But in 1919 Keller convinced Sullivan to let her take the job. The pros just outweighed the cons. For one, Keller’s two previous books hadn’t sold well, and the money she was making on the Chautauqua adult-education lecture circuit wasn’t enough to sustain her. And because they had to travel to a new town for each lecture, the daily schedule was becoming too hectic for Sullivan, whose eyesight and health were growing worse. Doing vaudeville shows would allow them to stay in the same town for a week at a time, rather than traveling nearly every day.
Another factor that led Keller to vaudeville: She disapproved of the way Hollywood had told her story in a 1919 silent movie based on her life called Deliverance, in which she and Sullivan appeared as themselves at the end. The film glossed over a lot of details about her life, and completely avoided her political views. Vaudeville would give Keller a chance to set the record straight.
And finally, Keller was a people person, and she knew that vaudeville would be a great way to educate the masses about the struggles of the disabled. So against her family’s wishes, she signed on to the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.
NATURAL-BORN KELLERS
Keller knew that her decision to become a vaudeville performer was risky. How would the crowds treat her—like a freak, or as a respected speaker? There were, in essence, two Helen Kellers. “The sweet myth, the canonical one, portrays her as an angel upon earth, saved from the savagery of darkness and silence,” wrote Keller biographer Walter Kendrick. But the real Keller was not so angelic—she was a fiery, middle-aged woman who espoused radical left-wing ideals and spoke out against the United States’ involvement in World War I, which most Americans supported. With vaudeville, Keller’s ambitious goal was to put on an entertaining, educational act without compromising her ideals.
Amazon ants are incapable of feeding themselves and need captured slave workers to survive.
The public, in turn, wanted to see for themselves whether Keller could actually do all the things for which she was credited. Because deaf-blind people were often institutionalized, most people assumed they were “retarded.” Indeed, rumors had persisted for years that Keller was not the writer she was made out to be, that she didn’t really master five languages, and that her books were ghostwritten frauds. Furthermore, her critics charged, Keller was incapable of having sophisticated political opinions—Sullivan and her husband, John Macy, were using Keller to espouse their Marxist views. Keller was ready to prove that she did her own thinking.
The first shows were scheduled for early 1920 at the Palace Theater in New York City, one of vaudeville’s premier venues. The playbill advertised:
Blind, deaf, and formerly DUMB, Helen Keller presents a remarkable portrayal of the triumph of her life over the greatest obstacles that ever confronted a human being!
HELEN BACK AGAIN
Billed as “The Star of Happiness,” the 20-minute act began with the curtain rising to reveal Sullivan sitting in a drawing room. As Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” played, Sullivan spent the first few minutes chronicling Keller’s rise from a sightless, soundless childhood to a prosperous adulthood (basically the same story later made famous by William Gibson’s 1959 play The Miracle Worker). Then Sullivan led Keller onto the stage. Keller sat at a piano and exclaimed loudly, “It is very beautiful!” For the audience, this was a surprise. Despite what the poster said, Keller was rumored to be mute. But Keller proved that she could indeed talk, albeit very poorly—only her inner circle could understand what she said, so Sullivan was always there to translate. Said one audience member after hearing Keller recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Her voice was the loneliest sound in the world.”
Laptops are 30% more likely to fail than desktop computers.
But the performances were by no means somber affairs. Keller smiled throughout as Sullivan told stories about her, including one about her lifelong friendship with Samuel Clemens, who once said after a meeting with Keller, “Blindness is an exciting business. If you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door.” The crowd laughed at the jokes, and watched intently as Keller demonstrated how she could “hear” a human voice: She placed her hand on Sullivan’s face—the first finger resting on the mouth, the second finger beside the bridge of the nose, and the thumb resting on the throat. Keller could then feel the vibrations created by the voice and understand Sullivan’s words.
Q&A
The most popular part of the act came at the end when Keller took questions from the audience as Sullivan translated. This gave Keller a chance to show off her quick wit...and to push her socialist views (which were actually better received on the vaudeville stage than they were on the conservative Chautauqua circuit). A few recorded exchanges:
Q: How old are you?
