C8| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Last Train to Memphis:
The Rise of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick (1994)
1
You can practically smell the fried
chicken and peanut-butter sandwiches
in this book, whose author went to
Memphis and the small towns of
Tennessee to interview those who witnessed
Elvis Presley’s improbable rise to glory.
The result is a book that rocks and rolls with
a Tennessee twang. It’s a 1950s story about a
poorly educated young man who loved music
and had nothing but a cheap guitar, some
style-setting sideburns and a pair of swiveling
hips. Presley sang his way out of Memphis
but always carried it with him. This book
covers his first 24 years and ends in 1958,
when two events unsettled him: the death
of his beloved mother and his induction into
the Army. Peter Guralnick grasps the fact
that there’s a mystery to the success of Elvis
Presley. The King himself was bemused about
it: “Some people I know can’t figure out how
Elvis Presley happened. Sometimes I wonder
myself.” Sam Phillips of Sun Records, one of
the first to experience the Presley pizzazz,
may have had the answer: “He damn sure
wasn’t dumb.”
The Astaires: Fred & Adele
By Kathleen Riley (2012)
2
This is the Fred Astaire origin story.
Movie audiences first met him as a
partner for Joan Crawford in 1933’s
“Dancing Lady.” Astaire plays himself,
and Crawford greets him as “Mr. Astaire.”
Already a famous name, he’s totally self-
assured as he twirls the glamorous Crawford
around the floor. A lot has been written
about Astaire, but not much about his
earliest years or how he became not only
a symbol of style and elegance but also
the perfect partner for Hollywood’s most
gorgeous stars. Born Frederick Austerlitz in
Omaha, Neb., in 1899, Astaire was dragged
along to partner his older sister Adele in her
dancing classes. Brother and sister grew up
together in show business. A hoyden spirit
and a talented comedian, Adele was the
sparkle behind their success. Her brother,
Ms. Riley notes, grounded her “careless
exuberance” with his choreographic
imagination and relentless perfectionism.
When Adele left show business to marry
a British peer in 1932, Fred went on alone,
never forgetting all he had learned spinning
his sister around, matching his timing to
hers, showcasing her beautiful presence
without losing his own place. It was
Adele who prepared Fred for Ginger.
portrait is that of a life made joyful by
performing. Audiences loved her and she
loved them, a relationship she described
as a “serious romance.”Considering Doris Day
By Tom Santopietro (2007)4
Once in a while, it’s nice to read
a book about a woman in show
business who doesn’t turn into
Norma Desmond. When Tom
Santopietro’s book was published, the
“most reluctant of superstars” called to
thank him for treating her career with
respect. Despite her success, for more than
five decades Doris Day knew what it was
to be treated like a joke. Oscar Levant’s
wisecrack that he knew her “before she
was a virgin” typified the treatment.
Obstacles notwithstanding, she would
end up “the biggest female box-office star
in Hollywood history.” Along the way,
there were bad marriages, dubious reviews
and trivial films—which she succeeded in
enlivening—assigned by the studio system.
Her career epitomized that of the working
woman in a business dominated by men.
Still, she not only kept all her marbles,
but also most of theirs. She lived out a
happy and healthy retirement to the age
of 97, surrounded by friends, a houseful
of pets and all the privacy and luxury
she’d earned.Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams:
The Early Years, 1903-1940
By Gary Giddins (2001)5
Gary Giddins is the definitive word on
Bing Crosby, and this is the first book
in his epic trilogy. One of the first
white men to embrace the rhythms
of black music, Crosby achieved stardom and
the status of a legend for his success in radio,
recordings, movies and television. The book
reveals a star full of contradictions. In films,
he was often portrayed as a laid-back,
ordinary sort: His ears stuck out, his clothes
were off the rack and his glamour quotient
was low—until, of course, he began to sing.
