Frank Beacham's Journal

On meeting Helene Hanff...

On meeting Helene Hanff...

In the fall, 1996, my mother visited me in New York. Besides taking her to my favorite haunts, I had arranged a surprise for her: a visit to meet Helene Hanff, the author of “84, Charing Cross Road,” one of my mother’s favorite books.

Truth be told, it was a surprise for me too. After thinking up the idea on a whim, I had not expected that Helene Hanff would be listed in the phone book, answer my call and invite us to her apartment.

The Columbus Day Parade was in full swing as we left the subway at 72nd Street that day and made our way to Ms. Hanff’s cluttered Upper East Side studio apartment, where she lived by herself.

She expressed incredulity that my mother had read her books in India and had wanted to meet her. While the two of them chatted and Ms. Hanff autographed my own much-loved copies of her books, I offered to tidy up her little space, turning her bed back into a sofa, emptying ashtrays, folding clothes and fetching her a cup of coffee.

On the wall outside her tiny kitchen, Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins stared down from a poster for the movie version of “84, Charing Cross Road.”

Ms. Hanff passed away six months later, in April 1997.

— Vidya Shenoi Madiraju

Thanks New York Times

Jack London, author, journalist and social activist, was born 146 years ago today

Jack London, author, journalist and social activist, was born 146 years ago today.

A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North" and "Love of Life."

He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen," and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

London was part of the radical literary group, "The Crowd," in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.

On this day in 1916 — 105 years ago — James Joyce's book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in New York

On this day in 1916 — 105 years ago — James Joyce's book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published in New York.

The book had been previously serialized in Ezra Pound's review, The Egoist.

Born in Dublin, James Joyce was the eldest of 10 children of a cheerful ne'er-do-well father who eventually went bankrupt. He attended Catholic school and University College in Dublin, where he learned Dano-Norwegian so he could read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in the original.

In college, he began a lifetime of literary rebellion, self-publishing an essay rejected by the school's literary magazine adviser. After graduation, Joyce moved to Paris. He resolved to study medicine to support himself while writing but soon gave it up. He returned to Dublin to visit his mother's deathbed and remained to teach school and work odd jobs.

On June 16, 1904, he met Nora, whom he convinced to return to Europe with him. The couple settled in Trieste, where they had two children, and then in Zurich. Joyce struggled with serious eye problems, undergoing 25 operations for various troubles between 1917 and 1930.

In 1914, he published The Dubliners. His 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, brought him fame and the patronage of several wealthy people, including Edith Rockefeller. In 1918, his revolutionary stream of consciousness novel, Ulysses, began to be serialized in the American journal Little Review.

However, the U.S. Post Office stopped the publication's distribution in December of that year on the grounds that the novel was obscene.

Sylvia Beach, owner of bookstore Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, where Joyce moved in 1920, published the novel herself in 1922, but it was banned in the United Kingdom and the United States until 1933.

Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939.

Joyce died in 1941.

Henry Miller, writer and painter, was born 130 years ago today

Henry Miller, writer and painter, was born 130 years ago today.

Miller was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association and mysticism — one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.

His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

Miller died of circulatory complications in Pacific Palisades in 1980 at the age of 88. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes scattered off Big Sur.

Above, Miller in his writing studio in Big Sur. He lived there between 1942 and 1962.

Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, on this day in 1835 — 186 years ago

Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, on this day in 1835 — 186 years ago.

Clemens was apprenticed to a printer at age 13 and later worked for his older brother, who established the Hannibal Journal.

In 1857, the Keokuk Daily Post commissioned him to write a series of comic travel letters, but after writing five he decided to become a steamboat captain instead. He signed on as a pilot's apprentice in 1857 and received his pilot's license in 1859, when he was 23. Clemens piloted boats for two years— until the Civil War halted steamboat traffic.

During his time as a pilot, he picked up the term "Mark Twain," a boatman's call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation. When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by "Mark Twain" and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

In 1864, he moved to San Francisco to work as a reporter. There, he wrote the story that made him famous, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. In 1866, he traveled to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union.

Next, he traveled the world writing accounts for papers in California and New York, which he later published the popular book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870, Clemens married the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he continued to write travel accounts and lecture.

In 1875, his novel Tom Sawyer was published, followed by Life on the Mississippi (1883) and his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1885). Bad investments left Clemens bankrupt after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, but he won back his financial standing with his next three books — Pudd'Nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895) and Following the Equator (1897).

In 1903, he and his family moved to Italy, where his wife died. Her death left him sad and bitter, and his work, while still humorous, grew distinctly darker. He died in 1910.

On this day in 1851 — 170 years ago — Harper & Brothers in New York published Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

On this day in 1851 — 170 years ago — Harper & Brothers in New York published Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

The book flopped. It was many years after the author’s death before the book was recognized as an American classic.

