***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night- The Tune Weavers’ “Happy, Happy Birthday Baby”

A YouTube film clip of the Tune Weavers performing their classic last dance school dance number, Happy, Happy Birthday Baby.

THE TUNE WEAVERS
"Happy, Happy Birthday Baby" Happy, happy birthday, baby
Although you're with somebody new
Thought I'd drop a line to say
That I wish this happy day
Would find me beside you

Happy, happy birthday, baby
No I can't call you my baby
Seems like years ago we met
On a day I can't forget
'Cause that's when we fell in love

Do you remember the names we had for each other
I was your pretty, you were my baby
How could we say goodbye

Hope I didn't spoil your birthday
I'm not acting like a lady
So I'll close this note to you
With good luck and wishes too
Happy, happy birthday, baby
**********
Damn he never should have sent that note, that short, silly, puffed-up cry baby note trying to worm his way back into Lucy’s arms with memory thoughts about this kiss, or that embrace. And bringing up old seawall sugar shack beach nights holding hands against the splashed tides, against full moons, against tomorrow coming too soon; double date drive-in movies, speakers on low, deep-breathing car fog-ups on cold October nights, embarrassed, way embarrassed, when they surfaced for intermission's stale popcorn or reheated hot dogs; and, that last dance school dance holding tight, tight as hell, to each other as the DJ, pretending to be radio jockey Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg, played Could This Be Magic? on that creaky record player used at North Adamsville high school dances since his mother’s time, ancient Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday times.

Damn, a scratchy, scribbly note, a note written on serious stationary and with a real fountain pen to show his sincerity, and not the usual half- lined sheet, pulled out a three-ring subject notebook, and passed to Lucy during their common study class. Notes the passing of which sometimes got them severe looks from the study monitor, Miss Green, and giggles and taunts, usually some lewd or luscious remarks fraught with sexual innuendo from their fellow students, boys and girls alike, about fogged-up cars and trash talk like that who also tried to intercept those precious notes without success. Ya, “the note heard round the world” that would expose him to all kinds of ridicule, endless be-bop jive patter, and snide questions about his manhood from guys, and probably girls too, around the school, hell, all around North Adamsville and maybe already had if Lucy decided to cut his heart out and tell one and all what a square he, Luke Jackson, was when all was said and done.

He could hear it now, and could hear the words ringing in his ears. What a soft guy Luke Jackson really was, a guy known to be a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy before Lucy. A guy, a used to be sharp guy who shrugged off more things that you could shake a stick at and came back swinging but who was getting all misty-eyed and cry baby just because some dame, a good looking dame in all the right places, yes, a dame all the guys were ready to pursue once he was out of the picture, but still a dame, a young high school dame, when all was said and done, got under his skin, like they were married or something. Hell, he thought, thought now too late, to himself, that he would have been better off, much better off, leaving it at calling Lucy on the telephone every few hours and either hanging up before she answered or when she did answer freezing up. But that was costing money, serious add up money, since he had to use a public pay telephone up the street from his house because the telephone service had been turned off for non-payment as his family could not afford to pay the bill the past few months.

Besides it was getting kind of creepy going in and out of the house at all hours, midnight by the telephone waiting like some lonely, awkward girl, walking up the street like a zombie, half mope, half dope, then hesitating before deciding to make the call, making it, or not, and then scurrying like a rat from the public glare of the booth. Christ, one time the cops looked at him funny, real funny, when he was calling at about midnight. And he had to admit that he might have called the police station a few times too after he looked at himself in the mirror upon returning home.

That note, sent the day before and probably in Lucy’s plotting hands right now, was a minute, a quick minute, brain-storm that he had thought up when he was just plain miserable, just plain midnight telephone tired too, and anyone could make such a rash decision under love’s duress, teenage love’s duress. Right then though all he could think of was all the notes, the cutesy, lined-sheet paper school-boyish notes, that he had sent her when love was in full blossom, full blossom before Jamie Lee Johnson came on the scene, came on the scene with his big old ’59 Chevy Impala, his money in his pocket, and his line of patter and stole his “sweet pea” Lucy away from her “sugar plum” Luke. And that picture sent him back to thoughts of when he and Lucy first met, when their eyes first met.

