Ted Kennedy, Chappquiddick, and Joyce Carol Oates' novel Black Water (1992)

Ted Kennedy, around 1970.

The only picture of Mary Jo Kopechne I've ever seen.

Cover of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates, 1992.

The Presidential aspirations of Ted Kennedy ended during the night of July 18-19, 1969, when Kennedy’s Oldsmobile went off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, just off Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy was able to get out of the car, but his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned in the upside down car. Kennedy did not report the accident to the police until the next morning, after the police had towed his car out of the water and found Kopechne’s body. The accident at Chappaquiddick would forever cast a pall over Ted Kennedy’s legacy.

Joyce Carol Oates published Black Water, a short novel based on the events of Chappaquiddick, in 1992. Black Water tells the story of Kelly Kelleher, an idealistic young woman who meets The Senator, as he is always referred to in the novel, at a party on an island off the coast of Maine on July 4, 1991. Kelly and The Senator start talking, hit it off, and leave the party together. On their drive to the ferry, The Senator is driving too fast, misses a turn, and his car lands in murky black water. The Senator escapes the car, but Kelly is unable to, and drowns. Black Water is told from Kelly’s perspective, and the book flashes back in time as Kelly slowly drowns, thinking that The Senator will come back to rescue her.

Black Water is written impressionistically, almost like a poem, as various lines repeat again and again in the short chapters. The novel gives a voice to the voiceless, as we observe the thoughts of this doomed young woman. It’s quite a good book, and it inevitably makes one think more about Mary Jo Kopechne. Who was this young woman who died so tragically? A great deal of mystery still surrounds the events of Chappaquiddick, and there’s very little information to be found about Mary Jo Kopechne. I’m a collector of books about the Kennedys, and I’ve only ever seen one photo of Kopechne. It’s the same 1962 college graduation photo that was on front pages the day after she died. Didn’t anyone take a photo of her during the next seven years?

Oates does little in Black Water to distinguish The Senator from Ted Kennedy. The Senator is meant to be a portrait of Ted Kennedy in 1991, so instead of the dashing young man Kennedy was at the time of Chappaquiddick in 1969, The Senator is in his mid-50’s, and is a bit disillusioned with politics. As he tells Kelly, “It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing-how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principals,’ your ‘ideals’-and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.” (p.139-40) The physical descriptions of The Senator are clearly applicable to Kennedy: “That dimpled grin, the big chunky white teeth,” with eyes “the blue of washed glass.” (p.20) “And his broad handsome-battered face, the eyes so transparently blue, the nose just slightly venous but a straight nose, lapidary, like the jaws, the chin, the familiar profile.” (p.39) 

In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Oates said of the book, “I wanted the story to be somewhat mythical, the almost archetypal experience of a young woman who trusts an older man and whose trust is violated.” If Oates wanted Black Water to be mythical, then why did she stick so closely to the events of Chappaquiddick? Why not create a different, fictional scenario? If Oates’ interpretation of Chappaquiddick is that it was about a younger woman and an older man, I would disagree. Kennedy was only 8 years older than Kopechne, and Chappaquiddick was less about a man taking advantage of a woman than it was simply a terrible, tragic accident. Ted Kennedy certainly didn’t mean to drive off that bridge. 

Black Water is a fascinating book, and a quick read at 150 pages. I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident.

Book Review: The World According to Mister Rogers, by Fred Rogers (2003)

Mister Rogers with King Friday XIII, and the neighborhood trolley.

Fred Rogers, with his trademark cardigan sweater, singing "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"

The World According to Mister Rogers, by Fred Rogers, 2003.

My favorite television show as a child was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Sure, I liked Sesame Street a lot, but there was something special about Fred Rogers’ gentle show and the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe.” Mister Rogers didn’t do anything fancy or high tech on his television show, but through his calm and gentle demeanor, generations of children found a special friend who would show them how a Crayon was made, and also talk them through important topics like how to deal with anger and disappointment. 

