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Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, is an almost universally recognized name.  Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th century Concord, is firmly established.  Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and Transcendentalists, the intellectual protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker, with democratic ideals and progressive values about women – a worldly careerist of sorts.  Most surprising is that Alcott led, anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life not discovered until the 1940s.  As Barnard, Alcott penned some thirty pulp fiction thrillers, with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts – a far cry from her better-known works featuring fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and impish children.

Visit the filmmakers’ Web site for more.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women’ is the recipient of numerous awards and film festival selections, including:

AWARDS

Booklist’s Editors’ Choice: Best Video of 2009
CINE GOLD EAGLE 2008
Grand Award: Providence Film Festival
Audience Choice Award: Cape Cod Filmmaker Takeover
Best Feature Documentary: L.A. Reel Women Int’l Film Festival
Best Family Feature: Garden State Film Festival

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Rhode Island International Film Festival
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival
Santa Fe Film Festival
Through Women’s Eyes Film Festival

Read reviews of the film

What came out of all this is a remarkably detailed portrait of a strong-minded woman who was far ahead of her time and far more complex than the portrait of the dainty lady that others have previously presented. Elizabeth Marvel gives a remarkably insightful performance as Louisa May, full of humor, passion, emotion and progressive thinking that makes her come alive.

– The Providence Journal

As much as I’ve enjoyed the American Masters series and its biographies of actors, artists, writers, and musicians, the talking heads and archival material can feel like a straitjacket for filmmakers . . . and audiences. Even the Ken Burns effect — slowly panning or zooming in or out of a photograph — can get old during the course of a feature-length film. Most recreations have failed because they’re sparingly done, poorly cast and directed, or so clumsy that they just seem cheesy. But Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women’ gives us liberal, well-conceived dramatizations throughout, making them as dominant as those talking heads that are also featured. What’s more, there’s none of the usual take-yourself-too-seriously austere narration that so often accompanies literary biographies. Louisa May Alcott and her family are brought to life with dignity, but also humor. All of the dialogue that’s used comes from journals and letters, and that lends an authenticity and unabashed forthrightness that’s uncommon in films like this.

– DVDTOWN.com

Features rare performance footage and candid interviews with David Crosby, Bob Dylan, ex-husband David Harris, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Roger McGuinn, and more

Joan Baez made her debut appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Fifty years later she returned to that same Rhode Island stage on August 2, marking her and the festival’s 50th anniversaries. She is presently on a worldwide tour in celebration of her 50 years as a performer and in support of her Grammy-nominated CD, Day After Tomorrow.

In the first comprehensive documentary to chronicle the private life and public career of Joan Baez, American Masters examines her history as a recording artist and performer as well as her remarkable journey as the conscience of a generation in Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, premiering nationally Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). The film coincides with the DVD/CD release on October 13th on Razor & Tie. This DVD/CD will feature the film with bonus content and an audio CD of music from the film. The audio CD contains rare live performances and studio recordings that span her career.

“From an early age, Joan Baez had the courage of her convictions,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a six-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. “Her artistry and her commitment to human rights make her a musical and political force as relevant today as when she first started.”

Following Baez on her 2008/2009 world tour, the filmmakers captured Baez in performance as well as in intimate conversations with individuals whose lives parallel hers. From a stop in Sarajevo, Bosnia to revisit the scene of Joan’s courageous trip to that war-torn city in the middle of the 1993 siege, to Nashville, Tennessee, where she joined Steve Earle to talk about their collaboration on Joan’s 2008 Grammy-nominated album Day After Tomorrow, the film allows viewers an unprecedented level of access to Ms. Baez.

Shot in high definition with a natural, filmic look, Joan is also joined on screen by, David Crosby, Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn and Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others, to illuminate this extraordinary life. Rich historical archival footage – Baez’ controversial visit to North Vietnam, where she is seen praying with the residents of Hanoi during the heaviest bombing of the war; Martin Luther King Jr. outside a California prison where he visited Joan to offer his support after she was jailed for staging a protest; Joan at her first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and Joan as a teenager performing at the historic Club 47 – is woven into the story so viewers can experience scenes from Joan’s life that have never been uncovered.

