Tuesday, February 25, 2014

‘The Family,’ and Uganda’s Anti-Gay Christian Mafia
Sally Kohn The Daily Beast

The evangelical organization that describes itself as a Christian mafia has been the hidden hand behind Uganda’s anti-gay bill, along with Rick Warren, the gay-bashing pastor who presided at Obama’s first inauguration.

The President of Uganda has just signed into law extreme anti-gay legislation. In addition to imprisoning anyone who counsels or reaches out to the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender community in Uganda, the law establishes a crime of "aggravated homosexuality" which include acts where one person is infected with HIV, "serial offenders," and sex with minors. "Aggravated homosexuality" is punished with life in prison. A previous version of the law, amended after worldwide protests, proscribed the death penalty.

The legislation was written and promoted by David Bahati, a member of the Ugandan Parliament. According to scholar and writer Jeff Sharlet, Bahati—who has said he wants to "kill every last gay person"— is a core member of a secretive network of American evangelical Christians called "The Family." The Family sees its aggressive, worldwide evangelism embodied in the saying, "Jesus didn’t come to take sides; he came to take over." The organization has also referred to itself—proudly—as "the Christian Mafia." For over 75 years, its goal has been the "consecration" of America to God. But facing defeat in the American culture wars, The Family and its ilk looked elsewhere—including to Uganda.

The Family organizes the National Prayer Breakfast in the U.S. Bahati organized the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast—as well as overseeing a student leadership program in Uganda to which The Family has contributed millions of dollars. According to documents about The Family’s work in Africa, the organization’s strategy is "a Congressman and/or Senator from the United States will befriend the leader of another country and tell him/her how Jesus and His teachings will help his country and its poor … and to teach them how to live, what to think and what to say." Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is The Family’s missionary in Uganda.
Dozens of members of Congress, several Fortune 500 CEOs, generals and at least one Supreme Court Justice are members of "The Family," the right-wing evangelical mission supporting Bahati as well as Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.
Sen. Inhofe has traveled to Africa at least 20 times since 1999, at a cost of at least $187,000 to taxpayers (not including the cost of military aircraft) for what the Senator described as "a Jesus thing." In Uganda, Inhofe attended Bahati’s Ugandan prayer breakfasts and invited Bahati to the United States three times. Inhofe, who once boasted of being "proud" that there was not a single gay relationship in the "recorded history of our family," also boasted that he "adopted" Uganda. And yet Sen. Inhofe has denied knowing Bahati and, eventually, reluctantly, condemned the country’s anti-gay law.

Just after Parliament passed the law in December 2013, Bahati posed for a picture with Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan pastor who was another leading force behind the anti-gay law. Ssempa had been a leading force in the abstinence-only push in Uganda, funded aggressively by the Bush Administration, which had the perverse (but not unsurprising) effect of reversing Uganda’s early progress in stemming the spread of HIV. Ssempa, who has spoken out against condoms, once said, "We are promoting abstinence because Uganda is under attack from an agenda driven by homosexuals and Western experts"—thus linking all his crusades. One of Ssempa’s key mentors? Pastor Rick Warren, leader of the evangelical Saddleback mega-church in California. Until recently, Ssempa was a frequent guest at Warren’s church, including at a 2005 conference on AIDS where Warren had Ssempa lead a seminar on AIDS prevention as well as deliver a keynote speech. A year later, at another Saddleback AIDS seminar, Warren’s wife introduced Ssempa, saying, "You are by brother, Martin, and I love you."

Rick Warren, who has personally said gay marriage is "equivalent" to incest, pedophilia and polygamy and said that gay people are "evil" and have "Christ-o-phobia," after significant pressure eventually severed ties with Ssempa and spoke out against Uganda’s anti-gay law.

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared in a forum hosted by Warren at Saddleback Church, in which Obama denounced marriage equality. Obama also said, "I love the ministries that are taking place here at Saddleback." After his election, President Obama sparked outrage when he invited Rick Warren to deliver the convocation at his first inauguration. Last week, President Obama released a statement opposing the Uganda bill.

