Movie break (with Book Look): A TV network, allegedly appeasing Republicans in power, sacrifices dedicated journalists: Truth (2015), Part 1 of 5

A smooth docu-drama on a 12-year-old news-report controversy highlights a news producer who seems to have been railroaded*

Fifteenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

*The series title and subheads in some parts echo one of the film’s theses, but details are combed over in this mini-series partly to determine the title’s truth.

[Edits 8/8/16.]

Subsections below:

[introduction]

A story old and yet with relevant aspects; and a sketchy history of CBS anchormen

[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy story in a nutshell

Humorous sidebar: Another anchorman’s missteps (a controversy in 2015)

To come in Part 2:

[introduction]

[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy story in a nutshell

The trajectories of the two careers involved—Rather’s and Mapes’

“Hoist with their typeface”: The issue of the Killian documents, which still seems to stick in some controversy-principals’ craw (which I’d like to set aside, so the principals’ case can still be respected)

To come in Part 3:

[Story key B] Sidebar—A “score card” of the Texas Guard supervisors (and one or two others) who are relevant

The film’s story focusing on Mapes; and my main theses

Mapes’ memoir’s rooting and compelling nuggets, and my “meshing” a bit

[sub-subsection heads withheld here]

To come in Part 4:

Last nuggets from Mapes’ memoir

The dense, misguided last-minute editing

The document experts

Bill Burkett, relatively close up

A sketchy argument: Judging how much, or when, a case holds water

The debate between old media and new (Internet) media

To come in Part 5 (among other content):

How well does the film do? What do you readers need to “study up on” before seeing this film?

This entry also reviews, to an extent: Dan Rather, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012); and Mary Mapes, Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

(See disclaimer at end of this entry. I am not out to throw darts at CBS News; in fact, I regularly listen to its news on Newsradio 880 and in the evening news in the New York area [the Channel 2 and the network news], and 60 Minutes has long been my favorite TV program. Shows how nerdy I am.)

“Mary [Mapes] is a real reporter, an indefatigable reporter—the kind you make movies about.”

—Dan Rather, in his autobiography, Rather Outspoken, p. 36

Starting in the spring, I took out Dan Rather’s autobio (Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News) for two four-week periods, all in anticipation of doing a careful review of this film. Alas, I was unable to spend as much time on the book as I’d wanted, though I did reread, with interest, the section on the September 2004 George W. Bush/Air National Guard news piece and how it contributed to Rather’s “downfall” at CBS News. (I’d already read this episode a couple years ago or so.) Enough odd stuff has been going on in my life lately, with a busy enough work schedule for this summer for some weeks, that I have put off completing this review…while additional reading has come into the picture (Mary Mapes’ memoir Truth and Duty [St. Martin’s, 2005]). (I took out Rather’s book again recently.)

Meanwhile, enough has been said about Rather’s end with CBS—in the news, in his lawsuit against CBS filed in September 2007, in his autobio of 2012 (Grand Central Publishing), and now in this 2015 film, which itself was in development for about seven years—that I don’t expect, nor would I want, to say anything definitive about his anchorman’s career’s ending, even in my limited-aims review style. (Rather’s suit in 2007 alleged, among other issues, “breach of contract, interference with prospective economic advantage, and fraud, based on CBS’s ‘intentional mishandling’ of the aftermath of the Bush/Guard story” [his autobio, p. 228].)

A story old and yet with relevant aspects; and a sketchy history of CBS anchormen

I found the film Truth very interesting, but after seeing it one and a half times, I had to return it to the library (on a rapid-turnaround set of library terms) and also felt I could do it more justice later in the year. For those who like All the President’s Men (1976), and I suspect mostly journalism students value that today (but probably others politically-minded do, too), Truth is a pretty solid, competently done example of the genre. (I intend to view Truth again in coming days or weeks, as is needed to round out this review.)

I would suggest that those interested in the film read up on the political/journalism issues first—get a handle (from Wikipedia and elsewhere) on the issues of President George W. Bush and his deficient service in the Air National Guard of 1968-73, and how CBS reported the matter in September 2004, and the fallout from this (most known about is Dan Rather’s stepping down in 2005 as anchorman for the national CBS News [though he’d been set to retire about a year later, anyway]). Rather’s 2012 autobio has a very useful account—it is all of detailed, crisply eloquent, and readable—but maybe if you can find Mary Mapes’ book, that would prepare you, too, in especially useful ways. (This book seems a relatively rare bird in the New York State library system I frequently use.)

[Story key A] Sidebar—The messy story in a nutshell: On September 8, 2004, a story about George W. Bush was included in the second 60 Minutes program CBS ran in those days—60 Minutes II, it was called (having started in about 1998; the program’s first name Wikipedia articles repeatedly get wrong); it would eventually (in late 2004) be renamed 60 Minutes Wednesday, and be canceled in 2005 (Mapes, p. 335). Meanwhile, the old and staid 60 Minutes that had run since 1968 (and still does today, on Sunday; in TV terms, this means it’s been on “forever”) was still on. 60 Minutes II was a sort of junior-league program compared to its parent, with an angle to be a bit lighter (no surprise).

The September 8 segment on George W. Bush and his service in the Texas Air National Guard (starting in May 1968 and last documented as having any active status in May 1972, with a May 1973 report suggesting Bush had done nothing documented in this service for a year, and with his receiving an honorable discharge in October 1973, six months before his six-year term would ordinarily have ended). Dan Rather—who in those days, due to CBS News internal politics (alluded to in Rather’s and Mapes’ memoirs), could not have segments appear on the Sunday parent program—was the correspondent for the Bush segment. Mary Mapes was the lead “producer” for the segment, having worked on the story with several other people all of whom had solid track records as TV producers, researchers, or the like. After the story ran, starting the morning after it was broadcast, there welled up tremendous controversy mostly from members of the public, with blog postings especially presenting statements, arguments, and vitriol, with the potential of the Internet—in a sort of Googlebombing (what Rather calls a “blog swarm”)—to both noisily and attention-winningly present an issue, and make it seem to have wings and extent beyond what traditional media used to be able to do.

The central point of controversy was that documents presented in the report, allegedly written by a Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, who had been an officer in the Texas Air National Guard when Bush was in it and who was Bush’s supervising superior, were argued to be forgeries. In the aftermath, Rather issued an apology (on or just after September 20, and via a written statement [Mapes, pp. 233-34] as well as, I believe, a notice given on the evening news) for the Killian memos and for the now-purported deficiency of the September 8 report. Later CBS had an investigation of the reporting done by a panel headed by former Attorney General, and a Republican, Richard Thornburgh, and the ex-CEO of the Associated Press, Louis Boccardi. As a result of this, in early 2005 Mary Mapes was fired by CBS as a producer. Dan Rather, who would have retired in 2006 anyway, was led to step down as CBS News anchorman in March 2005. Other CBS employees were led to resign, with at least some receiving financial settlements in legal arrangements (per Rather).

I think this is the least controversial way the matter can be summarized, but I tell you, there are considerable details surrounding the situation, both regarding how Mapes developed the story (and, indeed, what her own respectable career in TV journalism was) and how CBS handled the aftermath of the controversy as it focused on the Killian memos. This turned out to be an enormously complicated story, but it turns out you can get a good grip on it from two books, Rather’s and Mapes’, and I wouldn’t have gone into all this if the film Truth didn’t seem like it needed some supplementary research to be able to assess it fairly.

Clearly, to dismiss the film outright as some CBS notables did last fall—indeed, the CBS network refused to carry ads for the film—is not quite justified, though as I know, a media firm will tend to defend its side in a highly pitched controversy “to the death,” despite what other parties have demonstrated, in court, in books, and otherwise.

##

The “world” of this film seems both relevant and yet, now, “old-time.” It’s hard to believe it’s 12 years ago the roots of this story happened. Network news still had the grip on audiences it did for many of the post–World War II decades, though its market share was declining; a major news reporter could still act on the idea that investigative reporting on some major shortcoming in a presidential candidate on a national news program could affect the presidential election. Consider how Donald Trump seems to wear his shortcomings, or at least his provocative “ways,” on his sleeve. Trump’s own status as “fit, by experience, to lead the military as its civilian commander in chief” (undercut in especially disturbing fashion this week) makes George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard look almost like a decorated stint in the Pacific theater during World War II. In fact, even an endorsement of Trump by Dick Cheney doesn’t sink him, though you could imagine this would have been the kiss of death for a Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 or 2008 elections.

