Edna Ferber did not utter the line above as an ironic comment on San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence. She died 15 years before he was born. Still, the two have a connection. Chances are you have no idea who Edna Ferber is, and a few years from now you probably won’t know who Pence is either.
This is no insult to either of them; it’s just the way things work.
Ferber was an extremely successful novelist, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1925 for So Big. Her novel Show Boat was turned into the groundbreaking musical of the same name by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. She had several very successful plays in her own right, co-written with George S. Kaufman, whom I suspect most people don’t remember either. Hollywood loved her stuff; So Big was filmed twice. Cimarron was turned into the Best-Picture winner of 1931. You still see the big Oklahoma land-rush scene in film retrospectives, even if no one knows what it’s from. There’s a bit from “Dinner at Eight,” her play with Kaufman, featuring Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler that also shows up all the time. Giant about Texas cattle and oil-men, became a 3.5-hour vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and Rock Hudson.
Edna Ferber and James Dean on the set of “Giant,” 1956. (Getty Images)
I don’t want to belabor Ferber except to say that there are people who are massively famous in their time and then vanish as newer stuff gets piled on top of them. Maybe they date, or maybe they would still be good if anyone bothered to read them, but they don’t make it onto your high school or college syllabus, and Barnes & Noble doesn’t bother to stock them, not even on their cheap-ass public-domain reissues rack.
You can do this as a game, Six Degrees of “Huh?” Ferber co-wrote “Dinner at Eight.” It ran over 200 performances on Broadway, which was a hit run for that time. It’s revived about once every 35 years. Dressler was in the film version. Obscure today, certainly more obscure than Harlow who had a nothing career compared to her (in fairness, her early death played a part in that), Dressler was a large woman who looked like a battleship wearing the head of a hefty shaved raccoon, but in the early 1930s she was three times ranked the top box-office draw among actresses and picked up a Best Actress Oscar in ’31.
Rewind. Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a collection of literary types who famously got together for lunch and barbed witticisms in New York from about 1919 to 1930. Kaufman was part of the circle also, as was Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was once one of the most famous critics (primarily of drama, but also of everything else) in the country. It was he who introduced Ferber to the composer Jerome Kern so that “Show Boat” could happen. He had his own radio show, “The Town Crier,” which ran for close to 10 years. Kaufman and Moss Hart, wrote a play called “The Man Who Came to Dinner” which was so obviously based on Woollcott that Woollcott himself played the lead character for part of the run. There was even a Woollcott volume in Viking’s famous “The Portable _____” series, which includes editions like, “The Portable William Faulkner” and “The Portable Thomas Jefferson.” In fact, it was Woollcott who invented the concept.
Woollcott’s sexuality was a secret he took with him to the grave; no one knew which gender interested him, if any. Once, on the verge of departing for Europe, Ferber said, “I want to be alone on this trip. I don’t expect to talk to a man or woman — just Aleck Woollcott.”
Robert Benchley, writer (Getty Images).
You’ve probably never heard of Woollcott. There is no reason that you should have. Robert Sherwood, another Round Table guy, won four Pulitzers, three for drama and one for biography. Pffft. There was Robert Benchley, one of our great humorists, displaced in memory by his more versatile disciple James Thurber. Benchley wrote economical, whimsical columns for years until writing became too hard for him and he found he could make an easier living as a comic actor, appearing in a series of parodic “How To” films as well as acting as a comic foil for everyone from Fred Astaire to Walt Disney. In 1940 he wrote dialogue for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” and played a disillusioned, alcoholic writer, which was, unfortunately an autobiographical role.There was Dorothy Parker, cruelly mordant critic, short-story writer, poet, and recipient of her own “Portable,” whose “Resumé” reads
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
They all worshiped Ring Lardner, who was often around them but not of them. He also wrote a play with Kaufman, “June Moon,” not to mention a great deal of baseball fiction and reportage and a whole pile of short stories that have nothing to do with the game but play at the level of Mark Twain or anyone else you can name. He got his own Library of America volume last year (well worth it), but was never taught in any school I pretended to attend.
Ferber’s novel Show Boat has been filmed three times. The poster above is for the ’36 version, directed by James Whale of “Frankenstein” fame. It has also had seven Broadway revivals. It was the first attempt at an “integrated” musical, which is to say it wasn’t just a vehicle for songs and jokes, but for a real story.
Though “Show Boat” became controversial because of its use of racist language by and about African Americans in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the story is motivated by the damage done by racial intolerance. This was a frequent, sympathetically-treated subject of Hammerstein’s career, and anyone who listens to the great Paul Robeson sing the show’s anthemic “Old Man River” (warning: some offensive language) cannot miss the authors’ intent.
Today’s quote is from an early Ferber short-story collection. “There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap,” it continues, “and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man’s best points.” I came across it via Baseball’s Greatest Quotations by Paul Dickson, for my money the best book of its kind.
What I’m getting at here is not that you (or you and I) are somehow lacking in the fund o’ knowledge department, but rather how quickly what seemed to be art is transformed into trivia.
Hunter Pence is a rather famous ballplayer of our day. He’s a three-time All-Star, has gotten some down-ballot MVP votes, and can hit the hell out of a baseball. He also gets some extra mileage out of the strange expressions his face seems to naturally fall into. He’s not a bad-looking guy; he just looks a little crazy sometimes. It’s like he was manufactured for social media.
Thing is, he’s 31 years old, and barring an odd uptick in his production, he’s not going to the Hall of Fame. He’s just going to have been another pretty good ballplayer, and there have been hundreds of those. To those of you who rate Pence your favorite ballplayer, I say that almost every player is someone’s favorite. There are statues of some of them outside of ballparks all over the country, but even a pyramid isn’t much of a monument if you don’t know which pharaoh it belonged to and what he did. Even then, it still might not have any meaning to you.
The Internet undoubtedly accelerates the process of obscurity — nothing has a chance to linger. Those of us who write daily doodads here can sometimes get to feeling self-important. For the most part, though, no one will even remember that we passed this way. As for Pence, he’s in the eighth year of his career. He has a 121 career OPS+. Here are five players from 20 years ago who were roughly as productive in a similar number of plate appearances, chosen at random (there are more): Kevin McReynolds, Mike Greenwell, Mickey Tettleton, Howard Johnson, Brett Butler. They were all, in their own way, good players. If you were following then, no doubt their names conjure some associations.
If not, in a functional sense they never existed.