Lena Horne

Jazz singer and film actress Lena Horne was born on this day in 1917, into an upper middle class black family in Brooklyn. When she was 16 she joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and within the year became a featured performer. She sang with Charlie Barnet's big band in 1940-41, but disliked the travel required and soon began singing on the NBC radio network out of New York.

In 1942 she headed to the West Coast, where she signed a long term contract with MGM. She was 25. Her contract stipulated that she would not perform in stereotyped roles, making parts hard to come by. Features that included black and white performers were already banned from some states, making her career prospects problematic. The same difficulty presented itself when she performed with bands, especially bands comprised of white and black musicians; she and Billie Holiday both sang with Artie Shaw's band during this period. Her mixture of African American, Caucasian and Native American ancestry didn't make it any easier for her to get the part of the mixed race heroine Julie in MGM's 1951 filming of Showboat; the part went to her friend Ava Gardner, who modeled her performance on Horne's recordings of the songs.

In the sixties and seventies Lena Horne became a perennial guest star on television variety shows, and a popular night club performer. Then in 1981, at age 63, she opened a one-woman show on Broadway. It ran for 333 performances; the longest running solo show in Broadway history. She won her fourth Grammy in 1996, at age 79. Lena Horne appears five times in A Book of Ages.

The Little Prince

Today is the birthday of the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in Lyon, France, in 1900. In 1935, a plane he was piloting from Paris to Saigon crashed in the Sahara. After surviving the crash, he and his navigator lived for four days on grapes, two oranges and a bottle of wine before being rescued by a Bedouin on a camel. This adventure formed the germ of the story that became The Little Prince.

After France surrendered to the Germans in 1940, Saint-Exupéry moved to New York and lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. It was here and in a rented mansion on Long Island Sound that he wrote the book for which he is best remembered. The Little Prince was published in 1943. Shortly after this Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe to offer his services to the Free French. On July 31, 1944 he took off on a reconnaissance mission from Corsica and was never seen again. He was 43.

Saint Exupéry appears on page 164 in A Book of Ages. Alternately twee and wise, but never cynical, The Little Prince is one of those books people read in their last year of college, just as they are about to launch into the unknown. It's reread later on in moments when the world seems inexplicable––and it can be read in a moment; it's quite short. One of the things it examines is the gulf between our selves at different ages. He writes: "Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." Sometimes when I read that it sounds ironic, and sometimes he sounds completely in earnest. It depends on where I am when I read it.

Joyce Meets Fitzgerald.

On June 27, 1928, Paris bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach gave a dinner party so she could introduce F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce. Fitzgerald went down on one knee and kissed Joyce’s hand. Beach was 41 and the proprietor of Shakespeare & Co.

Decline and Fall

Just before midnight on June 27, 1778, in the summer-house in his garden in Lausanne, Switzerland, Edward Gibbon finished The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The writing had consumed 15 years, producing 1.5 million words in six volumes, with 8000 footnotes. Gibbon was 37.

Joseph Smith

On June 27th 1844, in Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, was murdered by an angry mob. He was 38. In his short life he produced many volumes of scripture, and eleven children. Smith appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Michael

As career arcs go, Michael Jackson's was pretty amazing, and never uninteresting. He appears five times in A Book of Ages. I was just talking about him on the radio in Aspen.

At age 10 he has his first gold record, and also gold records two three and four. In fact the first four singles The Jackson Five record with Motown Records–– “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” and “I’ll Be There”––all make it to #1.

At age 24 he performs the moonwalk in concert for the first time, 1983. (The move was actually devised by mime Marcel Marceau.)

At age 27 he has plastic surgery, 1985. (At the same age Salvador Dali paints a painting of melted watches hung from trees, and Johnny Depp plays a strangely attired adolescent who has scissors instead of hands.)

At age 35 Michael marries Lisa Marie Presley, 1994. The King of Pop marries the daughter of the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

At age 38 Michael Jackson is a father, 1997. (This is still a bit hard to visualize.) Also, his plastic surgeon advises against any more work on his nose.

