In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

By Lance Lawrence 

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[Although I am a much younger writer I today stand in agreement with Bart Webber and Si Lannon, older writers who I admire and whom I have learned a lot from about how to keep it short and sweet but in any case short on these on-line sites. As far as Phil Larkin’s, what did Si call them, yes, rantings about older writers heads rolling, about purges and the like seem like something out of Stalin’s Russia from what I have read about that regime and are dubious at best. The gripe the former two writers have about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board is what I support. As Bart first mentioned, I think, if nothing else this disclaimer has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that he, they have been “demoted.”  That I too, as Si pointed out, while I chafed as an Associate Book Critic and didn’t like it am now just another Everyman. Although this is the first time I have had the disclaimer above my article I plead once should be enough, more than enough.

In the interest of transparency I was among the leaders, among the most vociferous leaders, of what has now started to come down in the shop as urban legend “Young Turks” who fought tooth and nail both while Alan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin as blog moniker for reasons never made clear, at least to me) was in charge and essentially stoped young writer developing their talents and when we decided that Allan had to go, had to “retire” and bring in Greg Green and surrounded him with an Editorial Board. (I am sure Phil Larkin will take those innocent quotation marks around retire as definite proof that Allan was purged.) But I agree with Bart and Si’s sentiment that those on the “losing” end in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle had taken their "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. That fact should signal the end of these embarrassing and rather provocative disclaimers. Done.  Lance Lawrence] 

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Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[As noted in a review posted here (and in the on-line version of American Folk Gazette) on Woody Guthrie’s forever influence on generations of folk musicians if not other genres as well I agreed with Bart Webber in a previous article of his about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to a fourth article I have contributed in this space which has once again pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Not directly, no not directly from this crew. No matter how tough Allan Jackson was, and he was, he spoke his mind and let the devil take the hinter post. So once again I plead once would have been enough, more than enough.

That brings me back to the additional point I in my last review that those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. I noted Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Moreover what originally appeared to me to be the rantings of a cranky old man (I am an old man but usually not cranky) by Phil Larkin, who in the interest of transparency is an old growing up friend, about a purge of older writers, or maybe a putting them on the back-burner seems more rational each day. Si Lannon]    

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A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.

In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.          

After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. 

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.            

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[I agree with Bart Webber in a previous article about the appropriateness of this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board. If nothing else this disclaimer has been attached now to three articles I have contributed in this space which has pointed told one and all, interested or not, that I have been “demoted”  from Associate Book Reviewer to Everyman. Once would have been enough, more than enough.

Those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin for a blog moniker) in the fierce no-holds barred internal struggle have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. Going on and on about the internal purging process, and while for public consumption he has “retired” I know enough from youthful left-wing politics which at the organizational, turf, level could be as crazy as any bourgeois political fights without the advantage of some material to now know that is what happened to the poor bastard is a disservice. Disinterested readers who want to read the main piece without disruptions are nevertheless presented with this excess baggage under some theory that it is informative about such inner social media workings seems rather preposterous in this day in age. Si Lannon]    

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Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting west to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

Once Again On The 1960s Folk Minute-The Cambridge Club 47 Scene

By Bart Webber 

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[Personally I find this disclaimer above or whatever it purports to be by the "victorious" new regime headed by Greg Green and his so- called Editorial Board annoying. Those of us who defended Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin) here have taken our "beating" and have moved on as far as I can tell. Going on and on about the internal purging process that did Allan in to disinterested readers who want to read the main piece without disruptions  presented under some theory that it is informative about such inner social media workings is beyong me. Bart Webber]    

I am not the only one who recently has taken a nose-dive back in time to that unique moment from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s when folk music had its minute as a popular genre. People may dispute the end-point of that minute like they do about the question of when the 1960s ended as a counter-cultural phenomenon but clearly with the advent of acid-etched rock by 1967-68 the searching for and reviving the folk roots had passed. As an anecdote in support of that proposition that is the period when I stopped taking dates to the formerly ubiquitous home away from home coffeehouses, cheap poor boy college student dates to the Harvard Square coffeehouses where for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry, and maybe a couple of dollars admission charge you could hear up and coming talent working out their kinks, and took them instead to the open-air fashion statement rock concerts that were abounding around the town. Some fifty years out in fits of nostalgia and maybe to sum up life’s work there have been two recent documentaries concerning the most famous Harvard Square coffeehouse of them all, the Club 47 (which still exists under the name Club Passim in a similar small venue across from the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore Annex).

