AFTER HE WAS CONVICTED OF MURDER, SANTIAGO VENTURA Morales met the right people. It was the way he screamed, say many of those who came to support him. The way he threw himself against the defense table and let loose a wail so chilling and anguished that it even seemed to shock the judge.

“No es posible! No es posible!” Ventura cried. It was the first time the jury had heard his voice. Sobbing uncontrollably, he was led from the courtroom.

Read the rest here.

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times – February 5, 1995

One of the dividends of owning stock in the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade ice cream company is being invited to the annual stockholder’s meeting. This gives you an excuse to eat lots of ice cream, check out Ben & Jerry’s 40-foot solarized stage bus and then spend two days listening to the Band, Bo Diddley, Michelle Shocked and the Kwanzaa Music Workshop Performance, among many other acts, play at the Ben & Jerry’s One World One Heart festival. You also get to attend the financial meeting. Here, one company co-founder might lead the investors in a hymn while the other makes a point about product standards by splitting open a pint of ice cream with a samurai sword.

Read the rest here.

 Originally published in The Oregonian – December 11, 2010

The sawed-off head of the My Little Pony doll came in a handmade box, with crimson string that was knotted into a bow on top.

I was at a hotel bar waiting for an interview. When the box showed up instead it seemed pretty, yet sinister, too. What could be inside?

One reason for trepidation: The guys who sent it were the proprietors of a Portland-based company called Revenge for Hire.

Also worth noting: This same pair had just shot the pilot episode of a reality series about their antics.

And there’s more.

Read the rest here.

Jay Cunningham on the threshold of his secret world

 Originally published in The Oregonian – January 1, 2011

In Jay Cunningham’s paintings, the things that don’t fit matter the most.

It’s the shiny gold key in the hand of the monkey who smiles cryptically as he unlocks a wooden door. It’s the golden crown on the table next to the man watching his toddler play with a toy dinosaur.

And it’s the detached expression of the young man peering away from the mother bird feeding her two babies in a vine-tangled tree.

That’s the picture that gets to Jay Cunningham’s mother, Sharon Vanderzanden, since she knows that the young man in the foreground is her son. The birds represent her family back when her two boys were navigating what Jay calls “the crucible” of their childhood.

Crucibles can do the darndest things. When he was young, the Milwaukie-reared Cunningham retreated into his room, where he projected himself into the wide-open world of crayons and paper. Brushes, canvas and pigment came later, then art school. Then a shockingly fast rise to the upper ranks of Portland’s most prominent artists.

Read the rest here.

Annie Leibovitz, 1976

Originally published in American Heritage – August/September 2004

The voices are clear and strong, their song crackling with energy. “Early in the morning we’ll be startin’ out,/Some honeys will be comin’ along/We’re loading up our woodie with our boards inside/And headin’ out singing our song….Let’s go surfin’ now/Everybody’s learning how/Come on and safari with me….”

This is “Surfin’ Safari,” one of the first songs the Beach Boys recorded, in 1962. Compared with the glossy, sex-drenched pop music of the twenty-first century, it sounds impossibly naive, a rattling contraption of tip-tap drums, rudimentary bass, wacka-wacka guitar, and hokey surfer slang. And yet, something vital radiates across the decades.

You can hear it in the music and you can glimpse it on the cover of the album Surfin’ Safari. There you see a cluster of mostly teenage Beach Boys—the brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and their neighbor David Marks—perched on a vintage yellow pickup truck that has come to rest on a California beach at dawn, looking toward the horizon. Yes, it’s corny with their matching blue Pendleton shirts and khakis and the awkward way Brian Wilson and Mike Love grasp a board to their sides. But you can feel the anticipation. Something’s coming with the morning.

Read the rest here.

Originally published in People – June 12, 1999

When the Allied armies gathered at the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Paris in August 1944, Ernest Hemingway was a step ahead of them. The barrel-chested 45-year-old author and war correspondent had fallen in with a band of French Resistance fighters and was able not only to lead the way into Paris but also to “liberate” one of his favorite haunts, the Ritz Hotel, where his arrival prompted a riotous two-day party. “We had a hell of a good time,” Hemingway told his friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner, “until the rest of ’em caught up with us.”

Read the rest here.

(Originally published in The Oregonian, 2009)

Jeff Alan says, finally, that it’s all true.

That Jeff Alan isn’t exactly his given name. And that the Social Security number he has used for most of the past 23 years isn’t exactly his either.

The former news director at KOIN (6) acknowledges he abruptly left his family in Los Angeles in 1986 and has since been distant from his three daughters. So distant that his ex-wife, the mother of his two youngest, had her vanished ex-husband declared dead in 1993.

That’s all true. So is the part about Alan being at the Ambassador Hotel, perhaps just steps behind Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, when Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy in the early hours of June 5, 1968. It’s true Alan had a thriving career in television syndication during the 1970s and early ‘80s before reinventing himself as a TV news anchor and executive. He worked at stations across the country the next two decades, wrote a pair of books (“Responsible Journalism” was one), taught broadcast journalism at the University of Pittsburgh and appeared on CNN and MSNBC as a media expert.

These things are real. So is the wrongful termination lawsuit Alan is pursuing against KOIN, and the investigation of potential fraud being weighed against Alan by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general.

Also true: A ruling by a probate judge in Michigan last week that echoes an Oregon judgement requiring Alan and his girlfriend, Patrice Bailey, to repay all charges to a credit card belonging to Bailey’s elderly mother, when she lived in their Portland home.

There’s more.

Alan has never denied owning multiple Web sites catering to people interested in the sexual practices known as BDSM (for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism). It’s long-term research, he says, adding that the true focus and scope is, for the time being, a secret.

It almost certainly has nothing to do with his work for the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative political think tank. That’s a campaign to root out Oregonians who might cast fraudulent votes by assuming the identities, and ballots, of people who are dead.

Which seems a bit ironic, given that Alan has, according to the Social Security Administration, been dead for more than 15 years.

Read the article here.

Bruce and Patti steam up the stage during the ‘Tunnel of Love’ tour in 1988.

In case you missed it, here’s the chunk of BRUCE that appeared in the books section of the New York Daily News today. Check it out, and remember that I had nothing to do with writing the photo captions. You can find it right here.

You can also expect coverage/reviews to turn up soon in Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and People. And more to come. . .

Originally published in People, Nov 29, 1999

It’s becoming obvious that John Cleese feels annoyed. For one thing, he can’t wrap his tongue around the cybervocabulary he needs to speak in the commercial he’s shooting for a California Web site design company. For another, his attempts to focus his thoughts keep getting stymied by the technicians parading through the hallway where the gangly actor currently hunches, muttering. When a woman with a clipboard walks up and catches his attention, Cleese seems to snap.

“This always happens!” he says, his voice rising into the sort of sharp yet perfectly enunciated rant Cleese perfected as one or another of the hot-tempered loons he portrayed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “I’m running my lines and some idiot comes up and interrupts me! What do you think? That I’m old and stupid? That you’re going to bring me to my senses?”

At 6’5″, Cleese would look imposing even if he weren’t standing with shoulders thrown back and nose aloft. But there’s a twinkle in his eye, and just before the woman’s expression fades to horror, he clicks right back to British charm. “Hello,” he smiles. “What can I do for you?”

What Cleese does when the camera rolls again–capturing his buffoonish reporter character’s ill-advised confrontation with the heavy-metal group Metallica–shows his unique ability, first seen widely 30 years ago on the Monty Python TV series, to portray characters torn between social haughtiness and emotional anarchy. Cleese went on to a career whose highlights–Python films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian; Cleese’s own sitcom Fawlty Towers; his Emmy-winning guest shot on Cheers; and the smash movie A Fish Called Wanda, which he wrote and starred in with Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline–made him one of the most recognized comic actors in the world. “John’s performances were the linchpin of Python,” says fellow Python Michael Palin. “He’s the headmaster turned naughty boy. And he can get away with anything.”

Just past his 60th birthday, Cleese has lately enlivened the Steve Martin-Goldie Hawn remake of The Out-of-Towners and now appears in the new James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. But Cleese, famously, has a serious side too: An advocate of psychotherapy, which he credits with healing his own wounded soul, he has cowritten two books on psychology. Once the co-owner of a company that made management training videos, he now makes videos for medical patients, in which sufferers from everything from acne to cancer can learn what symptoms and treatment they should expect. Cleese also has an appointment through 2004 to give occasional lectures as a professor-at-large at Cornell University. Such habits–and the failure of his 1997 film Fierce Creatures–have led some British critics to complain that Cleese has forsaken his place as the U.K.’s funniest man to become, as one put it, “a fussy, tetchy old academic.”

Eating lunch in Vancouver, B.C.–where he’s filming introductions for TNT’s Bond festival–Cleese doesn’t hide his irritation at that notion. “In Britain the media wants to define me,” he grumbles of the Brits who have ripped him for everything from his intellectual pursuits to his two hair transplants. “But if it comes down to the question ‘Is this man funny?’ my answer is ‘I don’t care!'”

