Rahmbo To The Rescue

February 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

Congressional firebrand, recordbreaking fundraiser, White House COS, and capable of carrying off a triple tours en l’air with the same aplomb as ordering a Chicago Hot Dog— is there anything  Rahm Emanuel can’t do?  

Apparently not.  

Ben Smith reports in today’s Politico:

A surprised fellow moviegoer passes on word that Rahm Emanuel took time out Saturday night to see The Wrestler at the E Street Cinema last night with a Secret Service Agent.

It was not a quiet night out.

“The guy sitting next to Rahm — literally sharing an armrest with him — had a seizure of some kind,” the moviegoer tells me. “Rahm used some vulgarities to impress upon the movie theater staff — who wanted to move the guy out of the movie theater so they could restart the film — that they should wait until EMS got there.”

Emanuel stayed and helped, I’m told, until EMS arrived.

Straight From The Great Escape

February 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Entertainment, Europe, Humor, International Affairs | Leave a Comment 

Though Greece’s most notorious criminal Vassilis Paleokostas and his Albanian sidekick Alket Rizai are no match for Steve McQueen’s heroic Captain Hilts, their escape from an Athenian prison deserves some props from prison break aficionados. Then again, the conservative government is on the verge of collapse:

The prison break was just the latest in a litany of embarrassments for the conservative government, which is teetering on the verge of collapse after Greece’s worst riots in decades, a resurgence of homegrown terrorism and a failure to stop the economy from crumbling.

The police said Sunday that the escape by the two prisoners, the serial armed robber Vassilis Paleokostas and his Albanian sidekick, Alket Rizai, came one day before both were to face trial for their 2006 escape from Korydallos prison. They were serving time then for armed robbery and kidnapping.

In the Sunday getaway, both were whisked from Korydallos prison after a helicopter — hijacked from Greece’s main international airport — flew into the heavily guarded compound and landed on the prison roof. A member of the helicopter crew cast them a rope ladder.

It remained unclear late on Sunday who hijacked the helicopter and how the getaway plan had been coordinated with Mr. Paleokostas and Mr. Rizai. Nor was it clear whether they were the only inmates to have escaped from the prison, situated in a congested residential district about seven miles southwest of the Greek capital.

“Sirens were blaring and shots were fired by the guards,” a bystander told Alter TV, a private television broadcasting network. “The helicopter swirled over the compound twice before swooping in to make the pick.”

Hours later police located the helicopter in a field near Polydendri, north of Athens, with no traces of the fugitives.

The pilot was found hooded and gagged but unharmed, according to the police. Interjet, a small Greek aircraft charter that owned the helicopter, refused to comment. Local news media, however, said the pilot had been taken in for questioning at the country’s national police headquarters in Athens.

Puhleeze, Mr. Postman

February 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, economy | Leave a Comment 

The Washington Times broke the story last week:

Postmaster General John E. Potter  recently warned that economic times are so dire that the U. S. Postal Service  may end mail delivery one day a week and freeze executive salaries. But his personal fortunes are nonetheless rising thanks to 40 percent in pay raises since 2006, a $135,000 bonus last year and several perks usually reserved for corporate CEOs.

The changes, approved by the Postal Board of Governors and contained in a little-noticed regulatory filing in December, brought Mr. Potter’s total compensation and retirement benefits to more than $800,000 in 2008. That is more than double the salary for President Obama.

The new compensation package, much of it deferred to later years, goes beyond a newly beefed-up salary, now $263,575, that Congress arranged for him as part of a 2006 law to make top postal salaries more competitive with those in the private sector. At least four other postal officials got more than a quarter-million dollars in total compensation in 2008, according to Postal Service records reviewed by The Washington Times.

Today’s paper reports that Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, will be looking into General Potter’s windfall profits.  ”All things considered,” he said, “I think most postal customers feel that the huge increase in pay for Mr. Potter is incongruent with the post office’s recent performance. I assure you that our subcommittee will look into this matter at a hearing in March.”

Watch What We Say Not What We…Dooops

February 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

The intrepid Detroit News has tracked down the automobile registrations of the eight members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry appointed last week to save the American automobile industry.  The paper also checked out the auto info of  the ten White House staffers assigned to help them in their tasks.  And it turns out that sixteen of the eighteen are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  (And the two only get a pass because they don’t own cars.)  

Starting at the top, with the two co-chairs, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose grandfather was a vice president of the Ford Motor Company, owns a 2008 Acura TSX.  And National Economic Council (and former Treasury Secretary) Lawrence Summers owns a 1995 Mazda Protege.

Here’s what other task force policy aides drive:

• Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist for the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, owns a 2004 Toyota Highlander.

• Joan DeBoer, the chief of staff to LaHood, said in an interview Sunday she drives a 2008 Lexus RX 350. She doesn’t consider herself “a car buff” and views her car as a way to get around town.

