Myths About Mozart

Myths about Mozart

 

By Warren Boroson

 Was Mozart poisoned by Antonio Salieri, a rival composer—a rumor repeated in the Academy Award-winning (“Best Picture”) film, “Amadeus” (1984)? No.

Was he poisoned at all? No.

Was his body thrown into a pauper’s grave? No.

Did he die a pauper? Unrecognized and unheralded? No.

There are so damn many misconceptions about Mozart! There’s even an erudite 285-page book called “The Mozart Myths,” by William Stafford, published by the Stanford University Press in 1992. In this article,  I’ve cribbed a lot from this excellent book.

 

One reason for the myths is that people like to embroider stories, make them more colorful and interesting and dramatic. So they exaggerate…and sometimes even fib. There’s a proverb among journalists: The facts kill many a good story. To put it another way: Good stories sometimes blithely ignore the facts.

 

Besides the temptation to goose up the truth, there are lots of honest disagreements about Mozart. One reason: Mozart did not have a scrupulously honest lifelong friend who wrote his recollections soon after Mozart’s death, when they were fresh. Mozart’s widow, Constanze, altered the facts to make herself look better. So did almost all of Mozart’s acquaintances. This isn’t unusual. Mahler’s wife, Alma, was such a liar that the phenomenon has been given a name: the Alma problem. And she was such a nutcase that she wouldn’t let Mahler’s music be performed at his funeral.

 

Rumors proliferate, especially when a famous person dies young. Think of all the rumors about the death of John F. Kennedy. One of my favorites came from the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald: She thought that Texas Gov. Connolly and the President got into an argument in their limousine and shot each other. Another time, she was asked: Did she really think her son was innocent and didn’t kill President Kennedy? I never said that, she replied. I never said he was perfect.

   

Beethoven had an acquaintance who wrote for newspapers — and liked to make things up. He wrote that Beethoven had told him that the beginning of the Fifth Symphony — dot dot dot dash — represents fate knocking at the door. So, another acquaintance of Beethoven’s said to him, I read that you said that the beginning of the Fifth Symphony represents fate knocking at the door. And Beethoven replied, I said WHAT? I said WHAT? And laughed and laughed.

 

A bounteous source of misinformation about Mozart is the film Amadeus — and we’ll see excerpts from it later on.

 

But first, the film did get something right. Mozart was a genius. And also a silly little kid.

 

Even his sister, Maria Anna (who was called Nannerl), said that “except for his music, he was a child.”

Once, while Mozart was playing the harpsichord for an aristocrat, a favorite cat of his came into the room…and Mozart stopped playing and followed the cat out of the room… — ”nor could we get him back for a considerable time.”

 

Another woman reported that Mozart, around 30 years old, had been improvising on the harpsichord in her presence, “only to break off suddenly and begin leaping over tables and chairs and meowing like a cat, and turn somersaults like an unruly boy.”

 

That someone can be an artistic genius and also a child is possibly the consequence of that person’s concentrating so much on art that he or she doesn’t  mature. And as you know, Mozart’s father, Leopold, dragged him all around Europe to show off his precocity…. Michael Rabin was an extreme example of an artist who never matured.

 

Now, the movie Amadeus centers on the rivalry between Mozart and the supposedly pathologically jealous Salieri. There’s even the implication that Salieri, wearing a mask, commissioned Mozart to write a requiem — which Salieri would have claimed to have written himself, and have played at Mozart’s funeral. (Actually, a Count Walsegg-Stuppach commissioned the requiem to commemorate his recently deceased wife.)

 

Movies and other media sometimes take ridiculous liberties with the truth. Remember the film biography of Beethoven — where Beethoven is secretly in love with his brother’s wife? The woman he fought with in court over her son — the woman whom he contemptuously called the Queen of the Night? Remember that Verdi wrote an opera about Joan of Arc — in which she gets married and rides off into the sunset? How about Prokofiev’s ballet about Romeo and Juliet, where they don’t die? (OK, he wisely revised it.)

I think if you’re going to write something, even fiction, about something that actually happened you should try very hard to adhere to the truth.

