Disposing of a Dead Elephant

In 1949, Joan Crawford reunited with "Mildred Pierce" director Michael Curtiz and actor Zachary Scott to make the melodrama "Flamingo Road," in which she plays a onetime carnival hootchy-coothcy dancer who runs afoul of a corrupt sherrff, played by the great and portly Sydney Greenstreet, all set in a steaming, small Florida town. It's a classic Crawford setup (the tagline for the film: "A wrong girl for the right side of the tracks."). Although 20 years too old for the part, Crawford the trouper pulls it off, and she looks great. Pauline Kael called the film "garishly overwrought," but what's wrong with that now and then? Kael does admit that Greenstreet "gives the picture a campy charm," which indeed he does.
The film, written by Robert Wilder (based on his play) and Edmund North, boasts some first-rate dialogue. Here's my favorite exchange:
Sheriff Titus Semple (Greenstreet): "Now me, I never forget anything."
Lane Bellamy (Crawford): "You know sheriff, we had an elephant in our carnival with a memory like that. He went after a keeper that he'd held a grudge against for almost 15 years. Had to be shot. You just wouldn't believe how much trouble it is to dispose of a dead elephant."
If you hear a better conversation in any of this summer's upcoming "blockbusters," please let me know.

Bradbury Summers

The great Ray Bradbury died yesterday at age 91, and there’s little I can add to the lovely obits in the papers and homages everywhere on the web, praising his imagination, his wonderful short stories and novels, and his decency as a man.
But I do have memories, wonderful memories.
Looking at the Bradbury paperbacks I’ve kept all these years, it appears I started reading him in 1964, when I was 12 going on 13. In my mind, it’s summertime and many of my pals have deserted the neighborhood, some to camp, others on vacation with their parents. The days are long, hot and humid, and with no one around to play baseball I read and read and read, usually sitting under a backyard tree, nursing a Coke and a bag of Pretzel Nuggets, racing through paperbacks, mostly bought at Jack’s Candy Store in the shadows of the Auburndale Long Island Rail Road station.
I first read “The Martian Chronicles,” a terrific introduction to Bradbury’s work. I obviously liked the book, because the adolescent critic in me wrote “Great” on the back cover. I bought whatever other Bradburys Jack carried, then prevailed upon my mom to get me more at a bookstore in one the arcades at Grand Central Terminal. I think it was called The Open Book, and it sold only paperbacks. So more Bradburys arrived, not just the ones pictured here but others I loaned to friends, never to see the books again: “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” “Dark Carnival,” “Dandelion Wine."
Children play an important role in Bradbury’s work, and that recognition certainly proved an alluring introduction. Really, though, it was Bradbury’s imagination coupled with his realistic take on humanity that got to me. Some critics—notably Thomas Disch—criticized Bradbury for a sentimental streak. Sentiment, certainly, but a Bradbury story or novel is no guarantee of happiness and joy brought on by easy sentimentality. Why else would the word “dystopian” appear in so many of today’s descriptions of his work?
None of the obits I’ve read has made mention of a 1965 off-Broadway production called “The World of Ray Bradbury,” starring the gifted George Voskovic. Three one-act plays based on “The Pedestrian,” “The Veldt,” and “To the Chicago Abyss” comprised the work, performed at the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue in the East Village. Luckily, I got to attend a Saturday matinee. “The World of Ray Bradbury” used sound effects and lighting to simulate the future Bradbury created. I’ve never forgotten the staging of “The Veldt,” based on one of his finest short stories.
Looking at these paperbacks makes me want to find a tree, a Coke and a bag of Pretzel Nuggets, then dive into “The Martian Chronicles.” Maybe I’ll be transported to those hot, humid summer days, a 12-year-old once more.
Now that would be worthy of a Ray Bradbury story.

