"Plymouth Adventure" and Other Bad Mayflower Takes

 

All claims (by others) to the contrary, I am at best an amateur historian, though I have been at it since childhood, when I was a 13 year old  Junior Member of the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society of South County, Rhode Island, where my brother, for reasons no one could ever quite figure out, was made President. He set me to work transcribing dusty old diaries and ledgers, and identifying the content of old glass photographic plates. and I have been bored to distraction by such tasks ever since. I’m glad other people do it, but it’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I prefer to write and tell stories, and history is a gold field for stories.

My love of books and history was inspired by my favorite grandparent, my mother’s mother Ruth Cady Herindeen (the one who stirred up all that trouble with the Trouble Man). Through her I am descended from Governor William Bradford, as well as Henry Howland, who was the brother of the boy who fell off the Mayflower, John Howland whom we might call the Jerry Lewis of the Pilgrims.

I hold in my hands right now a book of grandmother’s that came into my possession after she passed away, a 1925 school textbook called The Land of the Pilgrims, by one Jay Earle Thomson, A.M., Principal of School Number Three, Jersey City. New Jersey. This was the sort of outdated, misguided tome I spent my childhood engrossed in, full of charm and jingoism, obsolete vocabulary and vague, spotty information. It gave me a reputation for book-learning among those who never graduated beyond TV Guide, but also turned me into a square peg in the round, spinning hole of the 1970s. Since today I write nostalgically about things like Starsky and Hutch and KC and the Sunshine Band, it appears I will always be exactly one half century out of date.

At any rate The Land of the Pilgrims remains a useful gauge of the attitudes a certain portion of the American public has about the topic to this day, I think, insomuch as they reflect upon the subject at all. It is an attitude, one need hardly say, of unquestioning veneration. It’s the sort of book the teachers on the Little Rascals or Leave it to Beaver, ya know Miss Crabtree or Miss Canfield, might teach out of, full of “noble and edifying sentiments.” It dates from the one room school house time, when one teacher would teach you everything. It is a book so multiform and variegated that one would be hardpressed to say what it is. It is simultaneously a history of the Pilgrims, a travel guide to Plymouth Massachusetts, a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a critical appreciation of “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, which is presented in its entirety for the purposes of memorization.

Here is its description of Scrooby, the northern English village where the Pilgrim’s Separatist congregation first formed: (picture it read in a Margaret Dumont falsetto): “Like most English villages, Scrooby is quaint, charming and picturesque. Flowers, flagrant and colorful, and nicely kept lawns and terraces attract the traveler. It is not unusual to see tastily cultivated gardens in front of the dwellings. In the rear of the homes are well-kept fields separated by hedges that appear olive green in the sunlight. Everywhere one finds the people frugal, hospitable, and happy. In such an environment lived the Pilgrims over 300 years ago. Thus it is no wonder that they developed such excellent traits of dignity, character, and refinement.”

Wait, are they talking about Pilgrims or Munchkins? Sounds like the Scrooby Realtors Association slipped the author of this book a ten spot. “Each house possesses a lovely fireplace, equipped with its own chimney, allowing all the inhabitants of Scrooby an adequate supply of oxygen, which periodically aerates their healthy and well-nourished bodies”.

Apparently, things weren’t that good in Scrooby because the Pilgrims had to either flee or risk imprisonment and torture! The truth is that, no one is ONLY descended from nice people, so some of your ancestors were nice people and some of them were nasty people. You have not just hundreds but thousands of ancestors, and a sizeable fraction of them, whatever your color, whatever their origin, committed what you would consider unspeakable acts unless you yourself  are a psychopath. If you think no ancestor of yours ever did something so vile it would make you throw up to witness it, think again. That is the text of history. Now, you don’t have to put it quite that way to a group of elementary school children, but on the other hand, the pretty flowers in the front yards in Scrooby seems decidedly off topic, and something of a bait and switch. Unless you refer to Les Fleurs du Mal.

But there is an impulse which many among us have to speak no ill – at least to speak no ill of your own tribe. I am here to tell you that the world is too small for tribes, has been since long before I was born, so you’d better see the good in other folks families and acknowledge the ills of your own. White people, like people of all colors from every corner of the earth, have done unspeakable things. And never more so than at the very moment when they claim they never do unspeakable things. To claim otherwise is to LIE, which is L.I.E., the Long Island Expressway to perdition.

So The Land of the Pilgrims is a mighty white book. It came out in 1925, when membership in the Ku Klux Klan was exploding and the Nationalistic Society of Teutonia, precursor to the German American Bund was being established across several American cities. There’s ya patriotic education for ya.

At any rate, I find it significant that after all its promotion of pureness and goodness and commendableness, in the end The Land of the Pilgrims lands on the Longfellow poem The Courtship of Miles Standish which in the first, last and final analysis is a soap opera about a love triangle between Priscilla Mullin and her two suitors, John Alden, who was the ship’s carpenter, and Miles Standish, who was basically the Pilgrims' chief of police and commander of their militia. There was plenty in that poem to make a high school student’s heart go pit-a-pat, back when high school students knew how to read. Which guy is the girl gonna go with, huh, huh, huh? And don’t say Jesus.