But off screen, there were demons. Crosby
was rumored to be a wandering husband,
and in his early years a bad drunk and a
father who was far from ideal. Mr. Giddins
delivers detailed portraits of two Crosbys—
the mellow crooner and the tough business-
man who made more than 63 movies,
pioneered the development of audio
and videotape recording, and appeared
on the Top 10 box-office list 15 times.Jeanine Basinger
The author, most recently, of ‘The Movie Musical!’
BOOKS
‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.’—AL JOLSON, IN ‘THE JAZZ SINGER,’ 1927
FIVE BESTON THE STARS OF MOVIE MUSICALS
iBauhaus
By Nicholas Fox Weber
Knopf, 260 pages, $27.95
BYBELINDALANKS
W
HEN ANNI and
Josef Albers enter-
tained at their
home in Orange,
Conn., they would
sometimes take visitors to their fa-
vorite restaurant, the Plank House.
There Josef would rhapsodically praise
the polyurethane-encased tables and
the salad bar, whose suspended plastic
dome shielded an abundance of vege-
tables from germs.
The no-frills charm of the Plank
House might have escaped their
guests. But to the two world-renowned
artists, the Plank House embodied
their beloved Bauhaus principles: sim-
plicity, functionality and innovation.
The tables, covered in synthetic ma-
terial, were easy to clean; the variety
of produce, shipped in from around
the world, was a triumph of modern
transportation; and the menu prices
were accessible to many, not only a
wealthy few. Even its blunt moniker—
the Plank House—echoed the Bau-
haus’s objective to reduce everything
to its most elemental form.
Internet searches, unfortunately,
don’t turn up images of the long-
defunct eatery, so we have to rely on
Nicholas Fox Weber’s account of his
meals with his mentors. As the execu-
tive director of the Josef and Anni
Albers Foundation, he’s an authority
on the Bauhaus and the author of
“iBauhaus,” a treatise on how Apple’s
iPhone—a small, glossy plank of tech-
Jobs’s alternative: MacMan.) Mr.
Weber goes on to assert that many of
the key figures in the Bauhaus’s and
Apple’s history shortened their names
as the ultimate devotion to efficiency,
some even opting for unorthodox spell-
ings to reduce the number of letters
used: Jonathan thus became Jony and
Annelise became Anni.
Mr. Weber isn’t factually exacting
when recalling Apple’s history and
sometimes resorts to padding his book
in the most un-Bauhausian of ways.
In discussing Apple’s logo, for example,The Seeds
Of the Apple
Aesthetic
nology—is the culmination of the
school’s philosophy of creating su-
premely functional objects for every-
one.
For all its influence, the Bauhaus
operated for only 14 years in post-
World War I Germany. Founded by the
architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the
school was intended to unite all of
the arts through craft, then shifted its
focus to mass producing well-designed
objects for daily use.
In many ways Steve Jobs, Apple’s
co-founder and former CEO, took the
same approach to revamping comput-
ers. He believed early on that these
once bulky, ugly and expensive ma-
chines could be made easy to use and
accessible to a larger public. In a 1983
speech at the Aspen Institute—an
international think tank started by
Walter Paepcke, a philanthropist, with
a campus designed by Herbert Bayer,
a Bauhaus artist and architect—Jobs
predicted that “we will find a way toput [a computer] in a shoebox and sell
it for $2,500, and finally, we’ll find a
way to put it in a book.” He eventually
went a step further and put it in the
palm of our hands.
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary
that keyboardless, Internet-connected
device was in 2007. In its attention to
materials, the original iPhone could
hardly have been more Bauhaus. A
mere six months before the Apple
product shipped, Jobs persuaded
Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning,
to bring his company’s Gorilla Glass
(first developed in the 1960s to resist
scratches and breakage) out of retire-
ment for the iPhone’s face. Earlier, heAn authority on design
argues that the iPhone
is the culmination of the
Bauhaus’s approach to
form and functionality.Judy Garland:
A Portrait in Art and Anecdote
By John Fricke (2003)3
This is a coffee-table extravaganza
with portraits, photos, and comments
from Judy Garland and the people
who knew her best. John Fricke’s
sharply observed biographical summation
bears little resemblance to the portrayals
of Garland as a train wreck. He doesn’t
whitewash her problems, but he does takeinto account the relentless demands of the
studio system that found her, trained her
and made her a star. Garland lived 47 years
and worked for 45 of them. She did
hundreds of vaudeville and radio shows
before she was a teen; starred in 32 major
feature films; made more than 1,100 theater,
nightclub and concert appearances; and cut
nearly 100 singles and more than a dozen
albums. She was always working, but
always surrounded by loving friends—and,
significantly, usually laughing. Mr. Fricke’sKING’S LAIRElvis Presley at Graceland in Memphis, Tenn., ca. 1957.
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGESand his designer, Jony Ive, dreamt
up the idea of extending the screen
(first covered in plastic) all the way
to the edges of the device, creating a
smooth, uninterrupted surface agree-
able to the human touch.
Almost as important as tactility
is the defining role that color—
or the lack of it—played in the histo-
ries of both the Bauhaus and Apple.
The Gropius-designed Bauhaus head-
quarters, built in Dessau in 1925 after
the school relocated from Weimar, was
white both inside and out. The
Alberses continued the fascination
with the hue, using it on everything
from walls to their Naugahyde-uphol-
stered couch and vinyl-covered chairs.
After introducing candy-colored iMacs
in 1998, Apple moved to minimalist
white as well, most notably on the
original iPod. It was part of Mr. Ive’s
homage to his hero, Dieter Rams, who
designed elegantly pared-down
gadgets for Braun in the 1960s.
Mr. Ive is the son of a Bauhaus
aficionado, Mr. Weber points out,
and Mr. Rams taught at Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung Ulm, con-
sidered the Bauhaus’s successor.
Both Apple and the Bauhaus
embraced the branding power
of a name that seems to tran-
scend language. The latter is
a neologism that conflates
two German words to mean
“building house.” Just as
the word had never been
used before, the school
would ignite an unprece-
dented movement in design
and architecture. Similarly,
“iPhone” merges the familiar
and the new, with the lower-
case “i” inviting many differ-
ent interpretations—anything
from “innovation” to “identity.”
Ken Segall, the ad executive
who named the iMac in the
early days of the World
Wide Web, said that the “i”
was for “Internet.” (Mr.
Segall famously overruledhe traces the eponymous fruit’s signifi-
cance in art history, especially in depic-
tions of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from
paradise after taking that fateful bite;
he then attempts to circle back to the
Bauhaus with this awkward transition:
“It was the Third Reich that destroyed
a form of utopia. For Steve Jobs, it
would be illness and too early a death.
So why not bite the apple?” In books
as in design, as Mr. Rams would say,
less is often more.
Mr. Weber digs deep for other
Apple-Bauhaus ties. Growing up in
California, for instance, Jobs lived in a
single-family tract home conceived by
Joseph L. Eichler, with influences from
Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der
Rohe, which might have influenced
Jobs in his approach to design. Jobs’s
biographer Walter Isaacson quotes
the Apple CEO as saying, “Eichler did
a great thing. His houses were smart
and cheap and good. They brought
clean design and simple taste to lower-
income people.”
Yet for all Jobs’s appreci-
ation of the smart and cheap
and good, the iPhone still fails
to overcome class distinc-
tions—one of the key objec-
tives of the Bauhaus. Crit-
ics scoffed at the original
iPhone’s $499 price tag,
and the cost of subse-
quent models has contin-
ued to rise. If the iPhone
were truly the realiza-
tion of Bauhaus ideals,
it would be an enduring
object for the masses,
not an elitist gadget
with a limited lifespan. Of
course, there lies the unfortunate
difference between a utopian commu-
nity of artists and a successful tech
company: The Bauhaus always strug-
gled to find its financial footing,
whereas Apple has become one of the
most valuable companies in the world.Ms. Lanks is a New York-based
editor and writer.PHOTO
ILLUSTRATION:
WSJ; PHOTOS:
JENS SCHLUETER/
GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCK