ALAN writes:
A quarter-century after he died, my father has never been absent from my memory or awareness. I am continuously aware of the debts I owed to him. He accompanies me whenever I walk the streets of St. Louis. I remember most of all his frame of mind and sense of life.
Here is one example:
Many years had gone by since I last viewed the 1964 motion picture musical “My Fair Lady”. Early this month I watched it twice on consecutive evenings. And while doing so, I tried to imagine how my father saw it. It opened in early 1965 at the ornate Ambassador Theater in downtown St. Louis, a movie palace where Ginger Rogers danced on stage in the 1920s.
I do not recall talking with my father about that movie then or in later years. I regret that. But I am sure he saw it. There are many things in it that I know would have impressed him favorably, not least the marriage of music and lyrics, the witty dialogue, and the masculine authority worn unapologetically by Rex Harrison’s character. My father enjoyed the sound of language spoken correctly and carefully. That was one reason why he watched (but especially listened to) William F. Buckley and his guests on his “Firing Line” program. I imagine he was equally impressed by Rex Harrison’s meticulous respect for language and diction in his role as Professor Henry Higgins.
I was too young in 1965 to appreciate such a movie, which I did not see until many years later. In 1964 I listened to a radio station that featured rock-and-roll records. But that year they also played a record called “On the Street Where You Live”, sung by Andy Williams. At age 15, I heard magic in that song. It was as far as could be got from rock-and-roll, and it was pure uplift. In fact, I heard all the music in “My Fair Lady” long before I saw the motion picture. That was because legendary St. Louis radio announcer John McCormick played the complete soundtrack album a number of times on his midnight-to-dawn radio program in the years 1966-’68. That was how I “became accustomed to” those melodies. “On the Street Where You Live” is timeless and seems just as wonderful today as it did when I first heard it in 1964.
My father greatly enjoyed uplifting music like that. People walking out of the theater afterward felt better than they did when they walked in. For days afterward, they would be singing or humming the melodies of those songs. I imagine my father also enjoyed the British manners, the book-lined study, and the performance of the four stars. When they died, he thought highly enough of them to clip and save the St. Louis newspaper obituaries for Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe.
What neither my father nor I could have known in 1965 is that that movie would be one of the last of its kind, released in the twilight years of the great American cinematic entertainment. Nothing remotely like it or “The Sound of Music” would be made after 1965, not because of changes in movie-making technology, but because of revolutionary changes in Americans’ frame of mind and sense of life. Had he known it, he would have felt fortunate indeed to have enjoyed one of the last and best examples of such elevating entertainment, and in an attractive motion picture theater along with well-dressed and well-mannered theatergoers.
My father could not have cared less about Shaw’s purpose in writing the play upon which the movie was based. He would have enjoyed the movie for its own sake, regardless of any “messages” that it may have been intended to include. He would laugh (as do I) at modern “critics” who lambast the movie for being anti-“Liberal”, anti-feminist, anti-egalitarlan, and Professor Higgins for being a “tyrant”. As usual, the “Liberals” and the Feminists are lost at sea. They resent the very idea of speaking properly and sensibly. Mush–ever so fluid and flexible–is the vocabulary they prefer, and if they had the power, they would drag all of us down into it and keep us there. Listen to what passes for conversation today in public places, which in turn is approved and encouraged by the mass communications and entertainment rackets. And then tell me that such mush–a concatenation of what Orwell called “ready-made phrases”, contempt for diction, weasel words, slurred speech, and endless vulgarity–Is not several grades below Eliza’s Cockney speech.
Nor is their vilification of the Henry Higgins character any more credible. Precisely how was he a tyrant? Eliza was there not by his choice but by hers. He did not seek her as a client; she sought him. She approached him and asked him to teach her proper speech. Only with great reluctance did he agree to that arrangement. If she “suffered” from the way he taught her–as “Liberals” and Feminists routinely claim–she was perfectly free to walk out at any moment and leave him behind with his tuning forks and voice recordings. Surely she knew he was not the only elocution teacher in London. But she did not make that choice, because her desire to learn and become a lady was greater than her irritation at some of his teaching methods.
Yes, he was a strict teacher. But there was a time when it was generally understood that a strict teacher is a good teacher. That time was still within living memory when “My Fair Lady” opened on Broadway in 1956. That people today would look upon it as “tyrannical” is not a measure of how far they have “advanced” but of how little they learn from history.
