October 30, 2017 • 23 mins
In this final episode of the season, host Sean Braswell ties up some of our thread's loose ends, explores some more surprising connections between our characters and reflects on the nature of art, life, fate and redemption.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why media productions? What does it take to change the world?
A forceful personality, the right moment, and a good wig.
Vladimir Lenin was a brooding scholar and political theorist. He
had been living in exile for years. In nineteen seventeen,
he watched from overseas as the Russians are abdicated the
(00:23):
throne and a new government took power. The time was
right for revolution. Lenin made his move. He disguised himself
as a clergyman and snuck into Petrograd modern day St. Petersburg.
He wore a wig and a fake bandage and shaved
his trademark beard and mustache. Incognito, he made his way
(00:44):
to a secret meeting held by his fellow rebels, the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks wavered on whether to stage a coup or
to wait and pursue power through political means. Lenin was
fed up. He threw off his wig and demanded an
armed overthrow of the Russian government. His passionate argument carried
the vote that night. It spurred the revolution. It changed history.
(01:08):
It's set into motion a series of events that led
to the death of another Lenin sixty three years later.
I'm Sean Braswell and This is The Threat, a podcast
from Ozzy Media. This season of The Threat, we dove
into the connected lives of John Lennon, J. D. Salinger,
(01:29):
Una O'Neill, Chaplin, Eugene O'Neill, and Louise Bryant. We discovered
how their stories overlap, influence, and inspire each other. They
led us back in time from one Lenin's death to
another Lenin's revolution. But there's much more connecting our cast
of characters. This is the final episode of this season
(01:50):
and we're going to shake things up. We'll explore some
of the other surprising strands to our story. Sometimes you
need to look at history from a different angle to
get a new perspective, so we structured this episode differently
from the rest of the season. Today, we'll focus on
three main themes, chance encounters, communism, and suffering. If you're
(02:10):
joining us for the first time, please go back to
episode one and start our interconnected story from the beginning.
First off, Chance encounters John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman
believed in destiny. He was convinced he was meant to
kill the rock star. For Chapman, the world was filled
(02:33):
with little serendipities, meaningful moments, encounters, and omens. He called
them synchronicities, and in the days leading up to John
Lennon's murder, Chapman saw them everywhere. A prostitute in a
green dress, a passage from the Catcher in the Rye
mentioning a Monday in December, and the synchronicities grew stronger
(02:53):
the morning of that fateful day as Chapman strolled towards
Lennon's home at the Dakota. Yes, I knew that morning. Oddly,
when I left the hotel, this is Chapman again in
his interview with CNN's Larry King, some type of premonition
that this was the last time I was going to
leave my hotel room. I hadn't seen him up to
that point. That's what makes it interesting. I wasn't even
(03:15):
sure he was in the building. Despite his premonition, though,
Chapman was starting to have major doubts about his mission.
He thought about going home. As he paced back and
forth on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota that morning,
he prayed, please give me the strength the phonies have
to know. Looking up at the Dakota, he had a
(03:35):
sudden flash of it as the backdrop of the famous
psychological thriller Rosemary's Baby. The film, directed by Roman Polanski,
starred Mia Pharaoh as a pregnant woman who gives birth
to a child of Satan. Chapman remembered how Polanski's own
pregnant wife had been murdered by Charles Manson not long
after he made the film. Manson blamed the killing on
(03:56):
commands he received inside songs like Helter Skelp her By,
You Guessed It, John Lennon and the Beatles. Then as
Chapman pondered the significance of the connection between Rosemary's Baby,
Charles Manson and John Lennon, he received another sign, the
(04:18):
biggest synchronicity yet. A short, pale woman strolled by him
on the sidewalk with a group of children. They crossed
the street in front of the Dakota and went into
Central Park. It was Rosemary herself, the actress Mia fair Mark.
David Chapman smiled at the sign. This has to be
(04:40):
the day, he assured himself. He remained on the sidewalk
and history took its course. Paramount Pictures presents Mia Farrow
in a William Castle production Rosemary's Baby suggested for mature audiences.
(05:05):
Una O'Neill Chaplin was the fulcrum of our tail, the
hinge at its center. But there's someone else who could
have been the subject of episode three and whose story
could have sent us in a very different direction, Ernest Hemingway.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield criticizes Hemingway's
classic war novel A Farewell to Arms. J. D. Salinger,
(05:27):
on the other hand, admired the world renowned writer. Hemingway
was a war correspondent for Collier's Magazine during World War Two,
and he played a key role in Salinger's wartime experience
and writing. Here's Ken Slowinski, the biographer who told us
about Salinger's life in episode two, talking about Salinger's PTSD
or battle fatigue. We know of Salinger's um stay in
(05:51):
the hospital. We know of his battle fatigue because of
a letter that he wrote of old people to Ernest,
telling what whom he had before into during the war.