For those too young to know much (or care), network-TV news used to be a major “campfire” around which the American middle class gathered to both be informed on major news of the day and adjust their opinions to what seemed right (or reasonable) to think about things. Famously, it was TV news that showed what the media could do—and what obstacles the Pentagon could be up against, public-relations-wise—if TV news crews could cover a war (like Vietnam) out in the grimy field and show it going badly for the U.S. It was in this context that the likes of Morley Safer, Dan Rather, and various print journalists (e.g., David Halberstam or the more memoir-oriented Michael Herr, who died recently) who later became Grand Old Men of the profession first cut their teeth. Whatever these journalists had done before the war to earn their early stripes, Vietnam really sealed them as battle-tested journalists. Watergate only added (over two fascinating years) to their experience and, as the public trusted them, to their credibility as national leaders of a sort.

##

The anchorman was a feature of TV news that existed in some form when TV news first started, by the early 1950s, with the likes of CBS’s Douglas Edwards. But it was Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) on CBS (and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC [see here]) who first defined the role, again starting during the Vietnam era. It’s remarkable to think that when Cronkite first started doing a nightly report as an anchor, the national TV news was only 15 minutes long. It was a bit of a big deal when it expanded to half an hour.

Cronkite’s tenure as anchorman ran from 1962 until 1981. In the latter year, he retired because he was about retirement age for CBS workers. Cronkite, who lived almost 30 years after this, has long been lionized as some kind of magisterial and exemplary figure in network TV news; and modern journalism students can choose to regard him as glowingly as they will. But for TV anchors as for so many others, a good reputation comes with time, and it helps that people forget flaws and other down-sides. By about 1971, Cronkite was still known enough among conservatives as a mouthpiece for the “liberal media” that the fictional Archie Bunker on All in the Family (also a CBS program) would show his crabby-conservative stripes and trigger laughs (however angled in the audience) by giving a “raspberry” to Cronkite when he was on.

If one were to write a mildly satirical history of TV news (say, if one were from a Far East country coming to grips with the wondrous if puzzling features of U.S. culture), one would say: “Well, you have a Jewish-owned TV network, with head offices in New York City [William S. Paley (1901-90), famously, was the owner of CBS who first developed it as a major network up through the early 1980s]; and to get the consuming public to trust your national news, you get some Scandinavian or inoffensively Germanic type, or some kind of relatable WASP type or a Midwestern type, whom the average middle-class viewers across the country would trust as if he was as right as rain. Then you pursue a liberal agenda in how you tend to report on things, without making this look obvious.” Cronkite came of age as an anchorman when this sort of thing was ongoing (and not really objected to) in the early decades of TV news. (A more-local correlate was Jim Jensen, the anchorman at the flagship station of WCBS-TV in New York, who worked as an anchorman there from about 1965 to about 1994, after some earlier issues [including apparent comportment among fellow reporters and, as I recall, in his rare instances of troubled demeanor when anchoring] concerning substance abuse he had suffered for years.)

Dan Rather was Cronkite’s successor as TV anchor, and would be the long-serving anchorman CBS News ever had, 24 years, from 1981 through spring 2005. (Cronkite served for 19 years.) It seems that Cronkite—who first helped Rather get some standing as when Rather reported on a hurricane in Texas and/or on the JFK assassination—later had harbored some mixed feelings about Rather. Rather in his 2012 book talks about someone who had first been his supervisor back in the 1960s speaking ill of him in (I believe) the 2004-05 period when Rather’s stock was falling precipitously, and I could well understand Rather’s pain at this.

Rather had some quirks (sometimes stumbling in his verbal delivery, for which he supposedly was given some coaching) and some passing, minor career missteps or quirky episodes, which were publicly noted, among them:

* the “Courage!” signoff to some of his broadcasts (in the 1990s?) (this is actually playfully referenced in the Truth film);

* the “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” odd encounter (in the 1990s?) with an eccentric on the street (Mapes [p. 223] says this eccentric eventually killed someone);

* his jousting with Nixon in about 1973 when Nixon asked, “Are you running for something, Mr. Rather?” and Rather answered, “No, sir. Are you?” (Rather recounts this in his memoir, p. 148);

* his tussle with George H.W. Bush regarding the Iran-contra scandal in an early 1988 (I believe that’s the time) TV interview that seemed to make Rather look bad more than it did Bush; Rather’s walking off the set when a sports event ran late, and the screen was dark for about six minutes).

But Rather must have served CBS well, for he held his position for 24 years. He was enough part of the culture that even someone like me, who was less than 10 years old in the 1960s, could remember his name as when the CBS news used to list, in screen titles, which reporters were reporting from where and their names were spoken (I recall an announcer intoning, during the initial “credits,” something like “Dan Rather, reporting from Saigon”)—and one of my few memories of my father’s jokes about items or figures from popular culture was his remark about “Rather Dan,” just a play on the name and nothing more. Rather was famously part of the 60 Minutes crew when that show built its reputation in the 1970s.

In general, Rather was a famous figure in U.S. culture, for news junkies and anyone else who had even mild knowledge of the American news/political scene. If Cronkite didn’t develop a reputation as “Uncle Walter,” a grand old figure who radiated splendid trustworthiness, Dan Rather would be the main face of CBS News, for the period (as it turned out) that bridged the post-Vietnam era through the end of the Cold War and up through “Y2K,” “9/11,” and the Iraq war of 2003 and after.

After Rather left the news division in 2005, there was a bit of a managerial struggle to replace him, and beef up ratings to boot. Katie Couric was brought in in 2006, and lasted about five years; with her, it was attempted to give a softer face to CBS News (someone, maybe CBS News exec Jeff Fager, remarked that he wanted to get rid of the “voice of God” aspect to anchoring the news that he implied was an off-putting flavor to Rather’s approach). Well, CBS got rid of the voice of God, and replaced it with a woman’s touch that, however hard Katie tried, came out seeming wimpy and not up to what was needed for such news.

The next anchor to last several years, and still in the seat, is Scott Pelley (who Rather said [memoir, p. 291] had worked with and for him), who has a Rather-like burden in both anchoring the nightly news and doing other assignments, such as pieces on 60 Minutes—a sideline that Rather was fulfilling when he had his fatal step that occasions the film Truth. To me, Pelley resembles no one among CBS anchors so much as Dan Rather—with the squarish head, the generous, sonorous bearing—but with a softened tone. It would seem CBS knew it had a good thing with Rather, so it brought on a “nicer” one for today’s younger audiences, in the form of Pelley. (Rather also commends Fager for continuing to uphold the core values of CBS News [p. 291].)

(Humorous sidebar: Another anchorman’s missteps. The role of the anchorperson, which today’s smartphone-centered millennials might find quaint, is still a solid “staple” of American life. [Tongue in cheek here.] One can imagine Brian Williams, after his stepping down as anchor of NBC in 2015 following an infraction that was in some ways worse than the problem of the 2004 Mapes report, sitting at home, wimpering: “What am I going to do now? I have this fund of a gravitas-exuding voice, a senatorial bearing—and nice power suits! I can’t just speak that way and wear those suits if I worked at Kinko’s!” “No,” his wife says with quiet, patient dryness, “you can’t.” As it happens, Williams has another on-camera role in the NBC fold. [And, seriously: As a measure of the opprobrium Williams was subjected to when this issue was out in 2015, for one of many examples, The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s main newspaper, had an article in its February 6, 2015, issue, “Vets rip Williams over ‘reprehensible’ war story”; this included a quote from the American Legion: “As an organization of American veterans, the American Legion finds this type of behavior [Williams’ having claimed to be subjected to combat danger during the 2003 phase of the Iraq war to which he really hadn’t] to be reprehensible, and we hope that Mr. Williams will redeem himself.” (p. 1)])

##

If you appreciate all this cultural history, you can understand how Truth—which is, for its story, focused mainly on Mary Mapes, the producer behind the Bush/Guard story—pretty much features Rather as a sort of side figure, and yet assumed as “a trusted, respectable figure.” Even Robert Redford in portraying him—Redford is in the shadows here, unlike his more central role in All the President’s Men—makes him seem like an old warhorse, with nothing left to prove, walking around his privileged environs as if among his main daily ambitions these days is a good bowel movement, and occasionally sporting a substantial drink in hand. (Redford’s Rather is like an old Pontiac GTO—he still runs as he always did, except he requires repeated topping-off infusions of oil—in this case, apparently labeled with the name “Dewar’s.”) 