My mother was born one year after The Land of the Pilgrims came out. Books, even books as cockamamie as The Land of the Pilgrims, were not her cup of vodka. Growing up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, her main cultural influences outside of school assignments would have been old time radio and Hollywood movies. She loved her jazz bands and movie stars.

Times have changed

And we’ve often rewound the clock

Since the Puritans got a shock

When they landed on Plymouth Rock

If today

Any shock they should try to stem

‘stead of landing on Plymouth Rock

Plymouth Rock would land on them!

Those are of course lyrics from Cole Porters’“Anything Goes”. The tune first became a hit when my mother was eight years old. For some perspective. Somewhat irreverent! Hollywood!

Compared with Christmas or Halloween there aren’t many classic Thanksgiving themed movies. Practically none, in fact. In desperation, a few years ago Turner Movie Classics began showing a 1952 turkey known as Plymouth Adventure every November.

Contrary to what the title promises, the film offers virtually no Plymouth and precious little "adventure". The entire movie takes place aboard the Mayflower during its VOYAGE to North America. Half way through the picture they are still tied to the dock. The movie literally has a 20 minute scene where they haggle over the lease! There are limits to realism. On the other hand, there are aspects when we are definitely reminded we are in a Hollywood movie. The Mayflower as depicted is a bit more spacious than the reality. I’ve been on a replica of that tub. The ceilings were very low. To practicably shoot a movie there you’d have to use the all-midget cast of The Terror of Tiny Town. Hey, maybe the Pilgrims WERE Munchkins!

And since it would be a drag to fill two hours with what the Mayflower passengers were really doing during those uncomfortable 7 months ( throwing up, eating rotten food, and holding their noses), Plymouth Adventure spices things up with no less than TWO love triangles. The first has one of Hollywood’s sexiest female stars Gene Tierney as Dorothy Bradford. (wolf noises). Hoo boy! That is one hot Pilgrim! That’s a real hornicopia! Unfortunately Dorothy finds herself neglected by her husband William Bradford, played by the cuckhold from central casting Leo Genn, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the previous year for his performance in Quo Vadis? and remains a forgotten star of yesteryear in spite of that accolade. So Gene Tierney is all too grateful for the attentions of Captain Christopher Jones, played by the much more dynamic Spencer Tracy. Spoiler alert, Dorothy Bradford never made it alive to Plymouth, which is why I wasn’t making wolf noises about my own 10th grandmother just now even if she was Gene Tierney, and also why the filmmakers could depict a lurid tale of implied adultery in the age of the Production Code. It never gets consummated. In fact the trailer advertises it! Probably why the movie wasn’t a hit! Bradford later married a woman named Alice Carpenter and it is her from whom I am descended.

The other triangle in the film we already know from the Longfellow poem thoughtfully included in The Land of the Pilgrims. In this one Dawn Addams, who some of you may know from Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957) is Priscilla Mullin. [wolf noises galore]. She is lusted after by both John Alden, played by Van Johnson, and Miles Standish, portrayed by Noel Drayton, who’s even more forgotten than Leon Genn. The biggest of those three stars was of course Van Johnson, who was from my home state of Rhode Island and inexplicably a major heart throb with the ladies in the World War Two era. “Ah jeez, look at that. Say, if I knew you girls were havin’ a clambake, I’d have brought some of my famous quohaug stuffin’!”

WELL. I can see my Van Johnson imitation is wasted on you.

Plymouth Adventure also has a young Lloyd Bridges as a totally made up pirate guy walking around deck with his shirt off. With all this action you’d think a body’s pulse might quicken, but no dice. In fact in the end, Gene Tierney can’t take the tedium and jumps into the drink. The end. Oh and also, religious freedom.

Pilgrim dramatization had not appreciably improved by the time of my own childhood. When not reading 50 year old books, for my Plymouth fix in my own childhood I might tune in the 1979 CBS made-for-television movie Mayflower: The Pilgrim’s Adventure, with a young Anthony Hopkins as Captain Jones, and Richard Crenna, as Pilgrim leader William Brewster.

William Brewster was on the run from the authorities at the time so, I kid you not, Crenna spends the entire movie hiding in a small box like some kind of Pilgrim Senor Wences. And given that Hopkins had starred in Magic the previous year, I count that as a lost ventriloquial opportunity. “Are you alright down there, Brother Brewster?” (echoey Senor Wences): “S’alright!”

And did I mention the Pilgrim goils in this one? Whoa-sa! Trish Van De Vere as Rose Standish and Jenny Agutter as Priscilla Mullin. Clearly John Landis liked Agutter so much in this movie that he just had to have her for An American Werewolf in London and you know what that makes me say? (An absurd amount of wolf sounds and dogs barking).

But wait! Now we come to my sons' generation! And they have their own TV movie, Saints and Strangers, which premiered on the National Geographic channel in 2015.

This one has several male actors, but more importantly Anna Camp and Natsacha McElhone  as a couple of Pilgrim beauties [Crazy amount of wolf noises, climaxing with dogs barking "Jingle Bells"].

Hey now, these movies make it sound like Plymouth was a hotbed of…hot beds!