• Heather Zichal, deputy director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, owns a Volvo C30, according to public records and officials.

• Gene Sperling, counsel to the Treasury Secretary, owns a 2003 Lincoln LS, and previously owned a 1993 Saturn SL2.

• Edward B. Montgomery, senior adviser to the Labor Department, owns a 1991 Harley-Davidson and previously owned a 1990 Ford Taurus L station wagon, public records show.

• Lisa Heinzerling, senior climate policy counsel to the head of the EPA, owns a 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback station wagon, according to her husband.

• Diana Farrell, the deputy National Economic Council director, doesn’t own a vehicle. Her husband, Scott Pearson, owns a 1985 Peugeot 505 S.

• Dan Utech, senior adviser to the Energy Secretary, owns a 2003 Mini Cooper S two-door hatchback.

• Rick Wade, a senior adviser at the Commerce Department, owns a 1998 Chevrolet Cavalier and previously owned a 1998 Toyota Corolla.

• Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist, owns a 2005 Honda Odyssey.
 

Anthony Who?

February 23, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Peter T. Chattaway:

It’s funny to hear Michael Douglas say that Frank Langella makes all other interpretations of Richard Nixon fall away … when Anthony Hopkins, the star of Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), is standing right there on the stage with him.

The Nixon Family And Walt’s House

February 23, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixon family, Orange County | Leave a Comment 

Davidlandblog begins a series of illustrated posts about the Nixon family and Disneyland, including insights from Julie Nixon Eisenhower:

It was always a thrill for Julie to visit Orange County & Disneyland, as it meant that she could play with her cousins on both sides of the family: The Ryans (her mother) and the Nixons (her father). “Disneyland was a part of our lives. The major happy feeling that I remember about Orange County was seeing my cousins, which was always tied to a trip to Disneyland.” Between 1961 and 1963, the Nixon family would visit the park at least once every 3-6 months.

Right Again, Mr. President

February 23, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under China, Hillary Clinton, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

President Nixon, Beijing, February 21, 1972:

If [our two peoples] can find common ground to work together, the chance for world peace is immeasurably increased.

Secretary of State Clinton, Beijing, February 22, 2009:

[B]y continuing to support American Treasury instruments, the Chinese are recognizing our interconnection. We are truly going to rise or fall together. We are in the same boat.

Featured Articles — February 23, 2009

February 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The War On Drugs Is A Failure By Fernando Henqique Cardoso, César Gaviria, and Ernest Zedillo, The Wall Street Journal
The war on drugs has failed. And it’s high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.

Afghanistan Is No Iraq By Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
When President Obama announced last week that he was sending an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, I thought of David Kilcullen. Kilcullen is a former Australian military officer who wrote his doctoral thesis on insurgencies in traditional societies.

The Gatekeeper: Rahm Emanuel On The Job. By Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
Rahm Emanuel’s office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk’s edge.

Obama’s FDR Moment By E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
When President Obama addresses the nation tomorrow, he should not be distracted by Washington’s obsessions over partisanship and ideology. He needs, above all, to speak to the country’s raw fear.

In Afghanistan, it’s deadly at the top By Cheryl Benard, Los Angeles Times
Rather than perpetuating a love-hate-kill relationship with their leaders, Afghans need to develop respect for the laws and institutions of their new democracy.

The Stunted Economic Stimulus By Robert Samuelson, Newsweek
Judged by his own standards, President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program, which he signed into law last week, is deeply disappointing. For weeks, Obama has described the economy in grim terms. “This is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession,” he said at his Feb. 9 press conference.

Socks   1989 – 2009

February 22, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Hillary Clinton, In Memoriam, Presidents, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Socks, who served as the  White House Cat from 1992-2001, died on Friday near his waterfront home in Hollywood, Maryland.  The former First Feline was believed to have been twenty, although there are some discrepancies involving his date and place of birth.  He had not been well recently, and was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.  His death was the result of an assisted suicide of which he may not have been entirely aware, although he probably knew that something unusual was going on.

The Clintons broke new ground by having a cat as the sole White House pet.   Indeed, they  plowed relatively unfurrowed ground by having a cat at all. The first White House cat was Abraham Lincoln’s tabby, which, in that President’s simple but eloquent way, he named Tabby.  The first twentieth century First Felines belonged to TR — Slippers and Tom Quartz.  Calvin Coolidge had an alley cat named Tige.

Then there were no further White House felines for more than four decades, until Susan Ford’s Siamese Shan briefly took up residence in the Executive Mansion.  Shan was immediately followed by another Siamese successor, Amy Carter’s Missy Malarkey Ying Yang.