A: Between 16 and 60.
Q: What do you think is the most important question before the country today?
A: How to get a drink. [Prohibition had recently banned the sale of alcohol.]
Q: Do you believe all political prisoners should be released?
A: Certainly. They opposed the war on the grounds that it was a commercial war. Now everyone with a grain of sense says it was. Their crime is, they said it first.
Q: Does talking tire you?
A: Did you ever hear of a woman who tired of talking?
IT’S A HIT!
Audiences loved “The Star of Happiness.” And so did the critics. The New York Times wrote, “Keller has conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the world, was hers.” Everywhere Keller and Sullivan went throughout the United States and Canada, crowds greeted them warmly. “At first it seemed strange to find ourselves on a program with dancers, acrobats, and trained animals,” Keller later wrote. “But the very difference between ourselves and the other actors gave novelty and interest to our work.” Keller and Sullivan were paid in the top tier for vaudevillians—$2,000 per week.
One in 100,000 people is born with Moebius syndrome, the inability to make facial expressions.
After a show in Syracuse, New York, Keller wrote in a letter to her mother: “The audience was interested in me, they were so silent, paying the closest attention. Indeed, some days there wasn’t a clap and yet we knew they were deeply interested. After a while, they found their tongue and asked more questions than we could answer.” Other times, Keller wasn’t as pleased with the crowds: “Although I love the people, they appear so superficial. They are peculiar in that you must say a good thing in your first sentence, or they won’t listen, much less laugh. Still, they have shown us such friendliness. I’m grateful to them.”
SIGNING OUT
Keller quit the vaudeville circuit in 1924 when Sullivan’s sight and overall health became too poor for her to continue. Besides, Keller had bigger plans. Now under the care of Sullivan’s secretary, Polly Thomson, she amped up her advocacy. That same year she became a spokesperson for the American Foundation for the Blind and was already a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She then began traveling the world to advocate for people who faced discrimination or any other blows that life dealt them. During World War II, she visited disabled veterans to demonstrate—through her mere presence—that they could still accomplish great things. In 1948 she toured the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just three years after the atomic bombs were dropped. In all, Keller traveled to 39 countries and met with every president from Grover Cleveland in 1888 to Lyndon Johnson, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
By the time Keller died peacefully in her sleep in 1968, her stint in vaudeville was a mere blip in her 87 years, but she remembered it with fondness. “I found the world of vaudeville much more amusing than the world I had always lived in. I liked to feel the warm pulse of human life pulsing round and round me.”
Where do they put them all? The Library of Congress adds about 10,000 new items every day.
NANO-GOLD
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nbsp; How tiny is a nanometer? It’s one-billionth of a meter. Nanometers are the units of measurement for the world’s smallest particles—atoms and molecules. If you find it hard to imagine how tiny that is, picture this: A million nanometers could line up single file across the head of a pin. Amazingly, scientists are now finding practical uses for particles of gold that measure in mere nanometers.
HOW TO CATCH GOLDFINGER
Despite advances in DNA evidence, forensic investigators still favor an old-fashioned method of crime-scene detection: fingerprints. These are obtained by applying chemicals that react with the amino acids in sweat that was left behind in the print. But prints last for only about three hours on non-porous surfaces, and people with very dry skin don’t always leave clear fingerprints. Modern science has a solution: nano-gold. Researchers at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, have found that mixing gold nanoparticles into those chemicals gives much sharper detail, no matter how old the prints are or what surface they’re on. This is an important step toward the “holy grail” of forensic science: recovering fingerprints from a crime victim’s skin—even from corpses. “There is the potential to use it for evidence that may have been laying around for quite a while,” says researcher Dr. Xanthe Spindler.
WASTE NOT
Thanks to nano-gold, sewage treatment plants could go from consuming energy to producing it. How? By using the microbial fuel cell, a device that converts chemical energy to electrical energy. Bacteria from sewage are placed in the anode chamber of the cell, where they consume nutrients and grow, releasing electrons in the process. Result: electricity! Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered that coating the anodes with nano-gold increases the amount of energy released twentyfold. In the future, sewage treatment plants might not only produce their own operating power, they could become “brown energy” generators.
