The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night-Out In Pooh’s Corner

By Allan Jackson

[As I mentioned in the introduction to the last sketch, the one about the bakery smells that have memory aflame even fifty years  later the spirit that animated this whole series of sketches had a name-a name of Peter Paul Markin, always known as Scribe, who was our mad monk driving force to break out of the old Acre working class neighborhood of growing up North Adamsville where we all might have stayed like a lot of others unto this day and “died” on the vine in the process. The “pooh’s corner” reference is from a Jefferson Airplane song from the days when we all went, one way or another, one time or another, out to California to see what was what in those crazy 1960s days. None of us, probably not even Bart Webber, would have gone out there on our own without Scribe’s imprimatur his influence that way was so strong. We had some wild times, some bad times, but mostly memorable times, although all agree that when we think of those time we not only shed a small tear for our lost youth but for the lost Scribe.

Part of my recent taking on the by-line to this series was the hard fact that I wrote or seriously edited almost everything in the series. Probably worked one way or another on every freaking line. However I didn’t write everything as the by-line below for Josh Breslin indicates. On this sketch I did not want to do it myself since it involved a lot about me and my relationship to “pooh’s corner” and it would ring false if I wrote it in the third person. So I contacted Josh as he will explain below and since he was a writer on his own dime for half the small press and off-beat journals on the American landscape I asked him to do the project. Moreover Josh was there almost every step of the way including “stealing” my surfer girl girlfriend of the time Butterfly Swirl right from under me one night when we were on our “honeymoon” (Josh will explain below) so who better to write it.

Not only was Josh there in those turbulent 1960s times but he also knew the Scribe, had met him out there before any of the rest of us had gone out the first time so he too will shed a small tear for our lost comrade-and curse the bastard to high heaven too for leaving us in the lurch. Josh, by the way, has added gravity since we have always since those days called him one of our own, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. Nobody ever complained about it either. Allan Jackson]  

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

A while back, maybe three years ago now, I was sitting in the Sunnyvale Grille in Boston where I was visiting my old time merry prankster friend, Allan Jackson, where we got into a hot and heavy discussion about the kind of songs that turned us on back in the 1960s when we had come of musical age. We had young kids’ stuff grown up on the classic Elvis-Jerry Lee-Chuck-Bo-Roy stuff but that was mainly copped from our older brothers and sisters, the ‘60s sounds and their attendant political connections were our real age time. I had met Allan out in California after I had hitched out there in the mid-1960s just after I had graduated from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He was going under the moniker Flash Dash then , don’t laugh, for a while I was the Prince of Love, those monikers used in abundance as a way to break from our traditional-bound pasts, to break from the old neighborhood corner boy stuff, on the a way to make our own newer world. (Allan would later in a fit of nostalgia or something go back and us Peter Paul Markin as his moniker on the Internet in honor of his our fallen comrade so it wasn’t just in seeking new worlds 1960s where alias worked their magic.) That night Allan had a couple of his recently reunited North Adamsville High old corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins and Sam Lowell, and a guy he met after he had just graduated from high school, Frank Jackman, who was from Hull about twenty miles south of North Adamsville all of whom I had previously met one time or another out in the “Garden of Eden,” which is what we called our search back then and which came up California for all of us then whatever happened later.

Now the reason that I have mentioned who was in attendance at that “meeting” (really an occasion to have a few drinks without the bother of womenfolk around for a short time and without the lately more pressing need not to drink and drive impaired since Allan was in town for a conference and had been staying at the Westin a short walk down the street) is that each and every participant was a certified member of the generation of ’68. That generation of ’68 designation meaning that all were, one way or another, veterans of the political wars back then when we tried to “turn the world upside down” and got kicked in the ass for our efforts and, more importantly here, veterans of the “hippie” drug/drop-out/ communal experiences that a good portion of our generation imbibed in, if only for a minute. And thus all were something like “experts” on the question that was pressing on Allan’s mind. That question centered on what music “turned” each guy there on. Not in the overtly sexual way in which the question asked might be taken today but while they were being “turned on.” Turned on being a euphemism plain and simple for getting “high,” “stoned,” “ripped” or whatever term was used in the locale that you frequented, for doing your drug of choice.              

See Allan, full name Allan Chester Jackson but nobody in his old high school corner boys crowd called him that, nor did I or do I here, had this idea that rather than the common wisdom Beatles, Stones, Doors, Motown influence that when the deal went down the Jefferson Airplane was the group that provided the best music to get “turned on” by. By the way since she will enter this story at some point the only one that I can think of who called Allan that three name combo was a girl, what we call a young woman now, whom we met, or rather he met, and then I met and took away from him, Cathy Callahan, out in La Jolla in California, who went under the moniker Butterfly Swirl back in the 1960s. She thought, clueless California sunshine ex-surfer guy girl, the three name combo was “cute” like Allan was some Brahmin scion rather than from his real working-class neighborhood roots. But that was a different story because as he said, she “curled his toes,” curled mine too, so she could call him (or me) any damn name she wanted.     

Naturally there was some disagreement over that premise but let me tell you what the mad monk Allan was up to. See, as a free-lance journalist of sorts, he had shortly before our meeting taken on an assignment from a generation of ’68-type magazine, Mellow Times. A ’68-type magazine meaning that it was filled with full-blown nostalgia stuff: New Mexico communes where kids strictly from suburban no heartache homes tried to eke, the only word possible for such exertions, an existence out of some hard clay farming; outlaw bikers who guys like gonzo writers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe made infamous, or rather more infamous; acid head freak-outs in the Fillmores of the East and West sipping weird drug concoctions out of Dixie cups and getting twisted to the high decibel music up front; merry pranksters riding shotgun to the new dispensation taking more than a few over the high side with them; the Haight-Ashbury scene from the first “all men and women are brothers and sisters” days of sharing on the soup kitchen lines to the gun, drug shoot-up bitter end; Golden Gate Park days when that park had more kites, more bubbles, more wha-wha than any other park in the world; psychedelics from drugs to art; retro- art deco styles like the lost children were channeling back to the “lost generation” Jazz Age jail-breakers as kindred; and, feed the people kitchens in the good days and bad, Sally or Fugs, that kind of thing from that period.

Allan, well known to a select audience of baby-boomers for his previous work in writing about the merry prankster hitchhike road, what he had called in one series that I had read-The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- in which he had used me as a stick drug-addled figure from Podunk who didn’t know how to tie his own shoes until he came under the god-like Jackson spell, was given free rein to investigate that question under the descriptive by-line- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night -that was to head the series of articles the magazine proposed that he work on. Here is Allan’s proposed introduction to the series that he gave us copies of that night: 

“This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1960s with its bags full of classic (now classic) rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back to rise up and smite the dragon, and a warning to those in charge (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better his The Times They Are A-Changin’ with its plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside.  (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.”