Salinger confessed the Hemingway that he was quote in an
almost constant state of despondency. The talks I had with
you here, he said, we're the only hopeful minutes of
(06:12):
the whole business. The talks with Himingway that Salinger alludes
to form a remarkable subplot in the writer's harrowing war story.
It begins with the liberation of Paris in August, another
landmark event that Salinger experienced firsthand. The heart of European
(06:33):
civilization is beating strong again. Harris is free, and a
flood tide of jubilation has burst. For it was one
of the few positive memories he would carry with him
from the war. Jubilant crowds mob Salinger and his fellow soldiers.
Salinger's assignment was defined and arrest Nazi collaborators, but there
(06:53):
was one American in Paris that he wanted to find
as well. Salinger sought out Himingway at the Hotel Ritz.
Hemingway greeted the younger writer graciously, and the two talk
shop over drinks. Hemingway was even familiar with some of
Salinger's short stories. Just imagine how that would have made
a young Rider feel, especially one that had just survived
(07:14):
the blood bath at d Day. The two American icons
would meet again that winter. Remember the disastrous campaign at Hikin.
Salinger and Himingway ended up only a mile apart. In
that cold, dark forest, Salingder made his way to Hemingway's
camp During a lull in the fighting one night, the
two drank champagne from canteen cups and Hemingway's tent. It
(07:38):
was a brief distraction from death and destruction that Salinger
would never forget. Salinger found his true therapy and writing.
And so you know, O'Neil Chaplin might have helped inspire
the subject matter for The Catcher in the Rye the
Upper crests phonies of New York City, but Ernest Hemingway
helped inspire and rebuild its war weary author, giving Salinger
(08:00):
chance to write the novel at all. And now the
next theme, Communism. Our story begins with John Lennon's death
on the doorstep of the Dakota, and it ends at
the doorstep of another Lenin, the Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.
Louise Bryant and Jack Reid got to know Lenin quite
(08:21):
well during their time in Russia. They became friends, and
the writers visited him often. Lennon even wrote the introduction
to Read's book Ten Days That Shook the World just
before Reid died from Typhus, Bryant had an exclusive interview
with the Bolshevik leader. This interview was a major source
for scholars interested in Lennon's views of America. In it,
(08:43):
Lennon called for opening up commercial and political relations between
the two nations. America and its allies had refused to
recognize Soviet Russia and had instituted a blockade that was
choking off much needed goods from entering the country. The
previous year, Russia and the US had failed to come
to an agreement to lift the blockade. And guess who
(09:05):
was the American diplomat in charge of those negotiations, William Bullet,
Bryant's future husband. If the blockade had been lifted, then
Jack Reid might have lived. The blockade was the reason
that the Moscow hospital didn't have any medicine to give
to Read and the other Typhus victims. America's antagonistic relationship
(09:29):
with communist Russia continued for decades and impacted the lives
of several of our characters. Charlie Chaplin became a target
of the communist witch hunt led by U S Senator
Joseph McCarthy in the early nineteen fifties. Thank you. Let's
lads and gentlemen of the press. I'm not going to
waste your time, I should say, proceed with a berlad.
(09:52):
Could you ask a direct question? Are you a communist?
I another communist? Chaplain was neither a communist nor a sympathizer,
but the allegations turned Chaplin from a legend to an
outcast in Hollywood. As a result, Charlie and Una uprooted
their family and moved to Europe. Twenty years later, John
(10:13):
Lennon and Yoko Ono were caught in a similar net,
but they chose to stay and fight. Lennon wasn't a
communist either, but his outspoken criticism of the Vietnam War
made him a target for the US government. The Nixon
administration spent years trying to deport the rock star, and
a lengthy court battle ensued after Because we we talked
(10:34):
about peace, you know, I mean because we we won't
we we won't peace. You know, We've said the same
thing for two years, different way, one way or another,
and we believe in it. Lennon was even called rock
and Rolls Charlie Chaplin. He eventually won and was able
to continue living at the Dakota U S authorities also
investigated the playwright Eugene O'Neil for potential Communist ties. They
(10:57):
wondered why his play is touched on the plight of
the poor or the suffering and the unfortunate, But eventually
O'Neil was also cleared of all suspicions. Up next Suffering.