Dozens of members of Congress, several Fortune 500 CEOs, generals and at least one Supreme Court Justice are members of "The Family," the right-wing evangelical mission supporting Bahati as well as Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) among others have lived in what’s known as "C Street," The Family’s subsidized lodging in Washington, DC. Hillary Clinton has been active with Family prayer groups since she was First Lady. In her memoir, Living History, Clinton described The Family leader Doug Coe as "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

When the anti-gay legislation was first introduced in Uganda, the New York Times wrote, "You can’t preach hate and not accept responsibility for the way that hate is manifested." James Inhofe and Rick Warren not only preached anti-gay hatred with their own words but wrapped their political and institutional arms around David Bahati and Martin Ssempa and others who have taken hatred to its ugly, but foreseeable, conclusion in Uganda. Inhofe and Warren are responsible for the way that hate is manifested. Moreover, American political figures who have proudly associated with The Family and with Rick Warren are culpable as well. They cannot feign ignorance at the end of a journey that was ugly all along.

Uganda’s anti-gay law is not just an international disgrace. It is an American disgrace. And the American religious and political figures who played a role in spreading vicious homophobia in Uganda, whether actively or by turning a blind eye, should do more than just denounce the country’s law. They should denounce their own role in facilitating it
on No comments:

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Sample of Paris life at 19th century shopping arcades
              
  • Lunchtime can be particularly busy in Passage des Panoramas, where a handful of bars and restaurants compete for limited sidewalk space. Photo: Spud Hilton, The Chronicle
                                      




It's impossible to know if the Parisians who designed and built the Passage des Panoramas, a labyrinth-like temple of commerce with iron-and-glass vaulted ceilings and neoclassic arches, foresaw the possibility that it would still be in use two centuries later.
Or that they might be held accountable for the Mall of America.
It's more probable that they saw the value, and profit, in a place for a good long stroll among the necessities, luxuries and diversions of everyday life. A low-key pocket in the unending bustle that is Paris.
Which is how I came to be standing at the entrance to a great-great-grandpapa of modern shopping malls, seeking out Paris, not in its monuments or museums but in the remaining handful of narrow covered passages where Parisians have lurked, laughed, loved and browsed for centuries.
In an epic city that dares first-time visitors to try to do it all, I had to wonder if it's possible to find a broader, less overwhelming Paris in some largely overlooked 19th century arcades.

Light, naturally

The idea was sound. City planners in the late 18th century developed covered pedestrian arcades for shopping as an escape from foul weather - and an alternative to foul streets that at the time had too many horses, too few sidewalks and too much sewage in a city with nonfunctioning sanitation. Of the 150 to 200 passages (depending on whom you ask), about 20 or so remain. They fell out of novelty and favor, especially after the city's move toward grand boulevards later in century, and most were demolished or reused.
While not exactly secret, half the experience, apparently, is finding the covered passages. If there are signs pointing to Passage Jouffroy or Galerie Colbert (the way they do to the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre), I didn't see them.
The passages also are lesser known in part because most are in the portions of Paris' 2nd, 9th and 10th arrondissements that hold few other attractions for tourists. As when they were built, they tend to be populated mostly by Parisians seeking refuge from the weather or the bustle of the street.

