American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building

by Claudia Roth Pierpont, Pilar Witherspoon (Narrator)

Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture. Here is a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age.

Claudia Roth Pierpont expertly mixes biography and criticism, history and reportage, to bring these portraits to life and to link them in surprising ways. It isn't far from Wharton's brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgerald's giddy flappers, and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled world. The improvisatory jazziness of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has its counterpart in the great jazz baby of the New York skyline, the Chrysler Building. Questions of an American acting style are traced from Orson Welles to Marlon Brando, while the new American painting emerges in the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim. And we trace the arc of racial progress from Bert Williams's blackface performances to James Baldwin's warning of the fire next time, however slow and bitter and anguished this progress may be.

American Rhapsody offers a history of twentieth-century American invention and genius. It is about the joy and profit of being a heterogeneous people, and the immense difficulty of this human experiment.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Audiobook, Music, Film

11 pages, Audio CD

First published May 10, 2016

Reviews

[Brad B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book that I first learned about while browsing a bookstore in Paris (maybe not so ironic, since more than one of the artists profiled in American Rhapsody spent time in Paris). Even individuals who I never found particularly interesting (Katherine Hepburn), become more thoroughly three-dimensional in Ms. Pierpont's essays. Somehow she makes the Chrysler building seem perfectly appropriate in this collection. For those who remember an America of unlimited potential populated by artists who breathed genuine fire, American Rhapsody is an inspiring read. Even the artists who grow increasingly angry over our failure to fulfill that potential (Nina Simone) left me feeling a little hope.

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book. Everything about it made me reminisce about NYC too, so that helps, lol.
It always boggles my mind to think of how so many events/people/stories etc overlap on the real timeline of life. How many people happen to be in the same place at the same time, experiencing such different things simultaneously. A nice reminder that everyone is connected somehow one way or another down the line.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

* American Rhapsody original name of Rhapsody in Blue. Gerschwin's brother encouraged the change.
* Lots of the artists in the book left the US periodically or permanently yet America made them who they were

Ch. 1 Edith Wharton
* Mother Lucretia Jones was society and materialistic and father George was fan of books
* Marriage was a sexual disaster with Teddy Wharton
* Was not well waiting for her first book to come out... hysteria really. But, reviews were good and she didn't feel like that again. Teddy started suffering similarly as she did in her youth as she got stronger.
* George Eliot (a woman author) "Marriage is so unlike anything else. There's something awful even in the nearness it brings."
* Wharton knew author Henry James. William Morton Fullerton was romantically involved with both James and Wharton.
* Wharton divorces Teddy and moves to Paris permanently in 1913
* Whaton's Beatrice Palmato was more sexual than Ulysses.

Ch. 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald
* Wrote Great Gatsby from the French Riviera and published at age of 28. Gatsby was a commercial failure until Fitzgerald died in 1940.
* Mark of a first rate mind is to be able to contain two conflicting ideas at once. Condemn the idle rich and bask in the realms of gold and live with them both. Fitzgerald took the mind concept from Keats.
* Nick the narrator in Gatsby is like Sancho Panza
* A dreamer is about the dream and not the object of the dream... Gatsby (Buchanan) turns down Daisy when she was ready to run away with him
* Gatsby based on Tramalchio
* Masculinized capitalism and feminine consumption yields Fitzgerald's America
* Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn about time's passing (it's threat)
* Beauty is youth and vice versa, only way to happiness is through illusion, cold unbearableness of truth is the them of Gatsby. Don Quixote died of truth and arguably Fitzgerald too.

Ch. 3 Bert Williams and Stretch and Fetch It
* Performed with partner George Walker
* Williams famous comedian from Bahamas and had Booker T. Washington and WEB Debois' respect. Performed in dark face as a light black person. Was forgotten after death in 20s
* Zit Coone was the city version of country Jim Crow
* Black and Jewish comedians performed stereotypes of their race to make money... quite American really
* Black Bohemia in the Tenderloin 30 years before Harlem Renaissance
* 1900 race riot in NYC. Police stopped a lynching from street lamp on 34th and 8th.
* Williams and Walker created a theater run of In Dahomey (Dahomey is partly where Benin is) musical of all black performers but still had to perform to segregated audiences. Colonists in it who had returned to Africa return to the US. Abbie Mitchell a start singer of the production. Williams stayed in blackface in In Dahomey run in England.
* Mask of oppression was a means to freedom for Williams
* Paul Dunbar wrote We Wear the Mask about the pain of being black
* Other show runs were Abyssinia about Ethiopia and Liberia which never were colonized and Bandanna Land which had black actors in white face
* Williams was a mentor to Eddie Cantor who performed in black face. Williams swept away as a shameful past.
* Williams had a hopeful race movie in 1915 which got lost in the clamor for Birth of a Nation
* Charles Gilpin was a black theater actor benefitting from Williams trailblazing but died young
* Lincoln Perry, black actor, played Stepin Fetchit - the world's laziest man. He was quite intelligent but played the part even off stage and keeping PR releases in "dialect." Had his ragged costume delivered on a golden hanger.
* Al Jolson did blackface in The Jazz Singer
* Muhammad Ali and Dick Gregory state Stepin Fetchit as a hero... just getting a black man on the screen was enough. Although NAACP was working to no longer have such stereotypes on the screen.
* "His crimes where his only options." Chaplin playing a Tramp doesn't make all Englishman bums said SF.

