Il Duce, Il Donald?

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

Lately some political pundits have been asserting that it's not Donald Trump the man but Trump's message that is appealing to Republican voters, at least as reflected in the polls.  They're only partially right.  It's the message but also the man. 

Trump presents himself as a super dealmaker who can make America great again by making great deals with China, Mexico, and other rising competitors.  He's not unlike Mussolini in the way he holds himself out as a strong man who can face down the rest of the world.  His approach is grounded in a politics of personal charisma very different from Ronald Reagan's appeal.  Reagan avowed the essential goodness of Americans and the American system and campaigned on a promise to get government out of people's way.  By contrast, Trump sees the American people as dupes of greedy and incompetent politicians and offers himself as a strong leader with no need to enrich himself finacially from holding public office, someone who possesses the business skills to negotiate tough trade deals with tough foreign adversaries.

Of course, much of this rhetoric is Trump making extravagant promises without acknowledging -- or appreciating -- that making deals with foreign companies is not the same as making decisions as a president.  Yet a certain percentage of likely voters think the two roles are identical and that a President Trump can save us. Far too many people underestimate the importance of political skills, which are not the same as those of a businessman. They may overlap, but there is still a distinctive difference. It may be why America has never elected a businessman who never held political office to the presidency.  

(Victorious generals are another story -- it would appear that military command bears some resemblance to political leadership.  But anyone who makes the quick but facile connection between military leaders-turned politician and fascism should bear in mind that American presidents who were previously generals have a record of being more hesitant to rely on the military than presidents with little or no military experience.)

A conservative politician must always cut the Gordian knot which requires him or her to espouse limited government while at the same time presenting him or herself as strong and competent, someone who can inspire yet does not encourage a cult of personal charisma.

Trump is certainly no fascist.  But his own rather unique politics of personal charisma ought to concern us as his poll numbers continue to rise and his proposals for solving problems still bear closer scrutiny.


UPDATE -- 3/8/16:

On February 28th, candidate Trump quoted Mussolini in one of his early-morning tweets:

"It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."

According to the New York Times, Trump was not aware that the quotation comes from Il Duce, but said he likes it anyway.

"Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much"

On June 28th, The Wall Street Journal published my review of Michael Wood's new book, "Alfred Hitchcock:  The Man Who Knew Too Much."  You think you already know everything about Hitchcock?  Read "The Fine Art of Fear," by clicking here.  And my apologies to the late, great Joseph Cotten for spelling his last name incorrectly. 

Orson Welles at 100

May 6th would have been Orson Welles's 100th birthday.  The great actor, director, writer, producer, magician, and world-class raconteur died 30 years ago but is still a vivid presence to those of us who cherish his films.  The Wall Street Journal has published my tribute to him a day early, so we'll all have more time to celebrate, just as Orson would have wanted us to.  My piece is a rather unusual take on the kid from Kenosha, and I'm sure it will inspire as many brickbats as hosannas, if not more.  Join the argument:  "On His 100th Birthday, Rethinking Orson Welles."

Remembering Budd Schulberg

        (Photo: New York Times / File 1972)

Novelist, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, and memoirist Budd Schulberg would have turned 100 this year.  Here's my look at the life of the controversial writer from his childhood in Hollywood to his final years in Quogue, New York.  It's in this month's issue of Commentary, and you can read the online version here.  I expect -- in fact, I hope -- it will provoke some lively debate among the devoted readers of this blog.

Meanwhile, enjoy this clip from the 1959 TV adaptation of Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run?

Elegy for "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide"

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal published my piece about the discontinuation of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide after a run of 45 years. The book has been a part of my life since its first edition, so I thought it would be fitting to reflect on how the guide, the movies, and America have changed during those years. You can read the article by clicking here.

The Way Nostalgia Used to Be

Are people nostalgic anymore? Nostalgia was a big deal when I was growing up -- not just the nostalgia of older folks, but the peculiar second-hand nostalgia than their kids felt for cultural artifacts produced long before those kids were born. There was a boom in nostalgia books in the late Sixties and Seventies, with hefty volumes celebrating the movies, radio and TV shows, comics, and pulp magazines of the period spanning roughly from World War I to 1960; nearly every college kid had a poster of Humphrey Bogart on his or her dorm room wall, despite the actor's demise nearly twenty years before. Yes, one can find books and websites these days devoted to these cast-off but still-cherished products of mass culture, but it's somehow not the same. Nostalgia -- both the first- and second-hand kind -- just isn't what it used to be. 