It infuses the characters in O'Neill's plays and also forms
another common thread running through the lives of our characters.
(11:24):
The characters in our story suffered setbacks, traumas, and neglect
in their lives. Troubled childhood script almost everyone. Yeah, so
the more you know about Um Lennin and where he
comes from, the more a lot of his songs make sense.
This is Tim Riley, who we met in episode one.
He's talking about Lennon's childhood and his parents separation. There
(11:46):
was this one scene when he was five where his
dad came home and actually wished him off to Blackpool,
which was a vacation resort up the coast a little bit.
But Lennon's dad hadn't told his mom and she came
looking for John and apparently there was a confrontation there
in in Blackpool where it said you have to choose
which parent you want to go with. Can you imagine
having to choose between your parents right there on the spot,
(12:09):
Lennon chose his father, then ran back to his mother
as she started to leave. Ultimately, he was raised by
his aunt Mimi. Why did't he used to call you? Mimi?
When was the last time he phoned you? Night before
he was murdered two hours and he was saying that
I'll be seeing you soon. Maybe I can't wait to
(12:31):
see you. And then of course at fabitok. The next
morning it came over the overseas news. We know Una
O'Neill Chaplin was influenced by her father's abandonment, but Eugene
O'Neill's own childhood was no walk in the park. His
mother once attempted suicide right in front of him. She
(12:52):
ran screaming out of their house to New London, Connecticut,
and jumped in the Thames River as Eugene and his
brothers watched in shock, And he and Jim and James
we're all standing there sort of a gape watching this.
This is Robert Dowling who told us about O'Neill an
episode four. She had run out of morphine um, and
O'Neill didn't really know what he was looking at. He
(13:14):
had to be explained that his mother was a morphine addict.
At fourteen years old, O'Neill believed in the transformative power
of suffering. In his play Beyond the Horizon, he wrote
the line, only with contact with suffering, will you awaken
the suffering of combat awakened J. D. Salinger. War may
(13:36):
have destroyed Salinger the person, but it created Salinger the artist.
His iconic character Holding Caulfield comes off very differently in
the pre war short story A Slight Rebellion off Madison.
First of well, it's in the third person um. The
niration is called. The character is aloof and he's not
very likable. This is Kenselinski again. By the time he
(14:00):
writes the same passages and incorporated into the Catch on
the Rye, it has taken on a different dimension. It's
taken on his sensitivity. The intimacy is so powerful that
people I feel that they are holding, that Holding is
speaking for them, and that is completely missing from the
(14:25):
pre war Holding Corville. Great art often comes in the
wake of great suffering. That's only if you're able to
take advantage of it. John Lennon, Eugene O'Neill, and J. D.
Salinger all had outlets for their talents and time to
cultivate them. Una didn't have that option as a woman
in the nineteen forties and fifties. She had to marry
(14:45):
a great man and surrender her own ambitions. She had
to find purpose in her devotion to Charlie Chaplin. Take
this one scene in a cafe again back in Paris.
After the Chaplain's left America, Una was in the middle
of life with her good friends Carol Marcus and Truman Capodi,
and all of a sudden, Una looked at her watch
and said, oh my god. She said, I gotta run, Charlie,
(15:07):
You'll be back at the hotel now. And Capodi said,
how can you live like this? He said, don't you
have any time for yourself? And Carol butted in and said, Truman,
don't you realize that every woman in the world wants
a man to need her like that. Louise Bryant wanted
(15:30):
to be needed by the men in her life as well,
but she also wanted to be respected. As an independent journalist.
She resented the attention showered on her husband Jack Reid's
writing When the two journalists returned from the Russian Revolution,
they were the talk of the town in Greenwich Village,
Read for his reporting and Bryant for her Russian attire.
(15:51):
Louise married Dearborn rights in her biography of Bryant had
won the approval and friendship of no less than Lenin
the Sun, god of the radical left, and yet these
people talked about her clothes. She was very much aware
that women were second class citizens. This is Mary Dearborn.
She was a realist. I mean, this is someone who
(16:12):
really worked hard to get out of a little town
in Nevada to be on a kind of world stage.
And however she could get there, that was fine with her. Eventually,
Louise Bryant stopped writing in order to be a wife
and mother. There was a sacrifice that would have been
unimaginable for most of the male artists in our threat.