The grit of the film is Baez’ power as a musician – from her tentative teenage years in the Cambridge, Mass coffee houses to her emergence onto the world stage and the 50-year career that followed – Joan Baez is a musical force of nature and this film captures her strength as a performer and the influence she has brought to bear on successive generations of artists.

Related: watch Joan Baez perform her rendition of Pete Seeger’s classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” for the crowd at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Celebration at Madison Square Garden, presented by GREAT PERFORMANCES.

Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound is a co-production Razor & Tie Entertainment and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG. The film is produced by Mark Spector and Mary Wharton and directed by Wharton. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is produced for PBS by THIRTEEN. To take American Masters beyond the television broadcast and further explore the themes, stories, and personalities of masters past and present, the companion Web site (pbs.org/americanmasters) offers interviews, essays, photographs, outtakes, and other resources. American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Jack Rudin, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, and public television viewers. Additional funding for Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound is provided by The Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation.

In the interview below, the versatile performer provides her own take on an award-winning career that began in New York City in the 1950s.

Q: What challenges did you face starting out?

A: I wanted to be on Broadway, but in musical comedy. Aside from being cast in Once Upon a Mattress, which was a comedic role but also a great singing role, I was asked to be a regular performer, one of the second bananas as they say, on The Garry Moore Show. I kept thinking, “I’m not really television, I really want to be Broadway.” But the television became more fun for me because we still did music and we still had comedic sketches, with the advantage that it changed every week. So I was able to learn how to do different characters, and to be different people, as opposed to being the same person on a sitcom every week, or the same person eight shows a week on Broadway. This was like doing a little Broadway revue every single week, and that became what I liked the most because it gave me, as we say, variety.

Q: Tell us about your early days in New York City and doing summer stock.

A: I got there in August of ‘54, and the following year I got a 10-week commitment for summer stock, in the summer of ‘55, at a place in the Adirondacks called Green Mansions. There was a lot of training. In fact, some of the people who were starting out then too, were also in this same summer stock group. Sheldon Harnick, who later went on to write Fiddler on the Roof, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who went on to write Bye, Bye Birdie, Bernie West, the comic, and Mickey Ross, who was the director, went on to produce All in the Family. We did an original musical comedy revue every week on a Friday and a Saturday. We would do a variety show, where we would do our own acts, on Sunday. On Tuesdays we would do a play, and on Thursdays we would do an operetta. Sometimes you were in all of them. And you had to learn that much in a week. It was fabulous training. The following year, I went to another summer stock place in the Poconos called Tamament, where Arte Johnson and I were the comics, along with Bernie West. The year before I got there, they wrote Once Upon a Mattress at Tamament.

In ‘57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door. It was a brownstone that housed about 25 young ladies interested in the theater. It was all on the up and up, and run like a tight ship. The gentleman callers couldn’t go above the parlor. And every one of us in the club had to be actively pursuing a career in the theater because the rent was subsidized by a lot of wealthy New York socialites. They only charged us $18 a week room and board. I got a part-time job with one of my roommates at a ladies tea room called Susan Palmer’s Tea Room. My roommate Joyce and I split the tips. We got tips and food. But we made around $30 each a week, which left us 12 bucks after rent to squander.

Q: What do you think it was about you that caught the eye of producers on The Garry Moore Show? What set you apart?

A: I had a good loud voice and I wasn’t afraid to be goofy or zany. Those were the titles they used to give us – that goofy girl or that zany girl. I was encouraged by Garry Moore to just go for everything. I had been on his morning show, where he would introduce new young talent like me and Jonathan Winters and Steve Lawrence. Then he got a night-time variety show on Tuesdays and this one Sunday they called me and said that the guest, Martha Raye, who was a brilliant comedian, had terrible bronchitis, and could I come over immediately and learn the show for Tuesday night? I lived just a block from the studio and I ran over there and learned the show and it was live on Tuesday night. Afterwards, Garry, during the bows, called me out and explained to the audience that I had just learned all of this. The audience was very nice. Martha Raye sent me flowers backstage. The next week I got a call asking if I wanted to be on every week. Then I got into Once Upon a Mattress in May of ‘59, and when Garry’s show came back in the fall of ‘59, they were taping on Fridays, which then enabled me to double. So I did Garry’s show every week, and eight shows of Once Upon a Mattress every week.