The book The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember was published shortly after Rogers’ death in 2003. It collects sayings and advice from Rogers about a number of different topics. I don’t know much about the private life of Fred Rogers, but based on Tom Junod’s excellent 1998 profile of Rogers for Esquire magazine, it seems clear that Rogers was the same kind, calm, loving and patient man off screen that he was on screen. “Mister Rogers” was not just a persona that he put on for the camera; it’s who Fred Rogers really was. 

If you’re a fan of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, you’ll definitely enjoy reading The World According to Mister Rogers. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life.” (p.19)

“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” (p.53)

“The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.” (p.81)

“There is no normal life that is free of pain. It’s the very wrestling with our problems than can be the impetus for our growth.” (p.112)

“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.” (p.137)

“If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” (p.160)

Fred Rogers was important to many people who never met him personally, and the good work that he did still has an impact on people’s lives today. I’ll always be proud to have been a “neighbor” of Mister Rogers’.

Movie Review: The Eddy Duchin Story, starring Tyrone Power and Kim Novak (1956)

Tyrone Power and Kim Novak in one of the first scenes of The Eddy Duchin Story, 1956. He looks like he's just out of college, right? Also, Tyrone Power had the most dramatically arched eyebrows this side of Sean Connery.

You can't tell from this sexy publicity still that Tyrone Power didn't like Kim Novak. Sadly, there's no scene like this in the movie.

Tyrone Power is flanked by his two wives in The Eddy Duchin Story. That's Victoria Shaw as Chiquita on the left, and Kim Novak as Marjorie on the right.

The impossibly handsome Tyrone Power as the pianist Eddy Duchin.

The real Eddy Duchin, who was quite handsome himself.

In the 1950’s there were a number of biopics made about the lives of famous musicians. The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart, kicked off the trend in 1954. The Benny Goodman Story and The Eddy Duchin Story followed in 1956, and 1959 saw the release of The Gene Krupa Story, with Sal Mineo as the jazz drummer. (Why didn’t someone make the Rudy Vallee Story?) I’m not sure why the genre of “bandleader biopics” suddenly became hot in the mid-1950’s. Perhaps it was nostalgia for the big band sounds that were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. By the time these movies were released even big stars like Duke Ellington and Count Basie were having trouble keeping their big bands on the road. 

The Eddy Duchin Story, starring Tyrone Power and Kim Novak, was released in 1956 and was a big hit, becoming the 12^th highest grossing movie of that year. Eddy Duchin was a pianist and bandleader who had a very successful career in the 1930’s and 1940’s before tragically dying of leukemia in 1951 at the age of 41. Duchin was kind of a straight Liberace, a talented pianist who made ladies swoon while playing showy versions of light classical and jazz pieces. The Eddy Duchin Story is a melodramatic film that is also quite entertaining. Much of the film’s success rests on the charm and charisma of leading man Tyrone Power, who delivers an excellent performance. 

The movie begins with Duchin arriving in New York City in 1927 to play at the Central Park Casino. (The Central Park Casino was torn down in the 1930’s, and Tavern on the Green was used for filming.) Duchin is fresh off the bus from Boston, full of vigor and verve, until he discovers that the bandleader he thought had offered him a job was just being nice to him when he said, “If you’re ever in New York City, come say hi.” Oops. But all is not lost as society sweetheart Marjorie Oelrichs (Kim Novak) hears him playing and persuades the bandleader to hire Duchin. Of course, he becomes a big hit. Tyrone Power was really too old to play Duchin in these scenes, and he looks like the world’s oldest fraternity pledge. But Power makes up for it by projecting the youthful enthusiasm of a recent college graduate. Duchin and Marjorie soon fall in love and get married. Everything seems to be going great for Duchin. As we were watching the movie, my wife and I kept wondering what the conflict would be. Maybe her aunt and uncle won’t approve of her marriage to a piano player? Nope. Is he an alcoholic? Nope. Does he cheat on her? Nope. But then once they get married we learn Marjorie’s horrible secret: she’s afraid of the wind! Oh no! How can Eddy Duchin protect her from the wind? I’m not even joking about this, she’s afraid of the wind. It’s a good thing they don’t live in Chicago.

