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FURTHER READING:

Carnegie, Dale. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. New York,

Simon & Schuster, 1984.

———. How to Win Friends and Inﬂuence People. New York,

Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Conniff, Richard. ‘‘The So-So Salesman Who Told Millions How to

Make It Big.’’ Smithsonian. Vol. 18, October 1987, 82-93.

Kemp, Giles, and Edward Claﬂin. Dale Carnegie: The Man Who

Inﬂuenced Millions. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Longgood, William. Talking Your Way to Success: The Story of the

Dale Carnegie Course. New York, Association Press, 1962.

Carnegie Hall

The world’s most famous concert hall, New York City’s Carne-

gie Hall, opened in 1891, proved important as an institution and, by

Carnegie Hall

setting a critical precedent for ﬁnancing in the 1950s, for the future of

the performing arts in America.

ear, the hall was praised for both its architecture and its acoustics

following the opening performances by Tchaikovsky. Carnegie Hall’s

prestigious reputation was established by the quality of the perform-

ers who appeared there, and the way to get there was to ‘‘practice,

practice, practice,’’ the success or failure of a Carnegie Hall de-

but often determining whether or not a performer established a

successful career.

Olin Downes, a music critic at the New York Times, wrote, ‘‘In

the ﬁrst quarter of this century [the city] became the musical center of

the world. Nowhere else was to be met in the course of a season so

many commanding personalities, interpretive and creative, of the

period. New York was transformed from a cultural colony into a

cultural capital.’’ During that Golden Age and particularly between

1910-30, every one of the world’s greatest instrumentalists appeared

at least once every season in Carnegie Hall. Among conductors and

orchestras, Arturo Toscanini conducted the New York Philharmonic

there and Leopold Stokowski brought the Philadelphia Orchestra for

regular annual series, as did the various conductors of the Boston

CARPENTERS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

440

Symphony. Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Joseph Szigeti, Vladimir

Horowitz, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Artur Rubinstein appeared for

annual recitals or with the orchestras.

Although he provided two million dollars to build it, linking

steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s name to the hall is among the great

ironies of American cultural life. Carnegie’s musical interests cen-

tered on bagpipe melodies and Scottish folk tunes and hymns played

on an organ that awakened him each morning. The best statement of

purpose he could offer the public when the cornerstone was laid in

1890 was the hope that the structure would ‘‘intertwine itself with the

history of our country.’’ On opening night, May 5, 1891, Morris

Reno, president of the stock company that Carnegie had set up to

manage the enterprise (for a proﬁt), would advise that the hall had

been ‘‘founded with the loftiest purposes, free from all disturbing

private interests, devoted solely to the highest ideals of art....’’

In fact, Carnegie had no such ideals. Nor was he motivated by

needs for publicity or acclaim common to tycoons of the Gilded Age.

Finally, his unspeakable treatment of workers at his Homestead,

Pennsylvania, plant does not suggest sympathy for the common man

who, hopefully, would attend performances. The best that can be said

about Carnegie’s plan for the hall was that, like his plan for the

libraries he later founded, it was not an end in itself. For the libraries,

he would make a grant for construction, and then it was up to the local

community to raise operating funds. But it immediately became clear

that such a pattern would not ﬁt the Music (later, Carnegie) Hall.

There simply was not enough rental business, and Carnegie had to

underwrite operating deﬁcits, which he did with frequent complaints.

New York’s highly competitive social and musical establish-

ments were unenthused by his generosity to begin with. In advance of

opening night, the New York Times hoped that Music Hall presenta-

tions would educate rather than ‘‘merely entertain.’’ William Steinway,

a piano manufacturer who had a concert hall of his own, scoffed that

‘‘Mr. Carnegie’s hall will never pay. Take our present Philharmonic

concerts, for instance . . . increase the number of these high-class

concerts to twelve, and ﬁnancial disaster would be certain. The public

can only stand a certain amount of this sort of music....’’

A constant pressing need for cash inspired Carnegie’s company

to encourage not only musical but other types of renters. In December

1915, a large audience witnessed the launching of the ﬁrst mass fund-

raising campaign in American Jewish history for the relief of overseas

brethren. Fresh from the Versailles Peace Conference in July 1919,

President Woodrow Wilson disembarked in Hoboken, New Jersey,

and proceeded immediately to the hall, where he made the ﬁrst speech

in his unsuccessful campaign for congressional approval of United

States membership in the League of Nations. Tenants such as the

American Academy of Dramatic Arts, whose graduates included

Cecil B. De Mille, Agnes Moorehead, Rosalind Russell, and Spencer

Tracy, contributed to the hall’s international fame.

Carnegie Hall opened its 1925-26 season under new manage-

ment. Carnegie had died in 1919, and although his board of directors

continued to run the hall together with the Carnegie estate, it had

remained unproﬁtable. Robert E. Simon, a prosperous realtor, then

bought the building and kept his promise not to tear it down, although

there were hints that he and his son wavered during the years of Simon

family ownership.

Finally, when plans for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

were announced in 1959, Robert Simon Jr. announced that the hall

would be razed in favor of a skyscraper. Music lovers were outraged,

but New York was constantly tearing itself down and rebuilding, and

there was no march by the masses to the hall in protest.

A volunteer Citizens’ Committee for Carnegie Hall decided on

behalf of all city residents (without any referendum) that the hall

should be saved—and not with private funds. The committee favored

the idea that the city should issue bonds to pay for the hall’s purchase

and renovation, with the bonded indebtedness to be paid off by a

Carnegie Hall Corporation. Once the bonds were retired, the hall

would become the property of the corporation, which could, if it

wished, apply to the city for additional operating funds.

Thus was realized the concept that although cultural interests

could not be legislated into existence, the ﬁnancing for them could be,

a precedent critical for future ﬁnancing of the performing arts.

