Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D

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sons (who were two, ﬁve, and six when he died) be born in Puerto

Rico. Unfortunately, this pride often was misconstrued—and argu-

ably, one reason why he was not beloved earlier on was racism. The

expectation that he blend in rather than exude ethnicity is epitomized

by the fact that on all of Clemente’s Topps baseball cards issued

between 1958 and 1969, his name is Americanized as ‘‘Bob’’ Clemente.

Adding to the affront was that whenever Clemente would

comment that other ballplayers of equal accomplishment were luxuri-

ating in the limelight, he would be labeled a complainer and hypo-

chondriac. ‘‘As a teammate,’’ fellow Pittsburgh Pirate Willie Stargell

observed, ‘‘we had a chance to marvel at talents a lot of people didn’t

understand.’’ So it was no surprise that after the 1971 World Series,

upon being handed the MVP trophy, Clemente pointedly declared, ‘‘I

want everybody in the world to know that this is the way I play all the

time. All season. Every season.’’ Then, ever so typically, he spoke in

Spanish, asking for his father’s blessing.

The rule requiring a ballplayer to be retired for ﬁve years prior to

earning Hall of Fame eligibility was waived for Clemente. He was

inducted a year after his death, becoming the ﬁrst Hispanic to be so

honored. Since then, he has inspired thousands of Latino ballplayers.

‘‘Growing up in Puerto Rico, we got to learn a lot about his

character,’’ observed Bernie Williams, one of the major league stars

of the 1990s. ‘‘Clemente is a great hero for all Latin players,’’ added

Juan Gonzalez, a Williams peer and fellow Puerto Rican. ‘‘Not only

was he one of the best baseball players ever, but he was a great human

being as well.’’ Clemente also has been cherished by his teammates.

After pinch-hitting a game-winning ninth inning single in Game 2 of

1979 World Series, Pirate catcher Manny Sanguillen declared that he

wished his feat to be dedicated to the memory of Clemente. ‘‘He

helped us in a lot of ways,’’ summed up Willie Stargell, ‘‘to be the

players we were.’’

Clemente was the second ballplayer (after Jackie Robinson) to

be featured on a United States postage stamp. In 1973, the govern-

ment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico granted acreage for the

development of Roberto Clemente Sports City, which allows Puerto

Ricans to participate in a wide range of athletic pastimes. In 1993, his

eldest son, Roberto, Jr., established the Roberto Clemente Founda-

tion, which offers recreational and educational activities for Pitts-

burgh-area children while stressing the relevance of community

involvement. In 1994, the Pirates unveiled a statue of Clemente out-

side Three Rivers Stadium. Throughout 1998—the twenty-ﬁfth anni-

versary of his death—the Baseball Hall of Fame issued a special Ro-

berto Clemente commemorative admission ticket. Each year, one major

leaguer receives the True Value/Roberto Clemente Man of the Year

Award for combining on-ﬁeld heroics with community responsibility.

Roberto Clemente merits every honor he has received. In an era

of pampered, egocentric athletes who charge big bucks to little kids

for autographs, the manner in which Clemente lived and died is all the

more poignant and praiseworthy. As he once observed, ‘‘Any time

you have an opportunity to make things better and you don’t, then you

are wasting your time on this earth.’’

—Rob Edelman

URTHER READING:

Markusen, Bruce. Roberto Clemente: The Great One. Champaign,

Illinois, Sports Publishing, Inc., 1998.

Miller, Ira. Roberto Clemente. New York, Tempo Books, 1973.

Musick, Phil. Who Was Roberto? A Biography of Roberto Clemente.

Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1974.

Wagenheim, Kal. Clemente! New York, Praeger Publishers, 1973.

Walker, Paul Robert. Pride of Puerto Rico: The Life of Roberto

Clemente. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Cleopatra

The story of Cleopatra has been a perennial favorite for the

Hollywood cinema. The most notorious version remains the 1963

epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—a ﬁlm whose box

ofﬁce failure is credited with helping to destroy the Hollywood studio

system. Made for a then staggering 44 million dollars, the production

was fraught with setbacks and scandals, and ﬁlm historian David

Cook noted that the ‘‘disastrous’’ four-hour ﬁlm had not broken even,

some thirty-six years later. Received badly by both audiences and

critics, Cleopatra paled in comparison to the off-screen antics of its

stars. The cast’s real-life adultery, life-threatening illness, and the

grand passion between Taylor and Burton provoked the ﬁrst major

paparazzi feeding frenzy of the 1960s.

—Jeannette Sloniowski

URTHER READING:

Brodsky, Jack, and Nathan Weiss. The Cleopatra Papers: A Private

Correspondence. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1963.

Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. 2nd ed. New York, W.W.

Norton and Company, 1990.

Clift, Montgomery (1920-1966)

Four years older than Brando, eleven years senior to James

Dean, but ﬁnding stardom only just ahead of both, Montgomery Clift

is invariably bracketed with them—the leader of the great trio of the

beautiful and doomed who emerged from the Actors Studio in New

York City to transform the postwar face of screen acting with their

individual and collective intensity. He died too soon to recover from

his failures and too late to become a mythic icon like Dean or Marilyn

Monroe, but to examine his all-too-short ﬁlmography is to be remind-

ed of his achievements that have been all too often buried beneath the

rubble of his ruined life.

Only cast in serious dramas, the fragile and gifted Clift, frequent-

ly quivering with painful introspection, was the screen’s great outsid-

er, misﬁt, or victim during the 1950s—the ultimately rejected fortune

hunter of The Heiress (1949); driven by despair to murder and by

murder to guilt in A Place in the Sun (1951), his ﬁrst ﬁlm with

Elizabeth Taylor; beaten and humiliated for his refusal to ﬁght in the

boxing ring as Prewitt in From Here to Eternity (1953); a priest

tormented by the secrets of the confessional in Hitchcock’s I Confess

(1953); the columnist unable to cope with the pain of the lovelorn in

Lonelyhearts (1959); a victim of the Nazi concentration camps in

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); and last, but far from least, one of

John Huston’s Misﬁts (1961), corralling wild horses with Clark Gable

and Marilyn Monroe.