Even old-timers are too busy trying to catch up with the iPhone 6 and the plethora of tech devices being released at a furious rate. Who wants to be caught dwelling on the past?  And folks under 30, or at least an awful lot of them, show little interest in the cultural world of last month let alone the last century. It's chic to be retro, but that's more about being hip than being nostalgic; it's a cool pose, not a passionate longing for things past. Even old movies in black-and-white have become a tough sell. Do kids collect stamps anymore?  And what about old magazines? People are increasingly less interested in new magazines. The ones printed on paper and bound with staples, I mean.  Remember those? Remember?

Well, that's the title of a book published in 1963, nearly a decade before the nostalgia boom really exploded.  Charles Beaumont's book Remember?  Remember? is subtitled "A Nostalgic Backward Glance at Some of Yesteryear's Most Beloved Features of Our National Profile," and that in itself suggests its age.  Can you imagine a book with a subtitle like that today?  It sounds so...quaint.  But the unabashed nostalgia of the author for the things that gave him joy in his youth is infectious but also a bit sad, since Beaumont was only in his early thirties when the book came out, and he'd been publishing the pieces (primarily in Playboy) for the previous four years.  His youth had barely been over before he was memorializing it.

Beaumont, for those of you who don't already know (and shame on you if you don't), was one of the preeminent American short-story writers of the 1950s and 60s, specializing in brilliant, chilling tales that encompassed nearly every genre -- suspense, mystery, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and even a "mainstream" novel, The Intruder, about a racist demagogue down South that was made into a film by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner.  It's one of those films inevitably called a "cult classic" and beloved by anyone who's seen it.  I doubt there's anyone reading this who hasn't seen some of Beaumont's superb teleplays for such TV anthology shows as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Thriller, and, most significantly, The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote 22 episodes, more than any other writer except the show's creator, Rod Serling.  You've seen them, even if you don't remember the titles:  "The Howling Man," "Perchance to Dream," "Of Person or Persons Unknown,"  Once seen, they're never forgotten.

A man spends the night at a monastery where the monks have someone locked in a room whom they claim is the Devil; they warn the man not to let him out regardless of how much he howls to be released.  The captive pleads with him to realize the monks are crazy.  But are they?  A man sees a psychiatrist because there's an alluring woman in his recurring dream who's trying to kill him; if he goes to sleep again, he'll be dead.  But he has to fall asleep eventually. What should he do?  A man wakes up in his marital bed after a drunken party and his wife doesn't recognize him.  Neither does anyone at the place he works, and there's no trace of his identity in his wallet or the phone book.  Everyone assumes he's crazy, but we know he's not.  How does he prove he is whom he says he is?  Each of these stories places the protagonist in a situation where he's forced to judge what's real and what's illusion, and nobody can help him figure it out.  It's like being plucked out of your everyday life and dropped into a world where things seem superficially the same -- except they aren't.  Not unlike a man of thirty looking at the world of America in 1960 and vividly remembering the years of his youth, where everything was so different.

The very title Remember?  Remember? has the insistence of a man in a Twilight Zone episode grabbing you by the labels and begging with you, pleading with you, to remember.  Remember who he is.  Remember where he came from.  After all, it wasn't so long ago....

In fact, the world Beaumont wants his reader to remember -- America of the Depression years and World War II -- was not the stuff that dreams are made of.  In fact, it was a vast nightmare, playing out across much of the world.  But if you were an American kid living in a small town, you could ride out those years without much harm coming to you, and enjoy the cheap but potent pleasures the culture had to offer.  Beaumont devotes 13 loving chapters to each of them (and I have little doubt that the master of terror intended that number to be precisely 13). 