And now dead at age 50. Which Michael Jackson will people remember? The strange man in the page-boy and the epaulets or the 20 year-old who was the coolest person on the planet? I liked the kid fronting the Jackson Five best. Every famous life has a different arc. After the bizarre turns of the past decade, it appeared Michael Jackson's was set for an upswing. Then, suddenly, he's gone. I wonder what his estate sale will turn up.

The Lottery

On June 26, 1948, the New Yorker magazine published a short story by a 28 year-old Vermont housewife. The Lottery is set in an ordinary New England village, much like the one Shirley Jackson lived in. The story is about a town ritual. It unfolds much like the Fourth of July, with the attendant excitement and gossip and speculation, and the town fathers giving speeches, culminating in a drawing of names. Many who read the story in the New Yorker expected the heroine to win a washer-dryer, and were upset by how the story turned out, and angry with Jackson for having the nerve to write it.

Shirley Jackson appears only once in A Book of Ages. Another anecdote was left out with some regret; it involved Jackson using a voodoo doll to break Alfred A. Knopf's leg while he was vacationing at Stowe.

Little Big Horn

On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer and his small detachment of cavalry died at the hands of a much larger force of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a scene that was soon immortalized as Custer’s Last Stand in a lithograph that replaced murals of voluptuous nudes over saloon bars all across America. Custer, who the Native Americans called Yellow Hair, was 36.

George Armstrong Custer appears appears twice in A Book of Ages. Sitting Bull appears once. Geronimo, the warrior chief of the Apaches, appears four times. The history of the Native Americans has been written, for the most part, by the people who took the Americas away from them. It was done by treaty, disease, fraud, by force, in song and story and films and novels. When I was a boy I read boys' biographies of Custer and Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill and watched John Ford pictures which were often fair but depicted white heroes who were bluntly racist. Custer was played by Errol Flynn, a native of Tasmania. Native Americans were played by actors who were often African American or Asian or Polynesian and seldom spoke a line.

Picasso

Pablo Picasso opened his first gallery exhibition on June 24, 1901 in the Rue Lafitte in Paris. The 19 year-old Spaniard was just entering his Blue Period and still painting in a representational manner. He appears ten times in A Book of Ages. Being a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa, painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, marrying a ballerina, having an affair with a shopgirl, suing a biographer, rewriting his will, etc. An interesting life.

Hitler in Paris

Adolf Hitler spent the morning of June 23, 1940 in Paris. He had never visited before. He liked the Eiffel Tower, and had his picture taken there, but found the Louvre disappointing. He had some quiet time at Napoleon’s tomb. The 51 year-old despot, war criminal and former painter spent three hours in the city. He would never come back. A year later, almost to the day, he invaded Russia. Hitler appears 12 times in A Book of Ages.

Public Enemy

Today is the birthday of John Dillinger, the famous bank robber, born in Indianapolis in 1903. Dillinger was as famous for his daring escapes as he was for robbing banks. In March 1934 he escaped from a heavily guarded jail in Crown Point, Indiana, using a revolver carved out of soap and stealing the sheriff's new Ford automobile. Six months earlier he was sprung from a jail in Ohio by gang members posing as officers of the court. It was during the summer of 1934 that J. Edgar Hoover named him Public Enemy #1.

Because Depression-era Americans resented bankers, Dillinger was perceived as hero, a modern-day Robin Hood. He cultivated this persona by posing for newspaper photographers, but he was no philanthropist. Nor was he self-invented; newspapers and radio glorified him but Hollywood had already created the role of armed antihero. Dillinger represented the shift from folklore to popular media. The way he leapt over teller's windows during robberies was borrowed from gangsters he'd seen in the movies. In July 1934 he was gunned down by G-Men after seeing a gangster movie at Chicago's Biograph Theater. He was 31.

John Dillinger appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Machiavellian

Niccolo Machiavelli died on this day in 1527. He was 58. Machiavelli wrote the book on political ruthlessness. Today, The Prince is required reading on many college campuses. He once said, "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."