And so we, his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys hometown corner boys, Frank, and I were the “masses” for the purpose of Allan’s work. Free labor if you like for his little nostalgia music piece. And here is his rationale, or at least part of it that he sent in an e-mail trying to drag me from Portland down to Boston to beat the thing over the head with him:

“…Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind of stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like Out At Pooh’s Corner. A song that had every red-blooded American teen-age experimenter (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused him to pose the comment in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series”

And so after succumbing to his blarney we sat at that table in the bar of the Sunnyvale Grille sipping high-shelf scotch and trying to work through this knotty problem that Allan had put before us. This problem of what moved us though the squeeze that we put our brains through back then. Allan brought something up that kind of set the tone for the evening. He mentioned that coming out of North Adamsville in 1964 he, Jimmy, and Sam, if they had been prophetic, could not have possibly foreseen that they would, like about half of their generation, or so it seemed, have imbibed deeply of the counter-culture, its communal values, its new-found habits, its ethos, its drug-centeredness, or its music. He explained (and Jimmy and Sam chimed in with comments as he proceeded) that in strait-laced, mostly Irish working- class neighborhoods like where they grew up in North Adamsville anything other than working hard to get ahead, “getting ahead” being getting some kind of white-collar city civil service job and finally breaking the string of factory worker generations, since they were in some cases the first generation to finish high school and have enough knowledge to take the exam to white-collar-dom, getting married, maybe to your high school sweetheart or some such arrangement, and eventually buying a slightly bigger house than the cramped quarters provided by the house you grew up in and have children, slightly fewer children than in the house you grew up in, was considered scandalous, weird, or evil.

But as Jimmy said after Allan finished up it wasn’t so much the neighborhood ethos as the ethos of the corner boy life, the life in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up on Thornton Street. That life included plenty of under-age drinking, plenty of talk, mostly talk, of sex with pretty girls  (certainly more talk than any activity that actually happened-except in bravado Monday morning before school banter with every guy lying, or half-lying about what was done, or not done,  after the weekend’s exertions), and a view of the world perhaps slightly less rigid than the parents but still scornful of people of the opposite sex living together unmarried (and in high Catholic North Adamsville even divorced people were subject to comment, and scorn), scornful of guys who didn’t want to get married, sometime, and of the opinion that those who did dope, that dope being heroin, opium, or morphine which they knew about and not so much marijuana which just seemed exotic, were fiends, evil or beatniks. Not the profile of those who would later in the decade grow their hair longer that any mother’s most outlandish nightmare dream, wear headbands to keep the hair back, grow luxurious and unkempt beards, live in communes with both sexes mixing and matching, smoke more marijuana, snort more coke, and down more bennies, acid, and peyote buttons, and play more ripping music than the teen angel, earth angel, Johnny angel music heard down at Jack Slack’s jukebox. Everybody laughed after that spiel from Jimmy.

Those old time references got me to thinking about the days when we had headed west in the mid-1960s days, Markin first and then later Allan with various combination of corner boys including Sam, Frank and Jimmy, me, the first time solo and thereafter with Markin and others, the days when we were in search of Pooh’s Corner. Thinking along the lines of about Allan’s “theory” of the great turn on song for our generation, thinking about the search for the “garden,” the “Garden of Eden,” that we had picked up from a line in a Woody Guthrie song, Do Re Mi (meaning if you did not have it, dough, kale, cash, forget California Edens although at our coming of California age money was not a big deal, nobody had any and so we didn’t worry about it, unlike now). Of course everybody then knew the reference from the Jefferson Airplane’s song which contained those Pooh Corner references. I remember I first heard the song one night at the Fillmore, the rat’s end concert hall where everybody who had any pretensions to the new acid-etched music either played or wanted to play, and that was the Mecca for every person who wanted to think about dropping out of the rat race and try to get their heads around a different idea.

We had in any case all headed west maybe a couple of years after the big summer of love 1967 caught our attention. Markin had already been out there for a few months having hitchhiked from Boston in the early spring, had wound up in La Jolla down by the surfer Valhalla and had run into Captain Crunch and his merry band, a band of brothers and sisters who had been influenced by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to drop out, drop acid and “see the world” and their legendary former yellow brick road school bus, Further In, earlier in the decade and whose adventures had been the subject of a Tom Wolfe book. That Kesey-led experience, especially noticeable on the California coastal roads was multiplied a thousand fold once the jail-break hit full speed and Captain Crunch and his companion, Mustang Sally, had followed suit. It was never clear whether the Captain actually knew Kesey but he sure as hell was knee deep in the drug trade since the reason that he and the bus load had been in La Jolla was that he and his crew were “house-sitting” a safe house used by one of the southern drug cartels while the Captain was getting ready to head north to San Francisco and find out what was happening with the scene there. Markin had “signed on” the bus (in those days a common expression was “you are on the bus, or you are off the bus,’ and you were better off on the bus) since he had wanted to head to Frisco town from Boston anyway but the vagaries of the hitchhike road, a couple of long haul truck driver pick up the first which left him in Dallas and the second San Diego had brought him farther south. (In those days as I well knew you took whatever long haul ride you could get as long as they were heading west and got you some place on the California coast. I remember telling Markin, and he agreed that, I had never realized just how long a state it was, had been  clueless, until I had my first San Diego ride when I was looking to get to Big Sur several hundred miles up the coast which took me a couple of days of rides to get to.) 

This is the time when Allan (via Markin by the way) met Cathy Callahan, Butterfly Swirl, from Carlsbad up the road a few miles from La Jolla and who was then “slumming” in La Jolla after breaking up with her perfect wave surfer boyfriend and looking for, well, I don’t know what she was looking for in the end and neither did Allan, maybe just kicks, momentary kicks to see what she might be missing because after she got through with us she went back to that perfect wave surfer boyfriend. Go figure. But then people like Butterfly Swirl, ex-surfer boy girls, working-class guys like me from Podunk, Maine, ex-soldiers unable or unwilling to adjust to the “real world” after Vietnam, hairy-assed bikers who had taken some dope and mellowed out on their rage trip, college professors who saw what they were teaching as a joke , governmental bureaucrats who knew what they were doing was a joke, or worse, con men getting all worked up seeing all the naïve kids from nowhere who wanted to be hip and were easy marks for bad dope and bad karma , corner boys trying to break out of their corners looking for easy girls , the derelict doing what the derelict always do except not being castigated for it by those seeking the newer world, hot-rod junkies tired of their midnight runs and death, and the like were all taking that jail-break minute to see if they fit into the new dispensation so maybe it was just that. Most of them went back to whatever they were doing previously once the ebb began to catch up with us, once the bad guys put on a full-court press.

So Allan and Butterfly Swirl met, met at a party Captain Crunch was throwing at that safe house, a mansion from what Markin had told me.  This Butterfly Swirl was all legs, thin, blonde a then typical California surfer girl waiting on dry land for her surfer guy to get that  perfect wave and then go ball the night away before he/they got up the next day to look, he, for the next perfect wave. Definitely in the normal course of events not an Allan-type of young woman, his running to sad- sack Harvard Square intellectual types who broke your heart a different way when they were done with you, or mine either, French-Canadian or Irish girls, all virginal and pious for public consumption any way, also heart-breakers, but chalk it up to the times. So they met, got turned on to some great grass (marijuana, for the squares) and hit one of the upstairs bedrooms where she “curled his toes.”  And they were an item as the Captain and crew ambled north for the next few months until they hit a park on Russian Hill where they parked the bus for a few weeks.