He remembers the great era of American holidays, before they were tamed and commercialized, when Halloween and Fourth of July and even Christmas celebrations were often crude, raucus, and an unsupervised bacchanal of delight; the traveling carnivals and amusement parks with their terrifying roller coasters and haunted houses; the drug store soda fountains where there were professional soda jerks who would make you the biggest and best banana split you could ever dream of; the great dramas and comedies of radio's Golden Age, featuring such stars as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and written by radio scribes like Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler; the early, utterly anarchic slapstick comedies of Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin; the comic strips from the era when they were larger than strips of microfilm, like Krazy Kat and Terry and the Pirates; the movie serials like Flash Gordon and The Valley of Vanishing Men that thrilled kids every Saturday afternoon, one chapter at a time; the lavish movie palaces that convinced a patron that he'd entered the world of the Arabian Nights; the classic horror films of the Thirties and Forties like The Bride of Frankenstein and all her ghoulish cousins; the now-vanished pulp magazines ("The Bloody Pulps") like Doc Savage, The Shadow, Weird Tale, Black Mask, and Amazing Stories and scores of other titles that filled newsstands across the republic; and the great railroads and the luxurious trains like the Super Chief ("Lament for the High Iron") that dominated American life before cars, trucks, and planes turned them to scrap iron.  And there's a  poignant reminiscence of the one time he met Bela Luogsi in the actor's declining years, and how the man who'd mesmerized millions as Dracula yelled at Beaumont, "Don't hit the dog!  You fool!"  when the hapless writer came close to running over a pooch while driving Lugosi to a film studio to pitch a film (that never got made).  

In each chapter, Beaumont draws on his considerable talent for description and persuasion to convince us that these things are not simply the objects of one man's nostalgia, but intrinsically good, in fact better, than the tame substitutes available to the domesticated young of 1960.  Every page of his book communicates the utter joy these supposedly sub-cultural product gave him.  A joy and nostalgia shared by his contemporary and fellow Twilight Zone writers Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, and before them, Thomas Wolfe.  A joy that he found missing in the world in which he was writing.  

But did he have a point?  Were those comics, films, trains, holiday celebrations and pulp magazines demonstrably better than what came after?

Beaumont is fully aware of the perils of nostalgic reasoning.  Like the radio and pulp hero The Shadow, nostalgia has the power to cloud men's minds.  He revealingly writes in the opening of his book:

The rate of a person's descent into senility can be gauged, it's said, by the degree to which he reminisces.  If he harks back to the Good Old Days no more than a couple of dozen times a week, he is considered competent to function; if, however, he is a compulsive reminiscer, forever glorifying the past to the debasement of the present, he is patted on the head and fed soft foods.  Certainly he is not taken seriously.  Why should he be?  Old coots are the same everywhere.  Because they've survived the past, they love it, and because they're not at all certain they'll survive the present, they hate it.  Of course, that would not be their explanation of the value judgment.  to them, the world was indeed a better place when they were young.  The girls were prettier then, the men were stronger, the games wilder, the grass greener, the sun warmer, the stairs less, steep, and oh! if they could only go back.  But they can't, and that's a blessing, because they would find their world as dark and frightening and confusing as the children of today find theirs.

Beaumont concedes that the girls of today (1960) are as pretty as they've ever been.  He's not so sure about the rest.  And history in some respects has validated his feeling.  As early as 1949, James Agee was lamenting the lost world of silent comedy in his classic Life magazine piece, "Comedy's Greatest Era," and posterity has tended to agree with him; in 1963, Chaplin was still forbidden to return to the United States, which had revoked his visa eleven years earlier, with J. Edgar Hoover himself declaring Chaplin "perhaps the most dangerous man to American values alive today."  (The Little Fellow, dangerous!)  Halloween had become a mass industry by the 1960s, with tacky mass-produced "horror" costumes and parents cautiously following along after their kids as they went trick-or-treating.  The riot of pulp magazines had been reduced to a mere handful of science fiction and mystery titles, now digest size and with more tasteful covers.  Movie serials had died an unceremonious death in 1956, and television filled in the gap with shows that had were less thrilling but more campy.  Both comedy and horror were more domesticated -- America had become a cautious, status-conscious place.  Beaumont particularly regrets the loss of sheer hell-raising in American boys (he himself fled high school after two years), a wildness that he sees as natural and liberating, just as film critic Pauline Kael some years later saw trashy movies as liberating.  People had become just too damned well-behaved.  And air travel, even in the early 1960s, was no match for the comfortable, leisurely, train journey through America, your nose against the window, watching the small towns go by.  Imagine what Beaumont would think of planes today?