(16:38):
There may be no better reason for all of the
suffering in this story than bad parenting, and many of
our characters were bad parents themselves. As you probably noticed,
a couple attempted to redeem themselves, though Eugene O'Neill tried
to reconnect with his daughter near the end of his life,
but there was someone standing in his way. O'Neil left
(16:59):
Agnes Bolton for the actress Carlotta Monterey. Carlotta fiercely guarded
the piece and quiet O'Neill needed to write, and so
UNA's letters to her father often didn't make it pass Carlotta.
But in nineteen fifty one, Eugene and Carlotta were briefly estranged.
Robert Dowling explains, during that break in their relationship, O'Neill
(17:22):
rewrote his will and Una was right back in there.
And he actually told a friend around that time that
he really respected Una for actually having made a life
for herself in the way that she did, and he
really appreciated that. When Carlotta and Eugene patched things up,
she made him cut Una out of his will again.
(17:46):
None of the parents in our story made more of
an attempt at redemption than the man we began with,
John Lennon. Lennon had abandoned his son from his first marriage,
but he was determined to do things differently when he
and Yoko had their son, Sean in nineteen seventy. I
think he has this idea that he's gotten a second
chance here, and he really needs to figure this one out.
(18:06):
Tim Riley again, so he stays home to be a
house husband. But he was one of the very first
celebrities to say I embraced this feminist notion fully, so
fully that I'm gonna take a break from my career
and actually devote my life to my kid. In a
New York Times profile published a month before he was killed,
Lennon said, when I look at the relative importance of
(18:29):
what life is about, I can't quite convince myself that
making a record or having a career is more important
or even as important as my child or any child.
But I don't buy that. You know, my career is
so important that I'll deal with the kids later, which
I already did with my first night as my first child,
and I kind of regret it. JD. Salinger had a
(18:53):
redemption tale of his own. Like Eugene O'Neil, Salinger was
a neglectful father, at least at the start. Not long
after his daughter Margaret was born, Salinger walled himself off
from his family. Literally. He built a bunker in the
woods where he could write undisturbed, sometimes for up to
sixteen hours a day. It got so bad that Salinger's
(19:13):
wife fled with the baby. She gave him an ultimatum,
and Salinger's parenting improved, which brings us the Central Park,
right across the street from the Dakota where our story began.
At the ends of the Catch on the Rye, Olden
Cofield watches his ten year old sister ride the Central
Park carousel Ken Slowinski again that is the climax of
(19:37):
the book. Holden watches her go around and around on
her carousel horse in the rain. I felt so damn
happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept
going around and around. It was damn near bawling. I
felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth,
I don't know why. It was just that she looked
(19:57):
so damn nice, the way she kept going around and
around in her blue cotin all God, I wish you
could have been there. JD. Salinger had a similar experience
long after The Scene and Catcher was published. He took
his eight year old daughter, Margaret, to Manhattan and they
went you guessed it, to the carousel in Central Park.
The Salinger put his daughter on one of the horses
(20:22):
and watched in the same spot where he has holding Couldfield,
watching his sister, his daughter ride that carousel, taking the
part of his own character after so many years. It
it's one of the most moving images that I can
think of. It is almost too beautiful to imagine Salinger
(20:43):
at the carousel watching his own daughter go around. They
would have a rocky relationship in the years ahead, but
for one moment at least, there was a real synchronicity
between life and art. Mark David Chapman may have called
himself the Cher in the Rye after he killed John Lennon,
but he wasn't. Chapman was a phony, being a catcher
(21:06):
in the Rise about putting others first, something all of
our characters had to learn, some the hard way. In
the end, the power of their art could not insulate
them from the pain of living or the hand of death.
What mattered was how they treated others, their instant karma,
their connections. We're all connected. Each moment, our interactions and
(21:29):
choices shaped the course of our lives and impact the
lives of others. What we call history is the accumulation
of these actions and reactions, of chance, encounters and contingencies
of causes in their effects, every outcome is a thread
that gets woven into histories, ever expanding tapestry, a sprawling
(21:50):
masterpiece composed of our own lives entwined with the lives
of all those who came before us. M The Thread
is produced by Meredith Hotman, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao. Meredith Hotknot
(22:13):
engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.
Special thanks to Cindy Carpian, David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Sean Colligan,
Sun Jeeves Tandon, Cameo, George and k A. L. W.
