John O’Hara—American Dream Gone Sour

Colleagues at the New Yorker were amazed by O'Hara who would sit down at the typewriter, pound away furiously for hours without interruption and produce in one draft a short story ready to be typeset.  And he didn't even breath hard.

Note:  This is one of those posts that got away from me.  It took me all day to finish so it never got up on the actual anniversary of its subjects’ birth.  What got me going was not just the talent of John O’Hara—and despite the now orchestrated disparagement of him, he was a fabulously talented writer, especially in his early years when his prose and dialog literally sizzle on the page—and certainly not because O’Hara was an admirable man.  No, it was the fact that he was so flawed, so damaged, and such an insufferable jerk because of it that fascinated.

John O’Hara was one of those mid-century American novelists who soared to fame and acclaim.  But like a supernova his fame seems to have burnt out.  In his day he was as controversial as he was famous.  His defenders like John Updike compared him to Chekhov and wag Fran Lebowitz tagged him “The real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”  But many critics dismissed him as hack turning out sensationalized pot boilers for a low brow audience.  O’Hara himself said simply, “Being a cheap, ordinary guy, I have an instinct for what an ordinary guy likes.”

Of course O’Hara never really considered himself either cheap or ordinary.  He spent a life time chaffing against the social slights suffered as an outsider on the edge of social respectability and resenting that his father never sent him to Yale.  All of this became grist for his short stories and novels, but also earned him a well-deserved reputation as a needy social climber.

O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1905.  The town, 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, was in the heart of the state’s coal country on the banks of the Schuylkill River.  The river also provided power for a textile industry that included the Phillips Van Heusen Company of shirt fame.  The mines and textile mills generated enough local nabobs to populate mansions in a swanky part of the otherwise grimy city.  O’Hara’s physician father grew rich enough to live there.  But the O’Hara’s, Irish Catholics, were excluded from polite society tightly guarded by a WASP elite.  Both father and son bitterly resented it.

John’s father imbued him with the idea that if he went to Yale, it would be the ticket to respectability and acceptance both yearned for.  In pursuit of that dream his father had high academic expectations for his son and little tolerance for not meeting them. He was sent to Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York where he was named class poet but was otherwise a lackluster student.  To teach the boy a lesson of what life would be like without college, his dad sent him to work in the steel mills over summer breaks.  John hated the humiliation even more than the back breaking labor.

His disappointed father felt he had not earned the right to attend Yale and refused to send him.  Moreover when the elder man died shortly after John’s graduation in he left no provision in his will for his education.  It was a bitter blow from which he literally never recovered, spending the rest of his life pining for Yale and all it could have brought him.

Rather than attend a lesser school which he might be able to work his way through, O’Hara went to work as a reporter on the local Pottstown paper.  Among his assignments was covering the Pottsville Maroons, the town’s short-lived entry into the infant National Football League. 

But he soon threw even that up, going, as he described it, “on the bum. I traveled out west, worked on a steamer, took a job in an amusement park.”    Great experience for a writer, but for him a constant reminder that he had been “cheated” of a better life.

Eventually O’Hara drifted to New York City determined to become a writer.  He took a cheap room and began writing.  He supported himself with book and film reviews while concentrating on short stories. In 1928 the first of those stories appeared in the still young New Yorker.  He would soon become a fixture in its pages, publishing more than 200 stories in the magazine over the next decades.  The stories featured a keen eye for the details of life and sharp, believable dialogue.  They were often set in a thinly veiled version of Pottsville named Gibbsville and chronicled the lives and foibles of both the local elite and those who aspired to crash their party.

The stories were highly regarded and established O’Hara’s reputation.  They were even said to have established the New Yorker style of short story.  Updike and other future contributors like Saul Bellow were directly in his debt.

In 1934 O’Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra which he had been working on for years.  The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English, the owner of the Gibbsville Cadillac dealership and a younger member of the WASP social clique, destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide. O’Hara never gives any obvious cause or explanation for his behavior, which is apparently predestined by his character.  The novel was a critical—mostly—and popular success.  No less than Ernest Hemingway enthused, “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra.”  On the other hand Sinclair Lewis castigated the book as vulgar for it oblique but frank sexual episodes.

