Salon.com > Lorenzo W. Milam

National Private Radio

Mon, 02 Jul 2001 19:30:00 +0000

We're told we should be celebrating the 30th anniversary of National Public Radio this month, but for many of us who love radio, and what it can do, and what it can be, I suspect it won't be much of a celebration. It'll probably be more like a wake.

National Public Radio was set up in 1972 as a national, noncommercial radio network that would, in the words of its founding charter, "serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard."

And for its first few years, it did exactly that. I remember lying in bed, listening to a talk on NPR one afternoon, sometime in 1979 or 1980. It was one of those programs that move the heart, that make chills go up and down one's spine -- doing exactly what radio does best. It was the rebroadcast of a speech that Joan Baez gave to the Washington Press Club, which told of her visit to a children's ward in a hospital in Hanoi. It was a gentle, poignant description of what our bombs had done to the young and the helpless and the innocent of Vietnam.

I recall thinking to myself that at last we had a national network that would give us something besides pop music, five-minute newscasts and ads. I also remember thinking that the work that many of us did in setting up alternative radio stations in the 1960s and 1970s had finally been vindicated, and that a new form of lively, involved radio would soon be commonplace.

Jerry Lewis speaks the truth

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Sometimes we forget that comedian Jerry Lewis started his career 50 years ago in a nightclub in New Jersey by acting like what we used to call a "retardee." He would cross his eyes, galumph about, drool and give his straight man Dean Martin a big wet kiss (on the mouth). I even remember him falling off the stage and clambering back up the steps, acting like a regular gooney bird. It's an act that he continued, in his movies, long after he'd split from Martin. It wasn't just funny -- it was pee-in-your-pants funny.

As he has for years, Lewis continues to headline the annual telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. It's no accident that "Jerry's kids" sometimes move about not unlike the comedian of yore. The "Merck Manual of Medical Information" defines "muscular dystrophies and other myopathies" as "muscle weakness causing waddling gait, toe-walking, lordosis, frequent falls, and difficulty in standing up and climbing stairs." Sounds just like the Jerry Lewis I remember from back in the day. He is, in more ways than not, one of his beloved kids.

Swimming through the looking glass

Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Two seminal events crop up at the beginning of "The Million Dollar Mermaid," Esther Williams' recently published autobiography. One occurs when Williams faces down a young man who had been living with her family, and raping her, regularly, for over two years:

"I was fifteen, and the years of hard swimming had packed muscle on my frame and made me very strong. Not as strong as a football player, but strong enough to inflict heavy damage. He had to know that I was through being his trembling, passive victim ... Our eyes locked and I refused to look away. Suddenly his face crumbled and he sank to his knees."

Already, she's a beautiful woman who has the power "to inflict heavy damage." With her will and her no-nonsense muscles -- it takes muscles to swim as gloriously as she did -- she puts an end to this early threat to her well-being.

Soon after, with the combination of beauty and power, she is on her way to the top, beginning with Billy Rose's Aquacades at the 1940 San Francisco World's Fair; and then -- shortly after -- as a rising young star at MGM. Swimming, always swimming; and smiling, always smiling.

Biography avoidance techniques of the rich and reclusive

Mon, 04 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Howard Hughes and J.D. Salinger are (or were) two of the most famous recluses in America. They only came out of hiding when someone tried to write about them -- at which time they would send out a noisy cavalry of lawyers waving cease-and-desist orders.

Hughes, it was said, lived on the top floor of a hotel he owned in Las Vegas, grew his hair and fingernails to Chinese Mandarin lengths and downed massive doses of codeine. However, when a fake autobiography was published, he and his lawyers let the world know that he was very much alive.

Salinger apparently lives in a tiny town in New Hampshire and only comes out of his shell when he sees a picture of a sexy young girl on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, or when someone has the bad taste to dig up his old stories out of the Saturday Evening Post -- dreadful World War II short stories with names like "The Last Day of the Last Furlough." As in Hughes' case, at times like these Salinger's lawyers surface, letting us all know, at the very least, that he's still alive and kicking.

Postcards from the Eddie

Mon, 27 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

By the time he was 15, Eddie Fisher was on three different radio shows in Philadelphia. By the time he was 21, his records were selling in the millions. "I had more consecutive hit records than the Beatles or Elvis Presley," he says in "Been There, Done That." "I had 65,000 fan clubs and the most widely broadcast program on television and radio."