Socks was a stray adopted by Chelsea Clinton in 1991 and brought to live in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. She named him because his markings made him look like he was wearing socks.  Socks moved with the family to Washington and was the sole Presidential pet for several years until President Clinton acquired a chocolate lab puppy he named Buddy. Such introductions —even if made slowly and scientifically— are often unsuccessful.  And that is how it was for these two: Socks and Buddy were like oil and water.

The First Lady noted that Socks “despised Buddy from first sight, instantly and forever.”  President Clinton said: “I did better with…the Palestinians and the Israelis than I’ve done with Socks and Buddy.”

When the Clintons left the White House, they took Buddy to their new home in Chappaqua, New York, but left Socks under the care of the former President’s White House secretary, Betty Currie.  The reason given was that the new home was too small to keep the two pets apart.  Buddy (1997-2002) died as the result of an accident after running away.  His obituary in The New York Times was headed “Buddy, Socks’ Nemesis, Is Dead.”

One of Mrs. Currie’s White House assignments was to be in charge of the copies of Leaves of Grass that the President inscribed and sent to some of his most special admirers. Mr. Clinton used Leaves of Grass as an aphrodisiac. Cats use grass as an emetic. Perhaps the President, despite his Oxford education, confused the two —which are, in fact, very different — and naturally assumed that Mrs. Currie would end up with Socks.

As is not uncommon with the Clintons, even something as simple as a deceased pet has become a subject of controversy.

When Mrs. Clinton was elected to the United States Senate, she bought a big house off Massachusetts Avenue, and many of Socks’ supporters assumed that he would soon be reunited with his beloved and much-missed mistress.  Indeed, Senator Clinton’s office confirmed that hope. Alice J. Pushkar, the Senator’s director of correspondence, sent the following reassurance to the many concerned citizens who wrote in this regard:

Thank you for your recent e-mail in regard to Socks.  The Clinton family appreciates your concern.  To make this time of transition as easy as possible for Socks, the family decided that it would be best, while the Washington residence is being readied for occupancy, if he stayed with someone that he knew and with whom he has spent a great deal of time in the last eight years.  Betty Currie who knows Socks well and shares the family’s concern for Socks’ well-being offered to take Socks to her home.  I understand that he is quite content and settling in very quickly.

The house was completed several years ago, but Socks was never reclaimed.  He briefly surfaced as an issue in Senator Clinton’s recent presidential campaign, when her attempts to “warm up” her personality were undercut by questions about her treatment of her cat.

Caitlin Flanagan wrote an article in The Atlantic in which she noted that, “In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list.  But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”  Ms. Flanagan noted that the First Lady had published a book of kids’ letters to Socks and had preached  that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition.”

The presidential bid was not successful and Socks’ status once again receded from the public view.  Now family friend and presidential historian Barry Landau states that this ostensible abandonment was not as a result of any lack of care or kindness.  ”The truth be known,” he said over the weekend, “Betty asked if Socks could come live with her. The Clintons didn’t abandon Socks. They were totally conflicted. It broke their hearts, but they knew it would be the right thing for Socks’ welfare.”

Mr. Landau, however, may have been exposed to too much catnip.  He also claims: ”Socks didn’t act like a cat. Socks was very dog-like, and Buddy and Socks got along well.”  Not speaking ill of the dead is one thing, but that kind of historical revisionism borders on the Stalinesque.

Socks’ passing has been noted around the world, including in The New York Times, and the Washington Post, which had been reporting on his declining condition, and which claims to be the first news outlet to report his passing.  It was also commemorated on Wonkette:

Socks the Cat, sorta beloved pet of the Clintons, died on Friday in the care of retired Clinton secretary Betty Currie. And why was Currie watching over Socks? Because when Bill Clinton left the White House for New York, he brought along newer pet Buddy the Dog, who was soon run over and crushed to death by a car. Socks was supposedly going to live in Hillary’s fancy new house in Washington, but Hillary was never quite “ready” to allow her own pet — a helpless animal — to move to Georgetown. So poor old Socks was stuck with Mrs. Currie, or poor old Mrs. Currie was stuck with Socks. But at least they were no longer stuck with the Clintons. The end.

(November 1992: paparazzi surround the new President-Elect’s pet on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock.)

Saving Presidential Paper In A Post-Print World

February 22, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, National Archives, Presidential libraries | Leave a Comment 

Mark Feeney says we don’t need Presidential libraries anymore. Then how about we put the stuff in the Feeney family garage? Read more here.

Balancing Scholarship And Spin

February 22, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under National Archives, Nixon Library | 2 Comments 

As she celebrates a distinguished 40-year (so far) career with the National Archives, Sharon Fawcett, the assistant archivist of for Presidential libraries who helped shepherd the Nixon Library into the federal fold in 2007, discusses challenges and opportunities at these unique institutions.