Some snarky, younger types might scorn how Rather is presented here as if he is an Abe Lincoln, “assumed as respectable and quietly wonderful,” while the character lined up to go through a painful, wracking odyssey is his female key-support, Mary Mapes. I think Rather was depicted this way because the film knew its audience would basically be people who either (1) are journalists or enthusiasts about same, who don’t care to debate the ins and outs of Rather as a person or professional, or (2) those who grew up on the Rather news who know CBS by him more than by old Uncle Walter. If this strikes millennials as too square, that’s the way it goes (to adapt the old sign-off line Cronkite used).

But the way Cate Blanchett tries to bring Mary Mapes to life as the dynamo behind this story, in the process showing a minor tragedy of a serious female professional laid low by high-stakes office politics, is what is really of interest here, and hence viewers can just look at Rather as a sort of “female better half in the background” while the “male hero” of Mapes does all the story heavy-lifting.

##

(Disclaimer: I worked at Prentice Hall, the educational publisher, in 1997-98 in a temporary role [through a placement agency], when it was owned by Viacom, and was aware of the management-delivered changes in procedures there and the impending sale of Prentice Hall and other educational-publishing properties, all more or less obviously a result of high-level Viacom corporate imperatives. My attitude about that situation—or how I felt about the resulting later situation at Pearson, the company Prentice Hall was sold to by Viacom in about 1998 [when I worked for the Scott Foresman branch of it as a freelancer in 1999-2000 and for the Prentice Hall branch as a freelancer in 2001 and 2002]—should not affect my rationale for telling this story about CBS today.)

Piping up

Noisy cars resonate with ongoing blue-collar discontent, and possibly with emissions from a major presidential candidate

There’s been talk about how aspects of the 1970s are back. I’ve said this myself (such as in noticing certain social tones), but talk on it has been in the media in more varied and eloquent ways.

One way is the talk about “narcissism” again (cf., for one scholar’s take, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism [1979]); but this psychological category I always thought—whether it was 35 years ago or now—was a rather shallow diagnosis, at least when it came to understanding individuals. Common use of it, especially from a judgmental perspective, seems to accord to narcissism, which to me often seems to be more descriptive or about “traits,” more than its pronouncers seem to mean—that it reflects something especially deep or constitutional about a person.

Anyway, one thing that seems a “return of the ’70s” to me in the U.S., and I’ve anticipated talking about this in a past blog entry, is noisy exhaust pipes on certain cars and privately owned pickup trucks. Actually, the way this often features today is as a sort of “hot rod” aspect, or a certain status symbol among young, especially males. Back in the 1960s and ’70s—perhaps in the ’50s, too—a hot rod, a “souped-up” version of what had been an old/traditional-model car (like a mid-’50s Chevy, or a 1972 Buick Skylark) would not only have, say, a jacked-up back (and big rear tires), and “rally stripes,” but also exhaust pipes (and/or absence of a normal muffler) that were designed to make a loud noise.

Also, in the 1970s, when more average passenger cars were less well-made with rustproofing and such, people could go around after a while with rusted mufflers and exhaust pipes, and have noisy cars without really meaning to sound “like a hot rod.” That was more a feature of being a hapless middle-class sort who hadn’t yet gotten the car to the shop to get a replacement exhaust system.

I think that in recent decades, tightened car-inspection requirements and systems virtually eliminated noisy exhaust systems. And independently, cars had become made with better rust-proofing, I guess. I’m talking based on my experience with car-loaded New Jersey.

Well, as many of us know, noisy exhaust systems are back (as a feature of “underground culture”). In a big way. (How do these vehicles pass inspection? [Probably facilitating this development, inspection has become legally determined to be less frequent in recent years.])

Not only do diesel pick-ups often have big exhaust pipes and apparent “resonators” that make a loud sound—I’ve seen some exhaust pipes shaped toward their ends like a funnel, built for maximum noise, I guess—but little cars (a converted, old VW Rabbit or a Japanese car, let’s say), typical of late-teen and early-twenties male drivers, maybe with low suspension, have noisy “resonators” or whatever allows them to have noisy exhaust systems. They also, per impulse, drive the cars, with acceleration, to maximize the noise.

So-called “coal-rolling” is a different (and more socially disruptive) matter, where diesel vehicles seem to have, at the flick of a switch temporarily, the ability to alter the air/fuel flow (or something like that) in order to send out heightened belches of black clouds of exhaust. This has been done, mischievously, to obscure the view of drivers behind them. A state-law bill in New Jersey was pursued to make this illegal, and I think it was.

##

Well anyway, my main point here is that, along with other features of the blue-collar types that seem to be fueling the support of Donald Trump, it would seem—if anyone killed the time to do the calculations—that owning a car or pickup with a noisy exhaust system correlates positively with the driver’s supporting Donald Trump.

And on a “macro” level, this makes sense (aside from what you might say about the raucous doings at this week’s Republican National Convention). Donald Trump himself, with haystack hair and duck lips, with index finger uplifted and curved as he makes yet another point, seems like, with the effusion of noise that comes out of his pie-hole, a vehicle with a noisy exhaust pipe uttering a kind of air (and noise) pollution.

As a side matter, with the young guys around where I live and their noisy exhaust pipes, I’m reminded, a bit, of hearing one time that, supposedly, if (as a Mischief Night thing) you shoved a potato into the exhaust pipe of a car, when its driver tried to start it, he or she would find the car would stall. Which, on a physics level, may make some sense.

So maybe the young guys with their noise-pollution cars might be served by a potato shoved into their exhaust pipes overnight.

Which raises another question: what might happen if a potato was shoved into Donald Trump’s tail pipe?

Giving Us the Business: How did I handle an employer (with me freelance, in 2009) that was playing games with my pay?, Part 2 of 2

A short shot of unprofessionalism from “Dope Hole,” a tiny medical-promotions firm in Montclair, N.J.

Subsections below:

Intro sidebar: Staffer versus freelancer, for tax purposes: A notable point to understand for this story, and something you may be able to use in your career

Sudden uncertainty from Maura on aspects of my arrangement, and I start being hard about getting checks

The next, bigger check is delayed—and this time, inexcusably given the period after which it would void

The defamatory e-mail—sent to the wrong person!

A dog has the last say

[Edit 6/20/16.]

Part 1 is here, which you might want to read to get oriented on this firm (including why I call it what pseudonym I do) and on “Maura,” a fellow freelancer (of the decade 2001-10; not sure what she’s doing more recently) who had me in, very briefly, to this firm. Also, notes at the start of Part 1 sketch the provenance of this mini-series, which goes back to 2011, including why it’s edited in some quirky ways as it is. Lastly, there is a subsection at the end of Part 1 playfully featuring some fictional treatment of the two dogs that were really among the warm bodies inhabiting this firm’s offices: read about them, and you’ll understand my little joke at the end of this Part 2.

Intro sidebar: Staffer versus freelancer, for tax purposes: A notable point to understand for this story, and something you may be able to use in your career

Here is a basic description of the difference, in all sorts of business-world contexts, between being a company staffer and being a freelancer (or an “independent contractor”), and the differences regarding income tax for each. This may seem drearily technical, and it’s the sort of thing I learned about and applied to situations when needed through the late 1990s and maybe early in the 2000-10 decade, but which has seemed unnecessary to allude to until more recent years. But when it comes to the crossing of ethical and legal boundaries that you can find in medical-media (i.e., medical-promotion) firms (see End note in Part 1 on my use of “medical-media”), and such a simple thing as not getting your pay on time, this technical issue is a starting point for you to be able to say how “X situation is wrong in so many ways.”

