***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You

OR

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin who will be more fully introduced in a moment (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names).

Neither of those expressions referred to date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Peter back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Peter when they had reconnected a number of years before after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this nostalgic glancing back, especially by Peter since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.   

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that back then Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culturally-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “max daddy” another expression coined by Peter so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written and needed to play on Peter’s vanity) who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generations before they sold it to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That pizza parlor made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. (The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been heard of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks, Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion.) Moreover this spot provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of sports who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from).

Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as Peter would later claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligence he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Peter who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an item. An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it is about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to before he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to joint to keep up with what was going on with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home , believed what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam  looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing)  of who had joined and found the names of Peter Markin (he had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought) and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Peter, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s). Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad (the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Peter knew that, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what he saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulations).

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston (read: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Peter goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Peter as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of  college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a  term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,”  probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way though Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term). Strangely Markin made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will he never after that Melinda Loring had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band) but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it).

That was how Peter had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille. Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for a short period both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road  for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Peter, not so much later in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover in the Markin home phone).  He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to they were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War we were fighting against the Russians North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Peter was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his  Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested American foreign policy at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Peter had to say about this wicked old world, you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackman, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he took a dive (Peter’s words). Told a redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless). Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the gnaw, probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Peter was on his soapbox. 

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Peter that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters to state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period. 

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he delved into the struggle to build his printing shop. He told Peter that he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panther or guys like that, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but could not remember the titles. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Peter also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots. Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below:                                                                           

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. 

10th Anniversary Film-Crossing The Color Line-When It Counted-Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Story-Chadwick Boseman’s “42”-(2013)-A Film Review

Crossing The Color Line-When It Counted-Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Story-Chadwick Boseman’s “42”-(2013)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

42, starring Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford, 2013

Although the number of female sports reporters, including anchors and such, has grown exponentially since my pre-Title X in college days I admit I have never been a sports fan, never really followed, seriously followed in any case, the subject of the film under review, 42, baseball. Except to vicariously root for the New York Yankees whenever they raised their heads come World Serious times since I grew up around Albany in New York (that “World Serious” expression courtesy of Ring Larner via his You Know Me, Al stories via Sam Lowell who was, is a baseball nut). That rooting for the Yankees a not unimportant factor in the lives of both Sam and I since we have been long time companions and Sam growing up in North Adamsville south of Boston a rabid Red Sox fan which has led to many an “armed truce” come rivalry time. (I was experienced in “armed truces” well before meeting Sam many years ago since Albany is a “divided” city, or at least my clan was, is between loyalty to Yankees and Sox).   

Since I am not a baseball fan, as defined by Sam and many others-meaning knowing all kinds of arcane information about every aspect of the game how do I wind up getting this assignment. Well let’s get back to Sam, that well-known long- time companion who as film editor here back a few years before he retired would routinely do the sport films as they came up like the film adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural starring Robert Redford. Sam and I wound up watching this film not under the baseball hook but under my long-time “crush” on Harrison Ford ever since early Star Wars and my interest in seeing Chadwick Bozeman who plays Number 42, Jackie Robinson in something other than comic book super-hero Black Panther.  

After watching the film, as is our wont, Sam’s old-time expression, we discussed the merits of the film. That is where I made my “fatal” mistake. I told Sam who was awash in the glory of seeing the first black man in major league baseball (not capitalized as now) when major league baseball really was the king of the American pastime day-and later night when the lights came. Robinson helped integrate the sport AND help win the National League pennant for Brooklyn in 1947 AND win Rookie of the Year although the film was not really about baseball. Sure that was the tag line but the real deal was how for blacks since slavery times every step forward was something like a world-historic ordeal, was fought for with blood and guts by a few and then carried on by many. Since Sam had been assigned the film by site manager Greg Green (as he would have been even under recently sacked previous site manager Allan Jackson who was a boyhood friend of Sam’s and fellow baseball nut-Red Sox version) since he told me and Greg that he would have concentrated on the sports angle and somewhat downplayed the racial angle to have me to the review in order to say what I have just said above.

Greg hemmed and hawed for a while since he also is a member in good-standing of the baseball nut fraternity and wanted to highlight the incredible athletic ability and dedication that Jackie Robinson had which he believed added greatly to his ability to withstand the racial taunts and “assorted bullshit” his term, which Robinson had to withstand that first and later seasons from those “crackers,” my term who saw the game as another white preserve. A white preserve just as later, as today for that matter, blacks and others of color have had to break the white preserve on riding buses, voting, housing, employment, education you name it. All things that whites have taken for granted and not given it another thought. I include myself in that category as well.