Q: What was it like the very first time you saw yourself on television?

A: Oh, Lord. Who’s that big mouth? It was a little scary, but there weren’t VCRs then or anything so I really seldom saw myself.

Q: Over the years, you’ve mastered comedy and drama, you’ve been on stage and screen. You’re also an accomplished singer. What’s your favorite?

A: My favorite is doing the television show, as a variety show, every week. If the show wasn’t that great one week, we could always come back and apologize, you know?

Q: Your ensemble of players on The Carol Burnett Show was one of the greatest ever. How did they earn that reputation?

A: Ours was different because each one of our people had to be different people every week. They weren’t playing the same character all the time. We had to be flexible and versatile. And that was always the most challenging and the most fun. None of us ever played to the camera that much. We always played to the studio audience because we figured if we got a laugh out of them, we’d be getting a laugh out of the folks at home. We did very few pick ups, or retakes. In 11 years I don’t think we did more than 12. We just let it go, because then it had the spontaneity and the danger of being a live show.

Q: Over the years you created so many different characters. Which one did you enjoy playing the best?

A: I loved it whenever we had a “Family” to do. Eunice and Mama and Ed, we called them the Family, and they were just so highly dysfunctional and pitiful. I loved the writing, because it was funny, yet there were no jokes per se. It was all character driven, so that was a lot of fun to do, to walk that fine line, because sometimes they were kind of sad, like when poor Eunice was gonged on The Gong Show. We got a lot of mail on that, from people upset for poor Eunice. And I always loved it when we did the movie take-offs. You know, golly, to go out there and be Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis, or Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and to do our take-offs on the movies and Gone With the Wind. And I also enjoyed being with Tim Conway, when we did the dumb secretary, Mrs. Wiggins, and Mister Tudball. But then that was our show.

Q: How did your childhood help shape your comedy?

A: We were on relief. And my grandmother would save her pennies so that we could go to the movies. That was our respite. I was raised in that fantasy world of the ’40s, where in the movies everything came out okay. There was no cynicism in the movies. The bad guys got it in the end, and the good people always survived, and there was music. If there was violence, it wasn’t as graphic as it is now. I actually came away with a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland mentality, that if you had a show in a barn, you could put it on, and then it would wind up on Broadway. There was no cynicism. Yeah, it was rough at home, but I knew I was loved. We didn’t have money and there were a lot of arguments between my mother and my grandmother about drinking and stuff. I would kind of disappear behind a little shade and I would draw and at one point I thought I’d be a cartoonist and illustrate fairy tale books. But then I’d go to the movies and we’d come home and my best girlfriend and I, Ilomay, we’d act out the movies we saw. We’d pretend to be Betty Grable and sing and act out the movies with the neighborhood kids.

Q: When did you discover your singing voice?

A: On the good days, my mother would haul out the ukulele and we’d sit around the kitchen table – it was a cardboard table with a linoleum top – and sing. My grandmother played the piano, although we didn’t have a piano then, but she was a trained musician, so mama would play the uke and then we would sing. I’d take the lead and Nanny would take the third and Mama would sing the second or fifth. We’d sing all the popular songs of the day. We were a pretty good little trio and I could carry a tune.

Q: You were one of the first female hosts of your own TV show, and many of the female characters you created were as strong as they were funny. Back then, did you consider yourself a feminist?