—Milton Goldin

URTHER READING:

Damrosch, Walter. My Musical Life. New York, Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1924.

Schickel, Richard. The World of Carnegie Hall. New York,

Messner, 1960.

The Carpenters

Between 1970 and 1975, The Carpenters, a brother-sister musi-

cal act, were one of the most popular and recognized pop groups.

Karen and Richard Carpenter

CARPENTERSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

441

Because they emerged following a decade (the 1960s) in which the

most inﬂuential performers were those who pushed the bounds of pop

music, they were often criticized for their wholesome, straightfor-

ward style. However, Karen Carpenter, with her extraordinary voice

and girl-next-door good looks, and Richard Carpenter, with his

world-class composing abilities, overcame the criticism to produce

19 top-10 singles during the 1970s.

Karen (1950-1983), who was both a singer and a drummer, and

Richard (1946—), who was the group’s arranger, producer, and

keyboardist, were born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Harold Bertram

Carpenter and Agnes Tatum. While children, they developed an

enthusiasm for popular music. While Richard pursued music avidly,

Karen played the ﬂute brieﬂy, but was more interested in sports. The

family moved to Downey, California, in 1963. In 1966, Karen and

Richard teamed up with bassist Wes Jacobs to form the Richard

Carpenter Trio, an instrumental band. Karen also signed a solo

singing contract with the Magic Lamp record label, and recorded

‘‘Looking for Love’’ and ‘‘I’ll Be Yours,’’ released as singles.

Shortly after, the Richard Carpenter Trio won ‘‘The Battle of the

Bands’’ at the Hollywood Bowl.

It wasn’t until 1969, however, that the band, refashioned as the

Carpenters and with Karen singing as well as playing drums, was

‘‘discovered’’ by world-famous trumpeter Herb Alpert, leader of the

Tijuana Brass, and co-founder of the A&M record label. Upon

hearing a demo tape of the Carpenters, he immediately recognized the

extraordinary quality of Karen Carpenter’s voice. ‘‘It was full and

round, and it was . . . amazing. This voice was buzzing into my body,

and it was the way they presented it.’’ Their ﬁrst album, Offering, was

released on the A&M record label in 1969. It did not sell well,

although their cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Ticket to Ride’’ reached number

54 on the U.S. singles charts. In 1970, their album Close to You,

included their ﬁrst number one single of the same name (which sold

more than 300,000 copies), and the duo began international tours that

would include up to 200 concerts in a year. That year they also

released the hit singles ‘‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’’ and ‘‘For All We

Know.’’ They won Grammy Awards in 1970 for best contemporary

vocal performance by a group for ‘‘Close to You,’’ and also for best

new artist. In 1970, ‘‘For All We Know,’’ featured in the ﬁlm

‘‘Lovers and Other Strangers,’’ captured an Academy Award.

Between 1970 and 1975, the Carpenters were one of the hardest

working bands in pop music. Richard was the guiding force behind

the duo’s production and arrangements, and also wrote songs with

Richard Bettis. But material supplied by songwriters Burt Bacharach,

Paul Williams, and Roger Nichols helped the Carpenters gain as-

tounding success with 17 million-selling albums between 1970 and

1981. Other well-known standards released by the duo during this

period were ‘‘Rainy Days and Mondays,’’ ‘‘Superstar,’’ ‘‘Sing,’’

‘‘Yesterday Once More,’’ and ‘‘Top of the World.’’ Their compila-

tion album, The Singles 1969-1973, was on the U.S. album charts for

115 weeks. By the late 1990s, the Carpenters had demonstrated that

their success was more than ﬂeeting, with worldwide sales topping

100 million units.

The Carpenters bucked 1970s pop music trends by conveying a

wholesome, middle-class image, and were even mocked by the pop

music establishment, who viewed their songs as insipid and their

popularity as ﬂeeting. Music critic Rob Hoerburger (New York Times,

Nov. 3, 1991) wrote ‘‘They always dressed as if they were going to

church, and they sang sticky songs about love (but never sex). Worst

of all, parents loved their music.’’ During their heyday, rock critics

described their music as ‘‘treacle,’’ ‘‘drippy easy listening,’’ ‘‘schlock

music,’’ and their personalities as ‘‘squeaky,’’ ‘‘smiley,’’ and ‘‘sac-

charine.’’ Fortunately for their record company, A&M, and their in-

house mentor, Herb Alpert, the listening public purchased their

records by the millions and their concerts sold out consistently. Their

popularity was not conﬁned to the United States. They also had strong

fan bases in Great Britain and Japan, and they were also popular in

many other European and Asian countries. In 1973, they were

honored by then-President Richard Nixon by being asked to perform

at a state visit by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The Carpenters enjoyed their greatest success between 1970 and

1975. After that time, the duo was beset by serious health problems.

Richard spent several years addicted to the sedative Quaalude, and

recovery took another several years. Karen, meanwhile, battled

anorexia nervosa, a psychophysiological disorder whose cluster of

symptoms begins usually with a fear of being overweight and

continues with severe weight loss due to self-starvation. She fought

this disease for years, with her ‘‘normal’’ weight of 120 pounds (she

was 5′4″ tall) dropping to 79 pounds several times between 1975

(when she collapsed onstage in Las Vegas while singing ‘‘Top of the

World’’), and her death in 1983. Though few were aware of anorexia

nervosa as a disease during the 1970s, Carpenter’s death from the

disorder drew a great deal of attention to the disease. Indeed, she may

be as important a ﬁgure in American popular culture because of the

way she died as because of the way she achieved fame. After her death

anorexia nervosa became well-known to the American public, and

many sought help for themselves or their (often) teenage daughters

after reading or hearing media accounts of her symptoms and the

cause of her death.

