This Changed Everything—The Pill, the Sexual Revolution, and the Counter Revolution

A Canadian bottle of Searle's Enovid contraception tablets a/k/a The Pill/

It’s hard to believe that only sixty years ago today in 1960 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved marketing G. D. Searle Pharmaceutical Corporation’s Enovid as an oral contraceptive.  That makes May 9 sort of the birthday of The Pill. 

Of course its story goes back earlier.  Pioneering birth control advocate Margaret Sanger had long sought a safe and reliable form of contraception that women themselves could use and control unlike condoms.  In 1953 she brought her long-time associate and supporter Katharine McCormick together with noted hormonal biology researcher Dr. Gregory Pincus who had been trying to develop a contraceptive since 1951.  McCormick, a wealthy widow, agree to finance Pincus’s research and pay for trials of a breakthrough drug. 

Dr. Gregory Pincus--the Father or maybe step father of The Pill

Pincus had tried to convince Searle to support his research, but the company was afraid of becoming involved in such a controversial project.  A Searle researcher, Frank Colton, however had accidently discovered a formula that had a contraceptive affect.  Pincus was allowed to use it in his research and conduct trial tests.  Two million dollars of McCormick’s money financed the tests. 

In 1957 Searle agreed to market the drug when the FDA approved it for use in treating hormonal imbalances in gynecological cases.  Doctors recognized that it also was an effective and safe contraceptive and began to prescribe it for that purpose even without official FDA approval for that use.  Searle marketed the drug, but kept a low profile. 

The Pill was the fulfillment of Margaret Sanger's long cherished dream of reliable contraception that women could use and control themselves.  She swung the full strength of Planned Parenthood behind a campaign to get it legalized for all women in all states.

Sanger and her organization, Planned Parenthood, actively campaigned for FDA approval.  That approval finally came on this date in 1960.  

Timid and reluctant Searle quickly realized that they had a license to print money as women stormed their doctors’ offices to demand the Pill. 

Although the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960, contraceptives were not available to married women in all states until Supreme Court ruled in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and were not available to unmarried women in all states until the Eisenstadt v. Baird case in 1972.

The Pill is widely viewed as having far reaching cultural and behavioral consequences.  Just as conservatives had feared, one of the first notable affects was to liberate women sexually.  With the Pill they could, and did become sexually active in the way that only men could be before.  The Sexual Revolution   of the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s would not have been possible without the Pill and the wide spread availability of effective antibiotics for the treatment of venereal disease.

The Pill liberated women from the slavery of compulsory motherhood.  Women were able to be sexual beings, delay marriage and/or motherhood and enter the workforce in unprecedented numbers as self-supporting human beings. 

I doubt that this is a real ad--most likely a paste-up job either as satire or as part of an anti-Pill campaign.  But it does accurately suggest the sense of sexual liberation and empowerment /The Pill brought to millions of young women.

Most women did eventually elect to become mothers, but it was more on their own terms, at significantly older ages, and they tended to have small families with one or two children instead of the big, multi-children families that had earlier been standard.  The children that were born were both wanted and planned for.  The Pill both changed and enhanced the experience of motherhood. 

Although the Sexual Revolution was slowed by the stark realities of the AIDS  epidemic in the 1980’s, women still relied on the Pill—now available in a variety of compositions and dosages—to regulate family planning.  It became second nature and taken for granted. 

The rise of AIDS and a near pandemic of other sexually transmitted diseases took the wind out of the sails of the Sexual Revolution

While big cultural battles were being fought over abortion, however, a combination of quiet but persistent agitation by the religious right, soaring costs, and the increasing lack of insurance meant that contraception was harder for many women to find and afford.  Encouraged by the capture of several state governments by ultra conservatives who began to succeed in limiting abortion by making it as difficult and expensive as possible to obtain, religious right operatives turned to similar strategies to make it harder for women to obtain contraceptives.

Unplanned pregnancies, particularly among the young and uninsured, are once again of the rise.  Women are slowly becoming aware that gains thought secure decades ago must be fought for again.    

Religious Right zealots and right wing activists have targeted The Pill and Planned parenthood with alarming success.

