One of the greatest Sunday "Peanuts" strips Charles Schultz ever drew, based on a personal experience, involves Charlie Brown wistfully telling a story about his father's short romance with another girl, a movie they shared together that brought out deep emotions that stayed with him for years, the actress who starred in it as a constant reminder of that time, and finding out decades after the fact he'd fixed his memories on the wrong actress. Those first bites of culture we experience at pivotal points in our lives stay tethered to our hearts, but often times they are not tethered to accuracy and facts. I was reminded of this classic strip when earlier this evening, I was chatting with my father and the topic of classic movie serials came up. He told me a story of how, while traveling as a youth, he had seen a couple chapters of an exciting tale he remembered as "Sanazaro," and that he would go off and on for years trying to track it down with no luck, sometimes forgetting that odd title and then when it came back to him, trying to intensely memorize it harder to locate it later. It was only after over five decades that, on a chance channel flip to Antonio Banderas on TV promoting a certain action film featuring him and Anthony Hopkins, that the serial he had been searching for so many years was in fact called SON OF ZORRO.
If you think movie titles are easily mangled, they do not hold a carbon arc to that menace of all karaoke nights, the misheard musical earworm. Plenty of hay and lazy comedy has been made out of the disconnect between song lyrics and what people think they hear. ("Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy," "A Nine, A Ten, I'll Lay Her Again...") Some of it can be attributed to bad hearing, mental projection based in personal issues, or, yes, that the artist themselves has failure to communicate. But what about that truly bizarre period of childhood, as my father experienced, when you hear a song that you can't quite make out, and since you're too young to know that certain things do not exist, you create an interpretation out of whole misbegotten cloth?
For example, in Beverly Cleary's book RAMONA THE PEST, first-time kindergartener Ramona Quimby spends 3/4 of her school year convinced that class starts with a song about a special lamp called a "dawnzer" that gives off a "lee light." Only months later do her parents explain there is no such thing, and clarify the actual lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner."
Yep, my nascent brain took a hit off that same lollipop.
When I was about seven, I discovered a stash of my dad's old '50's '45's at our family's summer cottage, and went apenuts playing them over and over again.
One of them was "You Bug Me, Baby" by Larry Williiams, a labelmate of Little Richard at Specialty Records. (He also sang "Bony Moronie" and "Dizzy, Miss Lizzy") It's an R&B reworking of a standard Irish jig called "The Irish Washerwoman" - to be exact, THE Irish jig that always gets used when someone wants quick stereotypical color in something - with lyrics written by Sonny Bono. There is a couplet in the song that goes
When we go riding in the pale moonlight
All I wanna do is hold-a you tight
However, factor that most rock'n'roll is more concerned with cool delivery and less concerned with enunciation and phonics, and add that to my limited childhood abilities with language and dialects, and maybe you will understand how, for at least a year or so, I would swear that he was singing
When we go riding in a Peramo Line
"Pee-kaa?"
"A Peramo Line, you say? Pray tell, Mr. Heuck, what the fuck is a Peramo Line?"
Cut me a break, I was seven!!! I was just beginning to learn about the '50's, I'd only seen a few episodes of "HAPPY DAYS," what did I know of what was real and what was a fiction in my head? I dunno: I figured something teenagers did for fun back then was get together with their dates, drive their convertibles on a long stretch of road, and call it a Peramo Line.
It gets worse. While I was grasping the concept of a Peramo Line, I initially also thought that the second line of the disputed couplet was
All I wanna do is put a hole in your tie
"Marc, how many girls do you know that wear ties on a regular basis, and why would her boyfriend want to put a hole in one of them?"
Hey, the song was called, "You Bug Me, Baby." For all I knew, putting a hole in her tie was how he got revenge on her for all the times she annoyed him. At least it took less time to get this part corrected; I was almost ten before I finally figured out that back in high school my dad wasn't double-dating with Rudy Muckinfuss to go on a Peramo Line.
But here's the kicker, here's the filip, the freeze-frame before we iris out and roll credits.
