WEIRDLAND

Steve Cochran: Bad Boy of Hollywood

2026-10-18T05:32:41.595+02:00

Steve Cochran was a natural for the hoods and cutthroats he so often portrayed in the movies, and he was seen to good advantage in several entries from the film noir era, including The Chase (1946), White Heat (1949), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), and Private Hell 36 (1954) in a career that included more than 40 films during a span of three decades. Named for his lumberman father, Robert Alexander Cochran was born May 25, 1917, in Eureka, California. Steve Cochran arrived in New York in the fall of 1942, confident that Broadway was waiting for him. It didn’t take long, however, for him to be faced with the reality that the Big Apple was crowded with dozens of talented young actors like him, all hungry to be noticed. The competition was tough. All the wannabe actors hung out at Walgreens drugstore on Times Square or in the ballroom of the St. James, an affordable hotel on 45th Street and Broadway, where many actors, including Steve, rented a room for $10 a night. Working like a unit, the aspiring stars shared all possible information about casting calls while sipping coffee and eating mayonnaise sandwiches on stale bread.

It was around this time that Steve met actress Ruth Roman, with whom he would later star in two films. “There were a lot of times when Ruthie and I would sit at the lunch counter trying to figure out where we could land any kind of job in the theater,” said Steve. “We belonged to the same crowd of acting hopefuls who found the going tough, with not much chance of making the grade in New York.” Unfortunately, the lights of Broadway refused to shine for Steve, and he soon found himself broke and in need of employment. He accepted a modeling job with Roman, posing for pulp magazines about confessions or murder for $5 a job. Still in need of money, Steve went to Madison Square Garden ready to start an alternative career in boxing. He spoke to a manager and figured that he could earn $50 by fighting, so he bought fighting clothes, locker space, manager fees, practice time, and the rest. But as he risked damaging his face and ending any future film career, Steve decided professional fighting wasn’t for him.

In December 1942, Steve arrived to Hollywood with the hope of finding a job. On the day of his arrival, while reading the “wanted” ads in the paper of a drugstore, he bumped into Ruth Roman, who had arrived in town that same day. Since they were both looking for a place to live, they joined forces and found two single rooms in the same building. After that they saw each other frequently. Steve introduced Roman to one of his agents, who signed her and eventually got her a job. But there was no such luck for Steve. Jobless and broke, he decided that there was nothing in Hollywood for him so he went back to New York. Before leaving California, Roman loaned Steve thirty dollars. In Manhattan, while looking for stage work, Steve got hired as a store detective at Macy’s department store for twenty-five dollars a week. His job was to mingle with customers and keep an eye out for shoplifters. Unlike the other security guards who blended in with the crowd, Steve’s habit of patrolling the lingerie and the fabric departments and delivering threatening glares to anyone he thought might be stealing, backfired. “Four or five times a day I would be the one turned in by a well-meaning customer as a shoplifter suspect,” he said.

"He was often cast as a gangster or a rough, hard man. Steve Cochran was none of those things in real life. He was polite and sensitive, and very kind." —Virginia Mayo

Steve arrived in Hollywood from New York just to learn that production of The Kid from Brooklyn had been pushed back a week because of Goldwyn’s inability to assemble his crew, as they were still busy on a different set. In the meantime, Danny Kaye, the two leading ladies Virginia Mayo and Vera-Ellen, plus more than two hundred women had been rehearsing the musical numbers for several weeks under the direction of choreographer John Wray. While Steve was under contract with a basic salary, Goldwyn paid Vera-Ellen $1,000 a week as Kaye’s dancing partner. Virginia Mayo received costar billing as Goldwyn was grooming her for stardom. Because of the wartime housing shortage, Steve could not find a house or an apartment to rent. He had to stay in hotels which he had to change every five days, in accordance with the Office of Price Administration Administration regulations that controlled rents after the outbreak of World War II. The problem also affected Kaye and Vera-Ellen, who had to be hosted by friends. Principal photography began on July 12, 1944, but was suspended a week later after Kaye suffered an injury to his knee when he fell during a strenuous dance routine with Vera-Ellen.

In her autobiography, Virginia Mayo discussed her long-lasting friendship with Steve, which began on the set of The Kid from Brooklyn: "It was after The Kid from Brooklyn that I met a man who would become a dear friend for all the rest of my life, and his life too, right up until he died. His name was Steve Cochran and I loved him. Like a brother. He was tall, and in spite of the fact that he was photographed as if he was a really big man, he wasn’t. Steve was a man with a slight frame, had unusually dark, deeply smoldering eyes, thick black eyebrows, black hair, and was often cast as a gangster or a rough, hard man. Steve was none of those things in real life. He was polite and sensitive, and very kind. But indeed, he was extremely sexy and women just couldn’t get enough of him. I loved acting with him, and we went on to make many films together." Over the next few years, Steve and Virginia would appear together in five films: The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), A Song Is Born (1948), White Heat (1949), and She’s Back on Broadway (1953).

Off set, Steve was often photographed in the company of a pretty actress named Fay McKenzie (1918-2019), a sultry brunette with whom he shared the same agent. The couple became the talk of the town after they were constantly spotted together in Hollywood’s fanciest restaurants and nightclubs. Born in Hollywood in 1918, Fay McKenzie made her acting debut with Gloria Swanson in the silent film Station Content. During World War II she made two overseas tours with Frank Sinatra, both sponsored by the United Service Organizations, in order to entertain troops abroad. From 1934 until the time she met Steve, Fay appeared in five successful westerns made by Republic Pictures opposite “the singing cowboy” Gene Autry. Fay and Steve surprised everybody when, in January 1946, they secretly married in Acapulco.

Two months after they returned from Mexico, Fay left for Rio de Janeiro to fulfill a six-week singing contract at a local casino, while Steve started working on his next film. Their rollercoaster “marriage” confused friends, colleagues, and the press as Steve was seen flirting with other women. Many reporters talked of an alleged affair between Steve and Virginia Mayo during the shooting of The Best Years of Our Lives, a liaison that was thought to have continued after the filming ended until Virginia met actor Michael O’ Shea, whom she married in 1947. However, Virginia Mayo insisted that Steve and she had nothing more than a solid, long-lasting friendship. In fact, Mayo was happy to play matchmaker. According to a Lana Turner biographer, Virginia Mayo introduced the two film stars after Lana saw Steve on screen, and they went on to have a brief fling.

“Steve Cochran is excellent in The Chase as the Miami bad man, a role that probably will bring stardom to the handsome, Gable-like young man,” wrote fan magazine Movieland. “Steve Cochran will give you goose pimples as the menace,” wrote Photoplay, while Variety found “Robert Cummings being overshadowed by the dominating personality and looks of a newcomer, Steve Cochran, who plays the killer. Cochran is handsome, suave, confident, and menacing in the manner of Humphrey Bogart.” The Chase was a box-office disappointment and failed to recoup its costs, thus leaving the producers out of pocket. However, in recent years it has been rediscovered, with some critics including it among the most unusual and visually interesting examples of the film noir genre.

In spite of their differences and clashes, Steve called his collaboration with Mae West “an invaluable acting experience.” He learned a lot from the veteran of stage and screen, including onstage timing: “I never ceased to marvel at the brilliant rhythm of her performance, all the while I was with her in New York and on the road in Diamond Lil. Mae has a sixth sense for timing and she gave me pointers that would have otherwise taken me years as an actor to contemplate and handle.”

In The Damned Don’t Cry, the idea was suggested by Vincent Sherman, who remembered the title from a 1939 novel by Harry Hervey whose rights Warner had acquired. In April 1950 The Damned Don’t Cry opened nationwide. Sherman hoped that the picture could repeat the success of Crawford’s earlier Warner Bros. films, and while the reviews were mixed, the box-office revenues earned more than $1.5 million. The motion picture trade journal Harrison’s Reports dismissed the movie as “an unpleasant drama, sordid, unethical and unmoral, and it leaves a feeling of bad taste,” while The Hollywood Reporter’s critic stated: “The Damned Don’t Cry has strength, suspense, and fine entertaining values. Steve Cochran’s portrayal of the avowedly rough diamond has real force.” Today The Damned Don’t Cry is a perfect example of the film noir genre thanks not only to Sherman’s brilliant direction but also Ted McCord’s superb and suggestive cinematography. Steve’s performance was excellent, portraying the type of character for which he would become best known: the handsome, sinister alpha male who attracts equally tough women.

Later, this became a curse, as he would often be typecast in similar roles. “I do a sort of moronic type in Storm Warning,” Steve explained to the press. “I play the dumb Klan member who blows his top through mob hysteria and commits murder…. It’s a picture that pulls no punches.” Watching how Ginger Rogers approached each scene was an education for Steve. “She never commences a picture without first carefully examining all its possibilities down to the slightest detail,” he revealed in an interview. “From her, I realized that logic is the best means to break down emotion and to reassemble it. There isn’t a thing that Ginger does as an actress that isn’t clearly motivated. She is not a rusher.” Although Steve and Rogers had nothing other than the utmost professional respect for each other, no one imagined that almost a year later they would start dating. While filming, Rogers was seeing lawyer-to-the-stars Greg Bautzer, while Steve was often seen in the company of actresses Denise Darcel, Virginia Grey and Yvonne De Carlo.

Filming proceeded smoothly until there was a big fight scene between Steve, Rogers, and Day. “Ginger slapped me hard enough to feel it during a rehearsal,” he recalled. “I had a headache for two days.” The reviews for Storm Warning were generally good. Steve gave brute power to the despicable role of the Klansman, which was undeniably one of the best performances of his career, an opinion confirmed by Ginger Rogers, who called it “outstanding” in her autobiography. Many critics agreed. “Cochran scores soundly as the stupid killer husband,” wrote Variety, while Sight and Sound remarked: “As the killer Steve Cochran suggests a cross between the familiar hoodlum, and the husband in A Streetcar Named Desire: it is a very assured and capable performance.” After the premiere, the cast celebrated at The Beach, a trendy nightclub in Miami Beach. At the party Rogers accepted a dinner invitation from Steve. “Maybe she was just feeling sorry for me—because I had a broken leg, but we had a lot to say to each other and had a wonderful time,” he explained in an interview. “It was just about the time she and Bautzer were beginning to cool. But it wasn’t until they were definitely through that she let me take her to parties and theaters and see her most of the time.”

Louella Parsons discussed their romance in a lengthy article of Photoplay. Steve explained to the columnist that though Steve and Ginger had an exclusive dating relationship, they were not interested in marriage as many speculated. The tabloids loved it and called their romance “the hottest twosome since Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.” Steve explained he was smitten with Rogers, who was six years his senior, because she made him feel like a big, strong hero. “I know it’s nonsense,” he stated. “But I like gals to be impressed by me. We both know it’s an act—but it sure makes me feel good.” In order to impress Ginger, who was an avid tennis fan (she even took part in the mixed doubles at the US Open in 1950 but was knocked out in the first round), Steve started taking tennis lessons on the Beverly Hills Hotel Court, but quit when they broke up.

Despite only having a small part, actress Barbara Payton became the center of attention for most of the men working on Dallas (1950), including Steve and Gary Cooper. This attention was unappreciated by Ruth Roman, who had star billing with Cooper and who clashed with Payton during the shooting. According to Payton’s biographer, the starlet admitted that “she and Steve Cochran fooled around with each other when they were making Dallas. During breaks they used to go to the Western sets of WB ranch in Calabasas and grab a quickie.” Steve and Payton shared the same passions (notably drinking and sex) and allegedly indulged these in after-work dates and between-scene setups. It was also rumored that their affair continued on the road during the picture’s promotional tour. As if Payton’s torrid liaison with Steve was not enough distraction, the actress allegedly also had a fling with Gary Cooper, who was married. Steve was exhausted and felt he’d been worked to the bone, telling the press: “All I know is that I have done seven pictures in a year with Warner Bros. and that’s more than I did in four years with other studios. I am philosophic about my sinister reputation. When I’m told about a forthcoming picture, I merely say: “If there’s a snide enough heavy in it, I’ll be playing him.”

On December 27, 1950, Warner Bros. called Steve back to the studio from his Christmas in Carmel for a wardrobe test and rehearsals for Tomorrow Is Another Day, in which he was reunited with his old friend Ruth Roman. The picture marked the first time the two stars actually worked together. Directed by Felix Feist Jr., Tomorrow Is Another Day was based on the story Spring Kill by Guy Endore about Bill Clark, a man sent to jail at the age of thirteen for having killed his abusive father, and his complicated relationship with the world when he emerges twenty years later. Ruth Roman, wearing a platinum blonde wig, played the role of a dancehall hostess, who gets involved with Bill and kills a police officer. To prepare for the dance hall scenes, Steve had to learn ballroom steps from dance instructor Gene Nelson. Steve’s dislike for dancing was notorious and for him it was a chore. “It’s a subject that has never interested me,” he said to the press. “But now I guess I’ll have to stimulate some interest—in the interest of drama.” During the first weeks of production, Steve was hospitalized after a fight scene in which he struggled with actor Hugh Sanders for a gun. The brawl became a little too realistic and Steve fell on the ground suffering a fracture in his right leg, just above the ankle.

Steve was seen by his physician, who advised him to work only in close-ups and static shots so he could rest his legs for a few more days. To save time and money, Feist assembled the cast at Steve’s home for rehearsals until his leg healed completely. The rest of the film was completed in two weeks, even though Roman was bedridden for several days after becoming ill with a virus. Roman enjoyed sharing the set with Steve, as she said to a British magazine: “You can well imagine how we used to yackity-yack between shots about those days on Broadway when all we had was good health and determination.”

As she observed: “Steve’s strong, I’m strong and it comes through. We’ve known each other since we were starving actors in New York. When we work together, we keep looking at each other and saying, ‘Is this possible?’” On Ruth Roman, Steve commented: “Working with Ruthie is a joy. Between scenes, she’s a wonderful companion. Before the camera, she’s a gal who knows her business and concentrates on it to the utmost.” Off the set, Steve was often seen in the company of a new girl, Trudy Williams, a gorgeous New York model.

Trudy had been introduced to Steve by Ruth Roman and her husband Mortimer Hall. That spring Steve's love for animals encouraged him to get involved with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, one of his favorite nonprofit organizations. He attended a special event where he offered for sale one of his shirts that sold in a flash, and for a hefty price. "I was happy for the first three years at Warners, then I’ve felt itchy. Like the brakes were dragging," observed Steve Cochran to the press gathered at the event. A Christmas feature in Photoplay magazine reported that Steve planned to spend the holidays with his ex-wife Fay McKenzie and their little girl Xandra “but also his ex-mother in-law. Actually they all meet (together with Steve’s mother, who flied in from her home in Alaska) at Carmel, California, where Fay has a house.” The magazine went on to paint a picture of Steve as a generous family man: “It is Steve who foots all the bills, gives everyone terrific presents and enjoys himself very much. Every other day of the year, Steve is very much the lone wolf.”

While in Europe in 1954, one of Steve’s favorite subjects in many of the interviews he gave on set was women. He often compared American women with European ones and although his comments did not raise eyebrows then, today they would be considered sexist. “Now you take those German women,” he told a Hollywood columnist. “The theory is, they’re built square and solid. Well, that’s just not so. German women are very tasty to behold.” He added: “Oh, they’re not skinny like New York models, but they can be very trim and neat. You could not go wrong if you chose a German woman.” In Munich, Steve bought a flashy green Porsche, which he loved to speed around in, always in the company of his latest local female conquest.

One evening on set of Carnival Story, Steve, who was an amateur photographer, decided to climb to the top of a platform to photograph a 110-foot dive into a tank, which is one of the film’s most thrilling scenes. Suddenly a heavy spotlight began to sway toward the platform’s edge and he shouted a warning to the crowd below while at the same time trying to grab the light. He failed but his yell had been enough for the spectators to scatter. The spotlight plunged to the ground, destroying itself on a spot where, a few seconds before, part of the closely packed crowd had stood. Steve’s quick thinking had saved the set from a terrible tragedy, and undoubtedly saved lives. Steve remained in Europe for three months. After Germany, he drove his Porsche across the Alps down to Rome.

Once again, Steve spoke rather candidly about his experience of the local women: “To tell the truth, I was disappointed in the girls in Italy. You see, they refused to chase me. Not once was I chased or even casually pursued. But maybe I’m of a different temperament. Your Italian babe wants to make a game of love. You know, there are certain rules a guy must follow and all that. I believe in short cuts myself, but they always get mad at that and say you’re spoiling all the fun.” He didn’t, however, do too badly in the game of love, because while in Europe Steve was often photographed in the company of Esperanza “Chata” Wayne, a Mexican actress who was separated from her husband John Wayne (they would divorce in 1954). Once again the tabloids hinted marriage was on the cards but Steve was quick to dampen their enthusiasm. “She’s a wonderful person. She has the biggest heart in Hollywood,” he stated diplomatically. “She was teaching me Spanish. I’ve got Mexican movie production plans.”

When he returned to Benedict Canyon, Steve threw a big party at his house for Sadie Hawkins Day (an American holiday inspired by the comic strip Li’l Abner), and invited his neighbor, an aspiring young actress, who lived in a little house on stilts nearby. The woman was Jayne Mansfield, and years later she said: “I discovered one day the big movie star Steve Cochran lived in a house much like ours down the road on Yokum Avenue. I dressed like Daisy Mae [the comic strip’s blonde bombshell] and went to his Li’l Abner party on Sadie Hawkins Day. Steve lived the informal, open-house life always with a couple of friends to keep his place clean. It was exciting for me to have a real movie star for my next-door neighbor.” Mansfield’s marriage to her first husband Paul Mansfield was on the rocks and, unsurprisingly, Steve’s head was turned by the actress who was only twenty-one at the time. The two started seeing each other, first discreetly at his house and later more publicly. They were photographed together on several occasions, including at the opening of the Ice Follies.

Jayne Mansfield recalled: “Steve Cochran, 36, tall, dark and handsome in a rugged sort of way, was one of my first dates in Hollywood.” She praised the fact he was “casual at all times,” adding: “If a girl proposed to him, he could say ‘no’ so easily that no one would be embarrassed or feel frustrated. He has the he-man charm that women fall for. He doesn’t rely on techniques.” Their affair lasted four months but the two stayed friends. In 1956, when Mansfield had become a bona fide celebrity, they resumed their fling briefly, to the delight of the tabloids. “I don’t act like a hood in my films,” Cochran told Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams. “I’m basically a decent person and I let this come through in my portrayals. After all, a guy has to make a living some way, even if he’s a gangster. The big secret in playing a gangster in movies is to really believe that the character you are playing is doing no wrong.”

In one of Cochran’s final noir films, The Beat Generation (1959), he stars as Dave Cullman, a womanizer cop searching for a rapist known as “The Aspirin Kid.” Eventually, Steve got the opportunity to return to work on the big screen thanks to Ida Lupino. The multitalented actress-director-producer offered Steve a role in Portrait of a Cop (later retitled Private Hell 36), a crime noir she had written in collaboration with Collier Young, her former husband and still a partner in their production company Filmakers. Steve found the story’s outline about two police detectives who become greedy when they uncover stolen loot intriguing and accepted the offer even though the script was still a work in progress. With Steve aboard, Lupino finalized the rest of the cast, which included her current husband Howard Duff, Dean Jagger, and Dorothy Malone, but she was still searching for a director.

Once again Steve played a bad guy, crooked cop Cal Bruner, and in an interview on set, Steve complained that most of the offers he received typecast him as the villain and he wanted to branch out. “I just don’t care to play heavies anymore,” he said. “I tell them to go find another actor. For years Hollywood offered me heavy roles and nothing else. I don’t work as much now but I make just as much money and I’m a lot happier.” He started to get pickier. “That’s the way I like it,” he said, adding: “I’ll take the picture industry a la carte. Instead of getting salad and soup, I’ll pick the red meat. I may be wrong, but I’ll do pictures I believe in and pass up the junk. If there are any mistakes made, they’ll be mine.” Of his passionate love scenes with Ida Lupino he said, “Wouldn’t you know she’d bar Howard from the set while we were romancing! But when he was pitching woo to Dorothy Malone, Ida was right there watching. Tell you what I’d like to do—I want to direct.”

Although Filmakers Productions invested in a $100,000 national advertising campaign, Private Hell 36 opened to mixed reviews, with the critic for Variety finding it to be “good” but “occasionally slow-paced,” while The New York Herald Tribune hailed it as “a good noir melodrama.” Steve’s performance was appreciated by many reviewers but, without the support of a major studio release, the independently distributed film suffered in the waning market. In 1958, four years after its initial release, Private Hell 36 was rereleased with a new, misleading title: Baby Face Killer. The picture was low budget but full of twists and is well worth rediscovering. Steve’s depiction of the corrupt cop was very convincing and proved his acting ability once again. The extensive racetrack scenes in the film were shot at Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood, California. The interiors of real bars and shops were used so that the actors could walk out into actual streets within the same scene. The film starts with a pre-credit sequence in an early modernist foreshadowing of the action teaser before it became commonplace on television series of the sixties.

Off the set, Steve’s volatile private life became a hot topic for the British tabloids. First he had a heated affair with Kay Kendall that ended just a few weeks before the actress married Rex Harrison. Kendall found Steve sexy and funny, with a wonderfully “raffish sense of humor.” Kendall’s biographer reported an anecdote from Harrison’s good friend Roy Moseley, who visited Cochran at his Mayfair flat and found him playing a trombone. “Down the stairs came Kay, also playing a trombone,” wrote the biographer. “‘What do you think of my latest conquest?’ she asked a startled Moseley.” “Cochran played around, and she loved it,” recalled Moseley. “She was no prude, she loved his kind of jokes and sexual innuendo.” But Kendall favored Harrison over Steve and the tryst was soon over.

Through Joe Matthews, owner of Matthews News and Photo Agency, Steve met a curvy blonde glamor model and starlet known as Sabrina (real name Norma Ann Sykes), whose popularity was at its peak as she was appearing in the BBC television show Before Your Very Eyes. Steve was asked to escort her to the London gala premiere of To Hell and Back (1955). From that night on Sabrina and Steve were inseparable and were followed constantly by reporters who photographed them across town in fancy restaurants and nightclubs. They would often move from one club to another, playing out their stormy relationship to the legions of flashing cameras. Sabrina arrived in Los Angeles in March 1958 for a four-day visit and Steve met her at the airport. There were talks of the two working together in the film The Hood, but nothing ever materialized.

She kept denying rumors of romance as Steve had already been married twice, but Sabrina promised Steve she’d come for a longer stay the following fall on her way back from a planned tour of Australia. The two met a few times after that but eventually their relationship fizzled out. Meanwhile, Steve had teamed up with a group of Hollywood actors including Rory Calhoun, Rad Fulton, Michael Landon, and John Smith in the All Stars boxing team at Beverly Hilton Hotel, competing against professional boxers to raise funds for Thalians, a charity set up by Hollywood actors three years earlier and dedicated to mental health causes. That spring Steve guest-starred in “Debt of Gratitude,” an episode of the American western anthology television series Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre. Unusually for him, he played the part of a good sheriff whose justice is obstructed when he has to arrest a popular outlaw played by James Whitmore.

"Steve Cochran was the sexiest man I have ever known, he was the rough-hewn, sexy, perennial movie tough guy." —Mamie Van Doren

During the filming of The Beat Generation, Steve developed a very negative opinion of the so-called Beat Generation (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc), which he was only too happy to share. “They aren’t anything except deadbeat bums,” Steve said. “They shirk work and responsibility under the guise of what they think is some kind of an intellectual cult. They’re phony. They’re about as intellectual as they looked.” He explained that his ideas were based on the type of characters he met when he lived at North Beach in San Francisco as a struggling young stage actor. “They were artistic phonies and hangers-on and everyone knew them then as deadbeat bums. Today they insist they’re intellectuals but they are deadbeat bums as far as I’m concerned.”

For his role Steve drew his top salary to date—$75,000—while Mamie Van Doren earned $20,000 for just four days’ work. As his relationship with Barbara Payton had fizzled out, Steve didn’t waste any time in pursuing Mamie Van Doren, who was fourteen years his junior. Later she revealed that Steve had been one of her favorite actors when she was a teenager, so it was like an “animal attraction” when they met on the set for the first time. Mamie gave out spicy details about what she insisted was always a sexual liaison rather than a love story and admitted that this was what she needed at the time. Ironically, considering his perpetual roving eye, Mamie said she liked his loyalty. “I don’t like a girl who goes after another girl’s fellow. Or the fellows who let them,” she said. “That’s one thing I used to like about dating Steve Cochran. When Steve took you to a party and some other girl made a pass at him, he’d say, ‘Get lost, I’m with Mamie.’ When he’s with YOU, he’s with YOU. I must say I sure dig that.”

One person who did try and prise Mamie away from Steve was Cary Grant, who made frequent visits to the set between takes of the Hitchcock-directed North by Northwest (1959), which he was filming at the time. Grant was a fervent admirer of Van Doren, but she refused his advances, preferring to focus on Steve. While he was filming, Sabrina, who was en route to Australia with her own revue, showed up as a visitor at the MGM studios, where she was presented with a gold key to the studio. Steve introduced her to Zugsmith, who was interested in having her as the star opposite Steve in his next film The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960), but the roles were eventually assigned to Martin Milner and Mamie Van Doren. By Thanksgiving 1958, the shooting of The Beat Generation was over, as was the affair between Steve and Mamie Van Doren.

However, they were reunited when Zugsmith recast them in his new film The Big Operator (1959), a gangland story inspired by corrupt union boss Jimmy Hoffa (played by Mickey Rooney). “Steve and I started dating again,” Mamie said. “But it was short-lived. He was an exciting man in bed, partly because of the sense of impending danger he exuded. But I’ve never been good at a relationship the second time around.” In the meantime Steve appeared in the first episode of a new TV series called Bus Stop on the ABC-TV network. The program was adapted from William Inge’s play Bus Stop (which had been made into a successful 1956 film starring Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray).

The first episode “Afternoon of a Cowboy,” in which Steve was the guest star, was written by New York writer Sally Benson, author of the short story collections Junior Miss and Meet Me in St. Louis, which were later adapted into two successful films. Steve’s episode aired on October 1, 1961, and received excellent reviews from the Los Angeles Times, which called it “the most moving and memorable hour the networks have given us thus far in the new season. Superbly written and ably directed. Steve Cochran was marvelous as the sluggish, driven cowboy.” This was echoed by The Hollywood Reporter: “Steve Cochran gives a memorable performance… if producer Robert Blees matches the quality of this opener on future segments, there’ll be plenty of consideration when Emmytime rolls around.” It was not to be, as Bus Stop was canceled after twenty-six episodes—not for poor ratings but for the explicit violence of one episode that was so highly controversial it attracted negative comments from politicians in Washington and twenty-five ABC affiliates refused to air it.

Some rumors persisted that Steve was feuding with his costar Merle Oberon because she was obsessed with getting more close-ups than him. He confirmed the troubles on the set of Love and Desire in a funny postcard he sent to Hollywood columnist Mike Connolly writing: “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here instead of me!” Yet, according to Richard Rush, Steve and Oberon got on perfectly fine on the set and there was no sign of rivalry. In fact, the two were involved in a short but intense sexual affair that left Oberon with a sense of attachment to Steve for the rest of her life. Love and Desire was shelved for over a year and a half until summer 1963, when it was sold to Twentieth Century-Fox for $1 million. According to Oberon’s biographer, the actress saw Steve “at previews and the premiere of the film in Hollywood, however his behavior became more elusive and erratic….” He wasn’t the Steve she had known: “Several people got the impression that he was being marked down by some unknown enemy. There was even a gossip that somebody in love with Merle Oberon was jealous of him, a rumor that persisted into 1980s.”

The New York Times’ critic Bosley Crowther didn’t hold back, labeling the film “garish” and the script “embarrassing,” adding: “What you will see in this picture is a sadly worn Merle Oberon playing a coy, bright-eyed, come-hither, race-you-across-the-swimming pool coquette to a hairy-chested Steve Cochran, who acts as though he thinks he’s Bobby Darin.” Steve let the criticism roll off him. He had never particularly cared about critics and reviews, paying almost no attention to them. Oberon, however, was so offended she sent the critic an angry telegram. Crowther met the actress at a party afterward and expressed his shock, saying that he was sure Oberon did not mean it because all professionals had to take bad reviews. Oberon didn’t agree and attacked him verbally until he was forced to leave the room.

As the shooting of Tell Me in the Sunlight kept being postponed, Steve made a few TV appearances including The Dick Powell Theatre, Route 66, and the two Western series The Virginian and Stoney Burke. It seemed that whenever TV producers had a villainous guest role to fill, Steve sprang to mind. Ironically, however, he refused roles in popular shows including Mr. Lucky, Philip Marlowe, Peter Gunn, Mike Hammer, and Cain’s Hundred. “It’s this way with me,” he said. “Some actors take on a series and find out too late that playing the same role week after week is tearing their insides out, I know without even trying that I couldn’t stand it for even one season.” He had also rejected most of the heavy roles offered to him. “This past year I’ve turned down five heavy guestings,” he said.

Finally in May 1963, without notifying the press, Steve took off for the Bahamas, where he produced, directed, and acted in Tell Me in the Sunlight. Six weeks later he returned to California to edit the film but realized that it was unwatchable. A Costa Rican woman, whom he had cast as the leading lady because she looked like a natural, showed all her inexperience on camera. Steve needed to reshoot the film with a new actress and began looking for a new cast. In the meantime, singer, actor, and activist Harry Belafonte invited him to participate in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, along with other actors including Frank Silvera, James Garner, Marlon Brando, Anthony Franciosa, and Rita Moreno. Steve was thrilled to be a part of the antiracist protest, which would go down in history.

According to close friend Bruce Pennington, Steve never looked after his health. Steve knew he had a heart condition (he was dismissed from the army for a heart murmur) but had never done anything about it. In fact, not only had he ignored it, he had punished his body with excessive drinking and smoking. He had tried to cut back on cigarettes but never on alcohol. When he returned from Africa in the middle of September, he closed Robert Alexander Productions (probably due to debt) and formed a new production corporation under the name Britannia Films Ltd. The first move for the new organization was the purchase of Tell Me in the Sunlight, which Steve planned to release under the Britannia banner, yet he was struggling to find a distributor. Nobody seemed interested. While Tell Me in the Sunlight’s postproduction was about to be completed, Steve ran into trouble.

On an eight-day sailing trip from Acapulco down the Pacific Coast to Costa Rica, where the picture was to be filmed on location. Cochran and his crew set sail on June 5, 1965. It would be his last adventure. Three weeks later, on June 26, 1965, the actor’s 40-foot schooner was towed into the Guatemala port of Champerico. On board there were three women – and the dead body of Steve Cochran. Officials later determined that Cochran had fallen ill from a paralyzing lung ailment during the voyage and died 10 days after departing from Acapulco. For nearly two weeks, the women drifted helplessly in the schooner before being rescued in Guatemala. Allegedly his last whispered words were, “Head east, you will hit land.” Then he let out a deep sigh, opened his eyes for the last time and shortly after 5:00 a.m. on June 15, 1965, Steve passed away at the age of forty-eight. The Hollywood community was stunned by Cochran’s strange and sudden death.

But his estranged wife, Jonna Jensen (who lived in San Francisco), wasted no time in laying claim to his money. Just four days after the actor’s body was discovered, Jensen filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court for letters of administration over his estate, estimated to be worth $150,000. Jensen had filed for divorce from Cochran in October 1964, but the case was never finalized, meaning that despite the protests of Cochran’s mother, Jensen inherited his entire estate. Cochran’s body was flown to San Francisco and buried next to his father, near the ocean in Monterey. His reputation was so tarnished that an old friend saw the need to defend his standing in an article in the Van Nuys News. Published two weeks after his death, actress and columnist Jeanne Markham Keating characterized Cochran as a kind and extremely good-looking man who was sadly a target for “numerous kooks who seemed to spot an easy mark.”

Today, Steve Cochran’s legacy as an actor has faded from collective cultural memory, becoming merely a cross-reference in news articles, cinema books, or an icon to fans of film noir. His performances are often overlooked, or dismissed by film historians and critics as simply fulfilling the cliché of the “bad boy” of classic gangster B movies. Although Steve Cochran was typed as the heavy throughout his career, he nonetheless demonstrated in numerous movies that he had a genuine talent, and he will be remembered for his unforgettable portrayals in films such as White Heat, Storm Warning, The Chase or I, Mobster. Despite his brushes with the law, Cochran seemed to be a rebel adventurer and more nonchalant than problematic, and while his acting career appeared to be waning at the time of his death, he was just starting in a new direction as a director and producer. Because of these realities, his premature end is that much more tragic.

Major stardom always eluded him, although it is thought by some film historians that Steve Cochran could have been as big as Bogart or Cagney if the right role had come along. Paul Auster included a digression concerning Steve Cochran’s life and his tragic fate in his novel Sunset Park (2010). He appears as the possible former lover of the actress mother of the book’s main character. Steve Cochran would be pleased that after his short and eventful life, his legacy lives on, decades after his death, but he probably wanted to be remembered for his films rather than his dramatic ending, which will always remain a Hollywood mystery. —Steve Cochran: Bad Boy of Hollywood (2026) by Michelangelo Capua

Lizabeth Scott: Noir Baritone Blonde

2026-10-04T16:52:21.717+02:00

Film historians give Lizabeth Scott a bad rap. The actress doesn’t even get a chapter in David Shipman’s Great Movie Stars series of books. Leslie Halliwell in his Filmgoer’s Companion writes of her blonde hair, defiant expression, and immobile upper lip. Eddie Muller claims that she was a polarizing figure in the movie business, under the control of Hal Wallis, despite she was on contract by Wallis only ten years. Muller calls her accent Hollywood via Scranton by way of Broadway. But he admits that Lizabeth Scott has gained a devoted cult following which grew over the years. Dan Callahan in Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman says Scott is a curious ersatz figure. She has hissing, sibilant line readings and curdled, tough girl smiles and tears. Scott can look down or into the distance for reflective moments of bruised intensity. She also fiddles with her hands and props. Her walk is that of a model since the actress was one professionally, this also means she wears clothes well. Scott cried with real tears and could be very funny tossing off barbs. She played a drunk in Easy Living, Stolen Face, and Bad For Each Other. Scott does an English accent in You Came Along, a cockney one in Stolen Face, and a southern accent in Loving You.

She was born Emma Matzo on Sept. 29, 1922, in Scranton, Pa., one of six children of Ukrainian immigrants. She attended Marywood College, but quit to move to New York City. She enrolled at the Alvienne School of Drama, got work in summer stock and modeling and started calling herself Elizabeth Scott. She had the goods: the luminous eyes and moist lips that belied a heart of stone, the slinky figure, the sculptured cheekbones, the cascading hair and husky voice suitable for torch songs or seductive close-ups. Irving Hoffman, a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter, had befriended Scott and tried to introduce her to helpful people. On September 29, 1943, Hoffman held a birthday party at the Stork Club—Scott had turned 21. By happenstance, Hal Wallis was also at the club that night. Hoffman introduced Scott to Hal Wallis, who arranged for an interview the following day. When Scott returned home, she found a telegram offering her the lead for the Boston run of The Skin of Our Teeth. Miriam Hopkins was ill. Scott recalled "On the train up to Boston, to replace Miss Hopkins, I decided I needed to make the name more of an attention-grabber. And that's when I decided to drop the 'E' from Elizabeth."

She has the same androgynous beauty of Bacall, though her physique is more emaciated. There is more than one parallel with Bacall. The actress had the husky voice and sultry but tough demeanor. She was said to be presented as the new Bacall, as Bacall was created by director Howard Hawks as his ideal woman. Scott was The Threat as Bacall was The Look. But the actress was just as much a threat to Veronica Lake, with the same side-parted hairstyle. Lake was the top star at Paramount Pictures at the time, where Wallis had his production company. But while Scott outlasted Lake, she did not have the same career longevity as Bacall. For Hal Wallis Productions the actress made You Came Along, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Desert Fury, I Walk Alone, Paid In Full, Dark City, Red Mountain, Scared Stiff, and Loving You. As she was signed to Wallis and not Paramount, Scott was contracted to appear in his films.

With rare exceptions, Lizabeth was stereotyped on the screen as the temptress who had no desire or will to change and was doomed to find a worthwhile good guy to love her only when she had already passed the point of redemption. In the 1973 essay The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Molly Haskell identifies Lizabeth Scott as “a kind of blonde Joan Crawford in the noir arena of female characters,” who wasn’t necessarily evil herself, but whose very presence seemed to invite evil. “Every time she appeared, the atmosphere became heavy, and we knew that trouble, big trouble, was ahead,” wrote Haskell. She was generally a compliant player, accepting whatever was assigned to her. This seemed to contrast with her own nature, since Scott was known to be a remarkable individualist. But even if she disliked the material, the actress would work to find something redemptive about it. Scott was no mere sexy siren, pin-up or filly with more curves than brains. She was a hard-working, well-trained career girl. Along with her talent and brains, the actress had a face and figure that dreams were made of and a personality like a ball of fire. The face was about picture perfect, chiselled nicely and had the clean cameo features that cameramen craved. The skin was like honey and the thick taffy hair matched. It tumbled in a long curving do that just fit the gal. the eyes are big and blue and the lashes and eyebrows inky black. The wide mouth was just made for a smile, and she knew how to laugh with her eyes.