Preserved passage

Despite the rows of faux-marble columns, the fashionable storefronts, sculptures of goddesses and the elegant glass canopy, the first inclination when entering Galerie Vivienne is to look down.
With the exception of the granite steps that have been worn inches shorter by 190 years of pedestrian traffic, the floor was wall-to-wall neoclassical mosaic designed by Italian artist Giandomenico Facchina in the mid-1800s. For a moment, it seemed wrong to be walking over it, akin to using a van Gogh as a doormat.
Built in 1823, Galerie Vivienne is among the most-refined and best-preserved passages - and the most likely to still appeal to the pre-Revolution residents of the nearby Palais-Royal. Along with a half-dozen interior design shops, a watchmaker, the tony Bistrot Vivienne and a photo gallery are fashionable pret-a-porter boutiques, including shops for Yuki Torii and Jean Paul Gaultier.
At the point where Galerie Vivienne turns left, however, is the longest tenant - Librairie Jousseaume, an antique bookstore that opened to the public about the same time as the passage itself (and possibly before a few of the antique books were written). Inside the hotel-room-size shop, it seemed oddly dim, as though the thousands of volumes were absorbing the light from outmatched fixtures. Every flat surface was stacked with tomes in all sizes, some bound in covers that looked thick enough to stop bullets, leaving separate narrow, winding passages from the door to shelves on the other side and to a bearded man behind a desk stacked a foot deep in periodicals.
I wanted to run my fingers over the red leather binding of a collection by Victor Hugo (possibly printed while the author was still writing), but considered that, like fine art, it was better to look than touch.
The similarly upscale Galerie Colbert runs a parallel L-shaped course next to Galerie Vivienne, but is home to exhibitions, university annexes and a back door to restaurant Le Grand Colbert, a chi-chi brasserie with film credits in the 2003 Jack Nicholson flick "Something's Gotta Give."

People's gallery

While the passages might be the ancestors of modern commercial malls, any family resemblance between the plate of duck confit and frites in front of me and Hot Dog on a Stick is purely coincidental. I had set aside the day just for hunting passages and, after walking from the Latin Quarter and crisscrossing the 2nd Arrondissement untold times, I welcomed the variety of cuisine and the opportunity to relax and Parisian-watch in Passage des Panoramas.
Built in 1799 (rebuilt, revamped and restored many times since), Passage des Panoramas is the oldest remaining arcade, as well as the first building in Paris equipped for gas lighting. It rests on the site of the former Hotel de Montmorency-Luxembourg, and was named for two enormous panoramas inside rotundas that were torn down in 1831.
If each passage represents a different side of Paris life, Panoramas and the connected galleries (Varietes, Feydeau and Saint-Marc) are about average, working locals. And philatelists.
The shops here lean toward small business: affordable clothes, accessories, artist studios and galleries, hairdressers and (since the early days) a critical mass of shops for stamp and postcard collectors. Had I not been hungry, I would have sifted through the bins of antique postcards for hours - one labeled "France," the other "France: Guerre." War.
Toward the end of the lunch rush (possibly an oxymoron in Paris), I took a table at Bistrot des Panoramas that had been placed in front of a stamp shop. The waiter said that when neighboring shops are closed, the restaurants use the space, further filling up an arcade walkway that is little more than 10 feet wide. If there were other tourists in the mostly business and casual lunch crowd, I didn't notice them.
The passage also is the poster child for the romance of early shopping arcades, something that French author Emile Zola used repeatedly in the short story "Nana," about a young Paris prostitute in 1867 who becomes a stage performer. "She adored the Passage des Panoramas. The tinsel of the 'Article de Paris,' the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth," Zola wrote. "It remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear herself away from them."

Walking the line

By design, Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau continue the same line as Panoramas. You can stroll a quarter mile through Paris, from the 2nd Arrondissement to the 9th, and only step into the open twice, to cross Boulevard Montmartre and Rue de la Grange Bateliere.
Built in 1846 to dovetail on the popularity of Panoramas, Jouffroy is mentioned in the 1852 "Illustrated Guide to Paris" listing of passages as "one of the most frequented in Paris."
It felt more lively and seemed to hold the promise of low-key entertainment. Some of that has to do with the Musee Grevin next door, a wax museum that opened in 1882 and exits into the covered passage, as well as hanging shop signs that range from traditional to the bizarre.
It appeared there were more out-of-towners, but the bulk of the drifting crowd were young couples with book bags, escaped office workers, pairs of women browsing, older couples with small dogs. Few of the cliches from the tourist bistros on the Left Bank seemed to apply here.
Much of the rest of the 460-foot-long passage is a melange of photo galeries, a bakery, small cafes, antique vendors, bookstores, a confectionary, one shop devoted to walking canes and another devoted to dollhouse accessories and miniatures and, at a curious jog in the passage, the front door to the Hotel Chopin. The hotel, with surprisingly inexpensive rooms that run from tiny to tinier, opened in 1846 as one of the first tenants.
I continued to the far end of Jouffroy and across the street to Passage Verdeau, where the architecture and design are essentially the same, but the businesses seemed smaller, more temporary, quirkier and, in general, fewer.
A glass of Bordeaux at the contemporary Le Stube restaurant seemed well timed, but workers already were closing up in late afternoon.

