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TAKING A WALK ON THE FILMIC SIDE, TRANSITING THE VINTAGE ROADS.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021 'Noirvember' film series, Larry Harnisch ponders on Michael Connelly and James Ellroy

November is a month to give thanks for cigarettes and chiaroscuro lighting, for sardonic voice-overs and unhappy endings, for doomed detectives and frisky femme fatales. November is Noirvember at the Brattle Theatre and the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with both venues celebrating some of the most stylish and cynical crime pictures ever made. If you like watching hard-boiled, heartbroken guys getting played for patsies in smoky rooms with ceiling fans and Venetian blinds, these next few weeks are an embarrassment of riches, with a total of 20 terrific noirs screening between the two cinemas. Throughout the month, the Coolidge is devoting their primetime evening Big Screen Classics slots to 1950s favorites like Kiss Me Deadly and In a Lonely Place, alternating with the Coolidge After Midnites exploration of the 1990s neo-noir revival, including VHS-era staples King of New York and The Last Boy Scout. The Brattle is spending Thanksgiving week on the 75th anniversary of 11 films from 1946, an exceptionally robust year for film noir that included Gilda, The Blue Dahlia and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Orson Welles was wonderful with actors and technicians but seemed to go out of his way to antagonize the executives. And in Hollywoodjust like everywhere elsethe suits always win. The studio re-cut Touch of Evil against the director's wishes, banishing it to the bottom half of a double bill with Hedy Lamarrs The Female Animal. But the French were onto it right away, with jurors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut naming Touch of Evil the best film at the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair. Welles never made another movie in Hollywood again.
The great noirs run almost entirely on atmosphere and charisma, with the details of their plots falling pretty far down the list of whats important about these pictures. I suppose I could explain exactly what happens in Touch of Evil if I had to, but theres no way I could tell you what the heck is going on in The Big Sleep, director Howard Hawks absurdly entertaining adaptation of Raymond Chandlers first Phillip Marlowe novel. A tale of bad girls and blackmail, the Brattles Thanksgiving Day treat was famously re-worked in post-production, with a lot of story stuff scrapped and additional flirtation scenes filmed to capitalize on the white-hot chemistry between stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. On the set, Hawks and company were parsing out the mystery and became baffled as to which character could have killed the chauffeur. The director sent a telegram asking Chandler, who famously confessed that he had no idea.Noirvember runs from Nov. 2 through Nov. 30 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and from Nov. 19 through Nov. 25 at the Brattle Theatre. Source: www.wbur.org