Machiavelli appears at age 44 in A Book of Ages, right before an anecdote about Ronald Reagan hosting the TV coverage of the opening of Disneyland. Machiavelli appears again at age 58.

Mary Wollestonecraft tells a ghost story

On a rainy June 19th evening in 1816, Mary Wollestonecraft is in Geneva with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, and Byron’s friend Polidori. It's Byron who suggests each of them write a ghost story. When the men can’t think of any good ideas, Mary writes one about a creature made out of spare parts from dead bodies. Back in England, she turns the story into a novel which she titles Frankenstein. The book will be published in March, 1818.

Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley appears twice in A Book of Ages, the same number as her poet husband. She will outlive him by almost thirty years.

Freaky

At around 4:30 P.M. on June 19, 1999, while walking along Route 5 near Center Lovell, Maine, horror novelist Stephen King was struck by a car. He was 43 at the time. No doubt all 43 years passed before his eyes. In the novel he’d been working on, From A Buick 8, a character dies after being hit by a car. King, however, survived. Anyway, the vehicle that struck him was an ’85 Dodge Caravan, not a Buick.

Stephen King appears on pages 4, 52, 80 and 199 in A Book of Ages.

Watergate

On June 18th, 1972, Bob Woodward, assigned to the police beat at the Washington Post, writes a small story about a second rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel. He is 29.

Woodward appears once in A Book of Ages. The security guard, Frank Wills, appears four times.

Bloomsday, Joyce, Plath, Hughes

On June 16, 1904, in Dublin, James Joyce fell in love with Nora Barnacle, whom he'd known for about a week. He was 22. June 16 became “Bloomsday,” the day in which the plot of Ulysses takes place. Shortly after this meeting Joyce left Ireland for the Continent, and Nora went with him.

On June 16, 1956, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married at St. George the Martyr in London. She was 23. They had known each other since February, when she met him at a party in Cambridge. When they embraced she kissed him and bit his cheek hard enough to draw blood.

Joyce appears ten times in A Book of Ages. Plath appears seven times. Both remarkably, poetically. The place where Plath and Hughes were married was aptly named. Plath died at age thirty, leaving 250 poems, two books of short stories, one novel and two small children.

Fathers & Sons

In 1955 Ford Motor Company hired Marianne Moore to help name their newest car-model. The 67 year-old poet had some interesting suggestions. Imagine driving a car named "Utopian Turtletop" or "Andante Con Tropo." What about "The Anticipator"? The "Thunder Crester"? The "Silver Sword"? The "Regna Racer"? What exactly is a "Magigravue"? Or a "Turcotingo"? Would you expect a "Pastelogram" to get better gas mileage and good acceleration? I like "The Varsity Stroke" but it might be a bit preppy. She also suggested "Mongoose Civique" and "The Intelligent Whale" (which the car was almost as big as.) "The Resilient Bullet" sounds almost cool.

Ford didn't use any of Moore's suggestions, deciding instead to name the new car after Henry Ford’s son and heir. The Edsel. The question isn't why Ford Motor Company named the car Edsel, but why Henry Ford would give such a name to his son. Maybe he should have let the poet name him.

Marianne Moore appears five times in A Book of Ages. Henry Ford, Edsel's grandfather, appears seven times.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Today is the birthday of the most influential novelist America has ever produced. Never mind J. D. Salinger and John Updike. Hemingway persuaded Americans to write shorter sentences, but Twitter would have done that eventually. Melville's novel didn't result in a ban on whaling. No, the most influential novelist in American history was a mother of seven from Cincinnati.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher. In 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was 40 years-old. The book went on to sell over a million copies. It was the first American novel to do so. It sold 10,000 copies in the first week, an astonishing thing considering there were no superstores then, no Amazon. In place of the author tour of radio stations and television talk shows, though, there were abolitionist lectures and meetings all across the North, where Uncle Tom's Cabin was talked about and quoted. It supplied the mythic underpinnings to the moral outrage that led to the American Civil War. A decade later, in 1862, there was the famous meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!" It was true.

Harriet Beecher Stowe appears on page 154 in A Book of Ages.