When you are hired as a staffer, you are expected to be at the office full-time or part-time, whatever the initially agreed-on arrangement is. You are paid a wage (hourly or some other form) that has taxes taken out by the employer—federal and state income tax, Medicare and Medicaid deductions, etc. When it comes time to fill out your IRS 1040 form, if such a payroll job is the only kind of job you’ve had for the relevant year, you should have had all the taxes taken out by the employer to cover your tax bill.

When you are a freelancer, you are paid at a certain rate (hourly, per project, or whatever else) without taxes taken out. You come in on a mutually agreed-on schedule. There is a certain freedom in how you keep your hours—or rather, you have a certain responsibility (along with suiting your hours to yourself) to the employer in terms of being there when needed, perhaps changing times of work as mutually suitable, and so on. This flexibility may benefit the employer as well as you. (And by the way, for simple enough factual reasons I won’t give here, while young people seem entranced by the idea that being a freelancer means “freedom!,” I am poised to answer this with, “Yeah, freedom to worry.”)

The IRS long ago developed an interest in defining the difference between a staff employee and an independent contractor in order to, among other things, get paid withholding tax on a more frequent basis than just when you, the freelancer, pay your yearly takes. A lot of the features of each definition are pretty commonsensical: for one example, the staffer has his or her work controlled in some (fairly) close way, while the freelancer does not. I believe the IRS started distributing pamphlets or the like on this sort of thing in the 1980s, if not earlier; certainly I obtained such a pamphlet in the 1990s. And in 2007 I received a memo from an accountant at one publisher (i.e., of early-ish– grade educational books) that reflected the state’s interest in clamping down on abuses by employers that claimed to use workers in a freelance capacity when really they should have been classified as staffers.

By the time I worked at Dope Hole in 2009 (see Part 1 to get oriented)—when (as I’ll recount below) I alluded to the IRS difference between staffers and freelancers in some tough-minded communications that I sent a company manager (one of the husband-and-wife partners) when I was trying to get paid—on the one hand this seemed a kind of nerdy thing to do, and on the other hand, it seemed rather unbelievable that after all my years in the work world, and with every sort of weird situation with an employer’s handling money that I had dealt with (now at a medical-media firm, Dope Hole, where in general it seemed money flowed like wine), I would have to allude to this basic distinction in trying to get common-sense handling of my pay.

(To some extent, I could theoretically have taken the same sort of approach at up to two other medical-media firms that were slow to pay me in other years. But in 2007, with a larger firm, the issue was framed by the fact that I was employed there through a placement agency, so what I had to do in the event I did not get paid was consider filing a complaint with the state department of labor against the placement agency and not the firm I was working at, which I eventually did.)

The situation with Dope Hole was that, when suddenly the Big Pharma company (which was Dope Hole’s client, relevant in this story) apparently barked that it was time for it to move on an account, Dope Hole sprang into action and, among other things, hauled me in for editorial work willy-nilly. Then, after I was there about two weeks, suddenly there were odd money-related decisions such as one of the company’s managing partners (the wife of the husband-and-wife duo) deciding to reduce a freelance writer’s fee on a project from $1,000 to $300 (which I overheard quite intriguedly) because of an alleged problem with the already-done work. (Meanwhile, a group of the staffers would within a very few weeks all head off to, I believe, some Caribbean venue for an educational meeting the company had scheduled, which obviously was not cheap to do.)

Then, mediated through news from Maura (Part 1 describes her in some detail; I think this was explicitly or implicitly given to me by her within a week or so after I left), I was not to be had in for some time, and (whether this was apparent immediately or not) it looked to me for all the world as if the company wouldn’t have me in further at all. But within a very few weeks after I last worked there, the problem became my getting my pay…and I’ll get to this part of the story shortly.

##

Getting the first two of the three checks took me between one and two months.

Of course, the work I was doing was in-house, which tends to conform with the IRS definition of a staffer, and there was indeed some level of control by management of my work. Also, the fact that I was hauled in (and could only come in) when the company was suddenly pressed by an imperative to chop work out on an account suggests that I was handled as a staffer, at least in practical terms regarding the work. But of course the narrowly temporary way in which I was handled suggests that I was only a freelancer.

But this is only one of the many exquisitely ambiguous arrangements you can find in the medical-media world; for instance, what are called freelancers could be allowed in to work at an office for time-limited periods, but they are there to do intense, short-term work when the accounts being dealt with require it; and yet they could also be entered into the firm’s payroll system, in a temporary fashion. And then they’re dropped like a hot potato as soon as the work is done. So, technically speaking, are they staffers or freelancers?

In Dope Hole’s case, when I pointed out to the male managing partner the difference between a staffer and a contractor, he might, first, have indicated in a sort of petty-academic fashion that I was just a freelancer, but then what he did say—which was really the annoying part for me—was his contention, which he made in an almost snippy way, that freelancers were paid on “30 net,” an accounting term essentially meaning after 30 days. Though this technical way of handling (as I said in 2011) seems to be an increasingly common practice in use of freelancers at such companies, I would point out that I come from a time (flourishing from about 1990 to about 2007) when this would have been unacceptable, with the larger nexus meaning that the firm was calling in a freelancer to do work that is sometimes borderline-staff-like, and then making the worker wait for his pay almost as if it is a bill for paper or wood.

When we see below how Dope Hole actually sat (for 10 days) on one of my checks for half the time that the check was stipulated to be good, we can see that the balance sheet between “new business practice” and “darkening grey areas” leaned toward sleaze in this one company’s case.

[end of sidebar]

Sudden uncertainty from Maura on aspects of my arrangement, and I start being hard about getting checks

As I foreshadowed, when I was leaving—at first, I think, Maura left it open that I could be back, but it was unclear to me when—I asked her when I could expect my first check. She told me in a couple weeks, or such. Of course, due to my own personal circumstances, I became in dire need of the money.

(Here’s a clue for young readers: If you get acutely anguished at times about needing money for a pressing bill, don’t go into the print-media or publishing fields. Sometimes, I found, if you’re really desperate to haul in a little money you’re owed, the tendency of firms not to accommodate you [on whatever excuse]—almost as if they sense your anguish and want to spite you—can be especially galling or upsetting, even when technically the firm should be paying you sooner rather than later.)

Within (I think) the next week or two, I asked her again once or twice by e-mail. She suggested the first check would be available three weeks after the first week of my work there, or such. Then the three-week end point came, and no check. (As it would turn out, this “three weeks” claim did not exactly follow the company’s supposed “30 net” policy.)

Whatever lengths of time she specifically told me, and however many times I asked Maura when my first check was coming, I do know I gave the company the time she’d said to get me the check, and I didn’t think at first that she had been talking so loosely just to temporarily get me out of her hair. Things hadn’t gotten that bad at first.

Finally, based (I think) on what I felt I had a right to do at that point in my medical-media career—and perhaps with my nerves all the rawer because of the just-past Bauer suit—I sent a certified-mail letter to the male half of the husband-and-wife managing partners of the company, demanding that I get my first check soon. I believe the letter included a contention that his firm’s using an editor like me as, in effect, something of a staffer (in terms of features of how I was managed) while it handled my pay as if I was a freelancer (which latter I was generally functioning as, anyway) after I’d done a lengthy term of work ran contrary to IRS rules on the difference between a staffer and an independent consultant.

As I’ve suggested in the sidebar, I hadn’t actually had to deal with this sort of issue with an employer for some years; and, in fact, I felt it was a bit of a stretch applying this particular standard at this point. But I felt that doing so was (tactically) worthwhile. I think also I felt I had given the firm adequate time in accordance with the three-week guideline Maura had spoken of, and I was becoming worried maybe they wouldn’t pay me (remember the one partner’s dropping a freelance writer’s fee by 70 percent, after the agreement was made on the fee and the work had been turned in). To my letter I added some kind of legal threat.

I heard back from the male managing partner—he e-mailed me, but shortly afterward, we also talked on the phone. He fairly lectured me on the phone about the tone of my letter, as if I was incontrovertibly out of line and could risk not getting future work with the place if I dealt with the issue like that again. (I had already been thinking with what seemed moderate good sense, quite based on all available indications, that they wouldn’t use me again anyway—or let me put it this way: Maura’s suddenly giving me no more time and no promise of when I’d work again left me, for my own practical needs, bereft enough that I was perfectly ready to write Dope Hole off completely. But these little places can be so arrogant that they can put you in this sort of position, and still they want to reserve the right to call you up whenever they pleased, which of course didn’t really mesh with your own practical realities. [End note] So, in short, my own position was that I was finished with the company, thus the managing partner’s lecturing me about jeopardizing my prospects there was beside the point and ludicrous.)

In the conversation with him, I held to my basic position about why I’d sent my demanding letter—at least as to my attitude (and I wasn’t cockily defiant but just remained confident in my own practical rationale for having sent the letter). I also probably argued a little, logically, in defense of the letter. I do know the male managing partner seemed miffed that I wouldn’t be cowed or “put into line” by him.

When privately I hypothesized after all this that (along with other facts that I more surely knew) he was about 10 years younger than I, I felt that on this basis alone, he was an arrogant sort to think he should be cowing me on the check-timing issue and my manner in dealing with him about it.

One thing he said is crucial: he said they paid “30 days net,” meaning a freelancer’s check was typically cut 30 days after the invoice had been received. This, to me—as I argued in the sidebar above—did not undercut, and in fact it supported, my beef about people being used as semi-staffers to do editorial work, but being paid as freelancers. And for a delay in freelance pay, 30 days was rather long, in my experience. (Believe it or not, at some earlier point, Maura made the contention with me that 30 days was an industry standard for the delay in paying freelancers, which I knew to be false—and which she should have known to be false—it wasn’t typical of at least some of the work situations we’d both been in earlier.)

Suffice it to say that the male managing partner and I were at a bit of a standoff in our philosophies on the matter, but he stated that in fact the check would be cut at the 30-day mark.

The first check was on the small side, covering a few days. The next check would be the biggest by far. And of course by the time I pressed to get it, I desperately needed it.

The male managing partner had been chafed by me with my legal-type demanding letter. My first check had gone out. One might say, in a kind of concert with the managing partner’s presuppositions, would I jeopardize my standing with these people by getting tough with them again, or had I learned a needed lesson, to be patient or the like?

The next, bigger check is delayed—and this time, inexcusably given the period after which it would void

The 30-day period for the second, big check came and went. Where was the check? I sent another demanding communication, this time by e-mail (I think), and copied to (I think) more than one person who should have been in charge of my pay. I was about as tough in my tone and wording as I had been with the certified letter, and yet this was as you would have expected me not to be if I had “backed down” out of discretion, or with some kind of apologetic attitude following the earlier letter.

This time I guess I really got them flustered. The male managing partner, I think, sent me an e-mail in answer, saying the check would go out and that this would finish my business with the company. He probably felt he put me in my place with that one.

Was I too headlong or headstrong in sending the second tough message? No: as I found when it came, the second, big check had been cut and dated about 10 days before I actually got it in the mail—it had been sitting idly on someone’s desk, apparently—and it would have automatically become void, per a notice printed on it, 20 days after it was cut. So it was delayed in being sent to me for half the time the check was good.

Enough said.

There was a third, small check I expected from them, but I thought that with how things wrapped up with the second, big check, I shouldn’t expect it. But eventually I got it, and on time—without having sent any communication to spur getting it.

The defamatory e-mail—sent to the wrong person!

As if the development with the second check wasn’t bad enough—and mind you, it never thrills me (as I wrote in 2011; times have changed) to lose the chance to work at any medical-media place in whose door I can get my foot, but I won’t be made a fool of by these places either—my association with Maura M. also ended quite unceremoniously, or quite tackily.

Amid the flurry of heated response to my second demanding message, she sent an e-mail that claimed that I’d long-term been “eccentric” but now proved to be “deranged.” How I knew about this e-mail is that, though clearly she meant it for all her relevant coworkers at the company and not me, she sent it only to me—a good example of her capacity for errors.

(One irony of this message, of course, is that, if they’d received it, it could have made her superiors ask, “Well, if he was such an eccentric, why did you call him in on short notice as if he was a choice editor for such a purpose?” Perhaps it isn’t surprising to say that, once, I saw two of the partners exchange a cliquish-wiseass look—as if acknowledging “as proven” Maura’s eccentricity, or such—over something about Maura’s relating to her son when he was visiting her in the office one day.)

In case her hypocrisy—however heatedly you want to regard it—in regard to my being “eccentric” or “deranged” isn’t clear, not only did she (more generally) engage in her trademark talking to herself and odd sighs and groans in the Dope Hole office when I shared the small editorial area with her (see Part 1 on these behaviors), but one behavior she engaged in was just nuts. She would start sniffling, on a number of days I was there, as if she started having an allergic reaction, or had a cold. The sniffling was apparently limited to the office. She really sounded as if you didn’t want her breathing near you.

Once she was in a tizzy of looking for some document, and for no clear reason at all, she picked up my coat, which due to the lack of coatracks nearby I kept lying on one side of my desk, and she fluffed it around as she ostensibly looked for the document, which was totally unnecessary to the task of seeking the document. This while she was sniffling ostentatiously. I was anxious in watching her do that: at times since, I have pictured myself berating her for her mucking around with my coat while she sounded as if she had a cold: What the eff are you doing, Maura, PUT IT DOWN!

It may seem sad that a work association with one colleague ends for all time like this—I have not been inclined to work with Maura again, after her nasty e-mail—but in a way I don’t care one way or the other. The general economic world in this country has gotten harder and meaner. The medical-media realm (I said in 2011) has gotten crazier and seedier. Maybe Maura and I were both respectively ripe never to work together again, for our own quite-honorable sakes.

##

The immediately above is one of the original crabby ending paragraphs of an early draft, but as I finish editing this entry (in 2011…and in 2016), I can be a little more light-spirited about the story….

As with the “Foreign Legion” story (another anecdote originally available in 2011, and differently disposed of later), with Dope Hole the anger that a cheap-spirited place, first, historically leaves you with, consequently, psychologically leaves you angry when you try to fashion a publishable story about it; but the process eventually gets less burdensome.

But I don’t think I’ve entirely lost the possibly-recurrent “revenant” angry thought I have that Maura herself, somehow, seems to have left me with—a frustration about getting my money from that place, when she kept promising me (though whether she was deliberately disingenuous isn’t clear) that it would be out in a couple weeks or so, yet this was not the “30 net” terms under which the male managing partner was going to disburse it; and meanwhile in everyday-life terms, the money wasn’t out yet….

Or, I should say: In 2016, this situation is basically water under the bridge, except that if someone (in a conversation, especially if the person really didn’t know these kinds of firms or industry) were to deny or dismiss out of hand this whole account, then, along with whatever else, my anger at the 2009 situation might reconstitute. That’s how it is with these things; I’ve found that in today’s history-denying climate, someone’s doing Stalinist airbrushing of your solid past experience raises more anger (including from an original source of trouble) than it has any sense or positive effects.

So, if the 2009 anger were reconstituted, I might echo in my head my imperious, shrieked demand I imagined in 2009, something like, “GET THE MONEY OUT! [GET THE] MONEY—OUT!” —as if Maura, a bit unfairly to her, stood for every business lunkhead I’d ever dealt with who, in rough terms, couldn’t or wouldn’t timely meet his or her end of the bargain.) [Added 6/20/16: I mulled over how this last subsection read...and talking about my arguably lingering anger regarding Maura or Dope Hole was the hardest part of this essay to edit for 2016. You say, it was seven years ago, and I was only a few weeks there. The relevance of this entry isn't as a good example of "unresolved anger" as much as might be regarding a workplace with which I was associated several or many years, and regarding which I had tremendous investment in terms of type of work and/or links to people there. So the relevance of the Dope Hole story is more (1) as a preface to the CPG story, which is still significant, in part, for showing why I left the "staffer route" for the "freelancer route" as an editor and never looked back; and (2) when it comes to companies with lots of money riding on a few staffer-shoulders, with the associated implications and cachet of medically-related media products, the excesses, ethical messes, craziness, etc., are still instructive years later, even in a place at which your tenure was very brief but from which the moral lessons can be, if told right, pungent enough.]

A dog has the last say

“Hey chief,” says (in 2009) the friendlier managing-partner dog (see Part 1, end) from wherever he is, “I would get that PSA test done that you keep putting off. Never mind the war stories about the medical-media shitholes. Your health comes first.”

