The Shadow Knows, Knows Nada, Nada Nunca, Nada As Legend-Slayer
Will Bradley Steps Up His Game-With Alex Baldwin’s “The Shadow” (1994) In Mind-A
Film Review, Of Sorts
By Will Bradley
The Shadow, starring Penelope Ann Miller, Alex Baldwin, John Lone,
1994
How the mighty have fallen. As the constant reader knows I have
been on a tear the past year or so beginning with the expose of the legend
around one Sherlock Holmes (where I locked horns with old man Seth Garth in an
epic fourteen movie review struggle which between us left nothing much left of
that silly so-called private detective and his boyfriend or whatever their
relationship), or whatever his name really was since the London police files
show Larry Lawrence on its books when he was arrested for transporting stolen
goods and about thirty other similar charges and a couple more serious like
conspiracy to murder which he and a few others did serious time for in Dartmoor,
and his dear friend Doc Watson whose real name was Nigel something but don’t
get hung up on names when dealing with legends since their various activities
require such or their well-paid and padded press agents decided to spruce up
their desperado names to appeal to the public’s fancy.
I won’t bore the reader with the litany of those whose
reputations, over-inflated, bloated, undeserved or just plain false, lies so
brazen that even a priest would be hard-pressed to give absolution, have been
crushed and they are now ready for the trash barrel of history. I have taken my
righteous campaign going back as far as Robin Hood and his press agent’s
coverup of his nefarious doings when he came into some dough. This Robin Hood,
for the record real name Robert Locklear or Lockwood the manse records are
messy and show both spellings, for example, who was nothing but a gouging
rack-renter once his patron King Richard, aka the Lion-Hearted, gave him plenty
of acreage for services rendered and he became as oppressive a landlord in his
lofty manor as any country squire. Forgot about those yeomen bandits who helped
him with his armed robberies of rich and poor alike, whoever dared show their
faces in and around Sherwood Forest up in the north of England. Shamed that
Lady Marian, real name Holly, by what today would be called “pimping” her to
the various courtesan when he found a younger woman, Ophelia.
(I have refused thus far to take on the “big boys and girls,” the
ancient Greeks and Romans, the cranky and crazed gods and goddesses for the
simple reason that tracing the records is a bear of a job but I do have a
lightweight line on Andromeda and Perseus which I am following concerning his
alleged fight against the sea serpents to free her which looks like it was a
put -up job worked out so he could “gain her favors,” ancient talk for hitting
the sheets or however they covered themselves in their pursuit of lust, if they
did, did cover themselves)
Here is the exciting news though and should help me a lot moving
up the food chain in this crazy quilt pattern and cutthroat profession which I
am only now beginning to navigate with some confidence. A recent UCal survey,
poll, conducted in association with the well-known Harrison Foundation has
shown a decrease in the belief in various legendary figures of late. The survey
was simplicity itself with a broad cross section of the population represented,
rich, poor, various genders, races a good mix from what I have seen so far in
the preliminary report, as the
interviewee was asked about his or her belief in some figure, then told to read
my or somebody else’s documented research and asked whether they were more
likely, less likely or the same to believe in the legend. Almost across the
board the ratings for these bums with nothing but high priced press agents and
shills touting their deeds went down, especially a guy named Don Juan who
legend was made of whole cloth by some pent up in a convent by a rich man’s hormonally-charged
daughter and Captain Blood exposed as one of the worse of the worse Middle
Passage slave trade transporters (and reportedly the person British painter
Turner was thinking of when he painted his masterful “Slave.”)
Naturally in any human endeavor there are failures, failures when
people still believe despite all the evidence to the contrary in the validity
of something. That was the case with one Johnny Cielo whose legend has kept me
up many a night trying to figure out why with all the documentation that I have
amassed his ratings actually “spiked” in this latest polling (I should note
maybe reflecting the season that belief in angels has also spiked during this
period). Fellow writers had shaken their heads when I started this
legend-slaying campaign although once I showed them the poll results they have
since backed off since especially among the older writers who were knee-deep in
backstabbing me for their own purposes, mainly to not fall down the food chain
further in my wake. They still though look at me with funny glances around the
water cooler when I bring up my troubles breaking the Cielo legend. My whole
idea is to get people to think more reasonably to shed their misconceptions, to
shed their alternate facts universe in these troubled times when clear heads
and clear thinking are necessary. Hence the heavy push against the fake Cielo
legend.
A few Cielo details before I go on to my current task of busting
up one Lamont Cranston and his shadow game. The genesis of my knowledge of the
Cielo legend came from a fellow journalism graduate student who I knew at NYU and
whom I had kept in touch with over the past few years. He had been down in
Florida, down in the Keys, on an unrelated story which the parties had backed
off on, didn’t show up to expose whenever they had to offer (something about
CIA conduits to Cuba if I recall). He was sitting in the old Tanner Tavern
trying to drown his sorrows and come up with some kind of story to earn his
daily bread. While there an older guy, a drunk from the look of him, Billy
something (here I really don’t remember the last name) came up and tried to
cadge a drink from him.
My guy reluctantly bought him a whiskey, and a few more as the
evening wore on, and as a result that loosened up Billy’s tongue about the old
days in Key West. The days when Johnny Cielo roamed the space, roamed the skies
by day and drank and whored by night. My guy had never heard of Johnny and so
Billy spent the better part of an hour describing this and that about Johnny’s place
in the early aviation pantheon which every serious aficionado knows about. (That
part, the press agent bullshit part is at least true that the cultists know
every detail about Johnny, especially in this part of Florida and the South in
general)
The rest of the story can be told by the researching I did after
my fellow reporter told me the story since he knew I was looking for copy on
these so-called legendary characters for my burgeoning by-line. The first tip
of the Johnny iceberg was the claim that he has been the first guy to take
human flight. This would seem to have been the straw that broke the camel back
on the legend since I was able to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate from
the Elmira clerk’s office showing one John Richard Cielo to have been born in
1910. The Wright boys did their magic at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The other kind of
secondary piece of evidence for Johnny’s early days was that he gave Howard
Hughes the idea for TWA and would have made millions if he had stayed with
Hughes. The real deal Johnny was basically a low-rent flying mail postman who
ran many operations to the ground before he had to hightail it out of the
country with guys with guns breathing down his neck, and a reward on his head
by some Chicago mobster who he tried to shake down.
That leaving the country is really where the Johnny legend is
centered, that and his later so-called exploits before he fell into the sea.
Yeah, his leaving for Barranca to run a mail operation down there is when all
the bullshit got wings. See he was supposed to have talked movie icon drop-dead
beautiful Rita Hayworth into leaving with him before she ran off with the Aga
Khan after Johnny ran out of dough-and prospects. The reality. He had met a
whore working some joy house in Hoboken named Sarah Lind, remember be wary of the
truth of names in this stuff who did look like Rita and went with him figuring
she was getting off cheap street with this good-looking guy (so-so, okay looks
from the photos). A view of her photos taken later when Johnny’s money had run
out and she had too from some men’s magazines, “girlie” magazines shows that
her legs were nowhere as good as Rita’s and this tramp didn’t have a tenth of
Rita’s style on her best days.
I mentioned that Johnny later, in the late 1950s fell into the
ocean, fell into the Gulf of Mexico. That location is important for the last
really blasphemous part of the Johnny legend. That he was the guy flying arms
and other supplies into Cuba for Fidel, Che and the hermanos and had fallen
down into the Caribbean. All the flight manifests from Key West show Johnny
flying a Piper Club, Jesus, a freaking tinplate Piper Club, taking well-heeled
passengers to Naples down in Florida before he fell into the Gulf. To this day
despite every denial by successive Cuban governments and every belief by those
who want to see a romantic Amerciano helping the good guys that is the lynchpin
of his legacy. That is the basis of the shrine, the heavy money-making shrine
in the Keys which Johnny’s estate such as it was established to milk the whole
thing for what it was worth. Yes, it will be tough to break that one if all the
documentation has provided nothing but a spike in his legend. Damn.
But we must move on to the case of one Lamont Cranston, who
claimed until his end at Bellevue where he spent the last twenty years of his life
in the indigent ward that he was the so-called Shadow whose task was to rid New
York City, also called Gotham, also called Metropolis, of crime and criminals.
A one-man wrecking crew, ah, vigilante man. We will crack this one easily
although I do feel some trepidation right now thinking that maybe one of the
reasons for the durability of the Cielo legend is that he was an American and
maybe there is as in a lot of things these days a sense of American
exceptionalism, that all the modern recordable American legends have to be
true. Baloney. (By the way I should point out that all these one-man or one-woman
vigilante operations to rid New York City, Gotham, Metropolis of crime and
criminals beyond questioning whatever nefarious motives they have is not borne
out by the statistics. Per capita that town’s crime rate was no higher than say
Roseville out in Kansas then, maybe now too with the epidemic of opioid
addiction flooding the rural parts of the country.)
World War I, Lamont Cranston’s war, I will use that name despite
the fact that the only person with that name in the 1920s was on the NYPD
police blotter for selling jewelry from a push-cart without a license on 7th
Avenue and subsequently for a “bait and switch” con on so-called magic decoder
rings, was hard on a whole generation of European and American youth. The
effects hit Lamont like a ton of bricks, maybe shell shock is what he had
although that diagnosis was in its infant stages back then, made him a Class A
junkie before long. But instead of heading to Paris in the 1920s, in the Jazz
Age he headed to Tibet and gathered in a serious opium addiction and lustful
carryings on with a fistful of concubines-all at one time when he was really
high. Then the Lama, Jimmy Lama if I am not mistaken, Lama in any case, took up
his case, made him see that he was made for better stuff, made to see the
better angel of his nature.
This Lama, no it wasn’t Jimmy but Jerry, yeah, Jerry Lama spent a
ton of time giving Lamont the skill set to go back to America, go back to so-called
cesspool NYC and clean house, make it livable for average joes to survive. One
of the skills he picked up was the ability to transform himself via a joke
store nose to look differently when he was doing his whirling dervish Shadow
shtick. That and a silly eerie laugh fit in the end more fit for Bellevue than
the mean streets of NYC. Yeah, the Shadow knows alright.
I grant that for a while this Cranston caught the public’s
imagination although strangely during his escapades the crime rate in Gotham spiked
before they put him in a safe place. Mostly I attribute that positive spin to his
hiring a press agent, the famous society columnist John Kerr, and his
reputation soared for a bit. Then the wheels came off his express. See back in
Tibet the word was that Lamont was some progeny of one Genghis Khan, yes that
Genghis whose nomadic marauding Mogol hordes at least according to some
revisionist historians brought some stability and modernization to Central Asia
in his day. DNA testing has proven once Lamont’s body was exhumed at the
request of his estate to see the truth of that matter showed he was descended originally
in the 14th century from a pig thief in England who was hanged,
hanged high in those days when stealing livestock meant something, especially when
the stolen object was of royal or noble ownership.
Yeah so Lamont played out the Genghis Khan gag, along with his brother
Don, the bad guy in the loop who like his forebear wanted to rule the known world.
A known world much larger to conquer these days than the steppes of Central Asia
which was child’s play for those lustful Mongol hordes. This Don Khan, this
brother, arrived in H.G. Wells time machine fashion via a coffin delivered to
the natural history museum in that town. After Don arrived all hell broke loose
since all he cared about were two things-world conquest and bringing brother Lamont
in on the deal as his hatchet man, as his alter ego maybe since Don too had
been trained by Jerry Lama. No wonder this so-called Lamont character wound up in
a straight- jacket, maybe they should have used two to be safe.
Of course when you have a guy like John Kerr sprucing up your
legend, taking liberties with the truth you have to have some society dame in the
mix or these Mayfair swells won’t read the column or buy into the legend. The
love affair aspect here is provided by one Lois Lane, no Margo Lane, whose
father allegedly was the real father of the atom bomb. More on him in a minute.
We know that Lamont had some kinky sex habits when he was high as a kite on
cocaine, opium whatever he could find in Xanadu, in the late Kubla Khan’s opulent
opium den where Sam Coleridge earlier had picked up his habit by the sunless
seas. This so-called society girl, this so-called Margo, was some call girl he
picked up in a joy house he frequented on 8th Avenue when he was
looking for a “flute player” just because she said she could read Lamont’s
mind. Not the hardest task in the world when somebody is looking for a little
off-kilter sex.
Here is where things get interesting. The legend anyway. Don, Don
Khan in case you forgot his name, that erratic symbiotic brother was interested
in this Margo too, and for the same reason in the end but mainly because she had
a certain style which could work with the guy who claimed to be the father of
the atomic bomb. This bomb is what Don needed to play out his hand. Margo got
handed back and forth and in the end she went with Lamont since he was more her
speed than the defeated maniac Don. Done in by the NYPD wrapping up his
operations off the East River. Well folks that is the legend, the legend the
Mayfair swells bought into to keep the “people with the pitchforks” from
Riverside Drive and other high number precincts in the 1920s and 1930s. In the end
though they trusted their local coppers who at least they could bribe rather
than another one of John Kerr’s paste-up jobs. Still legends die hard, especially
modern legends which can be traced as I have been doing of late. For now though
another bum-of-the-month down.