What is left of O’Hara’s literary reputation today rests on the short stories and this first novel.  In 1998, long after the literary establishment had turned on O’Hara, Modern Library ranked Appointment in Samarra 22nd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  As a result at least one critic said its placement on the list “was used to ridicule the entire project.”  Harsh.

If contemporary critics thought O’Hara’s first book was vulgar, they hadn’t seen anything yet.  BUtterfield 8 was based on a real life juicy scandal of speakeasy days when the dead body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull was found drown on Long Beach in Long Island. She was shown to be a good-time girl of easy virtue who drank and partied too much.  Her back story even included a childhood molestation by a former mayor of Boston. O’Hara made her Gloria Wandrous and put her in a mutually destructive an obsessive relationship with—you guessed it—a wealthy WASP.  A classic O’Hara story, according to one reviewer, in which he “He plumbs the fault lines of society where the slumming rich meet with the aspiring poor.”  Of course the book had plenty of juicy sex.

Just because it's Liz Taylor...in a slip, that's why.

It is best known now for the 1960 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey which took considerable liberties from the book—including resetting it in contemporary New York.  But like the novel, it sizzled with sex and won Taylor an Academy Award as best actress.

In 1940 O’Hara stitched together a popular series of stories that he ran in the New Yorker about a second rate nightclub entertainer in Chicago, a certified heel and louse, with big ambitions.  Written in the form a series of letters from Joey to his much more successful pal Ted, Pal Joey was more character study than story. 

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart inspired by the success of Porgy and Bess, which was based on a gritty novel, were on the lookout for darker, more serious material when they came on O’Hara’s book.  They enlisted the author to write the script for a new kind of musical.  The show Pal Joey opened to acclaim in 1940, just months after the book hit the stores with Gene Kelly in a star making turn in the lead.  The show featured two great American standards, If They Ask Me, I Could Write a Book and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.  It became the third longest running show of Rodgers and Hart’s long collaboration.  But it was also controversial.  Radio effectively banned playing songs from the show through most of the 1940’s because of their frank lyrics.  It was considered un-filmable in a Hollywood built on sunny, optimistic musicals.

It was not until 17 years later that Pal Joey finally made it to the screen in an adaptation staring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak and featuring aditional Rodgers and Hart songs cribbed from other shows, including My Funny Valentine.  The play, now considered a landmark classic, has been revived several times on Broadway and in London.

During World War II O’Hara returned to journalism.  He was a war correspondent in the Pacific Theater, although he would have preferred a gentleman’s commission like the graduates of Ivy League colleges received—or maybe an OSS posting like so many old Yalies.

After the war he returned to New York more confident in his own greatness as a writer on one hand and more than ever resentful of what he believed was the back hand snubbing by the snooty aristocrats of publishing and critical circles.  The more wounded he was, the harder he tried to become one of them.  He aped their manners, style of dress, and distinctive speech patterns.   He studied and memorized trivia and minutia about the Ivy schools and even the elite prep schools that fed them.  He stalked social gatherings.

But in perfect imitation of the self destructive social climbers of his fiction, O’Hara only further alienated the closed club he yearned to join.  Then he would get belligerent.  A leading critic referred to him simply as “a well known lout.”  The harder he tried, the harder the critics—most of them—got on his work.

He continued to churn out novels—O’Hara was nothing if not prolific—but most did not catch on.  Finally in 1955, the same year his reputation was somewhat buoyed by the release of the film version of Pal Joey, he won a highly controversial National Book Award for Ten North Fredrick,the story of Joe Chapin, an ambitious man who yearns to become President and his long suffering patrician wife, two rebellious children, and mistress.  The book was made into a film in 1958 starring Gary Cooper.

O’Hara had one more moderate success as a novelist before critics started simply ignoring his work and the public stopped buying.  In From the Terrace he painted a picture of a young lawyer from a family of small city aristocrats.  His mother has been driven to drink by a neglectful and distant father.  His wife is socially ambitious, self-pitying, and unfaithful.  The man finds solace with a young, tenderhearted exotic—read Jewish—do-gooder in the city.  O’Hara himself wrote the screenplay for the 1960 film version starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Ina Balin.