The Carpenters experienced a new surge of popularity in the late

1980s and 1990s as their catalog was re-released on compact disk,

most notably the four-disk set From the Top. In 1994, a compilation of

their songs entitled If I Were a Carpenter, performed by some of the

most popular ‘‘alternative’’ music groups, became a top-selling

record. Many of these rock stars, including Sonic Youth, Cracker, and

the Cranberries, said that they had been strongly inﬂuenced by the

Carpenters’ sound. Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross, one of the bands

featured on the CD, echoed the beliefs of many musicians and critics

who had reassessed their music almost twenty years after their peak

popularity. ‘‘I’d always been a huge fan of the Carpenters, and an

admirer of their songs. The quality of their songs was so wonderful,

they were lyrically very sophisticated, not this teenybop fare . . . Most

bands just want to write perfect pop songs. And these are perfect

pop songs.’’

Richard Carpenter’s music career continued on a considerably

reduced basis after his sister’s death, although he continues to tour

and produce. Most notably, he produced his sister’s last solo album,

Karen Carpenter, released in 1996, and his own album, Pianist—

Arranger—Composer—Conductor, came out in 1998.

—Jeff Merron

URTHER READING:

Coleman, Ray. The Carpenters: The Untold Story: An Authorized

Biography. New York, HarperCollins, 1994.

CARR ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

442

Carr, John Dickson (1906-1977)

Considered one of the twentieth century’s grand masters of the

detective story for his innovative use of subtlety, ingenuity, and

atmosphere, John Dickson Carr, alias Carter Dickson and Carr

Dickson, produced numerous short stories, non-ﬁction works, and

over 70 neo-gothic and historical mystery novels during his lifetime.

His best known tales, commonly referred to as locked room myster-

ies, feature horriﬁc crimes committed seemingly without human

agents; subsequently, his sleuths must exercise pure reason to solve

them. Amidst an atmosphere of suspense, a small dose of the

supernatural, and sometimes high comedy, Carr cleverly presents

clues, suspects, and motives such that few readers are able to predict

the solutions. His characters Henri Bencolin, Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir

Henry Merrivale, and Colonel March rank high among the most

memorable detectives within the genre, and Carr’s skill in detailing

their exploits continues to inﬂuence contemporary mystery novelists

in the 1990s.

Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on November 30, 1906, Carr

ﬁrst gained his lifelong interest in crime and detection from his father,

Wooda Nicholas Carr, a politician and lawyer. From an early age, he

enjoyed reading authors L. Frank Baum, Alexandre Dumas, and

Robert Louis Stevenson, though he later preferred the works of Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. In his early teens, he began

writing for a local newspaper and developed a keen interest in

detective stories that featured solutions to impossible crimes. He

attended the Hill, a preparatory school, and entered Haverford Col-

lege in 1925. At Haverford, Carr’s writing career blossomed. After

becoming editor of The Haverfordian, a monthly literary magazine,

he began to write not only short historical romances, but also a series

of detective stories about impossible crimes solved by Paris police-

man Henri Bercolin.

Circa 1928, Carr’s parents sent him to Paris to study at the

Sorbonne; however, Carr never attended the school and seriously

pursued writing instead. Determined to hone his craft in Paris, he

wrote but later destroyed an historical novel, then wrote another Henri

Bencolin story entitled ‘‘Grand Guignol.’’ Upon his return to Ameri-

ca, he submitted this manuscript to The Haverfordian, which pub-

lished it as a short novel in early 1929. Carr later revised the story,

expanded its length, and submitted the manuscript to Harper & Bros.

Published in 1930, It Walks by Night marked the beginning of Carr’s

successful career as a detective novelist. In 1932, he married Clarice

Cleaves, an Englishwoman, and the following year, moved to Eng-

land. During the remainder of the 1930s, he produced three to ﬁve

novels a year, adding Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale to his

repertoire of impossible crime solvers. He also began to write short

stories for popular magazines. In 1935, he published ‘‘Terror’s Dark

Tower,’’ one of his best short stories about murder in a sealed room,

and by the end of the decade, his works were regularly featured in

major magazines such as The Illustrated London News and The Strand.

During the 1940s, Carr produced fewer mystery novels; his

talents were needed elsewhere. Supporting the war effort, he wrote

and narrated propaganda broadcasts for the British Broadcasting

Corporation. Concurrently, he also wrote mystery dramas for the

BBC and CBS network in America and was instrumental in creating

the style of the great radio plays. At the end of World War II, he began

a deﬁnitive biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that was eventually

published in 1949.

Dissatisﬁed with the rise of socialism in England, Carr returned

to America with his family in 1948 and was elected President of the

Mystery Writers of America in 1949. During this period, he embarked

on a new phase in his writing career. A lifelong admirer of the past, he

decided to write mysteries situated in speciﬁc historical time frames

and that sometimes involved time travel. This innovative decision

proved fortuitous; his meticulously researched historical novels re-

ceived both critical and popular acclaim. In 1950, he published The

Bride of Newgate, a high adventure set in 1815 England. The

following year, he published The Devil in Velvet, in which a modern

professor bargains with Satan for a transfer back to eighth-century

England. Considered by Carr to be his best work, The Devil in Velvet

was the most successful of his novels.

Between 1951 and 1965, Carr moved back and forth between

England and America before ﬁnally settling in Greenville, South

Carolina. Due to increasing ill health, he wrote no more ﬁction after

1972, but contributed to a review column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery

Magazine and began a series about seventeenth- and eighteenth-

century criminals which was never completed. He died March 1,

1977, at age 70.

During his lifetime, Carr was the recipient of the Mystery

Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and

was the ﬁrst American ever admitted into the almost exclusively

British Detection Club. Indeed, his stories reﬂect the qualities that he

felt should always be present in the detective novel at its best: fair

play, sound plot construction, and ingenuity.