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Montgomery Clift

Born Edward Montgomery Clift in Omaha, Nebraska, the twin

brother of a sister and the son of a neurotic, social-climbing and

dangerously possessive mother, Clift was taken traveling in Europe

from an early age. He acquired polish, manners, and the right

acquaintance with art and literature. Precocious and sophisticated, he

began acting at age fourteen and was on Broadway a year later. His

rise was rapid, his connections inﬂuential, and by the time he

appeared in two Thornton Wilder plays, The Skin of Our Teeth and

Our Town, he was destined for theater stardom. Encouraged by Elia

Kazan, he became a founding student of the Actors Studio in 1947 but

soon succumbed to Hollywood, which had been courting him for

some time.

Clift’s ﬁrst ﬁlm was Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), which

cast him as a cowboy, pitting his almost girlish persona against John

Wayne, whose adopted son he played. The ﬁlm was, however, not

released until after Clift’s next, The Search (1948) for Fred Zinnemann,

which gained him the ﬁrst of his four Oscar nominations for his

sensitive performance as a soldier helping a stateless orphan in war-

torn Germany ﬁnd his missing mother. When Red River came out

Clift became a star, the darling of the fan magazines and the adoring

young girls of America.

But Clift, anguished by his homosexuality and increasingly

addicted to drugs and alcohol, was an unhappy man with a disastrous

private life that he strove to keep secret. In 1956, after a party given by

his most devoted friend, Elizabeth Taylor, the actor was involved in a

car crash. His severe injuries included the severing of nerves that

rendered the left side of his face immobile, effectively destroying the

perfection of his ﬁne beauty. He was ﬁlming Raintree County (1957)

with Taylor at the time and, despite director Edward Dmytryk’s

efforts to photograph him in such a way as to avoid exposing the

extent of the damage, both Clift and the ﬁlm remained inert.

Driven ever further into self-destruction and loss of control, the

actor did well to emerge with credit from Judgment at Nuremberg and

The Misﬁts, but he was disastrously cast as Freud (1962), John

Huston’s altogether misguided biopic about the analyst, during the

making of which Clift, whose staring eyes had become a too-

prominent feature of his on-screen face, underwent a double cataract

operation. After Freud, Clift’s mainstream career was over. He had

been overshadowed by his nemesis, Brando, in The Young Lions

(1958) and was of little account in the overwrought Suddenly Last

Summer (1959) with Taylor and Katharine Hepburn. He dragged

himself out of the murky private world into which he had descended

to play one last loner in a French ﬁlm, L’Espion (The Defector) in

1966, before dying of a heart attack at the age of forty-ﬁve.

—Robyn Karney

URTHER READING:

Bosworth, Patricia. Montgomery Clift: A Biography. New York,

Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978.

Hoskyns, Barney. Montgomery Clift, Beautiful Loser. London,

Bloomsbury Publishing, 1991.

Kalfatovic, Mary C. Montgomery Clift: A Bio-Bibliography. Con-

necticut, Greenwood Publishing, 1994.

Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York,

Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Cline, Patsy (1932-1963)

Known for her smooth, powerful delivery, Patsy Cline became

the ﬁrst successful crossover female country vocalist with hits in the

pop market during the early 1960s. Cline was an aggressive artist who

fought against efforts to mold her into a pop sensation. She initially

disliked many of the songs that became her biggest hits, preferring up-

tempo country tunes to the more accessible ballads that made her

famous. As her relatively brief career came to an end in 1963 when

she died in a plane crash, the slick recording style known as the

‘‘Nashville sound’’ was taking over the industry. In Country Music,

U.S.A., historian Bill C. Malone notes that Cline ‘‘moved female

country singing closer to the pop mainstream and light years away

from the sound’’ of artists with a more traditional, rural style such as

Kitty Wells. Despite her resistance to being typecast as a pop artist,

Cline played a major role in Nashville’s transformation from hillbilly

to ‘‘countrypolitan.’’

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley on September 8, 1932, in Gore,

Virginia, Cline began performing at an early age. She won a dancing

contest at the age of four, and a few years later she was playing the

piano by ear. By the time her family moved to the larger town of

Winchester, the teenage Cline was interested in singing professional-

ly. She began appearing regularly on a local radio show after

approaching the announcer, who recalls being impressed by her nerve

and her voice. In 1948, she traveled to Nashville to audition for the

Grand Ol’ Opry, and appeared on Roy Acuff’s radio program on

WSM. Without an immediate offer, however, she could not afford to

stay in town for long and returned home after a few days. Winchester

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Patsy Cline

band leader Bill Peer hired Cline to be the lead singer of his act, the

Melody Boys and Girls, in 1952. Peer became her manager, and

proposed that she use the stage name Patsy; shortly thereafter, she met

and married Gerald Cline.

In 1954, Cline signed a recording contract with Four Star

Records that would prove to be a major stumbling block in her career.

The contract paid her only small royalties and included a stipulation

that her material had to be approved by the label. As a result, almost

all of Cline’s pre-1960 recordings were songs chosen by the label’s

owner, Bill McCall, and published by Four Star, enabling the label to

proﬁt from the publishing royalties. Four Star made a deal that

allowed major label Decca Records to lease Cline’s music, giving her

the opportunity to work with top Nashville session musicians and a

gifted producer, Owen Bradley. Although Cline’s talent was apparent

to those who heard her sing, the recordings she made in the mid-1950s

were largely ignored. A fan of pop singer Kay Starr, she was capable

of styles other than country, and Bradley quickly recognized this.

Though Cline preferred country material, the songs from her early

recordings ran the gamut.

At the end of 1956, at McCall’s insistence, Cline recorded

‘‘Walkin’ After Midnight,’’ a tune she reportedly described as

‘‘nothin’ but a little ol’ pop song,’’ according to biographer Ellis

Nassour. Before the record’s release she made her national television

debut on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in January of 1957. Cline

favored the western outﬁts commonly worn by country singers of that

era, but for this performance she was told to wear a cocktail dress.

Godfrey’s staff also encouraged her to abandon country music and

move to New York. She was not persuaded, however, and continued

to promote the record with appearances on the Opry and a rock ’n’ roll

show in New York hosted by Alan Freed. The song became a Top Ten

hit on the country charts and went to number 17 on the pop charts.

That same year, Patsy and Gerald Cline were divorced, and in

the fall she married Charlie Dick. Over the next two years, she

released several singles and gave birth to her ﬁrst child. During the

summer of 1959, she hired Ramsey ‘‘Randy’’ Hughes as her manag-

er. As the result of Cline’s failure to record any major hits after

‘‘Walkin’ After Midnight,’’ McCall chose not to renew her Four Star

contract. At the beginning of 1960, she began performing regularly on

the Opry, fulﬁlling a childhood dream. Decca signed her later that

year, and Bradley found the perfect song for her ﬁrst session. In 1961,

‘‘I Fall to Pieces,’’ featuring the background vocals of the Jordanaires,

became her ﬁrst number one country hit, reaching number 12 on the

pop charts. The success of this record conﬁrmed Bradley’s belief that

Cline could capture a much larger audience by focusing her efforts on

pop ballads. Later hits such as ‘‘Crazy’’ and ‘‘She’s Got You’’

established her as a torch singer, and Bradley began using string

accompaniments on a semi-regular basis. These lush arrangements

typiﬁed the Nashville sound, and Bradley became a proponent for this

new style. By late 1962, she was headlining a month long engagement

in Las Vegas, wearing evening gowns. On March 5, 1963, a plane

crash outside Camden, Tennessee, killed Cline, along with Cowboy

Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Randy Hughes.

Throughout her career, Cline had a reputation for being outspo-

ken and opinionated. Those who knew her described her as a

‘‘brassy’’ woman who drank and cursed along with her male counter-

parts. She was also noted for being kindhearted and generous,

particularly toward other female country artists struggling for suc-

cess. The male-dominated recording industry of the 1950s was

unaccustomed to self-conﬁdent women, and Cline’s headstrong tem-

perament led to arguments with Bradley over her material. The

contradictions between her professional image and her personal

background reﬂect the conﬂicting forces that were shaping country

music in the early 1960s. Despite changes in country and pop styles,

the legendary voice of Patsy Cline remains timeless. She gained a new

following in 1985, when Jessica Lange starred in the ﬁlm biography

Sweet Dreams. Over three decades after her death her recordings

continued to appear on the charts.

—Anna Hunt Graves

URTHER READING:

Jones, Margaret. Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline. New York,

HarperCollins, 1994.

Kingsbury, Paul. The Patsy Cline Collection. Nashville, MCA Rec-

ords/Country Music Foundation, 1991.

Lewis, George H., editor. All That Glitters: Country Music in

America. Bowling Green, Bowling Green State University Popu-

lar Press, 1993.

CLINTON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

532

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

Press, 1985.

Nassour, Ellis. Patsy Cline. New York, Dorchester, 1985.

Clinton, George (1940—)

George Clinton was a doo-wop singer until he discovered acid

rock and protest music in the late 1960s, a combination to which he

added cosmological rants and booming bass lines to create a new style

of socially conscious, Afrocentric funk. His bands Parliament and

Funkadelic reached black and white audiences alike in the 1970s with

their psychedelic live shows and infectious, tongue-in-cheek concept

albums (Mothership Connection, 1976; One Nation Under a Groove,

1978). Clinton disappeared amid drug and ﬁnancial entanglements,

but reemerged in 1983 as rappers and hip-hop artists began sampling

his music and borrowing his aesthetics. In response, he formed the P-

Funk All-Stars (a permutation of his many splinter groups) to support

new albums and reissues of classic works, reinforcing the vitality of

his universal—yet pointedly black—music.

—Tony Brewer

URTHER READING:

Marsh, David. George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History (For the

Record). New York, Avon, 1998.

Vincent, Rickey, and George Clinton. Funk: The Music, the People,

and the Rhythm of the One. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange is one of the ﬁnest sociological and science

ﬁction ﬁlms ever made. With its highly stylized and often comic

violence, its over-the-top set decoration, and its unlikeable protago-

nist, the ﬁlm has exerted a wide-ranging inﬂuence on popular culture.

Opening in New York on December 20, 1971, to mostly ecstatic

praise, A Clockwork Orange immediately revolutionized the science

ﬁction ﬁlm by opening the way for more elaborate dystopian narra-

tives and intelligent cinematic analyses of social dilemmas.

Based on Anthony Burgess’s 1966 novel of the same name, A

Clockwork Orange tells the story of Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a

brilliant young thug whose thirst for violence, rape, and aggression

lands him in prison. To free himself from prison, he must submit to a

perverse behavior modiﬁcation technique that strips him of his free

will. Director Stanley Kubrick’s portrayal of conditioned-reﬂex therapy,

behavioral psychology, and systematized and bureaucratic cruelty

placed audiences in the uncomfortable position of feeling sympathy

for a brutal and seemingly immoral character.

Kubrick counters Alex’s brutality with that of the State police.

Alex’s earlier crimes pale in comparison to his torture by his old gang

buddies-cum-cops. His medical rehabilitation by the Ludovico tech-

nique, which includes viewing endless scenes of rape, murder,

lynching, and violence while listening to the music of Alex’s beloved

‘‘Ludwig Van’’ (Beethoven), seems more egregious than any injury

Alex inﬂicted. These juxtapositions force the audience to make an

uncomfortable moral choice between the virtue of free will with all its

perversions and the appeal of legislative/social control with its

tendency toward totalitarianism. Though Kubrick had touched on

these themes in his earlier ﬁlms—including, Paths of Glory (1957),

Dr. Strangelove, Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to

Love the Bomb (1964), and even Spartacus (1960) and 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968)—none illustrated his message as well as A

Clockwork Orange.

Kubrick accentuates the moral choices in the ﬁlm with brilliant

cinematic couplings. He sets a murder/rape scene to ‘‘Singin in the

Rain,’’ a song celebrating the optimism and bliss of life. He pairs

Alex’s desire for pain and violence with his love and devotion to

Beethoven, which is highlighted by Kubrick’s use of both classical

and electronic music throughout the ﬁlm. His elaborate set designs

contrast the blue- and white-collar worlds with the State. The Cat

Lady’s enormous penis sculpture and the submissive, objectiﬁed

naked female sculptures at the Korova Milkbar are strikingly different

from the ‘‘ﬂatblock’’ State architecture of the prison and Alex’s

parents’ home, which is an eerie twin of the Housing Authority

projects littering the inner cities of the world. Kubrick also highlights

the differences between the ﬂatness of the ‘‘ofﬁcial’’ language and

the vitality of the teenage argot, Nasdat: a home is called ‘‘HOME,’’

but in Nasdat ‘‘horrorshow’’ means awe and pleasure and ‘‘in-out-in-

out’’ is a evocative term for sex.

These cinematic exercises are reﬂected by innovations in tech-

nique speciﬁc to Kubrick’s ﬁlmmaking. His hallmarks include chill-

ing natural lighting, extreme close-ups, interminable tracking or

panning shots, jump-cut sequencing, extreme wide-angle lenses, and

low-angle and slow motion shots. Kubrick’s technical precision is

matched only by his deeply intellectual consideration of timeless

issues of freedom, pleasure, law, and punishment. Though New York

Times ﬁlm critic Pauline Kael criticized the lack of ‘‘motivating

emotion’’ in the protagonist and comic violence, many ﬁlm directors

found much worth borrowing from it. Films using similar techniques

include THX-118, Westworld, and A Boy and His Dog. Reﬂections of

the movie’s highly complex and ambiguous antihero can be seen in

ﬁlms by Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino. In

addition, the midnight movie crowd adopted the ﬁlm’s unique lan-

guage called Nasdat and would shout along with the movie on college

campuses across the country. Kubrick’s daring vision for A Clock-

work Orange was rewarded with the New York Film Critics Award

for Best Picture as well as four Academy Award nominations. The

ﬁlm placed its director in the company of the most inﬂuential and

creative artists of the twentieth century.

—Scott Thill

URTHER READING:

Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New Expanded

Edition. New York, Continuum Publishers, 1995.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloom-

ington, Indiana University Press, 1982.

Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick Directs, Expanded Edition. New

York, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1972.

CLOONEYENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

533

A scene from the ﬁlm A Clockwork Orange.

Clooney, Rosemary (1928—)

No one more epitomized female vocalists of the 1950s, a time

when America was hooked on novelty songs, than Rosemary Clooney.

With her strong, belting, melodious style and novelty hits ‘‘Come on

a My House,’’ ‘‘Mambo Italiano,’’ and ‘‘This Old House,’’ Rose-

mary Clooney swiftly achieved stardom in the early 1950s. She also

joined the ranks of the era’s top female vocalists, including such stars

as Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, and Patty Page. Her career transcended the

concert circuit, including television and ﬁlm appearances; she proved

a perfect match for the rapidly developing television industry. During

the later years of Clooney’s career, with a more smoky, rich voice,

critics compared her with top performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Mel

Torme, and Frank Sinatra.

Born in Maysville, Kentucky, on May 28, 1928, Rosemary and

her sister Betty often performed at political rallies for their paternal

grandfather. When Rosemary was 13, the family moved to Cincin-

nati, Ohio. During her high-school years Rosemary and sister Betty

performed with a local band until, at the age of 16, the two were hired

by Cincinnati radio station WLW to perform on a nightly music

program. Performing under the name ‘‘The Clooney Sisters,’’ the duo

continued to work at the station for two years. By 1945, however, the

Clooney Sisters had joined the Tony Pastor band and were performing

one-night stands across the country in theaters, hotel ballrooms, and at

high school proms. Due to her better mid-range voice, Rosemary sang

solos for the sister team. The Clooney Sisters performed with Tony

Pastor for two years until, suddenly, during a performance in Elkhart,

Indiana in 1949, Betty quit during the intermission. Soon after,

Rosemary embarked on a solo career.

Following her departure from the Tony Pastor Band, Clooney

signed a modest recording contract with Columbia Records. She had a

modicum of success at Columbia with the children’s songs ‘‘Me and

My Teddy Bear’’ and ‘‘Little Johnny Chickadee.’’ Mixed in with

recording dates were appearances at night clubs, on radio stations, and

on television. It was, however, her performance on Arthur Godfrey’s

Talent Scouts in 1950 that led to her run on Songs for Sale, premiering

July 7, 1950. Simulcast on radio and television, the program showcased

the talents of aspiring songwriters, with Rosemary Clooney and Tony

Bennett as vocalists for the program. It was also during this period in

her life that, under the inﬂuence of Columbia’s artist and repertoire

man Mitch Miller, Rosemary Clooney produced her ﬁrst big hit

‘‘Come on a My House,’’ which sold over a million copies. This was

followed by pop hits ‘‘Botcha Me’’ and ‘‘Suzy Snowﬂake.’’ Count-

less other chart busters followed including her ballad ‘‘Tenderly,’’

‘‘This Old House,’’ and ‘‘Hey There.’’

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534

Rosemary Clooney

Bing Crosby, a big fan of Clooney’s music, recommended her

for a screen test at Paramount Studios. Cast as a New York vaudevillian

who attempts to hide an illegal alien, she made her premiere in the

1953 ﬁlm The Stars Are Singing. Later that year she appeared with

Bob Hope in the comedy Here Come the Girls, but her most notable

achievement in motion pictures occurred in 1954 when she appeared

with Bing Crosby in the hit ﬁlm White Christmas. During this period

she also began a CBS radio program called The Rosemary Clooney

Show, which lasted for one season, and made the television variety

show circuit as a guest on the Ed Sullivan Show, Perry Como Show,

and Steve Allen Show.

In 1957, the Music Corporation of America (MCA) contracted

Clooney to produce the syndicated half-hour television program The

Rosemary Clooney Show. The program was well received by the

general public and critics alike, and included notable musical talents

the Nelson Riddle Orchestra and the Hi-Los. Seemingly never with-

out energy or creativity, she then began a NBC variety series titled

The Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney in the fall of 1957.

Because of personal conﬂicts between her husband, Jose Ferrer, and

Mitch Miller, her career was at an end with Columbia Records and she

joined the RCA label.

During the 1960s Clooney’s life was in turmoil. Her marriage to

Jose Ferrer was on-again-off-again, ﬁnally ending in divorce. Clooney

was left with ﬁve children to rear. She appeared on a number of

variety shows and specials on network television, and also performed

on the cabaret circuit. By 1968, Clooney was heavily dependent on

drugs and had just ended a two-year relationship with a drummer.

After working with the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign in

1968, she was devastated by his assassination and suffered a severe

nervous breakdown during a performance at Harold’s Club in Reno

Nevada. She underwent extensive psychotherapy for eight years

following the breakdown. She chronicled her psychiatric problems in

her autobiography This for Remembrance, which was dramatized on

television as Escape From Madness.

During the 1980s, a much happier and heavier Rosemary Clooney

emerged with an assured straightforward belting style all her own.

She performed on the Las Vegas nightclub circuit, toured with

theatrical revues, appeared on network television programs, and

assisted in the television production of her life story Rosie: The

Rosemary Clooney Story, providing the soundtrack singing voices.

An emblematic ﬁgure, at the close of the twentieth century she

ﬁnds herself revisiting many of her classics from the 1940s and 1950s

at concerts and on recordings. Like the changing times in which she

lived, Clooney proved that a woman could have a successful career, a

family, and survive many setbacks. Her work in the music industry,

like many post-World War II female singers, helped pave the way for

future generations of women artists.

—Michael A. Lutes

URTHER READING:

Clooney, Rosemary. This for Remembrance: The Autobiography of

Rosemary Clooney, an Irish-American Singer. New York, Play-

boy Press, 1977.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

With its elaborate, unprecedented use of special effects and

novel portrayal of extraterrestrials, Close Encounters of the Third

Kind opened to popular acclaim in November 1977, eventually

earning $240 million in worldwide release and signiﬁcantly contrib-

uting to director Steven Spielberg’s status as the most commercially

proﬁtable ﬁlmmaker in the new Hollywood. Close Encounters de-

picts an escalation in the number of UFO sightings worldwide and

climaxes in the ﬁrst ‘‘diplomatic’’ contact between mankind and

extraterrestrials at a remote military/scientiﬁc base in the Wyoming

wilderness. In stark contrast to numerous earlier cinematic portrayals

of alien visitors as hostile ﬁends intent on world domination, Spielberg’s

utopian ﬁlm presented the extraterrestrials as childishly mischievous

but benign: wondrous new friends from the stars. Spielberg would

return to some of Close Encounters’s themes again in 1982’s E.T.:

The Extra-Terrestrial, another worldwide blockbuster and for a time

the most lucrative motion picture ever.

Two parallel stories are developed in Close Encounters. The ﬁrst

focuses on a scientiﬁc team, led by a Frenchman named Lacombe

(famous French ﬁlm director Francois Truffaut), that tracks global

UFO activity. The second centers around a midwestern everyman

named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who is destined to be humani-

ty’s emissary to the stars. The ﬁlm opens in the windswept Mexican

desert, where the airplanes (minus their pilots) of a long-lost military

training ﬂight have mysteriously appeared. Lacombe’s team discov-

ers that the antique airplanes are in perfect working order. Meanwhile,

the skies over the American Midwest are abuzz with strange objects

and lights. A power company lineman, Neary sees a group of UFOs

ﬂying down lonely back roads near Muncie, Indiana, and becomes

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KINDENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

535

A UFO makes contact, in a scene from the ﬁlm Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

obsessed with encountering the aliens again. Unhappy with the

demands of adult married life, Neary shares his obsession with a local

woman named Jillian (Melinda Dillon), who is in search of her young

son, Barry, following his abduction by a UFO.

As the international scientiﬁc team moves closer to setting up a

secret landing site at the base of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming to beckon

the visitors, Neary becomes more ﬁxated on a mental image—that of

an oddly shaped mountain—implanted in his head during his UFO

encounter. Eventually, his tortured attempts to re-create the image in

reality lead him to build a mountain of mud and garbage in his living

room and thus drive his family away for good. When he sees Devil’s

Tower on television during coverage of a supposed nerve-gas spill in

the area (actually a hoax concocted by the military to give the UFO

team the required secrecy for ﬁrst contact), Neary ﬁnally knows

where he has to go and takes Jillian with him. After a hazardous cross-

country trek, Neary and Jillian reach the secret landing site and

witness mankind’s ﬁrst attempts to communicate with the swarms of

beautifully illuminated extraterrestrial craft through a ﬁve-note musi-

cal tone keyed to a light board. A gigantic mothership—a literal city

of light in the night sky—arrives to release numerous abductees,

including Jillian’s son. Different types of aliens also disembark and

mingle with the delighted scientists. Meanwhile, Neary, with Lacombe’s

blessing, suits up for a long journey aboard the mothership. As soon as

the ecstatic Neary and his alien escort disappear inside it, the

mothership soars majestically back into the night.