Though he’s currently developing a sitcom for American TV, most of Cleese’s favorite projects are a long way from thigh-slappers: a BBC series on the human face he’ll host next year, a lecture he’ll give at Cornell next October on W.C. Fields. “I would have been very happy as a zoologist,” he muses. Of course, few zoologists would compare the leaping gait of sifaka lemurs, as Cleese once did in a PBS documentary, to “Edwardian butlers on Benzedrine.”

Yes, Cleese can still be howlingly funny. “Right before his 60th birthday, he was just as outrageous, loud and brainless as ever,” says Palin of the sketches he, Cleese and their surviving Python compatriots Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones (Graham Chapman died of cancer in 1989, and Eric Idle stayed in Los Angeles) recently wrote and filmed for a 30th-anniversary program that will be seen on the A&E Network early next year. The reunion was strained by the long-distance contributions of Idle (who had been irked by Palin’s decision to scotch a Python reunion tour), and now Cleese is eager to twit their erstwhile partner. “Idle called me a ‘typical alpha male,'” he reports with a wicked gleam. “But he’s such a wuss an omega male could push him around.”

Cleese has long tried to laugh at tension. The only child born to Reg Cleese, an insurance salesman who died in 1972, and Muriel, a homemaker who just celebrated her 100th birthday, he grew up in tiny coastal Weston-super-Mare. “My mother always had her fair share of anxieties,” he says delicately, and though he would eventually spend years untangling himself from her angst, Cleese credits both parents for their sharp senses of humor. “Comedy,” he notes, “tends to be about things going wrong.”

When he arrived at Cambridge University in 1960, his fellow students saw something very right in Cleese’s comic performances for the school’s Footlights revue. Cleese left Cambridge with a law degree in 1963 but happily exchanged a career as a barrister for a joke-writing job at BBC Radio. He flirted with other careers during the mid-’60s (while living in New York City he briefly worked at Newsweek), but when he appeared on BBC-TV’s The Frost Report in 1966, his career took wing. Three years later he allied with Palin, Idle and company to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The Pythons’ timely collision of sophistication (some skits involved obscure philosophers, artists and historical figures) and silliness (others revolved around dead parrots, exploding penguins and tennis-playing puddings from outer space) eventually earned a worldwide following that often centered on Cleese. “John was a dominant figure, no way around it,” says Palin. “He was very good at expressing his ideas and had this withering invective he could direct at anyone with a loosely expressed idea. But he was never comfortable hanging out: He wanted to do the work and then get on.”

Cleese, in fact, left the show before its fourth, and final, season aired in 1974 and went on to even greater acclaim with Fawlty Towers, a sitcom about a stunningly incompetent hotelier he wrote and performed with first wife Connie Booth. Still, he was eager to make Python movies and stayed through their last film, 1983’s The Meaning of Life.

His post-Python career includes several hit movies, among them Time Bandits and Wanda, which at the time was the highest-grossing movie ever made in Britain. But Cleese seems most proud of the work he has done to come to terms with his emotions. “I’ve never handled pressure very gracefully,” he admits.

During the mid-’70s height of Python, the pressure of Cleese’s career–and his dissolving marriage to Booth–nearly capsized him altogether. “I was very depressed,” he recalls. “The two things I was most frightened of were anger and noncommunication.” Therapy helped him express his feelings and come to terms with them. “I’m much more aware of my surroundings and myself,” he says. “That makes me feel much more alive.”

Married since 1992 to Alyce Faye Eichelberger, a psychotherapist he met on a blind date in 1988, Cleese divides his time between a London townhouse and a three-story oceanside stucco home in Santa Barbara, Calif., which he and Eichelberger share with his 15-year-old daughter Camilla (from his second marriage, to artist Barbara Trentham). With older daughter Cynthia, 28, down the coast in Santa Monica, they profess to have found a sort of domestic bliss. “We never bicker,” Eichelberger says. “Yes we do!” Cleese retorts. “Bickering is a form of entertainment sometimes, when there isn’t anything on the telly.”

Eichelberger (whose own book on psychology, How to Manage Your Mother, already a bestseller in the U.K., will be published in the U.S. next spring) and Cleese say he prefers life in America. “I don’t miss London,” he says simply. “I’ve had enough.” Down on the terrace, close to where the Pacific laps against the foot of his house, the frustrated zoologist ponders the pelicans winging by. “They remind me of pterodactyls,” he says. “Or is it the Cornish game hen?” Cleese looks away from his binoculars. “Or maybe Cornish gay men–I’ve known a few.”

additional reporting by John Hannah