Okay, time for a reality check.  I wasn't alive during the years Beaumont writes so fondly of, but I have my own nostalgia to reckon with (and my second-hand nostalgia, which I'll get to in a bit).  True, air travel has become a tedious, tawdry ordeal; who wouldn't prefer to ride the Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, with club cars and a dining room and high-quality meals and drink to ease your trip across the land?  But people today are in a hurry, for better or worse, and people in a hurry don't want to travel thousands of miles on a train, however well-appointed.  The radio shows like Orson Welles Mercury Theater on the Air were undoubtedly great -- I've heard recordings of them; but Welles then went to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane, which is arguably even greater.  The louche carnivals of Beaumont's childhood have certainly been cleaned up and been replaced by Disney or Disney-fied versions, wholesome and clean and fit for the whole family.  But I defy anyone to tell me that the roller coasters of today are less scary than the ones of seventy years ago.  And if you still hanker for a ride on Coney Island's Cyclone, it's still there -- and scary enough for me, thank you.

True, the pulp magazines are gone, but they were replaced by paperbacks, which peddled much the same material (and often reprints of the work that originally appeared in the pulps).  Today the Library of America puts out expensive hardcover volumes on acid-free paper of the writings of such pulp-masters as H, P, Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, not to mention a recent two-volume set of science fiction novels of the 1950s.  And the remaining science fiction and mystery digests -- Analog, Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's mystery magazines -- still soldier on, both in print and online, and the writing is top-notch.  If you don't believe me, check them out.

The great movie serials that Beaumont and many others loved so much are indeed gone, though some are available on DVDs.  Having seen some of them, I confess that they're not terribly well-done, though the kids who watched them as they jeered the villains and cheered on the heroes didn't especially care about mise-en-scene.  If you're looking for pure mindless action-adventure superhero movie entertainment, there's something of a Golden Age going on right this minute, if you don't mind all the CGI effects.  Judging from the box-office receipts, the audience doesn't mind at all.  Will people still remember and love these blockbusters thirty years from now?  I have my doubts, but then I'm not the target demographic for these films.  I wonder if I would have liked them when I was ten.  Probably.  But at ten I actually thought Tang tasted good.

The drug store soda fountains and their highly professional soda jerks?  Gone with the wind, and the "server" making you a triple-chocolate Rocky Road ice cream cone at Ben & Jerry's is no lifer -- he or she is just biding time until finishing high school or college or until that big audition comes in.  Yet the ice cream, even to my jaded palate, still tastes great.

The comic strip is not what it once was in its glory days, but in some ways what we have now is even better.  While the newspaper comic strip has continued to shrink in size so that dozens of strips can appear on a single page, comic art is flourishing elsewhere as never before.  Whole raft loads of graphic novels -- once called "underground comix" or "alternative comics" -- fill both the comics stores and mainstream bookstores, and there's more talent on display in every genre than a single person can possibly read.  Whether you go for Art Spiegelman's now-classic Maus, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, David (Ghost World) Clowes, Alison Bechtel, Roz Chast, the indefatigable R. Crumb, Love and Rockets, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, or the more mainstream superhero comics, there's no question that a writer and artist has infinitely more freedom to say and draw what would have been unthinkable, much less printable, in the good old days of the family comic strip.  Is the work better because of it?  Yes and no -- depending on your taste.  But there are treasures there to be found.

The loss of the movie palaces is harder to justify.  If you don't care to sit in one of the 24 theaters in your multiplex, even with stadium theater, having to listen to the booming soundtrack from both your screen and the theater next door (and that's just the trailers), you can go to an "art" theater in one of our large cities and take an escalator to the basement, walk through a maze of sterile walls until you find a tiny chamber with a screen smaller than your cell phone where your film will be digitally projected.  Enjoy the movie!  If you wish to get a taste of what you're missing, check out the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, one of the last of the grand movie palaces Beaumont writes about in his book, and watch a classic like Lawrence of Arabia as you're surrounded by Middle Eastern castle turrets, an artificial night sky bejeweled with stars overhead, and a (mostly) unused organ from the 1920s just below the stage, for the happy occasions when a silent film is shown.  And during intermission, be sure to spend some time in the ladies' powder room (if you're a lady) and the men's smoking room (if you're a man, and smoking), as well as stroll by the fountains and Baroque architecture festooning the rooms of this amazing place, and you'll say, "By God, Beaumont was right."

