in Litigation, in the show’s final season. “One thing Garry used to say that had a big impact on me was that the show was about people who loved each other but show business got in the way,” Apatow said on the DVD extras for The Larry Sanders Show. He said the difficult schedule and Shandling’s demand for excellence made him better when he made his first show, the cult classic Freaks and Geeks.
Though it never had a Game of Thrones-sized audience on HBO, Larry Sanders was the network’s first Emmy bait, receiving 56 nominations over the course of its run and winning three, one for Shandling and Peter Tolan for writing the series finale, one for Todd Holland for directing it and one for Rip Torn, who played the show’s producer, Artie.
Even for those who know Shandling only for his appearances in the Iron Man movies making a few cracks at Tony Stark’s expense, the innovations that he pioneered in comedy can still be felt every time we turn on the tube. TV was never the same after him, and it won’t be the same without him.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2016/mar/24/garry-shandling-comedy-sitcom-legacy
Garry and Larry and Jeffrey and Hank
Dave Itzkoff
Dave Itzkoff
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/arts/television/31sanders.html?action=click&contentCollection=Television&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
29 October 2010
HISTORY has been doubly unkind to “The Larry Sanders Show,” the enormously influential, deeply neurotic HBO comedy that starred Garry Shandling as the anguished talk-show host of its title and Jeffrey Tambor as his bombastic but insecure sidekick, Hank Kingsley. First, the series ended its six-season run in 1998, before its cinematic, laugh-track-averse style (and its meta-fictional show-within-a-show) became the norm. Then, for years, only a handful of its episodes were available on home video. At least one of those wrongs will soon be righted. On Tuesday “The Larry Sanders Show: The Complete Series” will be released as a 17-DVD boxed set by Shout! Factory.
To mark the occasion Mr. Shandling and Mr. Tambor spoke by phone with Dave Itzkoff about their time together on “Larry Sanders.” These are excerpts from that conversation.
Q. You haven’t tired of talking about Larry Sanders, I hope.
GARRY SHANDLING It takes me so long to get tired of a man. It’s women that are the problem. Don’t get me wrong. I think men have their problems, just as much as women. I wouldn’t want to have to marry either sex.
JEFFREY TAMBOR Hi, Garry.
SHANDLING Jeffrey, did you get to hear me just do a couple jokes?
TAMBOR I just did.
Q. Your characters on the show felt almost uncomfortably real. How much of your true selves were in those performances?
SHANDLING People always go, “What’s the difference between Larry and Garry?” The combination of Larry and Garry is: I know I have been saying I’ve got to come watch Jeffrey’s acting class for probably 8, 10 years or forever, and I haven’t made it, and I apologize.
TAMBOR Now who’s that talking?
SHANDLING That’s a combination. I really mean to come because I want to see it, and I forget.
TAMBOR So neither of you will be attending, is that correct?
SHANDLING We will both be attending very soon.Continue reading the main story
Q. Jeffrey, how were you cast on the show?
TAMBOR I was actually auditioning for something else, for Garry’s [producing] partner on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” Alan Zweibel. It was just not right for me, but Alan looked at me and said, “Do you mind if I make a call to my friend?” Two days later I was in Garry’s office.
SHANDLING My side of that is: While he was fielding that, I was semi-tortured. Or was that an Oliver Stone movie?
TAMBOR I was up for that.
SHANDLING That was one of my favorites. It wasn’t an up ending, as I remember. And [a cellphone rings] I don’t even want to know.
TAMBOR It’s mine.
SHANDLING Was that Jamaican music?
TAMBOR I’ve made a lot of changes. We’ll catch up.
SHANDLING Yeah, you have dreads now. So, I was semi-tortured that we hadn’t found Hank, and I had put another actor through a real workout of trying to make him right. I did not know Jeffrey, but we were improvising a bit, and within the scene I made for the door, and Jeffrey took a chair and blocked the door. Our chemistry was immediately intact.
Q. Was it ever difficult when you were called upon to bring out the darker sides of your characters, or to come into conflict with one another?
SHANDLING “The Larry Sanders Show,” it’s actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn’t exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don’t think the show was.
TAMBOR When they would call, “Cut,” Garry had this gesture that he used throughout the years that we were together. It’s his palm extended towards you, and he looked at each of us, and it was sort of like, “Are you O.K.?” And each of us nodded, and he’d say, “O.K., print.” Basically, he was saying: Bring all you have. Bring all your good stuff, and don’t worry. Bring your mistakes too. Bring the dark parts as well as the light. A finished performance wasn’t required. An honest performance was required.