I will now get off my soapbox since I have said what I wanted to say about my angle on the film and give you as Sam has eternally said “the skinny” on the film some of which I have already telegraphed. Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford, old time good old boy talking out of the side of his mouth, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, later to be the Los Angeles Dodgers which some of the diehards in Brooklyn have never forgotten or forgiven, for a whole series of reasons personal, professional and business-wise which get a workout in various scenes in the film decided baseball, or at least his team needed to be integrated to be successful and to cater to the fair number of blacks who attended Dodger games. As in the case of Rosa Parks later and others Rickey did not want to get just any black but one that represented the better aspects of the black race. Up steps Jackie Robinson who was playing excellent no money baseball in Negro League dungeons in the South and who would have continued to do so if Rickey hadn’t given him a call. That decision for good or evil would drive the rest of the film except for the off-hand romance interspersed between baseball scenes between Robinson and the woman who would become his wife and mainstay Rachel.            

Obviously, Rickey, and Robinson, knew that what they were facing was a daunting task from confronting those white preserve crowds to fellow baseball players, teammates and opponents, who hated the idea to fellow baseball owners to the Jim Crow conditions which precluded blacks in the South, and in the North too but less publicly blatant from white-only facilities. The centerfold on this was Robinson’s grit on and off the field and Rickey’s drive to do the right thing. All of that gets thoroughly vetted throughout the film. Of course the great plays and the marching toward the pennant get worked in as well. Despite Sam’s thrill a minute at the baseball plays this one is a good close look at American sport in a day when football which has replaced baseball as the American pastime is knee-deep in controversy around black players and their allies “taking a knee” and putting a bright spotlight on the role of the police in the black community. What else is new.       

Remember 1979 Greensboro Massacre!-Built The Anti-Fascist United Front!

Workers Vanguard No. 1121	3 November 2017

Remember 1979 Greensboro Massacre!-Built The Anti-Fascist United Front!

Emboldened by the overt racism of the Trump administration, fascists have stepped up their provocations and deadly attacks. Their murderous intent was clearly seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, when hundreds of fascists mobilized in defense of the Confederacy. Heather Heyer was murdered by a Nazi-lover who drove his car at high speed into a group of anti-fascist protesters. The goal of today’s fascists is no different than that of their Nazi and Klan forebears: racial genocide, of black people in particular, and the destruction of working-class organizations, including unions and the left.

Today, “Charlottesville” is a byword for fascist terror, just as “Greensboro” has been for 38 years. On 3 November 1979, Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists murdered five union organizers and anti-racist activists, supporters of the Communist Workers Party, in broad daylight in Greensboro, North Carolina. The fascist killers did not work alone; they were aided and abetted by the government. Dozens of Klansmen and Nazis in a nine-car caravan drove up to the black housing project of Morningside Homes, the assembly point for an anti-Klan rally. With calculated deliberation, they took their shotguns and semiautomatic weapons out of their trunks, aimed and opened fire directly at the 100 protesters. Then they calmly packed up and drove away. The whole massacre was shown live on TV and recorded by the Greensboro cops.

In less than 90 seconds, five demonstrators lay dead: César Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson, Sandra Smith and James Waller. Ten more were wounded, one of them paralyzed for life. As soon as the attack ended, the cops swooped in and arrested survivors. Liberals, black Democrats and the trade-union bureaucracy reacted with the same lies as the bourgeois media, implying that the dead got what they deserved. Grotesquely, the New York Times described the carnage in Greensboro as a “shootout” between two “fringe groups.”

Many of the anti-Klan activists who survived were fired from their jobs, jailed and hounded by the FBI and local police. These courageous people—black and white, men and women—were targeted because they acted to oppose the fascists’ vicious campaign against blacks, Jews, unionists and leftists. Many of them had a long and honorable history in the Southern civil rights movement and as union militants in North Carolina, where Klan terror has historically been used by the bosses to keep unions out.

The Greensboro Massacre was the product of collusion between the fascists and the capitalist state. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent helped train the killers and plot the assassinations; a police/FBI informer rode shotgun in the lead car; a Greensboro cop brought up the rear. The killers literally got away with murder. They were acquitted by all-white juries, affirming once again the meaning of “justice” in this racist, capitalist system.