In high school Latin, I found out that "per amo" literally means "for love."
So even though this ritual never existed, and "Peramo" is an invented word that came out of that confused megalopolis I call a brain...I had been grammatically correct the entire time! If teenagers were going for a group drive with the specific goal of making out sometime during the trip, it would be acceptable English to call it a Peramo Line. BWAAAANNNG!!!
Meanwhile I googled "Sanazaro" and all I could muster, aside from a lot of people with that as a last name, was that it derived from 15th Century poet Jacopo Sanazzaro who wrote ARCADIA, and his name derived from Saint Nazarius, who was martyred with his protege Celsus for reasons at best apocryphal. Now, in fairness to Dear old Dad, my longtime grade school principal and church pastor was named Father Celsus, and like Zorro the Fox, he wore black and took no bullshit. But that is generous stretching at best, whereas my dubious disambigulation has a direct, if retroactive, relation to reality. So I think I trumped him.
Meanwhile, I'm not doing anything Friday night. Who wants to go riding on a Peramo Line with me?
There was a young bohemian who whimsically decided to skip out on his last quarter of college to see Europe, joined the Navy, met and married a woman overseas, and made a valiant attempt to become a writer, settling down in New York City for a spell. Around that same time another young bohemian who was already living in NYC made a small reputation from cartoons and novelty toys, then against all odds wrote a smash Broadway play, and spent an unsual amount of time trying to craft it into a feature film. Meanwhile back in Europe, yet another young bohemian, a rabid movie lover, was quickly turning out a string of hit movies, which, as one sage observed, were slashing film loose from decades of convention like a modern Alexander. In 1965, one of these people influenced a second of these three who created something that had a deep impact on the remaining party.
Herb Gardner's 1962 play A THOUSAND CLOWNS is now a familiar part of our cultural canon, so I don't think I need to explain much of the plot; its trope of a cheerfully unemployed wit forced to choose between his untethered life versus assuming more responsibility in order to hold the people he loves has popped up constantly in other works that have followed in its wake. While Wikipedia claims the character of Murray Burns was based in part on radio satirist (and A CHRISTMAS STORY source author) Jean Shepherd, it is just as likely a large amount was based on Gardner himself, since before he invented the glum and egotistical kids show host Chuckles the Chipmunk for the play, he himself served as foil and cartoonist for TV legend Shari Lewis on NYC's "KARTOON KLUB" in the '50's. It clearly continues to resonate with anyone who has ever fought valiantly to rebuke the status quo, or eaten multiple silver bowls of shit to keep a home for your kid...or been the kid who had to watch your parent eat all of that shit every day.
For as much as people write about the flawed morality of Burns' rebellion, that he is often selfish and impractical in his worldview, today it seems hard to believe that his lifestyle could ever be an issue. Plenty of people today have been spending months living off of unemployment, albeit not by choice as Burns does, and nobody outside of bloviating political media pundits would call them out as bums as Nick fears Murray will be by Childrens' Services. Murray to his credit has much more of a parental impulse than his unseen sister who dumps "Chubby" on him, and while he may not have full-time employment, he's definitely not a layabout sitting at home watching TV and eating Chuckle Chips while Nick goes to school; he's constantly soliciting Nick and anyone else within the range of his voice to visit the city, various landmarks, movie houses. He's taking advantage of free time and frugal living to enjoy the cultural opportunities of New York. It stands to reason one of his objections with 9-to-5 employment is that it leaves people too tired to do anything but come home, shlumpf in front of Chuckles the Chipmunk, and never go on any adventures. If anything, Murray is the prototype for Free-Range Parenting.
Also, I've always been struck by the lesser-acknowledged element of sexual rebellion present in the feature film of CLOWNS. While much action is still phrased in neutral words to appease what's left of the Production Code, we are presented with a story where a child is openly acknowledged to have been conceived by a promiscuous mother ("[Nick's father] is not a where question, that's a who question.") and is well aware his guardian is prone to having booty calls ("Your 'work' left her gloves."). When Murray and failed social worker Sandra Markowitz fall in love, there may be a partition around the bed when she spends the night, but sure as there's mustard on pastrami there ain't no wall of Jericho separating the two of them in that bed. For a movie that was being pitched to large family audiences, this was a pretty daring acknowledgement of the fact that "family" was beginning to be redefinied in society.