Marjorie gets pregnant, and then dies shortly after delivering a son, Peter. Bizarrely enough, the doctor specifically tells Eddy that her sudden, unexplained death has nothing to do with her childbirth. (The wind didn’t have anything to do with her death either.) The film is really weird about Marjorie and Eddy’s deaths. The film has both Marjorie and Eddy dying of weird unexplained illnesses. In real life Marjorie’s death was obviously connected to complications from her delivery, even though she didn’t die in childbirth. When Eddy suddenly gets ill at the end of the movie, doctors tell him that he will die soon, but it’s never stated that he has leukemia. The real-life Eddy Duchin knew he had leukemia. I don’t know why the film is so squeamish about this. But that’s getting ahead of the story. When Marjorie dies, Eddy doesn’t want anything to do with his son, letting Marjorie’s aunt and uncle bring him up. 

Interesting side note: in real life Peter Duchin wasn’t raised by his great aunt and uncle, but by family friend W. Averell Harriman and his wife. W. Averell Harriman was just your average guy who was fabulously wealthy, was the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, served as Secretary of Commerce under Harry Truman, ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President in 1952 and 1956, and was Governor of New York for one term. You know, not someone who would be an interesting character to have in a movie. So why does the screenplay write Harriman out and change who raised Peter? My guess is that the studio didn’t want to be accused of playing politics by portraying a very active political figure as a character in a movie. At the time The Eddy Duchin Story was filmed in 1955, Harriman was Governor of New York, and about to run for President the next year. Including Harriman as a character in the movie would be a bit like making a movie now where Jeb Bush was a supporting character. 

After serving in World War II, Eddy comes back to New York and starts to build his relationship with Peter. Peter is being raised by not-Averell Harriman and not-Averell Harriman’s wife and by family friend Chiquita. No, she’s not Carmen Miranda. Chiquita is a young woman in her 20’s who basically acts as Peter’s governess. Peter has developed a talent for playing the piano, and this becomes a bond between father and son. Eventually Eddy and the ridiculously named Chiquita marry, and then Eddy gets sick from his mystery illness and dies. 

Tyrone Power spent 11 weeks learning how to make it look like he was actually playing the piano, and I was very impressed with his dedication. The movie doesn’t make use of trick shots where you only see someone’s hands on the keyboard. Power’s hard work paid off, as in almost all of the camera shots during the songs you see Power’s face, hands and the piano keyboard at the same time. Power was a friend of Eddy Duchin’s, and he said in an interview during filming, “The real tragedy of Duchin’s life was his dying at such a young age, only forty-two. I knew Eddy quite well. Working right here across from the hospital reminds me of how I used to visit him over there when he was a patient, toward the end.” (The Secret Life of Tyrone Power, by Hector Arce, p.258) Sadly, Tyrone Power would also die young, of a heart attack at age 44. Because Tyrone Power was one of the most impossibly handsome leading men of Hollywood’s Golden Age, I think it’s a law that all reviews of his movies have to make some comment about his looks. Here is mine: Power looks as handsome as ever in The Eddy Duchin Story, whether he’s wearing a tuxedo or a snazzy sweater. Power uses all of his movie star charm and charisma playing Eddy Duchin, and he makes the movie fun to watch. I examined Power's career in more detail in a post from last year.

I’m on record as saying that Kim Novak is one of my favorite actresses, as well as one of the most beautiful and sexy women on the planet, but she doesn’t do much in The Eddy Duchin Story. I wonder if Novak pissed off the director of photography, because she doesn’t look as beautiful as usual. Her wardrobe is pretty drab and boring. Tyrone Power did not get along with Novak during filming. All he said about her was “Confusion between temperament and bad manners is unfortunate.” (Arce, p.259) Ouch. 