The ﬁlm originated in Spielberg’s memories of his formative

years in Arizona, where as a teenager he had made an 8mm sound ﬁlm

on the subject of UFOs entitled Firelight. Throughout the beginning

of his career as a professional ﬁlmmaker, Spielberg intended to

remake his amateur ﬁlm and call it Watch the Skies. During produc-

tion of Jaws (1975), Spielberg often entertained his crew with tales

about UFOs and his plans to make a ﬁlm about them; with the critical

and ﬁnancial success of Jaws, Spielberg had the clout to do so. He and

other writers, including Paul Schrader, worked on various screenplay

drafts, although it was Spielberg who received sole credit. He also re-

titled the ﬁlm Close Encounters of the Third Kind—a puzzling title to

all except UFO buffs, who would recognize the phrase as UFO expert

and Northwestern University professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s termi-

nology for physical contact with extraterrestrials.

Columbia Studios agreed to ﬁnance the project at an initial cost

of $16 million. Pre-production scouting settled on the Devil’s Tower

location as a suitably mysterious backdrop for the ﬁlm’s climax. The

ﬁlm quickly went over budget, ﬁnally costing approximately $20

million because of a host of factors, including the logistical demands

of location shooting in Wyoming and India (for a brief sequence

involving thousands of extras pointing to the sky); the lengthy

CLOSET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

536

climactic scene, which required an enormous and problem-plagued

set in a hangar in Alabama; and the special effects, supervised by

Douglas Trumbull, which involved months of planning and con-

sumed millions of extra dollars. Spielberg’s fanatic attention to detail

and demands for secrecy on the set added to the studio headaches and

delayed the ﬁlm’s release date. Producer Julia Phillips did not

approve of some key ﬁgures associated with the production, includ-

ing Truffaut, and was eventually ﬁred by the studio head, David

Begelman. Columbia itself was suffering from major ﬁnancial prob-

lems and scandals, and a negative early review of the ﬁlm did nothing

to improve frazzled nerves in the production ofﬁces. However, once

the ﬁlm opened, the reviews were much more positive, and the ﬁlm

began to make enough money to be considered another huge success

for Spielberg.

There are several different versions of the ﬁlm in existence. A

few years after its initial run, Spielberg returned to the ﬁlm, re-titling

it Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition. At a cost

of $2 million and a seven-week shoot, he ﬁlmed new scenes, the most

notable of which is a rather disappointing look inside the mothership,

and removed some of the lengthy middle portion of the ﬁlm detailing

Neary’s breakdown. He also added a brief rendition of ‘‘When You

Wish upon a Star’’ to the musical score accompanying the mothership’s

ascent to the heavens. The new version, actually a few minutes shorter

than the original, was released in 1980. A later television version

combined elements of both ﬁlms. The special edition was the version

most widely available on videostore shelves until a 1998 video

release, subtitled The Collector’s Edition, a re-edited mix of the

original version plus ﬁve short sequences from the 1980 special edition.

—Philip L. Simpson

URTHER READING:

Balaban, Bob. Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary. New York,

Paradise Press, 1978.

Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. New York, Citadel

Press, 1995.

Mott, Donald R., and Cheryl McAllister Saunders. Steven Spielberg.

Boston, Twayne, 1986.

Perry, George. Steven Spielberg Close Up: The Making of His

Movies. New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998.

Taylor, Philip M. Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their

Meaning. New York, Continuum, 1992.

The Closet

Since the 1950s, ‘‘coming out of the closet’’ has been the

commonly accepted expression for a gay or lesbian person revealing

their sexual orientation since the 1950s. Though many advances in

gay rights and gay pride have been realized since then, coming out of

the closet remained a major milestone in any gay person’s life into the

late 1990s.

The expression ‘‘coming out’’ originated in the early twentieth

century when stylish drag ‘‘debutante’’ balls were popular society

events. Especially in African American communities, the drag queen

in-the-know aspired to be presented at these balls, just as young

heterosexual women ‘‘came out’’ to society at their debutante balls. It

was only later, in the 1950s atmosphere of hiding the abnormal, that

the connotation came to be that of coming out of a dark closet.

Perhaps playing on the expression ‘‘skeleton in the closet,’’ meaning

a guilty secret, homosexuals themselves were the sinister skeletons

lurking behind the closet door. In the decades since gay liberation

began, the expression has slipped into popular usage, and ‘‘coming

out of the closet’’ is used in a lighthearted way for any admission of a

slightly guilty secret.

The closet remains a metaphor for the shame and oppression that

forces many gays to hide their identities. ‘‘Closeted’’ or ‘‘closet-y’’

are also used as adjectives, sometimes derisively, to describe gays

who pretend to be heterosexual. ‘‘Closet case’’ refers to someone

suspected of being gay but unaware of it or hiding it. ‘‘Coming out’’ is

used among gays to signify the ﬁrst time they acted on their sexuality

(as in, ‘‘I came out when I was ﬁfteen with my best friend’’) as well as

the traditional means of announcing their sexuality ‘‘to the world.’’

‘‘Outing’’ has gained usage as a verb meaning the exposure of

someone else’s gayness, particularly someone who is well-known

and closeted.

Because of the widespread assumption of heterosexuality in

American society, coming out of the closet is a lifelong endeavor for

gays. Gay men and lesbians must decide whether to come out to

friends, to immediate family, to extended family, at work, and so on,

and each decision involves a new set of worries and consequences.

Even relatively well-known gays must continually assert their identi-

ty in new situations or remain in the closet by default.

Gay activists have long touted the importance of coming out of

the closet, insisting that much of the oppression gays experience

would be diffused if their true numbers were known. In this spirit, the

ﬁrst National Coming Out Day was declared on October 11, 1988, the

ﬁrst anniversary of the second gay and lesbian March on Washington,

D.C. The idea behind National Coming Out Day is to encourage gays

to come out of the closet to at least one person on that day. Some

organizations have even distributed printed cards for gays to give to

bank tellers and store clerks announcing that they have just served a

gay client.