Robert Altman reimagined Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953)in the context of 1973, capturing the comedic side of the noir private eye in the process. The film was not well received by the audience or the critics. When Altman attended a question-and-answer session afterward, the mood was "vaguely hostile", reportedly leaving the director "depressed". Time magazine's Jay Cocks wrote, "Altman's lazy, haphazard put-down is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire". Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times found the film "inventively photographed... The problem is that the Altman-Brackett Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, is an untidy, unshaven, dim-wit slob who would be refused service at a hot dog stand. He is not Chandler's Marlowe, or mine, and I can't find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can't be sure who will." The events of "The Long Goodbye" are lurid and often disturbing, but as Chandler's famous detective Philip Marlowe, Elliot Gould finds an exasperated side to the character that is hilarious. Between his playful cats and light-hearted banter with his beautiful Free-Love neighbors, Marlowe is hardly a traditional private eye. Marlowe receives a surprising visit from his old friend Terry Lennox, who enlists his help traveling to the Mexican border. Thinking nothing of it, Marlowe is later interrogated by detectives who accuse Terry of murder. Marlowe questions the validity of the accusations and decides to look into the case himself, leading to a series of misadventures involving pretentious authors and local gangsters. In 1973, Alan R. Howard wrote for The Hollywood Reporter: "The Long Goodbye is a gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become. But the scenes dont mesh into a whole, the drama never becomes as powerful...The Long Goodbye charts its own perverse course, throwing much (perhaps too much) of Chandlers novel out the window."
Dom Sinacola (Paste magazine): "Philip Marlowe is a man of another time, a barely noticed figure, a born loser as even one of his closest friends calls him. And the world into which Altman abandons him isnt one of dark alleyways or the damp, wan glow of streetlampschiaroscuro be damnedits the bright dawn of something new and something disconcertingly shiny in America. The Long Goodbye is Altmans stab at the devastation of film noir, pitting its beleaguered protagonist not against those stuffy, old, deeply ingrained mechanisms of institutionalized evil, but against a much younger brand of nihilism."
Raymond Chandler, born in the U.S. in 1888, was classically educated in secondary school at Dulwich College in Dulwich, London. He read Livy, Ovid, and Virgil in Latin, and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle in Greek. He translated texts from Latin to English, and then, after an interval, from English to Latin. He studied French and German, too, and he lived in each country to become fluent. Im an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up in Latin and Greek, he has been quoted as saying. It would seem that a classical education might be a poor basis for writing novels in a hard-boiled vernacular, he said, I happen to believe otherwise. In The Long Goodbye (1953) Chandler wrote: The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennoxs left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline Source: www.slashfilm.com
Larry Harnisch: As Philip Marlowe might ask: Why am I looking for Michael Connelly books?The Wrong Side of Goodbye, debuted in the United States on November 1, 2016, earning a bravo from Booklist and qualified praise from Kirkus. The novel is the 19th in the consistently well-wrought saga of LAPD Detective Hieronymus Harry Bosch, currently working as a private detective and volunteering with the budget-depleted San Fernando Police Departmentafter being forced into retirement at the end of The Burning Room (2014) and filing a lawsuit against the department in The Crossing (2015).In contrast, James Ellroys novel Perfidia (2014), drew no more than mixed reviews. In The New York Times, Dennis Lehane offered an extended analysis of Ellroys career and the book, which begins a proposed Second L.A. Quartet, saying that Perfidia was written in a jumpy, feverish and anarchic style, and deeming the book erratic. While Jonathan Shapiro, writing in these pages, called it not the best, just good enough. Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times declared, with some ambivalence: Perfidia is 700 pages of ultra-violent, often frenetic police procedural, macho swagger, anti-Semitic broadcasts and racist rampage. The New York Review of Books passed on the novel altogether. Time might be leaving Ellroy behind.Like Connelly, I was in love with Chandler when I was in my 20s, but between then and now, my exposure was limited to viewing the films based on his novels.
Rereading Chandler for the first time in 40 years was like having lunch with an ex-girlfriend and feeling the old chemistry.The flawless descriptions and sharp dialogue that had been etched in my mind were there, along with the extraneous characters, strange plot turns, and other problems that I had forgotten and that had been untangled or eliminated by screenwriters.My friends in law enforcement say Connelly is their favorite writer; one LAPD sergeant confided that he was sure Connelly has someone inside the department because he portrays its inner workings so precisely.I worked with Connelly at the Times, along with his fellow mystery authors Miles Corwin and Denise Hamilton, and were amiable acquaintances. I was friends with Ellroy for about five years until he drifted away, as he does with everybody. He disappointed me in endorsing Black Dahlia Avenger author Steve Hodels theory on the case, after initially repudiating it, but we remain cordial, and when I last saw him, he broke the ice by joking: Nobody mention Steve Hodel. Connelly, a former president of the Mystery Writers of America, has an admirable reputation for encouraging other writers. Miles Corwin, in the acknowledgments to his Midnight Alley (2012), calls Connelly the ultimate mensch. Still, the disparity between the two is more than a shelving issue at a bookstore. If you go to a bookstore cashier with a stack of Connelly novels, you may get a knowing nod. If you go to the same cashier with a stack of Ellroy novels you will get a wary look and they may call security.Ellroy looks in the cloudy rearview mirror at a distant and darkly imagined Los Angeles revisiting Chandlers era, and using imagined facts, with disinterest if not utter disdain for accuracy. Its no trick for someone grounded in Los Angeles history to find huge errors in Ellroys novels. He is hopelessly lost in even the basics of local government, having the Los Angeles City Council appoint an acting Los Angeles County District Attorney in White Jazz (1992). Granted, novels arent supposed to be documentaries, but that is a historians spit take.
Anyone who writes about Los Angeles does so in the shadow of Raymond Chandler. Kenneth Millar, who used the pen name Ross Macdonald, reckoned: Raymond Chandler was and remains a hard man to follow. He wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence. And this is where Connelly and Ellroy are poles apart, the north and south of the same magnet. In public appearances, Ellroy is the carnival barker at a grotesque sideshow and Connelly is the friendly, self-deprecating author who is clinical in discussing the nuts and bolts of his writing. In 1977, Connelly was an engineering student at the University of Florida when he saw Robert Altmans screen adaptation of Chandlers The Long Goodbye (1973). Connelly told The Wall Street Journal thatThe Long Goodbyewas probably the most important book Ive read because it made him want to be a writer. The opening of The Wrong Side of Goodbye intentionally echoes the beginning of The Big Sleep and Marlowes interview with old and frail General Sternwood. Connelly fits happily into the post-Chandler school of L.A. mystery writers, though, unlike Chandlers, his Bosch plots are crisp. He starts with a first line and a last line and improvises his way between the two, but theres usually a clear organization: a main story and a secondary story, with Boschs relationship with his daughter and a bit of soap opera about his personal life used as ways to shift between the two narratives. After being fired in the crucible of daily journalism, Connelly writes in the clean, spare prose of a reporter, much like Tony Hillerman, another reporter turned mystery novelist.
There seems to be minimal difference between his earlier and later novels, except that he switched from third person to first person in Lost Light and The Narrows (2004). Hes at his best in portraying the differences between the many male investigators and police officers who fill his novels. His female characters can be well drawn, but they are sometimes two dimensional with perfunctory backstories. One of the most fully dimensional female characters, though briefly seen, is Boschs daughter, Maddie. Make no mistake about it: Connelly can be as dark as Ellroy. Unlike Ellroy, however, his darkness is never unrelieved. Without light, there can be no shadows, and there is always some sunlight in a Bosch novel. Speaking to Nathaniel Rich for The Paris Review, Ellroy said: "Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Dashiell Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandlers books are incoherent. Hammetts are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me." Did Ellroy, of all people, call Chandlers books incoherent? Yes, he did. In EllroysMy Dark Places (1996), which deals with his mother Geneva Jean's killing, he says that he graduated from high school in June 1962, but he told Rich that he flunked out in 11th grade. Either way, Ellroy is self-taught as a writer, an outsider artist with no training in perspective or color theory whose canvases are raw, highly individualistic, and deeply problematic. James Ellroy has had many influences, but none more powerful than Jack Webbs The Badge (1958), an otherwise obscure book that was given to him several months after his mothers murder and, hence, was carved into the deepest recesses of his brain. From drawing on the Club Mecca bombing in his first book to using LAPD chemist Ray Pinker (a character in the TV show Dragnet) in Perfidia, the incidents, characters, and worldview of Jack Webb are hiding in plain sight throughout Ellroys novels. The later Ellroy books are dark, dense, and bombastic, turning the readers head into a punching bag, yet he did not start by writing word salad with noir dressing.
His debut, Browns Requiem (1981), begins solidly in the post-Chandler school, with a heavy dose of racial epithets, until it takes a dark, violent, and sexual turn in the second half. Even The Black Dahlia (1987) fits into the post-Chandler school. But in his next book, The Big Nowhere (1988), Ellroy began using a staccato minimalism, reducing a sentence to one or two words. Ellroy developed this style over the rest of the L.A. QuartetL.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992)until it evolved into the word confetti of the Underworld USA Trilogy. I spent a Sunday afternoon sitting with American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Perfidia, trying unsuccessfully to get started in any of them. Nobody is ever going to say that Ellroys books are page-turners. American Tabloid is factually ridiculous, and all the characters sound like Ellroy: a writers monotone of words dug from a thesaurus. Even J. Edgar Hoover and Robert F. Kennedy sound like James Ellroy. Perfidia features all of Ellroys excessesthe factual errors, the eccentric style, the homogeneous voice (even Kay Lakes diary sounds like Ellroy), the disorganizationand none of his strengths in storytelling. And the clock is ticking. Meanwhile, Connelly keeps writingHe has gone on social media to reassure his readers that, contrary to what they might infer from the title of The Wrong Side of Goodbye, this is not the end of Harry Bosch. Connelly says that Bosch looks into the abyss of humanity and makes sure he doesnt slip in. For Ellroy, his characters have taken the plunge, and he has all too often gone with them. If you are unfamiliar with Connelly, if you are put off by the somewhat contrived name Hieronymus Bosch, or if you arent certain whether Connelly is an L.A. writer, The Wrong Side of Goodbye will convince you otherwise. Source: www.lareviewofbooks.orgPosted byElena Wat6:22 AMNo comments : Saturday, November 06, 2021 The Black Dahlia, Larry Harnisch ponders on Steve Hodel and James Ellroy