Ch. 4 George Gerschwin
* Rhapsody in Blue was very new when released. Brother Ira talked him out of calling it American Rhapsody.
* Learned initially from player pianos and picked up so much naturally studying more seriously from classical to jazz
* Fuzed musical styles and transcended them.
* Ford's anti-semitic Dearborn Newspaper attacked "Jewish Jazz"
* Gerschwin was inspiration for Russian orchestra leader in the Great Gatsby
* Porgy and Bess called first true opera since Strauss and disliked by other critics. Reworked in the 50s and received better reviews. Also accused of being racist but black musicians breathed life into songs like Summertime and My Man's Gone
* Gerschwin died at 38 in 1937 from brain tumor. Ill health leading up to death was blamed on his always being somewhat temperamental healthwise.

Ch. 5 The Chrysler Building
* William Van Alen architect
* Tallest building in NY at time of building. Van Alen was nervous about the spire being affixed to the top and it not falling.
* Desires supplanted needs in the 20s. Walter Chrysler started in trains, built first car in early 20s, then wanted to build the best building despite diminishing returns on skyscrapers as they get higher.
* Stainless chromium nickel steel plates at top have never been replaced and gleam almost impossibly
* Inside of the Chrysler was quite pedestrian
* Chrysler and Van Alen had a falling out and Van Alen never did significant architecture work after the Chrysler Building
* Tenancy dropped to 17% but rebounded in the 90s with Tischman Spire managing it and selling to Abu Dhabi

Daschiell Hammet
* Wrote Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man
* Believed just being a man was a guarantee for moral corruption
* Became a Pinkerton out West with one focus being union busting but was incapable of physical work due to tuberculosis
* Maltese Falcan seeks personal language to express a unique point of view. Sam Spade was the detective.
* Lillian Hellman was his lover and writer herself.
* Ended up in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
* Gertrude Stein asks why men can only write themselves. He said it was because men were confident in 19th century and not as much in the 20th as women gained more confidence.

Peggy Guggenheim
* Was in Paris in 1940 and saw Picasso in his studio. Other artists were eager to sell as the German invasion was imminent
* Father died on the Titantic. Family found wealth in Colorado minerals.
* Loeb, her cousin, was inspiration for unflattering Jewish character in the Sun Also Rises.
* Guggenheim helped to significantly launch Jackson Pollock's career
* Daughter killed herself leaving Guggenhein calling herself "bankrupt"
* She called the Guggenheim in NYC Uncle Solomon's Garage

Katharine Hepburn
* Brother Tom hung himself and she found him... suicides ran in the family
* Invested in A Philadelphia Story and made a good deal of money
* Had a long relationship with Spencer Tracy despite his marriage and his general constant alcoholic depressed misery
* She was "too content to be among the really great actors"

Play King - Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles
* Both Shakespeare expert actors, like make up / fake noses etc. as "camouflage"
* Welles directed an all black cast in Macbeth production as a young man
* Adapting Shakespeare to film is challenging due to the language.
* Henry V directed by Olivier was a smashing success
* Welles saw Shakespeare as somewhat American
* Citizen Kane was first titled "American". Had overlapping dialogue and deep focus allowing one to see actions of characters in background. Also, the camera was freed from tripod and had lots of movement. Olivier was impressed by these innovations.
* Olivier did Hamlet shortly after also with lots of motion in the camera
* Welles shoots Othello over 4 years
* Yesterday's realism is today's mannerism

Marlon Brando - Method Man
* Stanislavski brought method acting to America via the First STudio of the Mascow ARt Theatre in the 20s
* Thought was you had to feel an emotion before you could act it.
* Early supporter of Civil Rights and Native American Rights
* The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris were released at nearly the same time and were tour de forces
* Daughter Cheyanne hung herself at 25 at compound in Tahiti which Brando envisioned as a paradise for artists and research on ecological breakthroughs. Son, Christian was sent to jail for killing Cheyanne's boyfriend in Brando's house in Hollywood. She told him the boyfriend was beating her.
* Quit method acting after Last Tango in Paris figuring the audience couldn't tell the difference.

Another Country James Baldwin
* Didn't like the bittersweet poetry of Langston Hughes but liked the rage of Richard Wright
* Saw Orson Welles all black production of Macbeth and studied acting with Brando in New York
* Was thrown out of an American Diner because they "didn't serve negroes." The anger helped him understand his father (actual step father) raise in the South and Wright also raised in the South. Knew it could consume him.
* His charge was to keep his own heart "free of hate and despair"
* Art is order created from the disorder of life
* Hatred destroys the one who hates
* Realizes how much he identifies as American in Paris because he feels closer to white Americans there than black Africans. Helps him move past violence seeing America as a family. Described race relations in America as a wedding.
* To avoid hating another one can pity them
* Part of a group that met with Robert Kennedy askign JFK to escort a young black child to desegregated school.
* Medgar Evers' murder gave Baldwin pause about efficacy of non-violence
* Was cut out of speakers at March on Washington partly because MLK didn't like him being gay
* Birmingham Bombing and then MLK's assassination changed something inside him he admitted
* Maybe the things that helped him and hurt him could not be divorced he thought
* Robert Kennedy said in the 60s there would be a black president in 30 years. Baldwin's reply was "I'm curious of is what kind of country he will be president of?"

A Raised Voice - Nina Simone
* Four Women song about anger and history
* After Birmingham Bombing wanted to make a gun and kill someone in the way of her race. Her husband and manager told her to put her rage into the music. Wrote Mississippi Goddamn in an hour.
* Rejected from Curtis Music School in Philly and she felt it was due to her race. Started playing piano in Atlantic City, was asked to sing by bar owner where she performed, and performed under name Nina Simone to hide her activities from her mother.
* Beat her daughter Lisa in Liberia at 12-13. Lisa left to return to US to her father who beat Nina.
* Bi-polar. Burner her French house. Shot a teenager in the leg for being loud. Wandered naked in a hotel hallway with a knife.
* To Be Young Gifted and Black meant to help all black children love themselves.
* Zoe Saldana cast as Nina Simone in her biopic. Controversy because she's so much lighter. Dark women actors can't even get cast as dark women.
* Met Michael Jackson as a boy and told him not to let the world change him. Was sad to see his skin and plastic surgery seem to point to him listening to the world instead of her.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blending biography and criticism, Claudia Roth Pierpont's collection of twelve essays on American arts and letters of the 20th century is a celebration of the fascinating people (and one building) who helped create our common culture. Writers (Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, James Baldwin), actors(Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, and pairings of Bert Williams & Stepin Fetchit and Orson Welles & Laurence Olivier) , musicians (George Gershwin, Nina Simone), an art collector (Peggy Guggenheim) and the Chrysler Building are all given the treatment.

The essays are derived from the author's published articles in the New Yorker, and have one important thing in common - Ms. Roth Pierpont knows that above all an essay must be interesting and entertaining; as a result there is not one dud in the bunch. If there is a unifying theme (and there probably isn't), it's that the way these characters lived their lives (e.g. Brando's and Welles's flakiness, Simone's politics, Baldwin's exile) is as much a part of their art as the films, books or recordings that they produced. I also should mention that these essays were enlightening and fresh whether or not I had extensive prior knowledge of their subjects.

As I write this review, it is six weeks after publication and I am the second person to rate this book on Goodreads and the first one to review it. American Rhapsody deserves more attention than that, and I hope I convince some people to pick it up.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pierpont is a gem of a writer and her essays fill me with unexpected points of wonder and interest. I liked the premise that tied the essays together . . . That each of these people (not to mention the building) were a force that impacted our national conscience, but I didn't always feel like the essays buttressed her unifying theme. The bit about Welles and Olivier felt the most off.

[Carl Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This compilation of essays, originally appearing in the _New Yorker_, wander through the lives and work of twelve quintessential American icons—authors, actors, and musicians, along with one “personality” and one building:

-Edith Wharton
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
-George Gershwin
-Burt Williams
-Dashiell Hammett
-Katherine Hepburn
-James Baldwin
-Marlon Brando
-Nina Simon
-Orson Wells
-The Chrysler Building
-Peggy Guggenheim

America’s (mostly, though not entirely, high—brow) social and cultural history of the 20th century (and occasionally brushing on intellectual history) is explored through the lives and work of these icons. Their thinking and efforts define the American experience and underline our uniqueness. Engaging and thought provoking.

[John Calia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but not a rhapsody

A well written and enjoyable book, presenting a series of mini-biographies of some of America’s leading artists of the last century. Their stories are connected - if barely - by the common theme of struggle with demons, both internal and external, to achieve an artistic vision in the land of opportunity. However, if the author hoped to convince this reader that each of her subjects had a significant impact on American society, she failed in that endeavor. It seemed to me that each (with the exception of James Baldwin) was more a product of our culture than a shaper of it. Nevertheless, I liked the book and found myself wanting more when I finished it.

[Janie Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and illuminating look at the work, influence and personal live is a range of authors, actors, musicians, some of whom I had never heard of, warts and all. Interesting too was the way some were treated and fell from favour but are having their lives reassessed, in a similar way that is happening today!!

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://artsfuse.org/147077/fuse-book-...

[Kathy Wojo]

An interesting mix of people to learn about.