On This Day: September 18

On This Day, for September 18, by Britannica.
Today we’re looking at

The fall of the man behind “Livestrong”
A banner day for birthdays and film and TV
A guitarist who was much more than just a guitarist
From beyond the grave, “Garbo talks!”

On this day in 1971, Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist who was the only rider to have ever won seven Tour de France titles, was born.

Armstrong entered sports at a young age, excelling in both swimming and cycling, and by the time he was a teenager he was competing in triathlons and swimming competitions. Before his high-school graduation the junior national team of the U.S. Cycling Federation had recruited him. Armstrong competed in Moscow at the Junior World Championships and in 1990 won the U.S. Amateur Championships. In 1992 he turned professional when he joined the Motorola cycling team. Armstrong won stages of the Tour de France in both 1993 and ’95 but withdrew from three of four Tours he attempted from ’93 to ’96.

After the 1996 Tour de France, Armstrong fell ill, and, in October of that year, his physicians diagnosed testicular cancer, which had by that time also spread to his lungs and brain. He underwent chemotherapy and surgery, which were considered his best chances for survival. Months of treatments followed before he could attempt his comeback. On July 25, 1999, however, he defied the odds: Armstrong became the second American to win the Tour de France and he contributed to the first to win for an American team. Riding with the U.S. Postal Service team, Armstrong won the 2,256-mile 22-day race, beating the next best time by 7 minutes 37 seconds.

During the Tour he fought allegations of doping, because traces of a banned substance—corticosteroid, from a prescription skin cream he used for saddle sores—were found in his urine. The International Cycling Union cleared him, but he continued to endure accusations, especially from the French press. Thus, Armstrong felt his win of the Tour de France in the following year to be a vindication of his first win and an answer to his critics. His additional Tour de France wins in 2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, and ’05 were just icing on the cake.

After winning that seventh Tour in 2005, Armstrong retired from the sport, but in September 2008 he announced that he was returning to competitive racing. He placed third in the 2009 Tour de France and stepped away from competitive racing permanently in 2011.

In June of 2010, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (or USADA) alleged that Armstrong and five of his associates—three doctors, a manager, and a trainer—had been part of a decade-long doping conspiracy beginning in the late 1990s. According to USADA, Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs—including erythropoietin (EPO) and human growth hormone—and distributed drugs to other cyclists. USADA also accused Armstrong of having undergone blood transfusions and testosterone injections. The allegations resulted in his immediate ban from triathlon competitions, which he had been competing in. In August 2012 he declined to enter USADA’s arbitration process, which led the agency to announce that it would strip him of all his prizes and awards from August 1998 forward—including his seven Tour de France titles—and enact a lifetime ban from cycling and any other sport that follows the World Anti-Doping Code. Armstrong stated that his decision to no longer dispute the organization’s allegations was not an admission of guilt but was instead a result of his weariness with the process.

Despite Armstrong’s continued protestations of his innocence, the evidence of his doping was incredibly overwhelming. In October 2012 he was officially stripped of his titles and banned from the sport. In January 2013, during a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, Armstrong finally admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs from the mid-1990s through 2005.

American rock guitarist, singer, and composer Jimi Hendrix fused American traditions of blues, jazz, rock, and soul with techniques of British avant-garde rock in the late 1960s. The fusion redefined the electric guitar’s presence in pop music as well as in mainstream culture, and left Hendrix’s imprint on the instrument thereafter. Hendrix passed away on this day in 1970 in London, England.

Hendrix was a paratrooper who was honourably discharged from the service for medical reasons, and so he was exempted from service in the Vietnam War. He spent the early 1960s working as a freelance accompanist for a variety of musicians. His unorthodox style limited him until he was discovered in a small New York City club and was brought to England in September 1966. Performing alongside two British musicians, he stunned London audiences with his virtuosity and showmanship. He rapidly adapted the musical fashions of late 1966 London to his own needs, and consequently outpaced other bands like the Who, with his own show that became the hottest ticket in town.

By November 1966, his band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, had their first Top Ten single “Hey Joe.” Hendrix and his band followed up with two more hits, “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” and then released their first album, Are You Experienced? in the summer of 1967. These songs and the album became rock and roll classics.

Hendrix returned to the United States in 1968. But legal complications proved frustrating. An old contract in the United States meant that he could keep making records but not receive money from them. This situation obliged him to tour in order to pay his bills. Complicating this, his audiences were fond of his early music and reluctant to let him evolve beyond it. Hendrix was on the verge of solving both these problems when he died of an overdose of barbiturates on this day in 1970, leaving behind a huge backlog of works-in-progress. Many of these pieces were eventually edited and completed by others.

For Hendrix, the thunderous drama of his hard rock band was merely a fraction of what he aspired to. He wanted to compose more complex music for larger ensembles, and not just improvise endlessly for audiences who came to watch the spectacle of him smashing his guitar on-stage. Even so, his hope of exceeding that spectacle was and is realized by so many musicians and performers who’ve drawn inspiration from him, even to this day as they create their own music. Hendrix remains a touchstone for emotional honesty and a vision of inclusive cultural brotherhood.

And a personal note here: I like to think that when people say, “Rock and roll will never die,” this is the rock they’re talking about.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

I’m Meg Matthias, and here are Fast Facts for September 18th.