As a play, A THOUSAND CLOWNS ran for two years and like plenty of other successful shows, was optioned for a feature film by United Artists. Its director Fred Coe had produced film and television but never made a feature before, and as originally shot, was a mostly straightforward adaptation, with a little bit of outdoor action to open it up from its one-room setting. But after an initial edit, audiences and Gardner agreed that something just didn't work - all the laugh lines were there, but it just felt rote instead of dynamic. With the blessings of director Coe and the indulgence of editor Ralph Rosenblum, an unprecedented ten months was spent literally rebuilding the movie into the form that it is now known and loved. And for that, inspiration came from an unusual source...
By 1965, enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard was electrifying critics and audiences with films that would tip their influences from Hollywood while presenting unconventional methods of telling their stories. BREATHLESS was startling with its use of jump cuts and fat-free dialogue scenes where, like the movie crooks Jean-Paul Belmondo's character idolizes, they get in and get out. A WOMAN IS A WOMAN confounded viewers just like its character confounded her men, by talking of being inspired by musicals but always stopping short of actually delivering a big production number, the only full music scene a static shot of listening to a Charles Azanvour record. BAND OF OUTSIDERS stopped its rival robbers-in-love narrative for a Madison dance that would be given homage in both PULP FICTION and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. At that time more than anyone, Godard was the playful smartass who understood that films were not THEATER!, thus should they not be bound by arbitrary rules of storytelling.
As such, Godard's sense of nonconformity was the solution to Gardner's problem. Rosenblum, already a fan of Godard's editing technique from having used the style for a crucial sequence when he cut Sidney Lumet's THE PAWNBROKER, began to apply some Godardian touches again with Gardner's input. The author on his own shot footage of morning commuters and synchronized them to incongruous jazz and march music to satirize workaday drudgery. A long introductory sequence with Murray and Nick was not only shaved down, but cut up jaggedly to suggest that instead of a single morning's conversation, we were watching an ongoing argument they'd had for weeks. An exchange of florid endearments between Murray and Sandra was replaced by a tandem bike ride underscored with a sweet and crackly ukulele song. The bulk of the movie still stayed focused on dialogue exchanges in stationary settings, but now there was a sense that this movie was going to stay grounded when it needed to be grounded, and expand like the circus car metaphor that its title suggested when it needed to expand. To be sure, there would have been too much sentimentality in this story for the aloof Godard to really enjoy it as tribute, and in turn your average New York Nebbish would likely look at one of Godard's films and say, "This is cute. This is nice. WHAT THE HELL IS IT?" But these two disparate parties in the common ground allowed for a fine, timeless movie to emerge.
Which brings us to that third wannabeatnik from my opening. Yep, it's January 26th, and that's my father's birthday. And for about as long as I've been Grave as Peter about loving the movies, I've known that Roger Heuck has been a big fan of A THOUSAND CLOWNS. When MGM finally released it to burn-on-demand DVD in 2011, I asked for it as a Christmas gift, and I think he was not only quite pleased to buy it for me, he was probably a little jealous that he couldn't hold onto it for a wee bit longer after I left home with my copy. I don't know for certain if he saw it when the film emerged from that near-year's worth of editing by Gardner and Rosenblum to an triumphant reception in December 1965, or maybe a little bit later on, but between conversations about the film in particular and his youth in general, I can well fathom that this one has stuck with him because it had a resonance with that young man who hadn't yet fathomed my existence.