 

Here’s what one critic has written (from the High Country Press) about “Amadeus”:

 

“If rivalry did exist between the two composers, it was not likely as intense as the film suggests, as evidenced by the concerts the two presented together. Salieri did not play nearly so prominent a role in Mozart’s life as the film suggests. Also, Salieri is portrayed in the film as an incompetent musician. Though his abilities paled in comparison to Mozart’s and are not remembered by history, he was a good musician and a respected composer during his time. The idea that Salieri poisoned Mozart does date back to his death, but is not founded in fact. Mozart’s cause of death is more widely believed to have been a fever that was epidemic at the time.”

 

By the way, the notion that Salieri poisoned Mozart…well, Mozart on his death-bed said he had been poisoned. Salieri, while he himself was dying and had gone crazy,  said he had poisoned Mozart. In fact, Pushkin, the Russian playwright, had written a play (1830) conveying the notion that Salieri had poisoned Mozart, out of envy.

    

    O where is justice when the sacred gift,

    Immortal genius, comes not in reward

    For toil, devotion, prayer, self-sacrifice –

    But shines instead inside a madcap’s skull,

    An idle hooligan’s?

                                                                 --Pushkin

 

One critic, Neil Wenborn, writes in “Mozart” (1994) that “Mozart may have believed at one point that he had been poisoned, but there is not the slightest evidence that he was, or for that matter that Salieri — despite his self-accusatory deathbed ravings more than 30 years later — was in any way connected with his death....”

Salieri actually helped Mozart’s career and was in awe of his genius.

Well, if Salieri didn’t poison Mozart, who did? The Masons? No. Did he in effect commit suicide — by taking too much mercury for his syphilis? No. (He didn’t have syphilis.) Hmm. Who else might have done it? Oh, I know! The Jews! (General Ludendorff argued in 1926 that the Jews, along with the masons, had poisoned Mozart.)

But Mozart scholar William Stafford writes: “No anti-Semitic utterance by him is known to us. He had more contact with Jews than was usual, and his Jewish former landlord stood godfather to his first child.”

Stafford, spoilsport that he is, came to “a firm conclusion: Mozart died a natural death.”

 

Then there’s Mozart’s undisputed vulgarity.

Even in his early 20s, he wrote things that carry, to quote one Wenborn, “an embarrassing emphasis on bodily functions.”

But he shared his vulgarity with his parents and with many of his contemporaries. Scatalogical humor was not uncommon in those days. Mozart’s 56-year-old mother wrote to Leopold, her husband, from Munich: “Keep well, my love, Into your mouth your ass you’ll shove. I wish you goodnight, my dear, but first shit in your bed and make it burst.”

Well, as the French say, autres temps, autres moeurs.

     

Was he a womanizer? The film Amadeus implies that Mozart seduced a popular singer, whom Salieri had his eye on. Actually, Salieri himself had seduced her. Mozart was generally chaste — unlike so many other composers. He himself wrote that “he had too much horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases…to fool around with whores and too much religion and honor ‘to seduce an innocent girl.’”

In fact, Mozart was his century’s equivlent of a member of the Tea Party. When Voltaire died, Mozart wrote: “that godless archrascal Voltaire has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That is his reward.”

 

Was his wife Constanza an airhead, no help to him in his career?

To quote Wenborn, she “turned out to be a giddy and flirtacious girl, a bad manager, and no help at all to Mozart. But he loved her, and the marriage seems to have been happy….”    

 

Was he poverty-stricken just before his death? He was deeply in debt, yet he and his wife employed their own domestic staff, including two live-in maids and a servant. His financial problems, says Wenborn, stemmed from his lavish lifestyle — he owned expensive furniture and an extensive wardrobe. William Stafford’s conclusion: “…Mozart was by no means poor.”

 

Did he die in obscurity, cruelly forgotten by just about all? At the time of his death, writes  Wenborn, “he was by any standards a famous man, whose works were performed, studied and eulogized throughout Europe.” He continues: “The pauper’s grave is a myth, as are the rain and snowstorms that are said to have accompanied his body to its last resting place. He was given a third-class funeral…and the weather was unseasonably mlld.” (A third-class funeral was common.) And because cemetery space was scarce, headstones were not permitted. Writes Stafford, Mozart’s unceremonious burial was “normal” for that time. He was not “buried like a dog.”

 

Was he really a combination of a genius and an idiot, given to maniacal laughter, as in the film? Stafford writes: If you read his letters, you quickly recognize his intelligence. “…Mozart was a sophisticated man—certainly not the naïve child of legend….” He also concludes: “…he was a very strange and difficult man.”

