Mickey Spillane: My typewriter is quick

I'm not a fan of Mickey Spillane's books, but I do admire Mickey Spillane the writer. He wrote what he wanted to write, he made himself a household name, he sold millions of books. He did all that while being savaged by the literary establishment. To paraphrase a quote about Laurel and Hardy, “Everybody hated him but the public.”

This 1952 article tries to put a finger on Spillane's success, but I feel it was more of a “right place at the right time” sort of thing. He was writing for the exploding paperback book market at a time when millions of men had been through the biggest and most violent war in history. The communists were threatening us, and the atom bomb was hanging over our heads. It was a time of film noir, cynicism about the future, political sound and fury, and the world and everything we'd known just a few years prior to the war was forever changed. Spillane filled a niche.

Spillane died at age 88 in 2006. The article, being sixty years old, is about a youthful Spillane, a writer in t-shirts who who was playing by his own rules. I would never have guessed the ending of this article, which has him in a sports coat and tie leading a religious service. It's a surprise ending that would have floored me had I read it in one of his books.

Copyright © 1952, 2012 Time-Life

Some examples of Spillane's bestselling paperback books.

“There Oughta Be a Law” Part 2

I'm out of town for a few days. I've selected some things to show in my absence.

First up, the comic panel, “There Oughta Be a Law!” by Shorten and Fagaly. Heritage Auctions had dozens of originals from this old newspaper feature, and I posted twenty of them on June 23. Here are another twenty. I especially like the originals that come with the pencil artwork attached. It's always fun to look at what goes underneath the finished drawings.

Scans Copyright © 2012 Heritage Auctions

Richie Rich Romney doesn't want to play “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Senator Harry Reid just called out Mitt “Richie Rich” Romney, claiming he’d heard from a source that the reason Romney won’t release his tax records is because he hasn’t paid any taxes in ten years.

Well, gosh-all-whillikers. The richer a guy is the less he has to pay. Isn’t that built into the tax code, written by “our” Congress for the purposes of wealthy friends and supporters?

Romney is upset with Reid. Part of it may be that Reid, like Romney, is a Mormon. There is a sort of code, “Thou shalt not diss a fellow Latter-day Saint” (unless that fellow Saint is of the other political persuasion. Then it’s apparently okay.)

I had a conversation with a relative on Sunday night. Like me he was raised in Utah, like me he was raised Mormon and dropped out when he got the chance. His take on Romney’s tax forms was, “I don’t think he wants to release them because it’ll show he didn’t pay his full tithing to the [LDS] Church, and they’ll find out.”

(As an explanation, an LDS bishop consults with each member each year and asks them, “Have you paid a full and complete tithe?” and the answer, if negative, could deny one a permit to go through the LDS Temple, a punishment to the devout.)

That’s one theory. I countered with, “What if he paid his full 10% tithing on all of his millions, but didn’t pay any taxes? His opponent could say he cared more about his church than his country.” That would not go over well with the Mormon-haters amongst Republican voters.

Any of those three reasons would be enough to get him to hold his tax information close to his vest. Any of the three, or even any combination of those reasons could be enough to enrage enough Americans that he could kiss his White House dreams goodbye.

The other thing that came to mind concerns Romney's potential running mate. Should they release their tax information, or in deference to Mitt keep it private? It sounds like a lose-lose to me.

If Mitt were smart about it and better advised he’d probably just release his taxes and take his lumps now, before the convention. Undecided voters would have time to make up their minds, and the people who are supporting him now would probably support him then, even if they are pissed off at him in the short term.

No matter how you look at it, Mitt needs to make a decision and show those tax returns or ‘fess up as to why he’s not making them public.

P.S. His wife, Ann, attended the equestrian events at the Olympics. Someone didn’t sit her down and say, “Ann, do you know how this horsey stuff looks to voters? It’s a real high class, upper crust sort of sport, like polo.” Luckily she seems to have dodged the bullet as far as the news media goes, but I noticed, and I’m sure a few other people noticed, also.

Mick Jagger: Still alive after 50 years of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

I’ve got to get this off my Baby Boomer, grew-up-in-the-sixties chest: I was never a big Rolling Stones fan. I bought their early records, but not hits like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud,” “19th Nervous Breakdown.” My interest was revived briefly with “Honky Tonk Women,” and I can still appreciate their hard-driving rock of that era, but big fan, no.

So why did I read Mick, The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger by Christopher Anderson? I guess it’s because when someone is still famous, still considered relevant after fifty years, especially in the here-today-gone-next-week world of rock music, I pay attention.

