When I was a teenager, I spent most Saturday mornings at Kaufmann's Department Store with my mother and my aunt.
Partly this was because Betty was a shop-a-holic with excellent taste and enough clothes in superb condition that it took one estate sale, two tag sales and a generous donation to the local Goodwill to dispose of her wardrobe. Partly it was because my uncle Oscar, Betty and Mum's brother, worked in downtown Pittsburgh and it was easy for him to drop us off, go to his office at Gateway Center for a couple of hours while we shopped and had lunch, and then pick us up for a leisurely afternoon antiquing on East Ohio Street. And partly it was because after a hard week of teaching and grading papers, Mum wanted to spend time with her sister and her daughter.
We visited all the local department stores - Horne's, Gimbel's, Saks Fifth Avenue - but Kaufmann's was our favorite. Founded by Edgar Kaufmann, a patron of Frank Lloyd Wright and owner of Fallingwater, Kaufmann's prided itself on offering classy, high quality merchandise, from the first floor perfume counters to the fine crystal and silver at the Vendome Shop on the top floor. Even the restaurant, also named the Vendome, had the air of a slightly faded but still elegant clubwoman with its light fare of salads, soups, and "dieter's special" hamburgers with plenty of vegetables and no bun.
Kaufmann's also had a book department.
I patronized it quite a bit, as one might imagine; this was where I bought my first copy of The Silmarillion, and later Dorothy Dunnett's standalone novel King Hereafter. I also remember scoring a copy of HG Wells' The Invisible Man there, and several other interesting paperbacks.
But of all the books I bought at Kaufmann's, the one that really changed my life was The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and how they got that way), by Michael and Harry Medved, with Randy Dreyfus.
Michael Medved is best known today as an ultra-conservative commentator and radio host. Back in the late 1970s, though, he was a journalist. His most popular work was Whatever Happened to the Class of '69?, but he also contributed to The People's Almanac and wrote The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides about Presidential chiefs of staff. The conservative politics and the radio show were later developments, and like many other disturbing trends in America, can be blamed on Rush Limbaugh, who gave Medved his start in radio in 1999.
All that was in the future when I spotted a copy of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time at Kaufmann's sometime in the spring or summer of 1978. I picked it up, thumbed through it, and soon found myself laughing out loud at the descriptions of such cinematic jewels as:
- At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's horrendous evisceration of Cole Porter's songbook, starring a tone-deaf Cybill Shepard, a clueless Burt Reynolds, Madeline Kahn and Brenda Vaccaro in roles they probably wish they'd never taken, and a talentless Italian hack named Duilio del Prete.
- Robot Monster - a 1950s horror movie filmed on such a low budget that the titular "robot" is a guy in a gorilla suit with a deep sea diving helmet on his head. The "special effects" were provided by something called an "Automatic Billion Bubble Machine" that spewed soap bubbles across the set to show that "Ro-Man" and his superiors had unleashed a death ray to kill all the "hu-mans" on Earth.
- The Conqueror - a brawling, sprawling swashbuckler starring John Wayne as Temujin/Genghis Khan (?), Agnes Moorehead as his mother (???), and red-haired Susan Hayward as Tartar princess Bortai (!!!!). The dialogue is hilariously overblown, but you haven't lived until you've seen Wayne deliver lines like "I would salute you as I wish but I am bereft of spit," or the "wedding scene" where Temujin wrestles Bortai to the rocks, proclaims "Know this, woman, I take you for wife!" and starts rolling around Bronson Canyon while the camera pans upward to the dusky sky.
- Spin Out - a terrible Elvis Presley car racing movie where the King barely moves while teenagers romp and dance around him.
Of course I bought the book - how could I resist? I took it off to college, too, and it's still in my basement, right next to my laminated Star Fleet Technical Manual. I've read it many times over the years, usually either while eating Chinese take-out at the dining room table or while taking a bath, and the poor thing definitely shows its scars. I bought all the sequels as they came out, from The Golden Turkey Awards (the Medveds included a fake movie, Dog of Norway, to test their audience, as well as showcase their Norwegian elkhound) to The Hollywood Hall of Shame (about cinematic disasters that went over budget and into orbit, from Darryl Zanuck's awful Noah's Ark to Benito Mussolini's overblown Scipio Africanus). And despite its flaws, and the occasional mistake thanks to Michael Medved not checking brother's film synopses closely enough, the original book is still a hilarious, affectionate, snarky look at the films Hollywood wishes would go away.
Oh, and in between reading the books, of course I started seeking out the movies.
Night of the Lepus...Dondi...Sincerely Yours...Heaven's Gate...King Kong...The Exorcist II...Plan 9 From Outer Space.... I've seen them all, and alternately laughed, shrieked, winced, shouted at the screen, and basically done my home version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I've even sought out movies unknown to the Medveds, most notably the execrable (and hilarious) Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula, the world's only vampire disco belly dancer musical, and probably the only film to star Yvonne de Carlo, John Carradine, and, as a werewolf, Brother Theodore.
And bad movies were just the start. Bad architecture (I wrote a paper in graduate school on roadside attractions like giant balls of twine and enormous concrete chickens as the modern American equivalent of pilgrimage sites)...bad popular culture...bad music...and (you can see where this is going, can't you?)...
Bad books.
That's right. The ultimate origin of Books So Bad They're Good can be laid squarely at the feet of Michael Medved, conservative columnist and radio host, because I happened to pick up a book he didn't even want to have published under his own name. And though I can't stand Medved's current writing, I'll always cherish his sarcastic, hilarious take on awful movies.
Kaufmann's is now Macy's, and my mother and her siblings are long gone. Those careful Saturdays will never come again. But then I pick up a certain book, and I reread the review of Nelson Eddy/Jeannette McDonald vehicle New Moon, and I start to giggle about the time they describe Nelson Eddy's wig falling off while he sings about shining his shoes...and I'm seventeen again, and I'm back in Kaufmann's, in the book department while Mum and Betty argue over sweaters and Oscar works at his office a few blocks away....
Proust it ain't, but I'll take it.