Check us out at ausy dot com, That's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about The Thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the
(22:35):
Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
The Thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening, and stay
tuned for more interconnected stories from history, with Season two
of The Thread coming soon. Two
Why media productions? What does it take to change the world?
A forceful personality, the right moment, and a good wig.
Vladimir Lenin was a brooding scholar and political theorist. He
had been living in exile for years. In nineteen seventeen,
he watched from overseas as the Russians are abdicated the
(00:23):
throne and a new government took power. The time was
right for revolution. Lenin made his move. He disguised himself
as a clergyman and snuck into Petrograd modern day St. Petersburg.
He wore a wig and a fake bandage and shaved
his trademark beard and mustache. Incognito, he made his way
(00:44):
to a secret meeting held by his fellow rebels, the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks wavered on whether to stage a coup or
to wait and pursue power through political means. Lenin was
fed up. He threw off his wig and demanded an
armed overthrow of the Russian government. His passionate argument carried
the vote that night. It spurred the revolution. It changed history.
(01:08):
It's set into motion a series of events that led
to the death of another Lenin sixty three years later.
I'm Sean Braswell and This is The Threat, a podcast
from Ozzy Media. This season of The Threat, we dove
into the connected lives of John Lennon, J. D. Salinger,
(01:29):
Una O'Neill, Chaplin, Eugene O'Neill, and Louise Bryant. We discovered
how their stories overlap, influence, and inspire each other. They
led us back in time from one Lenin's death to
another Lenin's revolution. But there's much more connecting our cast
of characters. This is the final episode of this season
(01:50):
and we're going to shake things up. We'll explore some
of the other surprising strands to our story. Sometimes you
need to look at history from a different angle to
get a new perspective, so we structured this episode differently
from the rest of the season. Today, we'll focus on
three main themes, chance encounters, communism, and suffering. If you're
(02:10):
joining us for the first time, please go back to
episode one and start our interconnected story from the beginning.
First off, Chance encounters John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman
believed in destiny. He was convinced he was meant to
kill the rock star. For Chapman, the world was filled
(02:33):
with little serendipities, meaningful moments, encounters, and omens. He called
them synchronicities, and in the days leading up to John
Lennon's murder, Chapman saw them everywhere. A prostitute in a
green dress, a passage from the Catcher in the Rye
mentioning a Monday in December, and the synchronicities grew stronger
(02:53):
the morning of that fateful day as Chapman strolled towards
Lennon's home at the Dakota. Yes, I knew that morning. Oddly,
when I left the hotel, this is Chapman again in
his interview with CNN's Larry King, some type of premonition
that this was the last time I was going to
leave my hotel room. I hadn't seen him up to
that point. That's what makes it interesting. I wasn't even
(03:15):
sure he was in the building. Despite his premonition, though,
Chapman was starting to have major doubts about his mission.
He thought about going home. As he paced back and
forth on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota that morning,
he prayed, please give me the strength the phonies have
to know. Looking up at the Dakota, he had a
(03:35):
sudden flash of it as the backdrop of the famous
psychological thriller Rosemary's Baby. The film, directed by Roman Polanski,
starred Mia Pharaoh as a pregnant woman who gives birth
to a child of Satan. Chapman remembered how Polanski's own
pregnant wife had been murdered by Charles Manson not long
after he made the film. Manson blamed the killing on
(03:56):
commands he received inside songs like Helter Skelp her By,
You Guessed It, John Lennon and the Beatles. Then as
Chapman pondered the significance of the connection between Rosemary's Baby,
Charles Manson and John Lennon, he received another sign, the
(04:18):
biggest synchronicity yet. A short, pale woman strolled by him
on the sidewalk with a group of children. They crossed
the street in front of the Dakota and went into
Central Park. It was Rosemary herself, the actress Mia fair Mark.
David Chapman smiled at the sign. This has to be
(04:40):
the day, he assured himself. He remained on the sidewalk
and history took its course. Paramount Pictures presents Mia Farrow
in a William Castle production Rosemary's Baby suggested for mature audiences.
(05:05):
Una O'Neill Chaplin was the fulcrum of our tail, the
hinge at its center. But there's someone else who could
have been the subject of episode three and whose story
could have sent us in a very different direction, Ernest Hemingway.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield criticizes Hemingway's
classic war novel A Farewell to Arms. J. D. Salinger,
(05:27):
on the other hand, admired the world renowned writer. Hemingway
was a war correspondent for Collier's Magazine during World War Two,
and he played a key role in Salinger's wartime experience
and writing. Here's Ken Slowinski, the biographer who told us
about Salinger's life in episode two, talking about Salinger's PTSD
or battle fatigue. We know of Salinger's um stay in
(05:51):
the hospital. We know of his battle fatigue because of
a letter that he wrote of old people to Ernest,
telling what whom he had before into during the war.