I’m not sure the book has any real revelations for anyone who has read anything at all about Jagger or the Rolling Stones in the past five decades. Mick has a reputation as a true rock star, taking drugs, shagging groupies. Author Anderson claims Jagger has had sex with over 4,000 women. I have three words for that: in cred ible. That seems an unreal number to those of us who’ve been lucky in our lifetime to have at least one woman agree to have sex with us. But the sexual prowess isn’t because Jagger is such a Casanova or a charmer, as much as it is that he’s famous. He’s a rock star, and in our celebrity-worshipping world women throw themselves at him. I guess if a guy has the stamina for endless sex and is willing to risk STDs (of which Jagger and the rest of the Stones have had their share) then he would be dumb not to use his stardom to get laid.

As far as Mick’s personality defects, Anderson launches into many of them. Jagger is a user of people, who finds them easy to discard when he’s finished with them. Jagger has had several relationships which seem almost traditional (he’s gotten married), but they’ve always broken up for various reasons, and one is that Jagger is a narcissist and the most important person in the world to Jagger is himself. Everyone else becomes disposable to him, and the landscape is littered with people, women especially, who’ve been treated like Kleenex and thrown in the rubbish bin. Is that a surprise to you? It wasn’t to me.

Consider this description given of Jagger when Chrissie Shrimpton threw herself at him while he was on stage at the beginning of the Stones’ career, earning her a big kiss. “Although Jagger seemed larger than life on the stage, up close he was anything but: five feet nine inches tall and 130 pounds, with a head that was disproportionately large for his slight frame. He also suffered from a serious case of acne.” With that sort of appearance a bloke would have to have something else going for him, wouldn’t he?

Over the years I’ve heard rumors that Jagger was bisexual, and if not, he has a taste for both men and women. He claims to be thrilled to be wanted, even by men, even if he never goes to bed with them. But he’s been to bed with many. In today’s world that gets a big shrug and a “so what else is new?” as more and more stars reveal themselves to be gay or gates that swing both ways.

Jagger’s former bandmate (and a man who considered the Stones to be his band), Brian Jones, is someone who at one time Jagger shared a bed with. Jones seemed to have much of the same convention-defying streak in him as Jagger, and bedded both men* and women. To women Jones was especially brutal, beating several of them, including groupies he didn’t even know. Jones was too spaced on drugs and was an absentee band member when Jagger and the Stones’ manager arranged a buyout of Jones. But Jones didn’t live long after that. In ’69 he invited the contractors working on his house to bring their girlfriends to a pool party. That night he ended up dead, drowned in his own pool. Many years later a deathbed confession by contractor Frank Thorogood claimed he had killed Jones by holding him underwater. When Jagger learned of Jones’ death he wasn’t all that unhappy. (Keith Richards was positively surly, even 40 years after Jones’ death, when he heard that Jones was murdered. He blamed Jones for bringing on his own death because he “pissed off his builders, whining son of a bitch.”)

The book is a catalog of stories like that, along with big dollops of sin, sex and debauchery. I’m surprised considering his lifestyle Jagger is still around at age 69. I’m even more surprised by Keith Richards (who also expresses his own surprise that he’s still alive). The drugs didn’t kill ‘em, the alcohol didn’t kill ‘em, nor did the cigarettes. No one shot them,** a la John Lennon, not even jealous husbands or boyfriends.

The Stones are even talking of another tour.

I guess there’s some sort of moral to the story. Only the good die young? Smoke, drink, drug it up, live to old age?  Or, maybe just have as much fun as you can get away with, because there is no moral!

*I saw the Rolling Stones up close and personal in a 1966 performance in a small venue, an amusement park north of Salt Lake. The crowd pressed itself close to the stage, but I was able to work my way up to the front, standing right under Brian Jones, who was playing rhythm guitar. I was probably grinning like an idiot, because I had elbowed, shoved and crawled to get close. Jones looked down at me and made eye contact. He then gave me a small wave with his right hand. I have told that story many times, but never thought about it until now. What did he see when he saw me standing there? Maybe I’m better off not knowing.

**Drowned at least one, though.

Atom bomb vs house and mannequins

Sixty-seven years ago today an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, the first of two bombs that ultimately ended the war with Japan. Almost eight years later a test was made of a nuclear device, slightly smaller than the Hiroshima bomb, against a couple of houses built for the purpose in the Nevada desert. It was reported in the Life article of March 30, 1953, below.

