“I coulda been a contender!”

When On the Waterfront was first released to American movie theaters on July 28, 1954, the film’s director, Elia Kazan, was worried about how well it would do on opening day.

Actors Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb gave the film plenty of star power. And, the script was written by legendary screenwriter, producer and novelist Budd Schulberg.

But there hadn’t been as much advance publicity about the movie as Kazan had hoped for.

Richard Schickel’s biography of Kazan notes that the director was so worried on the morning of July 28th that he went to the Astor Theatre in New York’s Times Square to see how many people were coming to the film’s first showing, the early matinee scheduled for 11:00 a.m. 

Schickel says Kazan “was surprised to see something like one hundred customers in line at the box office” and “immediately guessed that his film was going to be a popular success.”

Indeed, On the Waterfront was both a commercial and critical success.

The following March, it received eight Academy Awards, including a Best Director Oscar for Kazan.

Today, it is considered one of the best movies ever made. The American Film Institute lists it as one of the 100 Greatest American Films.

It also includes one of the most famous movie quotes of all time: “I coulda been a contender!”

The line is spoken by Brando, playing the washed-up boxer turned longshoreman, Terry Malloy, to his brother Charley (Steiger). Charley is an ethically-challenged lawyer who works for Johnny Friendly (Cobb), the brutal mobster who runs the local longshoreman’s union.

After Terry witnesses a fellow longshoreman murdered by Friendly’s thugs, Friendly tells Charley to make sure Terry sticks to the union’s “D and D” code (short for “deaf and dumb”).

When Charley presses Terry about this and even threatens him with a gun, Terry is shocked. It reminds him of how Charley had forced him to throw a big match and end his boxing career years before, at the orders of the same gangster.

In one of the most memorable scenes in film history, Terry expresses the pain he feels over Charley’s betrayals:

“You was my brother, Charley,” he says. “You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me, just a little bit, so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money...I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

Terry goes on to become a hero when he testifies against Friendly before a Congressional waterfront crime commission.

Many observers have noted that, in part, On the Waterfront seems to be Kazan’s cinematic justification for his own testimony before the McCarthy-era House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on April 10, 1952.

In the 1930s, Kazan was a member of the Group Theater, a New York City theater collective that included a number of politically progressive, left-leaning actors, playwrights and directors.

During his 1952 HUAC testimony, Kazan named eight former Group Theater members who he said had once been Communists, including Clifford Odets and Paula Miller, who later married the famed acting mentor Lee Strasberg.

Kazan also criticized the screenwriters and producers called the “Hollywood Ten” for refusing to cooperate with HUAC’s hunt for alleged Communists in the movie industry. (Often now described as a modern day “witch hunt.”)

Kazan’s testimony (online here) made him a controversial figure throughout his life. And, the controversy has continued since Kazan’s death in 2003.

His supporters feel his artistic achievements as a director outweigh the fact that he was one of many people in the film and theater world who “named names” and went along with the anti-Communist hysteria that led to the “blacklisting” of many actors, writers and directors in Hollywood.

His critics view him as a despicable snitch, who was willing to hurt former friends to protect his lucrative career.

Reading things Kazan said about the controversy himself over the years, I get the sense that he viewed his HUAC testimony as an act of conscience that was similar to Terry Malloy’s testimony to the waterfront crime commission in On the Waterfront.

For example, two days after appearing before the House un-American Activities Committee, Kazan paid for an ad in the New York Times in which he tried to justify what he had done. He said in one paragraph:

“Whatever hysteria exists — and there is some, particularly in Hollywood — is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy...Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists. Liberals must speak out.”

Decades later, in his 1997 autobiography, Kazan wrote:

“If you expect an apology now because I would later name names to the house Committee, you've misjudged my character. The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ I would do, I did out of my true self...The people who owe you an explanation (no apology expected) are those who, year after year, held the Soviets blameless for all their crimes.”

I love On the Waterfront and many other movies Kazan directed (my other special favorites are A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!  East of Eden and Baby Doll).

But I do question whether “exposing” former friends who seem to have been at worst “guilty” of having some misguided political views in their younger days is similar to exposing graft, extortion and murder committed by a gangster.

I hope that, if I had been put on the HUAC hot seat, I would have had the guts to respond like author Lillian Hellman.

In a letter she sent to HUAC Chairman John S. Wood on May 19, 1952, Hellman explained that she was willing to appear before the committee, as requested. However, she made it crystal clear that she would not name names.

Her letter includes a famous quote about acts of conscience and defiance of political witch hunters:

“To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable,” Hellman wrote. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

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“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

The great American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old.

But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled “The Lesson for Today.”

Frost first unveiled and recited the poem on June 20, 1941, at an event celebrating the anniversary of Harvard University’s Phi Beta Kappa Society.

In 1942, it was published in the book A Witness Tree, a collection of his recent poetry.

“The Lesson for Today” is not one of Frost’s more accessible poems.