Old frame, new art

More so than any other covered arcade, Passage du Grand Cerf (Big Deer Passage) gives the impression of the height, design and grandeur of a European train station - but without the width of even a single platform. Grand Cerf is the only covered passage left constructed just of iron and glass (gilded in dark woods), reflecting the more industrial nature of the Saint-Denis district, which in the 1830s was filled with small factories and workshops. At 40 feet, it's also the tallest of the arcades, increasing the train station illusion.
These days the passage is modern art inside an antique frame. Art workshops, design shops and studios line each side, as well as what seemed like a few sole-owner shops with artisan goods - soaps, clothing, accessories - as if the passage is an incubator for independent small businesses. Even the wine bar at the entrance, Le Pas Sage, offers a hip urban vibe.
From Grand Cerf, I exited onto Rue Saint-Denis, one of the oldest streets in Paris, laid out by the Romans in the first century. (While the Romans were a lusty bunch, it's doubtful they could have foreseen the number of sex shops and strip clubs today.)

Hooked in a loop

Just past Rue du Caire is Passage du Caire, but instead of Old World architecture and shops made for browsing, I found windows full of naked mannequins.
While Passage du Caire probably is least useful to travelers - the shops are wholesale only - it still reveals a side of Paris, the Sentier neighborhood, known both past and present for the textile and clothing industry. The passage strewn with garment racks and shipping boxes is not as complex as an Egyptian bazaar (Caire is French for Cairo, named at a time of Egypt obsession), but I still managed to get lost in a triangular loop of garment and fabric shops.
What Passage du Caire lacks in classic beauty, is in part offset by the new-ish, artsy Hotel Edgar, a boutique property with just 12 rooms, each designed by a different artist. It seemed like a clear nod, both to the local heritage and to the future.

Currying flavor

The trail led up Rue Saint-Denis, past the hulking Port Saint-Denis monument at Boulevard Saint-Denis and up Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis (all named for a guy whose miracle was carrying around his own head for a while after it was chopped off).
After only a cursory look at Passage du Prado (remarkable only for being shorter than other covered arcades), eventually I found the well-worn entrance to Passage Brady. My initial skepticism from the physical appearance - crumbling architecture, loose plywood flooring, blue tarps - gave way to astonishment once the aroma hit me. As the passage opened up, I were flanked by restaurants - Palais des Rajpout, Jardin de l'Inde, New Calcutta, La Reine du Kashmir.
Passage Brady, it turned out, is an unofficial Little India, a colorful collection of restaurants, flower vendors, sari shops and convenience stores reflecting the growing Indian, Kashmiri and Pakistani communities in Paris. Also in the two-block passage were hairdressers, spice shops and one costume vendor with a full-size yellow bunny outfit in the window.
Soaking in Brady's curry-infused air, it seemed the term "passage" didn't really apply, at least not philosophically. Our experience had not been a tunnel that takes you from one place to another, but of the passage as the destination itself. Passage Brady was our last stop, and Little India was a last petit bite that seemed to round out the experience. I was far from having tasted all of Paris.
It had been a great meal, just the same.

Other passages

Passage des L'Industries, 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, 10th, Strasbourg - Saint-Denis metro stop.
Passage de Choiseul, 40-42 rue des Petit Champs, 2nd, Quartre-Septembre metro stop.
Passage Moliere, 161 rue Saint Martin, 3rd, Rambuteau metro stop.
Passage du Ponceau, 243-245 rue Saint-Denis, 2nd, Reaumur-Sebastopol metro stop.