A: I really didn’t at the time, until the ERA came about. And the person who got me very interested in the ERA was Alan Alda. He’s a feminist, and he took my husband and me out to dinner one night and he started talking about the ERA and what it was about. I was rather apolitical then but I said, “Well, that’s not right. Women should be equal in the eyes of the law.” So I got on the bandwagon. With our show, as we got a little more sophisticated, I wouldn’t do negative jokes about women, or men, really. You know, we could do some funny put downs in character, but I wouldn’t do it for real.

Q: Do you think entertainers should be political?

A: I think they can be anything they want to be. After all, we do pay taxes. We never got political on our show that much at all. We just wanted to be funny and not make a lot of statements. We never preached. I did it as myself, for the ERA.

Q: Which female comedians do you enjoy watching today?

A: Recently, this past year, I caught Ellen DeGeneres in her one-woman show on HBO. She blew me away. There was no gratuitous blue material in there. And it was all fall-down funny. She would pick on the foibles of you as a human being, the real crazy things you do, and I thought it was brilliant. I just loved her. The same thing with Lily Tomlin, when she did her one-woman show. I couldn’t imagine being able to do all of that in an hour and a half. It was just fantastic. As far as sitcoms go, I thought Jenna Elfman in Dharma and Greg was a wonderful physical comedienne who had great timing.

Q: What do you think of today’s television landscape?

A: There are these are reality shows where they’re themselves. They come out and they dance and they’re great. But where’s the variety? Where’s the sketch? Where’s the goofball like Tim who comes out and cracks everybody up? It’s a matter of laughing, isn’t it? When we were doing our show, my God, there were several variety shows. There was Laugh-In, there was Flip Wilson, Sonny and Cher, the Smothers Brothers, Glen Campbell, Jim Nabors, Dean Martin. There would be times where you were at home and laugh out loud.

Q: Why do you think it changed, and do you think variety shows will ever come back?

A: I think it changed because it might have gotten too expensive. Our show couldn’t be done today, not the way we did it. The prices are just too high. We had a live, 28-piece orchestra. Wow! And those costumes every week. Twelve dancers, two guest stars, and all the different sketches. It was quite a production. I don’t think they could do it today. You’d have maybe six pieces in the orchestra and a synthesizer. And one chorus girl! It would only come back if there was somebody that the networks were after, and they would have to really love that person to give them that kind of show.

Q: After your show ended, you could have taken the money and retired. But you went on to play dramatic roles, write a memoir, and a Broadway play. Your career has continued into your 70s. Where do you find the energy?

A: Well, I’m not that driven any more. I only do stuff that I want to do. Before, if I wasn’t working, I’d worry that I’d never work again. Which is kind of a disease we all have when we’re younger. But now I’m writing again, I’m doing a book of anecdotes, of answers to questions that I get when I do my one-woman show like “What’s your most embarrassing moment? What was Tim Conway really like? How did you know Lucy?” The embarrassing moments, stories about the family, my kids when they were little, that are funny. It’s fun to write. I just finished doing the voice-over animation for Horton Hears a Who, from the Dr. Seuss book. Jim Carrey’s playing Horton, Steve Carell is playing the mayor of Whoville and I’m the evil kangaroo. That opens in March.

Q: Is it fun, sometimes, to play the bad guy?

A: Oh, I love it. Especially if it’s funny. Even if it’s not. I’m hooked on Glenn Close in Damages. She’s so brilliant and I just love to watch her, and that’s not a very sweet person.

Q: What do you tell young performers who ask for your advice?

A: Sometimes I get letters, and if they leave me their phone number, I’ll call them because it’s easier than writing them back. A couple of little girls who are maybe 12 years old will write me a letter and say, “I want to be the second Carol Burnett.” So I’ll call them and I’ll say, “No, you don’t. You want to be the first Mary Jane Smith, because that’s who you are. There will never be another Mary Jane Smith. You’re the only one. So why would you want to be some second person? You just develop yourself and take classes in school and if there’s community theater, try out for that. And if you’re turned down, don’t ever take it personally, because it could just be that you weren’t the type they were looking for. But just keep on trying, because if you have the fire in the belly, you’re going to make it.” I never want to rain on anybody’s parade and say maybe you’re not talented enough. I don’t know that. I was pissed on a few times, you know? But I always felt there was something that I could do that would see me through.