"The Black Dahlia: she's a ghost and a blank page to record our fears and desires," wrote James Ellroy. "A post-war Mona Lisa, an L.A. quintessential." It's a real-life mystery that's inspired countless moviemakers and writers from "Double Indemnity," "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential."One of the most important themes in noir is the confusion of identity. In that sense, "The Black Dahlia" is one of the purest examples in the whole genre. The femme-fatale in the story, Madeleine, identifies with Elizabeth's looks. Lee identifies Elizabeth with his little sister, Bucky sees himself reflected in Elizabeth's personality. Even Kay sees herself dragged in this twisted litany of obsession: "[Lee] loved us. And I love you. And if you hadn't seen so much of yourself in her you'd realize how much you loved me". Bucky has fallen in love with Elizabeth's image: "Bye-bye Betty, Beth, Betsy, Liz, we were a couple of tramps, too bad we didn't meet before 39th and Norton, it just might have worked, maybe us would've been the one thing we wouldn't have fucked up past redemption".This 'death leer', the book's dominating image, joins the comic to the macabre and joy to anguish because of the critical distance it puts between victim and tormentor. [...] great art requires distancing. It's perspective and slant that makes us wonder if Beth, despite the brutal pain inflicted on her by them, didn't get the last laugh on Ramona and Tilden, that sorry pair whose sole claim on our memory comes from their connection with her. Bucky's voice over: "They found him [Georgie Tilden] croaked in a parking lot downtown, just twelve blocks from where he'd dumped Betty Short. Just croaked. I hoped the evil ate him from the inside out, filling him with blackness..." -"Like Hot Knives to the Brain: James Ellroy's Search for Himself" (2006) by Peter Wolfe
John Gilmore: I met Elizabeth Short in late 46 when I was 11 years old. Elizabeth Shorts father abandoned his car on the Charlestown Bridge in Massachusetts, and seemed to vanishto disappear. This was just after he lost his business during the Depression. Phoebe (Elizabeth's mother) worked as a bookkeeper, but for the next four years the family mostly depended on Mothers Aid and government handouts. Phoebe Short was shocked when she received a letter from Cleo. He said he was in Northern California working in the shipyards, and apologized for leaving the way he did. He tried to explain in the letter that he had not been able to face up to the troubles, but knew that in his absence, if it appeared that he deserted or was dead, Phoebe would be eligible for more support. He asked if she might now allow him to return to the family. Phoebe answered her husband with an emphatic 'no'. She did not consider him her husband.Beth met a very handsome Army Air Corps lieutenant, a pilot who had taken her to dinner twice. He had the use of a car and hed take her to the beach and the amusement pier, or to Knotts Berry Farm for fried chicken.This sentiment changed on New Years Eve of 1945, when flyer Major Matt Gordan stepped into her life. A few days later the major asked her to be his wife. Im so much in love, Im sure it shows, she wrote to her mother. Matt is so wonderful, not like other men... and he asked me to marry him. Phoebe was very surprised with this news, but impressed with the photograph her daughter sent of herself and the handsome pilot. Matt gave Beth a gold wristwatch that was set with diamonds as a pre-engagement gift, and wrote to his own sister-in-law that Beth is an educated and refined girl whom I plan to marry.
James Ellroy: The LAPD will not let civilians see the file on the Dahlia case, which is six thousand pages long. When I started working on the novel, I was still living in Westchester County and realized that I could get, by interlibrary loan, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Express on microfilm. All I needed was four hundred dollars in quarters to feed the microfilm machine. Man, four hundred bucks in quartersthats a lot of coins. I used a quadruple-reinforced pillowcase to carry them down from Westchester, on the Metro-North train. It took me four printed pages to reproduce a single newspaper page. In the end the process cost me six hundred dollars. Then I made notes from the articles. Then I extrapolated a fictional story. The greatest source, however, was autobiography. Whos Bucky Bleichert? Hes a tall, pale, and thin guy, with beady brown eyes and fucked-up teeth from his boxing days, tweaked by women, with an absent mother, who gets obsessed with a womans death. It wasnt much of a stretch. Source: www.theparisreview.org
Larry Harnisch: Steve Hodel has also returned to his claim that his father probably killed Geneva Ellroy, mother of author James Ellroy. Steve Hodel earned a robust, throaty FU from Ellroy when he originally floated this nonsense, but Ellroy eventually jumped into the Hodel crowd and has now jumped out, refusing to discuss Steve Hodel or the Black Dahlia. One of Steve Hodels more bizarre claims is that when the purported killer of Elizabeth Short called Examiner city editor James Richardson, he identified himself as the Black Dahlia Avenger. Of course, that isnt true. As with so many things, its something Steve Hodel would very much like to be true. But its not. And the nonsense about George Hodel being a taxi driver and knowing the city of Los Angeles like the back of his hand, including the neighborhood on South Norton Avenue where Elizabeth Shorts body was found. Naturally, Steve Hodel has never actually researched when the neighborhood was developed or he would know that it didnt exist when his father was driving a cab. Did I mention that George Hodels purported photos of Elizabeth Short arent her? So says her family. I may add to this as I find more lies and these are lies. Steve Hodel knows that these things arent true. These arent mistakes. These are deliberate misrepresentations and lies. The main thing, of course, is that every bit of Steve Hodels investigation is about Steve. Elizabeth Short barely enters the discussion. It is all about Steve Hodel. Source: ladailymirror.com
Larry Harnisch has studied the case off and on for twenty-four years. He has interviewed more than one hundred-fifty people, ranging from the first officer on the scene, to family members of Short, to a former boyfriend, to detectives assigned to the investigation, to the woman who discovered the body. The office in his small South Pasadena home is crammed with five metal file cabinets, twenty boxes of file folders, and four bookcases lined with hundreds of books, all focused on the Short homicide or Los Angeles history. Harnisch is writing a book about the case, but the homicide and the investigation are only part of his focus. His research began when he was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times and he was writing a 1997 fiftieth anniversary story on the killing. He had so much additional material that when the story ran, he decided to write a book. After three drafts, engaging in countless online battles with people writing about the case whom he constantly fact-checks, and struggling to find a publisher, there are days, he says, when he wished he never heard of the case. He never imagined that he would unearth a murder scenario and a suspect who would intrigue LAPD detectives. Nobody can tell this story straight. Harnisch scowls. Everyone wants to fuck with it. Some writers claimed she was lured to Hollywood from the East because she was an aspiring actress. She wasnt. Others wrote that the newspapers gave Short the sobriquet. They didnt. A few have intimated she was a hooker. She wasnt. Or that, at the very least, she was promiscuous.
She wasnt. Some writers contended the original detective team was inept. They werent. Shed been called a war widow. She wasnt.Harnisch is grateful he began his research decades ago, long before the case generated renewed interest in the Twenty-First Century, because many of those he interviewed are now dead.What keeps me going is that I promised myself I would clear up all the lies and myths and try to reclaim Elizabeth Short from the Dahlia freaks. I feel a responsibility. The family has gone through so much and all writers have ever done is rip them off. They deserve to have somebody tell the story accurately. Thats the least I can do for them and for Elizabeth Short, someone who changed my life.In the 2001 documentary James Ellroys Feast of Death, Harnisch presents his theory of the case during a dinner hosted by Ellroy, who called Harnischs theory the most plausible explanation of the murder that Ive heard the theory is great. Its just about watertight in most ways.Everyone wants this to be a noir morality play, Harnisch says. The aspiring young actress comes to tinsel town with stars in her eyes and this is what happens to impressionable young women who want to be in the movies. The truth is she came out to Southern California for a man. Thats a lot less glamorous.Writers have portrayed Short as a promiscuous loser sleeping her way across Hollywood. The truth is, Harnisch says, she was just a young woman traumatized by the death of her fiancée, she was a lost soul.Harnisch anticipates finally finishing his book next year. Source: crimereads.com
Larry Harnisch: To the people who ask how my Black Dahlia book is going. A snippet: James Ellroy is a wretched human being and a tortured soul. A high-school dropout who tosses around words he's dug out of a thesaurus and belabors and belittles everyone with his "Demon Dog" status. Anyone who isn't suitably deferential will be on the outs with Ellroy in short order. Today, he is coasting on his reputation, slowly sinking into a pool of poisonous thoughts, lazily penning racist, sexist fantasies about an imagined past for a dwindling base of fans who sees his abuse as some sort of genius. Source: Instagram.com