Q. One crucial member of the cast was Rip Torn, who played the hard-charging producer, Artie. What was it like to work with him?
SHANDLING He tried to rob the show twice.
TAMBOR Rip is Rip, and we were thankful to have him. He’s one of our legends and like any national treasure is to be protected.
SHANDLING With Rip he came in the first time, and his agent said he wouldn’t read. Weeks later it was just him and me in a room with no one else, and I said to Rip, “Could we read half of this together?” And he said, “I don’t want to read.” I said, “That’s totally fine,” and I pushed it to the side of the table. We talked for less than another minute, and he reached over and took the page, and he starts the scene. It’s like trying to describe a good date to a friend the next day. I had to say to HBO and everybody else, “Honestly, this is the best sex I have had.”
Q. It was never a secret that Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” was the primary inspiration for “Larry Sanders.” Did he ever give you feedback on your show?
SHANDLING I don’t recall Johnny saying anything specifically to me. But Peter Lassally, the producer of “The Tonight Show” then, told me that Johnny really liked the show. Peter Lassally would call me, “We have a saying here backstage, on tough days when things aren’t going right, and we can’t get a guest or any number of other circumstances: This is a Larry Sanders moment.” And he still does that, evidently, over at Craig Ferguson.
TAMBOR When I studied “The Tonight Show,” I saw two remarkable things. When Mr. Carson did his monologue, Ed was no more than 10 feet away, even though it seems like he’s across the stage. And he’s totally appreciative and laughs at every single thing. And then they went to commercial and they both turned, like ships of state, and they sat in dim light until they came back from commercial. And they sat in silence, like for 30 seconds. And I totally got the relationship.
Q. What made you decide to bring “Larry Sanders” to a close?
SHANDLING I think that the show had a natural, organic running time. I did bear the brunt of the running the show, besides being in it, and we probably should have done less episodes a season, certainly at the beginning. I remember sitting at the table, the last season, with Judd [Apatow, a “Larry Sanders” writer and producer] alone, we were rewriting a script at midnight, and I said, “Judd, you think the show goes another season?” And he said, “Garry, do you want to spend this summer with new writers explaining the characters again?” We had a situation in which the writers were leaving the show for other Brillstein-Grey shows, which became part of the issue of a lawsuit that’s in the past. I’m so proud of that last season that it seems right.
Q. What did you ultimately learn from making the show?
SHANDLING There’s probably a lesson for real life, which is that everybody needs to be our true selves instead of jacking it up and trying to make it faster and better, which is a reflection of the problem we’re having in the country right now. Forgive me while I say the most important thing, which is this country seemed to be doing better when “The Larry Sanders Show” was on. I don’t want to sound like a politician but the economy was O.K.
HISTORY has been doubly unkind to “The Larry Sanders Show,” the enormously influential, deeply neurotic HBO comedy that starred Garry Shandling as the anguished talk-show host of its title and Jeffrey Tambor as his bombastic but insecure sidekick, Hank Kingsley. First, the series ended its six-season run in 1998, before its cinematic, laugh-track-averse style (and its meta-fictional show-within-a-show) became the norm. Then, for years, only a handful of its episodes were available on home video. At least one of those wrongs will soon be righted. On Tuesday “The Larry Sanders Show: The Complete Series” will be released as a 17-DVD boxed set by Shout! Factory.
To mark the occasion Mr. Shandling and Mr. Tambor spoke by phone with Dave Itzkoff about their time together on “Larry Sanders.” These are excerpts from that conversation.
Q. You haven’t tired of talking about Larry Sanders, I hope.
GARRY SHANDLING It takes me so long to get tired of a man. It’s women that are the problem. Don’t get me wrong. I think men have their problems, just as much as women. I wouldn’t want to have to marry either sex.
JEFFREY TAMBOR Hi, Garry.
SHANDLING Jeffrey, did you get to hear me just do a couple jokes?
TAMBOR I just did.
Q. Your characters on the show felt almost uncomfortably real. How much of your true selves were in those performances?
SHANDLING People always go, “What’s the difference between Larry and Garry?” The combination of Larry and Garry is: I know I have been saying I’ve got to come watch Jeffrey’s acting class for probably 8, 10 years or forever, and I haven’t made it, and I apologize.
TAMBOR Now who’s that talking?
SHANDLING That’s a combination. I really mean to come because I want to see it, and I forget.
