When he read his late grandmother’s diaries, Nelson Calisch was astonished.
“I did not know the lady in this book,” says Calisch, a retired Henrico County mental health clinician. “My relationship with her had been grandson to grandmother. But this was the professional woman whose career spanned all these years. The more I read, the more fascinating it was.”
Using those diaries, Calisch has compiled “A Line a Day: The Private Thoughts of a Public Woman” (The Oaklea Press), a book that documents the many lives and thoughts of his grandmother, Edith Calisch, who, as Edith Lindeman, was not only Richmond’s first movie reporter and critic but a successful songwriter who ended up co-writing, among other well known songs, Willie Nelson’s signature tune, “Red Headed Stranger.”
Nelson Calisch will sign copies of “A Line a Day” at the Richmond Main Public Library on April 12, as part of the James River Film Festival (JRFF). “My motivation for doing this was that it was worth preserving her words and her story,” he says. “I really wanted to have this for friends and family. I’m pleased to see that it’s resonating with others.”
A Richmond pioneer
“Calisch was a pioneer,” says Michael Jones, the director of the James River Film Society, which produces the annual JRFF. “She was very assertive with a real independent streak, quite unusual for ladies living in conservative Richmond in her time. I think Nelson’s book really makes her come to life, using her own words.”
Edith Lindeman Calisch was both progressive and conventional, her grandson says. “She really did value the domestic role of being a mom and a housewife and would have been content to just do that if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression. She needed to make a nickel and she got this opportunity and made the most of it.”
Before she started writing part-time for the paper in 1933, eventually becoming the editor of the entertainment pages, the Richmond Times-Dispatch had no consistent movie critic. “It was basically whoever had the day off,” Nelson says. “The guy who covered local politics, the sports writer, even the janitor.”
That was before real estate developer Morton G. Thalhimer approached the paper. He had repossessed two movie theaters in 1926, and those moviehouses grew into Neighborhood Theatres, the area’s predominant movie chain all the way up until the 1990s, when it was sold to Cineplex Odeon Corp. “He approached the Times-Dispatch and told them that it would help the theatre owners if just one person wrote the reviews. That way it would be consistent and the public could measure their own opinions against that reviewer.” ‘Who did you have in mind?’ the T-D editors asked. Thalhimer replied, ‘Well, my wife has a friend who’s done some writing…'”
Thalhimer was married to Edith’s best friend, Ruth Wallerstein Thalhimer. They had been maids of honor in their respective weddings. ‘It is my guess that Ruth probably said, ‘you either go downtown and get my friend Edith a job or you’re sleeping on the couch tonight,'” Calisch says with a laugh.
Once on the beat, Edith’s movie reporting and witty, sometimes catty, reviews became a popular feature of the paper. “She praised the films most of the time,” says Nelson. “But she could be pretty scathing when it came to saying, ‘this movie sucks.'”
Indeed. Reviewing the 1940 bio film, “Lillian Russell,” she wrote: “Alice Faye, in the role of the glorious, glamorous, almost legendary Lillian Russell, looks and acts exactly like Alice Faye, with a pompadour, a collection of exquisite gowns and a bit of judicious padding. It is no fault of hers that she has been handed an assignment so far beyond her capabilities. One might as well ask Shirley Temple to play Zaza.”
Her reviews would often earn the consistent ire of the man responsible for her job: Morton Thalhimer. “There were several times when Morton would come into the Times-Dispatch and raise hell and say, ‘this Lindeman woman is starving me to death,’ complaining about a review and threatening to take his ads out of the paper.”
Inspiring Willie Nelson
Starting in 1937, the paper started sending “Edith Lindeman” to Hollywood to interview the stars. She ended up talking with everyone from Gary Cooper to Jimmy Stewart to Joan Crawford to the kids in the “Our Gang” comedies. The many photographs of the critic conversing with the actors, often on set, are worth the price of the book alone. They sure impressed the folks back home.
“This really elevated her status and made her sort of a local rock star,” says the author. “There was only the newspaper and the radio back then and here’s this woman pictured with Bob Hope, Clark Gable and Judy Garland. Who did you want to talk with in 1938? The reporter who covered the Virginia General Assembly or the woman who interviewed Clark Gable? It’s not that hard of a question.”