“Let’s see,” Luke said to himself it was probably at Chrissie McNamara’s sweet sixteen birthday party that he first laid eyes on her. Hell, who was he kidding, he knew that it was exactly at 8:32PM on the night of April 25, 1962 that he first laid eyes on her, big almost star-struck staring eyes. Or maybe it was a few seconds before because, to break the ice, he had gone up to her and asked her for the time, asked in his then bolder manner if she had time for him, asked her to dance, she said yes, and that was that. Oh, ya, there was more to it than that but both of them knew at that moment, knew somewhere deep down in their teenage hearts, they were going to be an “item,” for a while. And they were indeed sweet pea and sugar plum, for a while. Although Luke would get mad sometimes, fighting mad, fighting break-up mad, when Lucy teased, no, more than teased, him about his not having a car so that they could go “parking” by themselves and not always be on some clowny double-date down at the seashore on Saturday night (or any night in the summer). And Luke would reply that he was saving money for college, and besides sitting on the seawall (and sometimes in love’s heat down beneath its height), their usual habit, was okay, wasn’t it.

That simmer, that somehow inarticulated simmer, went on for a while, a long while. But Luke had noticed a few months back, or rather Lucy had made her sugar plum notice, that now that they were high school seniors sitting on the seawall was nothing but nowhere kids’ stuff and why did he want to go to college anyway, and wasn’t going to work down at the shipyard where he could earn some real dough and get a car a better idea. The real clincher though, the one that telegraphed to him that the heavens were frowning on him, was the night she, no bones, stated that she had no plans for college and was going right to work after graduation, and maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be able to wait for him. And that’s where things started to really break down between them.

Enter one Jamie Lee Johnson, a friend of Lucy’s older brother Kenny, already graduated from North Adamsville two years before and working, working steady with advancement possibilities according to the talk, as a junior welder down at the shipyard making good dough. Making drive-in movies and even drive-n restaurant good time dough, and driving that souped-up, retro-fitted, dual-carbed, ’59 Chevy, jet black and hung to the gills with chrome to make a girl breathless. And before Luke knew it Lucy’s mother was answering the phone calls for Lucy from Luke saying that she wasn’t in, wasn’t expected in, and that she, Lucy’s mother, would tell Lucy that he had called. The runaround, the classic runaround since boy meets girl time began, except not always done over the telephone. And while Lucy never said word one about breaking it off between them, not even a “so long we had fun,” Luke, although not smart enough to not write that sappy note, knew she was gone, and gone for good. But see she had gotten under his skin, way under, and well, and that was that.

Just as Luke was thinking about that last thought, that heart-tearing thought, he decided, wait a minute, maybe she didn’t get the note, maybe he had forgotten to put a stamp on it and as a result of those maybes he fished around his pocket to see if he had some coins, some telephone coins, and started out of the house prison to make that late night pilgrimage creep, that midnight waiting by the telephone creep. Walking up the street, walking up the now familiar night street-lighted against the deathless shadows Hancock Street he noticed a jet black ’59 Impala coming his way, coming his way with Jamie Lee and Lucy sitting so close together that they could not be pried apart with a crowbar. Luke thought about that scene for a minute, steeled himself with new-found resolve against the love hurts like in the old love 'em and leave ‘em days, threw the coins on the ground without anger but rather with relief, turned back to his house wondering, seriously wondering like the fate of the world depended on it, what pet names they had for each other.

Old Willie Boy’s Gone Now- A Black Cat Story

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The rhythm of the life cycle takes strange twists and turns sometimes. Back in the mid-1970s I did a fair amount of freelance research for my old friend from back in high school days in the 1960s, Peter Paul Markin. I gathered true life stories, or some kind of stories anyway, that he would sent on to his writer friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin whom he had met in the later part of the 1960s out in California during the heyday of the summer of love/hippie/communal experiments that flamed out in the early 1970s.