It may be hard for the American Taliban to force the genie of independent women back into the bottle.  But they are trying mighty hard.  Perhaps it’s time for women and their allies to smash the bottle itself.

That Lucky Old Sun—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

That Lucky Old Sun sung by Johnny Cash.

The Sun is shining brightly in McHenry County but temperatures are plunging and it will be well below freezing Saturday morning with the possibility of a flake or two in the air.  That’s a recipe for Coronavirus ambivalence and angst just the mood for Johnny Cash’s version of That Lucky Old Sun with music by Beasley Smith and words by Haven Gillespie. Like Ol' Man River, its lyrics contrasted the toil and intense hardship of the singer’s life with the obliviousness of the natural world.

Frainkie Laine was featured on the sheet music for That Lucky Old Sun.

The song was clearly written to reflect the experience and voice of a Black laborer or sharecropper but Frankie Laine first scored a #1 hit with it in 1949 with another White singer, Vaughn Monroe hard on his heels.  Louis Armstrong only reached #24 the same year.

Other significant covers over the years included Pat Boone (yeesh!), Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson.

A grizzled Johnny Cash in his late years.

But Cash’s version is practically a scab ripped of wound.  In 2000 Cash released American III: Solitary Man, the third and final album in his Amirican series.  Between American II: Unchained and Solitary Man Cash’s health seriously declined and he was hospitalized with pneumonia.  The illness forced him to curtail his touring. The album contained his response to his illness with selections like Tom Petty’s I Won't Back Down and version of U2’s One.  Cash’s deep voice was rawer and raspier and stripped down arrangements by producer Rick Rubin let the songs shine, as one reviewer put it, as a “raw-boned meditation on redemption and death.”

The Other Inventor—Radio Day Celebrates Popov’s Claim

Alexander Popov--Russia's claimant as the inventor of radio.

We think we know with certainty the inventor of many of the devices that transformed the world in the span of about 100 years from an agricultural and muscle—human or animal—powered society little changed for millennia.  But often things are less clear than our tidy history texts would have it.  Many technologies like the automobile or television have multiple creators any one of which could be credited depending on what is defined as critical to the modern devise.  Sometimes the same results were obtained earlier than generally credited using technology that was ultimately ignored or abandoned. Sometimes the time is simply right and all of the groundwork has been laid so that individuals make the same breakthroughs almost simultaneously and completely independently.  Who gets the credit might be, as in the case of the telephone, be who wins the race to the patent office or has the sharpest lawyers as was the case with more than one of Thomas Edison’s creations.  Others might have gotten into the air before the Wright Brothers, but only their invention led directly to a worldwide industry.

Then there is the case of Alexander Stepanovich Popov who certainly built and demonstrated a gadget that had all of the essential elements of a radio receiver but did not at first conceive of its application as a communications device.  The Russians, as they are wont to do, proudly proclaim him as the inventor of the radio and celebrate the anniversary of his presentation of a scientific paper on May 7, 1895 as Radio Day.

Popov was born on March 16, 1859 the son of an Orthodox priest in Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovs Oblast in the Urals. Although interested in science from an early age, his father was determined to make him a priest and sent him to a seminary at the provincial capital of Yekaterinburg.  But after completing his basic education he rebelled and refused to continue on to theological school.  Instead in 1877 he enrolled at St. Petersburg University where he studied physics.  Popov was a brilliant student and graduated with honors in 1882,  He stayed at the university as a laboratory assistant and doing the equivalent of graduate studies while getting hands on experience with laboratory equipment and testing procedures.

In 1883 he left the university for a better paying and more prestigious position as an instructor at the laboratory at the Russian Navy’s Torpedo School at Kronstadt.  

Of course in Kronstadt Popov was not doing abstract basic research.  He was more engineer than scientist, working on practical problems for the Imperial Navy which was straining to join other great powers in modernizing their fleet.  One of the problems that he was investigating was the failure in the electrical wire insulation on steel ships.  He discovered it was caused by electrical resonance which in which oscillation in high frequency electrical current seemed to be somehow communicated over at least short distances led him to further research  on that topic.  That in turn led him to interest in the mysterious waves discovered by German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1888.

