Capitol Theatre

Tuesday Jan 1

by

Jan. 1
Last night’s New Years adventures
will be found on last pages.
I spent the day quietly at home

[from a memoranda page at the end of the diary]

Jan 1, 1924

New Years Eve. in N.Y. is certainly
an event, last night I deserted my
friends for a while at 11:30 I was
in the jam of the merry and noise
making crowds, Poor, rich, soldiers
sailors, old and young, some masqu-
eraded with countless noisemaking
devices, looking into their faces, every-
body seems to be happy, Slowly I fought
my way to the Capitol Thea. to make
the special midnight performance,
after leaving the theatre at 1:45 the
Street was still crowded with the gay
throngs.

Am I the only one whom this
carnival fails to make happy? But I
think I did notice sadness in some
eyes, are their souls hungry? Longing?
My New Years Eve, was at an end at an
East Side joint where prohibition drinks
were freely served, I reached home 4am.

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Matt’s Notes

This entry really starts to give us a feeling for the New York City my grandfather lived in. His description of the crowds is almost cinematic, a whirl of costumed extras (soldiers and sailors? Really?) with smiling faces blowing into noisemakers and clogging the streets. It’s not hard to picture at all.

His offhand mention of the Capitol Theatre, though, really places him a different, long-ago New York. The Capitol, which once stood at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway in New York City, was one of the grand movie palaces that used to be common in America. They disappeared way before my time, but as I understand it they were enormous, spectacular spaces, gilded to the nines and outfitted to invoke the European palaces that their largely immigrant audiences would never have gotten near back home.

By ©1920 by American Studio N. Y.

In palaces like the Capitol, movies screenings were almost beside the point. Nightly programming included orchestral music (remember that films were silent in 1924, so theaters were outfitted for live orchestras as a matter of course) as well as ballet and opera performances from the theaters’ resident companies.

According to the New York Times archive, the New Years performance my grandfather saw was an exemplary mashup, including “Chaminade’s ‘Air de Ballet’ by the Capitol singers and dancers”, the “Volga Boat Song” (a Russian folk song — you know the tune) and the “Skaters Waltz”. The draw for my grandfather, though, would have been the Capitol Grand Orchestra’s scheduled performance of the “1812 Overture” (no doubt with the cannons going off at midnight) since he was a huge fan of Tchaikovsky. (Oddly enough, as I write this on New Year’s Day in 2007 the “1812 Overture” started playing on the radio station I’m listening to on the Web. Maybe it’s a New Year’s tradition that I wasn’t aware of.)

His reference to the bar he winds up in is the oddest detail for me. I always gathered that he had something like a Buddhist’s monks beatific vibe and moral virtue, and preferred to spend his free time raising funds for Zionist organizations and going to synagogues. It’s hard to imagine that he ever took a sip of alcohol other than at his own bris, let alone wander into a “joint” to drink illegally, but I suppose it was the order of the day on New Year’s eve.

I also find it interesting that he refers to illegal alcohol as “prohibition liquor”, which I always thought was a label created for historical reference. It’s a very official-sounding term; maybe he uses it rather than something more slangy because he’s not exposed to drinking all that much.

Though Papa gives the New Year’s spectacle its due, he’s clearly unable to shake the low mood he mentions in his previous entry. The way he wanders away from his friends to search strangers’ faces for some sign of kinship, some confirmation that other people feel as lonely and dissatisfied as he does, is terribly wistful yet oddly comforting to me. Of course there are others in the crowd who feel at odds with the spectacle, who reflect on their own concerns while pretending to celebrate — if I’d been there there, I might have been of of them, someone in whose eyes he noticed sadness. Haven’t I been known to back away from a crowd, watch a party from the sidelines, withdraw into my own head when I feel at odds with the people around me?

Maybe I share Papa’s very brand of self-reflectiveness, passed to me through his genes or through his influence on my mother. And if that’s the case, it’s not so bad. Papa was admired and beloved, an exemplar for his family of a life well lived, a source of vivid, affectionate memories for a grandson and a granddaughter who barely knew him. It occurs to me that whatever I have in common with him is worth embracing if it means I can be more like him.

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Additional references for this post:

– Gabler, Neal. “For 25 Cents, Every Moviegoer Was Royalty“, The New York Times, 10/24/89 (subscription required).

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Update

I’ve been thinking a little more about “The Volga Boat Song” I mentioned above (give it a listen if you haven’t already). I’ve always thought of this tune as the default accompaniment to images of drudgery or dread in early 20th-Century movies — I feel like I’ve heard it in Bugs Bunny episodes, Max Fleischer cartoons and maybe even Universal horror movies — but I guess I figured it was just always there and never considered its origins. It must have been a real touchstone for immigrants if the Capitol Theater played it on New Year’s Eve for an audience that was no doubt packed with Eastern European Jews like my grandfather. And since Jewish immigrants were no strangers to radio and film work, it’s no wonder that imports like “The Volga Boat Song” found their way into the popular culture of the day.

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Update 3/19 –

Listen here to the Volga Boat Song:

Image Credit: Library of Congress LC-USZ62-113144. Inquiring into ownership.

Tuesday Mar 25

by

Had the 20. Century girl on the
phone. Arranged a date
with her for this coming Sat. at (torn)
opera for which occasion I have (torn)
secured the choicest best seats.

