Upon the Kennedys’ arrival in Washington, Jacqueline Kennedy set out to transform the dowdy executive mansion room by room. She started by persuading Congress to place the White House under National Park Service jurisdiction, which made donations to restore the building tax-deductible. Then she created the position of White House curator and established a fine arts committee to advise her on restoration. She published a White House guidebook, restocked the White House library, and restored the Rose Garden. To let people know about her campaign, she invited a CBS camera crew to view the early results—hence the Valentine’s Day, 1962, broadcast.
With her breathy yet cultured whisper, in those flat pumps she wore so she wouldn’t be so much taller than everybody else, and her triple strand of pearls, Jackie led distinguished senior correspondent Charles Collingwood on a White House tour that included stops in the freshly restored State Dining Room, the Red Room, and the lavish East Room, where just a few nights earlier Pablo Casals had serenaded a dinner honoring American Nobel Prize winners. Along the way, she discussed each room’s history.
These, however, were only the White House’s public rooms. From the days of Andrew Jackson until the early twentieth century, every New Year’s Day the White House doors were flung open and anybody could come in and shake the president’s hand. Neither the press nor the general public, however, were customarily permitted upstairs into the family quarters. At Mrs. Kennedy’s invitation, for the first time ever, the public and press were ushered via the CBS camera crew up the stairs and into the Lincoln bedroom, then into the Madison family’s sitting room, where they were joined by the president, fresh from a top-secret wrangle over whether to commit the first American helicopters and “advisors” to prop up the government of South Vietnam. Now, with the first “television war” only months away, television had penetrated the “New Frontier.” Cool had entered the White House.
In 1957, the actor John Cassavetes, twenty-seven, went on Jean Shepherd’s Night People on WOR, the hippest radio show in Manhattan, to publicize his new movie, a pedestrian Martin Ritt policier called Edge of the City. The New York–born son of a Greek immigrant importer-exporter, the handsome, dark-eyed Cassavetes was already making a name for himself playing edgy misfits and tightly torqued tough guys in low-budget double-feature fodder like The Killers and Crime in the Streets. Shepherd, a wildly improvisational radio monologist, was then at the top of his game and he boasted a large and dedicated audience. Shepherd’s flock responded enthusiastically when Cassavetes claimed that he could make a better movie than Martin Ritt, and if they wanted to see an alternative to the Hollywood mindset, they should send in money to fund a project Cassavetes was creating in collaboration with his drama workshop. Over the next few days, two thousand dollars in bills and coins poured in.
A week later, Cassavetes started his film, shooting with the then-revolutionary hand-held sixteen-millimeter black-and-white camera, rented lights, a volunteer crew, and a cast composed of members of his acting workshop. Every take of the movie—which took two years to complete—was improvised, and shot in Cassavetes’s apartment, his friends’ apartments, or on streets and in alleyways in a semidocumentary style using real names. Bass player Charles Mingus did the score. The final product was titled Shadows.
“We were an intentional collection of people who decided to make a movie,” Maurice (Moe) McKendree, who helped produce and edit the film, told me, “and we did.” They felt like they were on a mission to, as Shadows star Lelia Goldoni puts it forty years later, “break the forms of the past.” They were so poor that the first few scenes of Shadows were lit by a floor lamp using a two-hundred-watt bulb that they carried around the streets and plugged in wherever they could find an outlet. “Whatever it was we were doing,” says Moe McKendree, “at least we were doing something!”
The focus of Shadows is two weeks in the lives of a trio of African-American siblings living together in a Greenwich Village pad crowded with rickety bookshelves full of paperback books. Hugh (Hugh Hurd), the older brother, is a button-downed Ivy League alumnus in clothes worn so tight that he looks like his head is going to explode. He is a singer—hard-working and dedicated, but amazingly untalented—who accepts a horrible job as an emcee at a strip club so that he can help support his younger brother and sister, who are too immature and self-centered to show any gratitude.
His younger brother, Ben (Ben Carruthers), is a skinny hipster with a sallow, subterranean pallor. With his gravelly Miles Davis mumble and his impenetrable wraparound shades, Ben is a trumpet player without a trumpet. Like Garry Goodrow’s Ernie in The Connection, he’s hiding emotional vulnerablility behind his hipness. Hugh and Ben’s little sister, Lelia (Goldoni), is just nineteen, recently back in New York from Los Angeles, all fluttery, nail-bitten intelligence and raw nerve—aware that she is beautiful but trying to figure out who she is.
Bored with the belabored come-ons of a stuffy white intellectual who’s just published a novel about the beat generation (a character likely based on Chandler Brossard, the New Yorker “Talk of the Town” contributor whose novel of the San Remo set, Who Walk in Darkness, had just been published), Lelia loses her virginity to Tony (Tony Ray, son of Nick Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause), a handsome white boy who moves in on her with a macho cool. When Tony meet’s Lelia’s much darker-skinned brother Hugh, Tony realizes that Lelia is black and dumps her—not that she seems to care too much. But Tony can’t stay away. When he tries to see her again, though, Lelia’s two older brothers threaten to kick his ass for being such a racist.
The coolest thing about Shadows is that, without preaching, it turns the concept of race upside down. Lelia Goldoni’s parents were Sicilian; Ben Carruthers was only about one-sixteenth African-American. (In the year after the making of Shadows, the two got married and divorced.) In the racially charged American atmosphere of 1957—at the same time they were shooting the film, President Eisenhower was sending federal troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School—they were sexual outsiders. In Shadows, Cassavetes represents race as a total illusion. In Greenwich Village, race has been subsumed in the desire to be cool.
When they started shooting Shadows, none of the participants knew what they were doing. Actors improvised, and the story evolved as the shooting progressed intermittently over the next two years. As a result, the scenes were wildly uneven in tone, jittery with hesitation and false starts. There is little physical action, and everybody appears hemmed in and ready to explode, struggling to remain cool.