(Actually, I finally had my first PSA test in 2015, after much-too-much delay. I turned out OK.)

End note. Somewhat a different matter, one of the most bizarre examples of a firm wanting to employ you yet not pay you in a timely fashion was in early 2007, when Access Communications in Berkeley Heights, for which I’d been working a lot over about six months since June 2006, suddenly (out of its own cash-flow problems) stopped paying the placement agency (The Guy Louise Group) through which I worked at Access; and this withheld payment was for me and other freelancers, and concerned weeks of work. Yet Access, through the genial managing editor who had no say on Access’s paying the placement agency, still wanted me to come in because Access liked my work! My putting my foot down (in diplomatic talk with the managing editor at Access; he understood) and my declining to work, in an arrangement with GLG, until I was paid was a prelude to the placement agency’s collapsing in spring 2007 (and of course, it owed numerous of its freelance workers pay). I deal with this dense matter in this spring 2014 entry. (In spring 2007 I filed a complaint against GLG with the New Jersey department of labor’s bureau of Wages and Hours, even while sympathetically working with one of the principals of GLG to get paid. I dropped the complaint with the state when the last check was paid to me.)

Movie break: A “daughter” of Psycho and a serving of Bette Davis with modern appeal: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Part 1 of 3

Misleadingly considered energized by a real-life actress-catfight squall, this dark mix of genres still entertains

Under the occasional series head: Third Acts in American Life

Subsections below:

Two tough-minded women define the film—by their illustrious real-life careers, as much as by the story

Davis’ heyday was past by 1962, but she still had “goods to deliver” in older age, which has helped define her at least as much as early success

The film has ended up defined by, or curated by, post-Vietnam esthetic sensibilities

A trove of DVD extras

[Edits 6/2/16.]

I reviewed this film in spring 2012, and picked it up recently for mere entertainment while I had other film ideas I was grappling with and more serious about. But as I watched this film, and the copious extras on its 2012 DVD (two disks), I was struck by how it was still worth talking about.

Amid this, I had a sense of a bit of “cognitive dissonance” in terms of (1) trying (with Brooklyn, 1+ weeks ago) to deal well with the sensitive, appreciative treatment of “young hopefuls” and ethnic flavoring, while (2) also mulling over (with Baby Jane) the combination of camp, horror, black comedy, and facetiousness about women in the 1962 film.

Two tough-minded women define the film—by their illustrious real-life careers, as much as by the story

This film is probably best known today as the one where two old Grand Dames of classic American cinema, Bette Davis (1908-89) and Joan Crawford (~1904-77), play characters (sisters) in a pitched battle in a domestic situation, echoing (supposedly) something of their real-life relationship. While the 2012 DVD packaging may seem to go along with this, and also presents stills of the actresses’ faces (in black-and-white) as if you’re in for a campy good time, this all oversimplifies the film quite a bit.

(Davis won Oscars for best actress for film year 1935, for Dangerous, and for film year 1938, for Jezebel. Altogether over her career, Davis received at least 10 Oscar nominations for best actress [including for Baby Jane]. Davis also was the first female recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, in 1977. Crawford won an Oscar for best actress—her only one—for Mildred Pierce [1945].)

I think Baby Jane was made to capitalize on the excitement (and box-office windfall) that emanated from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), showing that a horror film need no longer be defined by rubber-suit monsters, or campy counts in capes and suits, or extensively bloody doings, but instead by human drama, amid average middle-class doings, especially if the drama involves first-degree relatives and some “underlying psychological baggage” originating all the way back in early youth. (Optional during-the-film commentary also makes references to Sunset Boulevard [1950], which is an important cultural reference point for this film, too.)

In comparing Psycho and Baby Jane, both regarding cultural hindsight and how the two films stand on their own artistic merits, I think Baby Jane is rather second-rate as a “psychodrama”; in fact, I think it doesn’t care to be terribly smart about psychological theorizing, though it is certainly entertaining. Meanwhile, I think Psycho is clearly an ingenious cultural milestone, in terms of being a sort of almost archetypal “gestalt” of a piece of gothic fiction (even though it, too, is rather deficient regarding educating about psychological issues).

That is, their psychological aspects are key to the horror, while being written as more loyal to the horror aims than to educating the audience about psychology, though—to me, as an award-winning psychology major in college who later had articles published on psychological topics—this is fine, as showing our culture’s liberality and sense of humor.

One obvious way that Psycho is superior is that it came first, and defined its horror type first (and had the benefit of Hitchcock having worked expertly in suspense, and in line with pet themes, for many years), so it has the merits of originality, while Baby Jane (directed and partly produced by Robert Aldrich, who would have a producing hand in one or more later “hag-horror” films) is clearly trying to copy Psycho’s horror style and ideas to some extent. Meanwhile, Baby Jane is well-made on a craftwork level (it imitates Psycho in some ways, but in complimentary and not slavishly derivative ways, such as in the black-and-white spookiness of a cluttered, old-time house), and generally embroiders together some good film tropes and techniques. (Frank DeVol did the score for it, which sometimes imitates Bernard Herrmann, thus being a bit derivative, while still often being strong in its own right. Lukas Heller did the screenplay from Henry Farrell’s novel.) (End note 1)

One could add that while Psycho, reflecting Hitch, is mischievously humorous, indirect, and myth-following about “an impossible old woman,” while Baby Jane spells out, even revels in, the “ugly face” of the “impossible old woman” in a way that practically defines its main cultural value (and notoriety), for better or worse, over the decades since it was released.

You’ve heard the expression “Talent does because it can, but genius does because it must”? Well, taking off from this point tangentially, Psycho is a work of genius, while Baby Jane is a work of talent—though the Davis component could be considered a matter of genius.

##

In fact, what I think is really worth enjoying in Baby Jane is Bette Davis’ performance, not just in how the film uses her—as it was clearly designed, the film oscillates between camp/black comedy and horror, with some basic everyday-life drama stuck “in between” as story-facilitating transitions. But Bette Davis (born Ruth Elizabeth Davis) is clearly the better actress between herself and Crawford (born Lucille LeSueur, according to Wikipedia).

Davis’ Wikipedia article, compared to Crawford’s, shows her to be the more long-term-disciplined and distinguished actress, as a scan of its introductory paragraphs will show. (It could also be well argued, as I will look at in Part 2, how Davis was the more emotionally deep/rich actress, even if she has been described as a “character” actress, while Crawford was more emotionally shallow as an artist, even if she still has appeal today.)

Though I am not very familiar with a lot of films from the “Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s, when both Davis and Crawford first flourished, Davis through her decades of activity sticks out as a personality/actress, as a look at the profile of her on the 2012 DVD set will show (I will list and annotate the DVD extras at the end of this entry). The DVDs contain profiles of both actresses independently, but Crawford’s is basically an interview, in black-and-white, by a British interviewer, Philip Jenkinson (of the BBC), done I would estimate between 1967 and 1970. In this, Crawford seems a bit stiff and mannered (stultified) in her later middle-age, like an “old actress” (though a second look allows her to appear more sympathetic); and she is even so square as to opine that there should be a return of old-time romantic films (people are so angry today, she laments with a sort of contented person’s tone), and young men should cut their hair and young women should grow theirs, to be more promising members of society (or films—she is breezily generalizing).

Still, she could be as sure of certain facts or views as, arguably, Davis was, with Crawford not hesitant to correct (or rebuff) the interviewer on some points—such as his offhand remark about the studio system having manufactured stars: Crawford says, “You manufacture toys, you don’t manufacture stars.” As she spells out a little later, actors come alive (reveal their talent) in the creative process in producing a film (the point is more exactly: when Jenkinson remarks how films have become more about multifarious interests and making a lot of money, Crawford echoes the money detail, but also notes how one stake of films is that “there is so much talent to be made, or lost,” too). (End note 2) She basically stopped making films in the 1970s, some years before the end of her life, and died in 1977.

As their Wikipedia bios take pains to show some facts about, Davis started on the stage, and in the early 1930s had a bit of a bumpy start getting her career going in films (receiving critical help from a male actor, George Arliss, who had formerly been a teacher at a drama school she’d attended, and who insisted on her costarring with him, as ended up jump-starting her acceptance in the film-studio world).