Long after taking that unexpected break from college, my father had finished school and his Navy service, married a French-Italian NATO secretary in Naples in April of 1964, and stayed there for a spell with her parents. He had been writing since high school, and once in Italy made his first serious attempt at living the romantic notion of the American expat writer. It didn't pan out to a lot of success, but it did lead to a short friendship with silent film star Ramon Novarro, who had briefly decamped to Naples as well. By late 1965, he and his wife moved to New York, where he continued writing and selling short stories. He paid bills by selling encyclopedias in shady neighborhoods, dressed so nattily he was often mistaken for the local numbers runner. I don't know precisely when this sojourn ended, but ultimately, his father summoned him back to Cincinnati to run the family business, and his artistic aspirations essentially went into mothballs until the late '80's, when he took up the painting for which he has been so richly lauded for in the present.
It's not hard to play drugstore psychiatrist as to what my father must have gravitated to in this movie. I'm sure he always felt a little frustrated at not being able to make his artistic ambitions pay the rent, and envied Murray's flights of fancy and his gift for countering drab authoritarianism with impish wit. Later on, the identification with Murray's sober acceptance of his fate must have been easily mirrored when he too had to knuckle down and take on a more utilitarian job. And once I was in the picture and started expressing my own esoteric self, we never officially celebrated Irving R. Feldman's birthday, but he knew where to find a good delicatessen, when and how to holler and put up an argument, and made sure I knew the subtle, sneaky, important reason why I was born a human being and not a chair.
If I may throw in a sidebar, another enormous fan of A THOUSAND CLOWNS was the beloved proprietor of L.A.'s New Beverly Cinema, Sherman Torgan. It was one of the first movies he screened when he began his repertory programming in May 1978. Sherman too probably saw a little of Murray and of Arnold Burns in himself as he took on what became the daunting task of keeping the lights on and the projectors fed over the decades. He also did a terrific if culturally unconventional job raising his son Michael, who now runs the show with the same endearing mixture of patience and exhaustion as his dad. When Sherman died the day after my birthday in 2007, it naturally devastated film lovers all over the city, but it wounded me especially, because Sherman was a bit of a surrogate father, getting me into shows and telling stories of the '70's, and because I looked up to him as an example of handling the world on your own terms, as opposed to what I was experiencing in my employment situation, where, to quote big brother Arnold, I was exercising my talent for surrender far too often. Truth be told, in the wake of that loss and other drama, I flat out quit that job for 24 hours, I was so emotional...but then I backtracked on that too and returned. When I had the floor at his memorial service, all I could do was quote those final lines of Murray's:
"I'm sure I speak for all of us here when I say that I...Now, I'd like to say right now that...that...Campers, I can't think of anything to say."
To this day, I'm sad that my dad and Sherman never got to meet.
In the years after that 1965 convergence, Jean-Luc Godard's playfulness sadly metamorphosed into cranky pseudo-polemical misanthropy, and Herb Gardner's plays and film adaptations met with varying degrees of success but never quite matched what he unleashed in that first youthful barbaric yawp. Roger Heuck, meanwhile, did a damned fine job adapting to his adulthood: while the marriage to my mother didn't work out, and after years of nobly keeping a sizable workforce employed and well-paid he saw the writing on the Wal-Mart and sold the company, but he also found the woman he wanted to spend all his days with, and found another venue to express his love of all that was beautiful and true in the world. Like Martin Balsam expressed in the monologue that won him an Best Supporting Actor Oscar, he got up, he went, he lied a little, he peddled a little, he watched the rules, he talked the talk...he was the best possible Roger Heuck.
So today may not be Irving R. Feldman's birthday, but it is my father's. At last check his plans are to go out to a nice Italian restaurant. With any luck, he won't have to order a flashlight with his carpaccio. Happy Birthday, Dad.
Today is the 72nd birthday of that Great American, Captain of Industry, Patron of the Arts, two-time invitee to the Bohemian Grove, and...uhh...oh yes, the guy who made me possible: my dad, Roger William Heuck. Last year, I marked the occasion with a retrospective on himself and the Heuck family that met with accolades beyond my wildest expectations. I don't think I can top what I wrote there in 2010: much like the fox auditioning for Porky Pig's talent agency, I can only do that trick once.