Now here's the kicker that I alluded to before.  When the nostalgia craze was in full flower in the early Seventies, countless kids (including this writer) discovered the comics and pulp magazines and radio dramas and movies of that fabled time years before we were born.  We watched the films on our portable bedroom TVs or even projected 8mm prints of them on our walls late at night when we were supposed to be sleeping; we collected records or cassettes of the old radio shows and bought coffee table books filled with reprints of the old comic strips; we went to the science fiction conventions and actually met and talked to the stars and writers and creators of those old movies and comics and pulp stories.  And when we compared their work to the stuff being produced at the time, we couldn't help feeling that the older works were the real gold.  Even the scent of those browning, flaking pulp magazines seemed like a rare perfume, inviting us to voyage back to a more vigorous creative era.  To this day, the EC comics of the early-50s are seen as nearly matchless in their writing and artwork, and sell for appropriately large amounts on eBay.  Just owning one of them was like having a piece of the Golden Age in your hands.  That's second-hand nostalgia, and while it may not be as pure as Beaumont's first-hand kind, it was heady enough.

Ironically, even as he was eulogizing the past, Beaumont was busy creating some of the great pleasures of his present, which provide nostalgia for some people today.  His stories appeared in both Playboy and the digest science fiction and mystery magazines; his teleplays scared the hell out of millions of not-so-innocent viewers; and he wrote some of the splendid American-International horror films of the early Sixties that usually starred Vincent Price.  But life was crueler to Charles Beaumont than anything Vincent Price ever dished out to his movie victims.  At the age of 34, writing feverishly, with a wife and children and a home in North Hollywood, he suddenly came down with what doctors diagnosed as either the result of a childhood bout of spinal meningitis, or Alzheimer's or Pick's Disease, or a combination of all three.  Whatever the cause, he aged incredibly fast, and looked like a man of ninety-five when he died in 1967 at the preposterously young age of 38 -- just before the nostalgia craze, which he anticipated and brilliantly contributed to, swept the culture.

It's impossible not to think of the scene at the end of one his best Twilight Zone episodes, "Long Live Walter Jamison," when the eponymous hero, who has remained the same early-middle age for thousands of years thanks to the potion of an ancient Egyptian sorcerer, is confronted by one of his ex-wives -- now old and vengeful -- who shoots him in his study shortly after his engagement to (yet another) young woman.  Jamison, played to perfection by Kevin McCarthy, reverts to his true, ancient age in less than a minute, eventually becoming a pile of bones and then dust.  

It was a strange life.  A rowdy, ecstatic boyhood, a brief but highly accomplished adulthood accompanied by deep pangs of nostalgia for that vanished youth, and an early, terrible death.  It's a story Charles Beaumont might have written himself.

Gorby, Staged and Upstaged

(Photo: Dennis Paquin / Reuters)

This November the world will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event which at the time seemed to herald a new era of freedom, not only for millions of people in East Germany but throughout the Soviet-dominated Eastern European bloc and, indeed, in the Soviet Union itself.  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Ronald Reagan famously demanded in his speech in the still-divided Berlin in 1987, and while Gorbachev didn't exactly tear it down -- there were countless volunteers more than happy to do the job -- he didn't send in Soviet troops to stop it from coming down, as previous Soviet leaders most assuredly would have done.  

Mikhail Gorbachev, it was widely assumed, was something different -- somewhat.  "This is a man we can do business with," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in her best British shopkeeper daughter's voice not long after Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 (his title was thankfully shortened to simply "President of the Soviet Union" in 1990).  The newspapers at the time dubbed him "Gorby," though the predictably non-conformist New Republic preferred to call him "Gorbo."  That moniker never caught on, probably because its reference to the reclusive film star was so off the mark.  Gorbachev unlike Garbo in her post-film career years, was everywhere in the 1980s and early '90s.  His speeches, policies, his 1987 book  Perestroika (restructuring) with its call for greater freedom and openness (glasnost) in the stultified, stratified, economically stagnant Soviet Union, and the signature large birthmark adorning his bald pate (resembling either the Korean Peninsula or the Siberian archipelago of islands known as Durak Aprel, depending on who you ask), all were as ubiquitous as Stalin and his pipe were in the 1930s and '40s.  Gorbachev seems to have never questioned the basic system Lenin had created, but thought he could "reform" it without destroying it -- a claim that was more PR than political reality -- and his annoucement that he possessed the magic formula to square the circle, i.e., produce freedom in a society structured from top to bottom expressly to deny freedom, brought praise from the more gullible sectors of the West (remember those journalists who regularly experienced "Gorbasms?") as well as attacks from his political enemies at home.  Those attacks reached critical mass in August of 1991.  They're also the subject of The President's Holiday, a play by British playwright Penny Gold, which opened at the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2008 but has not, to my knowledge, been performed yet in the United States.  

