Major Leaguer

Burned by 'Bonfire,' Tom Hanks reached a new level of stardom by sitting on the bench

The following post is part of an ongoing series on Tom Hanks specifically and Hollywood actors as historians generally.

Julie Salamon does not devote a tremendous amount of space to Tom Hanks in The Devil’s Candy – her protagonist is really the director Brian De Palma – but the portrait that emerges of Hanks, one that’s important to the degree to which it was relatively unmediated by the usual show-business filters, is intriguing in its very sense of understatement. We see him at the start of the book quietly but firmly advocating Melanie Griffith over Uma Thurman as his onscreen love interest for Bonfire of the Vanities, a clear case of a star exercising his leverage. For the most part, however, he is determined to be – or, as far as Salamon is concerned, seen as – a team player. So it is that he goes out of his way to be a model citizen on the set: showing up on time, even when his presence wasn’t really necessary, and minimizing requirements for attention. “Hanks always went out of his way to distinguish himself from other movie stars,” Salamon reports. “He believed, and wanted everybody else to believe, that he was just a guy doing his job. So he always showed up for rehearsals and endured the boredom without complaint.” In contrast to method actors underwent a flashy personal transformation (e.g. Daniel Day-Lewis), “Hanks, a pragmatic man, actually believed stars could simply pretend to be somebody else.” When Hanks goes down to the World Trade Center as part of his research on how to be a bond trader, Salamon describes him as “fully dedicated to the appearance of unpretentiousness at all times.” So it is, for example, that he refuses to take the stretch limousine the movie studio offered him, insisting on a plain black sedan the traders themselves – only relative slumming to be sure, but an act of moderation nonetheless.

  Salamon was probably right to be skeptical about Hanks’s modesty (even if part of her stance could have been a matter of frustration about how guarded her subject was), and the passage of time and the growth in Hanks’s clout has probably made him both more guarded and quite possibly imperious when there’s nobody around to report it. But there are at least two reasons to take his self-presentation seriously. The first is how much better he comes off relative to his co-stars on Bonfire, whose behavior was far more egotistical, childish, or both. Salamon depicts a Bruce Willis justifiably insecure about his acting talent; compared to him, she writes, “Hanks was diligent and uncomplaining – and he had talent.” Griffith, for her part, was downright embarrassing in her vamping. The actress had (unannounced) breast-augmentation surgery halfway through the production, was not shy about showing off her new assets. At one point she “totters” over to a seated Hanks and plops herself on his lap. Hanks, firmly ensconced in what would prove to be a second marriage, had just attended Lamaze classes for his first child with Rita Wilson. Griffith wants to know if he’s uncomfortable at the prospect of their upcoming love scenes. “Not at all, no” he replies, pulling his head back stiffly. Hanks then made a genial but pointed joke about having seen Griffith’s husband, Don Johnson, on TV recently. Griffith moved on. 

The other, and really more important, reason to take Salamon’s portrait seriously is that it comports with the choices Hanks began to make now that he had finally attained a durable degree of power in the movie industry. He not only slowed down his pace, but began to choose projects that had a more emphatic collaborative dimension in terms of his role – literal as well as figurative – and its content. If filmmaking is, among other things, a form of politics, Hanks now began to reveal real talent in the way he got things done. And at the heart of that talent was what might be termed characteristically Lincoln skills of discipline, understatement, and carefully wrought eloquence in expression.

One early indication of his was his participation in the 1992 film Radio Flyer. This was another one of those hot-properties gone to the dogs, a weird combination of lyricism and brutality in movie that is an extended childhood flashback about two brothers (Elijah Wood and Joseph Mazzell) and their abusive stepfather (Adam Baldwin). Besides the abrupt shifts in tone, the movie lacks credibility in the way it depicts the two children protecting a mother (Lorraine Bracco) who somehow manages to be completely oblivious to their ordeal. The story is bracketed on either side by brief unbilled scenes of Hanks as one of the brothers in adulthood.

More substantial – and for our purposes, a turning point, particularly as it concerns Hanks’s historical vision – is A League of Their Own. League was another Penny Marshall project, a plum assignment for a female director at what could be termed a feminist moment. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy of 1991 generated new awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, and the optics of a row of older white males sitting in judgment of a female sparked the so-called “Year of the Woman” that brought fresh faces, like U.S. Senator Patty Murray, to Congress. This was also the moment of Thelma & Louise, a cinematic feminist manifesto by screenwriter Callie Khouri. The early nineties was also a time when a new wave of feminist scholarship committed to documenting the lives ordinary people began trickling down into popular consciousness.  And one when the passage of Title IX, a 1972 law that promoted equity in sports, was reaching critical mass in the nation’s schools. All these currents converged to create an audience for a film loosely based on a real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League founded by Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley, which ran from 1943 to 1954. Women players in the league were inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1998.