—Marlena E. Bremseth

URTHER READING:

Greene, Douglas G. John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained

Miracles. New York, Otto Penzler Books, 1995.

———, editor. The Door to Doom and Other Detections. New York,

Harper & Row, 1980.

Panck, Leroy. Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain,

1914-1940. Bowling Green, Ohio, Popular Press, 1979.

The Cars

With their campy groundbreaking videos and catchy songs, The

Cars emerged from the late-1970s/early-1980s New Wave movement

to become one of America’s best selling musical acts. This Boston

band led by Ric Ocasek scored thirteen Billboard Top 40 hits from

1978 to 1987 with thinly-veiled sexual innuendo songs like ‘‘Shake It

Up,’’ ‘‘You Might Think,’’ ‘‘Drive,’’ and ‘‘Tonight She Comes.’’

Formed in 1976 out of the ashes of various local Boston bands,

including the Jonathan Richman-fronted Modern Lovers, The Cars

landed a major label deal with Elektra after a demo of ‘‘Just What I

Needed’’ became a hit on local Boston radio stations. The group

consisted of Ric Ocasek on vocals and guitar, Ben Orr handling

vocals and bass duties, Elliot Easton on guitar, Greg Hawkes playing

CARSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

443

The Cars

keyboards and former Modern Lovers drummer David Robinson

behind the drum kit. The Cars’ aesthetic jumping-off point fell

somewhere between AM radio bubblegum pop, new wave quirkiness,

Brian Ferry-esque art-pop, and the bombast of Album Oriented

Radio: a combination that appealed to a wide variety of consumers.

Early on, The Cars established themselves as one of the best-

selling new wave bands in America. Their self-titled debut album was

released in 1978, spawning a number of hit singles, going platinum,

and staying in the album charts for two and a half years. They released

a string of hit albums, including Candy-O, Panorama, Shake It Up,

and Heartbeat City, before they took a two year break starting in 1985

so that Ocasek, Orr, and Easton could record solo albums and pursue

other projects (such as Ocasek’s appearance in the John Waters ﬁlm,

Hairspray). By the time The Cars regrouped to release 1987’s Door to

Door, the band had run its course, creatively and commercially. After

a tour supporting Door to Door, The Cars broke up in 1988.

Although their pop radio-friendly songs were a major reason for

their popularity, The Cars also gained attention with their music

videos—something that distinguished the post-MTV era from other

periods of popular music. Their most acclaimed video was the Andy

Warhol directed ‘‘You Might Think,’’ which sported groundbreaking

(for the time) computer animation. The success The Cars had with

their videos, along with a few other artists that were regularly played

on MTV, demonstrated the burgeoning music channel’s power as a

marketing device.

In addition to his work as the frontman of The Cars, Ric Ocasek

produced a number of important underground, avant-garde, and punk

bands that didn’t sell a lot of records, but which proved extremely

inﬂuential. Among the most signiﬁcant Ocasek-produced bands were

the Washington D.C. hardcore punk group Bad Brains and the New

York City duo, Suicide. Ocasek also produced albums by the com-

mercially successful Romeo Void in the early 1980s and, in 1994, he

produced the platinum debut by Weezer. Because of his role as a

major contributor to American underground and commercial music,

Ric Ocasek had a large number of high-proﬁle fans like Billy Corgan,

the leader of 1990s alternative rock icons, Smashing Pumpkins.

Corgan paid homage to Ocasek by producing Ocasek’s 1997 solo

album, Troublizing.

—Kembrew McLeod

URTHER READING:

The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave. Ed. Ira A. Robbins. New

York, Scribners, 1983.

Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk

History for a Post-Punk World. New York, Penguin, 1993.

CARSON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

444

Carson, Johnny (1925—)

In January 1965, Johnny Carson appeared at Lyndon Baines

Johnson’s presidential inauguration gala. Carson took the stage

directly opposite the president and bragged ‘‘I’ve done more for birth

control than Enovid.’’ The claim is questionable, but it is vintage

Johnny Carson. Like most Carson jokes, it looks neither particularly

funny nor particularly racy on paper. In its delivery, however, Carson

won much of the audience over, created a ﬂurry of scandal, and

effectively situated himself in American cultural history. Carson

made one of television’s greatest careers by playing his impish wit off

his Midwestern charm, bringing the sexual revolution to middle

America, middle America to the world, and establishing the form for

television variety and humor that continues to dominate.

Carson was born on October 23, 1925 in Corning, Iowa, and

spent the ﬁrst eight years of his life moving throughout Iowa as his

father established a management career in the Iowa-Nebraska Electric

Light and Power Company. In 1933, the Carson family settled in

Norfolk, Nebraska, population 10,000. Carson came of age in Nor-

folk, premiering his magic act, ‘‘The Great Carsoni,’’ there. Carson,

along with his magician alter-ego, enlisted in the Navy in 1943,

hoping to be a ﬁghter pilot in the Second World War. His military

career, however, was more notable for its hilarity than its heroics.

In the fall of 1946, Carson left the Navy and enrolled in the

University of Nebraska. As a student he initiated his broadcast career,

appearing in a western comedy on KFAB, a Lincoln, Nebraska, radio

station. Also at the University of Nebraska, Carson met the ﬁrst of his

Johnny Carson

many loves—Jodi Wolcott, ‘‘The Great Carsoni’s’’ magician’s as-

sistant and a native of Western Nebraska.

Wolcott and Carson married in 1949, just after they moved to

Omaha where Johnny had taken a broadcasting position at NBC’s

Nebraska afﬁliate, WOW. It was the dawn of television, and WOW

had just branched out of the radio market to broadcast the region’s

ﬁrst television signals. Carson got in early, with an afternoon program

called Squirrel’s Nest. The Carsons had their ﬁrst child in 1950, but

Carson was unwilling to settle down. In 1951, he set out, alone, in the

family Oldsmobile, determined to make it big in California.