Josh Breslin, whom I would subsequently meet and become friends with, would use these stories, dolled up a bit, for his by-line in the East Bay Eye out in Northern California where he lived at the time.Josh’s idea was to grab stories from people who had been touched by the turmoil of the 1960s, had experienced whatever had been experienced, drugs, communes, music, politics, alternative life styles, stuff along that line and who had not made it back to “real” society after that wave ebbed about 1970. Not psychos and screwballs but people who were left adrift after the ebb, maybe had a drug habit, had been in jail, were some kind of outlaws. He would later do a series based on the same premise around guys who had been to Vietnam and who had not adjusted when coming back to the “real world” and found themselves living as best they could down in the ravines and under the bridges around Los Angeles.

The reason that Markin asked me to help Josh out back then was that he had moved to some Podunk place in Maine to get away from the cities for a minute (he rushed back pretty soon but don’t tell him I told you), not exactly the center of the counter-cultural movement, and did not have access to the kind of stories Josh was looking for. Whereas I had moved to Boston, a center of that movement and a place where there were plenty of people who had been burned out by the 1960s flame. One of the guys that I ran into in Boston back then was Adam Jamison whose story is the subject of this sketch. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Nashua, New Hampshire, had gone to school a while (Lowell Tech, now merged into U/Mass-Lowell), had dropped out, and listed as 4-F for draft board purposes (chronic knee problem caused by a serious fall when he was twelve) gone to Boston in 1966 and immersed himself into the budding communal scene there.

As the 1960s turned to the 1970s Adam had developed first a large alcohol problem and then a large cocaine problem. Such problems, or the satisfaction of such needs, led him to small-time larcenies, robberies, and also rip-offs of each and every friend he had ever met by the time I ran into him at the Boston Common one afternoon in early 1976 when he had hustled me for some spare change. From his demeanor, despite his unkempt look, I sensed a story and so I offered him a couple of bucks if he would tell me his story and he agreed. Some of it sounded right but some of it sounded like it was just trade-puffing by some half-bent junkie. I also spent a few weeks talking to him each time I was at the Commons until one day when we were supposed meet to finish up he never showed and I never saw him again.

That story, in any case, is not what concerns me here since I believe that Josh used it in one of his columns, although he does not remember whether he did or not. What does concern me here is that via Facebook this Adam Jamison whom I had not heard from for maybe thirty plus years wanted to tell me a story.

Not a rags-to-riches story because that was not the case, that had not been his fate. Not a victim story all dressed up and ready for pity because he had grown up poor, without much in the way of the world’s goods, with heavy wanting habits, and without any rudder to guide him. Adam had knocked down that idea a while back he said. Not a survival story as such although he did survive, had had his share of life’s up and downs like the rest of us, a couple of failed marriages and one that lasted, will last to eternity he said, had a couple of kids whom he was able to keep on the straight and narrow, had gone back to school and got catch up early on in the high tech computer wave, got himself and his a nice little house in the leafy suburbs and had recently retired with a reasonable pension and an okay 401k account. Oh, and lived some days on the edge, the edge of a cocaine meltdown. All except the last not worthy of any ink, not worthy of the ink spilled back forty years ago when his generation’s ebb was newsworthy. What had him agitated was about how cats, particularly black cats, had saved his bacon after I had lost contact with him. Here is the way he told it to me, a little dolled up, when we met at a restaurant, Not Your Average Joe’s, up in Newburyport one sunny afternoon a few weeks back:

He, Adam Jamison, had long been disheveled in appearance by the time he decided to dry out that time, that time in late 1976, although it could have been late 1970, ‘72, or ’74, in all cases long after the summer of love wave to give it a name that he had used to describe the experience of the 1960s to anybody who would listen [including me] that had hovered over the land and which he had been caught up in ran its course. There he was in raggedy second -hand faded chino pants, a too large short-sleeved checkered shirt also faded and floppy shoes, brown, all picked up off the rack at the Salvation Army Store over in Cambridge, and needing a shave and a haircut badly. The drying out this time, by the way unlike say 1970 when it was from booze, was from a bout with cousin, you know, sweet, sweet cocaine. As he sat in a chair in the waiting room, waiting to be processed into the shelter, which shall remain nameless since he has been long past needing those kind of services, where he would be staying to recuperate, to get well, that time, he looked out the open filmy window of the back alley when he spied a black cat, a black cat that looked to be like himself homeless and in need of some help.

