History

A Memory of Cary Grant

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A memoir about the night I saw Cary Grant in person:

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Starting in the mid-1980s, Cary Grant toured in a one-man question-and-answer show, A Conversation with Cary Grant, in which he spent ninety minutes or so answering questions from audience members. Several other movie stars and celebrities have since taken on similar productions in which they and their fans bask in an accepted and reflected adoration— Gregory Peck, for one—but Grant was the first. The show was an extended, and deserved, curtain call from beginning to end.

One cool feature to Grant’s tour was that it brought him to theaters in which he had performed during his vaudeville years in the 1920s. Thus it was that in April 1985 I found myself sitting in the balcony of the small (1500 seat) Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, New York, a stage on which he had performed decades earlier. I was 16 and a movie nerd and Cary Grant was my idol.
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Today in History: Nov. 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Erwin Schrödinger published a paper titled “The present situation in quantum mechanics” on this date in 1935 in which he presented a thought experiment in a joking way that involved a box that contained a vial of poison, some radioactive uranium, a Geiger counter … and a cat. Happy birthday to Schrödinger’s cat, always simultaneously dead and alive.

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The New York Yankees signed free agent outfielder Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $2.96 million contract 40 years ago today.
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Today in History: Nov. 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“This is how I made 500 friends and 15,000 enemies.”—Truman Capote

Truman Capote spent the summer of 1966 toting around a classic marble-covered composition book in which—he told everyone and anyone he met—he was compiling a list of names to invite to his grand party, to be held that fall in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. “Maybe you’ll be invited, and maybe you won’t,” he told anyone and everyone he met that summer.

Those who made the cut received the invitation at top in the mail.

Fifty years ago tonight, Truman Capote threw his party of the century, his “Black and White Ball,” with more than 500 of the country’s most famous and powerful writers, artists, journalists, and politicians in attendance. It was an old-fashioned masked ball, perhaps the last major one in memory. The men wore tuxedos and masks and the women ball gowns and masks.
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