If you go

Getting there

The covered passages described here are in the 2nd, 9th and 10th arrondissements.

Where to stay

Hotel Chopin: 10 Blvd. Montmartre, (46 Passage Jouffroy), +33 1 47 70 58 10, www.hotelchopin.fr. Rates start at $120 per night.
Hotel Edgar: 31 rue d'Alexandrie, +33(0)1 40 41 05 19, www.edgarparis.com. Also a chic restaurant on the property. Rates start at $212 per night.
Historic Rentals: (800) 537-5408, www.historicrentals.com. Boutique vacation rental firm with private apartments on both sides of the Seine, including one about 10 minutes walk from Passage du Grand Cerf. Weekly rates only, starting at $995.

Where to eat

Bistrot des Panoramas: 10 Passage des Panoramas, +33 01 40 26 76 10. Entrees starting at $10.
Bistrot Vivienne: 4, rue des Petits Champs, +33 01 49 27 00 50, www.bistrotvivienne.com. Next to Galerie Vivienne. Entrees: $22-$41.
Le Passage de Pondichery: 87 Passage Brady, +33 1 53 34 63 10, (page on Facebook). Lunch and dinner. Entrees start under $9
on No comments:

Monday, February 17, 2014

Loneliness is a killer? Tell us something we don't know

Researchers have informed us that lonely old people are at more risk of dying – so why do we do so little about it?
Michele Hanson
Governments don't care about lonely old people (posed by model) … Photograph: Alamy
Loneliness can be twice as deadly as obesity for old people, Chicago researchers have found. Here they go again, the Department of the Bleeding Obvious. What a pointless thing to tell us. We already know loneliness is fairly deadly at any age, and if you're old, can't move about, are stuck up some stairs or in a high rise with the lift broken and no visitors, then you really are stuffed. Who'd want to go on with life like that? Better to just give up and fade away. Especially if everything hurts.
Why don't the researchers stop doing pointless sums and go visiting the immobile elderly? And why don't the rest of us? Because we haven't got time, we're too busy trying to make a living, or too far away; the visiting carers have had their times cut so they can only whizz in and out with barely a microsecond to chat; funding cuts mean that there are scarcely any day centres left, so the elderly are left mouldering alone more than ever.
A few years ago on The Secret Millionaire, the millionaire visited an elderly lady marooned in her second floor flat. It was full of bags of catshit, and stank, and she had a bushy moustache. No one had cared about her for months or years. How brave she was to struggle on. My mother would plunge into gloom over one whisker. To her, whiskers were a sign of helplessness and neglect. Like anyone else, old people need tasty food, to be clean, to look good, and to talk. And talk and talk. I'm lucky: I have a helpful daughter and lots of friends nearby. We plan to trundle round on our motorised chairs visiting the ones who are conking out, until the last one trundling goes down, because there'll be no one else to do it.
Governments don't seem to give a stuff. Why keep the elderly alive for too long? It costs a fortune. Don't bother researching, scientists. I can tell you for nothing. If our attitude to the elderly doesn't change, loneliness will soon be four times more deadly than obesity
on No comments:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