A trip in 1893 for the scientific conferences held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought Popov up to speed with the most recent and important discoveries in the fast moving research into Hertzian waves.  The next year he read about the accomplishment of Englishman Oliver Lodge who at a memorial lecture in London after Hertz’s demonstrated a device that showed what he considered the “semi-optical” nature the waves could cross distances and physically affect the behavior of target material.

Lodge constructed a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When waves emitted from an antenna about 50 feet way were applied to the electrodes, the coherer became conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it, with the impulse being picked up by a mirror galvanometer. After receiving a signal the realigned metal filings in the coherer had to be reset by a manually operated vibrator or by the vibrations of a bell placed on the table nearby that rang every time a transmission was received.

A recreation of Popov's Lightning Detector.

Popov concluded that a similar but improved and more sensitive device could detect lightning, which had been shown to emit Hertzian waves at a considerable distance giving the crews of steel ships time to prepare for approaching storms. 

Because I am lousy at technical description we’ll let Wikipedia summarize Popov’s Lightning Detector:

…the coherer was connected to an antenna, and to a separate circuit with a relay and battery  which operated an electric bell. The radio noise generated by a lightning strike turned on the coherer, the current from the battery was applied to the relay, closing its contacts, which applied current to the electromagnet of the bell, pulling the arm over to ring the bell. Popov added an innovative automatic reset feature of a “self tapping” coherer where the bell arm would spring back and tap the coherer, restoring it to its receptive state. The two chokes in the coherer’s leads prevented the radio signal across the coherer from short circuiting by passing through the DC circuit. He connected his receiver to a wire antenna suspended high in the air and to a ground. The antenna idea may have been based on a lightning rod and was an early use of a monopole wire aerial.

Got that?

Popov described his devise in the paper On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electric Oscillations delivered to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg on May 7, 1898 which the Russians, and most of the countries which were in the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union celebrate as the birth of radio.  But there is scant evidence and considerable doubt that he actually demonstrated creation when he read his paper that day.  Still his paper attracted considerable international attention, including reaching the Italian Guglielmo Marconi who was interested in applying Hertzian wave to wireless telegraphy.

Popov's main rival for the title of Father of Radio--Marconi with his radiotelegraph equipment.

Popov evidently did not at first recognize that his lightning detector could also be a communications devise.  It is unclear if he was aware of the near simultaneous work being done by Marconi.  But we do know that his earliest confirmed public demonstration came on March 24, 1896 when he set up a transmitter and a receiver in buildings on different St. Petersburg campuses and transmitted a Morse code message that rang the bell on the receiver and was transcribed onto a blackboard.  The message reportedly spelled out “Heinrich Hertz” in the Cyrillic alphabet.   Popov was reportedly moved to create an improved devise and demonstrate it after reading Marconi’s 1896 patent application for a radio telegraph system.  He had not taken any patents of his own.

Marconi had demonstrated his radio telegraph system employing significant differences and improvements over Lodge and Poplov’s early work by transmitting a message over half a mile in mid-1895, which was well documented and bolstered by the patent application which is why most Western countries credit  the Italian as the inventor of practical radio.  Marconi was also relentless in promoting his invention and exploring commercial applications.  

Popov’s system was taken up and improved upon by French entrepreneur Eugene Ducretet and began manufacturing equipment in competition with Marconi’s system in 1898.

A poster for a 1948 Soviet bio-pic about Popov references the dramatic communication with the stranded General-Admiral Apraksin.

Popov meanwhile set about making his system useful to his masters in the Czarist Navy.  He achieved ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 6 miles in 1898 and 30 miles in 1899.  In 1900 he set up a station on Hogland Island in the Gulf of Finland to relay communications with the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin which had run aground and then been iced in.  The ship was equipped with one of his transmitters but was too distant to communicate with the Russian Naval bases on the mainland.  The Hogland station acted as a relay to shore from where the signals were forwarded to Naval Headquarters by land line.  In the months before the ship could be reached and rescued more than 400 messages passed through the station between ship and shore.  The celebrated incident cemented the potential for radio in nautical safety.