But it's a birthday and a son wants to show off pride in parenting. So considering that I spend a great deal of time flogging my own projects, and my father is a damned fine artist, the best thing I can do is stir up your interest in my dad's work. Now, unlike myself, he ain't exactly what you call a starving artist, though depending on the day's headlines you may get an earful from him about the havoc those pointy-headed intellectuals running the government are causing to his cashflow. But very like myself, he puts a lot of time and research into his work and takes great pride in it. And we both like to get a sale or two for our trouble.
So, here is a sampling of his body of art. And yes, all of these fine paintings can be purchased, and could be hanging in your own home right now. Imagine all the oohs and aahs of your friends when you tell them YES, that's a genuine Heuck in the house!
"Presidential Parlor"
"Day Lilies at Dusk"
"Immaculata Church Mt. Adams"
"Sunset & Sloop"
"Venice Aglow"
"Admiring Monet"
You can see many more images of his artworks that are in private collections, and get details on how to actually purchase these and others that are available, by visiting his website: RogerHeuck.com.
Happy Birthday, dad, and thank you for a lifetime of artistic encouragement and achievement.
January 26th is a momentous date in my movie history. It's my father's birthday. And besides the inherent logic of Dick Cavett's maxim that if your parents didn't have children, you probably won't either, I maintain that it was through him that I picked up my all-encompassing love of the movies. In all likelihood, it goes back even further.
In Cincinnati of 1875, Hubert Heuck had turned his successful saloon on 13th & Vine into a performance space, Heuck's Opera House, and created the "Burlesque Wheel," which united a lucrative network of theatres in eight cities that guaranteed 30 weeks of work for shows and performers. He took over a neighboring beerhall on 12th & 13th in 1882 to create a new Heuck's Opera House, rechristening the previous location Peoples Theatre. Both houses hosted acts like Buffalo Bill Cody, Sarah Bernhardt, and W.C. Fields. In 1905 he opened a third location on Fountain Square near Vine named the Lyric, which became a hub for New York's Shubert Organization. Eventually by the '30's, all these locations got acquired by RKO and converted to film presentation, and like that, the Heuck family was out of show business. However, Hubert's daughter-in-law Mathilde Eisenlohr Heuck launched a longer-lasting family business in kitchen gadgets, upon her invention of the turkey lacer.
Mathilde's grandson Roger William Heuck was a youth who loved going to the movies. In the Golden Age where one could find two or three single-screen theatres on a major city thoroughfare that was a short bus ride away, he would spend a Saturday hopping from one show to the next, without any parental supervision. Long Naval voyages were always made tolerable by the nightly 16mm screening that would take place aboard ship. During his bohemian days as a starving writer in Italy, he struck up a brief friendship and patronage with silent film great Ramon Novarro. And while ultimately he would return to Ohio to run the family business and take root in suburban security, he never lost the taste for two hours' diversion.
That prime directive, had it not been in Marc Edward Heuck's (yes, I was named with the company initials) blood already, was fed to him in the formative years. I started out a TV baby, enraptured by cartoons and sitcoms, but Dad steered me to the longform narratives. My first memory of going to the movies was seeing a subtitled film with my parents at the Esquire, a pair of scenes lodging in my brain and puzzling me for years as to where they came from. In my 20's, in the course of an ordinary laserdisc rental, I would discover it was Fellini's AMARCORD; appropriately, the translation of the title is "I Remember."
When my parents got divorced, my Friday night and Saturday afternoon visits with him would often entail going out to the movies. My palate was wonderfully expanded; as I once stated in an opening boast on that game show, I asked him one afternoon to take me to Disney's DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE, instead he took me to STAR WARS. (GENIUS!) My school-induced Catholic paranoia was gradually dissipated thanks to his lassez-faire attitude on taking me to R-rated fare. And in a refreshing divergence from the conventional wisdom, he was not satisfied going to the same theatre; we would go all over the city to see stuff. Of course, in the late '70's, there was still a healthy amount of neighborhood theatres and a smaller number of multiplexes, and some of the traveling impetus would be to accomodate other friends of his who would join us. But the fact remains that I was able to visit many beautiful venues - the Carousel, the Valley, the Ambassador, the 20th Century, the Westwood, the Kenwood, the Hyde Park, the Mt. Healthy drive-in - that are gone, and I'm the richer to have those memories, especially since there are still others from my past - the Alpha, the Mt. Adams, the Studio, and a dozen drive-ins - that I can only constantly wonder about. To this day, I continue to carry that spirit of adventure, sometimes driving an hour or more to see an exclusive run or a surviving single screen facility.