Salinger confessed the Hemingway that he was quote in an
almost constant state of despondency. The talks I had with
you here, he said, we're the only hopeful minutes of
(06:12):
the whole business. The talks with Himingway that Salinger alludes
to form a remarkable subplot in the writer's harrowing war story.
It begins with the liberation of Paris in August, another
landmark event that Salinger experienced firsthand. The heart of European
(06:33):
civilization is beating strong again. Harris is free, and a
flood tide of jubilation has burst. For it was one
of the few positive memories he would carry with him
from the war. Jubilant crowds mob Salinger and his fellow soldiers.
Salinger's assignment was defined and arrest Nazi collaborators, but there
(06:53):
was one American in Paris that he wanted to find
as well. Salinger sought out Himingway at the Hotel Ritz.
Hemingway greeted the younger writer graciously, and the two talk
shop over drinks. Hemingway was even familiar with some of
Salinger's short stories. Just imagine how that would have made
a young Rider feel, especially one that had just survived
(07:14):
the blood bath at d Day. The two American icons
would meet again that winter. Remember the disastrous campaign at Hikin.
Salinger and Himingway ended up only a mile apart. In
that cold, dark forest, Salingder made his way to Hemingway's
camp During a lull in the fighting one night, the
two drank champagne from canteen cups and Hemingway's tent. It
(07:38):
was a brief distraction from death and destruction that Salinger
would never forget. Salinger found his true therapy and writing.
And so you know, O'Neil Chaplin might have helped inspire
the subject matter for The Catcher in the Rye the
Upper crests phonies of New York City, but Ernest Hemingway
helped inspire and rebuild its war weary author, giving Salinger
(08:00):
chance to write the novel at all. And now the
next theme, Communism. Our story begins with John Lennon's death
on the doorstep of the Dakota, and it ends at
the doorstep of another Lenin, the Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.
Louise Bryant and Jack Reid got to know Lenin quite
(08:21):
well during their time in Russia. They became friends, and
the writers visited him often. Lennon even wrote the introduction
to Read's book Ten Days That Shook the World just
before Reid died from Typhus, Bryant had an exclusive interview
with the Bolshevik leader. This interview was a major source
for scholars interested in Lennon's views of America. In it,
(08:43):
Lennon called for opening up commercial and political relations between
the two nations. America and its allies had refused to
recognize Soviet Russia and had instituted a blockade that was
choking off much needed goods from entering the country. The
previous year, Russia and the US had failed to come
to an agreement to lift the blockade. And guess who
(09:05):
was the American diplomat in charge of those negotiations, William Bullet,
Bryant's future husband. If the blockade had been lifted, then
Jack Reid might have lived. The blockade was the reason
that the Moscow hospital didn't have any medicine to give
to Read and the other Typhus victims. America's antagonistic relationship
(09:29):
with communist Russia continued for decades and impacted the lives
of several of our characters. Charlie Chaplin became a target
of the communist witch hunt led by U S Senator
Joseph McCarthy in the early nineteen fifties. Thank you. Let's
lads and gentlemen of the press. I'm not going to
waste your time, I should say, proceed with a berlad.
(09:52):
Could you ask a direct question? Are you a communist?
I another communist? Chaplain was neither a communist nor a sympathizer,
but the allegations turned Chaplin from a legend to an
outcast in Hollywood. As a result, Charlie and Una uprooted
their family and moved to Europe. Twenty years later, John
(10:13):
Lennon and Yoko Ono were caught in a similar net,
but they chose to stay and fight. Lennon wasn't a
communist either, but his outspoken criticism of the Vietnam War
made him a target for the US government. The Nixon
administration spent years trying to deport the rock star, and
a lengthy court battle ensued after Because we we talked
(10:34):
about peace, you know, I mean because we we won't
we we won't peace. You know, We've said the same
thing for two years, different way, one way or another,
and we believe in it. Lennon was even called rock
and Rolls Charlie Chaplin. He eventually won and was able
to continue living at the Dakota U S authorities also
investigated the playwright Eugene O'Neil for potential Communist ties. They
(10:57):
wondered why his play is touched on the plight of
the poor or the suffering and the unfortunate, But eventually
O'Neil was also cleared of all suspicions. Up next Suffering.
