Month / September 2012

by Edward Champion

Steve Stern (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this one hour radio interview, Steve Stern discusses how searching for Jewish heritage in the South led to an unexpected fiction career, Kafka’s “Above the Law,” and how to use Elvis Presley to get revenge.

Steve Stern is most recently the author of The Book of Mischief.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering why they’re playing the bagpipes.

Author: Steve Stern

Subjects Discussed: Playing bagpipes for the dead, the relationship between Jewish identity and the phantasmagorical in Stern’s fiction, growing up without Jewish identity, being an oral historian in Memphis, Beale Street culture, becoming an ethnic heritage director by accident, hippies and Jewish magic, learning about culture almost exclusively from books, finding moral heft within the fantastical, the pedestrian vs. the imagination, the human possibilities that arise from distinguishing between two worlds, paradoxical success, balancing present-day comic calamities vs. past heritage within The Frozen Rabbi, how the brain is affected by coffee, authors who suffer from impostor syndrome, Bernard Malamud’s “Man in the Drawer,” living in books more than living in life, misfits and outsiders defined by heritage, entering the zone of the collective dreamife by climbing a tree, juxtaposing human faith against religious faith through observation, the ambivalence of wanting to make connections and not being able to fit within a community, recurring disembodied characters within Stern’s stories, not writing for the drawer, dealing with a very limited reading audience, varying notions of “being an entertainer,” saturating a story with Yiddish words and ethnic identity and why the American fiction landscape is hostile to this, Stern’s fictional descriptions of The Pinch in Memphis, Stern being bitten by Tova Mirvis’s mother, comparisons between Steve Stern and Saul Bozoff in “The Wedding Jester,” Bozoff as Stern’s Zuckerman, being sued for a quarter million dollars because of mischievous fictional representation, the dark side of Steve Stern, getting vengeance through the use of Elvis Presley, “The Man Who Would Be Kafka,” how stories are vulnerable to interpretation, changing the rules vs. respecting folklore, legendary Jewish jesters, Kafka’s “Above the Law,” “Legend of the Lost,” pondering an existence without a soul or empathy, why Stern’s new stories are darker than the old ones, connecting with a spiritual dimension, and paradoxical parables.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We are outside a place that is playing bagpipes for someone who we believe is dead. Steve, how are you doing? You’re quite alive, I see.

Stern: Well, I’ve got one and a half feet in the grave with me.

Correspondent: Oh really?

Stern: I don’t know. I’m a very lively undead author.

Correspondent: (laughs) Who deals with the dead quite a bit. The Frozen Rabbi. Well, at least it’s frozen there. It seems to be the ultimate metaphor for this.

Stern: My characters tend not to stay dead.

Correspondent: Despite your best efforts. Well, let’s talk about some of the qualities of your work. One intriguing quality about your fiction is the way in which you have this idea of being Jewish aligned with these fantastical elements. In The Frozen Rabbi, you have this kid named Bernie. He’s constantly having to remind himself of his faith. Because he has this thawed out rabbi that he has to deal with, even as the rabbi becomes more craven and commercial as we learn more about his existence and we go back to the past. And then a story like “Avigdor of the Apes” sees its title character transform as he reads the secular, decidedly secular Edgar Rice Burroughs. You have “Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven,” which takes much of its influence from the story of the golem, as well as this premise of the stubborn father-in-law, who, like we’re talking about here, refuses to die. So I’m wondering. When you come up with a fantastical element for a story, are you thinking in terms of Jewish identity? Or does the Jewish identity tend to come along the more you think about the story? Or the more you tend to write about it? How important is it for that fantastical element to work on some moral or thematic level?

Stern: You want the long answer or the short answer?

Correspondent: Feel free to be as long-winded as you like on this program.

Stern: Well, the truth is that I grew up with virtually no Jewish identity. I was raised in a Reform synagogue in Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s, during a time when the Jews in the South were trying their best to be invisible. So Reform Judaism was a lot like Lutheranism, I think, in those days. The rabbi wore ecclesiastical robes. He had choirs and robes, a pipe organ, very little Hebrew in the liturgy. So I pretty much was confirmed, not bar mitzvahed, and then walked away from it virtually untouched by heritage or tradition.