SID CAESAR TV Great, legendary comedian

The rubber-faced Sid Caesar, in some of his comedic guises over the years. Clockwise from top left, NBC; Joe Caneva/AP; AP (3); Sam Falk/The New York Times
Sid Caesar, a comedic force of nature who became one of television’s first stars in the early 1950s and influenced generations of comedians and comedy writers, died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91.
His death was announced by Eddy Friedfeld, a family spokesman.
Mr. Caesar largely faded from the public eye in his middle years as he struggled with crippling self-doubt and addiction to alcohol and pills. But from 1950 to 1954, he and his co-stars on the live 90-minute comedy-variety extravaganza “Your Show of Shows” dominated the Saturday night viewing habits of millions of Americans. In New York, a group of Broadway theater owners tried to persuade NBC to switch the show to the middle of the week because, they said, it was ruining their Saturday business.
Albert Einstein was a Caesar fan. Alfred Hitchcock called Mr. Caesar the funniest performer since Charlie Chaplin.
Television comedy in its early days was dominated by boisterous veterans of vaudeville and radio who specialized in broad slapstick and snappy one-liners. Mr. Caesar introduced a different kind of humor to the small screen, at once more intimate and more absurd, based less on jokes or pratfalls than on characters and situations. It left an indelible mark on American comedy.
Mr. Caesar and Imogene Coca on “Your Show of Shows” in 1953. NBC-TV, via Associated Press
“If you want to find the ur-texts of ‘The Producers’ and ‘Blazing Saddles,’ of ‘Sleeper’ and ‘Annie Hall,’ of ‘All in the Family’ and ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Saturday Night Live,’ “ Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times when he was its chief theater critic, “check out the old kinescopes of Sid Caesar.”
A list of Mr. Caesar’s writers over the years reads like a comedy all-star team. Mel Brooks (who in 1982 called him “the funniest man America has produced to date”) did some of his earliest writing for him, as did Woody Allen. So did the most successful playwright in the history of the American stage, Neil Simon. Carl Reiner created one landmark sitcom, “The Dick Van Dyke Show”; Larry Gelbart was the principal creative force behind another, “M*A*S*H.” Mel Tolkin wrote numerous scripts for “All in the Family.” The authors of the two longest-running Broadway musicals of the 1960s, Joseph Stein (“Fiddler on the Roof”) and Michael Stewart (“Hello, Dolly!”), were Caesar alumni as well.
Sketches on “Your Show of Shows” and its successor, “Caesar’s Hour” (1954-57), were as likely to skewer the minutiae of domestic life as to lampoon classic Hollywood movies, arty foreign films and even operas. Mr. Caesar won Emmys for both those shows.
With a rubbery face and the body of a linebacker, Mr. Caesar could get laughs without saying a word, as he did in a pantomime routine in which he and his co-stars, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris and Mr. Reiner, played mechanical figures on a town clock that goes dangerously out of whack.
Fluent in Fake Languages
Mr. Caesar was a master of improvisation: In a classic moment during a parody of the opera “Pagliacci,” as he was drawing tears on his face in front of a dressing-room mirror, the makeup pencil broke. Suddenly unable to draw anything but straight lines, he made the split-second decision to play tick-tack-toe on his cheek.
He was also deft at handling whatever wordplay his writers gave him. In one guise, as the extremely far-out jazz saxophonist Progress Hornsby, he explained that his new record was in a special kind of hi-fi: “This is the highest they’ve ever fied. If they fi any higher than this, they’re gonna foo!”
He could seem eloquent even when his words were total gibberish: Among his gifts was the ability to mimic the sounds and cadences of foreign languages he didn’t actually speak.
 