Adam had chuckled to himself that here was another waif in the world trying to make do with what had been dealt. Scrounging for whatever it could to survive another day in the mean urban streets. He was partial to waifs ever since he walked away from his home, his home town and his home town interests in order to search for what he described as the search for… The “search for” aided and abetted by the 1960s summer of love frame that had hovered over the land and that he had wanted in on. So out of some sense of romance, or hubris, he always considered himself a waif, a loner in this wicked old world. He would seek out such types as well for female companionship, seeing kindred. And more often than not he would find one to share his time.

[He went on endlessly about all the ”chicks,” lost soul chicks he called them that he had run through in good days and bad and how many he had ripped off, ripped off to feed his various habits of the day and show not an ounce of remorse. I could see where he had a certain rough charm that would appeal to lonely women, for a while, although the waif part seemed just some romantic self-aggrandizement.]

But all of that was past, had all turned to dust since Adam from old sturdy New England stock up in the river towns of New Hampshire had inherited some bad genes that had caused him to spit up everything that mattered to him once he got his wanting habits on, wanting something for nothing habits. So he ran through women, through friends, through 1970 booze, through 1972 booze, through 1974 cocaine and then 1976 cousin again. And so that waif thing, that free spirit spitting on what he called bourgeois society wore pretty thin by the time he sat in that barren waiting room looking out of that murky window at that fellow waif black cat.

That cat, black cat suggesting witches’ delights and evil, that damned black cat, triggered thoughts in Adam just then of cats he had raised as a kid. He had to laugh about the first cat back in the mid-1950s he was not sure of the date, but not black he was sure, not by a long shot but white and gray, a cat they had named Smokey as a result of that coloring combination, who had terrified he and his two brothers the first night after being brought home from the animal shelter. Smokey had been carried in a small box, maybe a shoe box, over to their grandmother’s house where they had been staying over Christmas vacation and that night letting him out of the box he had jumped around, jumped around like kittens will do. They, at wit’s end, tried to get him back in the box but to no avail. What did they know of cat behavior though and in their fright they, taking turns, had guarded against Smokey getting on the bed and doing who knows what to them. By dawn’s early light they realized that Smokey was just a gentle playful kitten.

And so it started, the cat thing started. Later after his family had moved across town with Smokey they had adopted a pregnant stray cat, black, who begat her litter in their basement and for many seasons until he reached manhood and left home (or was thrown out depending on whose version of the story you wanted to believe) to seek the great American night various generations of cats were hither and yon around the house, the most memorable one, the one he was attached to was a frail black cat named Sorrowful who died young after producing several litters of kittens. Those thoughts, those reflections back to sunnier days though were suddenly cut short by a rush feeling that he needed a line or two of cousin to get well, needed it kind of bad. That feeling passed, a little, since there was nothing he could do about it just then, penniless and sitting in a detox center.

[When I asked him why the family did not get the cats neutered to spare the endless turmoil of litter after litter of cats Adam said they were poor, poor as church mice, and so things like neutering or going to the vet were out. He also remembered that his mother had argued in a Christian Science kind of way that one should let pets follow nature’s course set for them unaided by whatever science had come up with by that point.]