The journey was a success, and soon the whole clan made the

trek, Jodi pregnant for the second time. In Los Angeles, Carson rose

rapidly from late night announcer to host of the prime-time Johnny

Carson Show. That ﬁrst show was a ﬂop, but it led to another, and by

1962, when Carson took over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar, he

had already hosted three incarnations of The Johnny Carson Show,

two game shows, and several short-run broadcasts.

Even as Carson’s corn-fed persona gained prominence in nation-

al television, his family was disintegrating. He divorced Jodi Wolcott

in 1965, endured hostile publication over his reluctance to pay child

support for his three boys, and read his mother’s dismissive com-

ments about his show business career in Time magazine. In the years

to come, Carson would have two more divorces and three more wives,

but somehow, the image of Johnny Carson, the good Midwestern boy

with a mean streak survived, and The Tonight Show was a hit.

In 1968, Carson discovered Tiny Tim, a Greenwich Village

performer with a ukulele, a falsetto voice, and an odd blend of hippie-

left appearance and Barry Goldwater conservatism. Tim and Carson

spoke about premarital sex and birth control (Carson was an advocate

and Tim an opponent). Tim plugged his album, God Bless Tiny Tim, a

collection of obscure American pop tunes, and it became one of the

year’s best sellers. Before long, Tim was a regular on the show. On

December 17, 1969, Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky live on The

Tonight Show. Carson biographer Laurence Leamer called the wed-

ding ‘‘the most-watched even in late-night television history.’’

Meanwhile, Carson perfected his trademark animal skits, ban-

tered in his calculated casual manner with such luminaries as

Muhammed Ali, Richard Nixon, Luciano Pavarotti, and Ronald

Reagan, and became a ﬁxture in American popular culture. In 1972,

The Tonight Show moved to beautiful downtown Burbank, California

where it was to play for another 20 years; its spartan set of ofﬁce

furniture and indoor plants becoming instantly recognizable to mil-

lions of American television viewers. The Tonight Show routine, from

Ed McMahon’s ‘‘Here’s Johnny!’’ through Carson’s free-wheeling

monologue and its selection of short skits and guests became the

model for late-night television. Tonight Show producers Rudy Tellez

described the program’s formula as ‘‘the bland leading the bland.’’

But, combined with Carson’s mildly risque sense of humor, it

consistently worked, facing and defeating competing shows from

Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Merv Grifﬁn, Alan Thicke, David Brenner,

and Joan Rivers.

Johnny Carson became famous as the man who lulled America

to sleep at night. When he left the air in May 1992, his reign was

undiminished, his persona was untarnished, and as the Washington

Post put it, ‘‘he was late night TV.’’

—Thurston Domina

CARTER FAMILYENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

445

FURTHER READING:

Haley, Alex. The Playboy Interviews. New York, Ballantine, 1993.

Leamer, Laurence. The King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson.

New York, Morrow, 1989.

Smith, Ronald L. Johnny Carson: An Unauthorized Biography. New

York, St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

The Carter Family

One of the founding acts of modern country music, the Carter

Family began recording in the late 1920s and developed a national

following that lasted throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. Among

the ﬁrst stars of hillbilly music, as country was labeled during that era,

they created popular versions of traditional folk songs, inﬂuencing

countless future country and folk artists. Their material included

classic songs such as ‘‘Wabash Cannonball,’’ and the melodies of

their songs were borrowed by other composers—among them Woody

Guthrie, who used one of their tunes as the musical basis for ‘‘This

Land Is Your Land.’’ The group was known for their vocal harmo-

nies, in addition to Maybelle Carter’s (1909-1978) innovative guitar

technique, in which she used her thumb to pluck out a melody on the

bass strings while using her ﬁngers to strum a rhythm accompaniment

on the treble strings. Referred to as the ‘‘Carter scratch,’’ this unique

style of playing transformed the role of the guitar in traditional music

ensembles by making it the lead instrument. While the original Carter

The Carter Family, from left: Maybelle, A.P., and Sara.

Family ceased performing and recording in 1943, Maybelle contin-

ued her career for several decades, ﬁrst in a group with her daughters,

and later as a solo artist.

Alvin Pleasant (A.P.) Delaney Carter (1891-1960) was a carpen-

ter in his early twenties when he married sixteen-year-old Sara

Dougherty (1899-1979) in 1915. The couple lived near Clinch

Mountain, in the tiny community of Maces Spring, Virginia, where

they provided musical entertainment at a variety of local social

gatherings. Sara led the singing with her resonant alto and strummed

an autoharp or guitar, while A.P. sang bass. They were occasionally

joined in these performances by some of their relatives, including

Sara’s cousin Maybelle Addington, a talented teenage guitarist and

singer who married A.P.’s brother Ezra in 1926. The following year,

this trio traveled to Bristol, Tennessee, where a New York talent scout

for the RCA Victor label named Ralph Peer was auditioning and

recording new artists. On August 1 and 2, the Carters recorded six

songs, and a few days later an unknown singer named Jimmie

Rodgers also made his ﬁrst recordings. The Bristol sessions were later

recognized as the beginning of the modern country music industry,

which grew as the result of the commercial success of these two

hillbilly acts and the tremendous effect they had on the artists who

followed them.