Hat tip to Jack Nesbitt

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

February 22, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | Leave a Comment 

Every Sunday, The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time Richard Nixon became President in 1969.

THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING (LEE HAZLEWOOD) performed by NANCY SINATRA

Nancy Sinatra had a pretty face, a great figure, an excellent attitude, and a modicum of talent. To that extent she hardly differed from the legions of wannabes and starlets-in-waiting arriving every day in Hollywood.

But Nancy’s father was Frank, and the rest is history. In 1960 she embarked on a career that is still going strong, and that is still a triumph of hope over experience. Although after almost five decades there has been a great deal of experience.

In 1964, her record company (which happened to be owned by her father) was trying to figure out a discreet way of cutting her lose. In 1965 she recorded “These Boots Are Made For Walking” —a song written and produced by Lee Hazlewood — and within the next couple of years she became one of the biggest celebrities in the world. She expanded her acting career and was, in 1967 and 1969, the biggest female box office draw in America.

RH: I toured with Nancy Sinatra and she said that a pop song has to be ‘dumb’ to succeed.

Lee Hazlewood: Dumb? Oh, that’s my word I taught her. She used to bring me songs and I’d go: ‘That’s not dumb enough for us! We do dumb things for the people.’ You know, we’re Laurel and Hardy, we do that kind of stuff.

RH: Would you still agree with that, then?

LH: Oh sure, absolutely! Dumb doesn’t mean without intelligence. It just means knowing where your limitations are and you don’t have any when you’re dumb. Dumb people don’t have any limitations at all. So we just did anything we could and God knows how she sold as many records as she sold with me, teaching her with my bad guitar playing, because I barely can hold one.

—Excerpt from British pop star and former Pulpster Richard Hawley’s 2007 interview with Lee Hazlewood.

 

(Above: The Sinatra Family in the early 1940s: Frank, Nancy Sr., and Nancy Jr.)

In 1944, when Nancy Sinatra was four years old, two family friends wrote a song about her. The friends were an Oscar-winning songwriter (Jimmy Van Heusen), and an amateur but not unaccomplished lyricist who was also one of the country’s top comedians (Phil Silvers).

The song was “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” and Nancy’s father recorded it and kept it in his repertoire for many years.

Nancy spent a year at UCLA studying music, dancing, and voice, but dropped out to begin her professional career by appearing with her father on his May 1960 TV special “Welcome Home, Elvis,” marking the singer’s return to civilian life.

(Nancy Nice Lady: Twenty-year-old Nancy Sinatra with her father and Elvis Presley on TV in May 1960.  She had traveled across country to welcome him home personally when he arrived at McGuire AFB in New Jersey on 3 March; he was officially discharged two days later.  Lee Hazlewood’s “Nasty Jones”  look was still several years in the future.)

In 1961, she was signed by Reprise, her dad’s new record label, but several singles failed to chart. By 1965 the embarrassing problem about what to do with the boss’s daughter was reaching critical mass.

In what amounted to a last ditch attempt either to get a hit or jettison her with at least a modicum of dignity, her boyfriend —who was a producer at Reprise— asked his friend and fellow producer Lee Hazlewood if he would consider working with Nancy. This friend was the prodigiously talented composer-lyricist-musician-performer-producer Lee Hazlewood, who had, among many other things, invented Duane Eddy’s “twang” and taught Phil Spector about walls of sound.

(Cover art for the second volume of Lee Hazlewood’s Reprise recordings.  Nancy Sinatra said that he was “part Henry Higgins and part Sigmund Freud.”)

By the mid-1960s, the 35-year old Hazlewood had already made more than enough money to retire — which was what he was planning to do.  As a courtesy he agreed at least to discuss the Nancy project with the Chairman of the Board (who was, at Reprise, literally the Chairman of the Board).

He dropped by casa Sinatra one afternoon and was greeted warmly. As he later described it, “[Frank] gave me a little hug and a handshake and said, ‘I’m glad you kids are gonna be working together, Lee.’ And he left. And I hadn’t even said yes yet!”

The story is good enough to be apocryphal, but somehow it has the ring of truth.

Hazlewood took stock of Nancy Sinatra circa 1965. She was the ultimate Hollywood princess. She had the polished, wholesome image of the girl next door (albeit upscale since next door in this case was Beverly Hills). Not to mention that she was Frank Sinatra’s daughter, which was like being the Meadow Soprano of back in the day.  (And I’m only making a comparison, not a point.) Besides, she had been very publicly married to teen heartthrob Tommy Sands for the last four years.

Hazlewood took stock and decided that everything had to be changed. He bleached her dark hair blonde and piled it up high; he slathered her formerly scrubbed face and eyes with makeup; and he moved her hitherto mid-pitched pop voice down into its lowest, throatiest registers. He turned daddy’s little girl into jailbait.  He told her to stop being “Nancy Nice Lady” and start thinking of herself as his new creation named “Nasty Jones.”