Probably contributing to O’Hara’s fading reputation as a novelist was his decision to become a columnist with a weekly book column, Sweet and Sour, for the Trenton Times-Advertiser, and a biweekly column, Appointment with O’Hara, for Collier’s magazine. In both venues he proved himself to be, “simultaneously embarrassing and infuriating in his vaingloriousness, vindictiveness, and general bellicosity.”  He bemoaned never receiving any academic honors, despite his firm conviction that he was the greatest living American Novelist.  He openly invited Yale to finally recognize his genius.  Yale considered it groveling and did not deign to respond.

But he still yearned for vindication. Privately, he told friends that he expected to be the next American recipient of the Nobel Prize.  He wrote to his daughter “I really think I will get it,” and “I want the Nobel prize... so bad I can taste it.”  It was not to be.  The next American to win the prize for literature was John Steinbeck in 1962.  He could barely conceal his disappointment

When he took this act to a broader stage as a nationally syndicated columnist based at Newsday in 1964, O’Hara showed himself to be not just a conservative, but a vicious reactionary.  Many young writers had suffered the stings of class prejudice. Most of them became liberals, even radicals.  Not O’Hara.  Just as he assumed the proper suites and accents of the WASP elite, so did he assume what he believed were the politics of the very richest barons of the boardroom and denizens of the old school clubs.

In his first Newsday column O’Hara proclaimed his willingness to spit in the eye of his critics: “Let’s get off to a really bad start.” He endorsed Barry Goldwater for President claiming that he spoke for the stolid fans of Lawrence Welk and blaming the downfall of the country on those who loved the jazz of Black musicians like Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie.  Then he railed at Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize.  It was downhill from there, week by week more antagonistic and outrageous.  Paper started dropping the syndicated feature.  In 53 weeks Newsday canceled the column.

The super rich graduates of his beloved Yale might have nodded approval, but the literary establishment was notoriously liberal.  The columns were like thumbs in their eyes.  O’Hara had successfully poisoned the well.

O’Hara continued publishing to diminishing success.  The last novel published during his life time was The Ewings in 1970.  A sequel to that novel more came out posthumously.  Neither was successful.

O’Hara died in Princeton, New Jersey, his longtime home, on April 13, 1970 at the age of 65. Just to make sure that everyone knew just who he was, he had this inscription carved on his headstone, “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.”  The final hubris of Pal Johnny. 

And the Oscars Go to….

Note:  Due to computer glitches that twice ate huge, unrecoverable chunks of drafts for this entry, it is a day late.

Quick quiz.  What woman won more Academy Awards than any other?  Meryl Streep your say?  Wrong.  Katherine Hepburn.  Nope.  Sally Field.  Don’t be ridiculous.  The woman with eight, count ‘em eight Oscars was not an actress at all but a diminutive woman outfitted for decades in enormous round glasses, black Moe Howard bangs, tasteful two piece suites, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Who else but costume designer to the stars Edith Head.

Edith Claire Posener was born on October 28, 1897—although she would later claim 1902, a date which still shows up in articles based on her Hollywood press clippings—in San Bernardino, California.  It was not a place she called home.  Indeed she never had a real hometown.  Her father, Max Posener, was a Jewish Russian emigrant and her mother, Anna E. Levy, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of German/Austrian Jews.  In the pecking order of Jewish society in America, they were mismatched.  It is likely Anna’s parents disapproved of the match and the couple eloped, or simply ran away since there is no evidence they ever married.

Max disappeared when Edith was small after a haberdashery he managed to open in San Bernardino failed.  A year later, in 1905 Anna married Frank Spare, a young Catholic engineer.  They were soon passing Edith off as their mutual daughter and she was raised a Catholic.   Her stepfather’s profession made the family virtual nomads has he found work in mining camps around the West.  The family stayed longer in Searchlight, Nevada than most towns.

Frank did earn a nice living an indulged his daughter in a first rate education.  Edith graduated with a B.A. and honors in French from the University of California at Berkley in 1919 and earned her Master’s in Romance Languages from Stanford a year later.