A League of the Own is an ensemble piece whose somewhat novel cast included Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell on a team, the Rockford Peaches, that resembled the quintessential platoon in a typical Hollywood World War II movie: you got your wiseacre city kid, your hayseed, etc. There’s also a sibling rivalry between the two sisters that serves as the core plot engine of the story. The presiding spirit over the picture, in art and life, is Geena Davis, the star catcher who carries the film with understated grace. Davis leads a team embedded in a newly created, but nevertheless skillfully run, organization that includes Wrigley (played by Marshall’s director Garry, again involved in an Hanks project), a likeable rogue of a scout played by Jon Lovitz (who almost steals the picture), and a sympathetic PR man (the always excellent character actor David Strathairn) who bobbles a series of divergent agendas between the women and their male bosses.

Hanks, who doesn’t actually appear until a half-hour into the movie, plays the manager of the Peaches, Jimmy Dugan. His entrance is a bit startling: boozy, overweight, and unshaven, he’s pretty much the antithesis of any previous Hanks character. Dugan’s haplessness is also contextual: a former slugger who’s blown out his knee, he’s unsuited to join the war effort, much less play ball himself (“how did I get so useless so fast,” he laments under his breath at one point). Nor is there any charm in his loutishness, as there had been in previous Hanks characters; Dugan his prone to humiliate his players publicly when he’s not too drunk to notice. “Are you crying?” he asks a playing in the movie’s signature moment. “There’s no crying! There’s no crying in baseball!”

Naturally, Dugan begins to change – but it only can when he begins to follow the example of Davis’s character, Dottie Hanson. At point early on in his tenure as manager, Dugan looks up from his newspaper to realize that Hanson, who has been functioning as a de facto coach in response to Dugan’s de facto absence, is foolishly signaling for a bunt.

“What are ya, stupid?” he says to her. Rosie O’Donnell’s character, also in the dugout, responds for her: “Somebody’s gotta run the game, Jimmy. You know, somebody who actually watches.” Dugan demands that another player – “blond girl” – tell him what the signal is to swing away (he never bothered to learn it himself). What follows is a comic tug of war with a bemused batter trying to figure out which set of pulled noses, ear lobes and touched caps she should follow. “Who’s the goddamn manager?” Dugan finally asks in exasperation. “I am!” An angry Hanson responds: “Then act like it, you big lush!” She steps aside, Dugan prevails, and his judgment proves sound: the batter responds with an extra-base hit that scores a run. Dugan naturally struts at this. Hanson turns away in the dugout, but can’t hide her smile: she’s happy about the hit (and perhaps that there’s a manager at the wheel).

Davis models team play a little while later at a lightly attended game in which a Time reporter is present. Strathairn’s PR character has asked the women to step up their game and impress the media, as the league’s fortunes are wavering. He dubs Hanson “the Queen of Diamonds,” maladroitly responding to her sister’s question about whether she had also been mentioned to the reporter, only to hear the answer: that the reporter had been told Hanson would only play ball if her sister could too (salt in a sibling wound, but one more indication of Hanson’s collective ethos). Hanson fulfills the request during the game with a spectacular split in catching a routine pop-up. “What the hell was that?” Dugan asks, appalled by the hot-dogging. “I dunno,” Hanson replies. “Just thought it would help the league.”

Hanson and Dugan gradually become more friendly, though any romantic relationship is blocked by the fact that Hanson is married to a GI  (Bill Pullman) fighting in Italy. The fear of permanent separation from loved ones looms over the women’s lives, and it’s in response to this that Dugan finally turns a corner and achieves a sense of real manhood. Though a better manager, he still views the team through a selfish lens, and is in the process of giving them a locker-room pep talk that he’ll get a bonus if they win the championship when a mail carrier arrives with an ominous telegram from the war department. The mailman clumsily notes that this is bad news, but then realizes he lacks enough information to deliver it to the right party (Hanson sits, bracing herself for news that her husband is dead.) Dugan, angry by the carrier’s intention to defer resolving the matter, literally manhandles him, yanking the telegram away, ripping it open, and gently delivering the bad news to another player.  As such he’s taken a significant step toward becoming a supportive organization man.

Next: Hanks heads toward Philadelphia

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The History teacher

Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic captures the zeitgeist of an indulgent, anxious decade

The following review was published last week on the Books page of the History News Network.

In 1989, Tom Wolfe published one of his provocative magazine pieces, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in which he took American novelists to task for their insularity and refusal to engage the great social issues of their time in accessible, informed prose. As is often the case with Wolfe, there was an element of self-promotion in his argument, as he had published Bonfire of the Vanities two years earlier, and was repositioning himself from New Journalist master of non-fiction to Balzac-style master of fiction. Wolfe followed up those novels with A Man in Full (1998) and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004; Wolfe's next novel, tentatively titled Back to Blood, reputedly about immigration and set in Miami, will reportedly be published later this year). All through this period, Wolfe has sustained and even extended his argument, engaging in critical exchanges with prominent figures like John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving (a writer with whom he would seem to have a lot in common).