The song this Svengali selected for his tarted up Trilby was one he had written the year before called “These Boots Are Made For Walking.”

He described how he found the title:

I was sittin’ in this bar in southern Texas and there’s this fella in there who’s about 35, who had just married an 18-year-old girl. And they’re teasin’ him and tellin’ him his wife had called and he better get on home and all this kind of stuff. So we all had a few more drinks, and then he says “I just wanna tell you guys somethin’. In my house, I’m boss, ’cause if I’m not the boss” — and he threw his foot up on one of the barstools — “these boots are gonna walk all over her!” I just said “God almighty!”

Hazelwood, never one to put too fine a point on things, advised Nancy to sing the song “like a 16-year old girl who screws truck drivers” — and that’s the cleaned up version of the quote.

“These Boots Are Made For Walking” is a pretty much perfect pop production right from the first twang of the instantly recognizable and immediately iconic descending quarter-tone baseline that Hazlewood created to set the boots in motion.

You keep sayin’ you’ve got something for me,
something you call love, but confess.
You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin’,
and now someone else is gettin’ all your best.
These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do.
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin’,
and you keep losin’ when you oughta not bet.
You keep samin’ when you oughta be changin’.
Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.
These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do.
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

You keep playin’ where you shouldn’t be playin’,
and you keep thinkin’ that you´ll never get burned.
Ha! I just found me a brand new box of matches,
and what he know you ain’t had time to learn.
These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do.
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

The single was released at the beginning of February 1966 and by the middle of the month it was Number One on Billboard’s Hot 100.

“Boots” turned out to be the right song in the right place at the right time. As Nancy Sinatra’s website puts it accurately and not immodestly: “‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin” kicked open the doors for a whole new category of women in music. Nancy’s tough girl attitude preceded women’s liberation and created the first rebel chick singer. The era of the female rocker was born.”

The immediate followup was another Hazlewood Big Bad Attitude song: “How Does That Grab You?”  The melody was so similar and the arrangements and production were so Bootslike (right down to the seven syllables in “you smart aleck tomcat, you”) as to be risible — if the result wasn’t just so darn catchy. Besides, why fix that which ain’t broke: “How Does That Grab You?” reached Number Seven.

There’s no video available, but you can listen to “How Does That Grab You?” here.

(The 1966 cover art for Nancy Sinatra’s second album, How Does That Grab You?.)

The formula changed somewhat in the next Sinatra/Hazlewood opus: the happier, sunnier, attitudeless “Sugar Town.” Hazlewood later talked about the song’s genesis:

I was in a folk club in LA which had two levels. I could see these kids lining up sugar cubes and they had an eye-dropper and were putting something on them. I wasn’t a doper so I didn’t know what it was but I asked them. It was LSD and one of the kids said, “You know, it’s kinda Sugar Town.” Nancy knew what the song was about because I told her, but luckily Reprise didn’t.

He knew that the tune had hit potential, but he was unhappy with his lyrics. “The lyrics were too clever and so I rewrote and rewrote it and made it so dumb — you know, ‘I never had a dog that liked me some.’ That’s a dumb lyric!”

“Sugartown” reached Number Five at the end of 1966.  Because of the cover photograph of Nancy in a bikini, the LP album was banned in Boston.  

But “Sugar Town” was more notable because of its B-side —a song called “Summer Wine”— on which the Sinatra/Hazlewood duo made its performance debut.

“Summer Wine” was different from the other songs Hazlewood produced for Sinatra.  Unlike the raunchy pop bubblegum along  this was prime Hazlewood: An hombre meets a mysterious woman and offers her some summer wine. In the morning he wakes up with a hang over and finds that his money and his silver spurs are gone, and so is she.  In Lee Hazlewood’s hands this hackneyed scenario becomes a moody, ambiguous, semi-threatening, borderline existential mini-epic.

(A tad too much in the pink: The cover art for 1967’s Sugar Town was banned in Boston and barred from Bean Town record bins.)

Nancy’s next hit was, arguably (and it’s an argument I am prepared to make), her best. Decidedly out of the Hazlewood mode —although he produced it scrupuously— “Somethin’ Stupid” had been written and recorded the year before by Carson Parks and his wife Gaile Foote.  When Frank Sinatra heard it, he told Hazlewood that if he wouldn’t record it with his daughter, he would. Hazlewood later said that he immediately booked the studio.

Although for some it didn’t sit entirely comfortably in a father-daughter context (wags around Reprise —anonymous wags if they were smart— referred to it as the  “Incest Duet”), its great pleasures and sheer perfection trump any such tawdry and/or prurient concerns.

The Sinatra/Sinatra single was Number One for a month in the spring of 1967. Unfortunately there is no video of it, but you can enjoy listening to it here.