The fascists announced they would “celebrate” the Greensboro Massacre a week later in Detroit. In response to this provocation in a black proletarian center, the Spartacist League built a labor/black mobilization at the same place and time that the Klan threatened to rally. Over 500 people, including black and white auto workers, turned out to make sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City. In organizing the protest, we had to overcome sabotage from the trade-union misleaders (especially UAW bureaucrats), who refused to endorse and build the rally, and from black Democratic Party mayor Coleman Young, who threatened to arrest the anti-Klan protesters. In an exemplary way, this mobilization showed that the working class, marching at the head of all the fascists’ intended victims, has the power to sweep the race-terrorists off the street.

The fascists must and can be stopped. Greensboro showed that the fascist killers can’t be effectively fought by individual direct action, no matter how courageous. What is necessary is to mobilize the strength of the working class. As we wrote in the immediate aftermath of Greensboro:

“Every successful cross burning, every fascist parade through a Jewish or black neighborhood, every courtroom victory in the liberals’ campaign for ‘free speech for fascists’ whets the murderers’ appetite for more violence.... This campaign of terror must be stopped. Socialists and militants in the labor movement must call on organized labor to mobilize its tremendous social power, in alliance with black and other minority organizations and the left to stop the Klan in its tracks.”

— “For Labor/Black Mass Mobilizations: Smash KKK Killers!” WV No. 243, 9 November 1979

Such mobilizations can give the working class a sense of its social power and of the class nature of the capitalist state and the Democrats. They also point to the need to forge a workers party to lead the fight for a socialist revolution. That is the only way to get rid of the fascist murderers once and for all—by doing away with the racist capitalist system that breeds them. In fighting for a workers America, we honor the memory of the Greensboro martyrs.

In Honor Of The 110th Birthday Of The Late Legendary Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe-An Encore Interview With Dotty Malone Back In 1978-The Last Living Link To The Fame Shamus Who Has Passed Away At 98

In Honor Of The 110^th Birthday Of The Late Legendary Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe-An Encore Interview With Dotty Malone Back In 1978-The Last Living Link To The Fame Shamus Who Has Passed Away At 98

By Seth Garth as told by Dorothy “Dotty” Malone

[Back in 1978 Seth Garth, then a young stringer at American Film Gazette did a piece in honor of the late famous private detective Phillip Marlowe who was then being feted on his 70^th birthday. (Marlowe had passed away some years before of some say hubris, drink and a serious cocaine addiction.) As part of his research into some of Marlowe’s more famous cases he ran across Dotty Malone who had at one time involved with Marlowe in a case, and as he dug deeper maybe more. Ms. Malone was in any case the last living link to the famous Sternwood case which first brought Marlowe to wide public attention, some say notoriety when he married Sternwood’s older daughter, Vivian shortly after Marlowe tied up the loose ends, the loose ends that counted which was to save an old man grief before the end, before he went to his rest concerning his younger wayward daughter Carmen. The name may not mean much now in super highway times, now generally or in Los Angeles where the case unfolded, but in that old-pre-World War II town he carried a lot of weight, had pull. Reason: General Sternwood was the guy who practically invented the La Brea tar pits which made his fortune. That insured plenty of newspaper coverage and cover-up as well depending on how the wily old man wanted things done.

So as a young up and coming reporter Seth interviewed Ms. Malone, let her tell what she knew of the Sternwood story from her vantage point. Recently Seth received word that Ms. Malone whom he had not seen in many years had passed away at her home in Brentwood where she lived for mainly years at 98. He went into his files to see if he still had the Malone interview, He did have a copy and we decided that it would honor both Ms. Malone and Mr. Marlowe to have an encore presentation of her interview which gives a very different view of the Sternwood case than the police logs or the newspapers had at the time-Greg Green, site manager]

********

Sure, I knew Phillip Marlowe, knew him from the Sternwood case which may not mean too much now with about twenty million stories out in the urban sprawl but did when a guy with money, a guy like old Sternwood,    more money than Midas some said after he hit pay-dirt with those stinking La Brea tarpits which put him on easy street. And gave him enough pull with the P.D. and with the L.A. Times to play whatever angle he was playing in whatever way he wanted. Originally, and I will tell you how in a minute, I only knew that the General had hired Marlowe, everybody called him Marlowe and that is the way he wanted to be called, to do some small chore, clean up the mess, for him around the antics his younger daughter who even I knew was a wild one, knew she frequented and was photographed at splashy Hollywood venues and did plenty of what today would be called kinky things with people in Hollywood. Some well-known actors and actresses, married and single, too who you would be surprised if I told you their names since you work for a film publication. You know dope, sex, strange rituals, and all you can figure it out. It was not until later that I found out the details, the details that put the case in the cold files and off the front pages of anything but the L.A. editions of the scurrilous Inquirer.