Once he was given a bed, a bed in a room that was on the same side of the building as that first day waiting room he would look out his equally filmy open window, looking for something, looking for that waif black cat as it turned out. One day he spied her, knowing that her was the right gender since she was showing her pregnant condition, something he knew from kid times around his home. He saved some milk from lunch for several days hoping that he would see her again. One day she showed up just underneath that open bedroom window, open since the room was too stuffy closed with the excessive heat from the overhead pipes that ran through the room, and he placed his opened carton of milk before her. She lapped it up quickly and left that way as well. Next day she showed again, same thing. This went on for a few more days until one day she jumped up onto the window sill meowing like crazy. She wanted to be petted. And so Adam Jamison entered the world of cats again.

She would come back daily sometimes for a while and sometimes if the window was open would jump the window sill and lay down on a cushion Adam had found. Given her condition he named her Mums and when she had her litter he took charge of getting them to the Animal Rescue League Center to hopefully be adopted. Later after the appropriate wait he had her neutered. A few months later after Adam checked out of the shelter Mums went with him to the half-way house that was to be the start of his new life.

Mums would stay with Adam through thick and thin the next nineteen years. Through another bout with cousin cocaine a couple of years later and through his last drying out. One day having snorted one too many lines, sitting on a rooming house bed wondering where he would get the dough for another eight- ball since he once again had run through and ripped off whatever new series of friends he have developed since that shelter time in 1976, Mums had sat across from him on the bed. As he looked in her direction she gave him a look that he took for pure contempt like she was ready to forsake him too. He stopped that day cold, although it was a close thing, would always be a close thing.

She stayed with him through his finding a real fellow waif woman who would not take his nonsense and who loved Mums as well. Stayed with him through some bad mental depression times, through changes in housing, through no money times, through having dough times so he could get her veterinary help as she aged (no mother Christian Scientist he), through ups and down until she passed away of old age and weariness. She rests in her last home, Adam’s current home up in Amesbury, out in the back yard where he still looks out the window at her grave.

The passing of Mums left a hole in Adam’s heart. He could not shake the feeling that Mums had been his lucky charm and without her he again had the itch for some cousin, for reaching for that high white note again. That despite that waif love and two kids to feed and support as well as that eternal mortgage around his neck in order to stay in the leafy suburbs. The feeling passed maybe out of some remembrance of Mums’ scorn, although it was a close thing. Instead he went to an animal shelter to find another, well what do you think, black cat, a cat that he, they, would name Willie Boy.

For the next fifteen years Willie Boy got him through some hard times, another bout of no dough times, some waif woman problems hard times, some thinking about mortality times, and some good times too. This Willie Boy would keep the household laughing with his constant desire for attention, with his patented whining, with his being everywhere there was something to get in trouble over. Mainly though it was that he was Adam’s shadow when he was in the house, a boon companion once the kids left. Willie Boy had died recently of medical complications which helped explain Adam’s desire to tell his story. Willie Boy too is buried out in that back yard. “Yes, old Willie Boy is gone now” Adam said with a lump in his throat as we finished up our talk. He too had been a lucky charm.

***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Cab Calloway's Cover Of Saint James Infirmary

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin

That High White Note-Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Every guy, maybe every gal too, who has ever picked up some raw-boned trumpet, some hammered sax, or some runaway trombone, some brass thing, dreams in his deepest dreams, the ones that count, about blowing that high white note. The one that says that guy is one with the instrument. That note that blows out some café door works its way down the barren black back streets and curls on out into some ocean slashed by the waves. Duke had it, Charley and Miles had it, Lionel on a good night had it, the Count off and on, it was (is) a touchy thing to talk about except when you heard it rip out in the night you knew, knew what being just south of heaven must have been like when this earth first sounded out.

Some guys, some guys like hard-nosed private eye Philip Marlowe, a guy who covered the sun-ridden streets of Los Angeles back in the day, back when the town was livable for the natives, before the war, World War II if you are asking, came and blew the high notes, hell, the low notes to perdition maybe picked up the blow, took some brass in hand, as a kid but could never quite get the hang of it, could never dream about that high white note. Could only know that it was out there for Duke or Charley to snap up. And so Marlowe wound up picking up brass of a different sort, empty slug shells from a wayward gun out in the sullen steamy Los Angeles night after some maddened episode that he had no control over either. Still Philip Marlowe, tone deaf to the music grift, always loved to listen to The Bill Baxter Be-Bop Hourfeaturing artists live, guys who would come in on an off-night or after a gig out of WJDA in the high desert night around Riverside midnight until dawn. Loved to listen to see if some guy just for a minute could hit that damn high white note.