It infuses the characters in O'Neill's plays and also forms
another common thread running through the lives of our characters.
(11:24):
The characters in our story suffered setbacks, traumas, and neglect
in their lives. Troubled childhood script almost everyone. Yeah, so
the more you know about Um Lennin and where he
comes from, the more a lot of his songs make sense.
This is Tim Riley, who we met in episode one.
He's talking about Lennon's childhood and his parents separation. There
(11:46):
was this one scene when he was five where his
dad came home and actually wished him off to Blackpool,
which was a vacation resort up the coast a little bit.
But Lennon's dad hadn't told his mom and she came
looking for John and apparently there was a confrontation there
in in Blackpool where it said you have to choose
which parent you want to go with. Can you imagine
having to choose between your parents right there on the spot,
(12:09):
Lennon chose his father, then ran back to his mother
as she started to leave. Ultimately, he was raised by
his aunt Mimi. Why did't he used to call you? Mimi?
When was the last time he phoned you? Night before
he was murdered two hours and he was saying that
I'll be seeing you soon. Maybe I can't wait to
(12:31):
see you. And then of course at fabitok. The next
morning it came over the overseas news. We know Una
O'Neill Chaplin was influenced by her father's abandonment, but Eugene
O'Neill's own childhood was no walk in the park. His
mother once attempted suicide right in front of him. She
(12:52):
ran screaming out of their house to New London, Connecticut,
and jumped in the Thames River as Eugene and his
brothers watched in shock, And he and Jim and James
we're all standing there sort of a gape watching this.
This is Robert Dowling who told us about O'Neill an
episode four. She had run out of morphine um, and
O'Neill didn't really know what he was looking at. He
(13:14):
had to be explained that his mother was a morphine addict.
At fourteen years old, O'Neill believed in the transformative power
of suffering. In his play Beyond the Horizon, he wrote
the line, only with contact with suffering, will you awaken
the suffering of combat awakened J. D. Salinger. War may
(13:36):
have destroyed Salinger the person, but it created Salinger the artist.
His iconic character Holding Caulfield comes off very differently in
the pre war short story A Slight Rebellion off Madison.
First of well, it's in the third person um. The
niration is called. The character is aloof and he's not
very likable. This is Kenselinski again. By the time he
(14:00):
writes the same passages and incorporated into the Catch on
the Rye, it has taken on a different dimension. It's
taken on his sensitivity. The intimacy is so powerful that
people I feel that they are holding, that Holding is
speaking for them, and that is completely missing from the
(14:25):
pre war Holding Corville. Great art often comes in the
wake of great suffering. That's only if you're able to
take advantage of it. John Lennon, Eugene O'Neill, and J. D.
Salinger all had outlets for their talents and time to
cultivate them. Una didn't have that option as a woman
in the nineteen forties and fifties. She had to marry
(14:45):
a great man and surrender her own ambitions. She had
to find purpose in her devotion to Charlie Chaplin. Take
this one scene in a cafe again back in Paris.
After the Chaplain's left America, Una was in the middle
of life with her good friends Carol Marcus and Truman Capodi,
and all of a sudden, Una looked at her watch
and said, oh my god. She said, I gotta run, Charlie,
(15:07):
You'll be back at the hotel now. And Capodi said,
how can you live like this? He said, don't you
have any time for yourself? And Carol butted in and said, Truman,
don't you realize that every woman in the world wants
a man to need her like that. Louise Bryant wanted
(15:30):
to be needed by the men in her life as well,
but she also wanted to be respected. As an independent journalist.
She resented the attention showered on her husband Jack Reid's
writing When the two journalists returned from the Russian Revolution,
they were the talk of the town in Greenwich Village,
Read for his reporting and Bryant for her Russian attire.
(15:51):
Louise married Dearborn rights in her biography of Bryant had
won the approval and friendship of no less than Lenin
the Sun, god of the radical left, and yet these
people talked about her clothes. She was very much aware
that women were second class citizens. This is Mary Dearborn.
She was a realist. I mean, this is someone who
(16:12):
really worked hard to get out of a little town
in Nevada to be on a kind of world stage.
And however she could get there, that was fine with her. Eventually,
Louise Bryant stopped writing in order to be a wife
and mother. There was a sacrifice that would have been
unimaginable for most of the male artists in our threat.