Peasant Chic

The play's cleverly begins by showing us Gorbachev's wife Raisa -- an educated, stylish academic, far removed from the stout babushkas of previous Soviet leaders' spouses -- playing the role of doting grandmother as she fits an old peasant dress for her granddaughter.  The nine-year-old tells her grandmother, "Mummy said it's very old."

RAISA:  These bits are.  (She points to various panels.)  The embroidery.  An old lady gave them to me when I visited her village.  She made them herself.

NASTENKA:  Was she a witch?

RAISA:  Of course not.  But she was very old and she sewed all those stitches when she was just a little girl.  And now she wants someone else to have it and to enjoy it, to keep the tradition going.  So she gave it to me, for you.

That peasant dress, for playwright Gold, encapsulates the situation she sees Gorbachev and Raisa embroiled in.  They're both educated, "modern" people, partners in crime, eager modernize the doddering Soviet Union which has by this time become an economic basketcase.  But Raisa's attitude toward the patchwork dress is meant to signal to us that the Gorbachev's are also respectful of Russian tradition (if not, in real-life, terribly respectful of their captive republics' traditions, or even the traditions of Russia's own citizens).  Modernizing a moribund police-state will turn out to be somewhat more difficult than fitting an old peasant dress to the body of a little girl.

Dialectics as Dialogue

The entire play takes place during the pivotal weekend of August 18-21, 1991, when Gorbachev and his family -- his wife, his doctor-daughter Irina, her husband Anatoly, and their two young daughters -- are vacationing at the Presidential  dacha on the Black Sea.  Gorbachev is at work on an important speech he plans to give in Moscow in a few days, one which will grant some freedom for the various republics under Soviet control to choose their own leaders, but still not allowed to choose freedom from Soviet rule.  In the midst of this summer idyll, fate as it tends to do, steps in.  A national "State of Emergency" is issued in Moscow by an eight-man committee of Politburo hardliners who have had enough of Gorbachev's reforms.  They see chaos and uncontrollable flora springing up in the formerly well-pruned Soviet garden, and they aim to nip it in the bud.  Their statement tells the world that the President "due to reasons of health" is "incapable of carrying out his duties," and that Vice President Yanayev has assumed the Presidency.  The coup is underway.

Meanwhile, the 60-year-old Gorbachev and his family have been put under house arrest in their dacha, including a large phalanx of guards preventing anyone from coming or going into or out of the compound, a blockade from the sea, and all telephone, television, and radio communications cut off.  Even Gorbachev's longtime friend and personal KGB security guard Yuri Plekhanov has turned against him and sided with the coup.  Gorbachev and his family are utterly isolated from the world, with the very real possibility that they'll all be shot if he does not accept the coup's demands.  The situation is not unlike the family headed by Fredric March in the 1950s William Wyler film The Desperate Hours, who are kept hostage by Humphrey Bogart and his group of escaped convicts, with the exception that Gorbachev is not a simple suburban family man, and nearly everyone in this play talks incessantly about Marxist ideology.  That minor quibble aside, those discussions provide the few ideas, if one can call them ideas, that the play offers.  The sharp confrontations between Gorbachev and Plekhanov recur throughout the play, ratcheting up the suspense with each encounter primarily because since this particular debate may be settled by an execution.

MIKHAIL:  You are an officer of the KGB.  I respect the KGB.  I have worked with them --- not because I like men in black mackintoshes trailing innocent citizens, but because I hate corruption and I want to stamp it out.  To make our country decent again --

PLEKHANOV:  Do you think I don't?

MIKHAIL (silencing him with a look):  I want a place where ordinary people work hard and can be open and honest and not one where it's easier to keep quiet and do nothing because every effort you make is thwarted by a bureaucracy worse than Byzantium.  I want one where we work together, not one run by fat officials who watch you wade through the mud because the road money is in their own pocket.  Like the housing money, and the tractor money, and the fuel money.  I want to make things better for people.  And I thought you did too.  I thought we shared a vision.