Born in New York City in 1819, Melville had a bout of scarlet fever in his childhood that left him with weak eyes. At age 19, he became a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool. He later sailed to the South Seas on a whaler, the Acushnet, which anchored in Polynesia.

He took part in a mutiny, was thrown in jail in Tahiti, escaped and wandered around the South Sea islands from 1841 to 1844. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, based on his Polynesian adventures. His second book, Omoo (1847), also dealt with the South Seas. The two novels became popular, although his third, Mardi (1849), more experimental in nature, failed to catch on with the public.

Melville bought a farm near Nathaniel Hawthorne's house in Massachusetts, and the two became close friends, although they later drifted apart. Melville wrote for journals and continued to publish novels.

Moby Dick, published on this day in 1851 in the U.S., was coolly received, but his short stories were highly acclaimed. Putnam's Monthly published "Bartleby the Scrivener" in 1853 and "Benito Cereno" in 1855.

In 1866, Melville won appointment as a customs inspector in New York, which brought him a stable income. He published several volumes of poetry. He continued to write until his death, and his last novel, Billy Budd, was not published until 1924.

Moby-Dick was dedicated to Hawthorne. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher.

Melville died at his home in New York City on Sept. 28, 1891 at age 72.

Thanks History.com

Writer Kurt Vonnegut was born 99 years ago today

Writer Kurt Vonnegut was born 99 years ago today.

Vonnegut’s works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction.

As a citizen, Vonnegut was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Born in Indianapolis to third-generation German-American parents, Vonnegut’s experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army.

While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February, 1945, which destroyed most of the city. Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility.

The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse-Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.

Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May, 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite.”

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working.

In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.

On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century.

A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide.”

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.

Albert Camus was born 108 years ago today

Albert Camus was born 108 years ago today.

Camus was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay, "The Rebel," that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.

Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label.

In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."

Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family. He studied at the University of Algiers, where he was goalkeeper for a university sports team until he contracted tuberculosis in 1930.

In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement after his split with Garry Davis's Citizens of the World movement, of which the surrealist André Breton was also a member. The formation of this group, according to Camus, was intended to "denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA" regarding their idolatry of technology.

Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”

Camus died on January 4, 1960 at the age of 46, in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's invitation to travel with him.

In the above photo, Camus reading the Red Cross newspaper “En Avant” (Ahead) on the terrace of the café, Les Deux Magots, Saint-Germain-des-Près, Paris, 1945

Photographer unknown

An excerpt from Frank Beacham's autobiography, The Whole World Was Watching: My Life Under the Media Microscope

An excerpt from my autobiography, The Whole World Was Watching: My Life Under the Media Microscope by Frank Beacham.

This section focuses on my first television job at WIS-TV in Columbia, South Carolina:

I started on the floor crew in the main studio, operating RCA TK-11 black and white cameras on the WIS’s 7 O’Clock news broadcast. In the afternoons, I did a live kids show called Mr. Knozit with Joe Pinner.

This was the era before zoom lenses on cameras. I had to learn to use prime lenses mounted on a turret, which were “racked,” or turned manually, when the camera was not switched on the air.

To zoom, one “trucked” the camera toward the subject, which meant physically pushing it. To “dolly” meant pushing the camera from side to side.

It took a lot of coordination and there were many mistakes, which the director — Charlie Roman — would always acknowledge by shouting loudly at the offender (usually me) into the camera’s headset.

On Mr. Knozit, I had the additional task of shooting live commercials for Joe Pinner. One commercial was for Sunbeam bread.

The idea was to say the bread was so fresh that it could be torn evenly down the middle. It would work consistently, but only if the bread was super fresh — meaning straight from the bakery. Otherwise, the stale bread slice wouldn’t tear straight. It was my job to secure fresh bread and make sure it would always tear straight on live television.

Joe Pinner declared that he could always tear the bread evenly, no matter how stale. Years later, we argued about this, with him refusing to acknowledge the incredible length we went to always have fresh bread on demand for him!

One day, when Joe was off, we had a guest host. He was William Shatner, a then 35-year-old actor who was in the second season of a new NBC television series called Star Trek. Shatner was doing promotional gigs around the country and ended up guest hosting this local kid’s show.

All went fine until a little girl on the Mr. Knozit set peed on Shatner’s knee. At the first commercial break, Shatner went nuts, shouting at me that such behavior was not part of his deal.

It was all I could do not to laugh. Captain James T. Kirk had lost his cool and it was hilarious to see a little girl do what those on the USS Enterprise could never achieve.

While I was on the studio crew, WIS was upgraded to color. The station bought RCA TK-42 color cameras, which were considerably larger than the older black and white models. In fact, we used to joke they were like Volkswagen Beetles on pedestals. They had zoom lenses and were a real challenge to control and operate.

The cameras were also electronically unstable. The engineers had to start tweaking them at 2 p.m. each day for use on the 7 p.m. newscast. Sometimes the camera’s bulk would get away from the operator. These were very heavy devices that needed a firm hand.

One time a color camera fell down an elevated lift between two studios. Apparently no one had touched it, but its forward momentum took over. We all viewed the scene with a sense of horror!

Sometimes, as low man on the totem pole, I’d get bizarre jobs. One involved James Dickey, the writer of the novel Deliverance in 1970, who was on the faculty at the University of South Carolina.

Since I was both a USC student and working at the television station, it was deemed appropriate by management for me to keep Dickey sober for a live television show scheduled at WIS that afternoon. I was to stay with him all day and make sure he didn’t drink.

It was probably known well in advance by all involved that I would fail at the job. In a biography of Dickey by Henry Hart, the author said the macho Dickey “drank oceanically,” slept with too many women and was a serial exaggerator. “I am crazy about being drunk,” Dickey wrote. “I like it like Patton liked war.”

Of course, Dickey drank hard all day, totally ignoring and laughing at my lame pleas for him to stay sober. He was a larger than life character and one I had zero influence over.

Yet, when he went to the television station that afternoon, he appeared totally sober on the air, defying all logic about how he could have consumed so much alcohol yet remained so coherent. Now that I look back, I wonder whether my assigned task of keeping Dickey sober that day was a big joke on me. I’ll never know for sure.

Perhaps a bigger challenge was working with Russ Benedict, the WIS sportscaster. At the time, Benedict had a nasty temper and I had learned to avoid him when possible.

But nothing could get me out of having to interrupt his 7 p.m. sportscast on April 4, 1968 with the bulletin that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. I lowered my head and walked past Benedict while he was on the air to deliver the bulletin to the anchorman on the other side.

After the show, Benedict blew up at me. He shouted and cursed, wanting to know how I had the nerve to interrupt his sports presentation. I said nothing because I knew I had to do it…that is until he picked up and threw a huge metal trash can in my direction.

At that point, I cursed and hightailed it out of the station, knowing it would be better to be gone while Benedict blew off steam. Later, I learned to like Benedict and we got along much better. He was a consummate professional and that counted for a lot with me.

I later worked with Benedict on weekends, shooting film of Clemson College (now University) football games on Saturday afternoon and flying to Columbia on a small Cessna plane to shoot University of South Carolina games at night. Then I would come into the station, process the monochrome film and edit highlights for Benedict’s sports shows.

The next morning, I would help produce and run live camera on Coach Paul Dietzel’s USC Sunday post-game show from the station. Those weekends were exhausting, but I was never short of money in those days!

Another character I encountered at this time was Bob Hope. I remember one very funny experience with him during a Benedict gig. I was at the football stadium at Clemson one Saturday afternoon during a marathon sports weekend. My routine as usual was to shoot the Clemson game and then go to the airport to fly in a small plane to Columbia for the night game at the University of South Carolina.

Hope, as a supporter of the Vietnam war, was not my favorite comedian during that era. However, he was performing a show later that night on the Clemson campus. In the press box, he stood two feet behind me — and as has happened before with other comedians — he chose me as the target of his comedy.

I was determined to ignore him, since I didn’t care for him and had to concentrate on operating the camera to shoot the game. But Hope, sensing a kill, would have none of that.

Hope started a non-stop stream of jokes targeted directly to me. Much of his riff was very funny and far more raunchy than the sanitized stuff I’d heard him do on television. Before long, I started laughing hysterically. The man, though I was determined not to like him, was hilarious.

Making me laugh pleased Hope to no end, and he kept piling on with more. I asked him to stop, since I could barely concentrate on shooting the game. But, no way — he wouldn’t quit. As I laughed harder and harder, he kept it up to the point of (my) near exhaustion.

When the game finally ended, I looked at Hope and he just smiled. He was very pleased that he had totally disrupted my entire film shoot. We shook hands and he left the press box, never to be seen by me again.

By 1968, I had moved off the camera floor crew to WIS News. It was here that I learned to do everything — including reporting a story, shooting film of it (sometimes running in front of the camera to do my own stand-up), processing the film, writing the script, editing the story and handling the live film projection for the news show.

I became a very early, primitive “one-man band.” Little did I know at the time, but I was learning multiple skill sets that would serve me well for the rest of my working life.

Jim Covington, the chief photographer at WIS, taught me everything I know about film. Jerry Pate, the 11 p.m. news anchor and only a few years older than me, taught me about news reporting.