He was equally convincing as a suburban husband slowly figuring out that his wife, played by Ms. Coca, had wrecked the car (a comic conceit that had not yet become a cliché); as an absurdly enthusiastic member of a bouffant-coiffed rock ‘n’ roll trio called the Haircuts; or as a pompous German professor in a battered top hat and moth-eaten frock coat who claimed, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, to be an expert on pretty much everything. One week, the professor was an archaeologist who claimed to have discovered “the secret of Titten-Totten’s tomb.” Asked what the secret was, he became indignant: “You think I’m gonna tell you? You got another guess coming. You take that trip.”
Mr. Caesar, as himself, at home in 2000. Misha Erwitt
Two decades after “Your Show of Shows” ruled the Saturday-night airwaves, another live 90-minute show, similarly built around a stock company’s wild and often irreverent sketch comedy, helped change the face of television. But there might not have been a “Saturday Night Live” if Sid Caesar and company hadn’t paved the way.
“It was fun, but hard,” Mr. Caesar said in 1984, looking back on his glory years. “I worked six days a week, putting the script together, working with the writers. The show had to be written by Wednesday night because Thursday we had to put it on its feet. Friday we showed it to the technicians, and Saturday was the show. Sunday was our only day off, and I used to stand under the shower and shake.”
He did more than shake. By the age of 30, Mr. Caesar was not just the king of television, earning $1 million a year; he was also an alcoholic and a pill addict. Under his manic exterior, he recalled in “Where Have I Been?,” his 1982 autobiography, he was distraught and filled with self-hatred, tormented by guilt because he did not think he deserved the acclaim he was receiving.
He was also given to explosive rages. Mr. Caesar once dangled a terrified Mr. Brooks from an 18th-story window until colleagues restrained him. With one punch, he knocked out a horse that had thrown his wife off its back, a scene that Mr. Brooks replayed in his movie “Blazing Saddles.”
By the late 1950s, he was off the air, a victim of changing tastes as well as personal problems. He made a triumphant comeback on Broadway in 1962, playing seven characters in “Little Me,” a musical created by Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh and Mr. Simon. (A concert revival of “Little Me” was part of the Encores! series at City Center this month.) A year later, Mr. Caesar held his own among comedy heavyweights like Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters in the hit movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” But his problems soon got the better of him, and his comeback was short-lived.
Most of the 1960s and ’70s were a struggle. They were also a blur: In writing “Where Have I Been?” Mr. Caesar relied on reporting by his collaborator, Bill Davidson, and the recollections of his family, because there was so much he could not remember. (Twenty-one years later, Mr. Caesar and Mr. Friedfeld wrote a second autobiography, “Caesar’s Hours.” This one was more upbeat, mostly because the focus was Mr. Caesar’s comedy career rather than his personal struggles.)
Mr. Caesar was not entirely out of the public eye, even in his dark days. He showed up on television now and then; he appeared in a handful of movies, some memorable (Mr. Brooks’s “Silent Movie”) and some less so (the silly horror comedy “The Spirit Is Willing”); he returned to Broadway in 1971, albeit briefly, in “Four on a Garden,” an ill-fated evening of one-act comedies that also starred Carol Channing. And the release in 1973 of “Ten From Your Show of Shows,” a feature-film compilation of sketches, helped keep his reputation alive. But he continued to flounder.
Back Up From Rock Bottom
The low point came in 1978. He was in two movies that year, “Grease” and “The Cheap Detective,” but by the time they hit theaters, he had hit bottom.
Fostering a new style of comedy on American TV: Mr. Caesar, far right, working with the writers Mel Brooks, far left, Woody Allen and Mel Tolkin. via Photofest
Incapacitated by his addictions and neuroses, barely able to get out of bed, he underwent intensive psychotherapy and medical treatment. He found salvation and sanity, he later said, in a form of Jungian self-therapy: recording improvised dialogues each day between himself as Sid, a wise father, and Sidney, his wayward son, whom the father teaches to become a restrained, confident adult. In the 1980s, Mr. Caesar acquired a new addiction: healthful living. He developed a lean, youthful physique by avoiding fat, salt and sugar and by strenuously working out at least one hour each morning.
“Now, instead of knocking life down, tearing it apart, I graciously accept life,” he said.
 