And that is where I had met Markin, Allan, and eventually Butterfly Swirl. I had stopped off at the park because somebody I met, a guy who had been on the Haight-Ashbury scene for a while, on Mission Street said that I could score dope, some food, and a place to sleep if I asked around up on the hill where the scene was not as frantic as around downtown and in Golden Gate Park. There was the bus, painted in the obligatory twenty-seven day-glo colors, just sitting there when I walked up and asked about a place to sleep. Allan, looking like some Old Testament prophet long unkempt hair and scraggly beard, army jacket against the chilled Bay winds, bell-bottomed trousers as was the unisex fashion then, beat-up moccasins, and looking like he had hit the magic bong pipe a few times too many, said “you can get on the bus, if youw want[A1] .” But mainly I remembered those slightly blood-shot fierce blue eyes that spoke of seeing hard times in his life and spoke as well that maybe seeking that newer world he was seeking would work out after all, he no longer has that fierce look that “spoke” to me that first time. That introduction started our now lifetime off and on comradely relationship. I think for both of us the New England connection is what drew us together although he was a few years older than me, had seen and done things that I was just getting a handle on. And strangely I think that being older helped when I “stole” young Butterfly Swirl away from him one night at the Fillmore where the Airplane were playing their high acid rock he was mad, mad as hell, when he did find out about us but he did get over it (and I, in my turn, got over it when she about a year later she went back to Carlsbad and her surfer boy).

The “strange” part mentioned above came about because Butterfly Swirl and Allan had been “married,” at the time, no, not in the old-fashioned bourgeois sense but having been on the bus together for a while one night Captain Crunch in his capacity as the head of the band of sisters and brothers “officiated” at a mock wedding held under his authority as “captain” of the adventure ship. While this “marriage” ceremony carried no legal weight it did carry weight on the bus for it meant that the pair were to be left alone in the various couplings and un-couplings that drove the sex escapades of all bus dwellers. Moreover Captain Crunch, a rather strange but upfront guy who was all for couplings and un-couplings at will, oh yeah, except when it came to his own barnyard and he would rant and rave at Mustang Sally, his longtime companion who as a free spirit in her own right made a specialty of picking up young guys who played in one of the burgeoning rock bands of the times, “curled their toes” and too made connections to get them gigs and stuff like that. The Captain was fit to be tied when Sally got her young guy wanting habits on. But what could he do, if he wanted her on the bus.

In any case the Captain who was not only mysteriously connected with the drug world, knew the mad max daddy of acid, Owsley, himself as well as the hermanos down south who trusted him as much as they could trust any gringo, but also had connections with the rising number of rock promoters on the West Coast decided to spring for a “honeymoon” for Allan(who was still going by the moniker Flash Dash at the time) and the Swirl. The honeymoon was to be a party before and during the Airplane’s next gig in San Francisco where had copped twenty tickets from the promoter for some service rendered, maybe a brick of grass who knows. But here is where things got freaky, this was also to be something of an old time Ken Kesey “electric kool-aid acid test,” particularly for Swirl who never had done LSD before, had never done acid, and was very curious. So the night of the concert a couple of hours before it was to start Captain gathered all around the bus then headquartered in Pacifica about twenty miles south of the city at another cartel safe house and offered whoever wanted to indulge some blotter. Flash and Swirl led things off, she trembling a little in fear, and excitement.  Then one and all, including me, took off in the bus for amble the Airplane show. (An amble which included picking up about six people on the Pacific Coast Highway road up, offering them blotter as well, and on the in-bus jerry-rigged sound the complete (then) Stones’ playlist which had people, including me, dancing in the back of the bus.

That was a very strange night as well because that was the night, the “honeymoon” night when Swirl freaking out on the acid trip. Good freaking out after she got over the initial fear that everybody has about losing control and about the very definite change in physical perspective that are bound to throw you off if you are not used to that pull at the back of your head, or you think is at the back of your head, after seeing gorgeous colors which she described in great detail, feeling all kinds strange outer body feelings as well. See she and I got together as I helped bring her down after Flash took off with some woman. Well just some woman at the time, although he eventually married her (and divorced her), Joyell, Joyell of the brown-eyed world. He had met Joyell initially in Boston but he had been seeing quite a bit since she had come to Frisco, come to get her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and whom he had run into at the concert. Yeah the times were like, a guy or gal could be “married,” or married and then have a million affairs, although usually not on their “honeymoon” but that was Allan, Allan to a tee, and nobody thought anything of it, usually, or if they did they kept it to themselves. We tried about six million ways to try to deal with breaking from our narrow pasts and I think we saw what would be scandalous behavior back in the neighborhoods as a way to do so, although in the end all Allan (and I) got was about three divorces, a bunch of love affairs and many, too many, flings. Here’s the laugher though the thing that brought Swirl back to earth that night was her “grooving” (yeah, we had our own vocabulary as well and you can check Wikipedia for most of the meanings) on the Airplane’s music, on Grace Slick’s going crazy on White Rabbit and assorted other great music from After Bathing At Baxter’s. (Swirl said she felt like Alice-In-Wonderland that night.) So in a way I have to agree with Allan about the effect that band had on us but I will be damned if fifty years later I am going to side with him after he left his “bride” standing at the altar. Even if I was the guy who caught her fall. Yeah such was life out in Pooh’s Corner, and I wish it were still going on, wish it a lot.                   

---

 [A1]

Once I Was A Good Boy-With Guitarist T-Bone Walker In Mind

Once I Was A Good Boy-With Guitarist T-Bone Walker In Mind 

By Lester Lannon 

No question Frank Jackman started out once as a good boy. Even his mother, Delores, brought up a pious Catholic and a “no tolerance” for evil type of mother admitted that up to the age of about eight he was a model child, went to school every day, got as good marks in school as he could with his limited abilities, went to church, that Roman Catholic Church thing his mother lived for, and was a star in Sunday school class. Then at about eight, maybe nine he fell in with the wrong crowd, fell in with some wrong gees as the saying went in the old neighborhood. Three of those young cronies spent many years in prison for armed something, one just finishing up a dime’s worth for armed robbery of a liquor store. Frank’s fate will be discussed further below after we figure out how he went from a good boy to bad.

A lot of people, you know, professional sociologists, criminologists and psychologists, blamed it on the neighborhood, “the projects,” where Frank and the others came of age. No question they had a point for the statistics bear out the facts of all kinds of strange pathologies among people at the bottom of the feeding chain, the hungry ones, “los olvidados” as one Spanish guy, one hip Spanish sociologist who came out of the place, called those “forgotten” hermanos (not hermanas so much) in the barrio when liberals were actually interested in trying to figure out how to make all boats rise. No question “from hunger” drove a lot of stuff back then when Frank was coming of age in the 1970s, now too although nobody is looking to closely at the subject (except to construct more jails or in the international case drop more bombs). And no question if Frank had been brought up in say leafy Forest Lawn or Glen Ellen he might not have run into those wrong gees, Ronnie, Ducky, Pistol, and Whiplash. Would maybe have found some Alfred, Harry and Bradley let us say and planned mayhem on the basketball court or something and not the local gas station which first got Frank into  trouble (unarmed robbery in the daytime). Actually that first troubled covered up in the courts so not counted was the ‘five-finger clip” at Kay’s Jewelry up in Riverdale Square. Like I said that didn’t count.        