The part she most loathed was Jane Palmer, the venal femme fatale in Too Late for Tears. Ironically it is considered one of her best performances. It was only once that Scott declined something - the Wallis film of The Rose Tattoo. Her withdrawal from making The Big Steal was said to be a decision made by Wallis. It would be an article in Confidential in 1955 that really impacted the actress’ career as the magazine claimed that she was a lesbian. Scott sued but the case was dismissed on a technicality. Later she would be exonerated when Confidential reporters in another court case admitted their facts had not been confirmed. The actress always denied being a lesbian. She said a vengeful wife had paid for the article to be fabricated and published, but the damage was done. The actress was independently wealthy, thanks to Wallis’ help in acquiring interest in income producing properties.

In an article in the Photoplay of June, 1956, by Gladys Hall entitled “The Poisonous Gas Of Gossip” due to the fact Stanwyck spoke about fake gossips creating feuds. During the shooting of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) Stanwyck was very ill with a cold so she didn’t feel well enough to work. But she suspected something would be made of it! Stanwyck went straight to Scott’s dressing room and explained her health issues. The star didn’t want her to get too close to Lizabeth for fear she’d catch it. So strictly in the interest of avoiding contagion, the women kept their distance from each other. But the gossips had their way with them anyhow. On an occasion, Lizabeth saw Stanwyck at Chasen’s restaurant and they hugged each other.

From the late 1950s, Scott did not need to work. She was not a recluse, still having a social life. But the actress had always been happy with her own company, locking herself into the house and not even answering the phone. She did not write a memoir, however Scott gave an extensive interview to Ronald L. Davis in 1985, and Carole Langer in 1996. Books that were helpful were James Robert Parish’s The Paramount Pretties, Karen Burroughs Hannsberry’s Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film, David Ragan’s Movie Stars of the ‘40s: A Complete Reference Guide for the Film Historian or Trivia Buff, Bert Prelutsky’s Sixty Seven Conservatives You Should Meet Before You Die, Todd Hughes’ Lunch with Lizabeth, and Bernard F. Dick’s Hal Wallis: Producers to the Stars. Also useful were profiles in Film Fan Monthly and Films Of The Golden Age.

Bogart was a colorful human being. He was a great star yet did not intimidate Scott during the shooting of Dead Reckoning. Bogart was a very charming man and kind with her. She never had any intellectual discourse with him but could see that he was extremely intelligent. Often Bogart would call her at home to ask how the actress was, but the age difference and their world views were vastly different. He was forty-six and she half his age at twenty-three. Scott was not interested in the world beyond her work. Bogart by contrast was conscious of all the things she did not care about. This included until politics and the Hollywood gears. One day he invited her to his dressing room for lunch. Bogart told the actress he would have liked anything but to be an actor. It was such a stupid thing to be and such a foolish life. Yet Bogart loved to frolic, loved partying, and loved staying out all night. Bogart had been warned Scott was temperamental, but she couldn’t have been nicer to work with. He also refuted the press’s comparisons of her to Bacall, instead stating the actress more resembled Mayo Methot.

Lizabeth found John Cromwell a good but very demanding director. Everything was too perfunctory and definitized. He had a very nice smile which made you think Cromwell was a dear sweet man but then he got officious. She had to hit her marks exactly, and not be one or two inches off, and this bothered her tremendously. The actress hadn’t thought about lighting before, only the lens. Being on her mark was less important to Scott than the emotion that had to come from within for the moment. Most people interested Scott and, when she met someone, the actress outdid a psychoanalyst in encouraging that person to talk about themselves. She was outspoken, explicit and direct and expected the same traits in everybody else. When Scott talked, she closed her eyes and used hands, sitting on the edge of a chair leaning forward, tense, as though getting ready to take off.

In May 1969, the wedding of the actress to oil executive William Lafayette Dugger, Jr. of San Antonio, Texas, was announced after a two-year engagement. She was aged forty-eight and he around the same. Scott said Dugger was a wonderfully interesting man, and she loved him very much. Dugger had a medium build, and was good-looking, with dark hair, a warm personality, and a strong handshake. Dugger planned to make a movie in Rome with Scott called “The Legend of Angel”. From the way William Dugger talked about the actress, people could tell he really loved her. Dugger had bought every copy of Scott’s songs album he could get and wanted her all to himself. Dugger didn’t want his fiancée to tour singing but to stay home. He suddenly left the room then returned with a copy of the album in his hand. He gave it to Rex Mondo, saying there was more than just lyrics. She was a misunderstood soul searching for love.

Her outward appearance was just a shield. Dugger suddenly died on August 8, 1969, following complications from an abdominal surgery. There was mystery surrounding the death. On August 21, 1964, he had signed a typed will attested by two witnesses as required by Texas Probate Code. It had left all his property to his sister Sarah Dugger Schwartz. However, approximately one year before his death, Dugger made some pen and ink changes. After his sister’s name he wrote in “and Lizabeth Scott my fiancée in equal shares.” Dugger initialled the change and had one witness sign their name. The changes were referred to as a holographic codicil. Hal Wallis died on October 5, 1986. It was said that despite his two marriages, he retained a fascination with her. Charles Higham in his memoir, In And Out Of Hollywood, writes about this. He was present the night Wallis watched one of the films he had made with the actress, repeatedly.

Other sources claim Wallis would screen the films he had made with her every night over and over. He was said to have never gotten over Scott’s sheer physical beauty, voice and charm. This did not phase Wallis’ then wife Martha Hyer. She wanted her husband to write about her instead in his 1980 autobiography. But he refused. The book Starmaker, written with Charles Higham, does mention her. However, there is nothing about their personal relationship. Martha Hyer didn’t write anything about Scott in her memoir, Finding My Way, either. In 1996, Lizabeth got a laugh when Carole Langer comments she was not the typical Hollywood actress. She replies, “Is that a compliment?” Langer answers yes and the actress thanks her. She gets another laugh when Scott says Langer has a question mixed up.

Scott claims to still be a severe introvert. Her friends of the past included Patricia Neal. She admitted to being a feminist but not a wild feminist. Scott was a feminist mostly because she had achieved what the actress always wanted to achieve. All her goals were not interfered with by any man. Scott knew she could triumph over any impediment there might be, and there was nothing that stood in her path. Until her last days, Scott got a tremendous amount of fan mail, including from young people and college students. She assumed this was because a lot of her film noirs were shown at colleges in academic cinema courses. Maybe those films depicted a contemporary look and feeling which made them so appealing.

The correspondence between Scott and Todd Hughes continued and then she invited him to lunch. This took place at the Musso & Frank Grill on February 14, 1997. When the actress suggested they order fish from the menu she grinned, and they both laughed. It seemed Scott was teasing the subject of her being a lesbian. She ordered a lamb sandwich instead. He felt they had committed to a friendship. Eddie Muller had organized a black and white portrait shoot for Los Angeles Magazine with many of the surviving noir queens. But the actress had no interest in it. The event was organized by Eddie Muller who contacted Todd Hughes, knowing he was a friend. Muller wanted Scott to be a special guest at the screening.

Lizabeth said she would do it if Muller was not in the building. Had Scott been influenced by Muller’s book Dark City: The Lost Word of Film Noir? In it he wrote how off-screen she preferred the pillow talk of other women. Muller graciously stepped aside. She arrived with her escort, casting director Marvin Paige. The theatre was packed and there was a standing ovation as Scott walked down the aisle. Fans came with memorabilia that could be signed in the lobby after the screening. Hughes volunteered to help set her up at a table and the line stretched down the lobby and around the entire periphery of the theatre. The actress was polite to the fans, but this would be her last public signing. –Lizabeth Scott: Noir Baritone Blonde (2026) by Peter Shelley

Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Dick Powell

2026-08-01T21:47:08.828+02:00

The Roaring Twenties descended on Hollywood as it became the film capital of the world, with dozens of young men and women—each dreaming of stardom—arriving daily from across America. It was an era of great affluence, as mansions were erected and stars drove around in made-to-order automobiles. It was also a time of cultural ferment and innovation in Pre-Code Hollywood. The film industry’s financial hub was still on Manhattan’s Wall Street, but its creative production center was in California. Directors could get away with almost anything—providing that their silent flickers made money. Hundreds of good-looking men came from the plains of Utah or the ports of New Jersey, hoping they would get cast in movies based on their looks alone. The women did the same, especially if they’d won a beauty contest such as Miss Indiana. Clara Bow and John Gilbert were typical of those hopefuls. Legends such as Valentino and Wallace Reid had arrived, as had Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Pola Negri. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., already wore their crowns. Studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rose out of the heap, as did Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. At the beginning, studios ruled by men such as Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner had near monopolistic control, from pre-production to release where they often controlled distribution. By 1925, 50 million Americans were going to movie houses every week. That was roughly half of the nation’s population. In poorer areas, a movie ticket cost ten cents.

A lot of people in the film industry, both male and female, have claimed that they discovered the young Clark Gable. B.P. Schulberg, a pioneer film producer and studio executive, might have made the claim himself, but he never did. However, he did cast Clark in a minor role in the silent film White Man in 1924. Schulberg was born in Connecticut in 1892. As soon as he finished his schooling, he headed west to Hollywood, where he broke into the film industry. After some success, he founded Preferred Pictures, which he built around the silent screen star Katherine MacDonald. He also hired Clara Bow, 18, giving her a three-month option. He may not have claimed Clark as a discovery, but he had found “The It Girl,” the bob-haired flapper who rose to super stardom as the late 1920s rolled on. Schulberg, as a marketing genius, dubbed Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart.” A fixture linked with Paramount, he did much to promote the film careers of such legends as Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, and the French star Maurice Chevalier. In the early 1930s, he discovered child star Shirley Temple, who became a box office champ. However, by 1950, the film industry shoved him aside. He suffered a stroke and retired to Florida, where he died at the age of 65 in 1957.

Clara Bow continued to date Clark Gable on occasion, but he grew disappointed with her when she vetoed him as her leading man in her next pictures. The first was Mantrap in 1926; the second was “It” in 1927. Producer B. P. Schulberg felt that Bow had great potential to become a major star as the Roaring Twenties moved on. He had tried to promote her as “The Brooklyn Bonfire,” but that label didn’t stick. After he read Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis, he became convinced that its film adaptation would shoot Bow into the upper ranks. He met with Victor Fleming who signed to helm the project. The movie became popular and helped make Bow a star. Its main detractor, ironically, was Sinclair Lewis himself. “I did not recognize my book from this film.” After Clark went to a movie house to see Mantrap, he discussed it with William Haines. “She let Ernest Torrence be her leading man. That’s insane. I would have been terrific in the role. Torrence might be better cast as her drunken uncle.” Producer Schulberg came up with another idea for Clara Bow that he thought would go over even bigger. “It” originated as a novel by Elinor Glyn. Schulberg was right about “It.” This star vehicle for Bow turned her into “The It Girl” of the flapper era. When asked to define “It,” she told the press, “The term is defined as the quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force.”

Within New York theatrical circles, producer Arthur Hopkins was known as “The Sphinx of Broadway” because he said little, his facial expressions indicating his approval or dislike. He earned a reputation for casting unknown actors in key roles, notably Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Spencer Tracy, and Edward G. Robinson. Clark Gable could be added to that list. Hopkins had also cast a spunky New England redhead, Katharine Hepburn, in the play These Days. Hopkins gave Clark Gable his first big break when he cast him in a minor role with 22 other actors in the Broadway play Machinal, a drama which opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on September 7, 1926. In spite of the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929, Hollywood in the upcoming 1930s entered its Golden Age. After a long and difficult climb up the Tinseltown ladder, rung by rung, Clark Gable suddenly found himself cast opposite such leading ladies as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Norma Shearer. He became so well known that a sarcastic new reprimand “Who do you think you are? Clark Gable?” swept across the country.

Clark Gable would soon be sustaining affairs with such leading ladies as Mary Astor and Marion Davies, the mistress of the immensely wealthy William Randolph Hearst. Another of his leading ladies, Helen Hayes, claimed, “There are only two actors in Hollywood that I would leave my husband for—Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.” Actors who had previously been allocated only small, sometimes uncredited roles, were becoming stars. Notable among them were Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, William Powell, and Constance Bennett. Legends were being born: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Mae West. From vaudeville emerged such stars as Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Alice Faye, and Bob Hope. Paramount was not the only studio challenging MGM. Competition was intense from Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and Columbia, too. Film historians rate 1939 as the greatest year in the history of filmmaking. In that benchmark year, Gone With the Wind would win the gold as its Best Picture. 1939 also loomed large in Clark’s book of memories. He married Carole Lombard, his third wife, defining for the world at large as “the love of my life.”

Howard Hughes wasn't too enthralled with Dick Powell's fiancé Mary Brian. “She’s a nice girl,” he told Lewis Milestone. “A nice, open, honest face. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Nice blue eyes. But she has the same emotion in every scene. Nice.” “But she’s from Texas like yourself,” Milestone said. “She’s not like any Texas broad I’ve ever met,” Hughes said before turning away. Mary Brian would re-enter Hughes’s life once again several years later, when her lover, Cary Grant, announced that he was going to marry her, angering Hughes. In later life, her career over, Brian took up painting portraits as a hobby. One of her first paintings was of Hughes, depicting him as a giant prick. She ultimately got her revenge on both Cary Grant and Hughes simply by outliving them, dying in 2002. She guarded good memories of her former suitor Dick Powell, though. Bogart had escorted Joan Blondell to the premiere of Night Nurse and later spoke about her to his best friend, actor Kenneth McKenna. “She’s my kind of broad. I like her tremendously, but I’m not in love with her. Besides, Dick Powell is always knocking on her door.”

Had casting gone differently, Clark Gable might have ruled over the kingdom of Warner Brothers instead of being crowned at MGM. Director Mervyn LeRoy had been intrigued with Clark as an actor ever since he sat through his performance in The Last Mile. LeRoy contacted him the following day and Clark agreed to shoot a screen test for the upcoming film Little Caesar. Variety had already announced that Edward G. Robinson had agreed to play the title role of the Chicago mob boss Rico Bandello, nicknamed “Little Caesar.” Glenda Farrell would star as the female lead of Olga Stassoff. She was instructed to appear in the test in tandem with Clark. After Gable completed his screen test, LeRoy set up an appointment with Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner to watch it. At the end, Zanuck gloomily predicted, “The lug will never make it… he's crude as hell.” “I hate that big-eared son of a bitch, but keep him as long as he makes money,” Louis B. Mayer told to Irving Thalberg. After his departure from MGM, Mayer was frank in his appraisal of Clark. “I couldn’t stand the son of a bitch. But he made money for the studio. MGM made $25 million when I loaned Gable to David O. Selznick for Gone With the Wind.”

Before there was a Louella Parsons, before there was a Hedda Hopper, there was Adela Rogers St. Johns. A daughter of Los Angeles born in 1894, she was a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. She is best known for her reporting about Hollywood movie stars in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was the major writer for Photoplay magazine. It is said that she fell in love with the screen image of Clark Gable when she saw his performance in The Painted Desert, a 1931 Pre-Code Western starring William Boyd. Gable phoned her two days later and asked to meet privately with her. She always wrote glowingly of him. “Clark Gable is the same man on or off the screen, which is true of only a few stars. He has a charm that no psychologist can explain. It probably is the same feeling that Eve had when she first spotted Adam in the Garden of Eden.” In a subsequent article for Liberty magazine, she referred to him as “The Great God Gable. A year ago, not a soul in Hollywood had heard of him. Today, he ranks ahead of any established favorites.” Clark and St. Johns were soon seen riding around Los Angeles in a $10,000 automobile presented to him by press baron William Randolph Hearst, the boss of St. Johns.

Once, in one of her columns, St. Johns ran a widely publicized quote from Clark: “I’m no Adonis. I’m as American as the telephone poles I used to climb to make a living. Other men see me on the screen making love to Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, or Joan Crawford. They say that if I can do it, so can they. They go home and make passionate love to their wives.” The “New Romance” referred to in the March 7, 1936 edition of Liberty was Clark Gable’s romance with Carole Lombard, “The Queen of Screwball Comedy.” The two leading gossip columnists, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons wrote extensively about it. As author E.J. Fleming said, “Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little remembered even there, but as general managers and as heads of publicity at MGM, they were the fixers of Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1920s through the 1940s.” Some secrets were relatively minor, such as Joan Crawford’s adulterous affair with Clark Gable, who was also married. Sometimes, they were more serious, such as when Wallace Beery murdered Ted Healy, the creator of The Three Stooges. When MGM executive Paul Bern was found dead in the home he shared with his newlywed wife, Jean Harlow, Strickling was the first man called. When Clark made his co-star, Loretta Young, pregnant on the set of Call of the Wild (1935), the urgent message went out: “Get Strickling on the phone and get Young out of town until she has Gable’s kid.”

When stardom finally came to Clark, it arrived fast and furious. By December of that year, his name was familiar to movie-goers across the nation. His on-screen (and sometimes off-screen) lovers included Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Fay Wray, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Greta Garbo, and Joan Blondell, among others. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was still married to Ria Langham—at least officially. At this point in his career, since Clark had been elevated to the status of leading man, the management at MGM was ferociously committed to protecting his reputation. Mayer himself, horrified at the possibility of one of his star’s public involvement in a sex scandal, began defining both Clark and Spencer Tracy as “walking time bombs.” In his bachelor days, James Stewart seduced as many beautiful women as Clark Gable himself. As he claimed, “My bachelor years were wonderful. Boy, did I have some good times.” Unlike the straitlaced Dick Powell, James Stewart was not the boy scout he seemed. Stewart’s seductions read like a Who’s Who from the golden age: Wendy Barrie, Diana Barrymore, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Mitzi Gaynor, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Jeanette MacDonald, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young.

Gable had met Stewart when they had co-starred in Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Jean Harlow. One late afternoon, he phoned Clark to ask if he’d help him out of a dilemma he had become trapped in: Confusing his calendar dates, he had invited both Harlow and Patricia Wilder on the same round of nightclub hops through Hollywood. At that point in his bachelor life, Stewart’s main interest involved seducing Harlow, so he asked Clark to escort Patricia. Clark accepted, and he and Honeychile got along fabulously. Thus began Clark’s series of occasional sexual trysts with this Georgia peach. In Manhattan, she became a “regular” during lunch at “21” with her beau of the moment. In a typical late-night spree, she could be seen at the Stork Club, Café Pierre, and El Morocco. Conde Nast would send his limousine to take her to black tie dinners where she met the elite of New York society. George Gershwin asked her to sit next to him while he was composing Porgy and Bess. She went bar hopping with columnist Walter Winchell and his pal, J. Edgar Hoover. Gable was so taken with her that he even promised to marry her, pending his divorce from Ria Langham.