In the movie, Higgins resorts to the expletive Damn half-a-dozen times. My father would not have approved of that. He did not speak or excuse profanities; not doing so was part of his iron moral code of self-control. He may have noted that blasted, bloomin’, and bloody were available to Higgins, and that Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden was just as volatile as Higgins but never uttered a single Hell or Damn.
I have spent most of my life watching license promoted as freedom. And my judgment is that a restoration of strict standards in rule-enforcement and law enforcement would be a vast improvement. Years ago I wrote that the disappearance of strict men in American life was a very bad trend (TTH, Sept. 18, 2013). Life is strict. Existence is strict. The laws of mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry are strict. Aristotle’s Law of Identity is strict. Only modern Americans could imagine that the same is not true in the moral-philosophical realm; that softening, “liberalizing”, or dumbing down standards in the moral-philosophical realm will not be disastrous. Only modern Americans could be stupid enough to believe that “A” can be made into non-“A”, or that learning to speak properly or learning anything worthwhile can be made into “fun”.
Eliza faced the choice of remaining a flower girl or aiming higher and learning to speak properly. It was her choice. If Professor Higgins was obstinate in his manner, she was equally obstinate. Being there at all was her choice, not his. Nor did he tyrannize her or anyone. The tyranny works the other way around: We are living today in a tyranny created by soft-headed “educators” whose hatred of standards has yielded one generation after another of “students” who can’t read, write, or speak sensibly. “Why Can’t the English” teach their children to speak English?, Higgins asks in an early scene. Today the question applies even more forcefully to Americans and their children. If they had any wits, they would know that softened standards lead to stupid students.
Audiences in the 1950s-’60s would not have loved “My Fair Lady” as they did if it had included Shaw’s conclusion to the story (that Eliza would marry Freddy). They would not have bought it — and properly so. They believed that a scene where Eliza and Higgins are reunited after a series of quarrels would be the only way to sustain the uplift in the play, and they were right. The ending is ambiguous, but suggests that Higgins and Eliza will iron out their differences and maybe even share a romance–after which they could resume their quarrels.
The play had a long run on Broadway in the 1950s, and its popularity was phenomenal. People parked themselves in line overnight outside the theater to get standing-room tickets the next morning. I interpret those things to mean that there was a tremendous hunger on the part of ordinary hardworking Americans in the mid-1950s for uplifting stories and uplifting music, stories with happy endings and “music that sings in the heart”, as one commenter described it. If so, then that would have been in reaction to the drivel emitted by by the “Beatniks”, the despair promoted in existentialism, the vulgarity promoted by “comedians” like Lenny Bruce, the noise marketed as rock and roll “music”, and the increasing promotion by the entertainment industry of “anti-heroes”. My father would agree most emphatically with this judgment. He had no use for those things or for entertainment with “messages”, especially Red, Pink, “Liberal” or Feminist “messages”, and neither do I.
No doubt happy memories of “My Fair Lady” were uppermost in his mind on the day in 1988 when he stood across from the Ambassador Theater and took two pictures, and then walked inside to take pictures of two of the ornate chandeliers.
At the intersection where that theater stood in 1965, there was a large drug store, a women’s apparel store, a huge department store, lots of traffic and hundreds of people walking about. Today there is a parking lot, minimal traffic, few pedestrians, a building with vacant storefronts, the empty shell of the department store now boarded up and repeatedly vandalized, and an empty lot. The city puts flowers there in oversized flower pots. No one is there to appreciate them except the dogs who stop there to relieve themselves of the stress caused by living downtown. This is the new downtown: User-friendly to “Liberals”, Progressives, Feminists, car thieves, “teens”, and dogs.
If he were here today and looked around, my father would conclude that Americans have descended into perdition of their own making. Moreover, he would say that such perdition is largely a consequence of the abandonment of strict rule-enforcement and law enforcement in favor of touchy-feely-comfy “compassion”. Where, he would want to know, are motion pictures like those, uplifting music like that, the downtown St. Louis pulsating with life and activities as it did in 1965, the clean, orderly neighborhoods that he remembered so well, and the iron moral code and hierarchy of standards that underpinned all those things? Where is the city in whose history and achievements he took pride?
Memories like these are one reason why I keep several dozen old motion pictures in my library, some of which remind me of my father or my mother, but none of which is more recent than 1965.