As sales of the Carters’ ﬁrst recordings increased, Peer made

arrangements for a second session that took place in Camden, New

Jersey, in the spring of 1928. There the group recorded several songs

that became country music standards, such as ‘‘Keep on the Sunny

Side,’’ which later became their theme, and ‘‘Wildwood Flower.’’ As

their popularity increased, the Carter Family began touring regularly

and continued recording. To sustain their popularity, A.P. sought to

supplement their repertoire of rural folk songs with material he

gathered on song-hunting trips. On some of these journeys, he was

joined by Lesley Riddle, an African-American blues guitarist who

may have also inﬂuenced Maybelle’s innovative guitar style. When

the Carter Family recorded songs discovered by A.P., he usually

received credit for the arrangement, a common practice that allowed

performers to receive publishing royalties for songs they did not

actually write. By the time they disbanded in 1943, the Carters had

recorded over 300 songs. While some were original compositions,

many recordings were derived from the songbooks and sheet music

A.P. collected, or traditional oral sources, or in some instances a

combination of both. Since many of these folk songs had never been

recorded, the versions popularized by the Carter Family served as

invaluable documents for music historians and hillbilly enthusiasts alike.

Sara and A.P. were separated in 1933 and divorced six years

later, although they maintained a professional relationship for ten

years after the separation. Toward the end of the 1930s, she married

A.P.’s ﬁrst cousin, Coy Bayes, and they moved to California. While

performing on Texas border radio stations during this period, the

Carter Family sometimes included Maybelle’s three daughters, Hel-

en, June, and Anita, as well as Sara and A.P.’s children, Gladys,

Jeanette, and Joe. After the breakup of the original Carter Family,

Sara and A.P. retired from music, while Maybelle started a new group

with her daughters. Calling themselves the Carter Sisters and Mother

Maybelle, they performed during the 1940s and joined the Grand Ole

Opry in 1950. Within a few years, the sisters parted ways to pursue

different interests. June married country artist Carl Smith in 1952, and

a few years later gave birth to Rebecca Carlene Smith (who began

performing in the late 1970s as Carlene Carter and was married to

British rocker Nick Lowe). In 1961, the year after A.P. Carter’s death,

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446

June began singing with Johnny Cash, and the two were married in

1968, after she helped him overcome his drug addiction.

Anita Carter also achieved success as a performer in the 1960s,

as did Mother Maybelle, who developed a new following as the result

of the folk music revival that began on college campuses toward the

end of the 1950s. The autoharp became her primary instrument, and

she impressed audiences with her ability to pick out melodies on the

strings rather than simply strumming chords. Maybelle performed at

the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, and she and Sara reunited a few years

later to record an album. In the late 1960s, Maybelle toured with

Johnny and June Carter Cash, and she was one of several inﬂuential

older country and bluegrass artists featured on the Nitty Gritty Dirt

Band’s 1972 double album Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Two years

after failing health caused her to stop performing, Maybelle died in

October of 1978, three months before Sara’s death. The original

Carter Family was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in

1970, and they are often called ‘‘The First Family of Country Music.’’

In the mid-1990s, Rounder Records released eight compact discs

containing all of their RCA Victor recordings. Seventy years after the

Carter Family ﬁrst began recording, their timeless music continued to

interest and inﬂuence listeners.

—Anna Hunt Graves

URTHER READING:

Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The

Saga of Women in Country Music. New York, Crown, 1993.

Carter, Janette. Living with Memories. Hiltons, Virginia, Carter

Family Memorial Music Center, 1983.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. In the Country of Country: People and Places in

American Music. New York, Pantheon, 1997.

Dew, Joan. Singers and Sweethearts: The Women of Country Music.

Garden City, New York, Doubleday and Company, 1977.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Austin, University of Texas

Press, 1985.

Caruso, Enrico (1873-1921)

Enrico Caruso, the quintessential Italian tenor, was the most

beloved singer of his day. Critics agreed that he was also probably the

best. Known throughout the Western world for his interpretations of

operatic roles, he also captured the popular imagination with Neapoli-

tan songs, sentimental period ballads, and that patriotic favorite of

World War I, Over There, rendered in his unique variant of the

English language. The emergence of the phonograph made Caruso an

entertainer as well as an artist, and he, perhaps more than anyone else,

demonstrated its potential as a creative medium.

Born in Naples near the end of Europe’s most placid century,

Caruso was one of 18 children of working class parents. At consider-

able ﬁnancial sacriﬁce, he studied voice with Vergine, a noted

Neapolitan teacher, who, nevertheless, envisioned for him only a

modest future. Singing ﬁrst in provincial theaters and later with

touring companies, Caruso gradually made his way to important

opera houses in Monte Carlo, Milan, and London. Though his initial

reviews were not always good, audiences responded to him. Despite

his increasing girth and a slightly comical stage appearance, his

exuberance and dramatic sense well complemented a voice that was

Enrico Caruso

soon being described as ‘‘golden.’’ With little formal education,

Caruso was a dedicated artist, who continued to reﬁne his theatrical

skills and musicianship throughout his life.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Caruso had developed

from a lyric into a dramatic tenor. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and

Russia, along with Western Europe, clamored for his appearances,

but it was the United States that made him a true national hero. First

engaged by New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903, he made this

house his home base for the rest of his life. Together with his fellow

countryman Arturo Toscanini, he established ‘‘the Met’’ as Ameri-

ca’s premier company and one of the great opera houses of the world.

He performed the full Italian repertoire, distinguishing himself as

Canio in Pagliacci, the Duke in Rigoletto, Radames in Aida, and

Samson in Samson et Delila. He visited synagogues and studied

Jewish life in preparation for his role as Eleazar in La Juive. But his

special love for things American was evident in his odd interpretation

of Dick Johnson in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. The composer

himself attended the Met opening. With his broad Mediterrane-

an gestures and throaty sobs, Caruso was not entirely convincing

as a Wild West outlaw hanged for his crimes, but audiences

applauded nevertheless.