One of the documentaries, Club 47 Revisited put out a few years ago traces the general evolution of that club in its prime when the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, the members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (the forming of jug bands itself a part of the roots revival we were in thrall to), and many others sharpened up their acts there. The other documentary, No Regrets (title taken from one of his most famous songs) which I have reviewed elsewhere in this space is a biopic centered on the fifty plus years in folk music of Tom Rush. Both those visual references got me thinking about how that folk scene, or better, the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene kept me from going off the rails, although that was a close thing.        

Like about a billion kids before and after in my coming of age in the early 1960s I went through the usual bouts of teenage angst and alienation aided and abetted by growing up “from hunger” among the very lowest rung of the working poor with all the pathologies associated with survival down at the base of society where the bonds of human solidarity are often times very attenuated. All of this “wisdom” of course figured out, told about, made many mistakes to gain, came later, much later because at the time I was just feeling rotten about my life, my place in the sun, and how I didn’t have a say in what was going on. Then through one source or another mainly by the accident of tuning my life-saver transistor radio on one Sunday night to listen to a favorite rock and roll DJ I found a folk music program that sounded interesting (it turned out to be the Dick Summer show on WBZ, a DJ who is featured in the Tom Rush documentary) and I was hooked by the different songs played, some mountain music, some jug, some country blues, some protest songs. Each week Dick Summer would announce who was playing where for the week and he kept mentioning various locations, including the Club 47, in Harvard Square. I was intrigued.         

One Saturday afternoon I made connections to get to a Redline subway stop which was the quickest way for me to get to Harvard Square, and which was also the last stop on that line then, walked around the Square looking into the various clubs and coffeehouses that had been mentioned by Summer and a few more as well. You could hardly walk a block without running into one or the other. Of course during the day all people were doing was sitting around drinking coffee and reading, maybe playing chess, or as I found out later huddled in small group corners working on their music (or poetry which also had some sway as a tail end of the “beat” scene) so I didn’t that day get the full sense of what was going on. A few weeks later, having been hipped to the way things worked, meaning that as long as you had coffee or something in front of you in most places you were cool I always chronically low on funds took a date, a cheap date naturally, to the Club Blue where you did not pay admission but where Eric Von Schmidt was to play. I had heard his Joshua Gone Barbados covered by Tom Rush on Dick Summer’s show and I flipped out so I was eager to hear him. So for the price of, I think, two coffees each, a stretched-out shared brownie and two subway fares we had a good time, an excellent time (although that particular young woman and I would not go on much beyond that first date since she was looking for a guy who had more dough to spend on her, and maybe a “boss” car too.

I would go over to Harvard Square many weekend nights in those days, including sneaking out of the house a few time late at night and heading over since in those days the Redline subway ran all night. That was my home away from home not only for cheap date nights depending on the girl I was interested in but when the storms gathered at the house about my doing, or not doing, this or that, stuff like that when my mother pulled the hammer down. If I had a few dollars make by caddying for the Mayfair swells at a private club a few miles from my house I would pony up the admission, or two admissions if I was lucky,  to hear Joan Baez or her sister Mimi with her husband Richard Farina, maybe Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton when he was in town at the 47. 

If I was broke I would do my alternative, take the subway but rather than go to a club I would hang out all night at the famous Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford just up the steps from the subway stop exit. That was a crazy scene made up of winos, grifters, con men, guys and gals working off barroom drunks, crazies, and… almost every time out there would be folk-singers or poets, some known to me, others from cheap street, in little clusters, coffee mugs filled, singing or speaking low, keeping the folk tradition alive, keeping the faith that a new wind was coming across the land and they, I, wanted to catch it. Wasn’t that a time.          