It was strictly a matter of happenstance that I would wind up meeting Marlowe, getting involved even as small a part as I had in what happened. I had come out West from my Maryland home after graduating from Bryn Mawr, mainly to get away from my straight-laced family and with the idea unlike most girls who came to Hollywood then, now too, not of becoming a film actor but a screenwriter since I was fascinated by some work that William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington had done with screenplays. I was pretty good looking, except for having to wear glasses all the time for bad eyes which would have cut down my chances of a film career if I had wanted to go that route. In those days wearing glasses, young women wearing glasses, was a subject of some social scorn once viper short story writer Dorothy Parker made everybody aware of the stigmata with her probably drunken remark that “guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” 

What I didn’t know, was kind of shocked at, was that there were a million girls, guys too, who wanted to be screenwriters and so I learned the hard way the way around the Hollywood studios. As you might guess, since you are with a film magazine, the way forward in this business with few exceptions is through sex. Everybody, at least everybody in the business knows that to get ahead you have to what we used to call “put out,” have sex, male or female, with some bastard to get in the studio before a camera or the writing room. I was naive enough for a while to hold out, to stay a virgin. Because Bryn Mawr was an all- women’s college I didn’t have much sexual experience, had never “gone all the way” as one of my daughter’s asked me in one of our candid mother-daughter talk-fests although I had some lesser sexual encounters. It was not until I hit Hollywood and started hanging with young actors who hung around the same places I did to try to figure out how the hell to get inside though studio gates that I went “all the way.” All the way the first time with Rory Calhoun, who when I knew him before he became a star was simply Jeff Mahoney. We remained friends ever after until his second marriage, still talk now and again. 

That is the background to how I met Marlowe, met him when I was working in a high brow book store on Sunset Boulevard while I was waiting to get into the studios, get into some writing assignment. I remember it was a rainy day, unusual for that time of year in L.A. and I had just practically thrown out a couple of young girls from Hollywood High School who had heard, correctly, that the bookstore had some interesting high-side erotica for sale. Had heard it from some boys and were curious. Since they were too young to look at such material I kicked them out after they started badgering me. Now to set the record straight especially in like of what was going on with the younger Sternwood daughter Acme Books sold strictly literary erotica which may or may not have had pictures alongside, For example, we carried the Kama Sutra, had it right on the shelves. Since smutty books come into the story I wanted to get that straight.

This guy with a rained-splattered trench coat, you know the ones that guys like Humphrey Bogart made famous in I think Casablanca with the belt buckle to cinch the whole affair, dripping soft felt hat, wearing a suit, brown although not high end, not from what I could tell, short to medium high, older and as he approached me as I was straightening up a book bin of overstocks I noticed he had a craggy face, kind of handsome in a way. (To set the record straight I mentioned to Marlowe in a funny manner that he seemed kind of short to be a private detective after he introduced himself. He smirked and said he had had enough of that kind of talk that day since the young Sternwood girl, Carmen, ahd said the same thing when he went out to that first interview at the Sternwood mansion. He then said that didn’t seem to stop Carmen at all since he then tried to do a lap dance on him when he was standing. I laughed a knowing laugh.) He startled me by asking me some questions about rare books mainly because he no more looked like a rare book aficionado than the man in the moon. When I mentioned that fact after answering his questions about specific rare editions he noted that the young gal at the reference room in the Hollywood library had told him the same thing. I also found out later, much later, that she had given him her telephone number on the basis of his reply about helping him get through the books. I also found out that after he left the bookstore he went to the library to pick her up and I guess she showed him quite time. She had still been pissed off at him when she informed me of this later because after he had had his way with her he had left, said he was on a case.                          

That is when Phillip, I call him Phillip now that he is gone but Marlowe  then like everybody else, laid out the story about how he was working for a wealthy guy up in the hills where the wealthy lived then in their above the grimy air mansions and without mentioning any names then said the guy was being shaken down by the bookseller across the street at Geiger’s Rare Books and Antiques over some stuff that one of his daughters had gotton caught up in. When he went to see “what was what,” to cram the shakedown, this book clerk, this Agnes, I will get to her later, her and her relationship with Phillip after her various guys, protectors fell down on the job was as clueless as he was about rare books. So he came over to see what I knew, whether the operation was legitimate or was it a front for from what he saw a “dirty book” racket to high-end customers. I mentioned that he must have grown up in my religion, Catholic, because nobody I knew except them used the words “dirty book” rather than pornography or sex books. He said I was correct and could a co-religionist help him by identifying this mad monk Geiger.