(Above: The sleeve for the single “Somethin’ Stupid.”  Nancy Sinatra recalled: “On the first take, Daddy got silly, sounding his S’s like Daffy Duck, which made me laugh and spoil the take, so we had to do two or three more.” The president of Reprise bet two dollars that the song would be a bomb; Frank Sinatra said it would make the Top Ten. It spent four weeks at Number One.)

Other Sinatra/Hazlewood songs and duets followed soon after “Summer Wine.” Some were awkward; some were downright embarrassing; and some managed to work magic:

The apotheosis of the Sinatra/Hazlewood collaboration was also its last real flowering: “Some Velvet Morning.” It only reached Number 26 on the charts in 1968, but it is still treasured today as a cult classic.

Hazlewood described its straightforward genesis: “I wrote it one morning when we were doing this TV special for Nancy. I didn’t have anything and they wanted something where the girl wears white on a white horse and the guy wears black on a black horse and she’s bad and he’s good. I thought, ‘Now that’s really original, isn’t it?’

From this simple premise he constructed a psychodrama that could have been scripted by Krafft-Ebing and directed by Sergio Leone — sort of like One Eyed Jacks on acid.  It didn’t take a high school graduate, much less a rocket scientist, to figure out that there was some kind of subtext to lyrics like: “Some velvet morning when I’m straight / I’m going to open up your gate.”

Much later, Nancy Sinatra said, “I’ve been singing this song for over twenty years and I still don’t know what the damned thing means.” (To which Hazlewood replied: “Ask me some velvet morning when I’m straight.”) Hazlewood’s drug of abuse was alcohol, and he undoubtedly spoke the truth when he said that “It’s not meant to mean so much. I’m not a druggie, so it was never to do with that.”

Despite Hazlewood’s makeover, Nancy’s Nasty Jones persona didn’t really fool anyone. The new sound and the new look were clearly successful, but Nancy’s basic decency and integrity shone through, and no one really believed that she was anything but a nice girl.  Maybe a bit gamer in her new get up, but still nice to the core.

That, at least in part, explains why she became the GIs’ favorite pinup in Vietnam — she was the girl they wanted to come home to.  ”These Boots Are Made For Walking” became the anthem of the boots on the ground.

Although she did not support the war, she had downplayed her feelings at least partly in deference to her father. But her remake of the 1922 Walter Donaldson-Gus Kahn classic “My Buddy” was dedicated to the troops and clearly intended as an anti-war statement.

There was no question how she felt about the soldiers, and she made USO tours to Vietnam in 1966 and ‘67. She insisted on going into the field and visiting many of the wounded in hospital.

She has maintained an interest in Vietnam vets and veterans affairs. In 2007 she received the Vietnam Veterans of America’s President’s Award for Excellence.

(The cover art for the 1969 album of duets.  Lee Hazlewood called their pairing “beauty and the beast.”

By the end of the ’60s, Nancy Sinatra’s recording, TV, and film careers were well established and in high gear both at home and internationally.  In the space of four years she had become one of the most famous people in the world.  Hazlewood, no less the maverick than before, simply pulled up stakes and moved to Sweden at the beginning of 1970. There were rumors that madness and/or the Mob had played some part in his decision, but he was simply reactivating Plan A from the time right before he paid that fateful courtesy call on Frank Sinatra back in ‘65.

I’ll conclude with two personal favorites from Nancy Sinatra’s late ’60s heydey.  The first, which I am hardly alone admiring,  is her recording of John Barry’s title song for the 1967 James Bond film  You Only Live Twice.  This competes with “Live and Let Die” for the top spot in my personal Bond Song Pantheon. (See The Soundtrack of Our Lives, 8 August 2008.)

The second highlight is a cover of the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards-Andrew Oldham song “As Tears Go By,” from her 1966 album Boots.  It shows how, given a stripped down arrangement and the right material, Nancy Sinatra, like Julie London, could cut right through to the heart of a song.  It’s a shame that, as a result of snobbery (and there are few more virulent forms than rock snobbery) that she’ll probably never be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  For the significant successes she achieved and the pleasure she gave to so many people, there is great credit due.

 

Nancy Sinatra’s extensive catalog is easily available (as on Amazon). She may just have the hippest and most comprehensive website in show business.

Featured Articles — February 22, 2009

February 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

America’s New Shrink By Jonathan Alter
If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.” For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while.

Obama’s Iran strategy By Doyle McManus
President Obama is working against time to untangle 30 years of enmity and prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, but even his own advisors know the chance of success is slim. So they also have been working on Plan B: What do we do if Iran gets the bomb?