 

Finally…did he really die “tragically” young? Some people believe that  “He lived a short life but this was simply because he lived much faster than normal mortals…. He was fully matured as an artist by the age of nine…. It is difficult to see what more he could have achieved. His musical output in his 36 years was greater than Beethoven’s, and not much less than Bach’s or Handel’s….” Goethe said that Mozart “had lived his creative life, spent his vital energy, fulfilled his mission as an artist.”

 

But William Stafford has a different view. At the time of his death, he argues, Mozart was not an exhausted composer; he was vigorously embarking on new ventures. “There is,” he concludes, “no consolation for his early loss.”

 

We can be grateful, though, that he lived as long as he did — and wrote music that will be played and admired until the end of time.

 

Odds and Ends

 

He had trouble all his life, Neil Wenborn writes, because he had “a remarkable facility for rubbing people the wrong way.” Some have speculated that he was autistic. Or that, he had Tourette’s syndrome.

 

Mozart’s father, who had nurtured his career, became cool toward his son later in life, leaving him “a distant and increasingly embittered observer of the career he had launched so spectacularly on the world….”

 

He had a deformed left outer ear, completely lacking the “outer convolution.”  So did his son.

 

He was five feet four.

 

Beethoven and others were offended by “Cosi fan tutte,” which conveyed the notion that women could not be trusted to be true to just one man.

 

 Joseph Hayden, the great composer, told Mozart’s father: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”

 

During Mozart’s lifetime, his most popular opera was “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”

 

The man who wrote the librettos for “Don Giovanni,” “Magic Flute,” and “Cosi” was Lorenzo da Ponte, a wildly colorful fellow. He spent time as a grocer in New Jersey, as well as a priest. He was exiled from Venice for adultery. He was the first professor of the Italian language and literature at Columbia College in NYC. I myself graduated from Columbia College, but unfortunately da Ponte taught there a couple of years before I matriculated.

 

In the audience during the first performance of “Don Giovanni” may have been da Ponte’s friend, Casanova — the model for Don Giovanni.

 

Harold Schonberg wrote about Mozart: “He was the finest pianist and organist in Europe, and the finest conductor. Had he worked on it, he could also have been the best violinist. There was nothing in music he could not do better than anybody else.

 

“The little man from Salzburg was a miracle. More Protean than Bach, musically more aristocratic than Beethoven, he can be put forward as the most perfect, best equipped, and most natural musician the world has ever seen.”

 

The Rise and Fall of Mario Lanza

When I was growing up, in the 1940s and 1950s, the tenor Mario Lanza was all over the place.

He had his own national radio program.

His record, “Be My Love,” in 1951, was a million-dollar hit.

His movies for MGM,  like “Toast of New Orleans,” made tons of money … in particular, “The Great Caruso.” It was the top-grossing film of 1951. Someone joked that the film company should be re-named Metro-Goldwyn-Mario.

Movie magazines were forever writing about him.

Maria Callas allegedly called him “Caruso’s successor.”

Toscanini allegedly said that his was “the voice of the century.” (I doubt he really said it.)

When he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth, she said, “Mr. Lanza, I didn’t know that such big sounds could come out of the human throat.”

And he did have a big, thrilling voice, effortlessly hitting high notes. Caruso himself sometimes had trouble with high notes.

But Lanza never sang at the Met—although he was interested and although the Met, at one time, was interested. La Scala actually wanted him to open a season!

             Still, near the end of his short life—he died at 38-- he owed $200,000 in taxes…MGM fired him—his wife, going off the deep end herself, was ready to divorce him (she died at age 36)—he became angry and paranoid. Here’s what he said about one of his co-stars in the movie “That Midnight Kiss”:  “That old bitch, Ethel Barrymore, she’s trying to steal my scenes! I’ll tell her where to get off!”

     The author of the best biography of Lanza (subtitled “Tenor in Exile”), Roland L. Bessette, put it this way: “His was a glorious and natural voice, with one of the broadest and most powerful ranges ever recorded. The worlds of music and film had not seen his like before. If he ultimately failed or disappointed, it was only when measured against his own dazzling potential.”

      The essential question is: What went wrong? He was dealt four aces and a king, and still  managed to get wiped out.

                                                            ***

His birth name was Alfred Arnold Cocozza (“Lanza” was his mother’s maiden name), and he lived from 1921 to 1958. He was born in the year Enrico Caruso, his idol, died.