I myself have long been a fan of Wolfe's work, fiction and non-fiction, even when it has veered toward unintentional self-parody. It's hard not to be seduced by the (sometimes malicious) glee in his work. The exclamatory points! the italicized phrases! the onomatopeeeeeeeia that makes his prose sing!

But if you're looking at a quietly impressive example of the kind of work Wolfe has been championing in the last 20 years, a novel that effectively makes a case for the novel in the 21st century, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic. This book, Haslett's second, follows his 2003 National Book Award-nominated collection of stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, by seeking to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. In Haslett's hands, that zeitgeist is one in which Americans seek to gratify their passions -- money and sex, among others -- in the shadows of distant, but looming, geopolitical and economic upheaval. The shape of dread is more clearly defined for some characters than it is for others, and some manage to find joy and meaning in their lives despite it. But the sense of Edwardian rot that so many social and political observers have been chronicling (Thomas Friedman, Kevin Phillips, et. al) here get embodied in vivid, three-dimensional people whose lives intersect in the fictional town of suburban town of Finden, Massachusetts (think Lincoln or Weston).

The catalytic figure in these intersections is Doug Fanning, whom we meet as a young naval recruit in a 1988 prologue set in the Persian Gulf, where he plays a dubious role in a hushed-up patrolling operation. The main action of the novel then moves to the aftermath of 9/11, when Fanning, now a buccaneering international financier for the Union Atlantic investment bank in Boston, buys himself a McMansion in Finden to salve the wounds of his troubled childhood (his abandoned mother cleaned houses in the town he now inhabits). His neighbor, a WASPish former high school history teacher named Charlotte Graves, is outraged by the house and everything it represents. She believes the land Fanning's house sits on was sold to him illegally by the town, an assertion that no one -- including her own brother, Henry, president of the New York Federal Reserve -- takes seriously. It turns out that Charlotte has a real case. It also turns out that she is slowly losing her mind. The owner of a Doberman and a Mastiff to keep her company, she hears the former talk to her in the voice of Malcolm X and the latter in that of Cotton Mather. (The literary ventriloquism involved here is one of the book's amusing pleasures.) The lives of Charlotte and Fanning are bridged by a Nate Fuller, bright but rootless gay adolescent who shuttles between the two houses and sharpens the confrontation between two adversaries that will culminate in a conflagration -- and some moments of high humor.

But the brisk narrative pace of Union Atlantic is only one of its pleasures. Perhaps the most impressive, in a Wolfean sense, is the lightly worn sense of authority Haslett demonstrates on topics that range from cutting-edge military hardware to the nuances of the Nikkei. There are times in the book where he sounds like Paul Krugman: "Thus were the monthly payments of the young couples in Arizona and Florida transformed by the alchemy of finance into a haven for domestic liquidity and the Chinese surplus." Haslett knows the precincts of suburban ennui of modern-day teenagers no less than the habits of mid-twentieth century heroin addicts (Charlotte's one true love is seduced away by the needle). You get the sense in reading this book that he's really taken the time to digest the rhythms of everyday life for a Faulknerian county.

That intimacy extends to the psychological realm as well, where Haslett manages the difficult trick of viewing his characters with empathy and clarity at the same time -- achieving, in the words of Charlotte's lover, "a lucid sympathy." That's as true of the aspiring African American office worker who plays a pivotal role in the plot as it is the world weariness of the immensely powerful Henry Graves. Even when his characters are crazy or repellent, they can nevertheless invite identification. Fanning is amoral at best and reprehensible at worst, but when an over-privileged Volvo-driving woman clogs traffic in the center of town, this naval veteran's less than entirely accurate complaint -- "For you, we killed. For this" -- has a ring of truth. Even as she descends into madness, Charlotte can still serve up zingers that illuminate American fecklessness. "You have no idea what it was like at school at the end," she tells her brother of her teaching career. "How the content remained the same while the meaning of the exercise changed so entirely. From enlightenment to the grooming of pets."

Union Atlantic is a relatively short book, and it betrays little of the sprawl or overt ambition of one on the scale of The Bonfire of the Vanities. But you finish it feeling like you've really lived with these people for a while, and that you understand them in a way you simply could not any other way. Journalism can explain and movies can show, but realistic fiction reveals how it feels to live in a particular time and place in a way that remains both singular and necessary. Haslett doesn't know what's really happening to our country better than anyone else; indeed, much of what he reveals has been described by others in one way or another. But that, in a way, is the value of his work: he captures a shared perception of a time in a way that gives pleasure to those who lived it and a testament for those who will follow. Such is the way history gets made -- and truly learned.