I said I would help when Geiger came out of the store. Then something came over me, maybe it was that funny rain, maybe it was boredom looking forward to a dull afternoon of cataloging a new supply of titles and maybe it was just my time to break out. I don’t know but I suddenly gave him my best come hither look and he knew exactly what I meant by my remark and look. Said he had a pint of whisky, bonded, going to waste and that was that. I put the “Closed” sign on the front door and we went into the back room where I had my desk. Oh yes, how could I forget this. I told you already I have to wear glasses and he mentioned couldn’t I take then off since he was well aware of the Dorothy Parker line. I went to the mirror, fixed myself up a bit put on some new lipstick and went back to my drink. His eyes bulged when he saw me. I don’t have to write a story about what happened that afternoon do I just know my dress was pretty messed up above my knees before we were done. When it started to get dark and rainier, I noticed that Geiger was coming out of his place with his so-called chauffer, but everybody knew his boyfriend. Phil said he had to leave and would get back to me. I knew he wouldn’t, still I felt like a woman, a real woman for one of the first times and was ready to chalk it up to experience. (I was also glad as hell Rory had broken me in since Phil could be gentle in some ways but a cave man in others-in sexual ways.)

In any case after that afternoon I kept tabs on the story. Through the newspapers, through a few people I knew including the store owner who knew what Geiger had been up to since his own daughter had been trapped in the vicious drug, sex and pornography tomb, pillow talk and checking in occasionally with the cop on the beat who knew the chief police department guy, a guy named Bernie Olds who got Phil the job with Sternwood in the first place since they had worked together in the D.A. office before Marlowe got canned for going around some rule, around some honcho who got his claws clipped.

I would not have mentioned this back when I was interested in the case, kept tabs on the players, on all the moving parts but I also knew a couple of hat check, cigarette and photography girls who worked in the Club Luna, no holds barred anything goes places on the outskirts of town where the Sternwood sisters, Vivian and Carmen, who were what the now gentle old general had nightmares about what he had spawned hung their hats. The reason I knew them goes back to when I was earnestly trying to be a screenwriter, trying to get into the film business and these young women were also trying to the same and like me were skimming working other jobs until that proverbial ship came. I should also mention that one of them, maybe two, the twins, Cecilia and Shirley, probably went to bed with our Phillip, although from what was told to me by the hat check girl, Pamela, who I had roomed with when I first came west it didn’t last long because Phil was kind of rough with them, thinking they were on the make and that was that. I could see that such women would be repelled by what was the ugly side of the craggy-faced handsome man.

By the way Seth since I noticed you didn’t pursue the question whether it was out of some silly chivalry for an old lady or fear of what I might come up with that “pillow talk,” bedroom late night after sweating up the sheets if it was typical L.A. night was a serious source of finding out stuff that never made the papers. Never made the papers because a young reporter named Ray Chandler, a member of one of the Chandler branches that ran the L.A. Times then took his orders from above, from some uncle who squashed whatever he could since he used to play tennis with the General in Bel Air in the old days when both were sprightlier. Ray was on the story from the beginning, from the Geiger hit and I had met him when he was rummaging around seeing what people in various shops knew about Geiger’s rackets and he came in to see me. I told him what I knew which then was not much more than he knew but somehow his manner and my idea that maybe I could get in the studios through writing as a reporter, or, face it sleeping with a reporter got him angle asked for date. Later he would take me down to his family’s cottage (a semi-mansion but he always called it a cottage) in La Jolla on the weekends and I would rifle around his study desk and get whatever information he was holding back from me. By the end of our relationship which didn’t survive much past the conclusion of the case I knew as much as he did about the goings on across L.A. to smother the case or really try to solve the damn thing.        

After Phillip had left my store that rainy afternoon he headed across the street to his automobile and trailed Geiger and that boyfriend to his house out in the Edgewood neighborhood, not a good or bad neighborhood then but a place where the houses where far enough apart that Geiger could conduct his little racket in some privacy. According to very late filed police report Phillip had staked the place out seeing what was about. What was about was one Carmen Sternwood coming to get her dope, a thing called laudanum, basically opium cut with ether if it is done right from what I heard, having never gotten beyond jimson, weed, you know marijuana that you can find anywhere now, really knocks you out. Which fit nicely into Geiger’s operation since he would take his “dirty pictures” from a hidden camera while someone like Carmen was doing her Balinese strip. From what I knew, heard about Carmen she might have done her dance on the Pacific Coast Highway at dead sun noon as long as some man was watching but the laudanum probably made sense to a weasel like Geiger.                       

