Have a potato.

[a bit of a meander]

[original publication: July 2, 2024]

In his 1959 book Lyrics on Several Occasions, the great Ira Gershwin (brother to and collaborator with the great George, also collaborator with, among others, the great Kurt¹ and the great Harold²) recounts, of the song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”:

Many years ago a friend of mine was in London, where, among other activities, he sat in on a couple of chorus-girl calls. At the first audition one of the young ladies gave a copy of this song to the pianist, then sang:

You say eyether and I say eyether,

You say nyther and I say nyther;

Eyether, eyether, nyther, nyther—

Let’s call the whole thing off!

“Apparently,” Ira adds wryly (or perhaps it’s really), “this sort of thing was quite pronounced that London season.”

I’ve always loved this story, though the first time I heard it, aeons ago, the misguided version of the song had not merely been warbled at an audition but recorded—which is as good a demonstration as any of the way anecdotal showbiz lilies tend to get painted³ a bit too gaudily (and increasingly unpersuasively) over time.

“You like potato,” the song goes on to explain, “and I like po-tah-to,” a differentiation I took at face value till one day, as I watched James Whale’s 1932 horror comedy The Old Dark House for the umpteenth time, Ernest Thesiger’s precise enunciation of “Have a potato” (that’s Ernest,⁴ whose Old Dark House character is named Horace Femm,⁵ in the photograph heralding this little party piece; you may also recognize him as Dr. Septimus Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein) finally penetrated my brain and I realized that no one actually, or even ekshally, pronounces “potato” as “po-tah-to,” not even in Wales. Which is as good a demonstration as any that in the service of a lyric, the truth is a bendable commodity.⁶

Today’s substacky subject was, then, going to be nearly indistinguishable pairs of words whose differences nonetheless pack a mighty wallop, and the story above was somehow going to be ramrodded into introducing the subject, but to be honest, with all this national tumult going on, to put it mildly, my heart’s not fully in my work today, so I’m going to (I promise!) come back tomorrow and do my actual job.

---

And another thing, he added (without a speck of segue):

Like, probably, a lot of you, I’ve been carefully bingeing⁷ season 3 of The Bear; also like a lot of you, I’m liking some parts of it more than other parts of it, though on the whole I’m having a grand time and am certainly not as grievously disappointed with the whole enterprise as certainly some of you are. And quite vocally too, I might note.

Oh, here’s a picture of Carmy, because I know that people like pictures of Carmy.

Any old way, my mixed response to this new season of a series that to date I have found ambitious and engrossing and exhilarating (also maddeningly inconsistent and pretentious⁸) put me in mind of watching, a couple of years ago, the limited series Landscapers, which starred the divine—and I mean that in the sense of touched by God—Olivia Colman, as well as the merely excellent David Thewlis, and which was one of the best things I’d ever watched on television till I got to its final episode, which was one of the worst (also most infuriating and most saddening) things I’ve ever watched on television.

And yet:

Even as the series collapsed into strained longueurs and tin-eared improbability, Olivia Colman delivered a line (I will tuck it into a footnote below so that you can avoid it should you decide to watch the series, which you absolutely should, and would like to experience it sans spoilers)⁹ that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

And this, then, puts me in mind (we’re coming in for a free-association landing here, I swear) of a comment I encountered decades ago, from the theater critic John Mason Brown, who, panning a Katharine Cornell vehicle called That Lady, observed:

It is not pleasant to have to write such words about any production offered by people in whose debt our theatre stands so deeply. We, the non-creative public, are all too apt to forget that artists are entitled to their mistakes. In the arts the wonder is not that lightning does not strike again and again but that it ever strikes.

The wonder is . . . that it ever strikes. Emphasis mine.

Have a lovely afternoon, please, as lovely as you can manage. Cut people some creative slack. Cut yourself some creative slack while you’re at it. And I’ll see you back here tomorrow, fresh and focused.

Benjamin

1. Weill. See, for instance, Lady in the Dark.

2. Arlen. See, for instance, George Cukor’s 1954 version of A Star Is Born, a.k.a. the Judy and James version.

3. In King John, Shakespeare wrote:

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pompe,
To guard a Title, that was rich before;
To gilde refined Gold, to paint the Lilly.

Sometime in the middish nineteenth century, the gild[e]ing and the painting began to muddle up, and nowadays people (and people may well include you) often say “gild the lily,” which is perfectly correct as a freestanding metaphor unless you’re attempting to quote Shakespeare, in which case it’s perfectly not. See also “to the manner born” (Hamlet) vs. “to the manor born” (not Hamlet).

4. As long as it’s, apparently, storytime, one of my favorite stories (I have a lot of favorite stories, I should note) involves Ernest’s complaining to Somerset Maugham that Maugham wasn’t writing parts for Ernest, to which Maugham—feel free to call him Willie; apparently everyone did—replied, “But I am always writing parts for you, Ernest. The trouble is that somebody called Gladys Cooper will insist on playing them.”

And one of my other favorite stories takes in Ernest’s (alleged) comment when asked about his experiences in France during the Great War:

“Oh, my dear! The noise! And the people!”

By the bye, here’s a photograph of Ernest as Dr. Pretorious in The Bride of Frankenstein with his little jars of little people.

The Bride of Frankenstein, as I apparently never tire of mentioning, is the first thing I can remember seeing on any screen at all, on the little television set in the little television room in my maternal grandparents’ house in Woodmere, L.I. I was presumably four or five years old, tops. It made quite an impression. How could it not.

And here’s a photograph of Ernest playing Jaques to Katharine Hepburn’s Rosalind in As You Like It on Broadway in 1950.

As You Like It also includes a character named Jacques (he’s our hero Orlando’s immediately older brother), which is the sort of thing that tends to enrage a copy editor.

5. No, you shut up.

6. On the other hand, some people do indeed like tomato and other people do indeed like to-mah-to. Hand to God, I was once reviewing a UK manuscript prior to handing it off to a colleague for fresh copyediting and Americanization—a touchy subject I’ll save for another day—and came across a line of dialogue that read: “Oh, well, tomato, to-may-to.” Other hand to God, a solid twenty-seven seconds passed till I figured out what I was looking at.

7. Some people go with “binging,” which to me looks like what a doorbell does if you lean really hard on it.

8. “I don’t know the problem with being pretentious if you can follow it up with something.”

—Ruth Gordon

9. Colman’s character, Susan Edwards, a delirious fantasist who also happens to be a parricide, is repeatedly characterized, especially by her husband, as “fragile.” Finally, as Susan (and her husband) are brought to trial for murder, the prosecutor climactically, sneeringly hurls that word at her, fragile, and Susan/Colman responds: “I’m not fragile. I’m broken. You can send me to prison. And you can— You can all laugh at me. And you can make me look like a piece of dirt in front of all these people. But I’m broken. So you can’t hurt me.”

I probably rewound and rewatched it a half dozen times.