TAMBOR So neither of you will be attending, is that correct?
SHANDLING We will both be attending very soon.Continue reading the main story
Q. Jeffrey, how were you cast on the show?
TAMBOR I was actually auditioning for something else, for Garry’s [producing] partner on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” Alan Zweibel. It was just not right for me, but Alan looked at me and said, “Do you mind if I make a call to my friend?” Two days later I was in Garry’s office.
SHANDLING My side of that is: While he was fielding that, I was semi-tortured. Or was that an Oliver Stone movie?
TAMBOR I was up for that.
SHANDLING That was one of my favorites. It wasn’t an up ending, as I remember. And [a cellphone rings] I don’t even want to know.
TAMBOR It’s mine.
SHANDLING Was that Jamaican music?
TAMBOR I’ve made a lot of changes. We’ll catch up.
SHANDLING Yeah, you have dreads now. So, I was semi-tortured that we hadn’t found Hank, and I had put another actor through a real workout of trying to make him right. I did not know Jeffrey, but we were improvising a bit, and within the scene I made for the door, and Jeffrey took a chair and blocked the door. Our chemistry was immediately intact.
Q. Was it ever difficult when you were called upon to bring out the darker sides of your characters, or to come into conflict with one another?
SHANDLING “The Larry Sanders Show,” it’s actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn’t exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don’t think the show was.
TAMBOR When they would call, “Cut,” Garry had this gesture that he used throughout the years that we were together. It’s his palm extended towards you, and he looked at each of us, and it was sort of like, “Are you O.K.?” And each of us nodded, and he’d say, “O.K., print.” Basically, he was saying: Bring all you have. Bring all your good stuff, and don’t worry. Bring your mistakes too. Bring the dark parts as well as the light. A finished performance wasn’t required. An honest performance was required.
Q. One crucial member of the cast was Rip Torn, who played the hard-charging producer, Artie. What was it like to work with him?
SHANDLING He tried to rob the show twice.
TAMBOR Rip is Rip, and we were thankful to have him. He’s one of our legends and like any national treasure is to be protected.
SHANDLING With Rip he came in the first time, and his agent said he wouldn’t read. Weeks later it was just him and me in a room with no one else, and I said to Rip, “Could we read half of this together?” And he said, “I don’t want to read.” I said, “That’s totally fine,” and I pushed it to the side of the table. We talked for less than another minute, and he reached over and took the page, and he starts the scene. It’s like trying to describe a good date to a friend the next day. I had to say to HBO and everybody else, “Honestly, this is the best sex I have had.”
Q. It was never a secret that Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” was the primary inspiration for “Larry Sanders.” Did he ever give you feedback on your show?
SHANDLING I don’t recall Johnny saying anything specifically to me. But Peter Lassally, the producer of “The Tonight Show” then, told me that Johnny really liked the show. Peter Lassally would call me, “We have a saying here backstage, on tough days when things aren’t going right, and we can’t get a guest or any number of other circumstances: This is a Larry Sanders moment.” And he still does that, evidently, over at Craig Ferguson.
TAMBOR When I studied “The Tonight Show,” I saw two remarkable things. When Mr. Carson did his monologue, Ed was no more than 10 feet away, even though it seems like he’s across the stage. And he’s totally appreciative and laughs at every single thing. And then they went to commercial and they both turned, like ships of state, and they sat in dim light until they came back from commercial. And they sat in silence, like for 30 seconds. And I totally got the relationship.
Q. What made you decide to bring “Larry Sanders” to a close?
SHANDLING I think that the show had a natural, organic running time. I did bear the brunt of the running the show, besides being in it, and we probably should have done less episodes a season, certainly at the beginning. I remember sitting at the table, the last season, with Judd [Apatow, a “Larry Sanders” writer and producer] alone, we were rewriting a script at midnight, and I said, “Judd, you think the show goes another season?” And he said, “Garry, do you want to spend this summer with new writers explaining the characters again?” We had a situation in which the writers were leaving the show for other Brillstein-Grey shows, which became part of the issue of a lawsuit that’s in the past. I’m so proud of that last season that it seems right.
Q. What did you ultimately learn from making the show?
SHANDLING There’s probably a lesson for real life, which is that everybody needs to be our true selves instead of jacking it up and trying to make it faster and better, which is a reflection of the problem we’re having in the country right now. Forgive me while I say the most important thing, which is this country seemed to be doing better when “The Larry Sanders Show” was on. I don’t want to sound like a politician but the economy was O.K.
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