Then out of nowhere the shit hit the fan, excuse my English, as shots rang out in the rain-swept night. Marlowe, Phillip, headed in to find Geiger dead as a doornail on the floor and Carmen half-dressed sucking her thumb as two unidentified cars sped away. I am not sure, or at least I don’t remember whether Phillip, took a run at Carmen, had his way with her in the old-timey expression, that night or just cleaned up the place of any evidence she had been there. Maybe both in any case nobody heard about Geiger’s demise for a while except I did see Phillip’s car across the street in front of Geiger’s the next day and then saw a station wagon with Agnes and some guy in it and that he had hailed a cab, a cab with a female driver which was a novelty in those days even for Hollywood usually doubling down as a way for certain women to do their other business, their prostitution if you must know, without the problem of irate landlords and seedy rooms. I would later find out in a strange way, strange if hailing that very same cab and female cabbie one night when I was closing up the book store and on the ride home she as much as said he had what she called “curled his toes,” Phillip’s, after doing the tail job once his name got around as crackerjack private detective. I am not sure whether she said he was strictly for tough nights or something like that but I do know that I shared no feelings of sisterhood with her.

This is probably the time to step back a little and see why hailing that cab and following that station wagon had anything to with helping General Sternwood or his wayward daughter out of a mess. The original reason General Sternwood had asked Phillip to do his work was that he was being bribed by Geiger over Carmen’s gambling debts and was trying to decide whether to pay or not. That is the front story and made sense since the guy in that station wagon with Agnes was a grifter named Joe Brody who was in the habit of putting the bite on plenty of people, either independently or for one Eddie Mars. Mars a name I did not know at the time was the real kingpin behind every evil known to man that happened in that town, in all of Southern California really, and as I would subsequently find out from that bevy of employees I mentioned earlier owned the Club Luna where the Sternwood young women held forth. Moreover Mars was the backer behind the scenes for Geiger’s sleaze ball operation which when exposed had dragged in half the young women not only in rancid Hollywood but among the “best” families, the so-called elite. The hush would be on in that case even if General Sternwood had not called in his chips. So Phillip tagged this Joe Brophy or thought he had only Carmen looking for her nude photos showed up and fouled up the works. Or tried to. Here is where things got unglued on that front. That boyfriend of Geiger’s thought Joe had wasted his lover that rainy night and as a result decided to bang-bang Joe. Done. Boyfriend done too since Marlowe wrapped him up with a bow before long and made him a special delivery packet at the local P.D. station. Work for the old General finished and without disturbing too many things.                  

That was the front story but the back, the real reason that the getting senile old General wanted Marlowe’s services was to get a tag on a guy named Rusty Regan who had been before he disappeared a while before, he said about a month, Vivian would say a couple of months, had been something like the General’s confidante, best friend. Had blown town and allegedly had run off with Eddie Mars’ wife in the process. Phillip  figured if he found Rusty then he would get a serious lead on the “who” and the “why” of the Geiger-Brody killings. Of course, while all of this work was going on Phil was playing footsies with older daughter Vivian, at first he said to see where she fit in the picture. Was he going to have to like his friend from the D.A.s office now working as a P.I. up in San Francisco Sam Spade and sent her over when she got him in too much of a jam. This is where Eddie Mars comes more clearly into the picture. He was the backing, the protection for Geiger’s “dirty picture” racket taking a nice cut. Taking cuts of a million other things from women to dope and back as well as even more sinister stuff. All the while looking like your average businessman using the Club Luna as a front for the whole operation. Slick, very slick. Vivian had made what even she would later admit a wrong devil’s bargain with Eddie because he held everything, he could over her (including a few tumbles in the hay while that wife was supposedly away with Regan and Marlowe wasn’t looking). Even now though every time though I think about that Club Luna and those former friends of mine, that hat check and cigarette girl sister act, who took a run at Marlowe knowing that I had been with him before them. 

Funny through all of this Carmen was making her own moves, trying to figure out where she stood in the mess. Of course she headed to Marlowe’s door whatever she thought of him (according to Vivian not much, said he was too ugly to be handsome but that was no bar to a man trap like her) And of course she had her way with him, including getting him to get some cash from Eddie Mars on account at his crooked gambling tables. Although the rest of the tale is pretty straight up let me give you the details because the whole thing shifts to Eddie Mars and his henchmen, especially his “hit man” some bad ass names Carlos something I forget the last name and it is not important because he had wasted some poor sucker Joe who was fronting for that Agnes who worked for Geiger and had been Brophy girlfriend. Women like her always get somebody to take then under protection and under the covers even if they bitch and moan about all their so-called tough breaks. Needless to say, Phillip played along with Agnes for two reasons-one to get her in the sacks since she was pretty good -looking for a tramp and she had information about the whereabouts of Eddie Mars’ wife. I don’t know what happened to Agnes probably found another Joe after she found out Phillip was just there for a tumble and ran that guy into the ground before moving on again.          