Correspondent: What kind of reading of Jewishness did you do during this time?

Stern: None.

Correspondent: None whatsoever?

Stern: Absolutely none.

Correspondent: Not even a scrap of the Torah here and there?

Stern: No. In fact, I wasn’t sure that the Torah and the Bible were the same thing. So, yeah, I was — if an orthodox anything, it was a hippie for years with the kind of counterculture life. Always was a reader. So I certainly read Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, and came, I think, to more traditional Jewish work — Yiddish books in translation — through a non-Yiddish writer, but Russian. Isaak Babel and his world of the Odessa ghetto was an easy segue into reading about the shtetl and Isaac Singer and becoming interested in Yiddish literature. But the truth is I was well into my thirties. And I’d come sort of full circle back to Memphis and kind of washed up there. Couldn’t find a job. Went to work for a folklore center, where I was transcribing oral history tapes of Beale Street and Beale Street characters. Black bluesmen and promoters. People who remember the heyday of Beale Street, which is fascinating to me. Because present day Memphis was a bit of a wasteland. And it turned out that there was this Jewish component on the street. The pawn shops, the dry goods dealers…

Correspondent: This would be Old Main Street then.

Stern: Well, Beale off of Main. And there was a kind of symbiosis between the black population and these Jewish merchants. And it was the first I’d heard of it really. Before my time. And I was fascinated.

Correspondent: Did you read a lot about the Jewish gangsters who crop up in a few stories here and in The Frozen Rabbi?

Stern: At this point, I’m pretty much tabula rasa. So they thought, “Well, he’s local. He works cheap. And he’s a Jew.” So they assigned me to do this. I became the Ethnic Heritage Director. I was suddenly elevated into researching the roots of the old Jewish community, which, again, I knew nothing about. It turned out that there had been an authentic East European ghetto community on North Main Street in Memphis, which was the other end of town. So I went about with a big Nagra tape recorder, knocking on doors and finding old folks who’d grown up in this neighborhood.

Correspondent: You were a one man Federal Writers Project.

Stern: Yeah. In a way. And working on a grant. And hurrying, trying to gather information before the grant ran out. And it turned out that the stories were fascinating. And I’d say, “Well, how did he get here?” So they generally begin in the old country and then bring their tradition with them and the tradition involved a lot of lore. Aside from the religion itself and the culture. There was a literature attached. There was a folklore attached. There were 1,000 years of just traditional stuff that I knew nothing about. So I fell into that world, kind of like down a rabbit hole, and thought, “Wow, here’s a place I can set my stories,” which had been kind of homeless before. And here’s a culture. You know, I grew up in the South. My friends were all in the tradition of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty. I love those writers. But it was not a tradition that I could ever connect with. And I thought…

Correspondent: You needed a heritage then. And this came out of the blue. Were you trying to write fiction before this?

Stern: I’d been writing fiction for years. For a decade.

Correspondent: And it just didn’t hit until you had that folklore element.

Stern: Well, I had this wonderful day when I had a novel and a book of stories that were just kind of traveling around New York. And the agent called to say, “Well, you know, I’ve just had another rejection of your books. And the truth is I’m not very enthused either.”

Correspondent: (laughs) Jeez. Why did this agent take you on?

Stern: Three minutes later, I get a phone call from the schools that I’d been adjuncting at, saying, “Enrollment’s down and your presence will not be required.” So I was desperate.

Correspondent: So all doors shut on you at the same time.

Stern: Yeah. And to be honest, I think in redacting my life, you look for a way to find elements or events that spell destiny. So the folklore center and the discovery of the Pinch has that kind of feel for me. But on the other hand, I’m romanticizing and twisting the facts in a way to make it seem like a good story.

Correspondent: We’ve strayed quite a bit from my initial inquiry.

Stern: The initial question!

Correspondent: Which is totally fine. Because I like this answer.

Stern: Coming back to it!

Correspondent: Coming soon! So how do we get from folklore to fantastical elements? That’s the question.

Stern: Well, because in beginning to explore this heretofore unexplored heritage, I began to discover a thing that I had never known about Jewish tradition. And that’s that it has this incredibly rich, incredibly vast, diverse folklore that includes all kinds of magic.

Correspondent: Was the magic — that was a big element for why it hit for you? Why you could connect to it?

Stern: I’m an old hippie.

Correspondent: It was either that or getting stoned all day. (laughs)

Stern: Well, that too. But I’d been led to believe that the tradition that I grew up in was as completely dry as dust. Sterile, antiseptic. And it was as if I had stolen into the attic of this old Methodist synagogue and discovered, whoa! Here’s a dybbuk. (laughs) You know, a possessing demon. Here’s a golem. A Jewish Frankenstein. Here’s a wandering soul. A fallen angel. All this.

Correspondent: So did you know anything of shuls or Shabos or wedding canopies or breaking the glass? Anything along those lines? Because your fiction is obviously very Jewish. Was most of that informed by all this folklore that you were soaking up during this time of discovery here?

Stern: Well, sad to say, and don’t tell Cynthia Ozick this, it’s all book learned. And I’ve had very little first-hand experience of authentic Jewish communities.

Correspondent: Even recently?

Stern: No. Because of what I’ve written, I’ve been mistaken for a Jew these many years.

The Bat Segundo Show #485: Steve Stern (Download MP3)

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(Photo: Zachary Tomanelli)

by Edward Champion

End of the Bat

Why I’m ending The Bat Segundo Show before Election Day.

The last episode of The Bat Segundo Show will air shortly before Election Day. The schedule for the last few shows — and I’m not sure how many there will be — will be intermittent and irregular. The time has come for me to move on. This wasn’t an easy choice, but it was a necessary one.

History has demonstrated that a specialized dirigible of this type can float in the air for only so long. Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show — which aired an especially gutsy interview with Charles Manson and opened its forum to in-depth talk with emerging musicians and cult figures — carried on for eight years, despite constant creative interventions from NBC. Dick Cavett’s ABC incarnation — the version frequently held up as primo — lasted six years. The Mike Wallace Interview, despite the indelible onyx background and the jasper smouldering in the tough interlocutor’s hand, lasted a little more than three years.

Stacked against these models of smart and engaging conversation, nearly 500 installments of The Bat Segundo Show aired over eight years isn’t bad. I’ve put out more episodes than This American Life, although it took Ira Glass and company seventeen years to hit half a grand. My rate of productivity was also slightly better than William Buckley, who pumped out 1,504 episodes of Firing Line over 33 years. These guys had a staff. I didn’t.

I also did not have Wallace’s Parliament Cigarettes to hawk. (I kicked smoking more than two years ago, which may explain why my slight rasp turned somewhat nasal and mildly mellifluous in the last 150 shows.) There was a long period where, despite hundreds of telephone calls and emails, I could not persuade a single advertiser to sponsor the show, although I did have some advertising on this website for a while and, near the end, sponsorship arrived through the good people at Litbreaker. Some income came from turning these programs into newspaper profiles or abridged bits that did not reflect the totality of these in-depth talks. But that’s to be expected. Because the dirty little secret about radio is that many of its finest practitioners can’t even turn a dime. This is a medium designed to be cut into manageable bits, arranged around selling things or hawking selves rather than the other way around.

I fought against these conditions for a long time, but the time has come to move on. If Bat Segundo’s end is how I get somewhere grand or more meaningful, then I would rather risk everything than mope about what I did not attempt or bray about what I did not have the guts to grow into.

* * *

I was told by one radio program director that I was “too intellectual” — even though I don’t consider myself much of one. I just read the books, thought about the ideas, staked out original angles, and did independent research. There were some email volleys with another station manager who inveigled me with the prospect of a weekly unpaid slot, but only if I didn’t talk books and only if I dumbed things down. I was never contacted by a single mainstream outlet during the eight years I ran the show, although a handful were kind enough to mention me.

I certainly never set out to dismiss Michael Silverblatt or Robert Birnbaum, who both still do first-rate erudite work. (I have been fortunate to have wonderful conversations with both gentlemen, on and off air.) I worked damn hard to keep Bat Segundo going, often when I had only a handful of dollars in my checking account. I always insisted on high standards, and maybe that was part of the problem. I read the books in full for every guest who appeared on the program, no matter if the volume was 200 pages or 1,000 pages: sometimes twice, sometimes taking notes, sometimes in tandem with other tomes. Sometimes I photocopied interesting articles and gave them to authors. I felt that anything less than this minimum industry was an insult to the author. But what use is a work ethic in an attention economy?

With rare exceptions, I met each author in person. Because that was the only way to do it. This often allowed for unusual encounters, such as the award-winning novelist who I once telephoned from a hotel lobby as his attentions were diverted by a prostitute (to his credit, he did the interview anyway) or the author who was so needlessly nervous that he showed up stinking of redolent weed (I said nothing, but was happy to see him clean up his act years later) or the guest who was so insecure that he asked me to feel his bicep (I did; why not?). Such human moments allowed me to care more about the authors, even as I maintained a febrile curiosity and did my best to ask honest questions, finessing some of the more challenging and critical queries with this ethos in mind.

Each installment took me a minimum of 20 hours to produce. This ranged from booking the interview (which could be anywhere from 5 minutes to three hours to negotiate; it was always the midlisters who gave me the most trouble, not the big names), reading and research, preparing about two single-spaced pages of questions and bullet points that I often disregarded, and mastering the rattly audio that I recorded in cafes, restaurants, hotel lobbies, mysterious rooms, parks, graveyards, laundromats, and any practical location I could discover in a pinch. There’s the maxim touted by reductionist thinkers that 10,000 hours (20 hours x 500 shows) make one a success at any given field. Well, if that’s the case, then Malcolm Gladwell should see how much I earned out.

* * *

I grew up doing this show. Perhaps the real commodity I’m considering is time and how to invest this precious and fast-flowing measure with greater sagacity.

I do know that a number of authors were greatly helped by these conversations. I do know that a number of listeners were inspired to pick up books. I do know that there are groups in Switzerland and Norway who are huge fans of the show. I have been genuinely surprised and humbled and moved by the numerous kindnesses expressed by many over the last eight years. The opportunity to connect with so many great books and great people behind the books has been truly incredible.

On the other hand, why should I expect anyone to engage with the history of credit or a conversation revealing what one man has spent forty decades to put together when they can have something more soothing and less challenging? Television, +1 culture, distracting smartphones, and the need to zone out are the present villains against American engagement. Only two of these were around when I started out. It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to make the pith I had seductive or entertaining. Loyal listeners reminded me that I cracked jokes throughout, even when the elaborate Bat Segundo intros became less frequent.

It’s possible that I’ve exhausted my thoughts on literature in this form. My passion for books hasn’t waned, but I may have become too polished, with each interview becoming something akin to slipping on a comfy pair of shoes. If you’re getting closer to forty and you’re going through the motions, there’s a good chance you’re erecting a massive obstacle preventing you from blossoming. I don’t want to stagnate. I want to up the ante and stop repeating myself. My general sense is that this nice round number of 500 is telling me to move on.

The final episode of The Bat Segundo Show will be recorded at McNally Jackson on October 3, 2012 with J. Robert Lennon, who is a deeply underappreciated writer who has taken more lumps than a man of his talent has any right to deserve. Lennon, who appeared previously on the 300th episode of The Bat Segundo Show, is one of the most underrated writers working today and I can’t think of a more fitting way to end the program. Please stop by and say hello if you can.

This was a very fun part of my life, but I’ve got to move on. Thanks to friends and loved ones who put up with me. Thanks to the writers and other folks who came on the show, and the publicists who took chances with my format. Thanks to everyone who listened.

by Edward Champion

Occupy Wall Street: One Year Later

My report from the streets on the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

They put up the steel grille barricades around the edge of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leaving a few hundred protesters looking for a workaround under the bright red cube sculpture across Broadway. But a few hours later on the other side of the park, a smiling group situated on the edge of Trinity Place was busy with brushes and thin placards. They were painting peace signs and placing these signs around the perimeter on a soft bed of newspaper to dry: bright green life and hopeful ovals just under the drab barrier prohibiting the perfect circle of year one.

The protesters were matched in number by cops, many in riot gear. And they swarmed with a hunger for arrest. Numerous whiteshirts had been unrustled from their beds at an early hour and many seemed indignant about the renewed duties. I observed one whiteshirt shove his way through a crowd at Nassau Street, his meaty hand giving a hard singular push at any shoulder that got in his way. The checkpoints around Wall Street felt thicker, more reminiscent of East Berlin. Like last year, there were police mounted on horses beyond these points. But as the morning rolled on, the New York Police Department opted for motorcycles, later parking them neatly and voluminously next to the Charging Bull, guarded so beyond measure that you almost wondered if the cops had received some weird lead about two hundred armed men planning the biggest theft in human history.

It was the absence of visible activism for so long that made the authority feel more formidable. The extra force inspired the cops, with their bright white ties swaying from their belts, to manacle more people and make more arrests. By 3:30 PM on Monday, the official tally was 146 people nabbed for disorderly conduct. This included the artist Molly Crabapple, at least one NYU professor, three handicapped activists, and a few journalists. There were rumors circulating that the figure was close to 200. Some people told me that the cops were dragging people off the sidewalk to arrest them for stepping onto the street, but I didn’t see anything like this. But during one highly charged moment near Nassau Street, I witnessed four people arrested in less than five minutes.

The protesters were peaceful and calm, but this was not the ragtag group that had formed one year ago. It was a seasoned crew familiar with the stakes of income inequality and what they were in for if they got arrested. They felt the rightful need to claim their anniversary, often doing so with messages scribbled into the sidewalk with colored chalk. Three people said happy birthday to me over the course of a few hours, and the tone was so sincere that I wondered for a mite if some authority had changed my birthday to September 17th without bothering to alert me before coming to my senses. There was music and glitter emitted into the air. There was impromptu dancing, often in the middle of intersections. I was especially fond of the “crow technique” that a group of students adopted at the corner of Cedar and Broadway, which involved fluttering their arms into the air and making pleasant squawking sounds.

But when protesters repeatedly shouted “Shame!” for the umpteenth time in response to an arrest, a few protesters next to me remarked on how shame had lost its meaning. The hysterical calls to “Arrest the bankers! They’re the real criminals!” felt more like a dull platitude than a careful considered irony. There was also a bleaker humor this time around, with some protesters dressed as doctors and leaving “blood money” around the area. Their hands were saturated in fake blood, and it was doubtful that Rick Santorum would shake them.

It’s pretty clear that Wall Street has no interest in beginning a meaningful dialogue with the Occupy movement, yet the neighborhood isn’t quite willing to accept the protesters as a regular fixture. I watched one angry white collar man stomp out bright red balloons outside a building with an amazing ire, as if they were newly discovered mice scurrying around the floor of a ritzy apartment. I listened to another man, putting in four orders and wrestling with an allotment of hastily collected twenty dollar bills, complain to a delicatessen worker about how nobody else in the office wanted to leave the office and get breakfast. I saw a scavenger pick up bottles and cans for extra cash. There were still blue-collar workers on the clock and they moved dollies through the thick streets with a great patience. There were more people in the streets, but it was business as usual.

by Edward Champion

Lynn Povich (The Bat Segundo Show)

In this 40 minute radio interview, we talk with Lynn Povich about a 1970 lawsuit against Newsweek that paved the way for women in the workplace and the impact it has had upon gender and newsrooms since.

Lynn Povich is most recently the author of The Good Girls Revolt.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering why mysterious men are packing him off to Paris.

Author: Lynn Povich

Subjects Discussed: The Henry Luce “tradition” of men working as writers and women working as researchers, well-educated women being exploited in a two-tier system, Janet Flanner, the influence of the Civil Rights Act, the old boys’ network, the contrast between Oz Elliott’s civil rights conscience and Newsweek‘s treatment of women, Anna Quindlen, Otto Freidrich’s 1964 ridicule of the fact checker (and Friedrich’s condescending description of women), “office maidens,” the importance and accountability of fact checkers, how people viewed women reporters in the 1960s, Businessweek hiring women straight out of college, Reader’s Digest‘s paternalistic form of “respect” towards women, Flora Lewis in The New York Times, whether Kay Graham and The Washington Post‘s support of the lawsuit was sufficiently commensurate at the time, women reporters not being invited to lunch meetings, the second Newsweek lawsuit, Gloria Steinem vs. Graham, being a feminist vs. being a businesswoman, Eleanor Holmes Norton and the importance of having the right attorney, Harriet Rabb, Margo Jefferson, black reporters who didn’t organize at Newsweek, inquiry into efforts to unite black and women reporters, income disparity, why the journalism industry is a good medium to examine income inequity, women and education, journalism school, Povich’s editorship at Working Woman, women managers, tryout sessions for women and writer training programs, office affairs and rampant recreational sex within newsrooms, Hanna Rosin’s recent claims about hookup culture being empowering, how women didn’t get ahead even when promiscuous, sexist stereotypes in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, Sorkin’s “silent bearers of sexism,” the 2011 Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, the American inability to consider work vs. family balance, why it’s important to worry about men, and men as stay-at-home dads.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: When Oz Elliott, the Newsweek editor-in-chief, initially responded to the lawsuit that you filed against Newsweek — and this is sort of my question to get you to talk about that lawsuit, but let’s go ahead and get the background first — he said in his statement that the reason that most of the researchers at Newsweek were women and virtually all of the writers were men was, in his words, “because of a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years.” Now he said this, despite what you describe later in the book as “a WASPY social conscience.” So why was this tradition, which originated from Henry Luce and Brit Hadden, tolerated for so long? Especially when you had some women who had to settle for this second-tier treatment and often give the best years of their lives? Let’s talk about the origins of this problem.

Povich: Well, yes, in fact, when Henry Luce created this system of all of the researchers being women, and all of the writers and reporters being men, Oz, who worked at Time Magazine at the time, said this was great for women because it got them out of the steno category and they could actually do editorial work. So at that point, which was in ’29 I think, it was considered more liberating than being a secretary. And Newsweek copied Time. However, by 1960, it was pretty clear that well-educated women coming out of the same schools as men with perhaps no prior experience, as many men did not have, and some prior experience, as some men had, were hired into this entry level category and couldn’t be promoted out of it. And women who really wanted to be journalists that young and knew it, like Nora Ephron and Jane Bryant Quinn and Ellen Goodman and Susan Brownmiller, they saw the lay of the land pretty quickly and they left. And the rest of us “good girls,” as I call us, were probably, first, happy to get a job. Especially in a place that was so interesting, about the news, working on the matters that really were important and having this special pipeline to the truth. As one of the writers said, we were all blind in many ways. I mean, the women bought into it. The men certainly bought into it. Until one day we didn’t. And I think the fact that the women’s movement happened as many of us in the mid-’60s were coming into the workforce helped us realized, certainly helped me realize. I was reporting and writing at the time. I was a junior writer. And I started covering the women’s movement. And I suddenly realized this isn’t just about those women. Hey, there’s something wrong with this picture for us at Newsweek. And that’s when a bunch of us started organizing.

Correspondent: Were there any other efforts at organization before yours that fizzled out? That you were aware of when you were organizing with your fellow women reporters or women researchers at Newsweek, aspiring of course to be reporters? I mean, were you aware of any other cues or efforts to rebel against this? I mean, I’m really curious as to why such a “tradition” lasted for so long and why good old Oz actually upheld that for a while, who was eventually forced to turn back. What was the impulse to, number one, cause him to change? And, number two, the other question is is: Why weren’t women revolting against this?