But to Delores’ mind, to Paul his father’s too, Frank was strictly “bad seed,” although not put in such a graphic pseudo-sexual way. Bore the mark of Cain, the mark of the early banishment from Eden unto as the 1930s writer titled one of his novels –East of Eden. And they, their other three boys, Frank’s grandparents and the rest of the extended family bore down on him with those thoughts until he actually began to believe he was marked by the original sin we are all born with under high hell Catholic doctrine. Started almost the day that Frank (and Whiplash not known as Whiplash then, that came later at about age fourteen when he took a chain and nearly beat a guy to death for being on the “wrong” corner and needed to teach the guy a lesson about turf) got caught at Kay’s trying to “five-finger” a bunch of onyx with diamond chips rings to give to some girl Pistol was trying to get a blow job from. (That part, the head reason, never came out and would have freaked out the whole neighborhood, the adults anyway. To keep the record straight despite the lack of jewelry to entice the girl Pistol got his blow job anyway. She was that kind of guy-crazy girl.)       

So Frank (never Frankie, just Frank) went from bad to worse. Got sly as he grew older, got to thinking about what he didn’t have in the world, saw what his father had to grovel for to keep his family, to keep Frank, feed and clothed. The sight of the poor bedraggled man coming home always with his damn head down even when he had steady work and a reason to pull his head up for a moment made Frank swear to himself one night an oath to never be like his father, never grovel to anybody period if he could help it. As far as anybody ever knew Frank never did, but never did grow up to be half the man his father had been as he began to recognize long and too late afterward while serving an armed robbery rap for single-handedly robbing the First National Bank of Gloversville of a hundred thou (unfortunately he set off an alarm in the bank on his way out and the cops found him a few days later in New York. Lesson learned: always have another guy at your back).

But that was later, a half- dozen armed robberies and assaults later. The key one, the one that gave him that first record, on the way to a near permanent home in some state correctional institution including now at the “max” security Hammerhead joint. The first was the night he along with Fast Eddy Jones robbed at gunpoint the Cities Service gas station on Thorndike Street in Riverdale. Got away with it for a while, even got a free blow job from that girlfriend of Pistol’s she was so juiced up by what he had done, so yeah, she was that kind of girl but don’t tell Pistol that because he thinks she is still chastely waiting for him to finish up his dime at Shawshank up in Maine for robbing a grocery store when he was high as a kite on cousin cocaine. Pistol would kill her and every guy who even looked at her so please keep this to yourself.

Naturally kids of fourteen are going to brag about such an event if for no other reason than to prove their manhood out on the dangerous streets. At least naturally for Fast Eddy (Frank never bragged about nothing- his motto just do the thing-from robbery to boffing some frail who looked his way ever so slightly). So Frank and Fast Eddy took the fall, did the youth detention center, reform school, for a couple of years and that was that. (Fast Eddy would open his mouth once too often usually to some frail and wound up face down in the Merrimack River up in New Hampshire for his efforts.)

No need to list all the other felonies that Frank committed from that time to his thirty-fifth birthday because Frank was strictly an armed something guy and the only distinction between the crimes was the time served. Except that last one-that three strikes and you are out last one. The one where a bank sneeze, a bank cop at the Portland (Georgia) Trust Bank got hit between the eyes when he believed that the money he was guarding was his and got rum brave, but also got  very dead. Felony murder, murder one  and in death penalty crazy Georgia that meant the big step-off, the big kiss-off of the face of the earth. He is still waiting for the “hangman” as this written. Every once in a while his ancient mother is able to get down to Georgia to see her boy, her bad boy. And every time she says to Frank-“up to the age of about eight you were  a model child, went to school every day, got as good marks in school as you could with your limited abilities, went to church, that Roman Catholic Church thing that I lived for, and were a star in Sunday school class.” Frank just took that never-ending line in and sat in stony silence.      

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The First International's Salute To Abraham Lincoln On His Re-Election In 1864

As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side-The First International's Salute To Abraham Lincoln On His Re-Election In 1864 

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the third year of which we are commemorating this month. 

Below is the First International's Address to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election in 1864

The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America 

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams January 28, 1865 ^[A]

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Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

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Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.



From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?



When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.



While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.



The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. ^[B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

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^[A] From the minutes of the Central (General) Council of the International — November 19, 1864:

"Dr. Marx then brought up the report of the subcommittee, also a draft of the address which had been drawn up for presentation to the people of America congratulating them on their having re-elected Abraham Lincoln as President. The address is as follows and was unanimously agreed to."

^[B] The minutes of the meeting continue:

"A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a M.P. with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members, who said workingmen should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.... It was then proposed... and carried unanimously. The secretary correspond with the United States Minister asking to appoint a time for receiving the deputation, such deputation to consist of the members of the Central Council."

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Ambassador Adams Replies

Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.



So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world. 



The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.



Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.



I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

Charles Francis Adams

Follow The Money-Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkin’s “Misconduct” (2016)-A Film Review

Follow The Money-Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkin’s “Misconduct” (2016)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

[Upon the retirement from the day to day duties of film review in this space of Sam Lowell (he called it drudgery not duty) and his replacement by his old friend and competitor from the American Film Gazette Sandy Salmon there was an understanding that Sandy would cover the old time movies and his associate Alden Riley would cover the modern current efforts. This is Alden’s second such effort. Pete Markin] 

Misconduct, starring Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Alice Eve, Malin Ackerman, 2016      

Ever since the Watergate revelations of the 1970s which did one American President, Richard Nixon, in and fouled up the political atmosphere for years whenever dirty tricks and cutthroat tactics have been employed the mantra has been to “follow the money.” That is the case with the plotline of the film under review, Misconduct, an apt title on several levels.  Although the action is done by private parties rather than governmental that same following the bouncing ball applies to the plotline here as well. 

Arthur Denning, played by now ancient Anthony Hopkins who seems to be chasing Michael Caine for the title of appearing in the most films in a lifetime, a billionaire Big Pharma magnate is on the carpet for doctoring up drug test results which proved fatal on a serious number of trial patients. He certainly wanted to get out from under that heavy legal problem especially the criminal liability part. Moreover he had a younger mentally unstable employee mistress Emily, played by Malin Ackeman, who had her own agenda and wanted to get out from under. She had conjured up documentary proof of Denning’s extensive knowing wrong-doings and figured to cash in on that knowledge.       