The Eddy Duchin Story is an enjoyable example of a big budget studio movie from the 1950’s. It may seem a little dated now, but it’s still quite good. The film was expertly directed by George Sidney, who helmed many big musicals of the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s like Anchors Aweigh, the first screen pairing of Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Kiss Me, Kate, Pal Joey, Bye Bye Birdie, and Viva Las Vegas. The Eddy Duchin Story also features lots of gorgeous location shots around Central Park and New York City, which makes it a visual treat. 

Eddy Duchin’s son Peter went on to become a successful pianist and bandleader of his own. He still performs in and around New York City.

Concert Review: Ramsey Lewis and Philip Bailey at the Dakota Jazz Club

Poster for Ramsey Lewis and Philip Bailey at the Dakota, 2015.

Ramsey Lewis playing "The Party's Over," at the Dakota Jazz Club, January 7, 2015. (Photo by Mark Taylor.)

The great jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis teamed up with Philip Bailey, the lead vocalist for Earth, Wind, and Fire at the Dakota Jazz Club last night, and it was a terrific show. I’ve been a fan of Ramsey Lewis’s piano playing for a long time, and I previously saw him at the Dakota in 2012. Lewis’s backing band, called his “electric band,” was the same group that appeared with him in 2012. They’re a great group, comprised of Tim Gant on keyboards, Henry Johnson on guitar, Joshua Ramos on bass, and Charles Heath on drums. Lewis has always been known for his great trios, starting in the 1950’s and 1960’s, with Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums, and Ramos and Heath continue the tradition. Johnson is an excellent soloist, with a clean, uncluttered sound that brings to mind great players like Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Gant adds flourishes on keyboards and synthesizer that bring colorful accents to the music.

At the age of 79, Ramsey Lewis continues to shine on piano. Lewis’s playing is an exquisite blend of all different influences, from gospel, classical, and jazz, to soul, funk, and rhythm and blues. Lewis’s sound can be bluesy or soft and gentle, depending on the song. He opened the show with Duke Ellington’s classic “Satin Doll,” which showed off his group well, with an excellent solo from Henry Johnson on guitar. Next Lewis played a beautiful ballad version of “All My Love Belongs To You,” which was a hit for R&B singer Bull Moose Jackson in 1948. (Lewis told that audience that information.) I loved Lewis’s playing on “All My Love Belongs To You.” His ballad style is so gorgeous, I could listen to him play for hours. Lewis reached back to the past for his next song, “Black Orpheus Medley,” where he weaved together several songs from Luiz Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s score to the 1959 movie Black Orpheus, which helped usher in the bossa nova craze of the 1960’s. Lewis’s version of “Black Orpheus Medley” uses the song “Manha de Carnaval” as an anchor that he keeps coming back to. The entire group did a great job of switching dynamics as the medley moved from swinging songs to ballads. 

After “Black Orpheus Medley” Philip Bailey came out and joined the group. Bailey played percussion and sang in his beautiful soulful voice. Bailey opened with a swinging version of the jazz standard “Caravan.” Bailey also sang an excellent version of the Antonio Carlos Jobim song “Wave,” which is one of my favorite Jobim songs. Bailey is a charismatic live performer, and he made sure the crowd stayed involved in the show. Bailey’s singing mixed very well with Lewis’s playing, and Lewis did a superb job of accompanying Bailey’s vocals. Bailey sang a fun medley of some of Earth, Wind and Fire’s biggest hits, which included crowd pleasers like “Shining Star,” and “September.” Lewis also played his biggest hits, “The In Crowd” and “Sun Goddess,” before coming back and closing the show with a lovely solo piano version of “The Party’s Over.” Lewis and Bailey have known each other for a long time, as Bailey appeared on Lewis’s classic 1974 album “Sun Goddess.” They clearly enjoy performing together. Lewis has a strong connection to Earth, Wind and Fire, as Maurice White, the group’s founder, replaced Redd Holt on drums in the Ramsey Lewis Trio in 1966. White played with Lewis for several years before leaving to start Earth, Wind and Fire. 

Lewis and Bailey put on an excellent show, and if you’re a fan of Ramsey Lewis or of Earth, Wind and Fire, you’ll have a great time hearing some fantastic music.