Posts Tagged ‘stamp’
“Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”*…
While William Faulkner spent most of his life in the Oxford, Mississippi area that he made famous, he did a considerable– and fascinating– stetch in Hollywood. John Meroney reports…
… It all started in 1932, when, riding on the success of his novel Sanctuary, Faulkner got word that Leland Hayward, a prominent Hollywood talent agent, had secured for him a $500-a-week contract (the equivalent of $8,500 today) to write scripts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Faulkner was a modernist, and film was still a new, exciting form of storytelling. But that wasn’t the reason Faulkner accepted. It was the money.
At the same time Faulkner received the offer from Metro, he got news that his publisher, Cape & Smith, was bankrupt. Faulkner had been planning on $4,000 ($68,000 in today’s money) from the company for Sanctuary but was informed he wouldn’t see any of it. Suddenly, he was broke. Word apparently got around Oxford. When he tried writing a check for three dollars at a sporting goods store, the owner told him, I’d rather have cash. All at once, Hollywood became attractive. Faulkner didn’t even have the money to send a wire to answer yes. Eventually MGM advanced him some cash and paid for his train ticket, and days later he arrived in Culver City.
He was so naive about the industry that he entertained hopes he would be writing for the famous movie star Mickey Mouse. But the folks at Metro informed him, No, Mickey lives at another studio out in the Valley—we want you for a Wallace Beery picture. “Who’s he?” Faulkner asked…
… Faulkner completed four story treatments in four weeks. That kind of productivity earned him a meeting with up-and-coming director Howard Hawks [see almanac entry here]. He liked Faulkner’s writing and purchased a Saturday Evening Post short story by him that he wanted Faulkner to adapt into a script for Hawks to direct. Over a “couple of quarts of whiskey,” as Hawks recalled in an interview, they clicked and found common cause. “[Faulkner] got up the next morning and started to work, and in five or six days, he had a script,” Hawks said. “It was one of the finest scripts I’ve ever read.” Hawks showed it to Metro’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, who concurred. “Go out and make it!” he ordered Hawks. The result was Today We Live, a drama starring Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford, released in 1933. William Faulkner now had a hit movie to his credit. And, more important, the beginning of what would become an ongoing professional connection with Hawks…
…Faulkner sometimes hunted with Hawks, and on one dove hunting trip recounted by the director, Hawks invited along Clark Gable, already a star. Faulkner and Hawks began discussing literature and eventually Gable asked, “Mr. Faulkner, what do you think somebody should read if he wants to read the best modern books? Who would you say are the best living writers?” Faulkner replied, “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself.” Gable asked, “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner replied, “Yeah. What do you do, Mr. Gable?”…
And so much (so very much) more: “William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey” from Garden and Gun.
* William Faulkner
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As we fathom fish out of water, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in Faulkner’s honor. Very early in his career, Faulkner had briefly served as Postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and in his letter of resignation in 1923 wrote:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
“The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters”*…
If you sent a letter in 17th-century Europe, there was a good chance it would pass through one of the continent’s so-called “Black Chambers”—secret rooms attached to post offices and staffed by intelligence units, where mail was opened, copied, resealed, and sent on its way, with the writer and recipient none the wiser.
Nadine Akkerman, a senior lecturer at Leiden University, is an expert in 16th- and 17th-century espionage. But during her research into the Black Chambers, she ran across something perplexing—a document by Samuel Morland, a British spymaster, in which he bragged about his talent for opening and resealing letters. “Wait,” she thought to herself. “Can’t we all do that?”
It wasn’t until she met Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith—researchers studying letters and document security during this period—that Morland’s braggadocio began to make sense. As it turns out, letters in the 1600s didn’t look exactly like letters today. Mass-produced envelopes weren’t invented until the 1830s, meaning that most 17th-century letter writers folded their correspondence in such a way that it became its own envelope—a process Dambrogio had dubbed “letterlocking.” Letterlocks could be simple, just a series of quick folds without any sort of adhesive. But they could also be incredibly complex, even booby-trapped to reveal evidence of tampering…
Postal privacy– “Cracking the Code of Letterlocking“: a tale of Black Chambers, lost correspondence, and high technology.
* Lewis Carroll
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As we muse on missives, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that the U.S. Postal Service issued the Bugs Bunny stamp– the first stamp honoring an animated character.
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