Just as much as fiction or drama, history and biography have the power to take us out of our time, place and solipsistic egos and open our eyes to other ways of being – good and bad, crazy and sublime.
One of the great projects of our time has been the patient almost archaeological excavation of William Shakespeare. Fifty-two years ago on the 400th anniversary of his birth he was a biographical blank – a few signatures and legal papers, a few sightings by contemporaries and a lot of conjecture.
Now 400 years after his death there’s still a paucity of tangible evidence, but busy historians and literary scholars have mined the archives, obscure texts and records of the era and have come back with a great deal more flesh on the bones.
The wonderful biographies of A.L. Rowse may have been superseded, but he was among the first to be so at home in the period that he might have been an Elizabethan. He knew who everyone’s cousin was and who they were feuding with.
In this vein, Charles Nicholl is unbeatable. Years ago “The Reckoning” used historical detection to unravel the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s murder. The more recent, “The Lodger Shakespeare” studied the London neighborhood around Silver Street where the writer lived for a decade and found a lot there that informs the plays.
We see how close he was to the varied life of the city. Taverns and brothels, lawsuits and marriages, tailors and wig makers crowd these pages. It’s a wonder of minute research.
At a less quotidian level, “The Year of Lear” by James Shapiro puts the year 1606 under a magnifying glass. In that pivotal year Shakespeare produced the play of the title, “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Macbeth.” It was also the year a new king, James I, tried to consolidate power, merge the kingdoms of England and Scotland, subdue a recalcitrant Parliament, and calm sectarian strife in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.
Shapiro demonstrates how these great historical events informed the plays Shakespeare’s company was presenting to the masses and at court performances. In the telling it becomes clear they are not plays about old legends and ancient history, but rather docudramas that address contemporary events, the divisions and fears and conflicts of the realm, in ways that would have been obvious to his audience.
In “West of Eden,” Jean Stein holds up a mirror to a different time and place – Los Angeles and Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. She does so in the form of an oral history of five wealthy families. She has added no commentary, letting a collection of voices create a mosaic picture of the milieu.
She is well-placed to have undertaken such an effort since she is the daughter of Jules Stein who began as a booking agent for bands in the swing era and created the powerhouse MCA which added Hollywood stars to its roster and then branched out to pursue TV and movie production. Her family’s is one of the stories told.
The cast throughout is straight out of Hollywood melodramas. Dysfunctional families, men corrupted by money and power, women sleeping their way to the top or neglected, abandoned or widowed and turning to besotted, dotty recluses. Who knew Raymond Chandler novels and “Sunset Boulevard” were documentaries.
First chronologically came Edward Doheny, the model for Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood,” an oil industry pioneer and pirate who didn’t understand time’s had changed when he delivered a bribe to the Secretary of the Treasury and precipitated the Teapot Dome scandal. He escaped prison, but lost his reputation, as well as a son in a murder-suicide scandal.
Jack Warner and his brothers built a movie empire but feuded constantly and at the end bitterly tried to steal the company from each other. David O. Selznick, Hollywood royalty married to the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, ruined himself for a starlet, Jennifer Jones who turned into Norma Desmond, complete with gurus, psychoanalysts, neglected children, alcohol abuse and reclusiveness.
Railroad heiress Grace Garland lives in a Malibu mansion with her schizophrenic daughter Jane and locks herself in her room at night for fear of being murdered in her bed. He late husband’s will has left the fortune for the care of the daughter and if Grace has her committed she risks losing control of the loot. So by day, with the collaboration of an avant garde psychologist, Jane is entrusted to a series of minders drawn from the ranks of local starving artists with no mental health training. What could go wrong?
The Steins lived in splendor but as time passed, Jules lost touch with trends in the business and becomes increasingly conservative and suspicious. His wife spent her life getting dressed to the nines and making the rounds of upscale bars with female friends equally interested in drinking the days away.
“West of Eden” is a strong dose of real life California Noir. “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”