Now a Russian celebrity, Popov was appointed a professor of the Electrotechnical Institute in 1901 and made its Director in 1905.  He did not live long to enjoy his new position.  He died of a brain hemorrhage on January 13, 1906 at the age of just 46.  The Institute was later re-named in his honor, just one of many tributes showered on him by the Czarist government and its Soviet successors.

Popov’s family was Romanoff loyalists who fled Russia to Manchuria in the dangerous chaos of the Revolution.  Eventually the extended family made it to the United States where his relatives and descendants have become distinguished scientists and academics in their own right.

One of several Soviet era or Russian postage stamps honoring Popov and/or Radio Day.

Despite their apostasy, the Soviet government in its nationalistic mode promoted Popov as the inventor of radio, along with other Russian inventors who could lay some claim to key inventions and technological innovations.  Some of those claims are ridiculous and flimsy, but Popov probably merits at least equal billing with Marconi in the West.

Zip A Dee Doo Dah—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

Zip A Dee Doo Dah sung by James Baskett in Song of the South.

No song exudes the exuberance of Spring like Zip A Dee Doo Dah.  In Disney’s 1946 break though combination of live action and animation it had everything—a pleasant rustic lane, chirping blue birds of happiness, clouds of pink cherry blossoms, and a carefree singin’ Darkie.  Uh oh—that’s where the storm clouds rolled in that pretty much kept the film and James Baskett’s performance as Uncle Remus from public viewing for 50 years.

The film was based on Georgia author Joel Chandler Harris’s collections of re-told Gullah folktales narrated by Uncle Remus, a kindly, happy-go-luck plantation worker in the Reconstruction era South.  Written in what passed for Black dialect the stories related the adventures of  Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear with roots going back to African tribal yarns to entertain a young white boy with fables with hidden life lessons.

Harris, an Atlanta journalist, considered his wildly popular books to be tributes to the stories he heard as a boy regionalist writers who used dialect in their work.

The original Disney theatrical poster for Song of the South featured only the white actors and cartoon characters so the film could be advertised and shown in the segregated South.

Walt Disney had wanted to bring the stories to the screen since the success of Dumbo in 1941 but shifting to war-time shorts and training films put the project on a back burner for years.  When it was revived Baskett, a busy radio actor with a little film experience, who had voiced Preacher Crow in Dumbo was his first choice to play Uncle Remus.

The movie was a big success and Zip A Dee Doo Dah, written by Allie Wrubel and Ray Gilbert, won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Song.  But Baskett was not nominated for either Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor.  There was considerable controversy over the snub and protests organized by the pesky NAACP.  In 1948 the Motion Picture Academy tried to atone by presenting Baskett with a special Oscar—the same designation once used for an award to Shirley Temple.  It was the first time any type of Academy award was presented to a Black man—Hattie McDaniel had previously won Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind.

Ingrid Bergman presented James Baskett with his Special Oscar.

When live filming began in 1945 Baskett was only 41 years old.  Although he had a full head of gray hair, he was much more youthful looking, and thinner,  than the elderly Uncle Remus.  A grizzled beard, a good deal of make-up, ragged clothes, and a beat-up hat transformed the actor.

With the Academy Award under his belt and a regular part on the half-hour radio version of Amos ‘n’ Andy Baskett was looking forward to a booming career when he suddenly died of a heart attack on July 9, 1948.  He was only 44 years old.

Disney re-released Song of the South just once and showed clips from the film on the Disneyland and Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV shows.  But by the late ‘60’s the film was under attack as pandering to racist stereotypes by organizations that included the NAACP which had once championed it.  Disney withdrew the film from circulation and from the regular rotation of the studio’s video re-issues. 

Zip A Dee Doo Dah was included in various CD collections of Disney songs, and, as we see, is seen on YouTube.  You can be the judge of how appropriate it is.

75 Years Ago—Nazi Surrender Ended Fighting in Europe but Not the War

A French post card depicting the German surrender at Reims from a painting by Lucien Jonas for the Musee de l' Armee in Paris.