The Human Soul:  An Owner's Manual

Was Gorbachev really so naive as to think that corruption could be eliminated from the Soviet Union while preserving its basic economic and political structure?  Historians are still arguing about the precise degree of idealism and opportunism in Gorbachev's so-called reformist agenda The play adamantly portrays Gorbachev as a man who was genuinely sincere in his belief that communism could be reformed not only from within but from the top-down, and that ordinary people could be given "the freedom to make some of their own decisions, run their own affairs."  It was not an entirely implausible goal.  After all, the Chinese had already been achieving some success with allowing capitalism to operate within the People's Republic, though its oppressive state still denies individuals basic freedoms of speech and protest, as the mass butchery in Tiananmen Square -- which also took place in 1989, the year of the Berlin Wall's fall -- horribly demonstrated.  But Gorbachev is no capitalist; the play asks us to believe that Lenin's massive slave state could have been administered without coercion and terror to create a better, freer, fairer society than the ones in the West:

GORBACHEV:  Because capitalism is about greed.  That's what it's built on.  Our state's not like that and never will be.  We know we're not here just for ourselves, for egotism, for me.  We have a sense of something beyond us.  That's socialism.  We serve.  Until capitalism, everyone did that -- once it was a god, or the kind or the czar -- even the old feudal lords something nobler than their own pockets, even the boyars for God's sake, knew more than the bankers!  "I will not serve!," wasn't that what the devil said?  Because we have no gods here any more, some people think we're devils, but we're not -- we leave that to the West!  Now, here, with us, we serve the people, the common good, each other.  That's what I believe in, it's what I'm trying to do. It means more to me than anything and it comes from the soul.  I've seen more joy in the faces of people that serve and give and share than I've ever seen on the face of some rich American in the West with a big car.

Of course, one can respond that it should be nobody's business if a person prefers to use the money he's earned to buy a big car rather than "serve" a czar or feudal lord or "the people."  And communist societies have invariably shown that the only way you can make people put aside their "greed" -- which can also be considered simply enlightened or even unenlightened self-interest -- is for the state to force them to be "good," while the party elite gets to behave in any way they wish.  The state then becomes "the engineer of human souls" (to borrow the title from the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky's 1985 novel); and yet, humans being human, the engineers are unsurprisingly inclined to indulge themselves in those big cars and other luxuries they imperiously deny the citizens, who must do most of the "sharing" and "serving."  Who, then, will watch the watchmen?  How do you stop corruption in a state which, by definition, is run by a ruling class of professional revolutionaries -- the so-called "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" -- apparatchiks who can't be voted out of power or even criticized, since the Party controls the entire apparatus of news on television, radio, and all publications?  Would Gorbachev have really loosened up the controls of the system and allowed greater freedom of the press so that dissidents could criticize even him?  Could the major domos of the Party elite been brought to heel through stricter regulations and oversight?  Could Marxism-Leninism actually become free and democratic?  More importantly, did Gorbachev ever actually himself believe or desire for it be so?  I leave this question to the historians and political scientists to sort out.

We never get to find out (though some of us already strongly suspected the answer) because although Gorbachev and his family, as we know, were never shot, his presidency was effectively ended during that tense weekend in the dacha on the Black Sea.  (The play presents short audio segments performed in darkness between the main scenes, in which we hear voices of a family under house arrest who eventually are shot.  It takes a while before we learn that the voices in these brief interludes -- called "Echoes" in the script -- belong to Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandria, and their children, who are being prisoners by the Bolsheviks in the basement of a house in Yekaterinberg in 1918.  The play insists on a similarity between the plight of the two families, particularly when the sounds of gunfire from old Russian rifles shooting the royal family merge with the sound of modern guns firing on Soviet crowds during the demonstrations in Moscow in 1991.)  Ultimately the Kremlin coup fails and is supplanted by Boris Yeltsin, the man of the hour, who stands on a car with a bullhorn denouncing the plotters and eventually replaces Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union and then simply President of Russia, shorn of its many satellite republics.  The old Soviet Union that Gorbachev hoped to preserve was, after 75 years, deader than a Soviet-made doornail.