After returning from the Korean War, Fisher married Debbie Reynolds, the girl next door. Theirs was the ideal marriage, at least to the media. "I've often been asked what I learned from that marriage," he says. "That's simple: Don't marry Debbie Reynolds."

Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records -- and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis "made drool eyes at me." He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

The not-a-biography of Richie Havens

Mon, 13 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Richie Havens grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was Native American, his mother from the Caribbean. He hung out in Greenwich Village in the '50s and '60s, made a few records, then appeared at Woodstock, where he sang "Freedom." Over the years, on the basis of this and the classic Woodstock documentary, Havens has managed to stay in the public eye. "They Can't Hide Us Anymore" is apparently another in a long list of credits designed to boost his image.

His philosophy, which he goes into at some length, is what you might call "standard deviation." Smoking grass is OK, using heroin is not. The American police are generally a bad lot, and the police where he grew up in the slums of Brooklyn were awful, but the soldiers at Woodstock who brought in (and took out) the performers in their helicopters were wonderful.

Southern Blacks have been mistreated over the years, War is Bad, and the War in Vietnam was Very Very Bad. Whales and porpoises are good, the environment needs to be protected and autistic kids know more than you think they do. And Havens has to be grateful for all the nice things that have happened to him - like making a living off music, making the records he wants to and meeting John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, among others.

Tell Laura I love her

Mon, 23 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Years ago, she would have been called "a common scold." Today, she's deemed "a pain in the ass," "dictatorial," "rude," "overemotional," "a fraud," "Laura the hen," "a psychological bag lady" and "our national mommy."

"I pretty much preach, teach and nag," Dr. Laura Schlessinger told a reporter from the Washington Post. "It's not pop psychology at all. If anything, it's a new genre ..."

Schlessinger can be heard three hours a day in almost every corner of America. They say that her audience exceeds 18 million on 450 radio stations and over 50 percent of her listeners are men. Fifty-thousand people try to call in each day. Her syndicated show recently sold for $71.5 million.

Schlessinger's themes are protect the child, practice family unity, use sexual restraint, stop making excuses and don't interrupt me. "Tell me what you think, not what you feel," she says. "Everything I say is true," she confesses.

She grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. She was a loner in high school and college, but no one could miss her intensity. She was fascinated with science, and got her Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Suite for heartbreak and name dropping

Thu, 29 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Famous names pop up in Judy Collins' "Singing Lessons" like pimples on the face of a juvenile delinquent. Leonard Cohen is an old buddy; so is Mimi Fariqa. Pete Seeger lies over there asleep on the couch, tired out after so many benefits, and Joan Baez turns up at a smoky '50s folk club. Faye Dunaway is around somewhere, along with Joan Rivers and John Denver. Joni Mitchell knows Collins well enough to say, "I don't believe you're still such a romantic." And Judy Blue Eyes also runs into Bob Dylan from time to time, along with Barbara Dane and Tom Paxton -- that "blue-eyed handsome singer with a sweet twang in his voice."

Even when Collins goes to jail in protest over some crummy war, they don't stick her in with the smelly drunks and freaked-out stoners. No, it's Stephen Stills, Tennessee Williams, poet Kenneth Koch, "Yale President Kingman Brewster" and "author Francine du Plessix Gray," merrily, all in the same cell together.

Mark O'Brien: Lifestyles of the blind and paralyzed

Mon, 12 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Once, at a press conference, someone asked Eleanor Roosevelt if polio had affected her husband's mind. There was a long pause, and she replied, yes, that it had affected his mind -- it had made him more sensitive to the pain of others.

It was an artful response to a difficult question, but the truth of the matter is that polio did and does affect the mind. It made Franklin D. Roosevelt think he could run the United States for four presidential terms, through depression and war, without killing himself. And it made Mark O'Brien, who died of complications from bronchitis on July 4 at age 49, think that he -- with scarcely an intact muscle in his whole body -- could live independently, on his own, and at the same time be a reporter, a baseball fan, a publisher, a journalist, a social critic and a poet.

He did all these things while living alone in an apartment in Berkeley, Calif. Not content with that, he went about town on a Stanford University-built electric gurney. That gurney, with Mark lying there on his back, enclosed in a plastic bubble, was forever and a day on the streets, O'Brien guiding the machine with his foot. He would zoom down the sidewalk, run off the curb and the whole thing would topple over -- dumping him out on the pavement. Somehow he would dragoon people around him into picking him up and sticking him back on his contraption, inside the cocoon, and then he would roar off again, ramming into walls and people, oblivious to the strange sight he was making in a city so used to strange sights.