Then she was on her own in the world.  She started as a French teacher, first in a parochial school in La Jolla and then at the Hollywood School for Girls, a prestigious finishing school catering to the daughters of the booming movie business. In order to qualify for higher pay, she volunteered to teach art as well as French despite having no lessons in the subject since high school. 

Edith drawing skills were extremely limited so she enrolled for night classes at the Chouinard Art College.  While there she met Charles Head, the brother of a classmate.  They were married in the summer of 1923.  It was not a particularly happy marriage and the couple separated after a few years.  They did not divorce, however until 1934, presumably because of Edith’s Catholicism.  They had no children, but she gained the name she used throughout her professional life.

In 1924, bored with the life of a house wife in search of a good income, Edith naturally turned to the main local industry for work.  Despite absolutely no experience in fashion or design and still limited drafting skills, he applied to Paramount Pictures for work as a costume sketch artist under the direction of studio designers.  To get the job she submitted a portfolio borrowed from another student.  Not the last time she would finesse her career by cutting corners here and there.

Head, however, was a quick study.  Her drawing improved, and she began making suggestions.  Within a year she was designing for her first picture, The Wanderer, a Raoul Walsh film starring German actress Greta Nissen and Wallace Berry.  She soon became a Walsh favorite, the first of several directors who championed her career.

At first she toiled in the shadows of Paramount’s head designers, first Howard Greer, then Travis Banton both of who, as was the custom, would often claim her work as their own for screen credits.  It was a “tradition” Head continued after she got the top job long after it was both out of fashion and professionally frowned on, for which she would get a lot of criticism from fellow designers.

But within the studio, Heads work was championed not only by directors, but by leading ladies who appreciated her habit of consulting with them on her design to accommodate  when possible their taste and to accentuate their best features.  Most designers took a take-it-or-leave it attitude with actresses except for the handful of stars with real clout within the studio system.

Although she had enjoyed some studio publicity over the years, Head did not attract wide spread public attention until she put Dorothy Lamour in that famous sarong in 1937’s John Ford epic The Hurricane.  The dress made Lamour a star—Head kept her in versions of it in the subsequent Bring Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures—and Edith a celebrity. 

When Banton retired the following year, Head finally ascended to the throne as Paramount chief designer.  And she would keep an iron grip on the job for 29 more years.

Paramount was toward the rear of the pack of Hollywood Major Studios, much smaller than the relentless factory at MGM which produced as many as 200 pictures a year at its peak, or Warner Bros.  home of gritty urban dramas, “women’s movies”, and prestige bio-flicks.  In either of those she would have had to compete with rafts of designers to get the top assignments.  Paramount, on the other hand, made 20 or 30 features a year with a relatively thin stable of stars.  Head got her hand on any she desired, and had time to frequently go on loan to other studios at the bequest of stars or directors she had cultivated.  By the 1940’s “Costumes by Edith Head” seemed a ubiquitous credit.

In that decade she left her impression on many stars and memorable films including Paulette Goddard in Cat and the Canary; Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels and I Married a Witch; Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Double Indemnity; Ginger Rodgers in Lady in the Dark; Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, Loretta Young in The Farmer’s Daughter; and Bette Davis in June Bride.

Head’s star was rising, but she was not about to let studio publicity departments burry her contributions while hyping stars.  She made herself available for interviews   key entertainment reporters and gossip columnists in her debt by occasionally feeding them juicy—but never career damaging—studio gossip and usually flattering bits on the stars she cultivated.  She contributed fashion articles to magazines and staged costume shows for newsreels.  She even got Paramount to film a short documentary on her and her department.

Not that she was without critics, particularly among her fellow designers and those who toiled in studio wardrobe departments.  She had been an outspoken opponent of unionization by costume designers.  Always obsequious to authority, especially studio bosses, producers and name directors, she could be a tyrant and taskmistress over the employees under her, quick to shift blame for failures and to claim credit for their work.  She defended the later by saying that their designs were always only executed at her guidance, direction, and inspiration. 