Seventy-five years ago today on May 7, 1945 representatives of the German High Command signed articles of unconditional surrender to the Allies at a French school house in Reims used as the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). 

It had been apparent for weeks that the German position was hopeless.  Pressed on all sides, the Soviets were about to take Berlin when Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker leaving Grand Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor as President of the Reich.  Dönitz realized his only duty was ending the war as quickly as possible on the best possible terms for Germany.  He immediately began back channel negotiations. 

Meanwhile German armies began surrendering regionally.  German forces in Italy lay down arms on May 1.  Berlin surrendered on May 2 and two separate armies north of Berlin capitulated. 

On May 4 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Holland, Northern Germany, Denmark and all naval forces in the area.  General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedberg, acting on orders from Dönitz initially offered surrender to Western allies alone leaving the option for his troops to turn around to face the Russians.  Montgomery coldly refused leaving the Germans no other choice by surrender. 

The same day troops in Bavaria, the state whose mountains were once considered as a fallback position for a drawn out campaign of guerilla resistance, surrendered.  From the Channel Islands—held by Germany even after the Normandy Invasion—to Prague one after another German forces capitulated. 

Dönitz was informed that any surrender had to be conducted by a representative of the German High Command.  This was because the Allies did not want a repeat of the Armistice of the First World War which was signed by the government, not the military leading to the charge that the Army had been “stabbed in the back,” a key propaganda point when Germany re-armed. 

On May 6 Dönitz dispatched Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German General Staff to Reims with orders to offer surrender to Western forces only—exactly the same terms turned down my Montgomery two days earlier.  Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower harshly excoriated Jodl and bluntly demanded unconditional surrender to all allies or face continued prosecution of the war.  Informed of the terms, Dönitz wired his consent.  

Celebrating after the German surrender at Reims were General Ivan Susloparov, General Walter Bedell Smith, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder.

At 2:41 local time Jodl signed the Instrument of Surrender.  Eisenhower pointedly and as an intended snub did not personally accept or sign for the Allies assigning his Chief of Staff, the brusque General Walter Bedell Smith, to be principal signer for the Allies.  Also signing was General Ivan Susloparov, Soviet liaison to SHAEF.  Susloparov signed before he could get full authorization from his government so it was understood that a second surrender would be signed with the Soviets on the Eastern front.  French Major General François Sevez signed as the official witness. 

The surrender of all hostile forces was set for May 8, 11:01 pm Central European Time.  Shortly after midnight on May 8 the second surrender signing was conducted at the seat of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin.  Marshal Georgy Zhukov, of the Soviet High Command was the principal Allied signatory and was joined by British Air Chief Marshal Arthur William Tedder, as Deputy Supreme Commander SHAEF. American Lt. General Carl Spaz, Commander of United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe; and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny of the First French Army were witnesses.  Signing for the Germans were Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy; Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff of the Luftwaffe; and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces also signing on behalf of the Army.  The signing was completed fifteen minutes after midnight. 

By the terms signed in Rheims, fighting had already ceased just over an hour earlier.

When the news of the surrender broke there were joyous street celebrations like this one in London.

News of the end of the war in Europe broke on May 8, with spontaneous celebrations erupting across Europe and North America.  Street celebrations in Britain and France were especially jubilant.

President Harry Truman announced the end of the war in a somber broadcast with the words that “Flags of Freedom fly all over Europe today,” while reminding listeners that the war against Japan continued.  The knowledge that a long bloody war against Japan might still stretch ahead with American troops taking most of the casualties in a final assault against the home islands somewhat restrained celebrations in this country.

This knowledge also haunted many allied troops in Europe, who knew that they might be shipped to the Pacific.  Indeed some Air Force and Naval units were almost immediately re-directed and some of the crack U.S. Airborne, Infantry, and Armored divisions which had been in the thick of fighting for months were slated for re-assignment, as were many individual G.I.s whose units would be dissolved.  

Isolated German units continued to surrender for about a week.

Not all fighting ended on May 8. Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner of the Army Group Centre fought on in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but the Soviets turned all of their considerable might against him and by May 15 ceased all offensive operations with mop up in Czechoslovakia completed. 