The Family That Made It to Moscow

It would be a mischaracterization of the play to suggest that it's all speechifying and politics.  Many scenes deal with the spectacle of a man struggling to keep both his family calm intact in the midst of a terrifying ordeal.  With the help of his pessimistic but resourceful son-in-law Anatoly, Gorbachev uses a camcorder to record a statement for the world in which he condemns the Kremlin coup in no uncertain terms; he records it four times, and then hides the four strips of videotape throughout the dacha, even lining a window curtain with one.  Raisa finds an old Sony transistor radio from which they glean news of the outside world from -- where else? -- the BBC World Service.  When the stress of the three days under house arrest prove too much for Raisa and she collapses with nervous exhaustion, her doctor-daughter helps her recover, though Irina's own nerves are frayed to the limits as she tries to create a "normal" atmosphere for her two daughters, playing games with them and making sure they're locked in the bedroom upstairs whenever the coup's guards enter the house.  At times the events turn comic, as the Supreme Leader of the Soviet Union is doggedly trying to keep together not merely his presidency but his own unruly family.  Gold's makes a special effort to capture the worry, doubt, resolve, tenderness, and fortitude of the women of the play, though this tends to have the unhappy effect of reminding us that she is not Chekhov (though, like the characters of Chekhov's Three Sisters, they all want "to go to Moscow" -- or, rather, go back to Moscow.  Gorbachev for his part makes it plain to his captors that he does not countenance their actions, and insists that all communications be restored along with his presidential authority.  It's a long standoff and no one is giving an inch.  Even though we know Gorbachev and family would ultimately survive to return to Moscow, there are moments when we feel that any minute it might all be over for them.  (Some of the original British reviewers of the play ardently wished that the play was over long before that.)

A final scene set months later sums up the events following the failed coup.  As we all know, Yeltsin -- whom Raisa calls "a selfish, dangerous drunk only out for himself" -- disbanded the Soviet Union and, with the help of Western advisers, ushered in a "shock therapy" program of rapid conversion to capitalism which freed millions of countries from Soviet domination but also helped create Russian billionaires  while leaving many other Russian citizens feeling adrift.  Today some economics and political scientists believe that a sudden transition to capitalism without an independent civic society of the kind which  took centuries to develop in the West, was most likely a misstep.  But consider:  no large communist society had ever made the overnight switch to capitalism before, and there were no guidelines to work from.  Amazingly, it was a counter-revolution without bloodshed, but the resulting chaos and rise of dictatorial arch-Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin has created more than enough grief to go around.  Gorbachev, absent Raisa, who died in 1999, lives on, condemning Putin's actions in the Ukraine and, no doubt, continuing to wonder if it could all have been different.  Indeed it could:  The coup might have succeeded, and the Soviet Union with all its manifold horrors might still be with us.  Or Gobachev could still be in power, still mesmerizing Western journalists with happy-talk about "openness" and "reform" with the same dreadful system remaining intact.

"The Past is Never Dead.  It Isn't Even Past."

Playwright Penny Gold has another view -- she tips her hand in the brief introduction to her play.  She writes:

In the 1990s, Reaganites claimed they had "won" the Cold War and Dr. Francis Fukuyama declared "the end of History."  At the time of writing, the American "neocons" continue to assert that with their economic and military might, the triumph of global capitalism is inevitable.  Socialism, they say, is dead.  Well, we'll see.

Clearly Penny Gold still believes in Gorbachev's stated "vision" of a free, noncoercive, unselfish yet efficient socialism in which people would "gladly serve and share" rather than drive around in big cars.  She is one of the last True Believers.  Reagan (along with his neoconservative supporters) was not alone in winning the Cold War -- he had help from Margaret Thatcher, the Pope, Lech Walesa and Polish Solidarity, as well as the inadvertent cooperation from Gorbachev and thereafter Boris Yeltsin.  Even Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs that Reagan's stubborn insistence on maintaining the right to continue researching the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars," as its opponents dubbed it, was crucial in convincing him and his advisers that the Soviet Union could no longer compete militarily with America in the increasingly high-tech arms race.  History may not have "ended," pace Francis Fukuyama -- the ever-growing threat of Islamic jihadists who do not accept Western liberal capitalism as the final stage of history is ample proof of that -- but a particularly bloody chapter of the 20th-century did end in 1991 during those anxious days and nights in the dacha on the Black Sea.  

The President's Holiday tries to convince us that Gorbachev was a fundamentally decent, admirable man, not the leader of the Soviet Union with all that that implied.  To say that he was a better man than Stalin or even Vladimir Putin is to damn with faint praise.  Perhaps Gorbachev was and is a doting father and grandfather -- so what?  The play would have been far better if it could have found a way to present that other, darker Gorbachev, incorporating it into this misleadingly warm "family" drama to create a fuller, truer portrait of the man and the occasion.  But Penny Gold would doubtless not have been interested in writing such a play.  So what we are left with is a protagonist who is less a hero than a helpless bystander, in a play that is a minor footnote to the real-life drama which brought down the curtain on nearly a century of unimaginable but amply documented tyranny.