Povich: It’s a good question. Well, first of all, during World War II, there were women writers, as there were in many professions, where women took over men’s jobs. But by the early ’60s, they had all left. And there was one women who managed to get out of research and into writing in the early ’60s and was promoted to being a correspondent in Paris. So she was already writing in Paris when we were back in New York.

Correspondent: This is at Newsweek.

Povich: At Newsweek. There were still no women writing.

Correspondent: It’s interesting. They sent the women from New York. Just like Janet Flanner at the New Yorker.

Povich: (laughs) Right. Exactly. Paris.

Correspondent: Somehow women could understand Paris, right?

Povich: And she was a brilliant write and reporter. She was fabulous. She just didn’t happen to be there when most of us were hired. She had left to go to Paris. So we were presented with this situation of all of us being researchers and the guys being our bosses. It’s interesting. Because even though the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, when the person who actually first started our revolt, Judy Gingold, who was a Marshall Scholar, who came back from England and could not find a job. Except as a fact checker at Newsweek. When she was talking to a lawyer, who told her that our situation was illegal, she couldn’t believe it. And she said, “Well, you know, I don’t think the guys know it’s illegal. I think we should just tell the guys.” And the lawyer said, “Call the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and you’ll find out.” And so she called them. They said, “Yes, this is illegal.” And she said, “Well, shouldn’t we just tell the men?” And the women at the other end of the line said, “Are you crazy? People in power don’t want to give up power. If you tell them, they will promote two women, co-opt your movement, and it will be finished. You have a clear-cut case and you have to sue.” So my feeling is that they didn’t know it was illegal or realized it was illegal. Because it had been accepted as a woman’s job for so long. It had been a tradition. And, of course, it benefited men. And their circles were men. I mean, they hired guys right off the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Daily. Because that’s where they were from. And their circle, as we know, in corporate America still — if it’s a boy’s club at the top, your sources are guys.

Correspondent: Do you think these men were conscious of the fact that they were playing into this sexism? Or that this was an automatic power structure that they fell into? I mean, we were talking about Oz Elliott changing his mind. How difficult was it to get other men who were in positions of power to change their mind? Even before you filed a lawsuit. Or was it fairly steeped in the culture?

Povich: I mean, I have to say that many of the men at Newsweek were supporters of ours. Certainly the writers we worked with and who knew how smart and talented many of the women were, they supported us from the very beginning. And Oz Elliott, as you said, got it right away. He told me that Monday he realized we were right. Now this is a man who put Newsweek on the map because of his civil rights coverage. And they were very proud of their progressive views on civil rights and Black Americans.

Correspondent: A great irony.

Povich: Yes. And at the same time, they hadn’t realized that in front of their noses, there was this horrible injustice happening to the women who worked for them. Oz Elliott also has three daughters. And my pet theory is that men with daughters are far more open and respectful of what women can do. But like all organizations, or many organizations, the actual discrimination came in middle management. For us, it was the senior editors and the top couple of editors under Oz. That happens a lot in corporate America. And many of those guys were against affirmative action. Anna Quindlen has a wonderful quote she told me. I always say I’m an affirmative action baby and I’m proud of it. I wouldn’t have gotten where I was without it. And she feels the same way. And she says when people look at her strangely about that, she says, “If you think affirmative action is promoting a second-rate talent just because they’re female or black, you’re looking at one.” And so I do think a lot of people were against affirmative action. They thought that this was not a good idea. And they also didn’t look at women, frankly, as capable professionally. Either because of their own backgrounds, because of power. Whatever it was. But I was told that promoting me was one of the worst decisions that the editor ever took at the time. We were told when we filed the suit — one of the top editor said, “Why don’t we just fire them all? We don’t need them.” It’s complicated. I call it our little Rosa Parks moment. Everybody went to the back of the bus until one day you didn’t. And one day, we didn’t.

The Bat Segundo Show #484: Lynn Povich (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

NYFF: The Savoy King: Chick Webb & The Music That Changed America

In this first dispatch from the New York Film Festival, we revisit Chick Webb’s legacy in a flawed but engaging documentary.

