By Steve Rhodes
The New Yorker seemed to slump over the summer but it’s come back this fall with a vengeance, especially in a series of outstanding profiles. In the current issue alone, you will find compelling portraits Bob Barr, Robert Mugabe, and (the late) Marlon Brando.
Let’s start with Brando.
I have a high appreciation of the art, power, and technique of film, but I am by no means a buff, so I can’t say whether what Claudia Roth Pierpont writes will be new to students of the cinema, but I found it pretty interesting.
This isn’t a full-blown profile, but it may as well be. Pierpont uses Brando’s Method acting style to plumb his psyche and what she finds is disturbing.
While other actors preserve boundary lines between their private lives and their performances, “no such boundary existed between Brando the actor and Brando the man,” both of whom suffered from what [author Stefan] Kanfer, assisted by several psychiatrists, labels “oppositional defiant disorder,” and an “oral fixation.” This is not entirely news: long ago, Harold Clurman wrote that Brando’s acting had “its source in suffering,” and Peter Manso, the author of a previous biography, consulted his own set of psychiatrists to diagnose the actor’s “dissociated personality,” “manic-depressive mood swings,” and “anxieties over sexual identity,” among other afflictions. (Brando appears to have slept with an uncertain number of men and a staggering number of women during his life.) But nothing has approached Kanfer’s assertion that the “Rosebud in Brando’s life” was “the mental illness that had dogged him for decades,” an illness that made his achievements all the more a marvel and his failures no surprise.”
The piece is subtitled: “How the greatest American actor lost his way.”
Revolting Revolutionary
It’s easy to forget that Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe was once seen as a liberator. Now his country lies in ruins.
“In the weeks after the election, as the political stalemate persisted, the value of Zimbabwe’s currency plummeted,” Jon Lee Anderson writes. “Before crossing the border from South Africa, I had exchanged a hundred American dollars for three trillion five hundred billion Zimbabwean – thirty-five billion to a dollar. Most of the cash was newly minted five-, twenty-five-, and fifty-billion-dollar notes, with pictures of giraffes and grain silos. A few days later, the going rate was a hundred billion to one. Food prices tripled overnight, and many salaries were made virtually worthless. Cash was becoming nearly impossible to obtain; banks were allowing customers to withdraw the equivalent of only one U.S. dollar per day. The effect was a state of existential madness. Prices bordered on the fantastic, and ordinary people had to grapple with calculations in the trillions for the most prosaic transactions. One day, I wandered into a supermarket to buy some water. The price for a half-litre bottle was $1,900,000,000,000. On a nearby shelf, I found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for $83,000,000,000,000.”
Barr Enterprises
Bob Barr’s journey from moralistic conservative to tolerant libertarian is interesting, but not as interesting as his life and times, which is equal parts Obama, Liddy and Gingrich..
“He was entering the third grade when his family moved to Baghdad and rented a house near Tigris . . . The family’s experience in Iraq established a pattern. As an expatriate, Barr enjoyed unusual personal freedom. He was detached from American society as well as from the culture around him. In Panama, where his father briefly took a job, the family one night attempted to have dinner in the American-controlled Canal Zone, but were turned away because their car had a Panama license plate. (“Even though we were U.S. citizens, and this was considered U.S. territory, we were second-class citizens,” Barr told me.) Before Panama, Barr’s family lived in Peru, where, as a teen-ager, he learned Spanish. He went to parties, drank, and smoked. A friend of his recalled, “Really, there were no rules, and we didn’t like rules, and the few rules that there were we really didn’t follow.” On expeditions into the Amazon, Barr fished for piranhas, and hunted alligators at night. “You would take a .22 rifle and creep along the riverbank with a flashlight,” he told me. “The light would catch their eyes, and you would see these two glowing points of red, and you would shoot for that.” Barr learned to adapt. “You make friends quickly,” he told me. “But you don’t become too attached, because you know you’re not going to be with them for that long.”
Barr went on the work as a CIA analyst specializing in Latin America after he graduated from the University of Southern California. Then he went to Georgetown Law, followed by a move to Atlanta to start a law practice.
He was aggressive and took risks. Once, fearing that policemen might harm a client, an accused cop killer, on an airplane, he hired another plane and flew behind them. When the brother-in-law of Baby Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, was apprehended in Puerto Rico on drug-smuggling charges, Barr and his law partner, Ed Marger, flew to Port-au-Prince to help. (“Ed and I were sitting on this couch in this beautiful residence with Baby Doc and his wife, and all of a sudden this big rat runs across the room,” he recalled.)
Eventually, in 1994, he won a seat in Congress, which he held for eight years.
Toon Trophy
Samantha Church of Chicago won this week’s New Yorker cartoon caption contest. I wonder if this is her.
Posted on October 24, 2008