Robert C. Sickels - 100 Entertainers Who Changed America

100 Entertainers Who Changed America

100 Entertainers Who Changed America

An Encyclopedia of Pop Culture Luminaries

Volume 1: AL

ROBERT C. SICKELS, EDITOR

AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, LLC

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Copyright 2013 by ABC-CLIO, LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

100 entertainers who changed America : an encyclopedia of pop culture luminaries / Robert C. Sickels, editor.

volumes cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781598848304 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781598848311 (ebook) 1. Celebrities DictionariesUnited StatesBiography. 2. EntertainersUnited StatesBiographyDictionaries. 3. United StatesBiographyDictionaries. I. Sickels, Robert, editor of compilation. II. Title: One hundred entertainers who changed America.

CT220.A15 2013
920.07303dc23 2013000306

ISBN: 9781598848304
EISBN: 9781598848311

17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

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Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

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Contents

Encyclopedia Entries

VOLUME 1

VOLUME 2

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, special thanks are due to my editor Erin Ryan, who was infinitely patient and enthusiastic in her shepherding of this project. Thanks to all the excellent authors involved in this collection, whose brilliant work made it a pleasure to compile and edit. Thanks to my home institution, Whitman College, which continues to be incredibly supportive of both my scholarly work and filmmaking endeavors. Thanks to Professors Tom Reck, Robert Merrill, Michael Branch, and Robert Withycombe for what has now been many years of guidance, mentoring, inspiration, and friendship. Thanks to the many makers of fine American rye whiskey, which was the key ingredient of the Manhattans and highballs that played such an integral role in the fun breaks required to keep my cool during the four years it took to bring this project to fruition. Thanks to my mom and dad for everything. Thanks to Annie B. for her unwavering love and support and ready willingness to join me in all the things that make life worthwhile. And lastly, thanks to my children, Dutch and Tallulah, for allowing me to see the magic of everything I love about popular culture anew through their eyes. This one is for you two dickens!

Introduction

100 Entertainers Who Changed America. The title alone is fabulously intriguing and evocative and the kind of thing likely to fuel endless debate about the choices contained herein, and thats just what a collection encompassing this topic should do. Indeed, in glancing over the table of contents, its easy to see how people might be just as excited to talk about who isnt in here that they think should be as they are about those who actually made the cut. But who you are a fan of and who should be in these texts are not necessarily the same thing. Theres more to consider than the level of ones popularity when assembling a collection of this nature. In fact, the biggest pitfall is the chance of confusing popularity with influence, and if youre talking about actually changing American entertainment, influence is often overlooked even though it typically has far more importance than popularity, although the two are certainly not always mutually exclusive. By favoring the popular when deciding whom to include, one would run the risk of producing a fairly straightforward and predictable set of books, which defeats the purpose of this collection. So while there are surely some figures who would make it onto a list of the most popular American entertainers, by considering influence as the most important factor for inclusion in these volumes the resultant collection is more pleasingly motley, surprising, and contentiously engaging, which is why influence was of the utmost importance in determining just who to consider for 100 Entertainers Who Changed America. So in these pages youll find obvious choices such as Jerry Seinfeld, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, and Ellen DeGeneres alongside less expected folks, including the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto, Agnes Nixon, and Simon Fuller, all of whom are profoundly influential, even though they arent necessarily household names, especially for folks under a certain age.

And even with this method of discernment in place, theres a greater unexpected question the title raises: What, exactly, does entertainment entail, anyway? Of course, film, television, and recording stars will come into play, but what about athletes? Or novelists? Poets? Gossip columnists? A chef? And what about the people behind the scenes, who most people never even think about, but whose decisions often profoundly affect what the general public sees, hears, and reads? Its incredibly hard to argue against the idea that all spheres of American life, including politics and even religion, have converged toward being entertainment, so by necessity the parameters for inclusion were expanded beyond film, TV, and popular music, the more traditional pillars of American entertainment, so as to create a more diverse list of entries.

Accordingly, alongside expected and deserving entries on people like Alfred Hitchcock, Roseanne Barr, Lucille Ball, and Bob Dylan are figures such as Amelia Earhart, who in addition to being a famous pilot was also among the first pop culture figures to use her celebrity to help promote a political agenda, which helped to change the nature of what entertainers could do from a social standpoint; Julia Child, who is perhaps contemporarily best remembered because of her oftimitated high-pitched voice, but whose television show brought foreign cuisine into American kitchens and surely paved the way for the endless parade of cooking shows that now permeate the airwaves; Lew Wasserman, whose behind the scenes deal-making changed the way movies and TV shows are packaged and sold; Michael Eisner, whose reign at Disney created the template company toward which all other media conglomerates now aspire; the so-called gossipmongers, Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper, the long-time writers of influential syndicated columns that are surely the progenitors of todays ubiquitous tabloid culture; the Velvet Underground, about whose debut album its been said that only 15,000 copies were sold but that everyone who bought it started a band; likewise, the Grateful Dead, whose innovative way of marketing themselves, selling tickets, and allowing fans to trade bootlegs of their concerts created a community unto itself; and then theres Jackie Robinson, whose breaking of Major League Baseballs so-called color line not only changed American sports forever, but changed American society as well. Now thats influence.

And while the above figures, and many other equally seemingly eclectic choices, made the final grade, their inclusion doesnt mean that theres an exact answer to the question of what, exactly, entertainment entails. I dont pretend to have a definite formula, but the fact of the matter is that neither does anyone else in the world; after all, its not maththeres no right or wrong here. But in assembling this collection, a variety of things have been taken into consideration, including both the longevity and breadth of ones influence across popular culture, almost every component of which now falls loosely under the rubric of entertainment. Ultimately, its my hope that my valuing influence as a key component in deciding who to include in these volumes has resulted in an iconoclastic, entertaining, and thought-provoking list of entries, and thats exactly as it should be.