Like other Italians successful in the New World, Caruso suffered

brushes with New York’s Black Hand, which attempted to extort

money from him. Rather than comply with their demands, Caruso

cooperated with authorities and two gangsters were apprehended. A

more embarrassing episode occurred in 1906 when the singer was

visiting the Central Park Zoo. A mysterious woman, who later

disappeared, accused him of molesting her in the monkey house.

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447

Caruso denied the charge; at the most he was probably demonstrating

a Southern Italian mode of admiration for an attractive woman.

Despite extensive newspaper coverage, the public soon chose to

forget the incident.

Two sons were born from Caruso’s long liaison with Ada

Giacchetti, an Italian soprano whose earlier marriage prevented a

regularization of their union. After deserting him in favor of her

chauffeur, Ada caused Caruso further suffering by publicly announc-

ing that she had never loved him. Near the end of his life, the singer

ﬁnally found domestic happiness in his marriage to Dorothy Park

Benjamin, a shy woman 20 years his junior. Formerly relegated to the

role of housekeeper and recluse by her wealthy and overbearing

father, Dorothy Caruso blossomed as the cherished wife of this

demonstrative man. The birth of a daughter, the only thing Dorothy

said she could give her husband that he had never had or could not

buy, brought further happiness to the last two years of his life.

Caruso’s generosity was legendary; he once hired a valet for his

own valet. Even rival singers invariably warmed to his personality.

They treasured the friendly caricatures he drew of them during

rehearsals. John McCormick, the Irish tenor of almost equal acclaim,

said: ‘‘I never loved any other man so much as Caruso.’’ America and

the world richly rewarded its favorite Italian with wealth and affec-

tion. But his obsession with honoring his commitments and fear of

disappointing his fans probably led to his premature death. Worn out

by exhaustion and lung ailments, he died at the age of 48, still in his

vocal glory. Headlines in American newspapers sadly announced

‘‘The Golden Voice Is Stilled.’’

When asked what makes a superb singer, Caruso liked to

answer: ‘‘A big chest, a big mouth, ninety percent memory, ten

percent intelligence, lots of hard work and something in the heart.’’

Clearly, he had these requisites in the proper amounts. Henry Pleasants

observed that in this singer a beautiful voice and a beautiful nature

seemed perfectly united, that his radiance did not originate merely in

his throat but in the man himself. Decades after his death, the highest

compliment that could be given a tenor was to suggest he might be

‘‘the New Caruso.’’ His Victor recordings, available in remastered

compact disk format, endure. Finally, the mega-concerts of leading

tenors of the 1990s, which blended classical and popular songs,

continued to perpetuate the legacy of Caruso in bringing the highest

musical artistry to the masses.

—Allene Phy-Olsen

URTHER READING:

Caruso, Dorothy. Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death. New York,

Simon and Schuster, 1945.

Greenfeld, Howard. Caruso. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983.

Pleasants, Henry. The Great Singers. New York, Simon and

Schuster, 1966.

Robinson, Francis. Caruso, His Life in Pictures. New York, Bramwell

House, 1957.

Carver, Raymond (1938-1988)

Raymond Carver’s success derived as much from the renewed

interest in the short story brought about by the publication of The

Stories of John Cheever in 1978 and the backlash against 1960s

metaﬁction as it did from Carver’s own genius. Although considered

one of the most recognizable and imitated stylists of his time, Carver

was in fact one of a growing number of minimalists whose ‘‘dirty

realism’’ came to be associated with (and for some demonstrated the

shortcomings of) university writing workshops. What chieﬂy distin-

guished Carver’s stories from the similarly laconic, uninﬂected,

disquietingly detached, and paratactic work of others was his focus-

ing on the marginal lives of generally working-class characters trying,

and often failing, to make do. Carver’s semi-autobiographical ﬁction

offered an alternative not only to earlier reports of the deaths of author

and character alike but to the pursuit of afﬂuence and the extolling of

the entrepreneurial spirit during the Reagan years. The triumph

achieved in a number of Carver’s later stories was more spiritual than

material and even then carefully qualiﬁed.

—Robert A. Morace

URTHER READING:

Meyer, Adam. Raymond Carver. New York, Twayne, 1994.

Salzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia,

University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Casablanca

The script for Casablanca (1942), one of the most successful

ﬁlms of all time, arrived at the Warner Brothers Studio the day after

the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941. Timing is just

one of the many reasons why this legendary ﬁlm about patriotism,

love, exile, and sabotage is often referred to as the happy result of a

series of accidents. If the studio had carried out its original plans to

cast Ronald Reagan as Rick Blaine or Ella Fitzgerald as Sam, now

Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in a scene from the ﬁlm Casablanca.

CASABLANCA ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

448

infamous lines and lyrics like ‘‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid’’ and ‘‘As

Time Goes By’’ may never have attained the same powerful signiﬁ-

cance they have had for generations of movie fans. Set in French

Morocco during WWII, Casablanca was directed by Michael Curtiz

and starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Peter

Lorre, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Conrad Veidt. Based

loosely on a play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Casablanca

proﬁles the life of Rick Blaine (Bogart), an embittered nightclub

owner with a broken heart and a checkered past. Blaine is exiled in

Casablanca as a result of the Nazi invasion in Europe. His elegant

casino/bar, Café Americain, is the unofﬁcial meeting point for war

refugees attempting to purchase exit visas on the black market to

reach the United States. Rick’s life comes to a halt when when his

long lost love, Ilsa (Bergman) comes into town in search of exit

papers for herself and her husband, famed resistance ﬁghter Victor

Laszlo (Henreid).