Posted byElena Wat5:41 AMNo comments : Sunday, October 31, 2021 Rock Wives: Bettye Kronstad, Angie Bowie, Lynn Krieger, Pam Courson (Set the Night on Fire)

An advocate for the downtrodden, Lou Reed gave a voice to those who were never heard before. He showed us people just like ourselves, but although they were underground, they were in no way beneath us. We could easily become them. Bettye Kronstad was Reeds first wife. She met him as a young college student in NYC in the fading embers of 1968. She memorably recounts meeting him in an elevator where Reed tried to impress her by acting like an imperious jerk and slapping her rear. From meager beginnings, she eventually found herself falling for the moody artist. Ms. Kronstad writes about Reed inviting her to his last performance with The Velvet Underground in August of 1970, and this was the point at which their relationship began. Ms. Kronstad writes of that fateful concert at Maxs Kansas City The band played notoriously loud, and Cales droning climbed over, around, and through us, yet you could also hear Lou singing screaming, really, over the instruments. Lewis sang his heart out sometimes, I could have sworn, right at me. It was a bit intimidating. This would all be fine except for the salient fact that by August of 1970, John Cale had been gone from The VU for nearly two years. He had been fired from the band after a show at The Boston Tea Party in September of 1968. Okay, so this was that kind of book.

Ms. Kronstad and Reed were in an erratic orbit of each other as Reed left The Velvet Underground, worked for his fathers business, and ultimately made his name as a solo performer. The dialogues contained within the book depict the mercurial Reed as a tortured, emotionally insecure artist who bluffed his way through life to protect his damaged core to the best of his ability. While attempting to work in theater, Ms. Kronstad decided to give Reed a chance, to the extent that she and Lou were living together for several years as Reed came to depend on her for emotional stability. Given that I cant begin to remember anything that I say to someone the next day, never mind 48 years later, the conceit of the book to recount exchanges is entirely suspect to my eyes in the veracity department. While the exchanges may or may not have happened, the emotional truth of the bouts of emotional and chemical dependency between Bettye and Reed do have the whiff of truth to them. Along the way the pills that Ms. Kronstad was fine with gave way to the demon in the bottle, Johnny Walker Red, who ultimately kept pushing her away from Reed even as she became his emotional crutch by the end of their time together. Like many drug users, she drew the line at needles, only to see Reed succumb many times over their relationship. Ironically, they finally married near the end of their tumultuous relationship, around the time of Reeds Berlin album. Ms. Kronstadt was comfortable with a song like Perfect Day recounting the details of their intimacy together, but when Reed used her painful family history as inspiration for Berlins harrowing narrative, then she finally came to the point where she had to leave Reed. That wasnt the end of the tale, though. Reeds manager talked her into accompanying Reed on his crashing and burning Berlin tour where she was expected to mind the erratic Reed until she walked out on him, finally, in Paris in 1973 after a cocaine fueled argument.
The doomed relationship depicted here seemed to set the tone for the self-destructive Reed throughout much of the seventies. Bettye Kronstad lives today in Wytheville, VA. While I doubt things played out exactly as depicted here, Reed was depicted with both light and shadow with all of his personal strengths along with his worst tendencies. Lou Reed was a gifted, pivotal artist who dramatically expanded the vocabulary of rock to encompass literary concerns. Yet at the end of the day, he was also a troubled man whose destructive defense mechanisms took their tolls on both himself and those around him. By the end of the book, I marveled at Bettye's ability to leave him behind and move forward on her journey. Source: postpunkmonk.com

AsMadeline Bocaro (writer for Dazed Confused and Mojo magazines, and author of biographies Stardust: The David Bowie Story (McGraw Hill, 1986), and The Wild One The Story of Iggy Pop (Omnibus, 1988) stated after Lou Reed's passing: "Ironically, Lou's influences were Bettye LaVette, Doc Pomus, Delmore Schwartz, Edgar Allan Poe, 1950s Doo Wop somehow it doesnt come out that way, but Lou did it his way. His life was saved by rock n roll.But who was Lou Reed? A crazy, cool, sarcastic genius who influenced thousands of lives across several generations. Reed had a bad rep for a nice guy. His masterpiece was Berlin. His 20th and final solo album was Hudson River Wind Meditations (2007). He was finally at peace."