Enter young “take no prisoners” big time New Orleans law firm lawyer Ben Cahill, played by Josh Duhamel, who just happened to be an old flame of Emily’s and who is the key to Emily getting out from under via a serious class action suit against Denning using her information as the lynchpin. Of course Emily used her obvious feminine wiles in her attempt to get the eager beaver young lawyer to do her bidding-to take on the case. Problem in that romance department was that Ben was married, very married, to Charlotte, a nurse played by Alice Eve and he passed on that part. He did however approach the senior partner, Abrams, played by Al Pacino, who after a lot of hemming and hawing decided to let Ben go ahead with the suit.            

Then all hell broke loose. First Emily staged her own kidnapping to grab some dough from Denning. As far as the lawsuit went Ben was a winner after Denning “settled” out of court for a big sum but also was protected from criminal liability as part of the agreement. Then before Ben could even celebrate his victory with Charlotte Emily wound up dead, very dead, from an apparent suicide. Ben found her body and just left it there in her apartment only to have it show up in his apartment and he had to go on the run. Go on the run to find out why he was being framed although he suspected that nefarious Denning was behind the deed. Figured the “deep pockets” guy was looking for further protection against whatever fall-out might come from Emily’s distraught mind. 

He would be wrong though. Wrong because the villain of the piece is none other than Abrams his boss who despite public appearances had been Denning’s lawyer for years. Yeah, follow the money, follow it closely. But there are other agendas, other kinds of misconduct, as well. See Charlotte was miffed at the idea that Emily and Ben might be rekindling that old flame and she went to Emily’s apartment to confront her. Had an argument and Emily fell. Charlotte coldly did not help her and staged the fake suicide scene. As for Ben and Charlotte they just moved on with their lives. And so it goes.            

From Out Of Nowhere I Get Waylaid By The Executor Of The Estate Of Dotty Malone The Famous Hollywood Screen-Writer For Not Paying Copyright Fees- With Famous California Detective Philip Marlowe In Mind-And Throw In Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler And Adele Saint John As Well

From Out Of Nowhere I Get Waylaid By The Executor Of The Estate Of Dotty Malone The Famous Hollywood Screen-Writer For Not Paying Copyright Fees- With Famous California Detective Philip Marlowe In Mind-And Throw In Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler And Adele Saint John As Well

By Seth Garth

I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore. That familiar old ditty has taken on a new meaning for me since I got a notice to appear in court, or have my representative in court in California to answer charges that I had violated the copyright laws when I did a combination obituary/ “tell all” story about the relationship between Dotty Malone, the famous Hollywood screen-writer who passed away a couple of years ago in 2017 at the age of 99 and the late equally as famous, then if not now, California private detective Philip Marlowe who passed on in the 1970s. It seems that back in the 1970s when I interviewed Ms. Malone after Phil passed away I “cribbed” some of the information she passed on to me to write a story about her take on the great Sternwood case which made Marlowe’s reputation, and made him a place in Ms. Malone’s bed after it was all over (make that marriage bed since to everybody surprise she was “doing the do” with Marlowe during the case while he was doing silky sheet duty with the young nubile Sternwood sisters marrying the older one, Vivian, after the case closed and while they were married). That bed like I said included a few years of marriage between the pair which was kept hush-hush so that Phil’s ex-wife that Vivian Sternwood, yes, General Sternwood’s Marlowe’s employer at the time of the case daughter would not throw daggers at Phil, Dotty, or both once she found out Phil had been sleeping with Dotty while on that case. Would break-up the settlement she laid on him to get a divorce to marry some Bel Air swell (and former New York underworld figure Carmine Dorio who when he came blood-drenched red turned “legit” with all the trimmings although knew he was the guy tied to eight million rackets) when Phil and she decide to call it quits. That information unknown to me after the interview was the basis for Dotty writing her own story about the Sternwood case and about the weird ways of high society Hollywood and environs doings.

But that unpublished although copyrighted story is not the real sticking point since that was too long ago to drag anybody into court for their come-uppance. What dragged me into court was that I had essentially retailed the same story when she passed on a couple of years ago. The cause of “my mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” though has more to do with some idea I have that using a little literary license did not really have all that much to do with her original story, my original story based on that series of 1970s interviews or my post-mortem story. So rather than go into that dreary foreboding court out West humbly to beg forgiveness of the lord high executor of Dotty’s estate I am going in to contest their contentions. With a lawyer provided by this publication. I will let you know what happens the million years down the road when this case gets an airing in the meantime though let me give you a rundown on what happened in that very famous case back in the late 1930s when the world was going to hell in a handbasket. If I mention Dotty Malone who was part of the story, tell information that she claims as her own, case so be it .            

As I prepared for that Malone interview back in the late 1970s at her big corner window office befitting a famous and successful screen-writer on the Metro studio lot in Hollywood I went back into the records out in California concerning that famous Sternwood case. (Dotty made me laugh when she mentioned that when she started at Universal she was hunkered down with four other young writers at three desks in a room with no windows. So, yes she had come a long way although that was not the cause of my laughter which was enflamed by the hard fact that then, as today, I shared office space with three other writers although we did have windows out in Oakland.) The Sternwood case, theone that made Philip Marlowe’s reputation as a hard-boiled detective in the tradition of those created by writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (mentioned in the title in case anybody did not know who they were), maybe later the late Lew Archer who had a few cases under his belt before he fell down and wind up doing keyhole-peeping, repo work and other undignified make work. Later still when female private investigators got a hearing the great Adele Saint John.

A case that would wind up as a film, a successful film made a few years after the events although the producers took many liberties with the facts. Like leaving the fate of the younger Sternwood sister, Carmen’s, chauffer lover unsolved event though one Pharoah Jack, Eddie Mars’ hit man was seen at the pier where that Sternwood car “skidded” off the tracks.  Like the fact that Vivian had had a clandestine affair with Eddie when his wife was away touring with the Artie Shaw Band so that it was no happenstance that Eddie helped Vivian out of the Carmen problem over her ex-husband Rusty Regan. Like Marlowe, that damn alley cat when you  think about although Dotty claimed she tamed his sexual excesses down a bit while they were married going down the pillows with Rita, Eddie’s wife, after he, Marlowe, found out where she was hiding out nad why, after Eddie fell down to his ploy. And other facts that sometime when I get out from under this frivolous law suit I will more fully expose. (This would be a good point to say that the original film called The Big Sleep was remade in the 1980s starring Robert Mitchum where even more liberties were taken with the facts so a look back at the real facts of the case are even more necessary now as I defend myself and my take on the events. I might add that one Dotty Malone, uncredited by her request, was the technical adviser/screen-writer on that remake although this was after I had interviewed her. Axes to grind, axes to grind)   

I admit that I have been a fan of hard-boiled private detective books cadged from the Thomas Lane Public Library in town and films since I was a kid reading about them in those lonely late night hours when with no money I would read and fantasize about their fascinating lives and spending what little money I made caddying for the local Mayfair swells on Saturday afternoon double-bill matinees on the big screen at the Majestic Theater in downtown Adamsville. So I had an idea about the gist of the case if not all the facts when I prepared myself for the interview. Whatever happens with this current legal situation I will be forever in Dotty Malone ‘s debt for giving me so much information that was not available either through the newspaper reports or the police and court records. To speak nothing of the insights into the lifestyle and working relationships in the Hollywood and Los Angeles of the pre-World War II era before everybody with five cents and enough stamina headed west to seek their dreams in the warm California nights. Dotty told me plenty about the bad guys too and the changing of the guard among the bad guys after World War II when things got too hot with the coppers in the East and Midwest and they went so-called legit.