After divorcing her first two husbands Honeychile married Prince Alexander zu Hohenlohe-Valdenburg Schillingfürst in 1951. After that, she became known as “Princess Honeychile.” Patricia Wilder survived a widely publicized encounter on the night of February 22, 1941 at the Café Pierre in Manhattan. Beverly Paterno—whose husband was the heir to a real estate fortune, calculated at 63 million in 1941 dollars—confronted her, slapped her face, and then peppered her with a flurry of rights and lefts. Honeychile fought back, pulling her hair and ripping her gown. Then, Paterno picked up a pitcher of water and doused Honeychile. The fight made headlines the next day. Honeychile later said, “Everyone was my friend, even Clark Gable himself, but I never fell in love. That was, not until I met my Prince Alexander. He was my dreamboat, what I had been looking for all my life and never found.” She married him in 1951. Their union lasted until his death in 1984. After that, Honeychile spent the rest of her life visiting rich friends at their estates around the world. Death came in August of 1995 when she was 81 years old.

James Quirk at Photoplay wrote an article he entitled, “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable”: “Clark meets every woman with a challenge in his eyes, a mocking grin culminating in a laughing dimple. He is an adroit opponent in a duel of the sexes. He is like a magnet that both attracts and repels.” He also defined Shearer as “a hottie who burns up the celluloid. She can simmer, seethe, and scintillate.” St. Johns later, in private, outed the affair between Gable and Shearer: “He made her hormones jump, something her husband, Thalberg, could not do.” In spite of her marriage to Thalberg, Shearer had a penchant for seducing her leading men. Gable, Shearer, and everyone else quickly realized that their sexual involvement was merely a fling, and rather brief. Shearer’s pattern of seduction had begun with John Gilbert during their filming of The Wolf Man (1924), continuing with Lew Cody in A State of Fashion (1925) and John Pickford (the brother of Mary Pickford) in Waking Up the Town (also 1925). By 1928, she moved in on Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance, followed by Ralph Forbes in The Actress (1929). She seduced Robert Montgomery when they made The Divorcée in 1930.

Shearer was reunited with Gable when they co-starred once again in Strange Interlude (1932). However, by then her romantic radar was focused on the film’s third male lead, Alexander Kirkwood. Burgess Meredith seduced her when they co-starred in Idiot’s Delight (1939). She also sustained affairs with Howard Hughes, James Stewart, David Niven, and director Victor Fleming. Author Gavin Lambert summed up Shearer: “She was the personification of elegance. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, she was the most versatile actress at the most opulent studio in Hollywood. Without ever appearing on stage, she inherited the great Broadway roles of Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, and Gertrude Lawrence.” Norma Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg, asked her why she wanted Clark Gable as her co-star. “He’s nothing but a big-eared mug with bad teeth.” Although Shearer and Clark would spark the screen together again, she almost became his co-star in Gone With the Wind (1939), when she was offered the role of Scarlett O’Hara against his Rhett Butler. She rejected the proposal after she received a ton of mail from fans who protested her playing Scarlett.

Most of the letters maintained that Shearer was far too sophisticated and refined to play a Southern dame like Scarlett. As Buddy Segal, president of her fan club in New York wrote, “our beloved Norma could never play a woman born in Georgia.” Shearer also rejected the title role in Mrs. Miniver (1942), an assignment that was eventually awarded to Greer Garson. Perhaps even more ironic, before its filming began in 1949, director Billy Wilder offered Shearer the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Although she rejected the role, he adopted her first name (Norma) as the moniker for the faded (and homicidally demented) grand diva of silent films. Shearer later issued her own appraisal of Clark: “He was beautiful from head to feet. He was rhythmic, unconsciously alive with a powerful grace, like a jungle animal.” Gable first met Stanwyck and Blondell in Night Nurse. “When Babs (Stanwyck) and I first saw Clark Gable walk onto the set, we both had to sit down to control our fluttering hearts,” claimed Joan Blondell to a friend of Darwin Porter. She’d been cast as the film’s third lead, Nurse Maloney, Stanwyck’s gum-chewing, wise-cracking roommate. As Blondell remembered it years later, “Babs salivated over Gable, but I was the one who got him. Maybe he preferred blondes. I don’t know.”

Born in 1906 to a vaudeville family in Manhattan, Blondell had become famous in Pre-Code Hollywood working for Warner Brothers. She often portrayed wisecracking, sexy characters over the course of forty/fifty years. She and the also blonde, also wise-cracking Glenda Farrell starred in nine films together. Blondell became one of the well paid actresses in Hollywood during the Depression. James Cagney was one of her early co-stars in such movies as The Public Enemy (1931). “For the rest of my life, wherever I went, I was always asked the same question: “What was Cagney really like?” In the 1930s, she had an affair with Bing Crosby and much later, with George C. Scott. He said, “For me, at least, the sexiest woman on the screen was Joan Blondell and I've bedded Ava Gardner.” “I had a brief fling with Clark Gable,” Blondell admitted to author Darwin Porter during the course of a weekend she spent at his home. “Any dame would be a fool, or perhaps a lesbian, if she turned down Gable.”

Stridently, Mayer once told Crawford, “Families go to movies, and I’m not going to put any actor or actress on the screen who isn’t a fit subject for father, mother, and their kids to watch. The only exception to my mandate is casting pictures with you and Clark Gable as the stars. For you two, perhaps we should put up a sign in front saying ‘Adult Entertainment.’” Mayer also told his secretary, Ida Koverman, “My greatest desire is that one day in the future, I will be able to summon Crawford and Gable to my office. There, I’ll order both of them to get off the MGM lot within the hour. Once they go through those gates, they are never to return. That will be the day when I will see the last of those two.” When Irving Thalberg learned that rumors about Crawford’s abortion of Clark’s child were sweeping through Hollywood, he summoned both of them into his office. Then he delivered a stern ultimatum: If they didn’t end their affair, Mayer would probably have them fired. Crawford was sent on a month-long press and PR tour of Europe with her alienated husband, with a special emphasis on London. There, they booked into different suites at the same hotel, where he was rumored to have engaged in seductions of three other women. Shortly after they returned to Hollywood, she filed for divorce.

To promote Marion Davies as a film star, William Randolph Hearst had founded Cosmopolitan Pictures, with links to MGM. By 1924, Davies was the number one box office attraction in America, at least temporarily. At the time, she’d already starred in two “big hit” silent movies: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), and Little Old New York (1923). Hearst invested $7 million to promote her career, the equivalent of $145 million in today’s currency. Over a 20-year period, Davies appeared in 40 feature films. During Hearst’s long affair with Davies, he remained married to Millicent Veronica Willson, born in New York in 1882. She had been a vaudeville performer whom Hearst had been attracted to, marrying her in 1903. When his affair with Davies began, she refused to give him a divorce. She died in 1974 at the age of 92. She had remained close to their five sons for all her life. In California, Hearst erected the legendary castle, San Simeon, north of Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The sprawling estate was filled with Greek statues and celestial suites at which Hearst and Davies entertained not only the elite of Hollywood, but major figures in politics, science, and the arts.

Davies became known for her sense of humor. When Albert Einstein came to visit, she asked him, “Why don’t you get a haircut? I’ll lend you the money.” President Calvin Coolidge, a teetotaler, was also an honored guest. She served him a vintage Tokay wine from their cellar, telling him it was a luscious non-alcoholic fruit drink. He liked it so much he asked for another glass and another glass, pronouncing it “the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had.” Marion Davies was famous for her stutter, and many of her film scenes had to be reshot. She often said words such as “v-v—very” and “s-s-short.” There had been an earlier version of Polly of the Circus, a silent version starring Mae Marsh released in 1917. Re-releasing it in 1932 with a different set of stars (Marion Davies and Clark Gable) “seemed like a good and wholesome idea at the time.” As the means to getting it made as a starring vehicle for his inamorata, Hearst established and funded an all-new studio, Cosmopolitan Pictures.

Hedda Hopper: "I had a hunch that some shenanigans put Dick Powell off Marion's company as much as her long romance with WR Hearst. Although I wasn't exactly bosom buddies with Powell, due to his allegiance to Louella, I knew enough about him through Marion's confidences. She talked of him in very lofty terms, saying he was an old-fashioned gentleman and a sweet young actor. I think they had a flickering, secret relationship that lasted until 1935; one of those hurried romances that Marion was so fond of having like her champagne parties." Dick Powell, who played Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother who woos Dixie American Marion Davies in the musical Hearts Divided (1936), would recount his experiences on the set to Tony Thomas. Powell recalled that William R Hearst would not allow Marion to perform unless he was on the set. Usually the mogul would be accompanied by three bulky associates, who said nothing but looked about with great intentness. "Those love scenes," Powell remembered, "were sheer torture. If I didn't make them look real, the director Frank Borzage would never use me again. If I made them too real, I was sure I was going to get a bullet in the back. Marion was doing her part in the long kissing closeups, but I was damn near choking to death. That picture lasted ten weeks, and I thought I'd die before I got out. I was still shaking months afterwards."

In a private screening room at MGM, Davies had ordered film clips of some of the leading men being considered as her co-star. Clark appeared on the screen in an episode from his recent A Free Soul (1931) in which he seduces Norma Shearer. After watching it, Marion announced to Irving Thalberg, “That brute Gable is not right for my movie. He’d be better cast as a boxer, a gangster. I don’t want him to appear in a picture with me. The part calls for a society man. Gable would not look right in a tuxedo with tails. He looks like Jack Dempsey, a little dumb but muscled.” To her astonishment, when the lights went on, Thalberg made her aware that Clark was sitting nearby, as he had requested the lead in Five and Ten. She looked back at him as he was making his way to the exit, having heard her review of him. After Polly of the Circus wrapped, Clark became part of Davies’ inner circle of star-studded friends. He often drove to San Simeon, which lay midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on weekends. And he was invited to the parties she hosted at the 118-room beach house at Santa Monica.

Over the years, Davies’ reputation has been trivialized, maligned even though Orson Welles claimed she was not the inspiration for Susan Alexander, the mogul’s mistress in Citizen Kane (1941). That film character—an untalented, gold-digging, dim-witted floozie, is familiar to film devotees of Citizen Kane. She was a woman of wit and charm, who captivated the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the King of Siam. When Louis B. Mayer exited from a private screening of Citizen Kane, he was in tears. He tried to buy the negative so he could destroy it. Davies was devastated by what she felt was her caricature. Hearst advised her, “Ignore the clamor. Go on with your life and hold your head up proudly. Continue to entertain your coterie of friends and admirers. Living well and thriving is the best revenge over the “screeching hyenas.” Conceived as an acting vehicle for Marion Davies, whose career was financially supported by her very wealthy lover, press baron William Randolph Hearst, Cain and Mabel (1936) was a reincarnation of an earlier silent film, The Great White Way (1924). Produced by Hearst’s production company, Cosmopolitan, it had co-starred Anita Stewart and Oscar Shaw. In its recycled 1936 version, Davies opens the film—as produced by Warner Brothers—as a waitress and ends up, before the final reel, as Mabel O’Dare, a Broadway star. Production was delayed over confusion associated with who would be her leading man. Although Dick Powell was the original choice for the male lead, Hearst learned that Davies (his protégée and mistress) had developed a powerful attraction for him. As such, Powell was booted from the picture. —Clark Gable, The King of Hollywood (2025) by Darwin Porter and Hollywood Greats of the Golden Years: The Late Stars of the 1920s Through the 1950s by J. G. Ellrod

"Obsession" (2026) is a Gen Z horror hit

2026-08-01T02:57:38.745+02:00

“Obsession” hasn’t earned a classic status: When it comes to movies, people will buy into a marketing narrative just to experience it themselves, but that alone isn’t enough to call a movie an all-timer. If box office returns and cultivated hype automatically constituted a place in the pantheon of great films, Curry Barker’s runaway horror hit “Obsession” would deserve to be called a new classic — but they don’t, and “Obsession” doesn’t. Though that hasn’t stopped audiences and critics from making constant comparisons between “The Exorcist” and “Obsession.” As of this week, the film has surpassed “The Exorcist” in worldwide box-office gross (before inflation). Some cinephiles tout the film as a modern classic, measured against the standard “The Exorcist” set, and more formal writing draws worthy comparisons between Linda Blair’s unforgettable performance and newcomer Inde Navarrette’s work in “Obsession.” But all of these praises are missing a key point in determining which movies can be deemed true classics, something that “Obsession” never quite manifests: a sharp yet unexpected correlation between the film and the world it’s released into.

Barker’s film, about Bear (Michael Johnston) who makes a wish on a cheap novelty toy for his crush, Nikki (Navarrette), to fall in love with him, has occasional flashes of shrewdness. A product of the YouTube generation, Barker has an innate understanding of how technology affects our modern mores. This knowledge supplies his screenplay with a sturdy base on which he crafts his story of parasocial fixation and all its consequences. But just because a movie is relevant doesn’t mean it’s eternal. “Obsession” is a pulpy, prodigious summer hit that checks boxes without posing any new questions. It’s a film that observes without commenting. And it’s that lack of curiosity for the world it exists in that will ultimately keep “Obsession” from competing with the true classics. It’s fair to say that “The Exorcist” is not just a horror classic, but an all-time classic in the history of cinema.

And if you look at other films that share that distinguished stature —“Citizen Kane,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Social Network,” “Rear Window,” to name a few— it becomes somewhat easier to find the cultural throughline they all share, that irresistibly magnetic aspect that makes them classics. “Citizen Kane” posited that all media moguls are driven by a lust for power that stems from an irreparable brokenness. “The Wizard of Oz” reminded viewers of the necessity for imagination and metaphor at the end of the Great Depression and dawn of a new war. “The Social Network” prophesied a new era of digital media pollution at the hands of an antisocial egomaniac, updating “Citizen Kane” for the world’s next tectonic shift. “Obsession,” on the other hand, wags its finger at projecting a fantasy onto your crush. Doesn’t exactly measure up to the enormity of the classics, does it? “Obsession” is a classic for the digital era, which is to say, a movie whose “classic” status is as ephemeral as any internet trend.

“Obsession” wags its finger at projecting a fantasy onto your crush. Doesn’t exactly measure up to the enormity of the classics, does it? It boasts two great lead performances, and its shoestring budget makes the entire production all the more impressive. But clever craftsmanship and a talented team aren’t enough to call something timeless. Barker’s screenplay is sorely lacking the imagination and ambition needed to stake its place among the true classics, horror or otherwise. Throughout the film, as Bear witnesses the violent repercussions of his tossed-off love wish, Barker continually gestures at the story’s significance. It’s not enough for a film to explain its meaning; it must also say something about that message and its broader significance to stare down the “classic” label. “Obsession” never manages to say anything that hasn’t been said in five more interesting ways by other recent films, several of which were released this year.

I found “Obsession” to be somewhat misogynistic in its execution, but I don’t think its popularity is a bad thing at all. But popularity isn’t enough to define a classic. And though a film’s contextual significance is an important part of determining what is and isn’t a timeless movie, applicability isn’t everything, either. The fact is, only time can cement a true classic. For all its immortal ideas and all those outsized news reports of people fainting, “The Exorcist” could’ve faded from memory if so much of what came after didn’t prove to be a cheap imitation. Perhaps the same will be true with “Obsession”; Curry Barker’s copycats will try and fail to interpret the trials of dating when personality is a facade, and I’ll be left eating crow. But judging by Barker’s shallow screenplay, I doubt that it will be too long before someone digs deeper, striking an unassailable, solid-gold classic. Source: salon.com

The Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan

2026-07-26T04:52:23.321+02:00

Christopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal presided over by capricious deities. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives. This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. It has gasp-inducing landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness. He is the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek king Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always mysteriously masked in a Batman-type helmet. Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife whom he is about to leave and whom he advises to remarry if he dies in battle, that the notional cause for the imminent war with Troy – the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with Trojan prince Paris – is a pretext.

It is actually a commercial contest for trading routes. How clever it was for Nolan to use the sacking of Troy to talk about standards of fairness, and the violation of those standards. The idea that what happened at Troy was so horrible that something was broken in the world. That this was such a moral transgression which provoked almost ontological ramifications seen in our modern society. It's a message that is both very timeless, but also very timely. I remember when the 'villains' of the day were John McCain and Mitt Romney, and I'm certain that if you told the majority of Republicans circa 2012 what would be happening today they would be legitimately horrified.

It feels like the world has become so much more insane, that people have become more irrational. Few people seem to have hope anymore and because of that they've decided they're going to do their small part to make the world a worse place. Nolan recreates the Trojan horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. My biggest takeaway on The Odyssey (and as with great art, I'm sure I'll have different takeaways on subsequent viewings): Civilization will rise again (hopefully). Our mistakes will be forgotten despite our intense regret. Individual humans can be redeemed, but humanity and its civilizations will continue to make the same mistakes. We will continue to destroy our fragile bonds, to open Pandora's Box, to become destroyers of worlds. But we will go on, sailing into the unknown West forever. Source: theguardian.com

Do What You Fear Most: The History of The Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger

2026-06-24T06:59:41.792+02:00

In November 1969, America’s greatest rock’n’roll band played at a converted pizza shop, the Matrix, in San Francisco. The audience numbered from thirty to 100 in size, 100 being the small club’s maximum capacity. The Velvet Underground were in label limbo; they had made their last record for Verve/MGM but were not yet signed to Atlantic/Cotillion. Unlike The Beatles, where every session has been completely documented, it was difficult to find concrete information about the making of their records, who played what, who engineered and mixed, etc. There were a couple of momentous decisions that Lou Reed made in the band’s short career. The first: parting ways with Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The Warhol-Velvets association had been quite good for both, but it soon became something of a negative circus that took the focus away from the band and their music. More than half a century later, the cult of The Velvet Underground continues to build and build. They are the granite support of the independent rock foundation. Thirty years ago, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Twenty years ago, their first album was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. According to Lou Reed, many powerful figures that control our society: "They’ll be the death of everyone," he warned us. As a lifeline, there’s rock’n’roll.