Crawford, for her part, was established in films before Davis was. She first aspired to be a dancer, and was in sound-era dancing films, including with the likes of Fred Astaire. She had started in the last years of silent films (in the late 1920s). One of her earliest film roles was as a “flapper,” a 1920s-era party girl. She worked for MGM for 17 years, until 1942, when she contracted with Warner Brothers (where, it happened, she would be a sort of rival with Davis). She was esteemed enough by her studio that she was in the multi-star Grand Hotel (1932), appearing in scenes with the likes of John Barrymore (incidentally, this is the kind of film, esteemed even today, that I really am not familiar with).

Davis’ strength in acting was reflected in her securing a series of roles (and value to Warner Brothers), and even her first Oscar, from early on. But her appearance, including her big, slightly spaced-apart eyes, marked her as “not a classic beauty,” which effectively meant she had to excel in emotional expression. Her first Oscar for a 1935 film showed her talent was impressive after only about three years. (Davis’ family origins make for a sort of “rags-to-riches” story similarly to Crawford’s, but there is something touching about how Davis came from a family where her father left the home, in a divorce, as a development rare and scandalizing for its day in her home-turf New England, and thus there were three remaining members—Davis, her sister [who was mentally ill, long-term, and who Davis apparently found ways to support as the years went on], and her mother, a professional photographer who encouraged Davis’ going into acting. The three women as the “early family nexus” with the father who divorced his way out obviously shapes how Davis later would be noted for a distrust of men, and with a series of marriages, four, to help support this idea.)

On the other hand, Crawford had a different experience and set of preferences regarding the issue of appearance: she went through a series of “images” that suited to audience tastes, first a sort of “shop girl who makes good” (when she also, appearance-wise, had a youthful, spry appeal on screen, her bone structure only hinting at her later look); she did not have her more “trademark” look with her heavy brows and even her shoulder pads until years later (by the early 1940s). I have to say, in re-reviewing some old movie clips of Crawford shown in the DVD extra focusing on her, I appreciate how she cut a distinctive figure (in simple appearance and “in motion”), but she strikes me as actress-y in a dated way, though others could obviously still value her.

So, in a way, Davis’ strength as “her own woman,” while Crawford was more of a slave to fashion, defined them early on.

As it happened, though Crawford seemed all-but-finished as a major star still making movies by the end of the 1960s, Davis managed to keep making films into the 1980s, before dying in 1989 at age 81. She worked in the TV series Hotel, and appeared in a number of feature films and TV movies in the 1980s, including in The Whales of August (1987), costarring with Lillian Gish, the silent-era actress who was so long in the business that she’d worked with D.W. Griffith (Gish died in 1993 at age 99).

In the DVD extra on her, Jodie Foster (in bright-red lipstick, in an early-1990s Turner special) narrates a brief bio of Davis, including many film clips as her life is marched through, during the 1930s and on. She made many films for Warner Brothers starting in 1932 and up to 1949, when her contract or association was unceremoniously discontinued by the studio, though she had won two Oscars during her flourishing Warners period, and obviously enough allowed the studio to make a good bit of money off her work. She pulled off a neat trick by appearing in one of her most famous films, All About Eve, in 1950, just following her tenure with Warners (this film is where she made the famous remark, “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night”).

Davis’ heyday was past by 1962, but she still had “goods to deliver” in older age, which has helped define her at least as much as early success

Davis fell on career hard times enough in the 1950s to do a TV commercial (and how strangely self-conscious those early TV commercials could be). And though my brief sketch of Crawford’s career suggests she was not quite as accomplished by about 1950 as was Davis, Crawford would be making films more often than Davis did in the 1950s. Yet Davis was of enough interest to be tapped to play Baby Jane Hudson in the 1962 film I’m reviewing, in something of another comeback.

Joan Crawford was an important co-star of the film, with her own tone helping define the story (a DVD comparing the two actresses and with many “talking heads” includes how Crawford was defined as filling victim roles from about Mildred Pierce on), but Baby Jane overall meant an opportunity for Davis to deliver a fuller, more memorable performance than does Crawford. My closer look at Baby Jane in Part 2 will show how the two actresses show their respective stuff in their later career years.

Incidentally, as something I only very recently have become more aware of, the success of Baby Jane prompted many of the same principals behind it to try capitalizing on it, with another film, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), also a sort of darkly baroque psycho-drama, including director Aldrich, writers Lukas Heller and Henry Farrell, Davis herself in a leading role, and fellow actor Victor Buono (though Crawford is absent, and present as another old-time player is Olivia de Havilland). In this film, Davis plays the victim-relative; I’ve haven’t seen this film, and it doesn’t seem as highly rated or widely known about as Baby Jane, but it seems worth checking out.

After Baby Jane, starting in the late 1960s, Davis seems as apt to have turned up on TV talk shows as in any films of great note. Though clips in the Jodie Foster–narrated extra show Davis to look older yet still “her trademark self” in color TV renderings (1971, ~1979, etc.), we can see a constant to Davis’ personal style: through her early films and into the 1970s, we see the same face, hear the same confident, clipped delivery, appreciate the same forthright (but not really nasty) opinions. (She said in an interview in about the 1970s, regarding Errol Flynn, with whom she costarred in a film in about 1939, that he’d said “I don’t know anything about acting.” Davis remarked retrospectively in the interview, “I admire his honesty because he was absolutely right.”)

As a classic-era actress, she may not be known for any particular 1930s or ’40s role the way Vivien Leigh might be known for Gone With the Wind or Judy Garland for The Wizard of Oz (both films, 1939), but Davis’ style as a sort of proto-feminist, and capable of “unpleasant characters” that are still interesting to watch on-screen, makes her not only recognizable as an individual but, I think, very watchable for modern viewers, of all the classic-era actresses.

(While a lot of Wikipedia articles can often have ungainly sentences and questionable judgments, I think Davis’ article reflects, as does Crawford’s, her fans’ continued loyalty guaranteeing some careful historical recordings about her, and one sentence I think is worth quoting to sum her up: “Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style[,] and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona, which has often been imitated and parodied.”)

That is, Davis’ sardonic deliveries and slightly tough manner make her a lot more of a modern-style American personality than, say, Crawford, and this difference helps define the nature of the two lead characters in Baby Jane. As it happens, the only film of Davis’ I’ve watched (beyond bits) is Baby Jane; and while fans of classic U.S. cinema might like her more in the old films (1930s-40s), to me her strength as an actress can be appreciated as much in the 1962 film as the early ones. While some classic-film actors aren’t best seen in late fare—it’s a shame to think you know James Stewart from his appearance in the 1970s Airport-sequel clunker, and not from his Frank Capra or Hitchcock roles—Davis seems able to appear in a complimentary light in a late film, perhaps because her personality was “made for more modern times.”

Given her strength as an actress, we can appreciate in the Foster-narrated DVD extra how she seemed “still herself, if older” when interviewed on 60 Minutes in 1980, or on some other talk show in the early 1980s. When a 1987 clip shows her having endured a stroke as well as a mastectomy, she seems almost appalling for her somewhat-broad face’s being shrunken, and her wrinkled appearance making her look at least 10 years older than her late-70s age. She seems like a mummified version of herself, a bit, but her courageous way of talking is still there, and she even jokes about how if she wasn’t smoking—a lifelong habit that probably didn’t help her aged state in 1987—people wouldn’t recognize who she was.

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By the early 1970s, the Golden Age of cinema was enough of a received-wisdom “staple” of American culture, and the generational change was such, that you knew a certain segment of TV viewers (older ones gobbling up talk shows) would appreciate seeing Davis—along with an older-looking William Wyler (the director) and actress Olivia de Havilland—appearing on TV, considered opinions and all. The variety-style Carol Burnett Show managed to appeal to young as well as old when spoofing some of the classic-era films, with Burnett burlesque-ing things up by, e.g., appearing in a gaudy dress derived from curtains, with the curtain rod still in it. Davis and others spoke on TV talk shows representing an older generation—those who had fought in World War II and maybe gone on to work at General Motors or the like—while younger viewers were “into their own thing,” appreciating the new styles and mores represented by Coppola, Scorsese, and others, while the young-Turk filmmakers were still influenced in some ways by older film practitioners.