Angela Bowie: David [Bowie] was the one who was gaga over the Velvet Underground. He just thought the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed as a songwriter was the greatest thing that ever happened. Also whatever David was into I immediately took interest. I was that naive and that much of a youngster at that time, I believed that if I echoed what he said, and trumpeted it louder, people would believe what David said was important. As David started talking about Andy Warhol I never told him I thought he was an idiot. Id shut up on that part. I was the perfect hostess. Iggy Pop and The Stooges were awfully nice to me. I dont know if somebody had told them that I was well-intentioned or basically nice underneath it all. I suppose the only person who I was really very nervous of knowing was Iggy but I mean he was a sweetheart. I liked Lou Reed intellectually. I loved his conversations, he was so articulate and intelligent, but personally I didn't find him sexy, although he had a sort of romantic, sexy aura. I always thought that he was totally asexual. Probably Bettye didn't think so. I did a lot of listening when Lou and David spoke about New York and David would draw him out and get him to talk about what was going on in New York and it was very easy to impress David because England was very backward; I mean, it was against the law to commit sodomy. So you gotta understand where David was coming from is not because he was stupid, or because he was juvenile, or naive, it was because he was looking at it with this whole look of an English man.
At that time in England you realize how repressed they were and how even the slightest hint of that kind of scandal could mean the difference between someone getting a recording deal or someone spending their life playing working mens clubs in the North of England and never actually becoming really popular, well yeah, you have to remember this is like late 1960s, beginning of the 1970s. It was very different and so when Lou Reed would talk about the Factory and Candy Darling and all of these incrediblecharacters who Andy Warhol was making stars out of, for David that was like America must be the most wide open, wonderful place. And so what I mean is youre like looking at it from a social mores, and from the point of view that if he hadnt had all of those experiences, when they asked him in that Melody Maker article and he said he was bisexual, he would never have had the balls to do that unless hed been around Iggy and Lou and realized that fuck it, if the English wanted to behave like that with that kind of hypocrisy, fuck it, but there was this place in the States where things were changing - not that much in the Midwest but David didnt know that, he just knew New York. Both Lou and David were extremely professionalwhich is an over used wordlet's says, manic about detail and getting it right and so thats what they were involved in; they were involved in the musicality of doing something incredible. The Ziggy Stardust tour ended in L.A.and thenIggy was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was in a terrible state.Iggy was staggering around and apologizing. I cant remember what hed done. Maybe he'd tried to fuck me or something. I picked him up off the floor and carried him to my suite.I think David was just as stoned as Iggy was. Later, at the Mercer Arts Center I met David Johansen when he was going out with Cyrinda Foxe so I knew him a little more than I knew Johnny Thunders, these guys were all so cool, too, so sweet. Thats what everybody doesnt realize is that there was ten years of this stuff going on before the Sex Pistols. I mean, Malcolm [McLaren] even says it and everybody else. The New York Dolls, The Stooges, The Ramones: I thought they were fabulous, because it was caricature and cartoon-like and larger than life.
I dont know if Lisa Robinson promoted David Johansen and Cyrinda Foxe as a great couple, but they were a great couple. I thought they were terrific but I only know my own feelings about them but this is a personal opinion and I just felt that Cyrinda always had very little vision as far as her own talent was concerned. Then I think that for her to leave Johansen and go with that crap guy in Aerosmith who was a total ignoramus, you know, compared to David, who was bright, intelligent and treated her well. I mean, she was my friend, I loved her to death, but Ive never been able to fathom her perception of men. Johansen positioned himself to be with her, he wanted to be with her, he was smart, it would appear to me that he would be an extremely supportive person to be with and stay with. As soon as David [Bowie] said he was going to put Cyrinda in the Rebel Rebel video I knew he was fucking her. I think its incredible that David and I were together for so long. I can only put it down to my stamina and endurance. I must be some kind of masochist to have been able to endure it. And with David the first thing that shocked me was he could write such intelligent lyrics and so it was very much in the same mode of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, you know, they wrote intelligent lyrics. Now, you could laugh and say, Now I wanna be your dog is an intelligent lyric? Yes it is! Those lyrics conjure an image in your mind. Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie (2000) by Angela Bowie
Robby Krieger: In the fall of 1966. The Doors had recently arrived in New York City to play a month-long residency at the Ondine Discotheque, to finish the mixing of our debut album,playing five half-hour sets each night, finishing just shy of sunrise.On our nights off, drummer John Densmore and I explored jazz clubs in the Village. During the daylight hours, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and his girlfriend, Dorothy, ventured out to the museums. Even though the New York crowd hadnt heard our songs before, they seemed to dig us, and the local groupies seemed fascinated by these mysterious aliens from California. I had brief flings with several of them, including Rory Flynn, a six-foot-tall model I knew from back in L.A., who also happened to be Errol Flynns daughter. I found out later that the groupies at Ondines compared notes with one another and bestowed ratings on their conquests. I didnt get much attention from anyone after Rory, so I must not have rated too highly.Before I met my wife, Lynn, she was hanging out with her friend Peggy at the New York apartment of a guy forebodingly known as Danny Overdose. Peggy found Dannys supply of liquid Owsley acid (a particularly potent formula) and said, Lets have a tea party! Instead of placing a single droplet on their tongues, Peggy and Lynn filled up half a teacup each and started sipping. A normal acid trip kicks in after about a half hour; the Owsley hit them almost instantly. The people outside on the street suddenly appeared to have bizarrely long necks, and their heads were bobbing around like they were in some sort of spooky cartoon.In hopes of finding a new way to look inward, I tried an alternative to acid: morning glory seeds. I had heard that by eating the crushed seeds I could achieve a similarly psychedelic high. So off I went to my local florist.Despite my wife Lynns negative experiences with acid, she had no interest in meditation and rolled her eyes whenever John or I talked about it. For all my dedication and practice, she said she never saw much of a difference in me. I was already a mellow guy. According to her, if I got any mellower I would drop off the face of the earth.Lynns mom was a fanatic Catholic who dragged the family to regular church services and forbade any of her eight children to curse, even though she herself cursed all the time. Lynns dad was generally laid-back, but her mom had wild mood swings and kept the whole house on edge. When Lynn was a teenager, her brother told their mom that Lynn had gone on a date with Sammy Davis Jr. It was an absurd story, intended to inflame their moms simmering racial prejudice, but it worked better than expected. Lynns mom not only flipped out in the moment but held it over Lynns head for years, no matter how many times Lynn attempted to explain that it was a joke.Lynn had to get out. She couldnt take the pressure and the hypocrisy and the oppression, so she escaped into New York City to go clubbing whenever she could. At only sixteen years old she moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side with one of her closest companions, a gay hairdresser named Kenny.By the time Lynn was eighteen, she had friends at clubs all over the city, so she had no trouble getting into the Ondine Discotheque when the Doors made their New York debut in 1966. I didnt meet her that night, but Jim Morrison did. She met the humble, gentlemanly version of Jim and was predictably charmed by him. That night, with the enthusiasm of a tourism board member, Jim told her all about Los Angeles, and how the West is the best. Palm trees, sunshine, beaches she was sold. She and her friends drove cross-country and saw that Jim wasnt lying.But he hadnt been too forthcoming about his relationship status. One day during her visit, she was hanging out at Jims house on Rothdell Trail in Laurel Canyon when Pam walked in and shrieked, Jim!Whos that? Lynn asked. Oh, this is Pam, my girlfriend.
Jim had failed to mention Pam before then. Lynn wasnt naive; but a secret, official, live-in girlfriend? Lynn ran out of the house and down the steps past the Canyon Country Store. Jim chased after her, shouting, Dont go!Somehow, Jim convinced Lynn to keep hanging out with him. She went back to New York and they met up whenever the Doors traveled east, and she saw him whenever she took trips out to L.A. with her friends. It was the beginning of the hippie era, and L.A. wasnt as crowded or as noisy as Manhattan. At first it was almost too peaceful for Lynn, but after a while convinced that she could maybe solidify things with Jim if she lived a little closer to him she finally made the move to Laurel Canyon.Jim tested Lynns limits just as he did with everyone else. Once they were at a party at a fancy Malibu beach house, with a deck that stretched out over the sand. Lynn was leaning over the railing when Jim grabbed her ankles and hoisted her over the edge. He held her dangling there as the blood rushed to her head. She screamed, Get me up! Get me up!He made a single demand: Tell me you love me. She could barely sputter out the words because she was so furious, but she told him what he wanted to hear and he pulled her back onto the deck. At first it was easy for Lynn to cope with Jims behavior because she had been surrounded by one type of craziness or another her whole life. But he kept pushing.Lynns relationship with Jim officially ended for good when she moved to a house at Horse Shoe Canyon with a new group of friends.
By early 68, though, we were both officially single, and Lynn's hilarious sense of humor, her East Coast edge, and her fearless spirit set her apart from other girls and made her irresistible. So one night when I found out that Lynn was going to be at a party at a mutual friends house, I made sure to attend. I had recently bought a burgundy Porsche 911S, so I gallantly offered Lynn and her friend a ride home. Like every dumb guy, I tried to show off by gunning the engine and taking corners at dangerous speeds. Nothing physical happened that night, but it was the first chance Lynn and I had to really get to know each other, and we started hanging out.I never asked Jim how he felt about me dating Lynn because he still had Pam, so it seemed like everything had worked out well for everyone.About a year later, Lynn and I moved into a house in Benedict Canyon that would later become the inspiration for the song Hyacinth House.Later, Jim complimented me on my choice of partner. He never went after Lynn again. Lynn and I remain together to this day. Set the Night on Fire is dedicated to her. "This book is dedicated to Lynn Ann Veres, my wife of fifty years so far. Shes the only person Ive ever met who lets me be me. And thats why Ill always love her."
Pamela Courson never tried to put a wedge between Jim and the band. She never meddled in our creative process. I always thought she was good for Jim. Their relationship may have been tumultuous at times, but they never had any major fights when I was around. They made their own rules. It was clearly an open relationship since they were both seeing other people, and that incited trouble from time to time. But they genuinely seemed devoted to each other. A true couple. And even their unstable version of stability was better than Jim bouncing from girl to girl every night. Pam used to date Arthur Lee from Love, who called her Yellow Tooth due to her discolored incisors. But her sweet looks outweighed her dental shortcomings enough that John hit on her at the London Fog before Jim ever did. Her squeaky voice and goofy demeanor made her appear sweet and innocent, but she was crazier than Jim in some ways, taking up with weird guys and doing heroin. To many men that would be a negative, but Jim had finally met someone who could walk on the edge right alongside him. Pam was too flaky to get into poetry or literature on the same level as Jim, but she was smarter than most people realized. Some people question whether she was calculating the cost-benefit of dating Jim in the name of a financially comfortable future. I cant say that wasnt a factor, but she still legitimately loved him. It was a complex coupling, to say the least. The bottom line is that she was weird, he was weird, and they were lucky they found each other to be weird with. Pam and I were both Capricorns so we always got along well. She seemed to get along with the other band members and all our girlfriends, too, even after Lynns awkward introduction to her at the Rothdell Trail house. But Jim and Pam were often in their own bubble. I dont think Pam ever consciously tried to separate Jim from the rest of us. She just hung out with all these junkies and oddball Europeans, and the separation naturally evolved. I cant say for sure that moving to Paris with Jim in 1971 was her idea, but Ive always believed that her long-standing affair with a French count/heroin dealer mustve factored into her enthusiasm for the idea. After Jim died, Pam returned to the States, exited the airport, got in a cab, and entered into a heroin-fueled fling with the driver, who happened to also be a drug dealer. I saw her only a few times after that. She was still the same Pam, but her silly side had been blunted by severe depression. She never wanted to talk much about what had happened in Paris, of course. The last time I ran into her was when Lynn and I met Ray and John and their wives for dinner up in Sausalito. Pam coincidentally walked into the same restaurant with another new boyfriend and made chitchat but then excused herself to eat at a separate table. There has always been speculation about whether Pams fatal overdose was accidental or intentional. I couldnt possibly say. I just know she was sad. And one way or the other, the grief took her."Set the Night on Fire" (2021) by Robby KriegerPosted byElena Wat4:57 AMNo comments : Labels:david bowie , jim morrison , lou reed , pam courson Monday, October 25, 2021 The Velvet Underground (2021) by Todd Haynes