Attended the performance
and movie at the Capitol.
Again the usual divertisement
Ballet & Music which appeals
so much to me.

The terpsy chorus interpretation
to the music of Straus’ Waltz,
Artists dream, was more than
wonderful.

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The movie Papa saw at the Capitol that night was The Unknown Purple, a sci-fi thriller notable for its use of purple-tinted frames and special effects (the film’s villain wields a purple invisibility ray while committing his dastardly deeds). The New York Times review was lukewarm, though the anonymous reviewer enjoyed the action scenes. Looks like Papa liked it even less, since he was more interested in the night’s ballet and music presentation than in the film (remember, the movie palaces of old supplemented their screenings with live, “highbrow” performances of all sorts to give their decidedly less priveledged audiences a taste of culture).

Note: Though I’m no one to question Papa’s knowledge of classical music, I think the musical piece he saw interpreted at the Capitol was Strauss’s “Artist’s Life,” not “Artist’s Dream.” Perhaps the slip happened because Papa’s own dream — a date with the “20th Century Girl” — was in the offing.

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A couple of the words in this entry are partially missing due to a small tear in the side of the page, but it also has a couple of other words I can’t quite make out. It looks like he’s written “the terpsy chorus interpretation of Straus’ Waltz” in reference to the house orchestra at the Capitol Theatre, but that’s obviously not right. Give it a look below. Any ideas?

unknown word

Update:

My mother adds:

He may have meant Terpsichore, who was the muse of
dance. He probably heard the word, but didn’t get the spelling right.

That makes sense. The word he was trying to write was “terpsichorean.”

unknown word
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References for this post:

Tuesday Apr 29

by


The climax of the
White Sister
at the Capitol Theatre
brought forward my tears

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Matt’s Notes

When I watched A Woman of Paris, one of the movies mentioned in Papa’s diary, I was pleasantly reminded of the artistry and maturity of 1920’s silent films and noted how surprisingly subtle and persuasive many of the performances were. The White Sister, which I watched yesterday, is much more of a Hollywood extravaganza, replete with exotic locales, grand special effects and feverishly manufactured plot twists, but it does bear out Norma Desmond’s great boast about silent film actors: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” In this case the face belongs to Lillian Gish, whose heartbreaking expressions and powerful charisma (apparent even in the film’s abysmally poor video version) transcend the movie’s contrivances and give it real emotional resonance. (“There is something about her hopeless wistfulness that squeezes sobs from the coldest heart,” said Time magazine of Gish.)

Lillian Gish

Gish plays Italian countess Angela Chiaromonte, who decides to become a nun after her jealous stepsister Marchesa (Gail Kane) robs her of her inheritance and her fiancee, Govanni Severini (Ronald Colman) seemingly dies on an African military mission. Govanni has, in fact, merely been imprisoned by Arab bandits, but Angela has already taken her vows by the time he escapes his captors and returns to Italy. He tries desperately to get Angela to leave the Church, but she takes her marriage to Christ seriously and will not budge (melodramatic, yes, but Gish expresses her sorrow and resolve convincingly).

As I watched the climax to figure out what Papa could have found so moving, I was initially stumped because it overdoes the deux ex machina something fierce, with a volcano eruption and a resulting flood forcing the resolution (even the New York Times reviewer, who lavished praise on the film’s grand landscapes and “serious, enthralling narrative,” found the ending “dissapointing”). The ending’s biggest problem is Govanni’s death — he drowns while saving people from the flood, but instead of affirming his character’s nobility this episode just feels like a handy mechanism for the filmmakers, who need to dispense with Govanni somehow (we never quite stop wanting Angela to renounce her vows and marry him, and that would do at all).

The climax also finds Angela’s treacherous stepsister Marchesa mortally wounded in a carriage accident. She crawls to Angela’s church to seek absolution for cheating Angela out of her inheritance, and, in her delirious state, mistakes Angela for a priest and confesses to her. Here, I think, is where Papa must have taken notice: Dying in Angela’s arms, Marchesa wonders aloud if Angela could ever forgive her, and Angela, mustering all her will and mastering all her pain, says:

God is love – she has forgiven you.

Papa, who based so much of his behavior on a deep, spiritual belief in the power of forgiveness, must have understood this moment keenly. And as I think more about the circumstances of Papa’s life when he saw this film, I realize the story must have touched him in other ways, too: How could he have watched the death of Angela’s wise, loving father in the movie’s opening scenes without thinking of his own father, so sick and so far away? How could he have watched the behavior of Angela’s resentful stepsister without thinking of his own brother Isaac, who so upset Papa by berating him for not sending more money to the old country? How could he have watched Angela vow to spend her life in the service of others without thinking of the sacrifices and efforts he made on behalf of his own people? It’s no wonder that Angela’s climactic moment of forgiveness “brought forward” his tears — for how could he be told, by Lillian Gish, no less, that all his loneliness and longing and trials might, in the end, be worth it, and not cry with relief?

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Speaking of tears, I have to confess I find it very hard to hold back my own when I watch the movies or listen to the songs Papa mentions in his diary. To hear the things he heard and to see the things he saw allow me — almost, almost — to be like Papa, to be with Papa, two things I want so much. I can’t not watch, I can’t not listen. But it breaks my heart. The films are here. The songs are here. But he is gone. He is gone.

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References:

And here’s the Capitol Theatre, where Papa saw The White Sister

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Image Credits: