In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "Visions Of Cody" -On The Road-Redux

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "Visions Of Cody" -On The Road-Redux

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs,   who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

Book Review

Visions Of Cody, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1973

The first three paragraphs are taken from a previous review about Jack Kerouac and his leading role in establishing the literary ethos of the "beat" generation. Those comments aptly apply in reviewing "Visions Of Cody" as well:

"As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s seminal ‘travelogue’, “On The Road”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.

Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all show up, one way or another (under fictional names of course), in this book. So that is why we today are under the sign of “On The Road”.

To appreciate Kerouac and understand his mad drive for adventure and to write about it, speedily but precisely, you have to start with “On The Road”. There have been a fair number of ‘searches' for the meaning of the American experience starting, I believe, with Whitman. However, each generation that takes on that task needs a spokesperson and Jack Kerouac, in the literary realm at least, filled that bill not only for his own generation that came of age in the immediate post World War II era, but mine as well that came of age in the 1960s (and, perhaps, later generations but I can only speculate on that idea here)."

That said, “Visions Of Cody” is an extension of that “On The Road” story line that made Kerouac famous, although "Visions" is more diffuse and much more concerned with literary imager than with the storyline developed in the earlier Kerouac/Paradise narrative. Here Jack as Dulouz and Neal Cassady as Cody Pomeray do more running around on the road, partying, reflecting on the nature of the universe, partying, speculating on the nature of the American experience, partying and… well, you get the drift. In some places the descriptive language is stronger than “On The Road”, reflecting Kerouac’s greater ease with his spontaneous writing style in the early 1950s when this was written (although not widely published until after his death.).

Additionally, included here is a long series of taped interviews between Jack and Neal over several days and, presumably, while both were on a running drug “high”. These tapes reflect very nicely the very existential nature of 1950s “beat”, or at least one interpretation of that term. They produce all the madness, genius, gaffs, gaps, whimsy and pure foolishness that come from an extended drug experience. Despite all reports to the contrary not everything observed until the “influence” comes out pure literary gold, and that is true here as well. But there is a lot of good stuff nevertheless, although here it could have been cut in half and we still would have gotten that “beat” beat.

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

By Jeffrey Thorne

The times were out of sort, the times were frankly a mess and in that little window of time, the time of Josh Breslin’s Summer of Love, 1967 he saw a little chance to jailbreak out of his humdrum existence, to skip the nine to five world that his parents thrived in and expected him to follow like a lemming to the sea for a while anyhow. We will skip all his thinking that got him there, got him to act on his jailbreak impulses, he had done enough thinking on lonely desolate roads heading west in placed like Neola, Iowa, Grand Island, Nebraska, Winnemucca, Nevada and a whole slew of nameless Main Street pass-through towns to last a lifetime. Let’s get him to Summer of Love epicenter Frisco and into the whole thing, the passion thing, with Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love.

For those who are already confused by the today strange monikers  that latter one was Josh Breslin’s self-anointed moniker once he hit Russian Hill in that Bagdad of a city. In those days, in that little window of time when the world was turned upside down, or a small segment of society, mainly young, when you looked back from a fifty year view, everybody was try to “reinvent” themselves, making a new washed clean beginning and so an epidemic of name-changing rushed the land. Josh a very good looking guy with some ego, a lot of ego for a working class kid from up in ocean-side Maine, Olde Saco to be exact, decided that he was royalty or something and so tagged himself with that moniker. (The Scribe, whom we will get to in a moment, used to kid him that he was really the Prince of Lvov, a Podunk town in Poland just to tweak his ego a bit.)        

So Josh Breslin just out of high school hit Frisco town, hit first stop Russian Hill after being told by some holy goof, that term no put down but a real live Yippie freak who called attention to himself using that idea, in Golden Gate Park, the epicenter of the epicenter at a certain point, that righteous dope could be had up that hill. As he walked up the long drawn out hill in a city with a fistful of hills he stopped near a park when he saw this amazing sight, amazing to him then but common to the emerging scene as he would find out later, a converted yellow school bus. The bus transformed on the outside into some fantastic psychedelic moving art show and inside a cheap travelling home after the seats had been ripped out and mattresses completely covered the floor and in the back boxes filled with spare clothes, food, and utensils. Topped off by a big sound speaker system just then blaring out some unheard of by him music from he thought maybe India or something (music which turned out to the Jefferson Airplane as they moved into the acid rock music world which took a spin as the rock genre of choice among the dope aficionados of the time like cool jazz had sustained the tea head beats a half generation before.

More importantly for our tale as he approached the bus he noticed a young guy, a guy who looked a few years older than him but still young with a long beard and long hair (Josh was beardless and had only let his hair start to grow after he fled staid bi-weekly barber shop Olde Saco and got on the road) sitting on the sidewalk beside this monster of a bus. Without hesitating Josh walked up to the guy and asked if he had a joint. The guy, the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin, also without hesitation, reached into his denim jacket pocket and passed Josh a big old joint, a blunt in the dope world language of the day, and that began the friendship, a little rocky at times, but a lasting time until the Scribe’s untimely and mysterious early death several years later.       

What that converted yellow school bus was about to give an idea of the times was that the owner, although don’t make a today’s assumption about the owner part, Captain Crunch (real name Jack Shepard, Yale, Class of 1958) had bought it or traded for it that never was clear to Josh as he heard different stories from different sources for a bag of dope in order to roam up and down the West Coast ocean-side highways picking up and letting people off along the way. The Scribe, who had quit college in Boston to head west once he heard about the Summer of Love stuff happening. Stuff which had confirmed for him his long time prediction that a new breeze was about to hit the land, to hit youth nation in particular had met Captain Crunch in Golden Gate Park and had already taken one trip up and down the coast to San Diego and back. It was on that trip back up the coast in Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego that Kathy Callahan, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, the Butterfly Swirl of this scenario comes into the picture.     

Kathy, let’s call her Butterfly Swirl to keep with the times and her time, had been nothing but a Southern California surfer girl meaning in those days that she looked beautiful, tanned and curvaceous on the beach while her golden-haired surfer boyfriend went hunting for the perfect wave. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway one late afternoon as it passed through Carlsbad where the yellow brick road bus had stopped to see the breath-taking ocean view that the Scribe spied Butterfly Swirl sunning herself waiting for her by then pruned surfer boy to come ashore for the day. The Scribe went up to her and started asking questions about surfers, surfing, a subject he knew nothing about having come from the East where such a sport did not have any cache then. They talked for a while and during that time the Scribe found out that Butterfly was kind of restless going into her senior year of high school, was intrigued by what she heard was happening up in youth nation San Francisco. 

Yeah, the times were like that. You would expect a guy like the Scribe to head west once he got the message. Maybe even expect a guy like Josh before heading on to other things to head west and see what was what. What was extraordinary was the jail breakout of a gal like Butterfly Swirl who if she was a few years older would have been totally immersed in the surfer culture and could have given a damn about some weirdos up north where the weirdos congregated and had done so for a couple of generations. The long and short of it was that a couple of days later Butterfly Swirl after the Scribe’s coaxing was “on the bus” heading north.

One of the things that guys like the Scribe was trying to break out of was the old girl-guy one and only thing although breaking through that barrier had been easier said than done. For a few weeks though as the bus headed to Xanadu, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterrey and up through Pacifica before landing once again in Golden Gate Park the Scribe and Butterfly Swirl were lovers. The Scribe gave Butterfly Swirl her first experiences with dope mostly marijuana, peyote buttons and mescaline, the LSD, the Kool-aid acid test would come later with Josh. And Butterfly being an easy-going young woman began to fit in with the travelling band of gyspys who populated the bus.        

Then the same day Josh met the Scribe on Russian Hill after he had brought Josh on board the bus Butterfly Swirl who had been out pan-handling to get some provisions for the bus saw him and that was that. Something happened between them from minute one but it was not until later that night that the big switch happened after they were all stoned. The Scribe who had taken a half-lover, half-fatherly interest in Butterfly Swirl once he saw that she was not very intellectually curious (although very sexually curious and inventive) saw the writing on the wall and “blessed” the union, became head of that little trio family. A couple of weeks later at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love had their first Kool-aid acid test and the Scribe, satanic love preacher “married” them. Yeah, like I said the times were like that, exactly like that.      

[As mentioned above the Scribe and Josh would be friends until the Scribe’s untimely death in the mid-1970s. As for Butterfly Swirl by summer’s end she had had enough of roaming and cavorting and returned to her golden-haired surfer boy still looking for that perfect wave. Not everybody was built to go the distance even in the Summer of Love. J.T. ]   

In The Age Of The Robber Barons-The Gilded Age-The Film Adaptation Of Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl” (2002)-A Film Review

In The Age Of The Robber Barons-The Gilded Age-The Film Adaptation Of Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl” (2002)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

The Golden Bowl, starring Kate Berkendale, Uma Thirman, Nick Nolte, Jeremy Northam, based on the novel by Henry James, produced by the famous team of Merchant and Ivory, 2000  

Seth Garth who has had a pretty good handle on literary figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald is always fond of using an expression credited to Fitzgerald to the effect that the rich, by this he meant the very rich and in his day rich with a pedigree, and if not a pedigree then some fake papers to that effect and not some upstart noveau riche white trash who made their dough in the garbage business. Now everybody knows another expression if not the author’s name from Anatole France that the rich and poor most democratically, most equally cannot sleep under that proverbial bridge and must adhere to the law-although the latter proposition has taken a serious beating since his day. Put together the Fitzgerald proposition and France’s grind them through the full-blown pen of American expatriate Henry James before that became seriously fashionable after the debacles of World War I when all that pre-war civilization business went bust, put old Henry’s ennobled hierarchy in the shade and you have something like a fairly decent tale of life among the very rich in the film adaptation of his The Golden Bowl.

Yes, of course the golden bowl that will find various places of refuge before the film is done is something of a metaphor for frail humanity, for the imperfections of even a high society, maybe especially a high society life. That is not what I want to dwell on but rather the cracks at the edges of high society that James details in his book and which is only partially expressed through the less cumbersome medium of film. The interior monologues, the psychological motivations of the characters which made James, whose brother William after all was as leading psychologist in his day, something of a break-through author heading toward what we now call literary modernism. No question in the post-Freudian and post-Gothic novel times this James novelistic approach is tough reading and although he has never totally fallen out of disfavor his star has diminished with time. The combined mighty Merchant-Ivory production team along with writer Ruth Prawer Jhavala has made a valiant effort to bring this tough look at high Victorian marriage and its temptations to the fore.     

Here is the play, an expression for a summary of the film that Josh Breslin first uttered to me back when we were lovers and working here before I left for greener professional pastures at his urging, who later told me that it was not really his expression but Sam Lowell’s which tells a lot about Sam’s power over the writing staff at this publication.

Until you remember that it was the late Peter Paul Markin that gave the expression to Sam but enough of this internal literary history and on to the plot line. Couple number one poor but drop- dead beautiful Charlotte played by then rising actor Uma Thurman had a serious affair with a poor but drop- dead beautiful Italian prince of uncertain lineage, Amerigo, played by Jeremy Northam but that affair due to their limited resources and big appetites for luxurious and idle living can go nowhere. Can go nowhere mainly because he is engaged to the daughter, Maggie played by Kate Beckinsale, of a very wealth American robber baron, Adam Verver played by miscast Nick Nolte. Charlotte by the way a girlhood friend of Maggie’s although that did not stand in the way of beating her friend’s time with her intended. And had not qualm number one about the matter. These four characters drive the film aided by a busybody couple who act as foils for various shifts in the drama.    

Rich overlays poor and our Prince marries Maggie and has a son with her after dumping Charlotte like a hot potato when the wedding bells ring and his life take a big swing upward. Charlotte meanwhile still is carrying the torch for the Prince and takes dead aim at him when she goes to London to visit her old friend Maggie several years later. She tries might and main to get her prince but gets nowhere while she is unmarried. Maggie worried about her father who seems to have an art collection hunger worthy of many a benighted robber baron brings Charlotte and dad into contact and from there Adam falls for poor as a church mouse Charlotte and marries her. Somehow having everybody in close contact shifts the playing field as Maggie draws what today would seem incestuously close to her father leaving the field wide open for Charlotte and Amerigo to have a fling, or what turns out to be a fling once Maggie and Papa become wise to what is going on between this adulterous pair.  

Of course in high society nobody wants to offend anybody by actually saying what they mean or what concerns them so many minutes are used to convey what takes many pages to convey in the book about the internal monologues each party goes through to NOT tell what he or she is feeling. This kind of thing can only go on so long and finally as Maggie gets more and proof culminating with the golden bowl caper of what was what between the pair the tension is resolved when Amerigo dumps Charlotte for Maggie and Adam forces Charlotte to go back to America so he can play generous former robber baron with his treasured art collection readied for a museum. Yes, Fitzgerald once again had it right the very rich are different from you and me-and not necessarily for the better. 

Everybody Loves A Con-Except When They Are The Conned-When At First You Practice To Deceive, Part II-Giuseppe Tonatore’s “The Best Offer” (2013)-A Film Review

Everybody Loves A Con-Except When They Are The Conned-When At First You Practice To Deceive, Part II-Giuseppe Tonatore’s “The Best Offer” (2013)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

The Best Offer, starring Geoffrey Rush, Donald Sutherland, Jim Sturgess, Sylvia Hoeks, directed by Giuseppe Tonatorem 2013

Greg Green who has been the site manager of the on-line edition of this publication since 2017 has as part of his new regime, as a part of a policy that he had initiated when he was chief editor at American Film Gazette for many years encouraged his writers to let the reader into some of the internal workings of on-line publication. I have taken him up on that proposition as a matter of completeness since I believe that this review of 2013’s The Best Offer is in kindred spirit to another recently reviewed film in this space, 1991’s Deceived.  In that review I mentioned, based on my own personal experience, that every woman stands in unfocused fear and trepidation that the man she starts a serious relationship is for real, is not a con artist, a holy goof psycho con artist in that film and just an ordinary one in my case. Then this film came along which under ordinary circumstances would go to Seth Garth but which Greg switched up after seeing what I had written about in Deceived. (Seth the obvious choice because he has been the one over the years who has used the expression “everybody loves a con except the one being conned” the most and done a number of reviews where the con was central to the action of the film like in The Sting back in the 1970s.)

What intrigued Greg about my prior review was that I took a very strong stand that this idea related especially to women and wondered how I would deal with a case where as in The Best Offer a man was the subject of the con, a non-psycho con but a con nevertheless. (Greg apparently missed my note that men could tell their own takes on this proposition, but I was dealing with women.) Here is how the con worked, a beautiful con according to Sam Lowell who watched it with me and saw where the thing was heading long before I caught on to the “grift” (a Sam expression from corner boy days as a youth so he says). Virgil Oldman, played by sad-faced Geoffrey Rush, was a high -end top auctioneer for a major auction house who also had via his companion in crime, Billy played by now ancient Donald Sutherland, accumulated a gallery full of the best the art world had to offer in female portraits going back to at least the Renaissance. Their own scam was to downgrade the artist who painted the thing and grab a masterpiece for cheap money. Nice.

This accumulation of female portraits locked away from prying eyes and who knows what else had much to do with Virgil’s finicky ways and fear of women. That fear, subtly using that unspecified origin fear  is what sets the whole con up once he got a strange commission to auction off a valuable villa full of high-end paintings and fine furniture. The strange commission from a young woman who allegedly suffered from agoraphobia in the extreme as she led him on a merry chase before they finally met. The key here is Virgil’s kinship with a fellow odd-ball, a fellow person uncomfortable with dealing with people. Her turning out to be drop-dead beautiful was an add-on although the homely as sin Virgil should have at least had a few defenses up. In any case he got lured in little by little helped by the machinations of a master tinkerer, Robert, played by Jim Sturgess, who also was giving lovelorn Virgil advise on how to woe this young woman who has sparked his interest. Finally Virgil woos the young woman, Claire, played by fetching and fragile Sylvia Hoeks, who blossomed under his tutelage. A number of incidents, including a brutal street robbery by thugs near the villa bring Claire out into the world. Virgil will take his credits for her resurrection, including a few romps in the hay. And she will not object.                

Once Virgil felt that Claire felt comfortable in his high-end digs after bringing her along from her cocoon and a few nights of high-end love-making he brought her into his inner sanctum-the room full of female portraits which had previously sustained him. From there it was all downhill as Virgil decided to retire and devote himself to Claire and her well-being. One day he came home to put another painting in his collection room. Bingo-no paintings except one that Billy painted, you remember Billy who helped Virgil with their own con scheme. A painting allegedly of Claire’s mother which was in her possession as she and Virgil were going round and round. Shocked, Virgil finally realized that he has been set up by a cabal led by Billy assisted by Robert and Claire and a few incidental characters. That sends him to a mental institution and later to Prague where he foolishly expected the perfidious Claire to show up since she expressed an interest in a certain place in that town. A beautiful con according to Sam but to me just an extension of my idea about every woman that now applies to every man-he must have a deep-seeded dread that the woman he is dealing with is not real, is a con artist-or worse.    

Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) In Mind

Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines-In Honor Of Icarus’s Progeny- With Cary Grant And Jean Arthur’s “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939) In Mind 

By Lance Lawrence

[Thanks to reader Lanny Lake who sent us the message that we had inadvertently cut the last few paragraphs from the original publication leaving her wondering what happened to Johnny Cielo after he left Barranca. This missing piece is more important now since young writer Will Bradley has unearthed some interesting details about Johnny which will raise some eyebrows-Watch for the commentary coming soon. Greg Green-site manager]   

[I am only the recorder, the light-touch editor on this piece, since these are basically the recollections of Billy Bartlett, a guy I met in a bar in Miami while having a couple after having a tough day tracing down some leads on a story about the below the radar scene in Palm Beach after the Pulitzer dust-up blew over. The person I was supposed to interview did a “dixie” on me which is not all that unusual in the business but gives the why of why I was having a couple (many three, okay) when Billy approached when he noticed I was writing some notes, asked if I was a writer, I answered journalist and then he hit me with the question-“buy me a drink”-also not unusual in the profession when everybody not connected to the damn thing thinks everybody from cub reporters to big byline guys and gals have an endless expense account.

Billy’s “hook,” his experienced hook, was to tell me about a guy, about Johnny Cielo, who I had never heard of before and how he was one of the real aces of the early aviation industry, the barn-stormer end when the guys, and it was mainly guys despite Amelia Earhart and Sally Southern, ready did fly by the seat of their pants. Took awful chances to fight for Icarus’s honor and would rather die in the sky that stay earthbound-simple. That homage to Johnny, whom Billy had met as a young man in the 1950s when he was hitch-hiking to the Florida Keys and wound up in Jack’s in Key West where Johnny hung his hat, was just the icing on the cake for the real hook which was that Johnny, for dough as always with these mercenary fly-boys, had met his end in the deep blue Caribbean seas running  guns or something for Fidel and his guys in the hills of Cuba.   

No question when Billy flamed that story he had my attention, especially after those four drinks and that “dixie” stand-up I had visions of a big sassy story which I felt certain that my editor, Greg Green, would spring for. Just for grins Billy told me that Johnny had bedded one Rita Hayworth the big Hollywood hot flash to guys before she went over to Morocco and the Aga Khan. I was all ears after that since I remember my father told me that his father had had a Rita Hayworth pin-up in his locker when he was in the service during World War II. He had showed me a photograph of her and I could see what he, what my grandfather, was all itchy about every time he mentioned her name. So here it is. L.L.]