The last battle in the war took place on May 15 in Slovenia and the last shots were fired on the Dutch island of Texel where Ukrainian prisoners of war had rebelled against the German occupiers on April 5 and kept up a guerilla campaign against them.  The German garrison had simply been forgotten in the shuffle and was afraid if they surrendered to the Ukrainians they would be executed en masse.

A final bit of business was dissolving the German Government under Dönitz.  The Allies had concentrated so hard on getting the armed forces to lay down their arms that they had neglected to demand that civil authority be transferred to them.  Worse, they had neglected to outline how a military occupation would work.  On May 28 a rather junior British officer was dispatched to the town of Flensburg to read to Dönitz Eisenhower’s edict dissolving the government and arresting all of its members.

In the meantime, local commanders took charge where they were.  On June 9 the Allies officially signed a Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Powers taking over civil authority at all levels in occupied Germany. 

Details of the shape of the occupation—and of the post war world—were agreed to at the Potsdam Conference by Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced after this agreement was reached at the Conference by Clement Attlee when Churchill stunningly suffered an election loss) and Soviet leader Josef Stalin. The agreement divided Germany, and its capital of Berlin in zones of Allied control. 

On December 13, 1946 President Truman finally declared that hostilities between the United States and Germany had ceased.  

The less dramatic and nearly forgotten final official end to World War II with the signing of Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany in 1990.  Seen Left to right:  Roland Dumas (France), Eduard Shevardnadze (USSR), James Baker (USA), Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FRG), Lothar de Maizière (GDR) and Douglas Hurd (United Kingdom).

Yet the war was not technically over.  Even after the establishment of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) as a U.S. ally and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1949, the U.S. felt it needed the fiction of an official state of war to maintain authority for stationing troops in Germany. 

Congress adopted a resolution declaring a formal end to hostilities in 1951.  Official occupation continued until 1955 when the West German government was given full sovereignty. 

In September 1990, more than 45 years after the surrender the Four Powers—the U.S., Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R—finally signed a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany with both German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic which allowed the two German states to unite, which they did on October 3, 1990.  The war was finally, officially over.

The Lusty Month of May—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

The Lusty Month of May from Camelot sung by Julie Andrews.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had a much randier assessment in their 1960 Broadway musical Camelot.

The musical was adapted from T. H. White’s 1958 The Once and Future King, the same Arthurian novel on which Disney based it’s 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone.  It was directed by Moss Hart and ran on Broadway for 873 performances, winning four Tony Awards and spawning several revivals, foreign productions, and the 1967 Warner Bros. film Camelot.  The stellar original cast included Richard Burton as King Arthur, Robert Goulet as Lancelot, David Hurst as Merlin, and Roddy McDowell as Mordred.  Julie Andrews who broke out to American stardom in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady was the duo’s first and only pick to play Guinevere.

Lerner & Loewe's  struggles to get Camelot on Broadway were chronicled in a Time cover piece.

Andrews was famously snubbed by Warner Bros. when Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.  Despite film musical triumphs in Disney’s Mary Poppins and the mega-hit Sound of Music and solid dramatic roles in The Americanization of Emily and Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtin, she did not appear in the 1967 film.   Miffed by Jack Warner’s insult, Andrews declined an offer to sell.  Largely in solidarity with her Burton, Goulet, and McDowell did likewise replaced with non-singer Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris, Franco Nero, and David Hemmings respectively.

John F. Kennedy was famously fond of Camelot and frequently played the enormously successful original cast album in the White House.  In a 1963 Life interview, Jacqueline Kennedy,  referenced a line from the Lerner and Loewe musical to describe the Kennedy era White House—Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”  The martyred President’s friend and speech writer Ted Sorensen cemented the public identification of the administration with Camelot in his subsequent books Kennedy in 1965 and The Kennedy Legacy in 1970.

The original Broadway Camelot poster.

In the play July Andrews’ Guinevere was hardly the nearly pristine white goddess portrayed in Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory and subsequent romances.  Instead she was a headstrong lass quite smitten by the attentions of Arthur.  And she was not shy about flaunting it in the song The Lusty Month of May.