To dance to, to make everything all right. But for Lou, it wasn’t enough just to listen and dance. He had to make a different type of rock music. ‘Rock & Roll’, like everything The Velvet Underground recorded, wouldn’t be a hit record. But the group he co-founded and led would transform rock’n’roll just as much as it had transformed him, helping to save countless numbers of other lives along the way. Lou Reed personally soaked the rock’n’roll explosion up, maybe more avidly than anyone in his musical crowd. “The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock-and-roll records,” he wrote in late 1966 in Aspen, his tone rising to a manifesto. “Everybody knew that it’s the music that keep us all intact,” he continued. “It’s the music that keep us from going crazy. We all made love to the music. And the word love was used in all that music. Over used, again and again, because that’s where it was at.” Although Reed studied classical piano for a few years as a child, by high school rock’n’roll was his focus, and guitar his instrument. He began to play in groups like The Shades, and made then his first attempts at songwriting. Rock’n’roll would be his ticket out of Freeport into an entirely different social sphere.

Stressed his good friend and high school bandmate Allan Hyman in an unpublished 2022 interview with filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, “All of this nonsense about Lou's parents wanting to give him electroshock therapy so that they would in effect prevent him from being gay, it’s all bullshit. In those days, that was a treatment for depression. They were concerned that he was so overwhelmingly depressed that that was like a last resort thing to do. They were too smart to think that electroshock therapy would be sufficient. That was crazy.” The problems between Reed and his parents, and particularly his father, however, can’t be entirely dismissed as the usual family tensions during adolescence. “Lou’s father was really a scary person,” said Victor Bockris. “I talked to him on the phone a couple of times. He scared me by just using certain words. There was something about him that would scare you.” Robert Quine, a major Velvet Underground fan who first met Lou in 1969, told Bockris “we were walking in the Village and bumped into Lou’s parents. Lou started to shake and went completely pale, and lost his power completely.” Reed would allude to the shock treatment in the first line of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s closing track, ‘European Son’– perhaps a veiled reference to his parents killing their European son. Off stage Reed found some fellow bohemians to hang out with, but one in particular served as a reminder that eccentricity could teeter on mental illness. As a sophomore, his roommate was Lincoln Swados–leaving Syracuse after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

When The Velvet Underground were still in operation, Lou’s ex-roommate played a more indirect part in Reed’s life; he met his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, in the late sixties while visiting Swados at Creedmore hospital. In Syracuse, the Lonely Woman Quarterly’s illustrations were drawn by Lou’s longtime girlfriend Shelley Albin, to whom he wrote daily letters when she returned to Chicago during summer break in 1962. Some featured short stories, most notably ‘The Gift’, a macabre tale of a young man who mails himself to his girlfriend, only to meet a gruesome end on the other side. Five years later, it was the basis of a Velvet Underground song of the same name on White Light/White Heat. Albin inspired some other songs he began writing around this time. The doo-wop-flavoured ‘I Found a Reason’ eventually surfaced on Loaded; the more emotionally complex ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, a highlight of their third LP in 1969, was also kindled by their romantic relationship, and essentially finished by 1965 at the latest demo. Inasmuch as anyone as wilful as Lou could have a mentor, he found one in poet and author Delmore Schwartz, whose career was in a tailspin of depression and alcoholism. He’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at one point in the late fifties, and though he’d managed to gain a teaching position at Syracuse, even that might have been a comedown as he’d formerly taught at the more prestigious Harvard University. In June 1964, Reed graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Lou nonetheless admired Schwartz a great deal, going as far as to praise him as “my spiritual godfather” in a letter to him shortly after graduation. When Schwartz held court with Lou and other students at the Orange Bar just off campus in the early sixties, he likely wouldn’t have advised Reed to follow the path the youngster chose. Delmore didn’t know or care about rock’n’roll. He did make a point of promising to haunt Reed from his grave if Lou ever sold out. And Reed never sold out when he led The Velvet Underground between 1965 and 1970, nor there were any appreciable musical compromises in his solo career. Reed’s skills as a fingerpicking acoustic folk guitarist are surprisingly accomplished on his 1963–64 tape recordings – not an ability he’s been usually noted for, nor one that surfaces much in his Velvet Underground or post-VU work. In the May 1974 Circus, he huffed, “I’ve never seen Dylan except in the old days, and that was enough.”

In 1975, he slagged Dylan in the Dutch magazine Oor as a “Woody Guthrie impersonator. He changed his name because he wanted to be someone else.” About his departure from Pickwick Records, Reed said: “I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do,” he recalled. Yet as he confirmed in his KZEM-FM interview, “In the meantime I was writing all the stuff that came out on the first Velvet Underground album.” On his Pickwick sides, whether deliberately or subconsciously, he still couldn’t help let some of his individuality seep into the singing and songwriting. This is particularly true of four tracks featuring Reed’s lead vocals: ‘Merry Go Round’ and ‘Cycle Annie’ credited to The Beachnuts; ‘You’re Driving Me Insane’ by The Roughnecks; and ‘The Ostrich’ by The Primitives. Even had there been no credits whatsoever, they’re unmistakably Lou’s. They could belong to nobody else. Nor could the streak of unhinged glee in these tunes. ‘The Ostrich’ could be considered a deliberately ironic mockery of rock’n’roll at its most vapid, along the lines of Lou's future rival Frank Zappa’s early efforts. At a time when dance craze records were on the wane in the wake of the British Invasion, a disc that urged listeners to get down on their faces and make other people step on their heads seemed to take the genre to its most ludicrous extreme.

There’s more going on here than meets the ear, however – The guitar that kicks off the track clangs like a metallic siren with an insistence that’s bordering avant-garde. It’s followed by a murky, garage rock variation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with a circular riff inspired by the hook of The Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me.’ As Cale explained in his 1998 BBC Wales interview, Reed was “very concerned about being paid $25 a week to write songs in the style of anybody they decided were fine at the time while the songs he really wanted to record would never get recorded. And in a very heroic mode I said, ‘Hell with them. Let’s go do it anyway.’” But probably John Cale is over-amplifiying his role in Lou's departure from Pickwick. Terry Phillis, producer of Pickwick recalled that "Lou sometimes brought strange looking girls to the studio, some I thought they were his girlfriends, and the ladies who worked as receptionists complained constantly, the staff was really scared by those druggy looking girls." Cale said in the December 2009 issue of Uncut, “I thought if we combined Lou’s literary side and my classical training and what I’d been doing with La Monte Young with the excitement of rock’n’roll and put the furthest reaches of these propositions together, it would take us where no one else had been and no one else was going.” It’s not known exactly when Reed’s association with Pickwick ended, but Philips confirms that “basically, Lou was disappointed, and I was disappointed with what was happening there. The bottom line of it was, I was a good guy and released him. I didn’t have to, I could have held on to his contract.” In Bob Ragona’s view, “The superiors at Pickwick didn’t recognise Lou’s talents. That’s why he left. Everybody else knew.”

As another passing notion, Reed invited another woman, Daryl Delafield (whose looks had a touch of Jean Seberg), to join the band shortly after the Elektrah Lobel experiment. Daryl is also mentioned in Cale’s autobiography, although he writes not about her musical abilities, but her engagement in simultaneous romantic affairs with both him and Reed. Daryl didn’t join the band, but might have inspired one of Lou’s most durable compositions, as in 2006, John told Uncut that ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was written about her. If so, Reed was quickly learning to pick up ideas from the odd, colourful characters he was meeting in the New York underground. As much as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey liked The Velvet Underground, they felt the group needed a new lead singer. Given Lou Reed’s subsequent fame, not to mention how well his voice and delivery fit his songs even then, it might be hard to believe they thought a change was necessary. Morrissey recalled telling Warhol, “The problem is these people have no singer. There’s a guy who sings but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him. They need someone with a bit of charisma.”

In late May 1964, Nico had her first brush with a major music icon when she and Bob Dylan had a brief affair. “My meeting with Lou Reed and John Cale was very important – perhaps especially for them,” Nico immodestly asserted in the February 1972 issue of the French magazine Rock & Folk. She was impressed by their dedication, adding in the same piece to Paul Alessandrini, “they believed very strongly in what they were doing, as if possessed by their music. They projected their entire life onto it: the drugs, the despair, the hope – because they found hope in the drugs.” Enigmatically reflecting her own attraction to the drugs that would hasten her post-Velvets downfall, she declared, “It’s when we don’t take anything that it’s the opposite.” ‘There She Goes Again’ exhibits Lou’s natural, nearly unsurpassed gift for street-tough vocal swagger as he spins almost cinema vérité-like vignettes, powered by propulsive riffs. Yet it’s not devoid of the nervy attitude at the fore on Reed’s more controversial songs, with a double entendre that could mean either physically hitting a woman or “hitting” her up with drugs. In a 1977 Penthouse interview with Mick Rock, Lou contended it reflected “just how violent America is,” adding, “I write songs I don’t agree with, or with the characters. It has to do with a movie I saw, or a character who was a certain way. Or somebody I read about in the paper, or met at a party. I put him in a song and I act him out.”

Richard Goldstein, then a rising rock journalist who’d write the first in-depth piece about the Velvets’ music later in 1966, describes The Factory crowd as “intensely sadistic and often cruel, seemingly waiting for the next suicide or overdose or whatever.” Lest The Velvet Underground be lumped in with their new friends, Goldstein made sure to add, “I didn’t find this to be true at all of the Velvets.” Even Lou Reed “didn’t seem that way to me. I didn’t see any gratuitous cruelty in him.” Edie Sedgwick might have been one of the most notorious casualties of The Factory, but she left an imprint on The Velvet Underground’s legacy when Warhol suggested Reed should write a song about her, asking if he agreed Edie was a “femme fatale.” The resulting song was a highlight of The Velvet Underground & Nico, helping to balance the band’s more ferocious and confrontational material with some much needed – albeit often overlooked – tenderness and delicacy. Lou Reed and Nico had a romantic fling which ended abruptly, after Nico delivering the devastating putdown “I cannot make love to Jews anymore” at a rehearsal.

Reed took something valuable from the relationship, however: after Nico told him “I’ll be your mirror,” he used the line as the title and inspiration for a great romantic ballad that ended up on, and helped balance, their debut album. That’s one version, at any rate. His Syracuse girlfriend Shelley Albin later contended ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ grew out of a conversation with her when she and Lou were in college. Another of Lou’s early girlfriends, Barbara Hodes elaborates, “I met Lou in the Factory, I think Lou was a bit into astrology. And a friend of his from Syracuse who became a friend of mine, filmmaker Roz Stevenson, was also into astrology. My feeling is that a lot of the songs are just conglomerates of different things and different people. I don’t think that there are that many that are only about one event or one person.” Whatever ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’s intentions and origins, there’s no doubt it held a special place in Reed’s heart, and that he even was delighted that Nico was taking the lead vocals. Asked in an interview for the May 1974 issue of Circus to name “your favorite Lou Reed song,” Lou simply replied, “I like Nico doing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’” It was one of Nico’s favorites as well, the singer telling Twen, “I can identify with that one,” finding its meaning as “to only see the beautiful, without the ugly.” Reed revealed, in the November 1987 issue of Creem, that the lead vocal was given to Nico in part because “she could sing the high chorus. That’s why, at the end of the song, you get those ‘oh-woa-woe’s.”

Tom Wilson muddied the matters when he spoke about the MGM deal almost a decade later in the January 31, 1976, issue of Melody Maker. After producing The Mothers of Invention’s debut album Freak Out!, he remembered, “We went on a cross-country tour and sold 47,000 copies. I had to sell it or lose my job. Then a few weeks later Lou Reed came by.” Michael Watts reported in the same article, “Reed bore with him a copy of his first album, which Wilson proceeded to buy for $3,000.” But Wilson certainly got some of the details wrong. As Freak Out! wasn’t released until June 27, there’s no way he could have met Reed and bought the album – presumably the Scepter session tapes – after the Mothers’ LP had sold 50,000 copies. The Velvet Underground signed with MGM nearly two months before Freak Out!’s release. As Sterling Morrison later admitted, MGM’s negligent attitude towards The Velvet Underground might have actually given them the leeway to get away with take-no-prisoners music that other labels may never have allowed. “The people at MGM didn’t even know us by name,” he told Creem in 1969. “Obscurity at MGM gave us freedom to do what we wanted to.” The Velvet Underground didn’t get along with Frank Zappa, the leader of the opening band, The Mothers of Invention. Cale later remembered Zappa putting down the headliners on stage, igniting a long-running animosity between Zappa and the Velvets. Mothers' drummer Jimmy Carl Black: “He really disliked the band. For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.”

Some members later accused MGM/Verve of pushing their debut LP back so it didn’t interfere with the promotion of the debut album by The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! In 2009, Cale told Uncut, “They said, ‘We’re not going to promote the record, the promotion money’s going to Frank Zappa. Why do you need money? You’ve got Andy and Frank needs help.’” In his April 1981 New Musical Express interview with Mary Harron, Sterling Morrison suggested “the problem was Frank Zappa and his manager, Herb Cohen. They sabotaged us in a number of ways, because they wanted to be the first with a freak release. And we were totally naive. We didn’t have a manager who would go to the record company every day and just drag the whole thing through production.” Such speculation didn’t just grow out of decades of bitter hindsight. Even in November 1968, in an interview with Open City, Lou Reed complained “our first album was released six months late… because the record company was afraid of ‘Heroin’ and, two, because the manager of the Mothers didn’t want Frank’s album to be like our first one, and theirs was coming out first… I’m not saying anything evil toward anybody, but there was panic, and ours came out six months later.” It actually came out eight months later. Such was the vitriol towards the Mothers’ leader from the Velvets’ camp that in a 1970 interview with Third Ear, Reed called Zappa “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit, pretentious academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock’n’roll, because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.”

Reed explained: “We want an audience who understands what’s going on and who has seen rock music stretch and change and grow. If what we do is confined too much to one state of mind, it won’t last. If rock is used only as a vehicle for something else, like protest, the audience turns off. But profoundness and complexity in music won’t put anyone to sleep. Our performance is approached technically and emotionally.” Sterling Morrison claimed that ‘White Light/White Heat’ was banned in San Francisco. So did Lou Reed while introducing the song at a March 1969 show in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Cale later contended that both ‘White Light/White Heat’ and ‘Here She Comes Now’ suffered radio bans. Even Doug Yule, who wouldn’t join the Velvets for another year, claimed ‘White Light/White Heat’ “was banned on every major and minor station in the whole United States in about 1968. As Lou Reed explained in a November 1968 interview with The Georgia Straight, ‘White Light/White Heat’ got banned because “they said it was a drug song. And the other side, ‘Here She Comes Now’, they said that was dirty.” In an interview with Ian Hoare of Time Out in May 1972, Reed added, “We put out ‘Here She Comes Now’ in San Francisco and they said ‘that’s about a girl coming,’ and I said ‘well, no it’s not, it’s about somebody coming into a room.’ And then I listened to the record and I realised it might be about a girl coming as a matter of fact, but then again, so what? But we were banned again…”

‘Stephanie Says’ certainly wasn’t a standard love song. An interior monologue by a mysterious woman, it offered more than its share of Reedian enigma, hinting perhaps at a globetrotter facing a tragic fate with bravery. As to why people call Stephanie Alaska in the lyric, that’s part of the enigma, though it's probable that was inspired by Nico. ‘Stephanie Says’ was hardly a sure-fire hit, but would have made for a reasonable A-side. But Verve decided – with the same inscrutable logic it brought to many of its dealings with The Velvet Underground – to leave it on the shelf. It wouldn’t be released until it was unearthed for the 1985 outtakes compilation VU. The other track from these sessions, ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’, presented the Velvets playing in the studio as a good-time, fun-loving rock’n’roll band. ‘Temptation’ is a rousing soul-rock tune with an audible debt to Motown, specifically Martha & The Vandellas, whom Reed cited among his favourite acts in his December 1966 article for Aspen. In a 2023 interview with the author, Jonathan Richman expounded upon what was unique in the Velvets’ use of volume and dynamics. “The Velvet Underground would shock you, not just with the volume of their guitars, but the cacophony of all the instruments loud a making wild overtones together,” he observed. “They would also shock you by playing kinda quietly behind the singer (Lou Reed), and then Lou or Sterling might step on fuzz boxes and the volume would triple.”

John and Lou came to blows, according to Sterling Morrison, at one of their shows at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground after Cale accidentally stepped on a distortion box and multiplied the volume of Morrison’s guitar fourfold during his solo on ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Cale then shut it off and kicked the effects box across the circular stage. It wasn’t the first time Reed and Cale had physically fought; another omen that whatever stage they shared might have been too small to hold both. It couldn’t have helped their mood when, as Susan Pile recalls, the audience “didn’t like them. I think they did one entire set of ‘Booker T.’, as if to say ‘fuck you!’” The Velvet Underground were taken far more seriously when they made their second set of appearances at Cleveland’s La Cave, drawing more than three hundred fans, though just forty-three came on the third night. The American Federation of Musicians contract for the shows made it clear Lou Reed remained their official leader, as he’s named as such in the document.

“I remember seeing Lou and the Velvet Underground at La Cave,” wrote Lou’s sister Bunny in her ‘About My Brother Lou’ essay, “when I was at college. Picture maybe twenty people in the audience. Picture not a lot of them liking it. But Lou was Lou. He couldn’t have cared less.” A particularly rabid young fan of the band, Lester Bangs, also supplied a different take in a 1971 Creem piece, writing: “My girl and I wanted to go up and say something to Lou, shake his hand and tell him how much we dug his music, but I was afraid,” he continued. “I thought he would be some maniac with rusty eyeballs or something, so we didn’t approach him, even though she said: ‘It seems to me like that was all they really wanted, for someone to just come up and tell them they appreciate what they’re doing.’ And as usual she was right, as Lou confirmed when I talked to him.” It was the first of several exchanges over the ensuing years between Reed and a man who’d do for rock journalism what the Velvets were doing for rock music. Although the relationship grew testy over time, Bangs had already anointed White Light/White Heat the best album of 1968 in a review he sent to Rolling Stone – though the magazine declined to print it. As Bangs wrote, “The Velvets launched into a new song that was one of the most incredible musical experiences of my concert career. It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully. The lyrics seemed like fantasy from an urban inferno: ‘Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / “Ooohh,” she cried / “This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen…”’ “But,” he concluded, “it was the chorus that was the most moving: ‘Ohhhh, sweet rock and roll – it’ll cleanse your soul.’ That’s classic, and no other group in America could have written and sung those words.”

The underground press, and the still-young serious rock press, was starting to catch on in a bigger way as well. “Put quite simply, the Velvet Underground is the most vital and significant group in the world today,” wrote Wayne McGuire in the August issue of Crawdaddy, hailing John Cale as “the heaviest bass player in the country today” and Lou Reed as “an incisive lyricist, creating a folk mythology of New York City and our generation which rings deep and true through the pap of fumbling unfocused artificial surrealistic imagery and facile pseudo-mystical-morality lessons produced by most new groups.” He concluded, “They are lyrics which breathe of real life, not empty conjecture, and reveal a very human and loving side, an almost Wagnerian sentimentality.” Oddly, in his New York Times essay, Tony Lioce didn’t recall the Velvets being as popular at the Tea Party as many claimed: “Almost no one came. There’d be maybe forty people on a good night. And generally the same forty people night after night, including one girl who always showed up in a wedding dress.” In the same article, Lioce also remembered often going backstage to hang out with the band, who gave him and his pals a friendly welcome. “Lou was gracious and kind, talking about everything from a weird diet to his love of Dion and his total dislike of Frank Zappa. We’d talk a lot about music, who he was listening to, and he’d ask us what other bands we thought were good (The Jeff Beck Group, we told him, and he nodded knowingly). But we’d talk about other stuff, too: New York, where he still lived; Boston, which he liked because he’d found an attentive audience. He could be very easy to talk to, a good listener, as interested in us as we were in him, or at least polite enough to pretend to be.”

The closest the public ever came to an explanation from MGM itself was printed in the May 1971 issue of Creem, in which a Los Angeles representative of the label told Lester Bangs, “The Velvets’ lead singer is the most absolutely spaced person I have ever met in my entire life. I think he was on heroin all the time they were here. And on top of all that, he had the nerve to tell me what a fucked-up company MGM is, how much he hates the way we’re handling ’em, and why don’t we give ’em any promotion – he’s sitting there running down the people who are giving me a paycheck every week! What am I supposed to do, agree with him?” Maybe the Velvets talked their way out of any good graces the label might have been able to grant them, although the L.A. rep’s comments didn’t address whether MGM actually gave them promotion. If not a ballad on the order of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ or ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, ‘I Love You’ testified to Reed’s oft-overlooked romantic side as a songwriter. “I know that his soft ballads were his favourites,” says his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, who began a relationship with Lou in 1968.

“He used to call them his soft songs. Lewis was a teddy bear, to be perfectly honest with you. He was a sweetheart of a man. It was very, very difficult to see what all the drink and the drugs were doing to him. I’m glad he didn’t spend his entire life using them.” ‘Walk and Talk’ would also end up on his Lou Reed album, where it was renamed ‘Walk and Talk It’, a more satisfying, streetwise roots-rock effort. Like ‘I Love You’, it signalled a slight move towards the more mainstream sound of most of the Loaded sessions. As to why it didn’t make the cut, “It took long to get it to be performed correctly,” Reed told BBC radio in 1972. Geoff Haslam who co-produced Lou Reed's landmark 1970 album Loaded made it clear how much he admired Reed’s abilities. “He was one of the most talented songwriters ever to appear on the scene. He had an incredible gift to communicate a lyric in a completely individual way. He was a rock and roll musician who sang like a jazz musician. He was brilliant, absolutely.” The Loaded version of ‘New Age’ still has merit, but the 1969 Velvet Underground Live performance is far superior, with a far more resonant aura of mystery. ‘Head Held High’ is a pretty blustery hard rock by Velvets standards, but there’s a slight knife-twister – Reed refers to his parents as “disfigured” when evaluating their well-meaning advice. Lou’s vocal is about as frayed and manic as it gets. Reed retreated to, of all places, his parents’ home in Long Island. “He had a nervous breakdown,” was Barbara Hodes’s straightforward explanation. “He was very fragile, and he was very unsure about the future. I think New York became too much for him.”

Within a few days he was nonetheless urging Sterling Morrison to form a new band with him, without Yule or Sesnick. But Morrison, still angry over Reed’s defection and about things in general, turned it down. “Lou suggested after he left that he and I pick it up and start all over with a different manager, get back to the way it was at the beginning,” he explained to Ignacio Julia. “But the way it was at the beginning wasn’t going to include Cale, we weren’t going that far back… Lou at the time accepted the responsibility for the tensions in the band, he said it was his fault because he was on these crazy diets. I had already thought that perhaps we had accomplished enough – to start all over would be like rolling the rock uphill again. One of the lines I used to Lou, I guess I was trying to tell him not to leave,” he continued, “was that even if we did do it, that it would take us three years to get back to the point that we were. And there was no certainty that we would do it anyway. I was very disillusioned.” Why didn’t Reed simply replace Doug Yule (as Maureen Tucker had already suggested), fire Sesnick and continue The Velvet Underground with Morrison and Tucker? He would certainly have been in a good position to call the shots.

It might have taken him a while to get back to where the Velvets were on his own, but a Lou Reed-less Velvet Underground couldn’t ever hope to get to that point without him at the helm. Perhaps legal obstacles prevented him from cutting ties with Sesnick and Yule, and carrying on with The Velvet Underground name, which Sesnick soon owned as a result of an out-of-court settlement that saw Reed win back sole songwriting credits for material on Loaded. Sesnick, as Yule confessed to Oor, “credited me as songwriter on Loaded, which is complete nonsense, because they’re all Lou’s songs. I was ashamed when I saw it.” In the February 2000 issue of MOJO, Doug admitted Sesnick “was hoping I would be Reed’s replacement, which we all know could never be the case. All the credits were designed to minimise Lou.” In Diana Clapton’s Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground, critic Richard Meltzer even remembered overhearing Sesnick discussing the possibility of removing Reed’s vocals from the album altogether when Meltzer dropped by Atlantic’s offices to pick up an advance pressing. In Sounds, Reed claimed, “I gave them an album loaded with hits, and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colours. So I left them to their album full of hits that I had made.”

“I would touch base with Lou and called him, and I got him to come into the city sometimes,” remembers Barbara Hodes. “But he was very fragile. Yet as a writer and musician, what was he gonna do, become an accountant with his father? Or take an office job?” Reed’s first public appearance since leaving The Velvet Underground would not be a musical performance, however, but a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village. Reed recited some new material about his future wife Bettye. A recording made at the reading is in the Lou Reed Archive. According to Bettye Kronstad, the audience “weren’t interested in hearing his heartfelt poetry, and it hurt him deeply. He’d been at his parents’ home for a year at that point, and he either had to go one way or the other, in terms of his career – to try to just work as a writer, or go back to rock’n’roll and write there. He couldn’t live off them forever, he said. I also think that living there, without the pressures of the city, all the people, their expectations, he was better able to build a career as a songwriter, which is incredibly difficult, but throwing it all away and beginning all over again as a writer at his age he thought was impossible. I think he had gotten his strength back by taking the time off and going home where he wouldn’t feel any pressure about a career, and was genuinely restored enough to get back out there again. It was just a matter of which path he was going to take – solely as a writer, and drop rock’n’roll – or as a writer in rock’n’roll.”

It might be tempting to view The Velvet Underground as the Van Goghs of sorts of rock’n’roll – unsuccessful in their lifetime, and hailed as geniuses half a century later. The Velvet Underground’s music has reached and influenced many more listeners than ever, as it will for new generations to come. Ultimately, it just was too good to remain a pure cult band. The themes the band addressed so brilliantly were too universal to remain ignored. Their bold sonic melding of experimentation with pure rock’n’roll energy gave their work a timelessness that has made it sound perfectly contemporary well into the 21st century, enduring far longer, with a far greater multi-generational appeal, than most 1960s acts who sold far more (millions) records at the time. To paraphrase their song ‘Some Kinda Love’, they had the courage to truly face and do what they, and we, fear most. —"Do What You Fear Most: The History of The Velvet Underground" (2026) by Richie Unterberger

“What was so great about the ‘60s and why were people so fabulous? Because it was an incredible time of abundance; there was great openness and mobility, people from all walks of life had access to each other. There were fewer barriers, socially and financially. For a short period, everyone met. There was a breakdown of barriers that had never existed before. There was this fabulous change that happened in cinema and music. You know it happened and it’s almost over. Now it’s running its course. It’s fading away. And then there were all those fabulous people, and one of the reasons they were fabulous was that they were in the audience and everyone could have access to them. Now you can’t anymore. The people are still fabulous, but you no longer have the chance to really get to know them.” -Lou Reed (April, 1976) for Rock News magazine

“Just as the elevator doors closed, Lou shouted out, ‘Sally Can’t Dance is a subversive album. It's about a poor rich girl who was into fashion and lived big. And it's really depressing. This album is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done! People have always been happy that I’ve been happy. I mean, maybe the attitude is: If Lou Reed can get it together, then who can’t?” -Lou Reed (November 1974) for Circus Raves magazine

“I got a call from Clive Davis [president of Arista Records] and he said, ‘Hey, how ya doing? Haven’t seen you for a while.’ He knew how I was doing. I knew then that I’d won. But turning that corner was really hard. When Ken Glancy backed me, that was step one; when Clive Davis gave me a call, was step two; and Street Hassle was step three. And I think they’re all home runs. I’m a long-term player. Saying ‘I’m a Coney Island baby’ at the end of that song is like saying I haven’t backed off an inch, and don’t you forget it.” —Lou Reed (March, 22, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine

Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood

2026-06-19T02:17:06.626+02:00

Lou Reed said to have been influenced by Raymond Chandler. "And despite people's derision, it proved to be more than diversion. Neither one regretted a thing." -Street Hassle (1978) by Lou Reed. “There’s a lot of what you might call vicious songs in my work but I feel compassion for the characters in them. Because I know what that’s like; I know what it’s like to be on the outside. I know what it’s like to have an unhappy childhood. Not everybody is born with money or an education or friends or nice parents. And I delineate these people because either I identify with them or I think that they deserve their moment in the sun." -Lou Reed, Frebuary 1992 (Q Magazine)

“Some people would love me to die onstage. It never dawns on them if I was so high, how would I hit the cues on time? Heroin in movies or novels is not a big deal but in rock and roll it is. How many people do you think could go up there and do a song about heroin and not be laughed off the stage? Scott Walker? Frank Sinatra maybe. Why doesn’t he sing a song with some lyrical content? He did it “My Way.” Congratulations. Who doesn’t do it his way? There are many pretty songs I’ve written. Why don’t people talk about them?” -Lou Reed, 17 April 1975 (NY Daily News)

The Black Dahlia refers to Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress found brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. The Blue Dahlia is a 1946 film noir starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, scripted by Raymond Chandler. The media coined the "Black Dahlia" moniker based on her rumored clothing style and the popular movie title. Despite a massive media frenzy, thousands of interviews, and several false confessions, the crime remains one of Los Angeles's most famous unsolved mysteries. The press branded Elizabeth Short the "Black Dahlia" because she reportedly favored black attire, though the name was primarily a play on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia.

The myth will tell you that Elizabeth Short was a sex worker, a gangster’s moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner. She was none of those things. She was a young woman who was fired up by wanderlust to leave her small New England town and see the world, defying the postwar gender expectations to settle down, marry, and have children. She lived by her wits and her charm as she traveled around the country, exploring places far more exotic than Medford, Massachusetts, where she was raised. True-crime narratives deal with, in the words of pioneering FBI investigator John E. Douglas, the “fundamentals of what we loftily call ‘the human condition.’ ” But her life is still more important than her death.

Business along the Pike in Long Beach, California, was up 25 percent from the year before. But there was something sinister out there lurking behind the levity of the liberated world that hinted things would never go back to the way they were before. Doomsayers warned that the war had upended traditional morality. The Pike lured thousands of tourists to Long Beach every week. Many boys loitered outside an amusement arcade. Among them was the owner’s son, Tod Faulkner. On a sweltering day in July, Tod spotted a young woman striding alone toward the beach. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, far more revealing than the prewar one-pieces. Her hair was dark, swept back from an extremely high forehead and framing her face like a lion’s mane. Over the next several days, Tod would see this woman again on the Pike. Whether he looked for her or just spotted her by chance isn’t known. But one thing is certain. He did not forget her. David Lander noticed her, too. On her way from the beach, past the massage parlors and tobacconists, the woman often stopped for refreshment at Lander’s pharmacy, Service Drug, at 102 Linden Avenue.

The Roosevelt Base on Terminal Island employed upward of twenty thousand, and the sprawling Naval Reserve Air Base saw a steady stream of reservists every few weeks. Even if she had wanted to, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been able to avoid military men in Long Beach. Robert Robertson was one of them. He and a buddy spotted her one morning on her way to Service Drug. “She was a very nice-looking girl,” Robertson said, “and she smiled at us.” Afterward, he and his friend walked with her to the beach. The next day, Elizabeth announced she wanted to go dancing at the Palladium in Hollywood, the big-band ballroom made famous by composer Tommy Dorsey. Robertson obliged, taking her on the thirty-mile ride to Hollywood on board the famous red trolleys. Something about her, however, must have appeared aimless, as he suggested she come back with him to Boise, where he was sure she could get a job. That was impossible, Beth explained. She needed to send for her birth certificate before she could get any work. So, Robertson helped her fill out a form for a town in Massachusetts called Hyde Park.

“Loving you the way I do would make me do practically anything,” Gordon Fickling wrote to her, and he proved it by renting her a room at the Brevoort Hotel in Hollywood on Lexington Avenue near the corner of Vine. On August 20, they registered as “Lieutenant and Mrs. J.G. Fickling.” Gordon headed back to base. The Brevoort was “the friendliest spot in Hollywood,” its ads claimed. Actors on their way up or way down stayed at the Brevoort. Within easy walking distance from the Brevoort was the Brown Derby, NBC, RKO, Columbia, Sardi’s, and Earl Carroll’s Theatre, where Betty had posed under the marquee not long before. Hollywood offered more to see than just the Long Beach Pike, and Betty liked to wander. The most salient fact people knew about Betty Short, however, was that she had once been engaged to marry a war hero, Matt Gordon, who was killed in action. Was that why she seemed to just drift along? Was grief the reason she’d been unable to commit to Gordon Fickling? “Betty appeared very depressed over Matt’s death,” Margie recalled. “She carried a newspaper clipping and picture of him in her pocketbook.” The clipping stated that he was planning to marry his sweetheart from Medford, Massachusetts.

It’s true that Betty could be a bit of a con artist. She knew that a well-timed letter to Gordon with a heart-rending tale of woe always brought a money order into Western Union. She’d sung a comparable refrain to Marjorie Graham to get free accommodations. What we still need to discover, however, is what she was looking for in Hollywood, if anything. Was modeling really her goal, or was it merely something she told people? We know, or can infer, details about the lives of Lynn Martin, Gordon Fickling, Marjorie Graham, and others. But it’s much more difficult to do that with Beth Short. She never gave an interview, never answered the questions of investigators the way her friends and acquaintances would do. To get closer to Beth and comprehend her life—and the forces that ended it—we need to consider the world around her, which was changing faster than anyone could have anticipated.

It was a world increasingly unfamiliar and more dangerous in some ways in peace than it was in war. Even today, most studies of the U.S. homicide rate see only the forty-year trough that extends on charts from the early 1930s until the early 1970s. The historic eleven-year plunge of the homicide rate stopped abruptly in 1944, leveling at 4.9 out of every 100,000 people. A year later the rate had climbed to 5.6, and by 1946 it was 6.3. A 31 percent increase in American homicides over three years. And while the rate started to fall again in 1947, it took until 1955 to dip past the low point of 1944. In Los Angeles, where homicides were already higher than elsewhere, the spike wasn’t as dramatic, but it’s still noticeable, peaking in 1944 and only dropping significantly in 1948. Los Angeles police psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River claimed that the number of “girl criminals” in the city had increased 28 percent since Pearl Harbor.

Anne Toth, her family said, had “brass.” She spoke her mind and “took nothing from nobody,” and that included both Leo Hymes and Mark Hansen. In short, Anne Toth was exactly the sort of person Beth Short needed to meet at that moment in her life. They became good friends. Anne kidded Beth about her Boston accent, the way she said “pahk” for “park” and “rawk” for “rock.” Young women, Anne counseled, had to be careful of the “jerks and moochers.” “You’ve got to stop being innocent sometime.” That’s fine for a kid, Anne said, but by the time you turn twenty-one, “gullibility is a liability.” Anne had left home at eighteen, traveling across the country to New York City “to seek her fortunes,” she said. She landed a job as a hostess at the New Yorker, the famous forty-two-story Art Deco hotel on Eighth Avenue. “That’s the center of the garment district,” Anne recalled, “and the first week I was there I had about fifty offers of modeling jobs.” Anne met “an exceptionally wonderful man, a very high-type fellow,” who was “very well connected,” she remembered. They began dating, and Anne’s new beau made introductions for her at the movie studios.

Anne told Beth she had a great look, with that cascade of dark hair and porcelain doll face, although she’d have to do something about her teeth. Anne offered to help Beth get work in the movie studios. Yet while Beth listened to her advices and seemed grateful for it, she failed to follow through. The problem, Anne concluded, was a lack of confidence on Beth’s part, something Marjorie Graham seconded. She “had an inferiority complex,” Margie told a reporter some months later. The goal of modeling, Margie came to believe, was a ruse. Beth wasn’t lazy. She was insecure. “She was too scared to try because she thought she might fail,” Anne said. To mask her insecurity, Beth sometimes acted like a blue blood from back East. “Betty had a lot of high ideas, believe me, with her Boston family and all that stuff,” Anne said. She alternated between calling her Betty and Beth, probably because Margie called her the former and Mark Hansen the latter.

The postwar transformation of America was not only social but also physical. In Los Angeles, the massive freeway development, finally underway, fundamentally changed the topography of the area, uprooting families and paving over neighborhoods, empowering the automobile over every other form of transportation. Rolling hills and citrus groves were bulldozed into tract housing. White flight abandoned urban areas to communities of color, who faced decreased funding for essential services and maintenance, and thus began the era of urban decay. From above, the verdant picture of Los Angeles County in 1940 would have compared starkly to the asphalt and brick of 1950, like before-and-after crime scene photos. One writer’s parallel between the disfigured body of Elizabeth Short and the disfigured City of Los Angeles is not an overstated metaphor.

Under Harry Hansen’s scenario, a solution proposed by Larry Harnisch might be compelling. As a very likely suspect, Harnisch put forward Walter Bayley, a doctor who once lived on the block just past the vacant lot where the body of Elizabeth Short was found. Bayley’s daughter served as a witness at the marriage of Short’s sister Virginia to Adrian West in 1945. The connection is a bit tenuous, but Harnisch theorized that Virginia may have told Elizabeth to contact Dr. Bayley if she ever needed assistance and Elizabeth, upon being stranded at the Biltmore hotel, took her sister’s advice. Dr. Bayley, who had been suffering from emotional and mental problems due to degenerative illness, certainly had the skills to drain and bisect the body. Under Harnisch’s theory, Bayley then posed the corpse in order to traumatize his estranged wife, who still lived in the neighborhood. Virginia said in 1947 that she hadn’t seen her sister in several years and hadn’t spoken to her for two, which predates her wedding. (Boston Herald, January 18, 1947) —Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) by William J. Mann

Jeff Tweedy: Outwards Expressions of Joy

2026-05-25T07:26:29.544+02:00

Jeff Tweedy: I honestly haven't seen the Wilco documentary since I watched it in the theater when it came out. I went to the theater with my wife and I felt like hiding. My ideal audience is a group of people that are better with outward expressions of joy than I am. I only worry about maintaining the personal and intimate connections I have with my family and friends and I prefer to be somewhat removed from the notion of fans. That's more of an abstract thing to me. I'm not anti-modern crowd participation. I'm anti-technological crowd distraction at concerts. And my father always told me I had a face for radio.