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A tear comes to my eyes every time I hear the name Johnny Cielo, yes, Johnny, one of Icarus’s latter- day sons who was a pioneer in aviation when that was tricky business-when flying by the seat of your pants really was something more than a quaint saying. (By the way for passport trouble purposes, for cons and scams, for ducking the law, John Law he called them Johnny Cielo had many aliases; Johnny Too Bad, Johnny Blade, Johnny Blaze, Blaze Johnson, Johnny Icarus, Izzy Johns and who knows how many other those are just the ones I remember but I will use his real name, assuming that it is for my purposes here). Yes, Johnny was a piece of work, was somebody who gave as good as he got and who had that flight dream from very early on, from the first day he heard about Wilbur and Orville Wright and their successors. Johnny though was strictly a fly boy adventurer, although he could have had a piece of Alleghany Airlines and lived on easy street for the rest of his life. Could have been flying Piper Clubs for the country club rubes to gawk over. But our Johnny was not built that way, didn’t want to become an extended cycle repair shop guy, didn’t have Howard Hughes’ overweening desire to own it all, whatever “it” was for the moment.       

Some people, even people knowledgeable about the history of aviation in America, have claimed they never heard of Johnny Cielo until you mention the Barranca air service set-up. Then they are all ears-not so much about the aviation part, the desperate flights to get the mail out, to get stuff delivered to impossible places, but about Johnny’s red-hot affair with film siren of the 1930s and 1940s Rita Hayworth. Yeah, there was plenty of truth to his exploits with the females, with high class dames like Rita back then. Rita who was every military guy’s favorite pin-up and if not then second. Johnny led Rita a merry chase, had her abandoning that very promising and lucrative Hollywood career to follow him to the wilds of Barranca down in Central America and then ditched her leaving her no choice but to grab the next best thing (this before the Aga Khan took his run at her and snagged her for a while-even “a while” most guy’s idea of heaven). Left Rita for some vaudeville tramp down on her uppers, somebody who couldn’t even stand in the same room as Rita but Johnny was funny that way-would stay with one woman just so long and that not long. Told them straight out his fly-boy life was it and he did not expect a woman, wouldn’t ask a woman to follow him where he was going. And he was right, just ask Rita who did and got not even a by your leave.   

Maybe it is better to begin at the beginning, or at least how Johnny got down on his own uppers so bad he had to take a shot a running a fool’s errant airline down in sunny Banana Republic Barranca. Johnny got deep into running dope, you know, marijuana, opium stuff like that way before most people even know what the hell illegal drugs were about from sunny Mexico up north. Did it for a few years, made a ton of money and proceeded to blow it on dames, various experimental airplane projects and hand-outs to every drifter he ran across. Then one day an agent for whatever cartel he was working for at the time, such things are murky and best left murky told him he was through, that they had some new boy, their boy who would run the merchandise.

Johnny thereafter needed work, needed it bad to keep up with the fresh but expensive Rita. Nothing doing around America for a guy whose last job was a dope smuggler so he headed south to Central America when his old friend and comrade Letts Fagan said he had a deal for him if he came fast. The deal was a secured route for a mail and express delivery for everything south of Mexico to what the hell Antarctica if he wanted to go that far if they could set up the route through some pretty tough terrain in the days when propeller was king and planes still wobbly in inclement weather. Heading out he told Rita he was going, he didn’t expect her to follow, wouldn’t ask her to but can you believe she said “let’s go” and as a sign of her own seriousness she was ready the next day to travel-a world record maybe for a woman with a big wardrobe and plenty of luggage to pull off. Johnny was impressed-and pleased.      

Things started out pretty well for Johnny and Rita and Johnny and his new airline. Looked like he would meet all the deadlines imposed by the contract and by his own daring. Pulled a few rabbits out of the hat to get through a bunch of horrible weather to deliver whatever there was to deliver-typical Johnny Cielo magic. Then the roof caved in, or rather that tramp from some northward-bound tramp steamer trampled into town looking for some sweet sugar daddy- or a Johnny kind of guy. She wasn’t choosey especially when she found out that Johnny was carrying Rita in tow. Two minutes after she saw him she had him in a backroom at Letts’ restaurant doing whatever she wanted, whatever he wanted. (We are all adults and know what was what but when some guy, some Johnny latter-day devotee wrote up his biography the guy left the hard sexual description part out, just like they were doing in the films in those days but you know as well as I do, and I know, because before the end Johnny told me, it was oral sex, a blow job, said she was good at that, Rita too, but you had to coax Rita and not the tramp.)

Okay even tramps have names, as if it mattered to Johnny or any other guy when a woman leads him to some backroom, so hers was Jean, Jean Smith I think Johnny said she called herself. Like I said Johnny had a fistful of aliases, so she probably did too. She was from nowhere, had done nothing but was something new and shiny for Johnny and that was that. Of course two dames, a glamour gal and a tramp or any combination thereof, working the same guy in the small blistered and balmy town are not going to make anything work in the end. That was when Rita blew town, went back to Hollywood to be knocked off by the Aga Khan for a while until she got bored. (The funny thing and even that biography guy didn’t know about the situation until I sent him a letter and he looked the stuff up after Rita blew that Moslem prince off and went back-where else Hollywood not Brooklyn or wherever she was from she and Johnny went under the sheets again for a while until she blew him off-nice trick. Johnny always spoke highly of his sassy redhead after that though-always had that glean in his eye when he mentioned her name. 

The tramp won round one. A big win but Johnny was all business for a while trying to make the nut with that fucking two-bit contract that must have been written up by a Wall Street lawyer it had so many escape clauses for the owners. Johnny had by his own reckoning, a half dozen ex-World War I planes of no repute, or something like that to get the mail and goods over the hump. Tough going, very tough as he lost a few guys who like him would rather die than not fly so they took risks, big risks, just for the hell of it. And nobody, Johnny made sure of that, mourned out loud about the dead guy, grabbed his smack sack possessions and divvied them up so no moony stuff. After one guy got, a guy who was supposed to buy this Jean a steak when he tried to make a play for her behind Johnny’s back, to sit with the angels, that what they called it she sniffled up and Johnny told her to shut up or follow Rita (Johnny could be cutting). Here’s the real deal Johnny part though-five minutes after the guy flamed out Johnny was a sky pilot taking the undelivered load over the hump and back in some kind of hurricane. (That “hump” not the Burma World War II hump that almost broke the backs of English and American pilots but through Condor Pass the next country over from Barranca.)   

Of course knowing Johnny like I did it came as no surprise that things didn’t work out in Barranca, he couldn’t get Letts’ operation going by that freaking Wall Street deadline and he had to skip town owning everybody and their brother and sister dough-including a ton to Letts who swore if Johnny Too Bad, that was the alias he was using down there apparently and not a bad idea with the riff-raff that went through that place, cutthroats, grifters, midnight stabbers, and the like the one time I went through there in a homage to the places Johnny set down on after I found out he had passed away. Naturally the tramp, that Jean whatever her sexual attractions and practices, once Johnny had no dough went on to the next best thing-whatever male was walking with dough in his pockets. As for Johnny he went free-lancing for a few years staying away from any spots where he owed dough. Picked up a few floozies and left them and headed for Key West where I met him in Jack’s, the hangout for guys like Hemingway and Giles, women like Selma Johns and Loretta Oldfield if you remember all those names.

That is about it except to grab the end, grab how Johnny fell down. Somehow about 1957, early in the year a guy approached  Johnny, a guy who called himself Colonel Fiero, something like that, who claimed to have been on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (as if Johnny gave a fuck what a guy’s credentials were as long as the proposition made sense, it involved flying, the more dangerous the better and the dough was big and in cash) who wanted Johnny to fly from some point in Mexico to the Sierra Madres in Cuba. To fly to Fidel and his band of rural fighters who needed arms and supplies. I never did get the place in Mexico, Johnny wouldn’t say even to me and I don’t know how many flights in and out Johnny made. Probably a guy like Johnny didn’t even know he was supplying revolutionaries, guys opposed to the guy who was running Cuba for the Americans. In any case one fateful night Johnny cashed his check, took at dive down in the deep blue sea Caribbean from what some sailor who saw what happened told it. Yeah, every time I think about that bastard (he had stiffed me too for dough more than once in those days) I shed a tear.