The Age of Irresponsibility By Matthew Continetti
Decades from now, historians are going to fill e-tome after e-tome debating when the crisis in American authority began. A good place to start would be the Clinton era. The president of the United States had a tawdry affair, lied about it, and refused to accept any responsibility for his actions. The Republicans correctly pointed out that the president had acted beneath his office. The problem was that many of them were acting beneath their offices, too.

Quieter Approach to Spreading Democracy Abroad By Peter Baker
Fresh from orchestrating a historic victory, President Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, headed to the remote seaside town of Baku for a lucrative speech. For Mr. Plouffe, it was a chance to pocket an easy $50,000. But for the authoritarian government of Azerbaijan, it was a chance to burnish the reputation of a harsh system headed by the son of a K.G.B. general.

Iraq’s Resurgent Nationalism By Robert Dreyfuss
For the first time in six years, it’s possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq. Despite all their flaws–and there were many–the January 31 elections in fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces ratified the resurgence of secular nationalism.

The Reeducation of Larry Summers By Michael Hirsh and Evan Thomas
Larry Summers had the rumpled, slightly sleepy look of a professor who has been up all night solving equations. President Obama’s top economic adviser, the man mainly in charge of the immense government bailout, splayed himself on a sofa in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, beneath a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, and did his best to be patient with two NEWSWEEK reporters.

‘Rebel angel’ Hugo Chavez bedevils Venezuela By Vanessa Neumann
In the wake of a Newsnight interview that I gave on last Sunday’s referendum in Venezuela, my e-mail inbox has been daily stuffed with vitriol from British and American men who have accused me of spreading lies about President Hugo Chavez, their hero. As far as I can tell, though, not one of them has actually been to Venezuela.

A Three-Pronged Bet on ‘AFPAK’ By David Ignatius
In the two-front war that Washington is now calling “AFPAK,” there’s more head-scratching going on than is immediately visible. Yes, President Obama approved a Pentagon request to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. But at the same time, he has ordered a strategy review to make sure the United States isn’t marching blindly into what historians call “the graveyard of empires.”

Two Governors and the GOP Future By Kimberley Strassel
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is mooted as a GOP presidential contender. During the stimulus debate he told President Barack Obama, to his face, that the Palmetto State wanted no part of a spending blowout that would be harmful to the economy, to taxpayers, and to the dollar. He even traveled to Capitol Hill to stiffen Senate Republicans against the plan.

Save Acting: Vote Nixon

February 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Movies | Leave a Comment 

On today’’s Daily Beast, critic Lee Siegel hopes against hope that the Members of the Academy will have the wisdom to reward and encourage real acting —as opposed to camera-aided impersonation— by choosing Frank Langella as Best Actor.  Whereas Mickey Rourke’s Randy Robinson and Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk are worthy and workmanlike characters, they only deliver what the audience expects; there are no real surprises and not all that much discovery.  

Whereas Langella’s RN cast an entirely new light on what most people thought was a thoroughly familiar figure.  

After analyzing The Wrestler and Milk, Mr. Siegel really gets down to business and  sinks his teeth into F/N and, in particular, Langella’s N:

Langella’s is not the crazed, antic, merely paranoid and vindictive Nixon that flourishes in the popular imagination, and was institutionalized, as it were, by Anthony Hopkins’ frenetic, almost campy impersonation in Oliver Stone’s film. Langella’s Nixon has something no public interpretation of Nixon has ever possessed: self-knowledge.

Early on, Langella tells his chief aide, superbly played by Kevin Bacon, that he’s going to hire some Cubans to spy, Watergate-style, on David Frost, after he agrees to be interviewed by Frost. Bacon stares at him with panic rising in his eyes. This is the lunatic villain right out of Central Casting! But Langella casts him a stern glance and says: “I’m only joking.” In one stroke, a new Nixon, like a new planet, swims into view.

This Nixon isn’t about to fall to pieces from the pressure of his inner demons. Yawn. Langella’s Nixon is—like Brando’s Don Corleone—a self-possessed, powerful man, who expresses his power by talking and moving slowly, speaking softly, and cannily pulling other people’s mental strings. Rather than responding excitedly to slights, provocations and feared conspiracies, this Nixon is a former leader of the free world—that is to say, his inner ballast and experience of power are so strong that he seems to be humoring reality rather than encountering it. He has experienced, and mastered, too much of the world to be much agitated by it.

That’s not to say that the demons aren’t there, but they are one important segment of this character’s gigantic psychic population. Perhaps the most startling quality that Langella brings to the role is Nixon’s practical intelligence. His frank desire for money has the disarming earthiness of a strictly budgeting housewife from Peoria.

So when Michael Sheen, expertly playing David Frost, finally pries from Langella’s Nixon—during their final TV interview—regret over his crimes, and something like an apology to the American people, you don’t feel that Nixon has been finally tripped up and that the good guys in the white hats have vanquished the black-hatted villain. You feel that Nixon has given up precisely what he is able to give up and no more, and that he makes his avowal in a complicated mesh of self-knowledge, fear of the truth, sudden horror and King Lear-like isolation, all anchored by that sense of having mastered the world, of belonging to history.