Pate and I worked together, usually doing the 11 p.m. show by ourselves. It was the absolute best experience a young neophyte reporter could get and the skills I gained from that work still serve me well in everything I do today.

Mentors like Covington and Pate are very rare and I count my lucky stars to have learned and worked with them.

Also, my timing entering the news business couldn’t have been better. The year, 1968, was one of constantly breaking major stories — one after another. Within a few months of each other was the Orangeburg Massacre, the killing of three black college students, and its cover-up by South Carolina officials. The Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, followed by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The resignation from the presidential campaign by Lyndon Johnson. I covered them all.

South Carolina was always an impoverished state, and I was assigned a trip to Washington to report on North Dakota Sen. George McGovern’s 1968 hearings on hunger. I was a very green 20-year-old reporter, but I could not help being impressed by McGovern. Yes, he was a liberal of the highest order — one who wanted to help poor people live a better life. I liked that.

Throughout his career, McGovern was involved in issues related to agriculture, food, nutrition and hunger. As the first director of the Food for Peace program in 1961, McGovern oversaw the distribution of U.S. surpluses to the needy abroad and was instrumental in the creation of the United Nations-based World Food Program. He had plans to help places like South Carolina and I wanted to report the story. Of course, in South Carolina, he was attacked for trying to help the poor.

As I would learn, he was constantly attacked. As one facing the draft and the war in Vietnam, I appreciated McGovern’s opposition to the war. South Carolina didn’t like that either. He was unlike the racist hypocrites who served then and still serve in Congress from South Carolina. But the seed of a life-long friendship with McGovern had been planted. I genuinely liked the man and supported him for the rest of his life.

In the summer of 1968, it came time for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I wanted to go to Chicago with my boss, Jim Covington. South Carolina’s governor, Robert E. McNair, was on the short list for Sen. Hubert Humphrey’s vice president, though his unethical actions during the Orangeburg Massacre had already killed his chances. But it was still a possibility, McNair was led to believe.

For a while, the station management went back and forth about sending me. And then, one day, they said yes, I could go. It was a big, big break for a 20-year-old college kid and I knew it.

Covington, who has remained a lifelong friend, and I flew to Chicago, not knowing that we were stepping into history. We checked into the Palmer House and had access to absolutely everything at the convention. Security at the time was laughable. We were permitted anywhere and everywhere, and we went.

We sat in Gov. McNair’s hotel suite waiting on the call from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, which finally came with word that he had named Gov. Edmund Muskie of Maine, not McNair, as his vice presidential running mate. McNair was gracious, but must have been deeply hurt when he didn’t get the nod.

Humphrey, on the other hand, was a “coming of age” politician for me. I had covered him earlier as he campaigned. One funny Humphrey story happened earlier in the year when Covington taught me a trick involving the vice president, who the press had learned loved to talk and talk and talk some more.

Humphrey was coming into a small South Carolina airport and no other press people were there. The Secret Service was not about to let a lone cameraman near the vice president. So Covington rigged several microphones on stands in Humphrey’s view as he got off the plane. Only one microphone was actually operative, the others were fake.

Sure enough, the bait worked. Humphrey saw the row of microphones and was lured over to have a “press conference.” Covington got his one-man, exclusive interview with the talkative vice president using that little trick.

Humphrey had a consistently cheerful and upbeat demeanor, and his forceful advocacy of liberal causes led him to be nicknamed “The Happy Warrior” by many of his Senate colleagues and political journalists. For a while, I actually believed that nickname.

That is until the 1968 Democratic convention. I somehow found myself in a small room with the then presidential nominee. Suddenly, the happy warrior wasn’t so happy anymore.

Humphrey started cursing and blurting out a string of expletives that was startling to anyone who had bought his old “Happy Warrior” shtick. This naive South Carolina kid was totally stunned. In that very instant, any notion of truth in politics was over for me. Forever! Like I said, I came of age quickly in Chicago.

Later, while working at NBC, I was assigned to Humphrey’s funeral in Minnesota. All I remember was the 20-degree below zero temperature outside. My beard froze, I had trouble breathing and thought for a few minutes that I would die. I was never before so cold.

Then, I remembered Humphrey’s hot language in the little room in Chicago and could only smile at the grand irony of the moment. Humphrey had gotten the last laugh.

The Whole World Was Watching: My Life Under the Media Microscope by Frank Beacham is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple

Sylvia Plath was born 89 years ago today

Sylvia Plath on the beach, June, 1954

Photo by Gordon Ames Lameyer

Sylvia Plath was born 89 years ago today.

A poet, novelist and short story writer, Plath was born in Boston and studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer.

She married fellow poet, Ted Hughes, in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England. They had two children together, Frieda and Nicholas.

After suffering from depression from the age of 20 and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel.

In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems.

She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

Here, Plath reads “Daddy”