That Agnes information proved to be invaluable, although if Phillip had headed to the nearest cop house he could have found out that at the address Agnes had given him there was a garage run by a dopehead named Art Huck. This was another one of Eddie’s operations, hot cars, so he knew, had known all along where his wife had been. Philip really only had to figure out the why of the ruse and the still pressing question for old man Sternwood of where Regan was. At the house after some fuss he found both Eddie’s wife Rhonda and Vivian. Oh yeah, and that savage Carlos who was ready to put a few slugs into Phillip’s head if that was what the boss wanted. Except Phillip through some quick action by Vivian got to him first. That sealed the deal between them as I will explain in a minute. The whole thing had been set up, set up with too many moving parts really, between Vivian and Eddie to cover for the fact that dope-addled Carmen had shot Regan when he would not tumble to her advances. That would be Phillips’ excuse for that tumble he had had with Carmen when he first went out to the Sternwood mansion and Carmen tried to do that lap dance while he was standing up.     

Although the reason for the elaborate cover-up was clear to him now Eddie was still a threat to him, and now to Vivian since a guy like Eddie ould definitely get burned up when he heard that his high-priced hit man had been turned to mush by Phillip’s firepower. I remember reading this part, the end of Eddie Mars (although not the end of some gangster’s control of all the evils in Southern California, Guy Madison moved up the food chain and things went on as usual without missing a beat). Marlowe and Vivian had hightailed it to Geiger’s now empty house (remember Eddie owned the joint) to hold a conference with Eddie. Phillip though had faked out where their location was expecting Eddie to think he would get there first and set up a very fatal ambush for the pair. Eddie, and his eternal bodyguards waiting outside to execute the ambush, got a big surprise though when he discovered Phillip got there first and sent out some shots to alert Eddie’s guys. Phillip then forced Eddie out the door to his well-deserved fate of being riddled with machinegun bullets by his own henchmen. Nice, right.     

That wrapped up Eddie. The fate of the others. Well Carmen was put in some private hush-hush mental hospital, stayed for a few months and then headed to San Diego where she was found dead about a year later out on some pier after having had an overdose of heroin and half her clothes ripped off. Eddie’s wife, after a short clandestine affair with Phillip, headed back East and into oblivion. Vivian and Phillip as you know were married shortly after the close of the case although as you also should know, or have heard about, the marriage didn’t take and there was a huge court case over the divorce. The General, old Sternwood, well he went to what some detective fiction writer called the big sleep. That is all I can tell you. Thanks for listening.  

********

[The following addendum to the Dorothy Malone interview was not included in the piece published back in 1979 for the simple fact that I could not verify most of it before the upcoming publication date. In those days unlike what is increasingly happening in the publishing business today maybe reflecting the influence of social media you checked your sources, or your assertions didn’t see the light of day, usually. Ms. Malone’s statement that after the Marlowe-Sternwood divorce she herself got married to Marlowe could not be checked, I could not find any paper trail except the Las Vegas marriage license she showed me. The most I could find in the L.A. County Courthouse was the complete proceedings in the widely covered divorce of the two prominent citizens. The settlement Vivian Sternwood laid on Marlowe to get out from under what she, or rather her fleet of lawyers, called mental cruelty and a whiff of adultery when that meant something in such proceedings. (That adultery would presumably include Marlowe’s affair with Ms. Malone but the case never got to that point for whatever legal reasons Vivian and Phil’s lawyers came up with.) Beyond that I couldn’t find much.             

More to the point Ms. Malone’s revelation that all through the case she was “curling Marlowe’s toes,” her expression learned through him which she used any time she made a reference to her sexual activities. That part turned out later to be more provable and I was, still am, amazed that she was able to carry the affair out while Marlowe was worming his way into Vivian and the Sternwood fortune. But enough of my naivete then out in Hollywood land where morality in certain precincts was very different from that of the Acre in North Adamsville. Let Dotty say her piece, finally. Seth Garth]

Seth now that I have told you the story of the Sternwood case, the case that made Marlowe, got him cushy jobs with no heavy lifting among the Sternwood crowd, let me tell you something that might make your career, might at least get you a by-line. Didn’t you wonder, didn’t you think in your head how I knew so many of the details of the case that only could have come from Phillip, like how he felt after Eddie Mars’ hit man wasted some poor grifter trying to help out Agnes get some dough to split town when all her other protection fell down (Geiger and Joe Brody) just because he was not fast enough with the answers-and the hit man didn’t want any witnesses to implicate Mars. This may come as a shock, although I hope it doesn’t but I was “curling Marlowe’s toes” not only after he married Vivian but while the whole case was proceeding to its conclusion.