In the new Apple documentary "The Velvet Underground" (2021), Lou Reed says he made $2.35 royalties for his pre-Velvet song "Leave Her For Me", more than he made with the Velvets. But The Velvet Underground is, along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock n roll. If you want to see the Velvets in their prime performing What Goes On or White Light/White Heat in a steamy rock club, or get a taste of what it was like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom in New York City in 1966, youre out of luck, because those clips basically dont exist. Its quite an irony considering that Warhol, the bands mentor, was notorious for filming everything around him. The Velvet Underground, whose music was a mesmerizing midnight trance-out, had no radio niche, no publicity, no media, no backstage verité Pennebaker or Maysles. Todd Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope that immerses you in the band but still leaves them slightly out of reach. The film interviews Reeds sister, Merrill Reed Weiner, who sets us straight on the legendary tale of how the teenage Lous suburban Long Island parents okayed his getting electroshock therapy because they wanted to shock the homosexuality out of him. (She says thats untrue.)

Lou the subversive guitar bad boy and Cale the debonair experimentalist came together like an acid and a base. Cale is the one whose story the documentary feels organized around. And thats not just because Cale (now 79) is interviewed at length while Lou Reed, who died in 2013, couldnt be. No, its as if Haynes wanted the Velvets to be an art band even more than he wanted them to be a rock n roll band. The Velvets second album, White Light/White Heat, is written off in the movie as an angry amphetamine binge of a record. But out of that came drama: Lou Reed fired John Cale, just as he had already fired Andy Warhol. That sounds like reckless Lou, and thats certainly the way the documentary presents it. But maybe Reed knew just what he was doing. He replaced Cale with Doug Yule, and together they made what I think is the groups greatest album, The Velvet Underground (1969). Its a masterpiece of religious street passion, yet the movie kind of brushes by it. Through it all, the Velvets, and perhaps only the Velvets, have remained perpetually hip. Source: variety.com

Lou Reed enjoyed a solo career renaissance primarily by passing himself off as the most burnt-out reprobate around (and it wasn't all show by a long shot). People kept expecting him to die, so he perversely came back, not to haunt them, but to clean up. The central heroic myth of the sixties was the burnout. Lou Reed was necessary because he had the good sense to realize that the whole concept of sleaze, of decadence, degeneracy, was a joke and he turned himself into a clown. In fact, a large part of Lou's mythic appeal has always been his total infantilism. Like Jim Morrison, Lou Reed realized the implicity absurdity of the rock 'n' roll bète-noire badass pose and parodied it, deglamorized it. Lou Reed, like all the heroes, is there for the beating up. They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth. "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" (2013) by Lester Bangs

All the books about me are bullshit, Lou Reed once said, when asked about Victor Bockris' biography, although he reckoned there were lots of truth in Bockris' book.In a breezy tone, Reeds first wife Bettye Kronstad wrote of the five-year period, 1968-1973, between the end of the Velvet Underground and Reeds third solo album Berlin. Kronstad makes an effort in Perfect Day to contextualize whats happening with their personal life with the goings-on of Reeds career. But at its most interesting and tragic, this book serves to inject the well-worn myths of Lou Reed the legend with humanity, and offers an insiders perspective to Reeds losses of personal control, his fears and anxieties, particularly during the Transformer era. With a legacy of four commercial failures to his name, Reed didnt exactly emerge as a hot property. Wearied from his Velvets experience and unsure about his next move, Reed ended up moving back to his parents house on Long Island and started a relationship with theatre student Bettye Kronstad. Bettye found him a kind, gentle, sensitive guy who nicknamed her 'Princess' and who telephoned her in the wee hours talking about his dreams of becoming a writer. In fact, they became serious and Bettye spent the first year she dated him living at his parents Long Island home.