The Art of Bondage: The great book covers of Richard Chopping*

With Daniel Craig returning this fall as James Bond in “Skyfall” just a few weeks after the 50th anniversary of 007’s UK movie debut in “Dr. No,” and William Boyd agreeing to write a new Bond novel for publication 60 years after Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” appeared in 1953, let’s celebrate some of the finest book covers ever created--covers Fleming commissioned Richard Chopping to paint for Bond’s adventures.
Ian’s wife Ann came across Chopping’s work in 1956 while attending an exhibition of several painters, including her friend Francis Bacon, who urged her to take a look at Chopping’s flower paintings and trompe-l’oeil works. Impressed, she suggested to her husband that Chopping (1917-2008) might make the perfect artist for the covers of the Bond novels.
Fleming (1908-1964) liked what he saw, declaring Chopping “the only English master” in the art of trompe-l’oeil. Splitting the cost with his English publisher, Jonathan Cape, Fleming paid Chopping 50 guineas (about $147 in 1957), insisting that the cover of “From Russia, With Love,” show both a Smith & Wesson .38 with a modified trigger guard for faster firing and a rose with a drop of dew. Despite such specifics, Chopping always insisted that he and not Fleming ultimately designed the covers.
Eight more covers followed. Another artist worked on “Dr. No,” an unfortunate decision; Chopping, with his breadth of knowledge of flora and fauna, undoubtedly would have produced a memorable cover for a tale centered in the Caribbean, rather than the dark, dreary one Cape published in 1958.
But from “Goldfinger” on, Chopping’s distinctive covers—united by artistically rendered wooden backgrounds--dealt the Bond novels a consistent, distinctive look that Fleming appreciated for their beauty, sense of danger and commercial appeal. Chopping thought “Goldfinger,” with a cover showing a skull clutching a rose and gold coins filling its eye sockets, his finest work in the series.
The gifted Chopping could even make a toad with a captured dragonfly seem menacing as he did for “You Only Live Twice.” He writes amusingly to an editor at Cape about his adventures capturing a toad of “extraordinary malevolent appearance” to pose for the cover. The considerable correspondence among Fleming, Chopping and others concerning the covers sold at auction for $57,600 in 2010.
Writing to Chopping about ideas for the cover of “Thunderball,” Fleming said that the covers were “marvelous” and offered to increase Chopping’s fee, perhaps to 100 guineas. Chopping asked for 200, and Fleming agreed “on condition that you do my jackets every year,” according to Andrew Lycett’s excellent 1995 Fleming biography.
Fleming then suggested the look of “Thunderball’s” cover: “the skeleton of a man’s hand with the fingers resting on the Queen of Hearts. Through the back of the hand a dagger is plunged into the table top.” Chopping showed his independence by adding the Ace of Spades and changing the Queen of Hearts to the Queen of Diamonds. Of course, the Ace and Queen make blackjack, but that game is not played in the novel (there is a scene of Bond besting the villainous Emilio Largo at chemin de fer). Whatever the cards, “Thunderball” remains a great cover.
As is the cover for “For Your Eyes Only,” a collection of five Bond stories In the November 1998 edition of Firsts magazine, Lee Biondi and James M. Pickard wrote, “Fleming made Chopping paint it many times, until he was satisfied with the shape [of the eye] and the color.”
Chopping himself published a novel in 1965 called “The Fly” (not related to any movies with the same title). One editor at Secker & Warburg deemed the novel “a perfectly disgusting concoction” before passing it on to a younger editor named Giles Gordon who concluded the book was “sufficiently sordid to appeal to voyeurs, and if Chopping were to adorn it with one of his famous dust-jackets it could be a succès de scandale; and so it proved.” Utilizing his talents for depicting insects, Chopping painted a memorable cover of a fly—in close-up-that has landed on a human eye. No words appear. Flies also buzz about the covers of “The Man With The Golden Gun” and “Octopussy.”
When the Fleming estate decided to resurrect Bond in 1981 with a new series of novels, Chopping was commissioned to paint the cover for British thriller writer John Gardner’s “Licence Renewed.” Chopping’s cover of a Browning 9 mm automatic, with pearls, flowers and—yes—a fly evokes several Fleming covers, most notably “From Russia, With Love.” Artists paying homage to Chopping’s style painted the covers for the next four Gardner books.
Here’s a suggestion to the good editors at Jonathan Cape: commission an artist to paint the cover in the Chopping manner for William Boyd’s Bond novel due in 2013.
As for “From Russia, With Love,” a fine first UK edition with fine dust jacket can fetch as much as $11,000 these days. Perhaps Auric Goldfinger’s heirs can afford that, but the rest of us will have to play the lottery—or maybe master chemin de fer.
Bonne chance.
---------------------------------------------------------------
*This originally appeared in the New York Daily News book blog, Page Views.