Q: If you had your career to do over again, is there anything you would do differently?

A: No. It all happened the way it was supposed to. I wouldn’t change anything. I had such a great run. It’s not like I turned down My Fair Lady. I never regretted turning down anything, I never regretted losing a job because I always felt something else was out there. In fact, when I was in New York in ‘59, I was raising my kid sister, I had done Garry and I almost had the lead in a revival of Babes in Arms. They kept calling me back to sing a couple of songs, and it was like I had the part. The director wanted me, but then they decided they wanted to go with a name. I cried a little when I got the word. And my kid sister said, “But Sissy, you always say, like Pollyanna, one door closes, another opens.” I said, “You’re right.” I dried my eyes and the phone rang and it was to come down and audition for George Abbott in Once Upon a Mattress. Babes in Arms never did open on Broadway. When I left UCLA, my classmates said, “What are you going to do when you get to New York, girl?” I said, “I’m going to be in a Broadway show, and the first Broadway show I’m going to be in will be directed by George Abbott.” I always held that in the back of my mind. It makes you kind of wonder.

Q: What does it mean to you to be included in the American Masters library?

A: I was very flattered. I had seen a few of them and I’d loved the one that they had done with Bob Newhart. I could see that it’s a class act, I could see the care and research that they put into everything. I saw the one they did recently with Tony Bennett, which was great. And I thought, what a nice living scrapbook to have.

Q: Is there a question you always wished you’d be asked in an interview that you’d like to answer now?

A: I think I’ve been asked everything in the world. There was one recently, in Texas, that I’d never been asked and I didn’t know how in the world I was going to answer it. A woman in the balcony said, “If you could be a member of the opposite sex for 24 hours and then come back and be yourself, who would you be and what would you do?” I thought, “I’m stuck, I have no idea. Would I want to be George Clooney or the cute one with the dimple?” And I thought, okay, dear God, I’m going to open my mouth and just whatever comes out, comes out. And I said, “I’d be Osama bin Laden, and I’d kill myself.” The place exploded.
Watch an interview with Carol Burnett from the PBS series Make ‘Em Laugh.

Tony Bennett is an artist who moves the hearts and touches the souls of audiences. He’s the singer’s singer and has received high praise from his colleagues through the years, including Frank Sinatra, who stated unequivocally, “Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.” He is an international treasure who was honored by the United Nations with its Citizen of the World award, which aptly describes the scope of his accomplishments.

The son of a grocer and Italian-born immigrant, Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on August 3, 1926, in the Astoria section of Queens. He attended the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan, where he nurtured his two passions – singing and painting. His boyhood idols included Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole, both big influences on Bennett’s easy, natural singing style. Bennett sang while waiting tables as a teenager, then performed with military bands in the Army during World War II. He later had vocal studies at the American Theatre Wing school. The first time Bennett sang in a nightclub in 1946, he sat in with trombonist Tyree Glenn at the Shangri-La in Astoria.

Bennett’s big break came in 1949 when comedian Bob Hope noticed him working with Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village in New York City. As Bennett recalls, “Bob Hope came down to check out my act. He liked my singing so much that after the show he came back to see me in my dressing room and said, ‘Come on kid, you’re going to come to the Paramount and sing with me.’ But first he told me he didn’t care for my stage name (Joe Bari) and asked me what my real name was. I told him, ‘My name is Anthony Dominick Benedetto,’ and he said, ‘We’ll call you Tony Bennett.’ And that’s how it happened. A new Americanized name, the start of a wonderful career and a glorious adventure that has continued for 50 years.”

With more than 50 million records sold worldwide and platinum and gold albums to his credit, Bennett has received 15 Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The MTV generation first took Bennett to heart during his appearance with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the 1993 MTV Video Awards ceremony. He appeared on MTV Unplugged and the resulting recording of the same name garnered the singer Grammy’s top award, Album of the Year. “Tony Bennett has not just bridged the generation gap,” pointed out The New York Times, “he has demolished it. He has solidly connected with a younger crowd weaned on rock. And there have been no compromises.” Bennett credits his son and manager, Danny, for his success in capturing a whole new generation of listeners.