I have to admit as well that in the old days, now a bit as well I took what I knew of the Sternwood case as mainly a high-end well-protected, meaning plenty of police “cooperation,” meaning plenty of graft sliding down the food chain, and very profitable pornography and prostitution operation that Marlowe had to break to keep the Sternwood name out of the scandal sheets and the wild wind daughters out of jail. A very tall task now and then not easy despite the place they had in the community. That part about maybe today my thinking that a lot of it was about the pornography and prostitution operation being key is centered on looking at the court records and finding that those two “revenue streams,” an  anachronistic term but useful today, funded all the other Mars Enterprises operation from the casinos, on and off-shore to the shakedowns of local businesses for “protection” to the drug trade and arson for hire stuff. According to Dotty in 1979, the last link to the case still standing Marlowe had half a belief in that idea himself although it never made the screen (although if a third remake was done today that might be the lynchpin to the plotline which unfortunately Dotty would not be here to write.)

Marlowe had picked up the Sternwood case of the fly, got a referral from his old LA DA’s officemate Bernie Olms when General Sternwood was looking for private eye, shamus, gumshoe whatever you call it in your neighborhood when somebody doesn’t believe the public coppers are up to the task or want something other than bull- in- a-china-shop discretion. Before I describe what the old man and he was an old man wanted Marlowe to do for him I better explain who this Sternwood was, how much water he pulled around Old California. And this is strictly a story out of Old California before the Okies and Arkies got dust-bowled out in the East and headed west looking, well looking for something and before World War II made California the main depot for all kinds stuff for the Pacific War being fought not far from its doorsteps. Neither the Tom Joad Okies, Barron Stallworth Arkies or the factory workers making good wages ever looked back but that is another story which only marginally plays in this saga. The Sternwood name might not mean much now, might not have been the subject of some chapter in American history class or Mister Wells’ history but you cannot understand early 20^th century California without knowing about what the Sternwood name meant any more than what Hollywood meant.  

General Sternwood and a couple of other guys lost to history once things started to jump was the La Brea tar pits oil well operator, meaning oil, meaning rich when America went from horse and buggy to cars and fossil fuels to run them. The Sternwood mansion by Marlowe’s time was far away from the even then forgotten oil wells making their noises and stinking up the planet but the dough was still coming in regularly enough to keep the General and his unwisely begotten late in life wild ass daughters, Vivian who at least had some brains if no morals and Carmen who lacked both and much more. In those days all the General had to do was make a couple of telephone calls, or rather have Morris his long-time butler/valet accountant and fixer man do it and whatever rain threatened stopped. Stopped hard and fast. For the matter he wanted Marlowe to attend to though a fine sense of what was going to happen in a fast-changing situation was required.

Here is where Dotty Malone was so helpful. (How she entered the story and how she wound up with Marlowe in her wedded bed I will get to in a minute). The film and the and both court and police records had it that this stumblebum Art Geiger, actually Arthur Gilroy Geiger from a big time Sonoma Valley ranching family which he wanted nothing to do with and we will see why in a minute) was looking for payment on some loans he had made to Sternwood’s younger daughter Carmen, some gambling debts to the tune of five thousand dollars even if they were unenforceable under California law. That was all bullshit though since what Geiger had was some very naughty photographs of Carmen doing all kinds of suggestive sex acts while naked as a jaybird. He needed to blow town, or that is what his message said so five K would work. Naturally since the General had been a playboy in his time and an old rascal having those dangerous daughters so late in life knew that the squeeze would be on forever. Enter Marlowe to see what “was what” with this grift.

You have to know something about pre-war Hollywood, hell, maybe now too except it seems highly unlikely in the Internet Age when your average eight- year old knows more about sex than we knew in adulthood. Also that there is more pornography than you can shake a stick at a lot of it free and a lot available in to anybody looking for any sexual act or perversion on the Internet. Back before the onslaught introduced to the mainstream public by publications like Playboy in the 1950s getting what in the end is usually harmless scenes of nudity, female nudity mostly but male as well or of sexual acts by both sexes getting lurid materials was a hard dollar. Although with the right connections and cash in hand you could satisfy whatever lust or perversion drove you mad with desire. That is where a guy like Geiger came in despite the stricter laws against obscenities then (and against even the idea of prurient interests).

Geiger would cater to the upscale crowd who didn’t want to be seen at what were called “girlie shows” (at least called so by Edward Hopper in a famous painting of his) using his antique and rare books operation as a front. Right out in public. Right on Sunset Boulevard. Which meant two things he was well protected, meaning somebody had the local coppers in their pocket and paid off to keep away from this exchange trading operation. Meant also that Geiger was not operating alone, no way. He was fronting for somebody, somebody who had the dough to pass around and to keep his hands in every crooked thing in town in those days. The days when Eddie Mar (real name Eddie Marston but these bigwig crooks like to do one syllable surnames for some reason some sociologist can figure out) was running everything illegal in Los Angeles County which meant a big tent area. (It may seem hard to believe today but the sex book trade was run like a lending library except you paid serious money to indulge your fantasies and generally harmless perversions turning the books in and getting another. The guys who ran this hustle like Geiger and Mars knew that their customers could only get off on their copies so long before they tired of the same old, same old and needed new stimulus for their lusts. Like finding money on the ground.  Not only that but the temptations of black-mail to keep the lids on was there for the taking just like that money already found on the ground.)   

Geiger was the perfect “front” for Mars’ girlie book operation. Everybody knew he was, as they said then, a fag, a fairy, light on his feet, a homo and to keep protected he had to do Mars’ bidding which was not hard since this sex book stuff was not solely of females. Hot boys were available. One of his young lovers had started out doing photoshoots with Geiger and had a room in his house which it turned out was owned by and rented out to Geiger by one Eddie Mars. Dotty told me that Marlowe had all the ancient prejudices against gays and lesbians, called them every name in the book, would affect a feminine demeanor when he wanted information, for example, about rare books when he wanted to get his hooks into Geiger. Marlowe had been appalled despite his years in Hollywood and knowledge of the various undergrounds tolerated there, some protected like the child pornography circle around one of the major producers when he saw Geiger’s set up which reeked of fag couture and was even more appalled when he saw that lover’s room with its heavy masculine façade along with whips and chains.