I try to remember that being a musician doesn't require you to aspire to success on anyone else's terms. About Wilco constantly being named the American Radiohead, I'd feel better if they were being referred to as the "British Wilco." I play guitar every day and I practice by skronking along to Sonny Sharrock's records and try to figure out Elizabeth Cotten's songs. I have a song that my wife and I call your own, as in "oh honey, they are playing our song." That's "Somethin' Good" by Herman's Hermits. I met my wife Susan in 1989 at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. She already had a boyfriend so I just asked for her phone when I finally got her attention. But even then I could sense she was the one. Sources: stateofsound.com and npr.org

There are undeniable similarities between how the brain responds to substance addiction and how the brain responds to falling in love. Both substances of addiction and individuals we are attracted to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, into a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine acting in this region helps us learn to associate cues with rewarding feelings. However, dopamine acts on two different types of receptors, called D1-receptors and D2-receptors, in complex ways. Activation of D2-receptors enhances bonding with a partner; it also promotes the reward value of a substance. Activation of D1-receptors maintain that bonding.

During this time early on in a romantic relationship or early exposure to an addictive substance, dopamine is primarily acting on D2 receptors, heightening our senses and focusing our attention on the cues of our next encounter… developing our craving, our longing, our drive for the next meeting. When we are in the early obsessive stages of love, every encounter (and especially sexual encounters) causes a pleasurable release of not just dopamine, but also natural opioids. These two brain chemicals work together in the brain to continually strengthen the association of the stimulus (the one you are falling in love with) with intense positive feelings. This will cause you to seek more and more of these interactions, craving them intensely in the times in between. These same chemicals act on the same receptors in the same way during the process of forming an addiction to a substance, causing the person to seek more and more of it.

With time, the brain adapts. Repeated encounters no longer cause the same euphoria they once did, but rather, a sense of calm contentment. The dopamine that is released before and during these encounters is now activating more of the D1-receptors, which result in more tranquil passion. In terms of relationships, it is thought that this transition actually helps maintain a pair bond with one individual, because in this stage you are less driven to seek a competing pair bond and you are more likely to aggressively defend the pair bond you have already established. In terms of substance abuse, this phase is called tolerance.

During this tolerance phase, lack of exposure to the object of your addiction results in a lack of dopamine and opioid release and an increase in stress hormone release. If we are talking about addiction to a substance, we call this withdrawal. If we are talking about a relationship, we call this separation anxiety or even heartbreak. To avoid these horrible feelings, we have to relapse… right back into the arms of our addiction. Love is not listed as a psychological disorder in the DSM-5, nor do we think of it as one. But in a true physiological sense, we may actually be addicted to the ones we love.

“Despite feeling loved being a fundamental human need, there is no consensually agreed upon definition of love and feeling loved,” explained Dr. Eric Sasaki in his postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. “Together with my co-authors, my first goal was to integrate scholarly and lay conceptualizations of love and key relationship theories to identify core components of feeling loved. These core components of feeling loved include feeling cared for, accepted, valued, and understood.”

The recent study “Feeling Loved as a Strong Link in Relationship Interactions: Partners Who Feel Loved May Buffer Destructive Behavior by Actors Who Feel Unloved”, was authored by Eric Sasaki, Nickola C. Overall, Harry T. Reis, Francesca Righetti, Valerie T. Chang, Rachel S.T. Low, Annette M.E. Henderson, Caitlin S. McRae, Emily J. Cross, Shanuki D. Jayamaha, Michael R. Maniaci, and Camille J. Reid. Source: psycnet.apa.org

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: Towering Art Rock

2026-05-17T05:32:33.714+02:00

Involving Cold War spy recordings, drug addiction and music industry landmarks, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been called a fable and a masterpiece. One of Wilco's best albums, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has uncanny connections to 9/11, a landmark Internet-first release; Reprise Records' then-president David Kahne listening to one of the most critically lauded albums of the 2000s and deciding Wilco should start again from scratch; Jay Bennett counting out tons of pills he'd had FedExed to the studio before the rest of the band arrived. Or perhaps it would be best to start further back: Jeff Tweedy perusing CDs in a record store and coming across one titled The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations: encoded spy transmissions made over shortwave radio. "The voices were so eerie,' Jeff Tweedy wrote, explaining the attraction, 'like a long dead ghost trying one more time to make contact.' On one section, against a storm of hiss, a woman's voice pronounced the same letters from the phonetic alphabet: 'Yankee, hotel, foxtrot'. There was no response."

Jay Bennett left the band during its making, and tragically died of an overdose eight years later, and Reprise Records rejected the finished record, only for it to be hailed as a masterpiece. The first element had all the ingredients of a cautionary tale; the second became something of a fable for the record industry as it began the 21st century. The Conet Project recordings made sense in the darkest corners of Jeff Tweedy's psyche. 'These solitudes exist so apart from each other in this sea of white noise and information,' he told Wilco biographer Greg Kot, 'and the beautiful thing is they keep transmitting to each other in the hope that somebody is going to find them.' The description seems to predict the America of today, a country atomised by the internet, but back then, for Jeff Tweedy, The Conet Project recordings described something more personal. 'The way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate in The Conet Project,' he explained, 'it's not all that different to me than my own efforts to communicate.' Those recordings, full of crackling static, might also have pointed Tweedy towards the album's experimental soundscapes.

The band had been in transition from punk-adjacent alt-country rockers to studio nerd wizards for some time. Jay Bennett, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, joined the band in time for Being There. Glenn Kotche, a drummer and percussionist with an eye for detail, who had been briefly tutored by The Velvet Underground's Maureen Tucker, replaced ex-Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer. Following the use of the sample from the Conet Project (a voice repeating: ‘yankee, hotel, foxtrot’) on the song ‘Poor Places’, Irdial-Discs successfully sued the band for copyright infringement. In our current age of carefully edited music documentaries, in which every moment of vulnerability feels carefully calculated, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco feels genuine and edgy. It is a fascinating warts-and-all document, but it also appears to have warped the process it observed. Jeff Tweedy never got used to having the cameras around, out-nerding Kurt Cobain. 'Maybe the camera is like a fly on the wall but it's a type of fly that you always know is there and you can't stop thinking about it,' he later reflected. But YHF would eventually reach its reward: Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 225 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2020.

What followed was a well-documented comedy of errors and misjudgments. Then-President of Reprise David Kahne and A&R Mio Vukovic listened to the finished album, decided it had no hits and gave the band an ultimatum: start again or be dropped. One wonders how closely they really listened to the record, and how much they were influenced by the opener 'I Am Trying to Break Your Heart'. Despite Jim O'Rourke's new mix, that track probably remained the album's most experimental. Foreshadowing the music industry to come, Wilco streamed the whole thing online ahead of its physical release. Finally landing on record store shelves, somehow miraculously coherent and complete given its tangled production subplots, the album was critically acclaimed. Uncut said it was the Americana equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A, and Pitchfork called it a 'masterpiece' giving it a perfect 10. Given the album was unlikely to return much profit, there appeared little choice for Wilco but to leave Reprise with the masters: 'It was a choice of making a record we didn't like and not making any money,' Tweedy wrote later, 'or making a record that we loved and not making any money'. At the time, the band had a substantial fanbase and were darlings of the music press. Streaming Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fed both, driving sales of tour tickets, creating a buzzworthy story and giving the album considerable underground lustre.

There is an alternative history to the YHF album. Had Reprise Records loved the record, then it would have been put out on its original release date: 11th of September 2001, available in record stores at almost exactly the same time American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre's North Tower. The fact the album had duplicated towers on the cover (Chicago's so-called Corn Cob Towers), contained the lyrics 'tall buildings shake' and a song called 'Ashes of American Flags' would have lent the album a creepily prophetic quality. Jeff Tweedy has said the original 9/11 release date would have probably resulted in the album being pulled from shelves. Randomness also played a role in Jay Bennett's story. Eight years after he had departed Wilco, after several solo albums that failed to break through, Jay died of a fentanyl overdose. 'It was hard to be surprised, but that didn't make it any less heartbreaking,' Jeff Tweedy said, adding: 'I wouldn't have been surprised to see him onstage with Jackson Browne for instance. Jay would have made almost any band better if he'd been able to get help'.

According to critic Robert Christgau in The Village Voice: "The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Jeff Tweedy with Wilco makes a virtue of their entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from slacker days, only slackers were more chill or at least ironic about it. Wilco and Jeff Tweedy's integrity comes down to a stubborn determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel." Sam Jones (December 12, 2000): "I have had many discussions with Tony Margherita, Wilco’s manager, and although he assures me the band is excited about the idea of a documentary, I can’t get Jeff Tweedy to return my phone calls.

Tony suggested to call directly Jeff's wife and she was lovely with us and encouraging of our project. Of course, Tweedy returned his wife Susan's call even during the rehearsal of 'Reservations', although he seemed distressed." According to the rival Son Volt's fan base, the marriage of Tweedy and Susan Miller might have been on the rocks at that time, but it's difficult to imagine there were serious problems in their relationship after all the eulogies that Tweedy has offered to her wife, being Sukierae (2014), an album explicitly dedicated to her, calling her "his best muse," and remarking "she understands me better than I understand myself. Without her, I wouldn't be here."

Sam Jones (January 13, 2001): "Christy (the producer), Roger (soundman) and I flew to Chicago. We arrived in the evening, and were met by Margherita. As he drove us from the airport to Wilco’s loft, I realized that he was a huge fan of the band, and that he had a very persistent habit of singing along with the stereo. We were let into the loft by none other than Jeff Tweedy himself. The rest of the band was sitting around a card table having Chinese food. I was introduced to Jay, John and Leroy. The mood was strangely silent and somber, and I felt very awkward as Christy and I tried to make conversation. And poor Glenn Kotche (Wilco’s new drummer). The band didn’t even tell him that a documentary was being made. He was about to find out. I just finished watching the Nine Inch Nails documentary, and I realize it is everything I don't want the Wilco film to be. It was full of quick edits in time to the music, with every visual medium ever invented mixed randomly. Although it is probably quite effective for the NIN audience, to me it is like watching moths darting around a porch light. After 30 minutes I decided that it was the antithesis of what I want my film to look like. I would rather a scene from my film be mistaken for “Harold and Maude” than it be mistaken for a music video. I don’t feel like the movie has to look like MTV to feel musical. And I decided right then and there that I do not want a music video editor to cut this film." Sources: stateofsound.com, gloriousnoise.com and medium.com

Sam Raimi: Send Help and Drag Me To Hell

2026-05-10T06:24:00.022+02:00

When the System Collapses: What Sam Raimi Is Really Revealing About Power Structures

Sam Raimi’s films are famous for its excesses—vomit, blood, demonic spectacles. But the real horror in Drag Me to Hell and Send Help isn’t mostly supernatural. It’s mostly structural. Both films begin inside institutional-coded spaces—a bank, a corporate succession pipeline. And both stage the same experiment: What happens when the insulation around power disappears? The answer isn’t always empowerment. It’s often exposure. Power isn’t always Strength. Sometimes paradoxically it’s Insulation.

In Drag Me to Hell, Christine competes for promotion against a less competent male colleague who thrives through proximity and schmoozing other colleagues. In Send Help, Linda is passed over in favor of a fraternity-connected executive heir. These institutions don’t simply reward merit. They simply stabilize incumbents. They absorb flaws. They normalize entitlement. They cushion mediocrity. The insiders do not need to prove themselves. The structure protects them from exposure.

The Closed System: Raimi’s worlds operate as closed systems—procedural, indifferent, fixed. In Drag Me to Hell, Christine enters a supernatural bureaucracy that mirrors corporate logic: someone must pay the debt. She becomes ruthless enough to exhume a corpse and attempt to transfer the curse given previously to her. She follows the rules. And she still dies. Not because she lacked cruelty—but because she never controlled the inner mechanisms. And a simple technical error seals her fate. Compliance offers no authorship. The system does not always reward effort. It just deletes errors.

In Send Help, the plane crash strips away corporate hierarchy entirely. No inheritance. No networking advantage. No institutional buffer. But the pivot happens even earlier. On the plane, after overhearing the men casually confirm her marginalization, Linda deletes the plan draft she is completing. Her gesture is quiet but decisive. She withdraws her labor and ambitions from a system that will never convert them into leverage. The plane crash that follows does not create her break from legitimacy—it reveals she was already prepared to operate without it.

From Compliance to Authorship: Once stranded on the island, Linda discovers the private beach resort—a hidden infrastructure with plenty of stocked resources, discovering an insulation she can control. From that moment, her survival shifts into authorship. She knows rescue is possible. But she chooses not to signal help. When Zuri and the guide suddenly arrive, she could restore legitimacy and return to the corporate order. Instead, she decides to eliminate them. Not in panic—but in consolidation of her new power. She refuses to reenter the system as a subordinate again, so she remains insulated.

Baptism and Revelation: Christine seeks restoration and is destroyed by structural indifference. Linda rejects restoration, seizes authority, and converts it into insulation. Closed systems reward either inherited protection or self-authored control. They do not reward compliance by outsiders. Raimi renders this divergence grotesquely literal. Christine is baptized in corpse vomit—engulfed, swallowed by forces she cannot master. Her immersion marks her erosion. She remains subject to rules she did not design. Whereas, Linda is baptized in blood during the boar hunt—drenched, exhilarated, dominant. Her immersion marks her initiation. She stops seeking permission. She generates an inevitability. The difference in these two films is not morality. It is control. And sardonic inevitability.

Blondie’s “One Way or Another” frames Send Help at both beginning and end. At first, signifies how "outside" and not accepted Linda is. By the end, it lands as sardonic thesis. “I’m gonna get ya” is no longer playful. It’s structural. Linda does not only earn legitimacy. She embraces inevitability. One way or another. The humor works because the film knows exactly what it’s showing. Success here is not moral triumph. It is rational adaptation within an uncaring structure.

The Structural Threat: If insulated hierarchies protect incumbents from exposure, then their authority depends on that insulation. When insulation collapses, what’s revealed is uncomfortable: power did not reflect ability. It reflected insulation. Christine believes compliance will protect her. It doesn’t. Linda recognizes compliance will not protect her. She exits legitimacy, gains authorship, and reenters the system insulated. Strip away the insulation, and power doesn’t disappear. What disappears is the illusion. Raimi’s horror isn’t moral—it’s structural. The system was never neutral, only uncaring.

Rachel McAdams is wonderful as always—our eternal romantic lead. Here she uses every ounce of that built-in goodwill as a weapon. Her Linda is never a victim in Send Help. Even covered in sand, blood and sweat, she possesses a terrifying, luminous capability. It is a subversive performance that lands perfectly. Opposite her, Dylan O’Brien nails the specific, grating energy of a boss we have all had. He is not a cartoon villain, but an indifferent, casually manipulative dude who mistakes privilege for charm. His descent from predator to pathetic prey is horrifying, hilarious and—crucially—feels earned. Raimi’s genius is in the balance. The torture walks a razor’s edge between cruelty and catharsis, but it never tips into nihilism. You are always cheering for Linda’s ingenuity and cruelty. Source: cultmtl.com

Donnie Darko as Suicidal Ideation Allegory, Twilight Override (Jeff Tweedy from Wilco)

2026-05-09T06:15:00.014+02:00

Narratively, cinema tends to oversimplify the onset of a character's mental illness by rooting it tidily in a single trauma. This is called the "presumption of traumatic etiology", a term used by Steven E. Hyler, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, in his Comprehensive Psychiatry article, "DSM-III at the Cinema." In the mythos of the film, Donnie Darko must sacrifice himself to save the universe. In another read, though, he instead comes to the unfortunately common conclusion that his suicide will improve everyone else's lives. He allows the jet engine to crush his bedroom with him inside: he kills himself. Just think of the image at the end of the jet engine falling through the wormhole tunnel. What does that resemble? A bullet traveling through a gun barrel. The jet engine's rounded, cylindrical, shiny-metal shape is completely analogous to that of a bullet. The jet engine missing him the first time might be symbolic of giving up on an early suicide attempt.

The suicidal young man's idea of himself as a hero who must sacrifice himself to save people is the psychology that is represented in many works (including Catcher in the Rye), and in certain mythology of rock and roll. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco differs from that mythology. Jeff Tweedy (talking over his most recent triple album Twilight Override): “I’m not espousing the dark underbelly of New York's nightlife or decadence or anything like that because I was so disappointed—even as an addict, I was so disappointed with the cliche of it, the hypocrisy of it. The disgusting nature of advocating for things that are really bad for people. You know, honestly, the way rock and roll was marketed as a culture was just awful. And the part that I knew was there and was disappointed to find wasn’t really the guiding principle was the part that I thought was really beautiful.”

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you get together with your friends and then the world is a little less painful. You get together with your friends, make some music and you’re all transported. And then all of a sudden, you have a community around it. And then other bands start because they see that there’s this opportunity, there’s this place. There’s a strategy for living. It isn’t what you’ve been sold. And so, you know, I reject it. I fucking reject it in rock and roll. The radical, individuated self-expression of rock and roll and the self-liberation of it — that’s all that matters.” He makes it sound so simple. What if it is?" Source: insidehook.com

At first Donnie/the antihero has an impulse to harm others, and then he turns it inward and imagines an elaborate scenario by which he "saves" people. His destructive, lashing-out impulse has found a personal mythology that makes him feel justified and good. Catcher in the Rye's Holden character has a fantasy of saving children running through a field toward a cliff. Holden Caulfield is the guy who catches them before they fall to their deaths. By the end of that novel, we realize Holden is in therapy and undeniably suicidal. His rejection of "phonies" is very similar to Donnie Darko's hostility toward the moral preachings of those at the high school. By burning down the house of the Patrick Swayze's pedophile character, Donnie Darko basically "catches" the Sparkle Motion girls (and his little sister) by preventing the local creep from getting to them.