The idea for the test had two purposes: the Army wanted to prove to soldiers that the atom bomb wasn’t much more terrifying than a conventional bomb, so troops were deployed less than two miles away from the site of the test. On the other hand, the civil defense people wanted to show Americans they needed to do more to protect themselves. To that end two “$18,000 Colonial-style houses” were built, with mannequins positioned inside for some verisimilitude. Cameras recorded the houses being blown apart, and had the mannequins been living people they would have been killed (well, duh, no big surprise there).

What wasn’t said, but understood at the time, was that the bomb used in the test was much smaller than weapons being produced at the time, so it was a show and not much more. The reporters and observers went away without being much impressed. “I rather expected something more violent,” a “women dressed in a lumberjack shirt” was overheard to say.

As for what happened to the troops placed two miles away I can only imagine. I’m sure in time a higher than average number of them developed thyroid cancer, and other health issues tied to nuclear testing. Ultimately testing like this, with the fallout carried by the prevailing winds, killed a lot of people. Unlike the Hiroshima bomb, where citizens near ground zero were killed quickly, the victims of bomb testing conducted in the Nevada desert took a long and agonizing time to die.

Copyright © 1953, 2012 Time-Life

“Baby Face, you got the ugliest little baby face...”

In 1957 my dad took me to see a Mickey Rooney movie, Baby Face Nelson. I was very impressed on the ride home when Dad told me about his memories of those gangster years, following it faithfully in those Depression-era newspapers. Bank robberies, Tommy guns shooting up the town, Model A Fords outracing the cops! Wow. I thought, “What a great story.”

Once home Dad let me use his old manual typewriter and I one-finger typed out the first page of a story called “The Baby Face Nelson Story.” I was ten years old and I had a short attention span. I wrote the first page, then abandoned it, leaving in the typewriter, and relocated to the couch to watch Zorro on TV. Mom found my literary effort within minutes of me leaving it. I wasn’t smart enough to take it with me, or hide the evidence. She waved the page in my face. “You won’t be writing any stories about criminals,” she told me in her no-nonsense way. She took my deathless prose and tore it into quarters and threw it in the waste can.

I can still remember — sort of — the first line or two of my Baby Face bio: “Lester Gillis, the real name of George Baby Face Nelson waited for the FBI to come get him with his tommy gun at his side.”

Later on I asked her why she was so upset and she told me, “Because Baby Face Nelson killed my cousin, Sam Cowley.” She told me the story of how she and her mother, in 1934, driving their old car, had traveled the 115 miles from their home in Central Utah to Salt Lake City to attend a memorial for the slain FBI man, Cowley. Because of a flat tire (common in those days) they nearly missed the memorial, but found someone in time to fix the tire and make the service.

  
They aged differently in those days. Cowley died when he was 35, but looks much older.

Samuel P. Cowley had been engaged in a shootout with Nelson. Cowley and his partner were killed on the scene by Nelson. Baby Face, with seventeen bullets in him, lasted a short while. He died in a bed, but was found the next morning, naked, dumped in a ditch.

 The other day I watched the Johnny Depp movie, Public Enemies. on disk. I like the movie, although the chronology is wrong. The movie makers have Nelson getting killed before Dillinger, right after the shootout at Wisconsin’s Little Bohemia Lodge. Nelson escaped that night and outlived Dillinger. Upon Dillinger’s death Nelson was declared Public Enemy Number One.

Here’s a clip from the noirish 1957 Mickey Rooney movie, directed by Don Siegel.



I’ve never checked on my mother’s genealogy to find out what branch of the Family Tree Sam Cowley sits on. Coincidentally, both Sam Cowley and my mother currently have the same address, Wasatch Lawn Cemetery in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Who do you like?

After the recent post where I mentioned Barack Obama-haters supporting Mitt Romney not for love, but for hate of President Obama, I read a newspaper article by Kathleen Hennessey of McClatchy News Service. In my paper it was headlined, “Why isn’t president tanking in polls? Voters like the guy.”

Likable.

The article gives some statistics, showing that despite recession, a slow jobs recovery, an oil spill, the Obamacare controversy and some ugly fights with Congress, “Obama’s favorability is 54 percent, according to a recent USA Today-Gallup Poll. Respondents gave Romney a 46 percent favorability rating.”

To add to that statistic, “two-thirds of voters surveyed recently by the Wall Street Journal and NBC said they personally liked the president. Romney, the unofficial Republican nominee was personally liked by just 47 percent.

Not as likable.

“‘Basically, it looks like Romney’s personality is holding him back and Obama’s likability is helping him,’ said Jeffrey M. Jones, managing editor for the Gallup Poll. ‘It seems frivolous, but it matters.’”

Yes, it does. “Pollsters note that favorability ratings have been an accurate predictor in the last five elections, including the virtual tie of 2000. Vice President Al Gore went into the election with 56 percent of the voters having a favorable impression; George W. Bush was at 55 percent.”