Edith stopped keeping diaries in the 1950’s – the book’s title comes from the brand name of the diary books she preferred. Her grandson guesses that the silence was because she had gotten too busy with her songwriting. In 1951, she started a productive writing partnership with Carl Stutz, an announcer at WRVA, one of three local radio stations where she did regular movie reports. “It was really her music that she seemed to be the most excited about. She really loved it when one of her songs was going to be replayed or was to be recorded by another artist … she was particularly thrilled by the Willie Nelson album, named after ‘Red Headed Stranger,” which was pretty important to his career.” [The song that Lindeman co-wrote with Stutz was originally intended for Perry Como and early on, Nelson began performing it on his show, “The Western Express.” Nelson then based his concept album, “Red Headed Stranger” on the song]
The songwriting began on a dare, the grandson says. She and her husband A. Wollner Calisch were on vacation, driving in the Smoky Mountains. Edith was unimpressed with the songs on the radio stations they were picking up in the car and told her husband that she could write better music than what she was hearing. Woolner replied, “Why don’t you?”
Her biggest hit was “Little Things Mean A Lot” as performed by Kitty Kallen, which became the number one song in the U.S. for nine weeks in 1954. “I’ve never been all that crazy about it,” admits her grandson. “Of all the songs that she did, my favorite is Tom Jones’ version of ‘I Know.’ It was on his album that included the big hit, ‘Delilah,’ so it sold very well.” He adds that his grandmother’s songbook continues to generate royalties, even after decades. “It has legs, as they say in the industry.”
Edith’s success in song was covered extensively in the local media. But people still knew her mostly as the movie critic, and her diaries show that she enjoyed the notoriety she received during her long stint at the Times-Dispatch (she retired in 1965). “For someone like her to get attention, in her own time, is pretty remarkable,” Nelson says. “And in one of the most conservative newspapers in the most conservative city in one of the most conservative eras.”
Learning from Mr. Bojangles
“A Line A Day” shows the subject’s personal evolution, starting in 1920 before her impending marriage, when she was living in wealth and comfort. “Were it not for the Depression, she might have met the definition of a Jewish American princess,” he says. “One substory in the book is her relationship with, and her thoughts on, being Jewish, and you can see a real shift in her sensitivity and awareness of issues relating to black people.”
That shift can be traced to an interview she did in 1939 with famed actor and tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a Richmond native. Robinson had come back home to star in the touring company of ‘The Hot Mikado,” the author explains. “She went to interview him in his hotel room. A white woman couldn’t exactly go into a Black man’s hotel room all by herself in 1939 Richmond Virginia, so my grandfather came along. It was cold and they were both wearing top coats. When they got up to leave, Robinson assisted my grandfather with his top coat but when it came to my grandmother, he handed the top coat to my grandfather to put on her. And that’s because it would have been too intimate for a Black man to have been in that close proximity to a white woman.”
Calisch never forgot that, he says, and even mentioned the incident to her grandson years later. “Before, she had been indifferent, but the writings from then on, relating to the Black public and African-American issues, showed sympathy and real concern.” She never considered herself a crusader, he adds. “But she was bold, she was progressive for her time, and I think her views would probably have been considered feminist, like her support for equal pay for women.”
One day, late in life, Edith asked Nelson if he would procure some marijuana seeds for her. She wanted to grow some pot in her garden. Nelson had to remind her that this was a felony. “I’m not sure that would have stopped her if I’d gone through with it,” he writes in the book.
As an older critic who got her start in the 1930s, grandma could surprise you. “She really liked ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ and I can’t really see her choosing to see something like that on her own, and when the 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange” [rated X at the time] was released, she loved it. She thought it was terrific. I was stunned. I just thought my nice little demure grandmother would have nixed something violent and sexual like that, but no.”
It turns out that Edith, who died in 1984, was not against the increased sex and violence in films, she just found much of it boring and exploitative. In a special column that looked back on “Edith Lindeman”‘s career, published after he retirement, she wrote:
“I’m glad I retired when I did, for in my day all I had to be concerned with was the entertainment value of the picture. By entertainment, it’s not to be assumed that all pictures had to be light, gay and relaxing. There were a great many films that were diverting by their canny projection of aspects of the world that we lived in.”
“Today,” she wrote, “a critic has to be too mental.”
Nelson Calisch will sign copies of his book, “A Line a Day: The Private Thoughts of a Public Woman” at the Richmond Main Public Library on April 12 at 12:30 p.m., as part of the James River Film Festival. For more information on the book, go to oakleapress.com