Others were critical of her style, particularly in modern dress pictures calling her the Shirtwaist Queen for her frequent use of that basic style.  But shirtwaists are flattering on most women’s bodies.  Moreover studio bosses were explicit that designs be a “timeless” as possible, shunning passing fashion trends, so that pictures could easily be re-released, a big money maker.  The result was a classic clean but elegant Edith Head style.

In 1949 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the costume design to its annual Oscar Awards.  Beginning that year with The Emperor Waltz, a Bing Crosby musical co-starring Joan Fontaine, Head would be nominated for the next 19 consecutive years—sometimes  for multiple pictures in a year—and five more times after that with a total of 35 nominations.  Her eight trips home with the trophy were for The Heiress with Julie Harris, 1950; Samson and Delilah with Heddy Lamarr (color), 1951; All About Eve with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (black and white), 1951; A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters, 1952; Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn, 1954; Sabrina, again with Hepburn, 1954; The Facts of Life with Lucile Ball, 1960; and The Sting in 1974.

Of those films, the award for Sabrina was the most controversial.  For the key sequences when Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter blossoms into a Paris model, the star personally picked sketches by designer Hubert de Givenchy.  The outfits were constructed in Head’s wardrobe department and she did design most of the “American” clothes.  She refused to give de Givenchy screen credit with her for design.   Although the award was obviously mostly for his contributions, Head accepted it anyway.

Head was now a major celebrity in her own right.  There were not yet famous American fashion houses, and outside of New York society hardly anyone knew the name of a haute couture American designer.  Only the great Paris fashion houses were known to the public.  For many ordinary American women, the highly visible Head was high fashion, not just costume design.  Knock-off manufacturers kept Main Street dress shops across the country stocked with dresses and suits inspired by Head movies.

Even I, a pre-teen yahoo in Cheyenne, Wyoming knew who Edith Head was.  In those days we had a full hour for lunch at school and those who could, walked home to eat.  I did.  And everyday Mom had Art Linkletter’s House Party, a kind of stone age talk/variety program, on the TV.  Head made frequent, sometimes weekly, appearances on the show, on the show, often dishing out fashion advice to members of the audience.  At home, Mom paid strict attention.

She had now added Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock to her list of director champions and a galaxy of stars including Hepburn, Taylor, Baxter, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood as her devoted fans. 

Among her other screen triumphs in the ‘50’s and ‘60s were Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson; Rear Window and It Takes a Thief with Kelly; White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Crosby, and Danny Kaye; The Man Who Knew too Much with Doris Day; the DeMille epic Ten Commandments; Witness for the Prosecution with Marlene Dietrich; Separate Tables with Rita Hayworth; Vertigo with Kim Novak; and That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren.

Starting in 1963 with Love With a Proper Stranger through The Last Married Couple in America in 1980 Head made seven films with Wood.

Her last film for Paramount was the gaudy melodrama The Oscar, for which she naturally received another nomination for the statuette in 1967.  Then Head left her longtime home at Paramount and jumped to Universal, a studio on the rise since its days as the home of classic monster movies.  She followed Hitchcock there, the director with whom she worked most often. 

Age and increasingly fragile health slowed her up some, but she could still pull out some claims to glory.  There were five more Oscar nominations including nods for the musical Sweet Charity,  the costume epic The Man Who Would Be King, and the disaster movies Airport and Airport ’77.  After years of gaining glory for designing for beautiful Hollywood clothes horses, her final years were marked by films centering on men, including her final Oscar win, The Sting.

She also designed for Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn.  She also did work that evoked earlier years of Hollywood glory and her own screen work—Gable and Lombard with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, W.C. Fields and Me with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine, and Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  The latter, released in 1981, captured the look of ‘40’s film noir.  Released after her death, Martin dedicated the film to her.

Head’s husband since 1940, set designer Wiard Ihnen died in 1979 of prostate cancer.  The couple had no children.  Although Head continued to work until the end, her health was bad.  She suffered from myelofibrosis, an incurable bone marrow disease.  She died on October 24, 1981 four days shy of her 84th birthday.  She was buried unostentatiously under a simple bronze plaque in a Catholic section of Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens removed from the flashy graves and mausoleums of the stars she had decorated.