His initial successes came via a string of Columbia singles in the early 1950s, including such chart-toppers as “Because of You,” “Rags to Riches” and a remake of Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart.” He had 24 songs in the Top 40, including “I Wanna Be Around,” “The Good Life,” “Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me),” and his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which garnered him two Grammy Awards. Bennett is one of a handful of artists to have new albums charting in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and beyond. He introduced a multitude of songs into the Great American Songbook that have since become standards for pop music. He has toured the world to sold-out audiences with rave reviews whenever he performs. Bennett re-signed with Columbia Records in 1986 and released the critically acclaimed The Art of Excellence. Since his 1991 show-stopping performance at the Grammy Awards of “When Do the Bells Ring for Me,” from his Astoria album, he has received a string of Grammy Awards for releases, including Steppin’ Out, Perfectly Frank, and MTV Unplugged. In celebration of his unparalleled contributions to popular music with worldwide record sales of over 30 million, Columbia/Legacy assembled Forty Years: The Artistry of Tony Bennett. The four-CD boxed set, released in 1991, chronicles the singer’s stellar recording career and documents his growth as an artist, inspiring Time magazine to call the collection “… the essence of why CD boxed sets are a blessing.”

Tony Bennett became a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2005, and in 2006 was named an NEA Jazz Master and recipient of Billboard Magazine’s prestigious Century Award, in honor of his outstanding contributions to music.

Tony Bennett has also received an Emmy Award and a Cable Ace Award for his groundbreaking television special, Live By Request…Tony Bennett, which featured a unique interactive format in which the viewing audience called in song requests to the performer live during the program, a concept created by Bennett that has become a regular special on the A&E network. Bennett has also authored two books, What My Heart Has Seen, a bound edition of his paintings published in 1996, and The Good Life, his heartfelt autobiography released in 1998. He won another Grammy Award in 2006 for The Art of Romance.

Tony Bennett is a dedicated painter whose interest in art began as a child. He continues to paint every day, even while touring internationally. He has exhibited his work in galleries around the world and was chosen to be the official artist of the 2001 Kentucky Derby, creating two original paintings celebrating this historic event. The United Nations has commissioned him for two paintings, including one for its 50th anniversary. His original painting “Homage to Hockney” is on permanent display at the Butler Institute of American Art, while the landmark National Arts Club in New York is home to his painting, “Boy on Sailboat, Sydney Bay.” Most recently his oil painting, entitled “Central Park,” was accepted to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s permanent collection in Washington, D.C.

Throughout his career, Bennett has always put his heart and time into humanitarian concerns. He has raised millions of dollars for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, which established a research fund in his name. His original paintings each year grace the cover of the American Cancer Society’s annual holiday greeting card, proceeds from which are earmarked for cancer research. He is active in environmental concerns and has performed at fundraisers for both the Walden Woods Foundation and the Save the Rainforest Foundation. The Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta bestowed upon him its Salute to Greatness Award for his efforts to fight discrimination. He conceived and spearheaded the effort to honor his great friend with the establishment of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, which opened its doors as a New York City public high school offering an extensive arts curriculum in September 2001.

In the 1950s, thousands of screaming bobby-soxers surrounded the Paramount Theatre in New York, held back only by police barricades, to see their singing idol Tony Bennett. Today, the children and grandchildren of those fans are enjoying the same experience. Perhaps what sums up Bennett’s legacy and longevity best was the observation The New York Times made in a review of MTV Unplugged. “What accounts for the Bennett magic? Artistry certainly. The repertory is indeed classic… But perhaps more important is his ability to convey a sense of joy, of utter satisfaction, in what he is doing.”