It’s an imaginary discussion in verse with the Medieval scholar Alcuin of York and it includes a number of obscure literary and historical references. (The kinds of references people like Harvard Phi Beta Kappa graduates might know.)

But the last line of the last verse of the poem became one of Frost’s most famous:

      “I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori
       And were an epitaph to be my story,
       I’d have a short one ready for my own.
       I would have written of me on my stone:
       I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

It’s unclear whether Frost truly planned for that last line to be his real epitaph when he wrote it.

However, over the next two decades, it became increasingly associated with him.

Public awareness of the line was especially enhanced by its use in the title of a widely-seen documentary about Frost released shortly before his death — Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World.

When Frost died, his family had it inscribed on the headstone of his grave in Bennington, Vermont.

You can see it there above the name of his wife, Elinor, who died a quarter of a century before him in 1938.

For her epitaph, Frost had chosen the words “TOGETHER WING TO WING AND OAR TO OAR,” a romantic line from a poem he wrote in 1936 for his daughter’s wedding, titled “The Master Speed.”

Below his name on the headstone are the words that became a famous summation of Robert Frost’s own life: “I HAD A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD.”

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“A wife is to submit graciously to…her husband.”

In 1998, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention decided to update the provisions of the “Baptist Faith and Message,” a set of principles adopted in 1925 to provide guidance to the millions of members of Southern Baptist churches in the United States.

The text of the 1925 version primarily focused on fundamental aspects of the Southern Baptist faith, which are generally similar to other Christian Protestant faiths.

There was nothing in it about the roles of husbands and wives or the definition of marriage.

Back then, what was “normal” with respect to such things was taken for granted.

Seventy years later, in the late 1990s, things were different.

Women had increasingly become “liberated.”

Homosexuals were increasingly coming out of the closet.

There was even talk of (gasp!) gay marriage.

So, in June of 1998, at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the church leaders decided it was time to add a new section to the Baptist Faith and Message that addressed these “issues.”

The new section, titled “THE FAMILY,” was unanimously adopted by Convention members on June 9, 1998.

The first part had some language that took a clear shot at the newfangled notion of gay marriage.

“Marriage,” it opined, “is the uniting of one man and one woman.”

Of course, it wasn’t any big surprise that Southern Baptists opposed gay marriage (and homosexuality in general). They had already staked out that turf.

But there was some other language in the new section that caught the attention of reporters and quickly generated nationwide news coverage, a firestorm of criticism and many political cartoons and jokes.

The most controversial sentence was in the third paragraph, which says:

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

The doctrine is loosely based on a Biblical quote, Ephesians 5:22-33. Those verses, which don’t actually say wives should “graciously” be “servants” to their husbands, are given in the King James Version as follows:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

For weeks, the Baptist Convention’s new rule about wives submitting graciously to their husbands was discussed, lambasted and lampooned by newspaper columnists, TV commentators, feminists and comedians.

Naturally, many women and social liberals attacked and mocked the idea that wives should graciously submit to their husbands, viewing it as incredibly outdated, wrongheaded and insulting to women.

And, of course, TV comics couldn’t resist commenting on the flap.

For example, Jay Leno quipped:

“The Southern Baptists issued a new ruling this week stating that a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband. What if a husband wants to lead her and the family to Disneyland on Gay Day? What do you do then? What if your husband’s an idiot?”

Given Hillary Clinton’s imminent nomination as presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, it’s especially interesting to read one of the paragraphs in the Associated Press story about the flap over the submissive wives doctrine.

It notes that in 1998 the most visible member of the Southern Baptist Church was President Bill Clinton. The reporter who wrote the story, Kristen Moulton, was told by White House spokesman Mike McCurry that Bill Clinton “was aware of the convention's action and had joked about pointing it out to the first lady.”

The criticism and jokes had no effect on the policies of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The sentence about a wife submitting graciously to her husband remained and still exists in the current Baptist Faith and Message text.

At least, it still exists on paper and online.

I haven’t seen any studies on how strictly it’s adhered to in Southern Baptist households.

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Non-submissive related reading: books featuring quotations by women…

“When you call me that, SMILE!”

When the groundbreaking Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister was first published on May 28, 1902, no one could have known that it would become so famous — or that it would create basic formulas used ever since in Western novels, movies, radio and TV shows.

Stories about cowboys, Indians, outlaws, lawmen, gunfighters and settlers were common in the “penny dreadfuls” and “dime novels” published in the last half of the 19th century. They had also appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, which published Wister’s first Western short stories.

But literary scholars generally consider The Virginian to be the first “serious” Western novel and the prototype for the modern cowboy story genre.

Elements of the book are loosely based on the real “Johnson County War” of 1892, a bloody clash between big landowners and small ranchers in Wyoming.

The lead character of Wister's novel is a cowboy simply referred to as “the Virginian.” He's tough, honorable, taciturn and fast on the draw.

Many of the characters, settings and storylines in the book created iconic templates for Westerns that followed in print and on film.

The Virginian also gave us one of the iconic Western quotations: “When you call me that, SMILE!” (commonly misquoted as “Smile when you call me that!”)