Hollywood was the stuff of dreams for any good looking female or guy and drew young people like lemmings to the sea looking for the main chance to get out of places like Butte, Boise, Grand Junction and every point between east or west. Plenty came, some went back home defeated or wised-up but some kept their daggers in, kept clawing their way around town. Working as waiters and waitresses, hatcheck girls, chauffeurs (that was what Geiger’s then current lover Carol was officially on the books as doing for work), gas station jockeys, department store clerks waiting for the big chance, the chance that never came. Others and this maybe the sad part either were conned into, fed dope and developed a nice jones, or freely did the job expecting to get into film via this method posing nude for books, films or “live shows.” The so-called “blue books and movies” of the time that no commercial theater would run and no Mom and Pop corner variety store or drugstore would stock on its magazine racks. When counted up Gieger’s operation had something like five hundred books filled with women doing every possible sex act and or just posing all doped up so he needed a huge supply of new faces to keep the cash flow moving along. The women got a couple of bucks, some dope, or nothing except a “promise” of future cinematic considerations.        

(By the way Geiger’s operation was strictly a female swap shop which was part of its charms for the high-end clientele knowing where Geiger was on the sexual charts. What Dotty did not learn until a few years later was that the owner of her own  bookstore, more on that when we connect her to Marlowe the first time, the “front man” Bill Cadger was a known “lady’s man” who was running the “male” side of the operation for as you might guess one Eddie Mars, sole owner and operator of Eddie Mars Enterprises. Additionally, despite the tough guy act and it was real, at least Eddie  had the stooges to enforce his play until the end and he knew how to call the rough play when warranted was either gay himself or was bisexual. Had actually “dated” some of Hollywood’s leading men (those who were gay like Rock Hudson, Rory Calhoun, Jim Bell, Sam Devine, etc.) which gave him the male side lead into the tons of hard-pressed guys who needed dough to avoid those Boise, Butte, Grand Island horrors where maybe broken young women could go back home and go forward but not to the shackled “closeted” life, not after Hollywood wild boy shows.               

   

This is probably as good a place as any to point out why Eddie Mars was able to run everything dirty and scandalous in Southern California before the war and how he was able to get his claws into the Sternwood circle via his entrapment of young nymphomaniacal   Carmen and as it would turn out later Vivian who had her own vices to hone. It might also help explain why I, and Dotty told me she was had been bothered by it as well, had originally thought the whole thing had been about wayward sex among the upper-crust and their toadies. Eddie had been born in California, born in Valley boy Fresno, yes, they had Valley boys even then, you know guys who had souped-up jalopies, grease under their fingernails and the choice of Valley girls, read easy girls then since that car was an irresistible lure for even the more virginal among the female portion of youth nation tribe of the times. Eddie hung around with that crowd to learn toughness and distain, learn too who could be trusted to do whatever needed to be done to move up the ladder.

Yes, Eddie was an original bright boy with big plans and big ideas. After the war he would have been lucky to be running numbers on Bunker Hill, maybe a go-fer for some of the really tough guys who descended on LA following the suckers to the golden land. They would have had Eddie for lunch and had time for a nap it would have been that easy for serious leg-breakers to bust his play. We all know that he never survived the war, never survived even the start of the war so we will give the devil his due and good luck.  Before the war he had it all figured out though, had his rise all figured and he knew maybe from day one it would center on drugs (big time drugs like cocaine much easier to get and legal then) and the sex trade (a growth industry since about the Whore of Babylon times and manna from heaven when the big cinema guys decided to blew New York and head west to make their films, and big bags of money with girls and boys with more good looks that brains following as sure as night follows day).  

All those skills and you would be surprised how few people actually could conger up the assortment of skills, fair or foul, to get to the top of the heap counted a lot in those days and Eddie rose through Pat Scanlon’s ranks before taking over himself when Pat got waylaid one night, rumor had it by one of Eddie’s minions. What Eddie brought to the table was fresh ideas about how to increase the revenue stream via this blue book, blue move grift to go along with the traditional white slave trade, the drugs, the fencing of stolen goods, funding armed robberies, and the numbers running and bookie operations. All fronted by the casino, Club Nana, which was the perfect money laundering vehicle. Eddie, according to Dotty already mentioned above, half pansy himself, would troll the Hollywood underworld looking for fairy queens like Art Geiger (sorry but those were the words of abuse used, some like “queen” even used by the gay community if we could call the closeted situation that then as coded references) to set up bookshops as vehicles to make the blue book trade look respectable. In Geiger’s case he was already running an antiques operation on his own cadging black- market objects for upscale clients looking for the odd and unusual as party talk material.

Eddie, pretty boy Eddie, either seduced Art himself or had one of his stable, Carol Lundgrund probably, do his bidding since Art liked them young. (While Dotty was working that bookstore across the street she would notice young guys, seemingly younger and younger as time went on, leave with Art and show up the next morning in tow. Dotty could put two and two together.) This Carol guy, Art’s last lover and while very pretty in leather was a loose cannon and a simpleton too who wound up killing the wrong guy when his man Art took a few slugs by parties unknown. Whatever their respective fates Eddie had Art by the claws since he would then threaten to expose Art’s homosexuality which had legal implications and Art caved in to Eddie’s operations. Nice people, right.

So much for that though since it is now story time, time to tell the tale although as Dotty pointed out to me a lot of stuff will never see the light of day because somebody in high places was protecting the Sternwood name when that mattered. Or the coppers screwed up the investigation so badly that they buried plenty of the details. Or and this grieves me to say Marlowe played his hand too close to the vest, decided to get too cute and messed up stuff that he had to bury and leave Dotty out in the dark on. We already know that Marlowe took the job of figuring how to get Geiger off the Sternwood back and as part of that process went to the library and read up on rare books, real rare books, to see if the operation was legit. For his efforts he had been stonewalled by a blonde twist named Agnes who worked for Geiger or rather worked for Eddie to keep an eye on Geiger and provide a pleasant front of the house person when the salacious gents came to get their lusty blue books. Her knowledge of rare books was inverse to her good looks (and Marlowe would later take a run at her himself winding up under some Agnes sheets but she was a high maintenance type and always looking for the next best thing, some sugar daddy).

That led to the Marlowe meeting with Dotty since he did not have a clue as to what Geiger looked like. He noticed the bookstore across the street and went in to find Dotty busy stocking books and looking kind of bored. After checking her out from head to toe (according to Dotty’s less than modest recollections although in her late forties when I interviewed her she still looked good, still had that something that guys from six to sixty would crawl on their hands and knees for) he asked her to describe Geiger, she did and ever curious asked why Marlowe asked. He told her about the run-in with Agnes and one thing led to another and she closed up the shop for a few hours while she and Marlowe drank some convenient whiskies and did the tango, the male-female tango. What nobody knew then and this is important Dotty and Marlowe would remain lovers (on occasion all through the case, while Marlowe was married to Vivian Sternwood and as already known would eventually marry Marlowe herself.)

Dotty, not only because she subsequently became a very famous and much in demand screen-writer but because of that affair/marriage with Marlowe, knew as much as any living soul about the interior of the Sternwood story. Dotty had headed west after Bryn Mawr looking for a job in the film industry (much against her parent’s objections since they had at some sacrifice paid the freight for her education and wanted her to write serious novels-in the East). As a million before her did and after too she hit town at the wrong time when nobody was hiring and determined to stick it out she looked for work where she could find some first as a cocktail waitress which she left quickly since as a virginal somewhat naïve young woman she could not handle being man-handled and propositioned constantly. She would shortly thereafter lose that virginity to a wannabe actor who called himself Jim Fisk as a stage name then but who would earn lasting fame as the legendary Robert Maslow. It was Fisk who told Dotty “what was what” about getting into the film business, male or female, via the casting couch. That is how she learned about guys, stars, like Randy Davis, Bill Connors and Rory Calvin who “earned” their places in the sun at first on those hard couches for some odd characters with pull.