Tony Bennett turned 80 on August 3, 2006, an event that generated a wide range of tributes and celebrations. In addition to the release of Duets – An American Classic, RPM Records/Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings is launching a monumental and definitive reissue project, The Tony Bennett Master Series. Executive produced by Tony Bennett and Danny Bennett, the first five releases in The Tony Bennett Master Series include expanded editions of three Grammy-winning titles – I Left My Heart In San Francisco (1962), Perfectly Frank (1992), and MTV Unplugged (1994) – as well as two brand-new 16-song collections: Tony Bennett’s Greatest Hits of the ’50s and Tony Bennett’s Greatest Hits of the ’60s.

Bennett was the subject of a major television special, Tony Bennett: An American Classic, which aired on NBC in November 2006. The special featured musical guests Elton John, Michael Bublé, John Legend, k.d. lang, Diana Krall, Christina Aguilera, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, Chris Botti, and Juanes. Segment hosts for the program included Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Billy Crystal, John Travolta, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Notables from the worlds of music, stage, screen, and politics were on hand to help Bennett celebrate his 80th birthday at a star-studded party at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The evening included heartfelt tributes from Harry Belafonte, Bruce Willis, Katie Couric, and former President Bill Clinton.

As the world’s most boyish octogenarian, a vital musical artist at the peak of his powers, Tony Bennett is living proof that fairy tales can indeed come true when you’re young at heart.

John James Audubon is best known for The Birds of America, a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life. Its creation cost Audubon eighteen years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book, and selling it to subscribers. Audubon also wrote thousands of pages about birds (Ornithological Biography); he’d completed half of a collection of paintings of mammals (The Viviparous Quadrapeds of North America) when his eyesight failed in 1846.

His story is a dramatic and surprising one. Audubon was not born in America, but saw more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive, and even in his own time he came to exemplify America – the place of wilderness and wild things. The history of his life reveals his era and his nation: he lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and New York – traveled everywhere from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas off Florida, from the Republic of Texas to the mouth of the Yellowstone – was a merchant, salesman, teacher, hunter, itinerant portraitist and woodsman, an artist and a scientist. He was, in a sense, a one-man compendium of American culture of his time. And his growing apprehension about the destruction of nature became a prophecy of his nation’s convictions in the century after his death.

So it is that Audubon has been called (by Lewis Mumford) “an archetypal American who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone and Benjamin Franklin” and “the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father.”

Audubon’s life seems invented rather than lived; at times his own version of it surely was invented, but even the real life has a distinctly exaggerated, mythical feel. For it’s an archetypal story of the American dream – a Horatio Alger tale in the flesh. The story goes like this: born a literal bastard in Haiti, Audubon was raised like a little lord in France, emigrated to Pennsylvania to escape conscription in Napoleon’s army, failed utterly in frontier Kentucky, was thrown in jail there and driven from his town in penniless disgrace… but he believed in himself, left his family and took a flatboat down the Mississippi, struggled on alone in Louisiana, and finally became a brilliant success, and a legend, overnight… in England. That story then ends with the family reunited, now living on their huge wooded estate in New York City, occasionally pulling in a 300-lb. sturgeon from their Hudson River landing, with a pink sunset rippling over the Palisades. It’s a whacking good story – all of the above, and More! Much More!, with pictures to boot.

The man himself, too, seems much larger than life. John James Audubon was a mix of characteristics, almost always to extremes: he was not just a little anything. He was the kind of excessive person who might show up for a two-month ocean voyage bearing, say, three dogs, two tail-less cats, and 265 live birds – which is what he brought in 1836. He was of course excessively handsome: “a handsomer man I never saw,” one neighbor in Pennsylvania wrote, and another (in Kentucky) crooned that “his eyes were an eagle’s in brightness, his teeth were white and even, his hair a beautiful chestnut color, very glossy and curly.” And he was inordinately vain – with “muscles of steel,” he crowed, and a “handsome figure.” He especially loved that hair: “My locks flew freely from under my hat, and every lady that I met looked at them and then at me until – she could see no more.” When Audubon had his “luxuriant” (his word) hair cut, he wrote a little obituary to it in his journal, with a heavy black border framing the page.