     His parents indulged him, and for the rest of his life he seemed to think he was someone special, someone who needn’t obey the rules, someone privileged. As a young man, he would drive without a license. In the army, he sometimes wouldn’t salute officers; his excuse: he hadn’t seen them. He was expelled from high school for misconduct and never went to college.

     After Serge Koussevistsky, the conductor, heard him sing, he arranged for Lanza to study music at Tanglewood. Later Lanza joined a famous singing trio, with George London and Frances Yeend. He was the star, but both of them--unlike  Lanza--managed to sing at the Met later in life. His big break came after singing at the Hollywood Bowl; Louis B. Mayer heard him and promptly offered him a contract. Mayer said that he hoped Lanza would become a singing Clark Gable.

      For a tenor, after all, he wasn’t bad looking--although he had a terrible tendency to become bloated from overeating and overdrinking. He was 5 feet 7 or almost 5 feet 9.

           

            His arrogance and sense of superiority were one handicap. Another was his  vulgarity. A book about him, “Lanza: His Tragic Life,” by Raymond Strait and Terry Robinson, published in 1980 by Prentice-Hall, contains so much that is coarse and gross that I can give only a few examples.

        While he was making “That Midnight Kiss” with Kathryn Grayson, he”occasionally relieved himself on the set, choosing a potted plant, a bucket, a corner on a stage where Kathryn Grayson was rehearsing. Louis B. Mayer was furious” when he learned about the complaints and gave him a talking to.

        As for Doretta Morrow, a young singer who had been educated in a convent, he used such “vile” language toward her during the filming of “That Midnight Kiss” that she would leave the set in tears. (He told her she should be so close to him in the film that he could feel her sex organ.)

         He boasted of his sexual conquests…in front of his wife! Among them: Judy Garland, Inger Stevens.

       Another time he got mad at one of his film’s directors, so—to get even—he drove over to the director’s house in Hollywood at night and…pooped on his lawn.

      Another time…no, I better skip the tale about Inger Stevens. But get the book and read pages 78 and 79.

      He wasn’t well educated. He read mainly fan magazines and body-building magazines. He couldn’t read music, and learned songs by listening to recordings. Frances Yeend, who sang with him, said, “He provided a great treat for the ear, but there was nothing for the mind.”

      He didn’t associate with the best people. He did associate with gangsters. Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion, introduced him to some Mafia types. Like Lucky Luciano.

     Lanza gained prodigious amounts of weight. He went up to 260 at one time. When he made movies, the people who made the costumes  had to have two or three sets for him. Fat, not-so-fat, and very, very fat. To lose weight, he had himself injected with urine from pregnant women. He was put to sleep—and lost weight presumably while he slept.

   I’ll pass along his diet:

 A grapefruit for breakfast, a hard-boiled egg and a cup of coffee (no sugar) for lunch,

And some fresh shrimp for dinner. Yes, he lost weight when he followed the diet.

He became somewhat paranoid, talking about quote “all those fuckers who are out to get me.” Here’s a memorable quote: “That old bitch, Ethyl Barrymore, she’s trying to steal my scenes! I’ll tell her where to get off!” Bessette, who consulted with a psychiatrist, concluded that Lanza was bipolar.

Among all his woes later in life, the IRS hit him with a bill for $200,000 for back taxes.

He had trouble with MGM – which fired him because he repeatedly didn’t show up for work. MGM sued for almost $700,000 in special damages and $4.5 million in general damages.

    Lanza did so much damage at hotels when he was angry and drunk that some hotels would no longer rent to him--and some restaurants would not serve him.

      Ed Sullivan wrote in the New York Daily News, “Temperamental antics of Mario Lanza driving MGM daffy. The studio never having met a performer so incapable of handling success.”

His death was sudden, and there were rumors that the Mafia had done him in because he didn’t show up at a performance that Lucky Luciano had arranged for him. But his health wasn’t good. Bessette believes that Lanza died of acute phlebitis.

Today, some critics dismiss Lanza as  singer. He overdid it. There was no subtlety, no gradations.  He tended to sing everything the same. Loud and louder. Bessette the biographer put it well: “He leaned toward Pagliacci on arias that called for Rodolfo….”

     Rudolf Bing,  manager of the Met  from 1950 to 1972,  felt that  Lanza’s films and his singing had cheapened opera, and regarded the idea of Lanza singing at the Met as as joke. (He also despised Beverly Sills.)

     But when Lanza was young, his voice was powerful and beautiful. And as a human being, he was sometimes kind—as in his genuine concern for a child dying of cancer, a child he had befriended.

      His biographer, Bessette, seems to have two primary feelings about Lanza: (1) dislike and (2) utter loathing. But he does finally admit that “There was much that was genuinely good about the man.”

      And Bessette was grateful to Lanza for his singing. Music can be therapeutic, and whenever Bessette had trouble in his own life—the death of a son , the death of a brother—“the antidote was … a voice that could reach me like no other: that of Mario Lanza.“

                                                            ***

His Worst Recording?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qE9f80tydU

Little Known Lanza Recordings:

A Pretty Girl Is like a Melody (Berlin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neCcO0mPwV0

On the Street Where You Live (Loewe)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98xxI-RAOvk&list=PL6ACBB8D2D1AC5881

Trees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTtfX7pVBiM

Charmaine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO-Y6r4HVyM

Donkey Serenade (Friml)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGFjvmriGI0

Roses of Picardy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8PtsNFyQfQ

Ah sweet mystery (Herbert)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MezcPUe3-Y&index=3&list=PLdOiqur1qGkrW2z3JtVhoSOI7gkV1-oGM

Lord’s Prayer

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mario+lanza+lord%27s+prayer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y0P995xAEY

Bill Murray mocking Mario Lanza singing “Be My Love”

News About Mark Twain

 News About Mark Twain

 I have long been in absolute awe of Mark Twain. Funny, wise, trustworthy, entertaining, enlightening, and — just occasionally — fallible. If I were asked to choose three people to have dinner with, I would start with …. Mark Twain. (I‘m still working on the other two.)

   I’ve just read a perfectly delightful and exaustively researched book about his last years — “Mark Twain: The Man in White” (2010) — by Michael Shelden, and I recommend it unreservedly.

    Things I never knew about Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorn Clemens):

            + Among his female friends: the actresses Ethel Barrymore and Billie Burke (the Good Witch in the film “The Wizard of Oz”).

              + While he inveighed against Mary Baker Eddy of Christian Science fame (“a shameless old swindler”), he was somewhat supportive of the notion of treating illness through spiritual powers.

+ His daughter, Clara, married a famous pianist and conductor, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Someone said the man suffered from “delirium Clemens.”

+ Receiving an honorary degree from Oxford, Twain agreed to answer a few questions from students. But first he had to ask his own question: “Where is the nearest urinal?”

+ He regarded the notion of an afterlife as “childish” — yet admitted that “I am strongly inclined to expect one.”

      + He met and befriended so many famous people! Winston Churchill, Bernard Shaw, Rudyad Kipling, Helen Keller (it was Twain who came up with the phrase, “miracle worker,” to describe Annie Sullivan), J.M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan), who was too shy to chat with him), Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, William Dean Howells,  Andrew Carnegie, novelist Elinor Glyn,* and so forth.

+ His taste in literature was … somewhat disappointing. He didn’t care for Jane Austen. And he wrote, “I can’t stand George Eliot,  & Hawthorne & those people; I see what they are at, a hundred years before they get to it, & they just tire me to death.” But he apparently loved “Alice in Wonderland,” referring to “the immortal Alice.” (And, of course, he loathed James Fenimore Cooper.)

+ In his old age, after his wife and second daughter died, along with his very close friend, Henry Rogers, Twain would sometimes become deeply depressed. He wrote: “3 a.m., Apl. 21/09…[In 1866] I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I didn’t succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is the only really sane thing the young or old ever do in this life….”

       + Woodrow Wilson wrote of Twain, whom he played billiards and socialized with in Bermuda, “He is certainly one of the most human of men. I can easily understand how men like [President] Cleveland … learned to love him.”

            + One of Twain’s long-time servants, Isabel Lyon, proved to be loyal but … not totally resistent to financial temptation. Twain fired her and vilified her. In 1958, Hal Holbrook — who went on to play Twain in celebrated one-man shows — visited her, and said that “the image of Mark Twain which she gave to me is one of the strongest one I have and, I believe, the truest one.”