“People tend to like their president.”

Romney’s recent foreign trip was not good. He wanted to portray himself as being good at foreign policy. He wanted to be liked in England, and then he opened his mouth. He wanted to be liked in Israel and it made the Palestinians angry with him. The whole excursion was a rough go, ill-advised if he meant to show his overall skill as a leader on a global level. (But then, according to an article in the Washington Post by Aaron Blake, quoting a Washington Post-ABC Poll, “One — yes, one — percent  of people said that foreign policy was the most important issue of the 2012 campaign. The problem for Romney coming off of this trip is even many of his staunchest defenders within the [Republican] party seem to have fallen back on a ‘He's not great but he doesn't need to be great’ argument.”)

I don’t know if Romney will get any better at presenting himself in the next couple of months, or make himself more likable. Can he learn how to be likable? I doubt it. My personal feeling is he’s like one of those guys we all know who try too hard to be friends and by doing so push other people away. But as stated in the McClatchy News article, Romney senior strategist Neil Newhouse “downplayed the [Obama] likability factor. ‘Likability doesn’t fix the economy. Likability isn’t helping the middle class.’

“And Newhouse pointed to the National Republican Convention in late August as a likely venue for showcasing Romney’s personal strengths. ‘People don’t really know Mitt Romney yet,’ he said. “By Election Day, I think they’re going to get a feel for who he is, what drives him.’”

Well, for Mr. Newhouse, getting to know Romney better might include letting us see his tax returns, so we can trust that he’s not lying to us or misrepresenting where his money is. It appears what drives him is money, acquiring it and keeping it. So far Mitt just isn’t doing that well with the likability or public-speaking-without-making-mistakes factors, the Richie Rich-factor, and now the foreign policy factor. If Mr. Newhouse factors those in, Barack Obama isn’t Mitt Romney’s opponent, Mitt Romney is Mitt Romney’s opponent.

Brit wit: Mitt, twit

Just before the 2012 Olympics, Mitt Romney went to England, expecting to be hailed as a hero based on his credentials running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Then Mitt did what Mitt does. He stuck his foot in his mouth. It earned him savage scorn from the British press:

“Mitt the twit” has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? Democrats might want to use that phrase, but in private. It would be considered crass, even with the snake-belly-low standards of American politics, to come out and say it in public.

Mitt also got stung by a rebuke from the mayor of London, and this derisive comment from The Telegraph:

I don’t think the British like Mitt. They don’t need much of an excuse. Having lived under a class system for their whole history, the British recognize upper class twits when they see them. But the British incident is a minor diversion during the grind of a long campaign and bitter fight, and will be soon forgotten. The American electorate has a very short collective memory.

The British criticisms are funny to me because I’m a Democrat, but realistically it doesn’t matter what the Brits think of Mitt the twit. They don’t vote for our president. Headlines in the British press won’t make a difference to the right-wing American electorate, many of whom have proved they would vote for any ideological Republican nitwit. Remember who was in and out of popularity as potential presidential candidates earlier this year: Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and against such a field of the dregs of the American right-wing Mitt came out a “winner.” So, call him what you will, insult him all you want, but Mitt’s vote is safe with the hate-Obama crowd.

Mitt brings scorn on himself, and the Olympics goof is very minor in comparison. The example of him not releasing his tax returns brings rebuke, even from pundits of his own party. Mitt is a bumbler, albeit a wealthy bumbler, and public perception is he has something to hide. But he’d rather continue to hide it than come clean and shock the public with exactly how much he is hiding. A few months ago after a series of public gaffes, his wife, Ann, made a comment that she should do the talking and not him. Then recently Mrs. Romney fumbled when defending his decision not to release any more tax information, telling us “we’ve given all you people need to know.” That “you people” just didn’t go down very well. It sounded like a 2012 version of “you people stay in your place.” A serious flub, and now even Ann Romney has to zip her lip. But will it keep Republicans from voting for him? Don’t even entertain such a thought.

I believe that Mitt Romney could get caught slaughtering kittens and feeding them to the dog on the roof of his station wagon, and be forgiven by his base. Their hatred of Barack Obama would override any revulsion against Romney. In this world at this time, love for a candidate isn’t necessary. We’re all cynical. We know candidates have sold out, or are lying with every word out of their mouths, saying what their base wants to hear. Love isn’t the reason we vote. We just vote against the other guy, and the degree of our hatred for one candidate is the benchmark for supporting an opponent. To beat Obama they’ll even vote for a twit like Mitt.