Though in the days of gay sitcom characters, noted gays on

magazine covers, and many openly gay organizations, the closet may

seem like a quaint remnant of a former time. Yet gays who do not live

in urban areas, do not have protected jobs, or do not have understand-

ing families still fear the repercussions of coming out. It may be true

that tolerance will come only when the public realizes how many gay

people there are, even among their friends, family, and most respected

public ﬁgures. However, to gays who have been harassed or beaten,

or gays who have lost or had to ﬁght court battles to keep their

children, gays who have lost their jobs, coming out of the closet may

seem a luxury they can ill afford.

—Tina Gianoulis

URTHER READING:

Bono, Chastity, and Billie Fitzpatrick. Family Outing. New York,

Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

Day, Nancy E., and Patricia Schoenrade, ‘‘Staying in the Closet

Versus Coming Out: Relationships between Communication about

Sexual Orientation and Work Attitudes.’’ Personnel Psychology.

Vol. 50, No. 1, Spring 1997, 147.

Harbeck, Karen M., editor. Coming Out of the Classroom Closet: Gay

and Lesbian Students, Teachers, and Curricula. New York,

Haworth Press, 1992.

CNNENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

537

CNN

CNN (Cable News Network) was rated ‘‘the most believable’’

of television news sources in a 1990 Times Mirror poll. By the end of

the twentieth century it had established itself as the leading news-

gathering organization, not only in the United States, but in the world.

Although in its early days CNN was a little-respected, self-described

‘‘rough around the edges’’ long-shot, by the 1990s other television

news departments feared its domination so much that NBC and Fox

decided to compete directly, on cable. Early CNN critics doubted that

television could host a 24 hour news channel, but executives soon

agreed that there was enough of a market for a number of them. By the

end of the twentieth century, CNN’s growth into a family of net-

works—CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNN en Espanõl,

CNNfn (ﬁnancial news), CNN-SI (sports), CNN Airport Network,

CNN Radio, and CNN Interactive (Internet)—has positioned it as the

ﬁrst in a now long line of network news shows which feed America’s

hunger for critical analysis of daily events.

When Peter Arnett appeared live on CNN from Bagdad while the

city was under attack by American bombers, the network’s reputation

as the source of ﬁrst resort for major international news was cement-

ed. Founder Ted Turner had called it ‘‘the world’s most important

network’’ from the beginning, but now many others commented on

The CNN newsroom.

the ‘‘CNN effect’’; how all participants in the war monitored the

network for primary information and often seemed to design military

movements and press brieﬁngs with particular concern for how they

would appear on CNN. World leaders now routinely mention the

Cable News Network and its programming. Its inﬂuence is such that it

is referred to as ‘‘the sixteenth member of the U.N. Security Coun-

cil.’’ At the end of 1980, after half a year of broadcasting, CNN

reached 4.3 million subscribers; by 1998 it claimed 184 million

households worldwide.

Ted Turner’s 1979 announcement about forming a 24 hour cable

news network elicited scoffs and scorn from the mainstream media.

The idea that such an enterprise could be proﬁtable, let alone become

a dominant world-wide news source, seemed ridiculous. Several

major news organizations had looked into forming just such a service,

but had determined that it would be far too expensive. The three

networks each spent over one hundred million dollars a year on their

news divisions, the result of which was the material for a half-hour

broadcast each evening. Turner proposed running 24-hour-a-day

programming on a budget of less than half that amount.

The America’s cup, WTCG, and the Braves had already made

Ted Turner well-known. He had won the Cup in 1977 and was

featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. After inheriting a modest

billboard business in 1963, Turner built a media company by buying

struggling UHF stations in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. He

surprised the established media in 1972 when his channel 17, WTCG

(later WTBS), beat out WSB, the largest television station in the

south, for the rights to broadcast Atlanta Braves baseball games. In

1976 Turner bought the Braves, the Hawks of the NBA (National

Basketball Association), and the Chiefs of professional soccer, large-

ly to assure that they would remain in Atlanta where he could continue

to broadcast their games. WTCG’s signal was made available via

satellite in December 1976. During the 1970s, cable television was

still in its infancy—Home Box Ofﬁce, one of the ﬁrst cable channels,

was launched in 1975—with only about 14 percent of American

households subscribed to cable.

Turner recruited a team of committed news people and for the

most part left the planning of the new network to them. They were

excited by his vision of a channel dedicated entirely to reporting the

news and decided that the emphasis should be on live coverage.

Operating out of a former country club, CNN went on the air on June

1, 1980. It started out with a staff of 300 and seven bureaus: Atlanta,

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, London, and Rome.

Disparagingly referred to as the ‘‘Chicken Noodle Network,’’ the

disparity between its budget and those of the broadcast network news

programs sometimes showed in production quality in its ﬁrst few

years. Gaffes and mixed signals seemed endemic at times. More

often, CNN claimed, the ‘‘raggedness’’ was unavoidable with un-

compromising, unﬁltered breaking news coverage to which the

network was dedicated. Ignoring the naysayers, producers pushed for

close monitoring of potentially developing situations so that when

something happened, they could cut to it immediately. Producer Ted

Kavanau became known for calling out, ‘‘take it!’’ when he wanted a

switch made at once.

It was not until 1985, as it worked to increase viewership and

fend off rivals, that Cable News Network was proﬁtable. In 1981,

Westinghouse, which owned major cable-provider Group W, an-

nounced a partnership with ABC News to take on CNN; they named

the venture SNC (Satellite NewsChannel). In direct response, CNN

launched Headline News on December 31, 1981, almost six months

before SNC was introduced on June 21, 1982. Still, the direct

COBB ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

538

competition proved to be the greatest challenge to CNN’s survival.

Ted Turner spent millions of dollars competing with SNC, and ﬁnally

defeated the network by buying it for 25 million dollars. It ceased

programming on October 27, 1983.

For the 1980 major-party political conventions, CNN did not

even have ﬂoor credentials, but by the 1992 conventions the tradition-

al broadcast networks cited CNN’s in-depth, gavel-to-gavel coverage

as a primary reason for their limited coverage. Originally CNN had to

ﬁght for equal access to the White House, but by October 1987 the

White House invited anchors from ‘‘all four networks’’ for a ‘‘chat.’’