*****

Twain worried about his children. He wanted the copyright laws extended to ensure that his heirs had money from his publications to live on. It was for nought. Daughter Jean died at 29, while Twain was alive; daughter Clara married a pathological gambler after her husband Gabrilowitsch died, and wound up living in a motel in San Diego, where she died at age 88.

      Mark Twain’s last direct descendant, Nina, the daughter of Ossip and Clara, died at age 55, in a motel in Hollywood, her body surrounded by bottles of pills and alcohol. Her death was ruled a suicide. One of her lawyers said she suffered because she felt she didn’t measure up to her ancestors.

                                                            *****

*Someone had penned a poem:

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger-skin?

Or would you prefer

To err

With her

On some other fur?

Only known film of Mark Twain and daughters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqaSOw1WhjI

Ossip Gabrilowitsch plays

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ossip+gabrilowitsch

Before There Was Bernie Sanders...

Before Bernie Sanders There Was…

Upton Sinclair preceded Bernie Sanders. A Socialist running as a Democrat, Sinclair campaigned for Governor of California in 1934, urging an end to poverty. (FDR didn’t endorse him, claiming that he was too radical.) Sinclair’s enemies did their damndest to defeat him...and they did, despite his tremendous popularity. Here is what he wrote years later, explaining why he lost the election (the term "Socialist," he thought, was his undoing):

“The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC [End Poverty in California]. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie....”

     Sinclair (1878-1968) was an amazing man. Wrote almost 100 books (including The Jungle along with the Lanny Budd series), won a Pulitzer Prize , started an ACLU in California, started a utopian colony (Helicon Hall) in Englewood, NJ, ran for various offices. His campaign terrified the 1%, and they did everything to defeat him... which they did. Died in Bound Brook, NJ. I once wrote a newspaper story about Helicon Hall, and he mailed me a book he had written, with his autograph--which I have treasured!

      From Wikipedia: “EPIC faced major opposition by the Republican Party and major media figures. Opponents of EPIC “organized the most lavish and creative dirty-tricks campaign ever seen—one that was to become a landmark in American politics” involving “turning over a major campaign to outside advertising, publicity, media and fundraising consultants for the first time.”

       Notable among these opponents were the heads of the major movie studios in Hollywood. This was largely due to Sinclair’s proposal to hand over idle movie studio lots to unemployed film workers to make movies of their own. In reaction, the studio heads threatened to move film operations to Florida, and deducted money from employee’s paychecks to give directly to the campaign of Sinclair’s Republican opponent for Governor, Frank Merriam.

       In addition, two of the state’s most influential media moguls, William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler, used their papers to solely cover Merriam’s campaign and to attack Sinclair.

       In the face of this coordinated opposition, and without the backing of Roosevelt, Sinclair began trailing Merriam in the polls. On November 6, 1934, Merriam defeated Sinclair with 1,138,629 (48.9%) to Sinclair’s 879,537 (37.8%). Despite his defeat, Sinclair’s vote total was the twice as large as the vote total of any Democratic candidate in California history to that point. In addition, two dozen candidates running on the EPIC platform were elected to the state legislature.”

Now It Can Be Told!

In the 1960s, I was sued for $2 million for libel by Barry Goldwater. The publisher (Ralph Ginzburg),  the  magazine (fact:), and I were sued for our part in publishing articles in fact: magazine arguing that Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be President.

OK, finally: the entire truth.

I had resigned from the magazine in anger before the Goldwater issue came out. I was angry because the publisher let David Bar-Illan, the Israeli pianist and a left-winger then, rewrite the article I had written about Goldwater. Bar-Illan's idea was that Goldwater was "schizophrenic"--whatever that meant. He took out much of what I had written and kept repeating that Goldwater was schizophrenic.
My article argued that Goldwater had doubts about his masculinity, and I relied heavily on a study of right-wingers called The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno and others.

Bar-Illan didn't want his name used and wanted complete anonymity. I didn't want my name on the main article, but agreed to have my name on a report about a poll about psychiatrists about Goldwater.

The magazine's lawyer emphasized to me: The defense must seem united. Nothing about my resignation -- nothing about any disharmony. So I didn't reveal that Bar-Illan was mainly responsible for the published article. And that I had resigned in anger.

Anyway, the magazine and the publisher were fined $75,000. And the magazine, the publisher, and I were assessed $1 in damages. So I wound up being hit with 0.33 cents.

Probably the lawyer had given us good advice.