Five-time Oscar nominee, one-time winner Jennifer Jones is 89 today. As mentioned here not too long ago, Ms. Jones won the best actress award for The Song of Bernadette.
Author Tom Wolfe is 78 today.
“I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” Irving said of Wolfe. When Solomon added that “Bonfire of the Vanities” author Wolfe is “having a war” with Updike and Mailer, Irving dismissed the notion out of hand: “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”
Irving described Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction … He’s a journalist … he can’t create a character. He can’t create a situation.”
Author John Irving is 66 today.
Reached through his publisher, Wolfe responded in writing. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” he asked about Irving. “Because he, like Updike and Mailer, has panicked. All three have seen the handwriting on the wall, and it reads: ‘A Man in Full.'”
If the literary trio don’t embrace “full-blooded realism,” Wolfe warns, “then their reputations are finished.” He also offers Irving some additional literary advice: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. All he’d have to do is get out and take a deep breath and talk to people and see things and rediscover the fabulous and wonderfully bizarre country around him: America.”
Mikhail Gorbachev is 77.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Lou Reed is 66.
The influence of the Velvet Underground on rock greatly exceeds their sales figures and chart numbers. They are one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades. Yet just two of their four original studio albums ever even made Billboard’s Top 200, and that pair – The Velvet Underground and Nico (#171) and White Light/White Heat (#199) – only barely did so. If ever a band was “ahead of its time,” it was the Velvet Underground. Brian Eno, cofounder of Roxy Music and producer of U2 and others, put it best when he said that although the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one went on to form a band. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Roxy Music and Sonic Youth have all cited the Velvet Underground as a major influence.
Jon Bon Jovi, New Jersey’s second most famous rock-and-roller, is 46.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) was born 104 years ago today. When Geisel/Seuss was awarded an honorary degree from Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.
Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.
Green Eggs and Ham à la Sam-I-Am
1-2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
4 slices of ham
8 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1-2 drops of green food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper
Wilt Chamberlain who apparently scored often, did particularly well on this date in 1962, when he scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors vs. the Knicks. The game was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, before 4,124 witnesses. Wilt was 36 for 63 from the field and 28 for 32 from the line. The Warriors won the game 169-147.