Bettye Kronstad: "At seventeen, Lous parents had sent him to see a psychiatrist who prescribed EST for his depression and mood swings. During the summer of 1959, he was treated at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York, where the EST treatments were administered without an anesthetic. At that time, the procedure involved putting him on a wooden gurney with a rubber block between his teeth. This was an experience that scarred Lou for life. It is commonly thought that EST was prescribed to Lou in order to cure him of his bisexual tendencies, but he never told me this or even alluded to it. I think he told journalists this to be more sympathetic to the gay community, and in part to broaden his appeal to that audience. From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I wouldwithout failleave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again."

Shelley Albin: "Lou Reed is a very fifties type guy. He's ultimately straight. He wants his wife, Sylvia, who is a very fifties type girl, to take care of him." As much as Reed's sexuality was pondered, he had a long time girlfriend in Shelley Albin, and married three times. Reed even admitted his heterosexuality when initiated his relationship with Sylvia Morales. Reed's Ecstasy album addressed the failed marriage to Sylvia Morales (in the songs Baton Rouge and Tatters - she wanted kids, Reed obviously did not) and then he came with Set The Twilight Reeling, which dealt with his need to become "the newfound man, and set the twilight reeling" with Laurie Anderson.

Lou Reed was a self-sabotaging, widely disliked man who gave voice to the unwanted and despised. Like Danny Fields said once: "poor Lou - his act worked too well." Humanity brought out the worst in him, and he returned the favor. Anthony DeCurtis: "There was an incredible level of fear of abandonment and terror and that's what motivated his violencecoming out of a kind of desperation, it was less about hostility than about a kind of self-hatred and fear." As Lester Bangs wrote shortly after his first encounter with Reed: "I never met a hero I didnt like. But then, I never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasnt looking for one.""I just hope it doesnt start getting thought of as this terrible down death album, because thats not at all what I mean by it, Lou Reed said of "Magic Loss" (1992) to the Chicago Tribune: "I think of it as a really positive album, because the loss is transformed magically into something else." In "Warrior King," Reed channels his anger into a fantasy of omnipotence: "I wish I was a warrior king; inscrutable, benign / With a faceless charging power always at my command / Footsteps so heavy that the world shakes / My rage instilling fear." Reed feels his loss, but has reached a level of acceptance: "My friends are blending in my head / They're melting into one great spirit / And that spirit isn't dead."

Ellen Willis, the first rock critic for The New Yorker wrote The Velvet Underground essay, included in fellow critic Greil Marcus book Stranded (1979). The songs on The Velvet Underground are all about sin and salvation, Willis begins. The crux of Willis essay is that Lou Reed managed to exist in that rare space between irony and sentimentality, to avoid slipping into either the snarl or the smile. His music was an exercise in rejection, but not the knee-jerk anti-establishment hostility. Its a rejection of rejection, a fight against both the nihilism of punk and the boppy, commercial vibes of pop music. For the Velvets, the aesthete-punk stance was a way of surviving in a world that was out to kill you, Willis writes. The Velvets were not nihilists but moralists. Willis explains, Their songs are about unspeakable feelings of despair, disgust, isolation, confusion, guilt, longing, relief, peace, clarity, freedom, loveand about the ways we habitually bury them from a safe, sophisticated distance in order to get along in a hostile, corrupt world. Rock Roll makes explicit the use of a mass art form was a metaphor for transcendence, for connection, for resistance to solipsism and despair.

Shelley Albin said about Reed's sexuality: "I think by nature he was more driven to women because of his relationship with his mother. Thats what he thought was normal. It was comfortable. Reed, Shelley said, was a romantic at heart. He could be very sweet. Hes probably the only person who ever literally gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentines Day. But he wasnt happy unless he made somebody more miserable than he was. Misery made for his best work, whether it came from me or somebody else. He wasnt anybody I wanted to live with and put up with. It wasnt worth it. It was too much grief. As for his reputation as a sexual player, that, too, was something of an image. I got the impression that he never really had a girlfriend in high school, she said. I think he put on an aura later of being a ladies man. Hardly at all. That didnt fit with the guy I met. He didnt do as much in college as he pretended later. I met him after hed been at college for a year. He was awkward. Boys I went out with in high school were smoother.I liked his brain, Shelley said. We could talk for hours and hours, days and days. We connected. He was an incredible romantic. So we connected on that level. It was very much a creative-mind thing. I was crazy about him. He was a great kisser and well coordinated. His appeal was of a very sexy boy/man. Lou was very insecure, and he needed a nurturer. Lou Reed treated relationships, sex, and masculinity with a sense of simultaneous distance and intimacy. Just as femininity, sex clubs, and drugs were something to look at, so was masculinity. Reeds explorations of identity evolved from rocker to strung-out junkie to effeminate songster to middle-aged intellectual. Lou Reed's quixotic/demonic relationship to sex was clearly intense. No one understood Lou's ability to make those close to him feel terrible better than the special targets of his inner rage, his parents, Sidney and Toby. Lou dramatized what was in the 1950s suburban America his father's benevolent dominance into Machavellian tyranny, and viewed his mother as the victim when this was not the case at all. The fact is Sidney and Toby Reed adored and enjoyed each other. After twenty years of marriage, they were still crazy about each other." "Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story" (2014) by Victor Bockris