John“King” Leonard hit that high white note, hit it a number of times like maybe he owned it or something. Marlowe heard the King, nobody ever called him anything bit the King all the way back to his high school days in Chi town, one night and knew exactly what it meant then when heaven beckoned. Marlowe also heard from theBaxter show that the King was to be playing at Jack Reed’s Club Lola over near the Santa Monica Pier for the next several weeks and knew he would make time to catch the King live and in person. Strangely Marlowe got to meet the King in person well before that club date opening although it had nothing to do with high white notes, heaven, or even curling sounds beating off the ocean’s edge, but rather too much noise, too much racket.

Times, like for everybody else, were hard in the 1937 private eye market and so Marlowe the never work nine- to- five- for- another- guy king had to lower his standards and work the graveyard shift as the house peeper for John Reed’s low rent hotel (a no tell hotel), the Taft (which hadn’t been fixed up since about that fat man’s presidential administration). Since everybody was trying to save dough in 1937 Reed had the King stay in his hotel rather than some five-star digs like he expected providing him with plenty of female company. That kind of trade-off appealed to the King because if he craved anything besides seeking that high white note it was diving under those silky sheets with women, lots of women.

The King with his angel- blown horn as a lure had no want for female companionship, lots of it, and no want either of one- night stands and then off to some other twist in some other town. You know the routine. Love them and leave them that has been going on since Adam and Eve time. In any case one night, or rather one morning about three o’clock, some of the hotel guests were squawking that the King and his entourage were raising holy hell, loud holy hell, booze holy hell, reefer madness holy hell, and please somebody stop the madman. And newly-minted graveyard shift house peeper Marlowe was the stopper no questions asked and no quarter given. When the King pulled rank he unceremoniously booted him out the door.

Of course a big ego guy like the King squawked to Jake Reed and Marlowe in turn was out on his ear. But that was not the end of Marlowe’s relationship with one King Leonard. See the King had an opening act, a honey his for the asking or so he thought opening act, a torch singer, good too, named Delia Day, who it turned out would not give him the time of day. Nada, nothing. But the King was a hard guy to say no to or to take no for an answer and so he headed to Delia’s digs one night to wait for her to come home after a gig over at the hot spot Café Florian where she was working smoothing out her act for the Club Lola front gig.

When Delia got home and went into her bedroom to change there was the King laid out in his splendor on her bed. Laid out and very dead with a couple of slugs through the heart, if he had a heart. Through the heart with her gun that she kept in her night stand for protection, agun given to her by Jack Reed when she asked for one. And the King was positioned in such a way that it looked, well, looked like some lovers’ quarrel, a domestic dispute. Naturally nobody believed that Delia just walked in and found the King in his very dead condition, not after the King had bragged to one and all that “he had had some of that” and so they threw her in the jailhouse to sweat out a confession from her. The L. A. cops figuring they had an easy score gave her the third degree but she would not tumble and so they kept her in the slammer as a “material witness.”

Marlowe who had also followed Delia’s career, once he found out the King was dead and Delia was set to take the big step-of for the crime, sensed that things did not add up, that somebody or somebodies had the frame fit right around her. So windmill-chasing Marlowe came to the rescue. It didn’t take long for him to figure the whole scheme out though since it had to be the work of amateurs once he gave the bedroom a once over and talked to a couple of the King’s female companions, amateurs with some special grievance up their sleeves. And they did in the persons of two guys who worked at Jack Reed’s hotel. The King liked his women, no question, liked to love them and leave them after he had used them up. The two guys at the hotel happened to be the brothers of one of the King’s used ups, a young woman from the sticks, Joan Brown, who they said took what the King said as pure gold and when he dumped her committed suicide.