This comes from a scene in which the Virginian is playing poker with the novel’s villain, a cowboy named Trampas. Here’s the part that includes the famous warning:

It was now the Virginian’s turn to bet, or leave the game, and he did not speak at once.

Therefore Trampas spoke. “Your bet, you son-of-a--.”

The Virginian’s pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas: “When you call me that, SMILE.” And he looked at Trampas across the table.

Yes, the voice was gentle. But in my ears it seemed as if somewhere the bell of death was ringing; and silence, like a stroke, fell on the large room.

The classic 1929 film based on Wister’s novel popularized a different version of the “smile” line.

In that film, Gary Cooper stars as the Virginian. His confrontation with Trampas, played by Walter Huston, occurs at the saloon’s bar instead of a poker table.

When Huston calls Cooper a "long-legged son-of-a-", Cooper cuts him off in mid-epithet and says: “If you wanna call me that, smile.”

This 1929 movie adaptation of The Virginian probably led to the “Smile when you call me that!” misquote.

Huston has a great response in the movie that’s not in the book.

“With a gun against my belly,” he says, “I always smile.”

Another classic film adaption of The Virginian was made in 1946. In that one, Joel McCrea plays the title character and the “smile” line he uses is the same as in the novel.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, “Smile when you call me that” and “Smile when you say that” were frequently used as joking comebacks.

I remember they were favorites of my father and his old Army buddies.

I don’t often hear people using those once-popular variations of the book and movie lines nowadays.

But whenever I do hear them, it does makes me smile.

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“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

On April 19, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur made a high-profile “farewell address” to a joint meeting of both houses of Congress.

Eight days earlier, he’d been fired as the top commander of the American forces in the Korean War by President Harry Truman, essentially for having the gall to publicly criticize Truman’s denial of his request to nuke Red China (in retaliation for sending troops to fight against the U.S. in Korea).

Truman later famously explained: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was.”

Today, with hindsight, most people would likely support Truman’s decision to avoid World War III and affirm the authority of the Commander-in-Chief.

But in 1951, Truman’s firing of MacArthur was highly controversial — and highly politicized by Truman’s Republican adversaries.

MacArthur was one of America’s most renowned generals during World War II.

Among other things, he was known for making and ultimately keeping the legendary vow “I shall return!” — his promise to return to liberate the Philippines from Japanese control after being forced to escape and leave many of his troops there early in 1942.

On September 2, 1945, MacArthur presided over the official surrender of the Japanese, thus ending that war. He then oversaw the American occupation and initial peacetime revitalization of Japan.

In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, President Truman tapped MacArthur as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces who were fighting with South Korea against the North Koreans and their backer, Communist Red China.

MacArthur was well-known and well-liked by most Americans and many believed that the spread of Communism had to be stopped to prevent a “domino effect.”

That didn’t stop the feisty Democratic President from firing him after the general wrote a letter critical of Truman’s decision to avoid further escalation of the war and sent it to Joseph William Martin, Jr., the Republican leader in the House of Representatives.

Martin read the letter aloud on the floor of Congress on April 5th. It was a clear poke in Truman’s eye. Six days later, Truman fired MacArthur.

To poke Truman again, the Republicans invited MacArthur to make a speech to Congress on April 19.

Much of MacArthur’s “farewell address” focused on “the Communist threat.”

He ominously warned that if Communism were allowed to spread in Southeast Asia it would “threaten the freedom of the Philippines and the loss of Japan and might well force our western frontier back to the coast of California, Oregon and Washington.”

Most of that Cold War rhetoric is now forgotten. The thing that is most remembered from MacArthur’s speech is his famous quote: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

It was part of the closing of his address, in which he said:

“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that ‘old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’ And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.”

As MacArthur noted, the line “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” is not something he coined. It comes from a song that was popular with British soldiers during World War I, called “Old Soldiers Never Die.”

The barracks room song was a parody of the hymn “Kind Words Never Die.” And, unlike the ending of MacArthur’s farewell address, the lyrics of the Army song are more satiric than schmaltzy.

There are several different versions. Here are the lyrics recorded by the late, great quote and phrase maven Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases :

       “Old soldiers never die, 
       Never die, never die, 
       Old soldiers never die —
       They simply fade away. 

       Old soldiers never die, 
       Never die, never die,
       Old soldiers never die —
       Young ones wish they would.”

Ironically, that and other early versions of the song poked fun at Army life and at career soldiers and officers like MacArthur.

However, after MacArthur cited the song in his farewell speech, Gene Autry rewrote the lyrics to create a more respectful version that specifically praised the general. The last verse of Autry’s rendition says:

       “Now somewhere, there stands the man
       His duty o’er and won
       The world will ne’er forget him
       To him we say, ‘Well done.’”

President Truman had a different reaction to MacArthur’s farewell speech.

When asked about it in one of the interviews recorded by Merle Miller for the book Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974), Truman said it was “nothing but a bunch of damn bullshit!”

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