Point to ponder: In your lifetime, you’ll excrete a school bus’s weight in poop.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
More than a third of all Americans—about 120 million people—will be diagnosed with cancer sometime during their lives. When the wife of Dr. Mostafa El-Sayed, a Georgia Tech professor, was fighting breast cancer, he began looking into cancer research. “In cancer, a cell’s nucleus divides much faster than normal,” says El-Sayed. “If we can stop a cell from dividing, we can stop the cancer.” El-Sayed felt that the properties of gold might be useful in killing cancer cells, and he designed nanometer-sized spheres of gold to test his theory. He and his team harvested cells from cancers of the ear, nose, and throat and coated them with a peptide that would carry the nano-gold into the cancer cells, but not into healthy cells. Result: The cancer cells started dividing, then collapsed and died. Though the discovery came too late to save El-Sayed’s wife, nano-gold may save many lives in the future.
CURE FOR THE COMMON GOLD
Scientists at the University of Georgia have developed a new way to diagnose influenza: They coat viruses with gold nanoparticles. It turns out that nano-gold is extremely effective at scattering light while biological molecules, such as flu viruses, are not. When scientists coat those gold nanoparticles with antibodies that bind to specific strains of the flu virus, the nano-gold causes the light to scatter in a predictable and measurable pattern. Result: a test that can detect a specific flu strain in minutes. “You take a sample, put it in the instrument, hit a button, and get the results,” says researcher Jeremy Driskell. Cost: a fraction of a penny per exam.
CAN YOU DIG IT?
Currently, scientists must make their own nano-gold by dissolving larger pieces of gold and growing nanocrystals. That may soon change. A research team has found nano-gold in western Australian clay. The area’s salty, acidic water dissolves gold deposits in the clay and redeposits them in masses of gold nanoparticles. But finding extractable deposits isn’t easy. “Gold nanoparticles are transparent and effectively invisible,” explains lead scientist Dr. Rob Hough. Why bother? Invisible gold—just like the kind you can see—is worth $1,500 an ounce and is projected to rise to $15,000 per ounce by 2020. All you have to do is find it.
Whee! It takes a snail 220 hours to crawl 1 mile.
BEHIND THE COVER
With CDs and digitally distributed music, album covers aren’t as important or as memorable as they once were. But from the 1950s to the 1990s, some became iconic pieces of popular art unto themselves, and many have great stories about how they came to be.
Artist: Van Halen
Album: 1984 (1984)
Story: When the art department at Warner Bros. Records asked Van Halen what they wanted for the cover of their sixth album, singer David Lee Roth said, “Dancing chrome women.” (He didn’t say why.) The Warner Bros. art department brought in Margo Nahas, an airbrush artist and cover designer with a knack for photo-realism. They’d used Nahas before—she’d done Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants and Autograph’s That’s the Stuff, which actually did depict a metallic woman. Nahas signed on, but after a few weeks, she just couldn’t get the chrome women to look real enough to suit her. So she sent her portfolio to Van Halen, hoping it would give them some ideas. But instead of being inspired, they picked one of Nahas’s paintings that was already done: a winged cherub smoking a cigarette. Nahas had painted it from a photograph she’d taken of a friend’s four-year-old son (holding candy cigarettes). 1984 went on to sell 10 million copies.
Artist: Rolling Stones
Album: Sticky Fingers (1971)
Story: The Rolling Stones liked to shock and titillate, and they aimed to do the same with the cover of Sticky Fingers. They knew they’d get something controversial if they hired legendary Pop artist Andy Warhol to design it. Warhol’s idea: a photo of a man’s crotch in a pair of tight blue jeans. Warhol then hired several male models and invited them to his New York studio, The Factory, for the photo shoot. In all, six men were photographed, but Warhol never took notes about who they were and never revealed whose image actually ended up on the album cover. Among the candidates: Jay Johnson, the twin brother of Jed Johnson, who was Warhol’s lover at the time, as well as painter Corey Tippin. (It definitely wasn’t, as an urban legend suggests, Mick Jagger.) But a crotch wasn’t suggestive enough for Warhol. He designed the jeans on the cover to include a real, working zipper. When zipped down, a glimpse of white cotton underwear was revealed with the message “This photograph may not be, etc.” After the first pressing, the real zippers were replaced by a picture of a zipper because the real ones were too expensive to produce (and they damaged the record inside).