These brothers, whose bedroom set-up antics only the cops could miss were something out of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, got everything wrong. They assumed that Delia was the one who took the King away from their sister when she in fact hated the King. So they set the frame for her by killing the King in her bedroom. They moreover assumed that the King had abandoned their sister on her word when it was she who walked out on King and was looking to fix him for her own reasons having to with a couple of off-hand beating she had taken from him when he was doped up . Her suicide was related to the fact that she was pregnant be another man later who actually had abandoned her. The only thing they got right was their getaway. Marlowe was able to follow them as far as Portland and then lost their trail out in the woods beyond that town. They were never found. The King though, the King lived on in his records played over that radio on WJDA . Every once in a while they would play the King on his signature song, Banana Blues, and Marlowe would ponder over the fact that even a rat like the King should be allowed to go to heaven to blow that high white note one more time.

***Out In The Classic Screw-Ball Comedy Night-Barbara Stanwyck’s-The Lady Eve

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, directed by Preston Sturges, 1941

Okay, moment of truth, moment of classic screwball truth anyway, women have been laying traps to ensnare men since, well, since Eve, and maybe before. And that premise drives this film entitled, ah, as if to put paid to that point, The Lady Eve, directed by the king of classic Hollywood screwball comedy (Sullivan’s Travels, among others). Of course if one went with the original story, that old Adam and Eve ensnarement story we would have a very short film, very short indeed and so Brother Sturges has flesh the piece out a bit.

He does that stretching by having Barbara Stanwyck (last heard from in this space leading Fred MacMurray down another garden path as a femme fatale in the film adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity) put on her sophisticated comedic best as a professional card-shark, a roper for her shark father, travelling the Atlantic sea-lanes in search of, well, in search of the big chance haul. And to show that those wearisome trans-Atlantic rides on some old tub were well worth the effort she took dead aim at the scattered-brained scion of a brewing fortune, a role played by Henry Fonda who was heading home from a year down in the Amazon looking, well, let’s keep with the metaphor, snakes. Yeah, easy picking for a world- weary traveler like our Barbara.

Here is the hitch though while trying to fleece Henry she, well, she falls in love with the goof and so all bets are off, literally. The problem is that other protective forces put Henry wise to her gang of ship-board hustlers and so all marriage bets are off. But one should be very, very careful with a woman scorned because all hell is likely to break loose. And it does as Barbara seeks to ensnare Henry one more time this time by doing an impersonation as the well-born Lady Eve (Sidley if you are asking) in his hometown. Needless to say our goof falls, falls hard, and marries our Lady Eve. Only to find out on their honeymoon once Barbara told him that she was basically a tramp in furtherance of her revenge. So the goof leaves her again. Seeing that revenge wasn’t so sweet after all Barbara has something else up her sleeve. Watch the film to find out what that stratagem is. In the meantime remember this-women have been trying lay traps to ensnare men ever since Adam and Eve, maybe before. Got it.

***The Road To…., The Corner Boys Of The 1930s-Tom Hanks’ “Road to Perdition”- A Film Review

DVD Review

The Road To Perdition, starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Dreamworks, 2002

I have spent a lot of time in this space writing about my corner boy experiences growing up in my old Irish and Italian working class neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I have also spent some time talking about the corner boys who just immediately preceded us in the early 1950s. Pretty tame really although if you were on the receiving end of a vicious beating, got your money stolen in some back alley, or had your personal household possessions ransacked or stolen by some midnight shifter your perspective might not be so romantic. The “corner boys,” Irish and Italian mainly, of 1930s Great Depression Chicago though, as portrayed in the film under review, The Road to Perdition, make all that other stuff seem “punk” by comparison.