Doty confirmed the obvious. Geiger had tried to put the bite on General Sternwood with the cover story about gambling debts figuring to replicate a guy named Joe Brody’s trick of hitting pay dirt the first time he tried that hustle. Working under the tried and true principle burglars use of hitting the same house twice (and fast) since the homeowner figured he or she was in the clear as victim and let down their guard. The burglar-con artist figured differently, figured better –“soft touch.” This Joe Brody, the soon to be late Joe Brody, figures twice here, first as already mentioned fall guy for Geiger’s boyfriend Carol’s unwise choose of him as Geiger’s murderer and secondly as that twit blonde twist Agnes’ boyfriend who put Geiger on to the soft touch gag to pay for her coffee and crullers. Enter Marlowe to clean the decks of unwanted trash accumulating around the Sternwood name. Geiger, maybe Joe too, made the wrong decision to work a scam they were not experts at. Geiger though was ready and able to hit pay dirt with his beautiful con of young, impressible women looking for Hollywood glitter. He grabbed Carmen into the play with a little dope but it really wasn’t all that hard to convince any man’s woman Carmen into taking her clothes off for the cameras.     

Carmen, unlike her older sister, was a brainless bimbo by all accounts and if it wasn’t Geiger it would be somebody else who would catch her naked on camera and exploit that advantage. Trying to say anything positive about Carmen Dotty was hard-pressed to think of anything except when Marlowe showed her the suspect photos she whistled that many a Beverly Hills professional man would be crying in his sleep for not being able to leer over that body in his dreams. (By the way don’t believe all that stuff about seeking rough justice, tilting at windmills Marlowe he had kept the photos of Carmen which he told Vivian he had destroyed for his own pleasure which is how Dotty wound up seeing them and making her sassy comments. Also don’t believe Marlowe was impervious to Carmen’s out-front charms after he had been in the Sternwood mansion about five minutes and she did a lap dance on him. After his interview with the General and a job and after an unsuccessful interview with Vivian he headed up to Carmen’s room for a one-time romp, one time being enough for any sane man.)    

                  

Whatever Carmen’s charms or lack of morals her escapades set off all the subsequent actions-and wasted bloodshed. Once the chauffer Owen heard that Geiger was having Carmen under that lovely dope head and brain do whatever sex acts including off-hand blow jobs with one of his protégés he coaxed her to perform he went crazy, went out to the Geiger house in secluded Bel Aire and blew him away. That in turn led to Art’s enraged rough trade lover Carol (a pretty boy’s name for sure all leather pure) acting foolishly and blowing Joey B away and which led parties still unknown to waste Owen (although Marlowe always maintained that one of Eddie Mars’ goof boys, a free-lancer named Pharaoh Jack who specialized in such tactics did him in at the famous Lido Pier dunking which got poor Owen all wet and very dead with a sap to the side of the head). After that it was all downhill, mostly with Marlowe acting as clean up man like in baseball. The cops for their own purposes, once Marlowe gave them Carol to whet their appetites, clamped the whole thing down as lovers’ quarrels and homo bullshit. Case closed. Nothing to lose sleep over.          

No way not if you knew Marlowe and his funny justice jag. He knew that General Sternwood could have given a damn about standing for a squeeze from grifters like Joe Brophy or even Carol Lundgren (who planned to parlay the Geiger estate into his nest-egg with those Carmen (and others) luscious photos). What the General worried his old tired head about was whether the legendary IRA commander Rusty Regan who made the Black and Tan cry their fill and who had fled Ireland after the troubles subsided on the advice of a couple of irate husbands looking for greener pastures in lush America had been involved in the soft touches. Rusty had landed on the General’s front floor via a tryst and marriage to older daughter Vivian who’s more discriminating than her sister’s motto was that she was every other man’s woman.  The marriage did not take but the eternal bonding between the two men could not be broken by time or women. Then Rusty fell down, left for parts unknown allegedly with one tough guy Eddie Mars’s torch-singer wife Rita by all accounts a very beautiful woman who caused many a man a restless night (and who “fronted” for those bisexual and gay rumors about Eddie which in those days was enough to keep that noise down).

The whole Rusty Regan search is what confused what was a simple sex and drugs case that went awry when some holy goof didn’t realize that high society girls like Carmen (or Vivian) were as capable of getting down in the mud as any wrong side of the tracks tramp. This is where I still think it is better to keep the theme along that sex and drugs track even if the play from here on in goes in the other direction. Goes to covering up what happened to our man Rusty Regan. By now everybody should know that Carmen was nothing but a man trap (men trap is maybe better). Even when Vivian was married to Rusty he was sharing Carmen’s bed whenever Vivian was out of town (and a few times when she was in the house, ouch). But as Marlowe found out a little more quickly a little of Carmen is enough, nothing but high maintenance. When Rusty tried to get out from under Carmen did what Carmen always did pout and suck her thumb-and place two bullets in Rusty’s blood red heart. Once Vivian found that out everything else makes sense. She went to Eddie for a big blanket cover-up- and got it. For an Eddie price (her losing at his stinking gambling tables as the form of payment and rumor had it a few nights under the silky sheets when Eddie was in what was his hetero mood). To put a big tent over the whole thing Eddie had that ravishing wife blow town as if she had bene Rusty’s mistress.       

 

The pact with the devil would have probably worked forever except Marlowe had that quirky nature and kept pushing for answers for his client. He got them too the hard way when some little punk got wasted by that Pharaoh Jack who liked the sap to the head but also tricky little poisonous drug potions. When that harmless punk fell down Marlowe decided to bust the whole crummy Mars operation (which when the Chicago boys led by Whitey Tiller came through after the war they greatly appreciated and took good care of Marlowe as a result). Willowy Rita, Eddie’s wife was hanging out about twenty miles outside of town at Art Hunk’s garage waiting for the call back to Eddie’s loving arms. She was being looked after by Pharaoh Jack, or held hostage is better. Marlowe found her location and wasted Jack. Done, not quite. Eddie had to fall and he did when Marlowe planned a meet at Geiger’s house (remember really Eddie’s) where he got there before the lost boy Eddie who brought those two goofs with him. Eddie figured, figured wrong he had the upper hand and would finally take down the bothersome Marlowe. No way since Eddie had told his dumbos to shot whoever came out the door first. Eddie fell down and nobody cried about it from police department headquarters to the Sternwood estate.

After that Vivian and Marlowe played house for a while but as with Carmen a little Vivian went a long way and after a nice settlement they were divorced. Then the secret arrangement between Dotty and him could go public. As everybody now knows that is not the end, will not be the end until I duke these estate executors of hers. Done