The one minor drawback of our moviegoing is that my father was not interested in exploitation or lowbrow fare, aside from the occasional slob comedy like STRIPES. So sadly, I would never be able to take in the almost annual triple bill of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT, and DON'T OPEN THE WINDOW that would blast the drive-ins, or any of the other horror and action outings that have now become bread-and-butter in my household, in lieu of actual bread and/or butter. But he was an early VCR adopter and cable subscriber, so to an extent, I was able to start perusing that stuff on my own. While he did intervene in my attempt to tape an ON-TV broadcast of a softcore edit of TRASHI with Lisa DeLeeuw, on other occasions, so long as he didn't have to watch, I was free to freak myself out, and any other poor suckers who entered the home. Ask certain members of the Roger Bacon class of 1987, and they may admit to still having trauma from my 17th birthday party and their first unprepared look at Stuart Gordon's RE-ANIMATOR.
Another important nugget of my upbringing was that on his own, my father took in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW 'round 1980, and was so blown away by the outrageous behavior and the catchy score he bought me the soundtrack album and a mini-poster for Christmas that year, and Dammit Janet if I didn't start memorizing those songs top to bottom. It wouldn't be until two years later that I finally got to see the movie, and by then midnight was already too late for him - my cousin David Beran took me instead. But the subtle message underneath this small gesture was that in a time where it was still a topic of fear and myth, my father was not hung up about gay people or unusual sexual expression, and he felt neither should I. And that's done wonders for my self-esteem, ways of representing myself, and my worldview, not to mention that I received early initiation into a community of kinks and kooks that as recently as last Saturday night has always made me welcome.
As I left home to become an adult, Dad finally had enough of trying to tilt at Wal-Mart windmills with turkey lacers, and began gradually phasing out all ties to the factory, to the point where today any family connection to the M.E. Heuck Company is in name only. While his cousin John Morrison would find himself back in the old Heuck business of sorts, forming the coalition that would save and rehab Clifton's Esquire theatre, Dad decided to explore another realm of the family tree, and follow the example of his great grand uncle John Henry Twachtman, and take up impressionist oil painting. He had always decorated the house for years with classic art; now he began to make it himself. And he's very good: The American Impressionist Society chose this painting, "Fog Lifting on Dollar Island," to be part of their 9th Annual National Exhibit at the CODA Gallery in Palm Beach back in November 2008.
As with many older fellows, Dad isn't as motivated to do the kind of trekking to the movies like we used to do. He's got a house on a hill and a beautiful downtown view and a bigger-than-sod-it-all widescreen TV, so between a nice sunset, a Netflix subscription, and Fox News, why ever leave the house? Not that there's many of our old haunts left anyhow. But when I come home to visit, I always make a game effort to get him out to something with an audience; I've taken him to KING KONG and THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, and he's enjoyed them. And I bring a stack of DVDs that I'm pretty sure he wouldn't seek out on his own. Sometimes the choices click, sometimes, eh, not so much. But it's always a good and simple pleasure to sit down to a movie with your dad.
Well, Big Rog, you're 71 today. The Lyric and the Opera House are flatland now, Peoples Theatre is now a pizza parlour run by nuns, which must give a good atheist like you a chuckle. But flip those digits around, and you get 17. Having picked up the cinema bug from you, I think you'll agree that when we watch a great movie, we feel as excited as a young buck ready to explore the world; it makes us feel like 17 again. And it happens to be your favorite song too.
Psst! Got some money burning a hole in your pocket? Go to RogerHeuck.com and buy a painting! Sure he loves my endearments, but that don't pay the bills!
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