This comparatively low-budget, romance/adventure ﬁlm was

recognized as a masterpiece from the beginning. Casablanca won

several Oscars at the 1943 Academy Awards, including Best Picture,

Best Director, and Best Writing. The ﬁlm also received nominations

for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Music

of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Some critics attribute the timeless

freshness of the movie’s dialogue to the fact that nobody working on

the ﬁlm, including the scriptwriters, knew how the ﬁlm would turn

out until the last minute. In spite of the relatively low-budget of the

ﬁlm, playwrights Murray Burnett and Joan Alison were offered the

highest fee ever paid for an unproduced play—$20,000—for Every-

body Comes to Rick’s.

Filmed almost entirely in the Warner Brothers soundstage in

Burbank, Casablanca is one of the most popular ﬁlms of all time. In

1973, a Los Angeles Times headline announced that Casablanca was

ranked as Warner Brothers’ most popular ﬁlm in ﬁfty years. The

runners-up in this public poll were The Maltese Falcon (1941), Who’s

Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

and The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948). In 1977, the American

Film Institute disclosed its list of the best American ﬁlms of all time

before President Carter and a television audience at the John F.

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Casablanca came in third

place, behind Gone With the Wind (1939) and Citizen Kane (1941).

The ﬁlm’s director, Michael Curtiz, was born Mihaly Kertesz in

Hungary. Curtiz came to Warner Brothers from Austria in 1926,

having already made 62 silent pictures, and went on to become one of

the studio’s top money-earners. Between the period of 1930 and 1940

alone, he directed 45 talking ﬁlms ranging in genre from horror to

westerns to gangster ﬁlms. Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow (1943) was

listed in the FBI’s ‘‘Communist Inﬁltration of the Motion Picture

Industry’’ ﬁle as a source of Communistic propaganda. Though Jack

Warner defended the ﬁlm while it was in production in a letter to

Ambassador Davies, his later humiliation and fear as a result of

making the movie have been attributed to his readiness to turn dozens

of employees over to the House Committee on Un-American Activites

(HUAC) in 1947.

Given the fact that most Americans resisted the idea of U.S.

involvement in the war in Europe at the time during which Casablanca

was set, Jack Warner has been viewed as having declared war on

Germany early, not only with Casablanca, but with earlier ﬁlms like

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Underground (1941). Of all the

Hollywood moguls at the beginning of the war, Harry and Jack

Warner were anti-Nazi at a time when opposition to Hitler was far

from common. In July 1934, Warner Brothers became the ﬁrst studio

to close down operations and leave Germany. MGM, Fox, and

Paramount, by contrast, continued to operate in Germany up to 1939.

Between the period of 1942 and 1945, Hollywood produced 500

features ﬁlms which dealt with war subjects directly and were

designed to foster the nation’s support for the Allied war effort.

One of the more popular interpretations of Casablanca’s success

posits that it is a political movie centered around resistance to fascism.

A 1942 Motion Picture Herald article portrayed the ﬁlm as a tribute to

the occupied people of France. Its opening night performance in New

York was sponsored by the organizations ‘‘France Forever’’ and

‘‘Free French War Relief.’’ A French delegation of Foreign Legion-

naires, recently returned from battle, as well as leaders from the

DeGaulle movement, marched in a parade from Fifth Avenue to the

opening of the ﬁlm at the Hollywood Theater. The political ﬁlm

interpretation focuses on the anti-fascist aspects of Casablanca and

places importance on Ingrid Bergman’s character and her relationship

to fascism.

According to critic Umberto Eco, writing in ‘‘Casablanca: Cult

Movies and Intertextual Collage,’’ Casablanca can also be seen as a

cult object. As such, it possesses the following qualities: it provides

its audience with a completed vision of the world which fans can

incorporate into their own world; using quotes and trivia from the ﬁlm

as a form of shared expertise, the narrative can be dislocated so that

one need only remember a part of it, regardless of its original

relationship to the whole ﬁlm; and the ﬁlm displays a variety of ideas

and does not contain a central philosophy of composition. The cult

paradigm revolves around near worship of Bogart’s masculinity and

patriarchal discourse and the repitition of key moments in the ﬁlm’s

narrative. Casablanca diehards, for example, have elevated the status

of the song ‘‘As Time Goes By,’’ a song which references the

romantic relationship between Rick and Ilsa, at the expense of other

important songs, like ‘‘La Marseillais.’’ What Casablanca possesses,

Eco argues, is a heavy amount of archetypal appeal which creates a

feeling of déjà vu, drawing audiences to the ﬁlm again and again.

Regardless of how the movie is interpreted, stories of the

movie’s making continue to enthrall fans. According to Ingrid Bergman,

for example, the movie’s narrative was invented at the same time the

movie was shot. Not even Curtiz knew whether Ilsa would end up

with Rick or with Victor until far into the shoot. Because of this

continual state of improvisation on the set, the scriptwriters conjured

up any number of archetypal tropes and threw them into the plot.

Some claim that this almost baroque overabundance of stock formu-

las is the secret to Casablanca’s timeless success. Ingrid Bergman,

known for her cleanly appearance and objection to wearing makeup,

was universally liked on the set of Casablanca, by hairdressers and

wardrobe people alike. She was patient, easy to work with, and did not

demand privileges, though she was not given to forming lasting

friendships with any of the people on the set. By contrast, Humphrey

Bogart is said to have been obsessive about everything from his love

scenes, to the script, to his own personal life. He has been called every

name in the book, from ‘‘troublemaker’’ to a ‘‘real guy’’; Warner

Brothers publicist Ezra Goodman once called him ‘‘sadistic.’’ Bogart

is said to have been good friends with Claude Rains and Peter Lorre.

Lorre and Bogart lived a few blocks from each other in the Hollywood

Hills and worked together on two other Bogart movies, The Maltese

Falcon (1941) and All Through the Night (1942).

Popular for nearly six decades, Casablanca has reverberated

throughout American culture. Aside from numerous songs, book

titles, comedy routines, commercials, and magazine advertisements

that have made reference to the ﬁlm over the years, in 1972, Woody