French physicist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault, who introduced and helped develop a technique of measuring with extreme accuracy the absolute velocity of light and provided experimental proof that the Earth rotates on its axis, was born on this day in 1819 in Paris, France.

On this day in 1961, James Gandolfini, the American actor known best for his portrayal of Tony Soprano in the HBO drama The Sopranos, was born in Westwood, New Jersey.

Another “happy birthday” is extended to actress Jada Pinkett Smith, known for Girls Trip, The Nutty Professor, and her wildly successful web talk show, Red Table Talk. She was born on this day in 1971 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Even more birthdays today: Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head before serving as the U.S. secretary of housing and urban affairs after an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential candidacy—he was born on this day in 1951 in Detroit, Michigan.

And Canadian ice hockey coach Scotty Bowman, who won a record nine Stanley Cups as a head coach in the National Hockey League, was born on this day in 1933 in Montreal, Canada.

On this day in 2014, Scottish voters rejected a referendum that would have made Scotland an independent country.

This day in 2001 was the third straight day Typhoon Nari pounded Taiwan. Its total rainfall over three days broke records, causing massive flooding and killing more than 79 people.

A Streetcar Named Desire—the film directed by Elia Kazan, and not the play written by Tennessee Williams on which the film was based—first premiered on this day in 1951, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh.

Jackie Chan’s breakthrough American film—the action-packed Rush Hour, directed by Brett Ratner, also starring Chris Tucker—was released on this day in 1998.

The cult classic television show I Dream of Jeannie, in which Barbara Eden portrayed a 2,000-year-old genie and Larry Hagman played her astronaut master, premiered on this day…in 1965.

Don’t worry—only two more. Also premiered that day were, in 1964 The Addams Family television show on ABC, which ran for two seasons and starred John Astin and Carolyn Jones, and, in 1965, the TV show Get Smart, a Mel Brooks comedy starring Don Adams. It was just that time of year for TV- and moviemakers.

On this day in 1905, Swedish American actress Greta Garbo, original name Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, one of the most glamorous and popular motion-picture stars of the 1920s and ’30s, was born in Stockholm, Sweden.

The daughter of a labourer, Greta Gustafsson grew up in poverty in a Stockholm slum. She was working as a department-store clerk when she met film director Erik Petschler, who gave her a small part in Luffar-Petter (from 1922; in English, Peter the Tramp). From 1922 to ’24 she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and in 1925 she secured a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Hollywood.

At first, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer was skeptical of Garbo’s talent, but he and all studio executives were impressed by the initial rushes of her first American film, The Torrent (1926). Garbo projected a luminous quality that was perfect for silent pictures. Throughout the remainder of the decade, Garbo appeared in such popular romantic dramas as Flesh and the Devil (1927), Love (1927), and The Kiss (1929). She often costarred with John Gilbert, with whom she was romantically involved off-screen, adding a layer of public interest to her box-office draw.

Once sound came to the movies, Garbo continued to flourish. Her first sound film, Anna Christie, was marketed under the tagline: “Garbo talks!” Her first spoken words on-screen—“Give me a whiskey”—revealed a husky resonant voice that added to her allure and her somewhat androgynous persona that has appealed to both genders throughout the years. The coming decade of the 1930s became the golden age of Garbo. People instantly recognized her by that single name at that point. She excelled in both her period films, which were always her most successful, as well as in contemporary pieces, in which she often embodied the cinema’s first modern emancipated woman. This decade brought her roles like Mata Hari and Queen Christina, as well as Anna Karenina, Camille, and Ninotchka. She proved herself to be incredibly diverse and rather brave for the time; her roles dipped into comedy, bisexuality, eroticism, tragedy, parody, and more.

After World War II, the market for Garbo’s movies began to fade. Her films had been more popular abroad than at home, and those markets began to dissipate in the wake of war, if they didn’t simply become impossible to reach from Hollywood. After the comic misfire Two-Faced Woman, released in 1941, Garbo chose to retire permanently, a move that just added to her enigma and increased her cult following.

Several of Greta Garbo’s movie characters spoke of their desire to be left to themselves after a plotline put them in some kind of distress. Owing to the audience’s fascination with her, Garbo’s own public life as a movie star was under more or less constant scrutiny and stress too. After a screen career of 20 years and with her film successes to back her up, Garbo chose to live the next five decades in her New York City apartment and made no public appearances. She was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955, but, true to form, she did not attend the ceremonies. It’s certain that some of her fans felt rejected by this.

A cliché then arose in popular culture about the reclusive Greta Garbo. Perhaps it was a kind of ridicule by fans who once felt they were close to her, even though they never were. The cliché suggested that her movie characters really weren’t the ones who sought solitude. Rather, she was saying “I want to be alone” in a dramatic but selfish tone.

But to a confidant, Garbo said there was all the difference between being alone versus being let alone, meaning left unpressured and undisturbed by the press and the social mayhem that comes with celebrity. Greta Garbo’s decades in New York became her testament to that.

Whether you’re a guitar hero, a neurosurgeon, or an actress embodying glamour itself, there’s always more for you to read and discover at Britannica.com. Thank you so much for listening today! Our program was written by Emily Goldstein and edited by yours truly. For Britannica, I’m Kurt Heintz. And I’m Meg Matthias.

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