But if he was as unselfconsciously vain as a child, he was equally as charming, magnetically so: almost everyone liked him immediately, and he returned the admiration. He loved children, adored his wife, was a wholehearted and affectionate friend and possessed a whole range of brilliant talents. Yet he was also full of neuroses – insecure about his talent and his worth, his education and his place in the world – craving affection, easily and deeply hurt.

Several Audubon experts have noted a multiplicity in the essential Audubon: there always seem to be competing halves. Biographer William Souder remarks an early division between the satin-breeched dandy in Pennsylvania who was the beau of every ball and the serious young student of nature who drew birds endlessly, turned his room into a natural-history museum, and was the first person ever to band birds. Writer Ella Foshay points out that he was equally comfortable sleeping on the forest ground as he was under the downy quilt of an European four-poster; that he played the violin and flute exquisitely, yet liked to swap tall tales and bawdy stories with frontier fur traders; that the same man who reveled in frozen weeks in the wilderness hunting bear and swan with Shawnees could also quote Shakespeare and Milton or cite Titian and Correggio. Sir Walter Scott thought that Audubon was “a Frenchman by birth, but less of a Frenchman than I have ever seen”; but a young assistant from Maine said that the painter was “a nice man, but as Frenchy as thunder.” There were always two Audubons.

The artist was a self-taught scientist, but an innovative one. As a young man, he studied the migrating phoebes near his home, tying colored yarn to their legs. This was, surprisingly, the first recorded instance of banding birds. Later, he devised an original set of experiments challenging the common belief that vultures find their food by smelling it. He put a painting of a dead sheep into an open field; sure enough, vultures landed and tugged at the canvas. He then put the painted decoy down close to a concealed pile of stinking vulture “food”; again, they pecked only at the painting – at the image rather than the scent of food. Finally he put small pieces of beef onto a cloth that covered a large amount of reeking offal. The vultures ate the beef, but did not detect the covered food. Audubon had proved his point.

Audubon probably regarded his election to membership in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Linnaean Society, and the Royal Society of London as his greatest accomplishment as a scientist. To most people today his scientific success is best exemplified by the birds. Despite his missteps, he discovered twenty-five new species, twelve new subspecies. These are astounding numbers.

Hard science demands an abiding concern for truth, and virtually all Audubon scholars point to the way Audubon was “economical with the truth,” as Duff Hart-Davis nicely puts it. Indeed, Audubon lied to hide the secret of his illegitimate birth. He claimed his father (a captain) was an admiral, and at one point decided that his family had been imprisoned in the Bastille (they hadn’t). He copied several figures from the work of others, then said he hadn’t. He quietly erased the name of an assistant, who’d made backgrounds, from the bottom of numerous paintings. “A tenuous balance between fact and fiction runs through Audubon’s life and work,” Ella Foshay tells us.

Audubon’s writing has drawn the hottest fire. His Ornithological Biography was made up of essays about individual species interspersed with what he called “Episodes” – personal essays and remembrances. Sometimes he “remembered” hearsay, sometimes he invented stories, such as a night spent in a cabin with Daniel Boone. But as biographer Shirley Streshinsky points out, his “Episodes” were written “to edify, to entertain, and particularly to give a frontier flavor to the book.” If the American West was the place where one could find vast rivers virtually choked with sockeye salmon or trees as wide as small houses (in real life), it was also the home for mountainous men whose best pal might be an ox – a blue one, yet – or a daring woman who could ride a catfish the size of a whale. To a degree, Audubon was simply taking the reader to that place. He wasn’t so much lying as telling stretchers.

But even if Audubon was a very particular case – an unusual and complex character with an astounding life – an examination of that life and that man tells us a great deal about his times in general. John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature provides a large clear window onto life on the American frontier; it shows how Europe regarded the still-young United States, and how people (on both sides of the Atlantic) regarded nature. It creates a meaningful portrait of the state of both Art and Science in the first decades of the 19th century. It shows us a person, and a people: the life and times of John James Audubon.

–Ken Chowder