Babe Ruth

On June 13, 1902, seven year-old George Herman Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School For Boys, a Catholic school for orphans and delinquents. It turned out to be a lucky break. Ruth's parents owned a bar in working class Baltimore and didn't have the time or the energy to deal with the kid.

George wouldn't be known as Babe for a few years. He was a large and (by his own description) an ugly kid, and his habits were hardly infantile. He began smoking and chewing tobacco when he was seven, drinking beer at age eight. He disliked school but loved games. Ruth would learn to play baseball at St. Mary's from a monk named Brother Matthias. The nuns forced him to learn to write right-handed. Luckily, Matthias left his left-handed hitting and throwing alone.

Babe Ruth appears on pages 16, 50, 59, 74 and 111 in A Book of Ages.

Nelson Mandela

On June 12, 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to overthrow the white South African government. His statement to the court received international publicity. He was 45 and would spend the next 26 years in prison.

Nelson Mandela appears on pages 88, 122, 175, 250 and 257 in A Book of Ages.

Women of A Certain Age

In the June 10, 1955 issue of Collier's Magazine, clothing designer Christian Dior said that “Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.”

Christian Dior appears twice in A Book of Ages. He introduced the New Look when he was 42.

Johnny Depp

Today's the birthday of Johnny Depp. Born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1963, he appears three times in A Book of Ages, beginning at age 15. (Johnny Depp's family moved 30 times by the time he was 15.) Some of his more famous personas also appear: Hunter S. Thompson (7 times) and Keith Richards (4 times.) Celebrity has an interesting way of intersecting.

McCarthyism

This day in 1954 saw the beginning of the end of the witch-hunting era named after Senator Joe McCarthy. On June 9th, it was Joseph Welch, a mild-mannered Army lawyer, whose famous rebuke seemed to waken America from a bad dream. "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Joe McCarthy, the failed chicken farmer and upstate Wisconsin judge, had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, where he served in obscurity. Then in February 1950 he held up a sheet of paper and said it held a list of State Department employees who were working for the Soviets. He had no such list, but his reputation was made. He was 41. Joe McCarthy appears three times in A Book of Ages. Today fewer people remember the man than remember the era named for him, and many confuse him with the wry, poetic, anti-war Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, who ran against LBJ in 1968, beating him in the New Hampshire primary and convincing him not to seek re-election, but it would be hard to imagine two less similar people.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this date in 1867 in a rural Wisconsin characterized by white clapboard houses, red barns and moral rectitude, certainties Wright would spend most of his life overturning. His interest in architecture began at the age of 9 when his mother gave him a set of blocks designed by kindergarten pioneer Friedrich Fröbel. He left high school and the University of Wisconsin without obtaining degrees and traveled to Chicago which was still engaged in rebuilding itself after the Great Fire of 1871, eventually finding a position with the firm of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

The suburb of Oak Park, Illinois remains a museum of Prairie Style houses designed by Wright while in Sullivan's employ and after he established his own firm. Wright dressed like an artist rather than a professional man, cultivated a following of acolytes, wore his hair long and had affairs with the wives of clients. In 1909, he eloped to Europe with one of them, leaving behind six children and a wife of almost 20 years. After returning in late 1910 he moved to the neighborhood of Spring Green, Wisconsin and began work on the hilltop house and studio he named Taliesin. He was 44.

Frank Lloyd Wright appears five times in A Book of Ages. It's hard to pin down his greatest achievement. Just as the man never quite settled down, his forms evolved throughout his life, taking on new shapes and conventions, new materials, each brilliant in conception if sometimes impractical in detail, but always dominating the changing landscape of built America. Office buildings and houses. Gas stations and museums. Churches, hotels and skyscrapers. When he moved to the Sunbelt at age 57 he was decades ahead of millions of other Americans. The house at Fallingwater, Pennsylvania, his signature design, was completed when he was 72. When he died at 91 he was still at work on the spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum in New York. Every time I see a Wright house I wish I'd indulged my early ambition to become an architect. I'm sure I am not alone.