Whatever had started that rainy day in the bookstore when my hormones were jumping and Marlowe came in the door like some avenging angel, like a guy who was looking for some answers in trying to bring a little rough justice to whoever needed it didn’t stop that afternoon although it very well might have. After we mussed up my desk, I figured the whole thing was a one night, a one afternoon stand, not uncommon in looser Hollywood certainly looser than Maryland or Bryn Mawr. But after the Geiger killing, murder as turned out. he went back to the Geiger’s bookstore looking for anything that could implicate Carmen Sternwood and not finding anything he came over to my store wondering whether I had seen anything going on across the way. Since I had customers and the boss was coming into the store shortly I didn’t play my come hither routine with him but he knew by my looking at him that was what I was thinking. He said we should meet later to “compare notes.” And that started things which never really finished after that until a few years before he passed away when I met somebody who would become my second husband and who would father that daughter I was always giving my advice about men to. That night was the first night by the way that Phil used his, our intimate expression- “a guy makes passes at a gal who wears glasses who hauls his ashes.”  An old-time expression “ashes” but it would get me going more than once when he said it especially since I was sensitive about having to wear glasses all the time.

What will surprise you even more is that shortly after Marlowe and Vivian divorced he and I got married in Las Vegas. [She showed me the copy of the marriage certificate-Seth Garth 2018] While I think that Marlowe would agree with me that we had a torrid affair it was kind of off and on depending on what was happening with him, with him and Vivian in the end. I was not happy from day one in the bookstore that he would be with other women, worse that he would wind up with Vivian which I could see from a mile away but that was the way it was with me-he was my man even when I had an occasional affair like with Ray Chandler and later with Jerry Lord, the producer, when I decided that my virtue was not more important than getting a screenwriting job. Mostly though after we were married we settled down, settled down to enjoy each other for whatever time we had.

So maybe in an odd way I should be thanking old long gone General Sternwood resting in his place of sleep for bringing Phillip Marlowe to my door. I hope you will let the world know that was the way things were between us. [This last remark after I had asked her if she had anything in the way of documentation, witnesses beyond the marriage certificate that I could hat my hand on. Seth Garth 2018]        

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

The Unholy Four (released in England as A Stanger Came Home), starring Paulette Goddard , Hammer Productions, 1954

In my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if fated Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and an English supporting cast with a thin storyline.     

I had done a bunch of these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my five review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various contracts for work over the years but not that one. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not fame any blow-back.

Here is the “skinny” on the film under review The Unholy Four (released in England and on the continent as A Stranger Came Home which as usual in this series is closer to the nub since in fact a stranger does come home to face all kinds of hell) in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four guys, four rich guys not of the nobility in England anyway, took a trip not shown trip to Portugal and only three came back. One guy vanished for four years and as the film opens up he shows up unannounced one party night. The guy, a guy named Phil, had this dishy wife, Angie, played by fading American screen star Paulette Goddard the first female fading star in the series which as mentioned before jacks up the film more than if there were only English nobodies playing the roles, who the other three guys on that fateful trip were in varying degrees interested in. Our man Phil, kind of a chain-smoking cuckoo, was waylaid by one of the three guys and he is well enough now to go the distance to find out who fucked him up enough that he lost his memory and is now seeking revenge-or at least answers to what happened to him and to his wife.

Problem, big problem, or really two problems one of the three guys winds up very dead the night Phil comes back home and guess what he is built to specifications to be the fall guy, to take the big-step off since everybody in their set knew that dead guy was crazy for Angie. Still the peelers don’t have enough evidence to throw him in the slammer and throw away the key. That second problem is that Phil is not altogether sure that good-looking if faded whorish Angie wasn’t playing footsie with one or more of the guys while Phil was lost in the rain out in Lisbon waiting with Victor Lazlo for some airfare to the States. She has a hell of a time trying to persuade Phil and the coppers for a bit that she did rub the dead man out. With only two guys left though Phil honed in on the killer and his lamester reasons for bopping Phil and killing the other dude. Phil lays the dude down and he and Angie head off into the sunset or something like that. For a while the film took turns like a real thriller but the dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Paulette too) make this thing a holy goof. Despite the come hither title and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one fades away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way.