Of course the motives to join a gang of lumpenproletarians in all cases were the same then, and today. That is “where the money was” to paraphrase the old-time famous bank robber, Willy Sutton. No question all those guys in the 1930s and later were (and are) from hunger. But also looking for the quick dollar and the “no heavy lifting” life not associated with steady working class factory every day values. Equally true is the fact that there are always more “hungry” guys than the market can bear which leads to two things-external “turf wars” between gangs and internal turf wars over who controls what within gangs. And that is the heart of this story.

The problem for Tom Hanks, a trusted, very trusted, enforcer (read: “hit man”) for Irish mob boss Paul Newman (he of many such corner boy roles going back to Cool Hand Luke and before) is that Newman's psychotic son wants his share of the goodies as befits a son and heir apparent. Needless to say that things get dicey, very dicey as they maneuver to the top, including the gangland-style execution of Hanks’ family that was suppose to include a son, the narrator of the film, who is forced to help Hanks’ seek the inevitable revenge required by the situation. In the end though Tom Waits is right in the opening line from Jersey Girl- “Ain’t got no time for the corner boys, down in the streets making all that noise.” A nice cinematically-pleasing 1930s period piece and what turned out to be a great farewell performance by the late Paul Newman.

***When Radio Ruled The Air-Waves- "Stardust:Decca Records:Classics and Standards Collection"

A YouTube film clip of the Inkspots performing I’ll Get By.

CD Review

Stardust: The Classic Decca Hits and Standards Collection, various artists, Decca Records, MCA, 1994

I am a first generation child of the television age, although in recent years I have spent more time kicking and screaming about that fact than watching the damn thing. Nevertheless I can appreciate this little compilation of Decca hits and standard tunes from the 1940s and 1950s as a valentine to the radio days of my parents’ youth, parents who came of musical age (and every other kind of age as well) during the Great Depression of the 1930s and who fought, or waited for those out on the front lines fighting, World War II. I am just old enough though, although generation behind them, to remember the strains of songs like the harmonic –heavy Mills Brothers Paper Dolls (a favorite of my mother’s) and The Glow Worm (not a favorite of anybody as far as I know although the harmony is still first-rate) that came wafting, via the local Adamsville radio station WJDA, through our big box living room radio in the early 1950s. It seemed they, or maybe the Andrews Sisters, be-bopping (be-bopping now, not then, you do not want to know what I called it then), on Rum And Coca-Cola or tagging along with Bing Crosby on Don’t Fence Me In were permanent residents of the airs-waves in the Markin household.

I am also a child of Rock 'n' Roll but those above-mentioned tunes were the melodies that my mother and father came of age to and the stuff of their dreams during World War II and its aftermath. The rough and tumble of my parents raising a bunch of kids might have taken the edge off it but the dreams remained. In the end it is this musical backdrop, behind the generation musical fights that roils the Markin household in teen times, that makes this compilation most memorable to me. Just to say names like Dick Haymes (I think my mother had a “crush” on him at some point), Vaughn Monroe, The Inkspots (who, truth, I liked even then, even in my “high, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly days, especially on If I Didn’t Care and I’ll Get By-wow), and Lois Armstrong. Or songs like Blueberry Hill, You’ll Never Know, A- Tisket- A Tasket, You Always Hurt The One You Love and so gather in a goodly portion of the mid-20th century American Songbook. Other talents like Billie Holiday, The Weavers, and Rosemary Clooney and tunes like Lover Man (and a thousand and one Cole Porter Billie-sung songs), Fever, and As Time Goes By (from Dooley Wilson in Casablanca) came later through very different frames of reference. But the seed, no question, no question now, was planted then.

Let’s be clear as well going back to that first paragraph mention of television - there something very different between the medium of the radio and the medium of the television. The radio allowed for an expansion of the imagination (and of fantasy) that the increasingly harsh realities of what was being portrayed on television did not allow one to get away with. The heart of World War II, and in its immediate aftermath, was time when one needed to be able to dream a little. The realities of the world at that time seemingly only allowed for nightmares. My feeling is that this compilation will touch a lot of sentimental nerves for the World War II generation (that so-called ‘greatest generation’), including my growing-up Irish working class families on the shores of North Adamsville. Nice work.