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Andrea Mitchell’s Talking Back
Fascinating review of Andrea Mitchell’s Talking Back, reminding us where she came from and what she’s buried in her past. Thanks, Dan, for fighting media amnesia.
Joseph N. DiStefano
Philadelphia Inquirer
April 17, 2006
Just read your terrific review of the Andrea Mitchell book. Hell! I remember the first husband! She and he were very angry people, and I remember working for the "Marciarose Show" at KYW and she was always wheeling Gil around (he was in a wheelchair by then-- 1972?), trying to get on the air with his problems, the kids, etc. Maybe she never told Alan Greenspan about him!
Kiki Olson
London
April 17, 2006
A long time ago, I spent an evening with Andrea and Gil. Two things were clear: He was the better looking of the two, and she was nuts about him.
Nice job on the book review.
Murray Dubin
Philadelphia
April 17, 2006
I enjoyed very much your Andrea Mitchell article. One teeny-weeny crit: Please resign from the ranks of those who say "prior to" instead of "before." You may not have noticed, but "before" has been wiped out of use by the more blowhard "prior to."
Michelle Osborn
Haverford, Pa.
April 17, 2006
Nice review on Andrea Mitchell. I had no idea about her first marriage to the black film maker. I’ve found it harder to imagine her life with Greenspan, although I soften at the memory of his early jazz life. I also wonder how she even had time to write a mediocre memoir. Of course, it could have been a way of keeping a distance from Greenspan.
Patrick D. Hazard
Weimar, Germany
April 18, 2006
Wonderful article. Thanks for pulling back the curtain. And per Mitchell’s comment that she wrote a professional rather than a personal memoir, it would seem logical that she excise anything and everything personal from the book, not just selectively.
Mitchell Owens
New York
April 21, 2006
What was it she said? "It’s not an autobiography. It’s a professional memoir"?
• memoir: a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources.
• memoirs: an autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.
• autobiography: an account of a person’s life written by that person.
Oscar Wilde said it best. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Burnell Yow
Center City
April 23, 2006
Editor’s. comment: For more letters re Andrea Mitchell’s book, click here.
John McIntyre was deservedly forgotten
Concerning Patrick Hazard’s comment about the late Philadelphia novelist John T. McIntyre, I too got that "King Tut thrill" when I read Kevin Plunkett’s City Paper piece on the man. In fact, I went online and managed to find four of the five novels Plunkett singled out for special praise.
That was the good part. The bad party is— I can explain why McIntyre got lost.
His novels are neither here nor there. They lack the incisiveness and punch of a good crime novel. They aren’t quite rich enough in local color to qualify as good "Philly novels." I found Steps Going Down, written in 1936, to be the best of the four— but it’s still a bit of a stretch to call it a gripping crime novel.
For lovers of genre fiction who want genuine Philly seasoning, best stick to David Goodis and William P. McGivern (The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, Odds Against Tomorrow), both of whom are occasionally lost, then found.
Andrew Mangravite
Yeadon, Pa.
April 17, 2006
Capital C Culture
Re your Editor’s Notebook response to my essay on "The ‘Capital C’ Culture syndrome"—
Eastern Europe as an example of fairness and accessibility?I have spent the last seven years in a part of that Eastern Europe, and have visited Bautzen, the prison where thousands were dispatched for trying to be decent. Come on, Dan. How about Finland, Sweden or Denmark for valid comparisons?
I have no argument with Bob Scott as a civilized man. He was the best of what is left from the WASP hegemony. But his crowd’s hiding behind Anglophilia instead of creating a truly egalitarian culture has saddled us with apparently intractable problems.
Do you see no connection between the recent reports of Exxon’s chief cleaning up on our oil addiction and the underclasses in Philly having to dodge daily bullets? Zillionaires and homeless coexisting? No number of museums will ever close that gap. Decent income (not underpaid illegals to do our dirty work), effective education for the damaged poor, and an open mind among the privileged about a globalizing economy favoring the already overfavored: yes, those are the necessary if not sufficient conditions of a truly cultivated society. Otherwise Culture with a capital C is just an unearned badge of status, crippling the overfavored into thinking their lives are exemplary, rather than simply overfavored. Eastern Europe as a counterargument? That’s a stinking Red Herring, Dan.
Patrick Hazard
Weimar, Germany
April 18, 2006
Editor’s comment: My reference to Eastern Europe was intended ironically. By all means let’s consider Finland, Sweden and Denmark. These are indeed fair and decent societies; perhaps coincidentally, they are (in my judgment, to be sure) nowhere near as culturally stimulating as those benighted places where rich and poor seem always to be at each other’s throats. Drama requires conflict. And if we eliminate, say, tobacco aand liquor, we may also have to learn to do without, say, Proust and jazz. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Patrick Hazard replies: No free lunch in the cultural sector, Dan? How about an affordable brunch? And although I no longer smoke and rarely drink, I have no problem with banning its public collateral damage.Man has a right to poison himself in private! But that you can be bored by Finland, Sweden and Denmark astonishes me.In my European retirement, I’ve spent almost as much time in Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe.What are you smoking, Dan? Gauloises?
I grew up in Detroit, relishing Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook, and later his son Eero at the GM Tech Center. Now I scour Finland for more Aalto.
True, jazz grew out of coping with black misery in the Mississippi Delta, but Benny Goodman picked up his clarinet in a mainly benign Chicago and got along with Louie Armstrong. And take Proust’s madeleines away and he’d find something else to munch on deeply and retroactively.
Are you going to blame Mozart’s 600-plus works on Austrian oppression? And Beethoven’s glory on his deafness? Surely there must be a via media between Hobbes and Norman Vincent Peale.
Ballets Russes
I have just read “Return of Les Ballets Russes,” by Saul Davis Zlatkovsky. It is a wonderful and very interesting review of the film Ballet Russes.
I would encourage you to have him write more articles for your Broad Street Review.
Janet L. Springer
Executive Director
Classical Dance Alliance
New York
April 18, 2006
Robert Montgomery Scott
I loved your piece on Robert Montgomery Scott. I remember his blocking Rocky and said to myself contentedly, "Now there’s a Main Liner with balls." The rejected New Era Ponzi scheme reminds me how shamefully dollar-o-centic our cultural institutions are. I prefer the French method of public cultural financing, avoiding the disgusting kind of sucking up to a fascist like Annenberg that I observed close-up.
As for the inheritedly wealthy being above it all, Bush’s infamous tax cuts and the brouhaha over Death Taxes makes me skeptical. I’d rather promote the Scandinavian-type safety net, with Nokia-generated fortunes accessible to the truly innovative. Nieman Marcus luxury is my definition of boring.Thorsten Veblen and Eugene Victor Debs remain my heroes. Better,nowadays, Architecture for Humanity’s new book, Design As If You Give a Damn. But no doubt about it, given the sterile Anglophilia that blinds the Main Liners, Scott was a giant in a pygmy-generating subculture♦
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