Parachutes (invented in 1783) are older than airplanes (invented in 1903).
Artist: The Clash
Album: London Calling (1979)
Story: The British punk band hired photographer Pennie Smith to take pictures during their 1979 U.S. tour. At a show in New York City’s Palladium theater, Smith snapped a shot of bassist Paul Simonon hunched over, about ready to smash his instrument in a moment of urgency, anger, and passion—a very punk moment. Later that year, when the band was trying to decide on a cover shot for their upcoming album London Calling, they asked Smith for her tour shots. All four band members agreed on the shot that best represented their music and its destructive, cathartic, cynical emotions: the one of Simonon about to smash his bass. Smith thought it was a terrible shot (it was slightly out of focus). All the better, thought the Clash, and CBS Records agreed.
Artist: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
Album: Whipped Cream & Other Delights (1965)
Story: Can you guess what 1960s band rivaled the Beatles in album sales? It was the Tijuana Brass, an instrumental group popular with adults. In 1965 A&M Records’ head Jerry Moss suggested to Alpert (also an A&M founder) that the Tijuana Brass should do an album of food-themed songs. They had a lot of familiar standards to choose from—“Whipped Cream,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Tangerine,” and “Lollipops and Roses,” among others, and Alpert titled the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. A&M art
director Peter Whorf had an idea for the cover that was very edgy for its time: a naked woman covered in whipped cream, giving the camera a seductive look. He set up a shoot with Dolores Erickson, a model who’d appeared in ad campaigns for Max Factor and on other A&M album covers (she was a friend of Alpert’s). Two notable facts about the naked woman in whipped cream: 1) She wasn’t really naked—she was wrapped in a white cotton blanket; and 2) She wasn’t really covered in whipped cream—it was shaving cream, which doesn’t disintegrate under hot studio lights as quickly as the dairy stuff. (She also was three months pregnant.) Alpert and Moss had major reservations about the image—they thought it would get censored, or at the very least, rejected by older, conservative listeners. Neither thing happened. Whipped Cream & Other Delights sold six million copies. The most memorable part of that album? The cover.
Largest oil field in North America: Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, covering 213,543 acres.
Artist: The Who
Album: The Who Sell Out
Story: In 1967 the Who were preparing their first album for Track Records, a new label founded by the band’s managers. They had complete creative freedom, and guitarist Pete Townshend, the band’s primary songwriter, decided they’d do a concept album about the increasing commercialization of rock music. Between the songs were real jingles recorded by a real jingle-recording company for real products, implying that the band had “sold out.” The Who wanted the sleeve to look like the band had sold out as well, so graphic designers David King and Roger Law came up with an idea for four panels, each depicting one of the four members in an advertisement for one the products mentioned in the album’s jingles. Rock photographer David Montgomery shot the four scenes: On the front, Townshend applies a giant stick of Odorono deodorant to his underarm, and singer Roger Daltrey sits in a bathtub full of Heinz baked beans. On the back, drummer Keith Moon uses a giant tube of Medac pimple cream, and bassist John Entwistle wears a leopard-skin Tarzan suit and stands next to a bikini-clad woman in a parody of Charles Atlas bodybuilding product ads. While the cover helped propel the album to the Top 20 in both the U.S. and Britain, the band was sued by makers of the real products for copyright infringement. The disputes were settled, but Medac had to be changed to Clearasil for the album’s release in Australia. (Another problem: The beans that Daltrey sat in arrived in two giant, frozen cans, and he claimed to have caught a mild case of pneumonia.)
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