And through this, Davis wasn’t to sound like an old fogey, opining that young men should cut their hair, etc. She would appear in modern-day films as she could, even if it was in TV movies in the 1980s. Crawford moved into retirement in the 1970s as if the times had passed her by, but this didn’t really seem the case for Davis.

The film has ended up defined by, or curated by, post-Vietnam esthetic sensibilities

Another interesting aspect of all this is that, today, Baby Jane seems, when marketed to more modern tastes, slotted into the “delicious camp”/“gay-icon” category, as is suggested by the DVD presence, as film commenters, of two men, one of whom is John Epperson, who under the stage name Lypsinka has performed as a sort of drag queen. Jokes in more modern films about Crawford being a “gay icon” seem well supported by her 1962 look, with those heavy brows and dark eyes being certainly a trademark feature, while she also has a slightly mannish look to her. Her face is as recognizable as the front of a mid-1950s Chevy. But Davis in Baby Jane seems to both serve and transcend the “gay icon” category, though she might still be embraced and celebrated by those who follow that esthetic: she seems to push for camp and a sort of comic/horror vibe, while offering enough character complexity as to inspire debate and hearty discussion, and comes out clearly the actress more worth watching in this film all these years later.

(You can also understand how, apparently, the playwright Edward Albee wanted Davis to play the role that Elizabeth Taylor got in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [1966], the film debut for director Mike Nichols, and a boundary-breaker/trendsetter in terms of what would today be called its rated-R language and concerns. This 1966 film seems to have done all right for Taylor’s stretching herself to define the performance, but we can consider that Davis would have done a respectable job in Woolf, as long as she didn’t stray over into camp a bit, and didn’t seem at times a little old-fashioned. Davis could certainly have brought the emotional vinegar to the role.)

A trove of DVD extras

The set of extras on the two-disk 2012 set is quite as full as fans would want, and go beyond an earlier DVD incarnation of this film. Not in the order in which the DVD lists them:

* The profile of Davis alone, narrated by Jodie Foster and originally made by Turner Broadcasting, is substantial. Amusingly, near the end, a snippet of the 1981 pop song “Bette Davis Eyes” is played (Kim Carnes sang it, but it was originally written and recorded by others in 1974), which really wasn’t about Davis (the lyrics, if you listen to them, suggest a skill set on the song’s character’s part that are not the actress’s).

* The interview with Crawford by the BBC’s Philip Jenkinson isn’t bad, but a little sketchy, and the print-quality is flyblown.

* The extra comparing the two actresses, with many talking heads, is substantial, but I only got to see it once, unlike the two profiles noted above. Interestingly, actress Carol Kane is quoted—she was notably active in the 1970s and ’80s, including in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)—and she remarks that Davis was a “character actress,” a good enough point; and she comments how Davis insisted that she look like the character she performed.

* A snippet from a 1962 installment of Andy Williams’ variety show (and the snippet is in color, obviously filmed that way, though it would only have appeared on TV in black-and-white) has Davis singing a pop-type song in support of Baby Jane. The film was released in October 1962, and this TV spot was in December 1962. By the early 1960s, the film industry was, by almost any standards we’ve known since the late 1960s, “weird” when it came to supporting a current release with pop music. By 1962, the influence of rock ’n’ roll over the larger culture was only beginning. (Even Hitchcock was approached with efforts to support his films with pop, such as his Marnie [1964], whose score was famously done by Herrmann, being considered by music-savvy Universal for a hit single by a famous pop star, though this never came to fruition. The idea was to duplicate the way Doris Day’s “Que Sera” supported The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956].) In the Andy Williams spot, Davis seems a bit “old”—though she was in her early fifties—moving slightly frumpily but gamely while singing banal lyrics (with a backing band mixing a rockabilly rhythm with classical-type strings) that do nothing to convey what a camp/horror-fest the film is. Davis actually can sing in a sort of “rough college try” way, but not beautifully; think of your mom, or Hillary Clinton, singing somewhat hoarsely but not entirely impossible to listen to. I mean, you would not put Davis’ rendition on your iPod, but you admire her for what she would, tongue slightly in cheek, do in later life to support a film, in an era (the 1960s) where an aging actress still being bankable was a rare phenomenon, indeed.

* A “making-of” doc for the film, made from informal footage filmed during production—and a sort of thing rare in that day—is on hand, though it is narrated, without people shown speaking. It includes the fact that some 58,000 feet of film was exposed by August 1962, which suggests a bigger deal than the budget seems to have demanded. By the way, Ernest Haller, rather along in years by 1962, was Baby Jane’s cinematographer.

All these extras are on the second disk.

* During the film, on the first disk, you can listen to Charles Busch and John Epperson comment, and they—like any good commenters during a DVD film—liven things up a bit, and expand your appreciation. But for those of a more conservative bent, the sort of “poofy” flavor you might get from their enthusiastic comments—both men come from the drag-performance world—might get a modern-day red-blooded meat-eater in the U.S. asking “if I should be worried” if he has to go to a public restroom in the near future.

To be continued.

End note 1. The more you look at Baby Jane, the more you see it imitating, or otherwise winking at, Hitchcock. For one thing, the next-door neighbor, a friendly woman with a grown daughter, is named “Mrs. Bates” (no explanation needed). Also, a situation where Jane Hudson is hustling a dead body out to her car, to dispose of it, while interrupted by an approaching vehicle with its sweeping headlights, is echoed in Psycho (though this sort of scene probably occurs in many suspense/crime films through the decades). There is even a late scene, with Edwin Flagg waiting at a gas station to use a pay phone, where a sign is focused on that advertises an undertaker—a sort of “stolen-shot” detail with some Hitchcockian humor.

Also, the ways the films were produced seem to have interesting parallels, though I don’t know all the details about Baby Jane. With Psycho, whose production arrangement I’ll be sketchy on, Paramount, Hitch’s main studio for the better part of a decade (much of the 1950s), didn’t care for the Psycho idea. Though it was the studio that bankrolled the film (and its logo still appears in prints), while Hitchcock was in the process of being wooed over to a long-term association with the Universal studio (courtesy of his agent Lew Wasserman, whose company MCA would be buying Universal), Hitch made the film on a Universal lot, and his own company was in charge of production (he would have an ownership stake in the film, while Paramount would recoup at least some of its money). So the film was a sort of production hybrid, regarding Paramount (which didn’t really want to be associated with the film, while bankrolling it) and Universal. (Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light [ReganBooks, 2003], pp. 580-81.)

Seemingly similarly, Warner Brothers would distribute Baby Jane, but it wasn’t really producing the film. (The trade name “Seven Arts” is associated with the film, and Seven Arts was some company allied with Warners for some years [it merged with WB in 1967-69] until WB started to get new, rejuvenating executive direction in the later 1960s; but all indications are that Warner Brothers the longtime studio was not what directly made this film.) Strangely, the production team is listed in credits as “Associates and Robert Aldrich,” with the order suggesting the “associates” put up (or were in charge of) more money than was Aldrich, who also directed the film, but presumably the associates didn’t want to be named. And of course, the credits take pains to show that Warners merely distributed the film. (Adding to it all, per the Wikipedia article on the film, Davis and Crawford arranged to take a percentage of the film earnings in exchange for lower production-time salaries, suggesting its speculative/shoestring nature.)

It’s interesting that both films, today, are not only favorites among some film buffs, but have received various types of scholarly attention over the decades, so the respective studios’ embarrassment over these films was (in hindsight) mistaken; and of course the Warner Brothers logo is present enough on modern DVDs of Baby Jane, while Universal, as it has with much of Hitch’s other films (due to his late-life arrangement with the studio), is publicly associated with distribution of modern incarnations of Psycho.

End note 2. Despite the long-time assumption that the two actresses hated each other over the long term, in the BBC interview, Crawford has enough loyalty in a sense to Davis that when the interviewer mispronounces Davis’ first name like “Bet,” Crawford immediately responds with “She’d kill you if she heard you say ‘Bet.” And she says this with a tone as if she’s basically on Davis’ side. On answering the interviewer about how Davis was to get along with, Crawford says she was a “fascinating actress to work with.” It’s almost as if her supposed campaign to deny Davis the Oscar for Baby Jane had never happened.