Anne Frank

On June 6, 1944, 14 year-old Anne Frank is listening to the radio, in the secret annex at the address in Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, and hears the voice of General Eisenhower announcing the invasion of Europe. She records the news in her diary: “I have the feeling that friends are approaching.”

Anne Frank appears on pages 7, 29, 33, 35 and 45 in A Book of Ages.

D-Day

On June 5, 1944, 53 year-old Dwight Eisenhower knew that his success or failure in life, and the entire future of the free world, hinged upon the weather over the English Channel the next morning. In his pocket he had a carefully-worded address explaining his decision, and was prepared to take full responsibility for what happened next.

This might be my favorite entry in A Book of Ages, because it is a book about decisions and moments that become watersheds. Everything turned out all right. The weather was good, the Germans had been fooled enough by the allies' various deceptions to deploy fewer troops above Omaha and Utah beaches than they might have. The war was won on that day, or we knew it would eventually be won. Eisenhower went on to be an affable, grandfatherly president of a prosperous country enjoying its bounty and worried about very little but the mortgage and the possibility of complete annihilation by Communists.

T. S. Eliot and Groucho have dinner

On June 3, 1964, T. S. Eliot sent a car to London’s Savoy Hotel to bring Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx to dinner. Eliot told Groucho that their friendship had greatly enhanced his credit with the grocer across the street. Eliot was 75, Groucho 73. Both were masters of the wisecrack, coiners of famous epigrams, now measuring out their lives in coffee spoons.

A Book of Ages is full of people meeting who you'd never thought met each other, or perhaps wondered if they had. Freud giving advice to Mahler, having his portrait drawn by Salvador Dali, Salinger meeting Hemingway in Paris, Marilyn Monroe having tea with Isak Dinesen at Carson McCullers's apartment, William F. Buckley Jr. meeting John Kenneth Galbraith for the first time in an elevator on the way to Truman Capote's Black & White Ball. Life is full of crossed paths. You never know who you might meet tomorrow.

Love & Marriage

In the month we all associate with weddings it's interesting to know that on June 3, 1989, 52 year-old Rolling Stone bass guitarist Bill Wyman married his 19 year-old girlfriend, Mandy Smith. The New York Daily News later reported that Wyman’s 28 year-old son was dating Smith’s 40 year-old mother. If they too had married, Wyman’s wife would have been her own stepmother-in-law and Wyman would have been his son’s stepson-in-law.

The Stones appear eleven times in A Book of Ages, the Who five times, the Beatles fourteen times, Bob Dylan seven times, Michael Jackson five times, Eric Clapton and Joni Mitchell four times apiece, Jerry Garcia six, Simon and Garfunkel six and five times respectively, Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson once each.

Fellow Travelers

In June 1943, 27 year-old Saul Bellow was fired from a film-reviewing job at Time magazine by fellow-traveler Whittaker Chambers. It’s said that Chambers disliked Bellow’s assessment of the poet Wordsworth. Bellow was able to find another job at Encyclopedia Britannica.

Saul Bellow appears six times in A Book of Ages. Whittaker Chambers twice, most famously at age 47 when he gives the House Un-American Activities Committee a tour of the pumpkin patch on his farm in Maryland.

Marilyn

Today is the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1926, but baptized Norma Jeane Baker. Because of her mother's mental illness, Marilyn's childhood was spent in a series of foster homes. She lived with her mother for the first time, and only briefly, when she was eight years-old, in a house was just of Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

Monroe appears eight times in A Book of Ages, marrying at 16; at 19 dyeing her hair blonde and signing a $125-a-week contract with 20th Century Fox; meeting Truman Capote on the set of Asphalt Jungle at 24; marrying Joe DiMaggio at 27. A photograph she posed for in 1949 helped launch Playboy magazine in 1953. Her film persona was one of dim vulnerability, but she studied at the prestigious Actors Studio. She married brainy left-wing playwright Arthur Miller at a point when he was under fire for his political beliefs, and stood by him, risking being blacklisted herself. Her films show a performer of subtle and fragile complexity, of contradictions. She famously serenaded JFK on his 45th birthday in 1962, and died the same year at age 36.