Respect was acquired gradually. CNN gave the ﬁrst American report

of the Pope’s shooting in May 1981 and extensive coverage to the

Falkland War in April 1982. The network was providing the only live

coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986,

when it tragically exploded 96 seconds after take-off.

Despite great logistical problems and restrictions by govern-

ments, 1989 provided CNN with many riveting images: the Tiananmen

Square massacre in May, the failed Russian coup in August (with

Boris Yeltsin rallying the throngs from atop a tank), the November

fall of the Berlin Wall, and the invasion of Panama in December.

These milestones bolstered the network’s reputation little by little, but

it was the Gulf War that elevated CNN’s status to that of undisputed

authority for major, breaking news. President George Bush told

diplomats, ‘‘I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA.’’

Time-Warner bought CNN from Ted Turner in 1996 for three

billion dollars. Turner also stayed on as an executive vice president.

CNN’s credibility, however, was damaged in 1998 after an investiga-

tive report on the new program Newsstand, alleging that American

forces used nerve gas in Laos in 1970. Attacks on the credibility of the

story led the network to retract the story and ﬁre the producers of

the piece.

Despite CNN’s undeniable inﬂuence, all of the networks again

considered starting their own cable news channels in the early 1990s;

NBC and Fox went ahead with theirs. Rupert Murdoch, media

magnate owner of Fox, said that he wanted to counter what he called

CNN’s ‘‘liberal bias.’’ Ted Turner cast CNN as an agent of global

understanding and peace. From the dedicatory ceremony in front of

the original CNN headquarters, where a United Nations ﬂag ﬂew

alongside those of the United States and the State of Georgia, he has

insisted that CNN is a world network, not American. The word

‘‘international’’ is preferred to ‘‘foreign,’’ correspondents from all

over the world are employed, and CNN’s tolerant reporting on many

totalitarian governments has provoked withering attacks from some

American conservatives. Turner also saw the network as a key

element in the ‘‘Third Wave’’ of futurist Alvin Tofﬂer. Tofﬂer

predicts that the information age will lead to a global age. Marshal

McLuhan also inﬂuenced Turner; writer Joshua Hammer writes, ‘‘If

Marshal McLuhan’s global village exists, its capital is the CNN

headquarters in Atlanta.’’ CNN International was launched in 1985

and in 1987 CNN introduced a new show called World Report, a two

hour program featuring unedited three minute segments from local

television journalists world-wide.

CNN claims to be different from older network television news

because it is an all-news network and it is on cable. Its cable home

means that CNN receives approximately half of its income from fees,

making it is less dependent on ratings than free broadcast channels

are. Therefore, CNN ofﬁcials argue, the network can cover news

more objectively, with less concern for what may titillate viewers. Its

news-only format means that it feels no inﬂuence from larger enter-

tainment division. In the 1990s CNN was watched by an average half

million households in prime time, while the big three broadcast

evening news programs were seen by around 25 million viewers.

CNN executives routinely refer to the large broadcast networks as

‘‘the entertainment networks.’’ Largely due to its commitment to

world-wide, unﬁltered coverage, as Time magazine wrote on January

6, 1992, ‘‘It has become the common frame of reference for the

world’s power elite.’’ A 1992 poll found CNN the fourth most

respected brand name in the United States, surpassed only by Merce-

des-Benz, Kodak, and Disney. Despite its relatively low ratings

(except during moments of crisis), CNN can legitimately call itself

the world’s premier television news service, essentially the network

of record, equivalent to the New York Times in print journalism.

—Paul Gaffney

URTHER READING:

Diamond, Edwin. The Media Show: The Changing Face of the News,

1985-1990. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991.

Flournoy, Don M., and Robert K. Stewart. CNN: Making News in the

Global Market. Luton, United Kingdom, University of Luton

Press, 1997.

Kerbel, Matthew Robert. Edited for Television: CNN, ABC, and

American Presidential Elections. 2nd edition. Boulder, Colorado,

Westview Press, 1998.

Whittemore, Hank. CNN: The Inside Story. Boston, Little, Brown and

Co., 1990.

Cobb, Ty (1886-1961)

The most fear-inspiring presence in baseball history, Ty Cobb

was unmatched as a performer during his 24-year career in the major

leagues. Cobb set statistical marks that, on the eve of the twenty ﬁrst

century, no major-leaguer has equaled. His .367 lifetime batting

average is 23 points higher than Ted Williams’ second best mark.

Cobb’s 2,244 runs scored put him well ahead of Babe Ruth. His feat of

leading his league in batting average 12 times easily tops Honus

Wagner’s eight, and his 37 steals of home plate may never be broken.

But Cobb is equally well known for his violent style of play and his

ferocious temper. Lou Gehrig, angered one day when Cobb brutally

spiked a Yankee pitcher on a play at ﬁrst base, complained that

‘‘Cobb is about as welcome to American League parks as a rattle-

snake.’’ He was so hated by his teammates that for much of his career

he carried a gun in a shoulder strap just in case a group of them jumped

him. Cobb’s career began at a time when baseball’s rules were still in

ﬂux, and spanned the ‘‘dead-ball’’ and ‘‘rabbit-ball’’ eras of the ﬁrst

two decades of the twentieth century.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb was born on December 18, 1886 in an

area of Georgia known as the Narrows, near Banks County. His

mother, Amanda Chitwood, had been a child bride of only 12 years of

age in 1883 when she married William Herschel Cobb, then a 20-

year-old schoolteacher. Despite these modest beginnings in poor rural

Georgia, Ty Cobb was the latest in a long roster of prominent

ancestors. The Cobb tribe dated back to Joseph Cobb, who emigrated

from England in 1611 and who eventually became a Virginia tobacco

tycoon. Thomas Willis Cobb was a colonel in the Revolutionary War

and an aide to General Washington. Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb died

as a Confederate brigadier general at Fredericksburg and Howell