And Langella conveys all this complexity while the camera stays on his face for what feels like minutes, which for most actors nowadays is the equivalent of bungee-jumping off the Empire State Building.

As Sam Rockwell—playing James Reston Jr., one of Frost’s consultants for the Nixon interviews—puts it, the triumph of Frost’s Nixon interviews was achieved by “the reductive power of the closeup.” 

Mr. Siegel doesn’t let his enthusiasm get the better of his grip on reality.  ”No one seriously thinks Langella is going to trump Rourke this year, or Sean Penn for that matter,” he admits.  ”But I like to imagine that Langella has a chance because it intensifies the already suspenseful acting contests to a stark polarity: The art of acting versus the hallucination of acting produced by special effects.”

Handicapping Best Actor

February 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

An AFP story out of Hollywood takes a look at the odds that bookmakers are offering as to what film or actor or actress will win the “Golden Dude,” as Robin Williams tearfully dubbed his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor when he won for Good Will Hunting. Slumdog Millionaire, according to the heavy-duty thinkers at bookmaking firm William Hill, is the 1/10 favorite for best picture, with The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button running a distant second. Hill and America’s Line in Las Vegas give Kate Winslet the winning odds for Best Actress for her performance in The Reader. Heath Ledger is given 1/40 odds to win posthumously for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

As for the Best Actor category, William Hill projects Mickey Rourke as the 8/15 favorite for his work in The Wrestler, with Sean Penn (thought by many to be the favorite among longtime Academy voters) at 2/1 for Milk. Brad Pitt is listed at 33/1 for Benjamin Button, and Richard Jenkins is at 40/1 for The Visitor. And smack in the middle is Frank Langella, given odds of 8/1 for his performance as the thirty-seventh President in Frost/Nixon.

Quite intriguingly, William Hill’s spokesman Rupert Adams is quoted thus: “We’re just starting to see a little bit of interest in Frank Langella. There’s one guy who bets with us every year who we regard as our Oscars guru and he has chosen Langella, which is interesting.”

Meanwhile, Sir David Frost has let it be known that he hopes Langella will be handed the statuette.

Stanley Yes, Patricia No, Says Times Editor

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Watergate | 2 Comments 

At the New York Times, public editor Clark Hoyt’s rebuke of reporter Patricia Cohen is stinging:

I asked [former National Archives supervisory tapes archivist Frederick J.] Graboske how he was certain Kutler mixed the two tapes on purpose. To have done it, he said, “would have been the height of sloppiness, and Stanley is a sloppy researcher or he did it deliberately.” That is a different answer than he gave Cohen. If plain error was a possibility, I do not think The Times should have printed the charge without strong evidence. Journalistic balance, giving both sides, did not produce fairness here.

Cuba Policy “At Odds With National Interest”

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cuba, Nixon Center, Richard Nixon, The National Interest | Leave a Comment 

Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, provides an early glimpse at a Senate report honchoed by Nixonian realist and GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, who says the 47-year U.S. economic embargo of Cuba hasn’t worked:

I call it the “slippery slope strategy” in which Lugar is shining a big spotlight on the inadequacy and failure of US-Cuba policy that for too long has been held in place by domestic constituencies who were working at odds with the American national interest. Lugar is pushing buttons and nudging Obama’s team into put itself forward constructively — and with these steps, it becomes easier to see the broader embargo as a serious anachronism and a mistake that needs remedy.

President Nixon would be pleased.

It Wasn’t Fit To Print (At Least On Page One)

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

The supreme and all-powerful in-house arbiter of journalistic practice and ethics at the New York Times, the paper’s “public editor,” has issued his report on its recent story about Professor Stanley Kutler, former White House counsel John Dean, and the Watergate tapes. While copies of the full text are bouncing around the Internet, the History News Network offers this excerpt pending the article’s publication in tomorrow’s editions:

I think The Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.

Clark Hoyt, author of the critique, believes that while Kutler’s published transcripts of March 1973 Watergate conversations contained errors, there’s no reason to believe they were intentional.

I raised some concerns of my own about the way Kutler edited a July 1972 conversation that I am certain are being studied carefully not only at the Times but in newsrooms around the world.

Kirill I: Russia’s $4 Billion Man

February 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Russia | Leave a Comment 

He’s filthy rich, former KGB, his organization has exclusive rights over the sale of tobacco and alcohol, his role is crucial in bolstering Putin’s autocracy, and incidentally he’s the point man on faith and morals.

Happy Anniversary, Mr. Dictator

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cuba, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Conrad Black on Nixon, Kennedy, and the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s seizure of power.

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