[This is the first in a series of dispatches relating to the 50th New York Film Festival. All of Reluctant Habits’s NYFF posts can be located here.]

His name came from a tough tumble down Baltimore stairs. They called him “Chicken” because that was the way he walked: wobbly and hunchbacked and sometimes a little alone around the schoolyard. They shortened the name to “Chick” because the single syllable rolled faster off the tongue. But Chick Webb had the grit to hawk newspapers and saved up enough dough for a drum kit. They figured he might build up his upper body strength if they kept him hammering young and long and hard on the drums.

They could not know he would become a big draw at a very big venue: the legendary Savoy Ballroom, immortalized in music with an indelible stomp, the rare place where blacks and whites hopped together on the same hard floor. They could not know how he would woo and shape Ella Fitzgerald’s talent shortly after her fateful appearance at the Apollo. They could not know how Chick would rehearse new arrangements from new composers, the band fueled by mescal and Mary Jane, into the sunrise. They could not know that if you hung around the Savoy long enough, you would have Chick’s respect. Because sticking around was how Chick had made it this far and this good. They could not know he would lead the first black band to host a national radio show. They could not know he would be dead only four months after his 34th birthday. Or maybe it was his 30th? Why not print the legend?

The biggest surprise about Jeff Kaufman’s documentary, The Savoy King: Chick Webb & The Music That Changed America, is how Chick Webb’s mesmerizing life is diminished by the clumsy collection of stray biographical tidbits (Chick liked motorcycles, Chick was a snappy dresser, Chick had a German Shepherd), which don’t quite coalesce into a true narrative trajectory until the film stretches itself across a more expansive canvas. The film serves up many prominent voices (Bill Cosby as Webb, Janet Jackson as Fitzgerald, Jeff Goldbum as Artie Shaw, Andy Garcia as Mario Bauzá, and so forth) as profound movers and shakers in the 1920s and 1930s swing scene. But when we know Chick argued with Jelly Roll Morton, why do we need the former Jello pitchman? This minor dissonance also hinders the film from fully portraying or explicating Chick’s innovative drumming (“He sounded very different from any of the other drummers,” says one subject, to which one must ask, “Care to elaborate?”).

Chick Webb was so legendary that the Harlem streets were congested with more than 10,000 people on the day he died. Gene Krupa said that Webb was the only other drummer who “cut” him. In light of these vital details, it’s surprising that Kaufman races too fast over such details as Chick’s loyalty to his longtime guitarist John Truehart, the only member of Chick’s band who kept with him all the way through, and is sometimes too willing to buy into the Webb myth. (For example, Charles Linton told biographer Stuart Nicholson that Webb only said that he adopted Ella Fitzgerald “for the press people,” yet Kaufman is quite willing to go on with the mythos of Webb as Fitzgerald’s legal guardian.)

When many of the charming survivors (especially the ebullient choreographer Frankie Manning, captured here in his final years and in remarkable shape) are happy to spill Kaufman the story, why have other people get in the way? The Savoy King has greater success with dodgy-looking visual aids (such as the Indiana Jones-like map depicting Chick’s relentless touring schedule across the States in 1937) than the high-profile vocal cast.

But when the film shows the Savoy’s impact on American culture, displaying its contours with a computer simulation of the Savoy’s interior, it becomes a more meaningful exploration of the swing scene. The film obviously worked on some level with me, because I am playing Ella Fitzgerald as I write these words and I have a great desire right now to time travel back to the fateful evening of May 11, 1937, when Chick Webb and Benny Goodman duked it out in a battle of the bands at the Savoy. When the film reminds us that there were clubs in which a racist rope separated the dance floor down the middle and when it tells us that, in other clubs, blacks had to pay the same admission as whites to watch an act from the balcony (and weren’t allowed to dance) and when we recall that even the much vaunted Cotton Club would not admit African Americans, the Savoy’s pioneering efforts, taken with what others remember of Chick’s great generosity and energy, feel like a forgotten historical chapter that can’t be reread often enough.