(16:38):
There may be no better reason for all of the
suffering in this story than bad parenting, and many of
our characters were bad parents themselves. As you probably noticed,
a couple attempted to redeem themselves, though Eugene O'Neill tried
to reconnect with his daughter near the end of his life,
but there was someone standing in his way. O'Neil left
(16:59):
Agnes Bolton for the actress Carlotta Monterey. Carlotta fiercely guarded
the piece and quiet O'Neill needed to write, and so
UNA's letters to her father often didn't make it pass Carlotta.
But in nineteen fifty one, Eugene and Carlotta were briefly estranged.
Robert Dowling explains, during that break in their relationship, O'Neill
(17:22):
rewrote his will and Una was right back in there.
And he actually told a friend around that time that
he really respected Una for actually having made a life
for herself in the way that she did, and he
really appreciated that. When Carlotta and Eugene patched things up,
she made him cut Una out of his will again.
(17:46):
None of the parents in our story made more of
an attempt at redemption than the man we began with,
John Lennon. Lennon had abandoned his son from his first marriage,
but he was determined to do things differently when he
and Yoko had their son, Sean in nineteen seventy. I
think he has this idea that he's gotten a second
chance here, and he really needs to figure this one out.
(18:06):
Tim Riley again, so he stays home to be a
house husband. But he was one of the very first
celebrities to say I embraced this feminist notion fully, so
fully that I'm gonna take a break from my career
and actually devote my life to my kid. In a
New York Times profile published a month before he was killed,
Lennon said, when I look at the relative importance of
(18:29):
what life is about, I can't quite convince myself that
making a record or having a career is more important
or even as important as my child or any child.
But I don't buy that. You know, my career is
so important that I'll deal with the kids later, which
I already did with my first night as my first child,
and I kind of regret it. JD. Salinger had a
(18:53):
redemption tale of his own. Like Eugene O'Neil, Salinger was
a neglectful father, at least at the start. Not long
after his daughter Margaret was born, Salinger walled himself off
from his family. Literally. He built a bunker in the
woods where he could write undisturbed, sometimes for up to
sixteen hours a day. It got so bad that Salinger's
(19:13):
wife fled with the baby. She gave him an ultimatum,
and Salinger's parenting improved, which brings us the Central Park,
right across the street from the Dakota where our story began.
At the ends of the Catch on the Rye, Olden
Cofield watches his ten year old sister ride the Central
Park carousel Ken Slowinski again that is the climax of
(19:37):
the book. Holden watches her go around and around on
her carousel horse in the rain. I felt so damn
happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept
going around and around. It was damn near bawling. I
felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth,
I don't know why. It was just that she looked
(19:57):
so damn nice, the way she kept going around and
around in her blue cotin all God, I wish you
could have been there. JD. Salinger had a similar experience
long after The Scene and Catcher was published. He took
his eight year old daughter, Margaret, to Manhattan and they
went you guessed it, to the carousel in Central Park.
The Salinger put his daughter on one of the horses
(20:22):
and watched in the same spot where he has holding Couldfield,
watching his sister, his daughter ride that carousel, taking the
part of his own character after so many years. It
it's one of the most moving images that I can
think of. It is almost too beautiful to imagine Salinger
(20:43):
at the carousel watching his own daughter go around. They
would have a rocky relationship in the years ahead, but
for one moment at least, there was a real synchronicity
between life and art. Mark David Chapman may have called
himself the Cher in the Rye after he killed John Lennon,
but he wasn't. Chapman was a phony, being a catcher
(21:06):
in the Rise about putting others first, something all of
our characters had to learn, some the hard way. In
the end, the power of their art could not insulate
them from the pain of living or the hand of death.
What mattered was how they treated others, their instant karma,
their connections. We're all connected. Each moment, our interactions and
(21:29):
choices shaped the course of our lives and impact the
lives of others. What we call history is the accumulation
of these actions and reactions, of chance, encounters and contingencies
of causes in their effects, every outcome is a thread
that gets woven into histories, ever expanding tapestry, a sprawling
(21:50):
masterpiece composed of our own lives entwined with the lives
of all those who came before us. M The Thread
is produced by Meredith Hotman, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao. Meredith Hotknot
(22:13):
engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.
Special thanks to Cindy Carpian, David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Sean Colligan,
Sun Jeeves Tandon, Cameo, George and k A. L. W.
Check us out at ausy dot com, That's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about The Thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the
(22:35):
Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
The Thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening, and stay
tuned for more interconnected stories from history, with Season two
of The Thread coming soon. Two
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