When Your Rooster Crows At The Break Of Dawn-Hold On To Your Wallet-Or Shallow And Swallow Down Your Love

When Your Rooster Crows At The Break Of Dawn-Hold On To Your Wallet-Or Shallow And Swallow Down Your Love

By Ronan Saint James

That goddam rooster down the road, I am not sure how far down that road but this the fourth day running the sleepy bastard has broken the hell out of my sleep, thought Jack Dolan as he once again, for the fourth time running tried to shake off the tepid sleep of the weary. Yeah, like the song said, Dylan wasn’t it, always that gravelly-throated bugger has an apt phrase to speak to what wearied a man, probably reflecting his own weariness, yeah, his own woman trouble what else would drive a man to write prose or lyric about his malaise blame farmyard animal for his discontents -“when your rooster crows at the break of dawn look out your window and I’ll be gone.” That is what had been keeping one John Dolan weary and wary four days running and not some fucking stone cold-eyed rooster yelling his brains out for whatever he yelled his brains out for at dawn. That Jack weariness wariness too had a name. Lucinda, Lucinda Jolly, the so-called love of his life who had walked out that door four days before without not so much as a by your leave. Left him high and dry in not to be alone Naples, down in Florida, broke and broken-hearted.

He should have seen it coming should have seen that Lucinda had been distracted by something. When they had argued, screamed really, that last night before she took a powder something they generally did not do since both had come up in households where the screaming and disorder had made them very reticent to argue, to yell at each other and maybe that was the problem, maybe what called the day done, she had mentioned that he seemed to be “distant, “ seemed to have been off his “meds” his drugs that kept him on keel. He denied it as usual and maybe that was the day done deal that finally broke things in her overheated head.

Hell that was all bullshit, all crap, what it was she had found another guy, a guy he did not see coming either although he should have since lately she had been going out by herself and coming in late. Didn’t make any excuses, lame excuses anyway, about being over at some girlfriend’s house but that she needed to be alone. That was when they decided to take whatever money they had and head to Naples, not a natural place like Big Sur out in the California coast where they could wish the Japan seas would solve whatever ailed their relationship and be washed clean by the fresh air and dreams of Jack Kerouac. dreams she had been spoon-fed on growing up in the French-Canadian Acre section of Lowell, Jack’s hometown, but what they could afford and had been a place to head for in fast sunnier days. Now she was gone, left him with no dough in godforsaken Naples of all places.

Maybe Jack should have taken those rooster crows for a sign, better should have listened to the whole Dylan lyric where he talks about it not being him (her) he (she) was looking for-after having given their, her, his bet shot, best shot maybe not up to some abstract standard they could never reach and a while back had both agreed could never reach that the whole thing had been a house of cards, had been a waystation for both after divorces, his three her pair and after those deep unhappy childhoods that seemed to glue them for a while. The whole thing had been so freaking fragile from the night they met in The Garden of Eden bar in downtown Albany near Russell Sage College when he had had plenty of dough and a full to the brim credit card that got them within a couple of days out to Big Sur, out to where he believed he had been washed clean and wanted her to see life through the prism of Pfieffer State Park complete with stone ass totems once she mentioned Jack Kerouac and that Lowell Jack park set in stone too with some his words, especially about looking for some dead-beat father they never knew. Hit right home with that one.             