Sidney Caesar was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in Yonkers, the youngest of three sons of Jewish immigrants, Max Caesar and the former Ida Rafael. Max, who emigrated from Poland, owned and operated a luncheonette with his wife, who had come from Russia; young Sid Caesar developed his foreign-sounding double talk by listening closely to the luncheonette’s multinational clientele. The family lived over the restaurant and rented rooms to transients.
As a child, Sid was moody, shy, quiet and — although he would later grow to 6 foot 2 — short. He once said he felt “like a midget in the world of giants.” He kept to himself much of the time. He was 3 before he began to talk, and even then, his brothers recalled, he did not say a great deal.
His teachers, interviewed at the time of his early television success, remembered a completely unexceptional child. “Sid Caesar was one of the dumbest pupils I ever had,” one teacher said.
He took up weight lifting. “I developed tremendous muscles, which everyone had to respect,” he said. “The biceps I built were disguises for my fear.”
He also learned how to play the saxophone, which he later said saved his life: “It helped me blow off some steam and get rid of some of the anger.”
Equally important, the saxophone gave him an entree into show business. At 14, he was hired to play at a Catskills hotel on summer vacation. While there, he also began performing in comedy sketches; he still thought of himself primarily as a saxophonist and would go on to work with the bands of Shep Fields, Claude Thornhill and others, but comedy soon became his primary focus.
After graduating from Yonkers High School, he worked as an usher and then a doorman at the Capitol Theater in Manhattan, auditing courses at the Juilliard School because he could not afford to attend. He met Florence Levy in the Catskills and married her in 1943.
Sid Caesar, right, with friend and comedian Billy Crystal in 2006. Fred Prouser/Reuters
In World War II, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and did duty on Brooklyn piers. In his free time, he wrote comic material that helped win him a role in “Tars and Spars,” a Coast Guard revue that toured the country and was made into a movie, in which he also appeared, in 1946. A monologue in which he played multiple characters and provided all the sound effects of a World War I aerial dogfight made a strong impression on audiences — and on the show’s director, Max Liebman.
In 1948, Mr. Liebman directed Mr. Caesar in the hit Broadway revue “Make Mine Manhattan.” The next year, when Mr. Liebman brought him to television on the weekly “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” Mr. Caesar was hailed as the small-screen discovery of the year. His star rose even higher with the debut of “Your Show of Shows,” also overseen by Mr. Liebman, in February 1950.
Although the chemistry between Mr. Caesar and Ms. Coca was a large part of the show’s success, NBC decided to split them up and give Ms. Coca her own show after four years. With Mr. Reiner and Mr. Morris still by his side, Mr. Caesar carried on with “Caesar’s Hour,” but after a strong start, the ratings declined, and the show was canceled in 1957. He returned the next year with “Sid Caesar Invites You,” a half-hour ABC show, which reunited him with Ms. Coca. But the old magic was gone, and the show lasted only a few months.
“I had no experience in failure,” Mr. Caesar later recalled of the years that followed. “And then, when failure comes, oh, boy, it comes in lumps.”
After 20 up-and-down years, Mr. Caesar found himself in 1978 spending four months almost entirely in bed, secretly ordering in beer whenever his wife turned her back. Offered a job in Canada in Mr. Simon’s comedy “Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” he was in such a fog of alcohol and pills that he couldn’t remember his lines. Finally, he sought treatment.
“I had to come to terms with myself,” he recalled. “Do you want to live or die? Make up your mind. And I did. I said, ‘I want to live.’ And that was it: the first step on a long journey.”
A Career Rejuvenated
His return to health and sobriety led to a career revival, aided by two events in 1982: the publication of “Where Have I Been?” and the release of the movie “My Favorite Year,” a fictionalized account of life behind the scenes at “Your Show of Shows” produced by Mr. Brooks, with Joseph Bologna as the show’s Caesar-like star.
Through the 1980s and ’90s, until health problems slowed him down, Mr. Caesar worked regularly: on television (he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1983), in films (he worked for Mr. Brooks again in “History of the World: Part I”), in nightclubs (with Ms. Coca), on Broadway (although his show “Sid Caesar and Company: Does Anybody Know What I’m Talking About?” closed quickly in 1989) and at the Metropolitan Opera, where he appeared as Frosch, the drunken jailer, in a 1987 production of “Die Fledermaus.”
Mr. Caesar was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1985.
Mr. Caesar’s wife, Florence, died in 2010. His survivors include a son, Richard; two daughters, Michele and Karen Caesar; and two grandsons.
In a 1987 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Caesar looked back on his early success and subsequent failures, both of which he admitted he had been unprepared to handle, and reflected on the perspective he said he had finally achieved.
“Everybody wants to have a goal: I gotta get to that goal, I gotta get to that goal, I gotta get to that goal,” he said. “Then you get to that goal, and then you gotta get to another goal. But in between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived and enjoyed — and if you don’t, you’re a fool.”
on No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)