Posted byElena Wat5:51 AMNo comments : Labels:lou reed Thursday, September 30, 2021 Bombshell, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Bombshell (2021) by Mike Rothmiller is both unconvincing as an argument and poorly written in general. And no, if he took this to any court he would not get a conviction, unless they chose to investigate all of his crooked dealings as a cop and prosecute him instead. A former (somewhat) bad cop talking about other somewhat bad cops at LAPD OCID while greatly exaggerating his importance and 'insider' knowledge writes on a key historical event about which we can only take his word. He read mystery police files from filing cabinets while not busy performing his primary task of sharpening pencils at OCID headquarters. Without vetted copies of documents, without recorded audio proof of his revelatory {if accurate} conversation with Peter Lawford, around which the substance of this narrative hinges, we can not evaluate his veracity. It's all hearsay. Unfortunately all of the pictures/taped recordings the author has seen or heard have not been shared to prove his statements. And all of the main characters are of course long dead so it is easy to make claims which they cannot refute or confirm.We are given a lot of information about gangsters and LAPD officers that I think we could have done without. There isn't a single photograph in the book apart from the cover photo of Marilyn.
Despite all the gallons of ink that have been spilled about his growth and evolution in the groovy Sixties, Bobby Kennedy was supposedly a homophobe and an anti-Semite. From Roy Cohn to Bayard Rustin to J. Edgar Hoover, he seemed to despise gays. As for Jews, Bobby took after his dear old dad, Joe Kennedy, who once described Jews as pants pressers, among many other slurs. In 1962, Bobby was assigned to arrange for Marilyn Monroe to sing at JFKs 45th birthday fundraiser at Madison Square Garden. Then Bobby called up the movie producer she was working for, a Jewish lawyer named Henry T. Weinstein, and demanded she be given a couple of days off. The executive balked, Weinstein later told Seymour Hersh, and Bobby reacted in his usual way. He called me a Jew bastard and hung up the phone on me.
Among the slew of books purporting to solve the mystery of Marilyns untimely death, only a few are worth the paper they were written on. David M. Marshalls The DD Group is one, and Donald R. McGoverns Murder Orthodoxies another. Gary Vitacco-Robles, author of Icon : The Life, Times, and Films of Marilyn Monroe, will publish his own interpretation in 2022. The remainder, unfortunately, tend to propagate wild conspiracy theories involving the Kennedys, the Mafia etc. Bombshell has been featured in UK tabloids The Sun and the Daily Mail. The blurb reads: "With his training and investigators knowledge, Rothmiller used that confidential information to get to the heart of the matter, to the people who were there the night Marilyn died two of whom played major roles in the cover-up and the wider conspiracy to protect the Kennedys whatever the collateral damage." Curious to know more about Rothmiller, I consulted McGoverns Murder Orthodoxies. If youre considering purchasing Bombshell, either for its low price and eye-catching cover (featuring a classic 1953 portrait by LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt), I suggest you read McGoverns thoughts on the author first.
DonaldMcGovern: Prior to the publication of Donald Wolfes The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, his 1998 exposé about Marilyns murder, only four persons actually claimed to have seen Marilyns diary and read the words she committed in longhand to its pages: Robert Slatzer, Jeanne Carmen, Ted Jordan, and Samir Muqaddin [aka Lionel Grandison], a clerk in the county coroners office. Wolfe added a fifth name: Michael Rothmiller, a Los Angeles police detective. Donald Wolfe, according to his source notes, interviewed Michael Rothmiller in 1998. Rothmiller, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, was a member of the Organised Crime Intelligence Division (OCID), otherwise known as LAPDs infamous Gangster Squad. In 1978, Rothmiller worked in the OCID file room which housed confidential data including the police departments files regarding Marilyn and the LAPDs investigation into her death. Those files, according to Rothmiller, contained not Marilyns original Red Book of Secrets but a copy thereof. Neither Rothmiller nor Wolfe offered any statements regarding the copys type or when the copy was made. In 1982, making copies of documents and books was not as easy and convenient as it is today or as it was in 1998. Rothmiller told Wolfe that Marilyns diary was more like a journal; and most of her entries memorialised her conversations with the middle Kennedy brothers. Apparently, Wolfe relied on Slatzer, certainly a questionable tactic. Samir Muqaddins memoir, however [Memoirs of a Deputy Coroner, 2012], offered a much more detailed view. It is definitely difficult, if not impossible, to conclude that Marilyns Red Book of Secrets actually existed based on Michael Rothmillers testimony. By 1998, the year Wolfe interviewed the LAPD detective, two decades had elapsed since he allegedly saw the copy of Marilyns diary. Why did he wait so long to reveal that this copy existed, to tell the world what he allegedly observed? Where was he in 1982 during the LAPDs threshold investigation?
Neither Robert Slatzer nor Jeanne Carmen nor Samir Muqaddin nor the 1982 LADA Summary Report regarding that investigation mentioned Michael Rothmiller. But then, the mythology surrounding Marilyns diary, as it relates to her death, is so ingrained in her story and so well known, it is entirely remarkable that more persons have not appeared with odd stories similar to Rothmillers. The assertion that the little red diary existed in a storage room filled with secret files fits neatly into the conspiracists mindset and their conspiracy puzzle: for them, the diary has become the missing piece which will bring into focus the complete picture of Marilyns odd, mysterious and, for the conspiracists, unexplained death. Still, Rothmillers testimony remains uncorroborated and unverifiable. Wolfe apparently expected his readers to accept Rothmillers testament on faith, a quantum leap that I, for one, cannot make.
Many biographers and many conspiracists have delineated over the years a Marilyn Monroe that did not exist. She was neither a helpless victim nor a silly pubescent girl of fantasy swooning over or gripped by the passion of an infatuation. When we compare the actual writings of Marilyn Monroe [collected in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, 2010] with the writings certain individuals have alleged were Marilyns, a large chasm between what those individuals have alleged were Marilyns and what we now know is real becomes painfully apparent It is their word against history: no diary of the type described by Slatzer, Carmen, Jordan, Rothmiller and Muqaddin has, in forty-four years, been found. Besides and in fact, not one person in Marilyns inner circle ever mentioned seeing a diary of the type described by our witnesses, not Pat Newcomb nor Susan Strasberg nor Ralph Roberts nor Joe DiMaggio nor Arthur Miller, not even Eunice Murray, who allegedly possessed it briefly, ever mentioned a little red diary. Source: themarilynreport.com

A mysterious box of Marilyn Monroe documents sealed until 2039 could prove she was murdered by her obsessed psychiatrist, claims a private investigator. The papers belonged to Dr Ralph Greenson, who found her body and who is suspected by some of administering the barbiturate overdose which killed her in 1962. Private detective Becky Aldrige found 'Box 29' stored at UCLA library where it will remain sealed to the public for another two decades, despite a list of contents showing it contains a trove of files about Monroe. Aldrige claims that Dr Greenson killed Monroe after she threatened to reveal affairs she'd had with the Kennedy brothers and he remained haunted by the actress. Aldrige told The Sun that she was stunned to find that Dr Greenson, who died in 1979, had a sealed box of papers. 'I spent hours looking at everything I was allowed to - I couldn't make copies or take pictures so I just took notes.' 'I discovered he was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe because he had every book, every magazine, every newspaper that was ever written about Marilyn Monroe, everything. Then there were letters that were written to him, people telling him to kill himself because they thought it was his fault, she was dead. I remember thinking "Why did you save this?" 'There is also letters in there to Marilyn Monroe from other people - and letters she wrote to other people - why does he even have those? There's also some of his confidential medical files, and another file that doesn't say what it is.' Aldrige says that in Monroe's previous suicide attempts she had left a note, but on the night of her death there was none. Source: thedailymail.com

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