In his mind, in his rooster-disturbed mind as Jack started to meditate, real meditation, and not just dwell on her being gone, who the hell that other guy was that he had not seen coming but should have when they were in their down in the mud days who maybe had not been divorced a million times, maybe didn’t drink, didn’t need “meds” and even need to meditate to keep an even keel, him with no dough and Albany many miles north but some old-time Allan Ginsberg in lieu of his now depleted “meds” he unwound the whole affair. Saw for the first time that what they had had was made of more smoke and mirrors than he could have figured when she was like a breath of fresh air coming through the fields after that first date to Saratoga field the day after they first spent the night together (he still had a hard time around “sleeping together, damn, sex so spent is what anybody would get who asked when they “did it”). She had been staying with her sister, a Russell Sage graduate and former denizen of “the Garden,  over in Ballston Spa, a sleepy little town that suited her just then but she was restless, needed to see some city lights and so the Garden of Eden had been her stopping place since Guy Williams, an old favorite, was playing a few sets there and her sister assured her that no guys would hit on her. Before she got out the door that sister Kate would amend her statement given what a breath of fresh air beauty he emitted even if she thought herself not particularly pretty, at least not too hard. Guys hitting on her. And hence Jack and his credit card and shy manner around her. (Lucinda was always amazed that he was ready to shake her hand, which he did, softly that first night and leave it at that he was so shy around women even after three marriages and a bunch of affairs. She had been the one who mentioned taking a walk along the Mohawk River to “talk” although that was not the only thing on her mind that night.) 

Jack hoped that tomorrow, tomorrow the fifth day running that rooster would lay off so he could gather himself to hit the road back to Albany and pick up the pieces of his now shattered life. The meditation, a new routine, which she had introduced him to calm him down when he was wired, when he was distant too but that was probably too little, too late.   

The next morning Jack did hit the road, well, not really hit the road like he was some second coming of Jack Kerouac or his buddies Allan Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy ready to throw caution to the wind and put his thumb out but go on his computer to look on-line for some ride-sharing opportunity. After setting up a meet with a guy going to New York City he sat around for a couple of hours in the place they had rented through Air B&B and which needed to be vacated by noon and rewound the spool of their two- year relationship now in tatters wishing all the time that he thought about it that morning that she had given a better signal, better signals that he was not what she was looking for, not the one she wanted and Dylan came lyrically back into view with his phrase from some forgotten 1960s song about “leaving at your own chosen speed.”        

Funny she had actually “discussed” with him several times her feeling she had to leave, no, that is not right, feeling that they could not go the distance, that they were too similar in their quiet desperations to stick and that whether he was expecting too much from her or she had too many non-negotiable demands the thing had not been despite Kerouac, despite being washed clean at Big Sur and a few times in Naples as well built to last. She never got to the door then, they would patch things up by having sex, or doing some dope or something to keep the embers alive. But he knew deep down that she was looking at that door and that a time would come, a time would come. 

Maybe a couple of months before when he mentioned that he had after several months had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and he begged her to leave and find her path since the treatment procedure, damn, maybe his whole life said he had to face this alone had triggered something. Or maybe so gallant had seen her and taken his best shot. Who knows. Just as he was to run a new train of thought he heard the honking of the car that would take him North-north and aloneness. He put the key in the mailbox as requested, picked up his suitcase and headed out the door to the waiting automobile. 

As he entered the vehicle and said hello to his new-found friend driver and savior Jack got pensive for a while after throwing his knapsack in the backseat and adjusting his seat-belt. Started recounting, no, re-living all the steps he and she should have taken to bring them to some understanding, if possible. He was not naïve enough after three marriages, a million affairs and his stint with her to think that it would have been a done deal but maybe. How many times had she made it plain that it was him, him and his mercurial ways that would drive her from his door, their door when they decided to move in together. How many times had he had the words in his stinking overactive head that would not come out, would not come out making any sense.

And about the night when both high but still in contact with their emotions they talked the whole night away about his “problem” of not being able to say the words she wanted to hear, that maybe they would make it with a little more communication. About too how that mother constant brow-beating made it very reticent to express any emotions, about the child being future to the man. About how in the end, she must have taken a hint from her ever practical side and realized that continuing would not work out, that the percentages were too low for her own fragile existence to count on.         

As Jack started to talk to that driver he thought  well at least he wouldn’t haven’t to listen to that cocksure rooster and his king kong king of the hill crowing … 

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]

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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.  

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[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]