The fear/love dichotomy is similar. He fears dying, especially the loneliness of dying by his own hand, fears many other things, especially losing his girlfriend Gretchen and his family. He wants to love and be loved. His parents are shown to be very loving people, but not reaching him, not even his doting mother. He really doesn't want to hurt them. He finds a way to think that if he dies, he is somehow doing them a favor. Part of him realizes that the fear/love dichotomy is a cop-out, so by the end he has accepted that if it has to be one concept winning above the other, it should be love.

The arrow of time, and the blob that goes in front of people before they take action, is like what he sees himself moving toward. But he's schizoprenic and starts to see his decision as inevitable. He goes onto a kind of autopilot toward his oblivion. That is similar to the resignation and elation that many suicidal people have just before they commit the deed. Often it is a sense of peace after the decision has been fully finalized and accepted. In suicidal research literature, this is often the time when people are giving away their personal items, as they don't care any more about possessions. Donnie's parents give him a lot of "new stuff" as a reaction to him getting in trouble at school, and unfortunately it doesn't mean much to him.

One major element of the story is the idea of destruction being a part of creation. "The Destructors" by Graham Greene is about young people destroying a man's wealth and home, and the story is said to mean something about destruction being a positive thing. It is the young reclaiming something from the old, an expression of vitality and renewal. I think the fixation on this story is completely a part of the psychological process Donnie Darko is working out. Interestingly, the term "cellar door" represents a portal to a downward location -- a portal one passes through to death. It's also a term from "a famous linguist," whom the screenplay avoids mentioning was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose claim to fame was the creation of a vast fantasy realm and mythology. Donnie Darko is creating his own personal mythology as he moves toward the "cellar door" of his demise. The two words are cast as "the most beautiful in the English language": death recast as a high form of beauty. Suicidal ideation.

Basically, Donnie considers himself a liability to his community. He falls in love with the new girl at school, but he imagines he might end up losing her, and fantasizes finally with saving her life. His therapist isn't making any real progress with him and recurs to use placebo medicine. The echo-voiced bunnyman he imagines doesn't seem to be alive -- it is a half-dead bunny face, like a skull. A bunny is a symbol of innocence but in the form Donnie hallucinates, it becomes a symbol of innocence turning to death, of something that has become rotten in its springtime. That's how he feels on the inside: Like he's not youthful or vital or hopeful like he thinks he ought to be, but already dead inside.

On October 2, 1988, Donnie Darko — a euphemistic “troubled teen” — receives a dreamlike message from a satanic bunny named Frank, that the world will be ending on October 30. Donnie accepts this news fairly stoically, but it’s just the beginning of a month of nightmares about destruction that Donnie then re-creates in real life. Or does he? Is anything that happens between the warning to Donnie of impending apocalypse and the date of its predicted arrival real? Is it all a drug-induced hallucination? Or a psychosis-induced fantasy, a detachment from reality? Donnie Darko is what Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might have been if David Lynch had ever gotten his hands on it, a daring, disturbing, visionary debut from writer/director Richard Kelly.

It's at times a bleak and pessimistic vision, but it reflects some of the feelings of Xers that they’ve been ignored and unappreciated. Donnie knows where his parents hide their gun. The inevitable chest-blob-arrow leads him right to it, as though it's not even his own decision anymore. He imagines a scenario where he'll end up using the gun on somebody else, out of revenge or some angry impulse. He doesn't want to do that. Up close, the gun's barrel is a wormhole of time. The bullet's aim is the arrow of time. The bullet is the jet engine. The Philosophy of Time Travel becomes the ability to make time stop, for him and him only. Source: popmatters.com

The Dick Powell Story by Tony Thomas

2025-11-14T07:16:00.034+01:00

No movie star ever made a more radical change of image in mid-career than Dick Powell. The former crooner turned tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (his darkest film), Johnny O’Clock, To the Ends of the Earth, Pitfall, Station West, and Cry Danger, all among the best examples of American film noir. It was, as he admitted, “one hell of a transition.” Dick Powell’s position in Hollywood history is unique in that he is identified as a leading exponent of two vastly different film genres—the musicals of the Thirties and the films noir of the late Forties. The actor of the one is barely recognizable as the actor of the other. Film students might be forgiven for wondering if they are the same man. Despite the complex image, Dick Powell was a relatively simple man. He was the product of an average working-class family, growing up with traditional values, politically conservative with religious views that did not much go beyond a faith in the Golden Rule and The Ten Commandmants. Powell was a classic example of the Great Depression self-made man with a passion for work and seemingly gifted with the Midas touch. Powell believed that anyone can achieve anything if he tries hard enough. For him it certainly worked.

Almost all the songs sung by Dick Powell in his first two years in Hollywood were written by Harry Warren and his lyricist Al Dubin. Dubin quit Hollywood in 1938, but Warren stayed for the rest of his long and productive life. He and Powell remained friends. “Of all the singers I’ve ever dealt with, he was just about the easiest to get along with. I don’t think he ever made an objection to any song we ever handed him. Music was easy for him. He’d been a musician and he’d been singing since he was a choirboy. His only problem at Warners was getting more money. Even when he was doing 42nd Street he was only getting $175 a week, and it was a constant fight to raise it.”

Naughty But Nice brought the long Warner Bros. phase of Dick Powell’s career to a rather abrupt end. The original title of this minor musical was The Professor Steps Out, which indicates the nature of the plot. In something of a change of pace for Powell, he is not a genial dunderhead but a serious minded music professor named Hardwick, who goes to New York to arrange for his symphony to be published. In The Big Apple the poor man is used, abused and confused, and learns that the music business is not run by decent minded academics.

Professor Hardwick is not equipped to deal with the kind of sharks who run Tin Pan Alley. Part of his problem is that he has been coddled and protected by three maiden aunts who believe him to be a genius. Although far from that he does have some ability with melody, which leads to one of his serious pieces being bowdlerized into a snappy jive song, “Hooray for Spinach,” performed by the slinky Zelda Manion (Ann Sheridan), who is in league with a sleazy publisher. She pursues the professor in order to filch more of his melodies but Linda McKay (Gale Page) falls in love with the sweet natured but thoroughly naive professor. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote four songs for Naughty But Nice. Ann Sheridan, whose career Warners was building, got two of them and Powell got “I’m Happy About the Whole Thing” and “In a Moment of Weakness,” which he recorded for Decca. Sadly it would be the last of the movie songs that he would record.

Dick Powell and Joan Blondell had been married four years by the time they made I Want a Divorce and still happy enough to hazard a film with such a title. While the critics had praised Powell for his performance in Christmas in July they didn't make many comments about any real change of image. That came with I Want a Divorce. Variety noted that there was no singing and commented that “he handles the straight role in capable fashion, displaying ability to carry both dramatic and comedy situations required by the characterization.” The Hollywood Reporter was even kinder: “Dick Powell is genuinely amazing as the boy, his work opening up a fresh screen career to him. Here Powell proves beyond question that glorified chorus boy roles are definitely behind him. He realizes expert understanding of the character changes in his role and plays each to the hilt.” He had been waiting a very long time to get a comment like that.

Murder, My Sweet continues to be a much studied and admired film. Its qualities are many but pivotal is the performance of Dick Powell. Always a confident man, he was here able to focus his intelligence as an actor. Never before had he been able to take such command of a characterization. His Philip Marlowe is not an especially likeable man but he is basically decent, “I’m just a small businessman in a very messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale.”

Much of the effectiveness of Powell’s performance was due to his skill in delivering lines, one of which became a classic, “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” Powell could muster the right tone for cynical dialogue, as when seeing the palatial home of the Grayles, “It was a nice little front yard. Cozy. Okay for the average family. Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox.” After this film Dick Powell no longer had to dog anybody to be considered for a good role. He had made the breakthrough. Now they would come to him. Philip Marlowe would be played by other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, but there are those who feel that Powell’s Marlowe was the closest to the part as written by Raymond Chandler.

One of them was Chandler himself, who felt that Murder, My Sweet was the best film adaptation of any of his novels. In his book The Detective in Film (1972), film historian William K. Everson noted: “Purely as a thriller, with a complicated yet logically worked out plot, Marder, My Sweet was near perfect. Powell—because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it—became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart, who had several other competing images against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Powell’s emergence as a director and producer was closely tied to the legendary eccentric Howard Hughes when he took over RKO as owner and manager in 1948. The studio’s financial affairs were then in disarray and the assumption was he had acquired RKO as a tax write-off. This proved not to be the case. Production picked up and for a while it seemed as if Hughes would become a movie tycoon, albeit one with highly unusual business practices. Hughes’ office was not at RKO but at the Goldwyn Studios and it is said that he set foot on the RKO lot only once and getting an appointment with him was virtually impossible. RKO functioned as if it had a ghost boss.

However, Hughes appeared to like Powell and gave his approval when producer Edmund Grainger suggested that he be hired to direct Split Second. Hughes’ respect for Powell increased when he found that Powell was not cashing any of the checks paid to him in the period of pre-production. Hughes called and wanted to know what was wrong. Said Powell, “I told him that the script was being altered without my having any say in the matter. Hughes asked for my ideas and immediately phoned the writer to work directly with me. Then I cashed my checks. The movie was a hit and Hughes started cultivating me.”

Dick Powell considered many other projects for Twentieth Century-Fox but none materialized. In 1960 he asked that his contract with them be terminated. It was obvious to Fox and to everybody else that Four Star Television had burgeoned into a major production company and Powell was the man who ran it. It was a matter of too much to do and too little time. He had directed five films, while also producing four of them. Split Second and The Enemy Below deserve special mention as very fine pieces of work. He was never pretentious about anything he did and about his work as a director he made no lofty claims. “I do the best I can with the type of material I am able to get. I have no illusions about joining the company of William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed or John Ford. I admire all these filmmakers for the honesty with which they attempt to do their pictures.” Still, it is interesting to wonder how good a track record Dick Powell might have had as a director had he been not so busy.

Ronald Reagan became friendly with Dick Powell soon after he arrived at Warners in 1937. He played an announcer in the film Hollywood Hotel and afterwards played supporting roles in three other Powell pictures. Recalls Reagan, “On Hollywood Hotel, Dick was the star and I had only two lines, but he couldn’t have been nicer. Easily and smoothly he put me at ease. I was one of thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. He always seemed to feel such genuine pleasure at seeing you. Sometimes our paths took us in different directions and months would pass without our seeing each other. Still in these later years, when we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.”

Four Star Productions blossomed in the late Fifties, taking over the Republic Pictures lot in Studio City. It quickly became known as a place that gave fresh talent a break. Powell said at the time: “I know what a tough time I had realizing my ambitions, so I’m giving everybody a chance to make money and do what other shows won’t let them do. I’ve been able to sign the best writers and actors in the business because I’m not following the greed principle of the other producers. The actors are coming into my fold because I’m offering them all rights outside of the United States in the shows in which they appear for me. And I’m giving the writers every financial break.” One of the young producers in whom he put his trust was Stanley Kallis: “I was hired as an associate producer for The Law and Mr. Jones and at the end of the first season, we didn’t know if we would be picked up. Dick came to me and told me: ‘I’d like you to stay here. I don’t have anything for you at the moment but I’ll find something.’ I was amazed. This is not the usual way of doing things in Hollywood. I’d been striving to find a niche in this business and he gave it to me. Dick was a very generous man.

There was a decency about him that is unfortunately rare in this business. He was a ‘no nonsense’ character. He had a genius for business but he did it with charm. Dick was a gentleman. I’d have done anything for this man.” According to Kallis, Powell was also a man of vision. “One evening in his office he showed me some plans he had drawn up for a future concept of the studio. He always had a keen regard for real estate and he thought the old idea of sound stages covering acres of ground was a waste. His concept was to build new sound stages one on top of the other, to stack them and thereby leave the cleared ground for location use or other buildings. There’s no telling how far he would have gone had he lived.”

Someone who had a good idea of where Powell wanted to go was June Allyson, who always referred to her husband as Richard. Allyson said: “Richard’s wheeling and dealing in TV boggled my mind. At one point Four Star was buying the stock ownership of Marterto Productions, which owned, among other things, ninety episodes of Make Room For Daddy. It would cost us $1,800,000. Time magazine called Richard ‘one of the major, and sharpest, businessmen in U.S. television.’ Richard's favorite phrase was, ‘Nobody loses, everybody wins.’” About Dick's investments, June sometimes complained: "No sooner would I get used to one house than Richard would move us to another—this time to Bel Air. But I loved English Tudor. And I told him "I love this house. I’ll never move. Never." He grabbed me and mashed the hysterics out of me in a big rough bear hug that ultimately turned into a long evening of lovemaking. The next day I sputtered all the way to Bel Air, grumbling about being thrown out of my house and deaf to his lecture on real estate values and the art of doubling your investment. He turned it into a most impressive estate on Copa de Oro."

MGM intended to star Dick and June as the married couple honeymooning in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) based on a best-selling book. Then when I Love Lucy became a sensation, the studio offered Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz the property. June wasn't happy about it, and Dick Powell never made another film, choosing to concentrate on TV productions. Powell justified all the long hours and the many periods away from home by affirming it as his plan for the future—to turn Four Star into a major film studio, one that would rival MGM. The plans were admirable, but the strain on his marriage was severe. He arose at six, conducted business by phone during breakfast and often put in sixteen-hour days, in addition to the constant trips out of town.

June Allyson complained: “Where was Richard? He was late. He was sorry but he wouldn’t be home early enough, so we'd just go ahead and have dinner without him.” Aside from the fact that they were genuinely in love and attached to each other, the Powell-Allyson marriage was regarded by some friends as a strange one. And in fact they were different kinds of people. He was confident and reserved, she was volatile and emotional. An industry insider once described them as "an oak tree paired with a butterfly." Despite of various rumors echoed by the press, the reality was simple: Dick Powell never really changed despite of his stardom. His views towards his marriage were based on mutual respect, love and family. Despite some obstacles thrown upon Powell and Allyson typical of their Hollywood milieu, it's been difficult to prove infidelity on either side. Powell belongs in that rare category of the consummate Hollywood artist who was also a basically decent man (in the same league of Fred MacMurray or James Stewart). —The Dick Powell Story (Riverwood Press, 1993) by Tony Thomas

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monster: Ed Gein

2025-10-28T02:51:00.018+01:00

Horror is derived, ultimately, from the unknown. Ultimately, the core of fear is that something will somehow harm you. Harm may lead to death, which leads to the unknown--fear is possible because in the depths of our minds, we're all agnostics. God takes away the uncertainty behind death, and thus, the terror it inspires. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds at being the finest expression of horror on film because it takes the concept of uncertainty as the source of fear and suggests that if there were no uncertainty, we would still be horrified. It removes the comfort of an afterlife not by delving into the supernatural, but by peeling the veneer of normalcy off reality.

The film is drenched in a post-Vietnam sense of irony and disillusionment, declaring itself a true story or revelation, which instantly crafts a sense of mythology around it. From the old man at the cemetery rasping that there's things they don't tell you about, things he's seen, to the radio broadcasts describing (an obvious series of lies) that the local sheriff has pinned the grave robberies on international jewel thieves, the film underlines the fact that the truth about the world is not only hidden but it's horrible. It also suggests, especially with its characterization of the unseen sheriff, that these lies are intentional and constructed to control the populace. The five youngsters' world is still holding on to Leave It to Beaver; their neighbors are still friendly and helpful. It has been suggested the film anticipated the death of the American Dream and the dissolution of the nuclear family.

These youngsters cannot conceive a world where Leatherface exists, no matter how grim the news reports. So Kirk, Pam, and Jerry, in the space of about 15 minutes, walk to their bloody dooms. Sally's terror is the terror of anyone faced with the dismantling of their illusions. The hypocrisy is shown casually when the cook says he can't take watching the cruelty, but when Grandpa tries it [sorta], he cheers it. Sally, as her horrorscope suggests, is awakened, and is thus able to react to the events before her, whereas her friends all died before they could process it. The only time the score and the sounds come together is to emphasize disorientation and terror, in the single greatest scene in horror movie history: the dinner table scene. Even if she survives, she will be scarred emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. This is as much a metaphor for America as it is PTSD in its significant change. As dawn comes, it shifts from a misty white (like emerging from the clouds of the afterlife) to the summer gold flare as Leatherface does his infamous dance of frustration.

This is Hooper's true masterpiece. From the moment Sally enters the dining room until she breaks free, everything is composed for the utmost agony. The characterization going on here is chaotic. The hitchhiker snarls and scorns the old man, who insists he doesn't like the cruelty. Leatherface has donned his 50s matronly garb, jarringly discordant with the idyllic domesticity it evokes. Grandpa rests there like a mummy, encased in hard human leather. Marilyn Burns gives one of the most intense performances in horror history, her eyes doing the work of a million lines of dialogue. Hooper zooms into them, lingering on the veins and irises, watching them twitch (and reinforcing his themes of seeing what's truly there), and Burns, drenched in sweat, writhes. It's here that hypocrisies are laid bare, where any vestige of mundanity is scored away by burning light, where the cow stops being meat and becomes a person, where the uncertain becomes certain, and that certainty is a godless, empty void of suffering. Hooper's sense of irony and understanding of hypocrisy is crystal clear in that moment. —Review by Sally Jane Black. Source: letterboxd.com

Sally (Marilyn Burns) is the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Within this horrific tale ("You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it") Sally is regarded as a hero and not simply as a heroine. Classically the heroine was saved by the male and the hero endured the hardships that follow in conventional horror films. Yet Sally is the only survivor of her group and has endured the hardships of a ruined society to literally laugh in the face of her iconic assailant. Carol Jeanne Clover (teacher of American Film at the University of California, Berkeley) states that even if often predominantly male, the audience is able to engage and identify with the Final Girl due to the fact that “the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.”

Therefore it is for this reason that the audience, male or not, is able to sympathize with Sally and identify with her anguish and then to her rise to power. Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”) similarly states that ‘Not only does this dinner scene provoke a visceral reaction from the audience but the viewer more intensely sympathizes with the femininity of the character. During multiple points within this scene, the audience is given the perspective of Sally who is strapped to a chair.

The fact that she escapes her assailants and laughs in the wounded face of Leatherface demonstrates her new found empowerment and reaffirms her sexuality. The Final Girl must subvert the patriarchal Texan society which is represented by the all male family that is impotent, perverse and gender confused.' Power is for this reason ushered away from the family and given to Sally. Therefore, the film allows the audience to identify with the Final Girl and celebrate her triumph over the killer. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago.

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what the film revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Charlie Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn't "really like the horror genre or dark, bleak stories," and so the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. Hunnam was "truly gobsmacked" when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. Of the episodes, Hunnam said, "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could."

And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann

2025-09-20T04:51:00.004+02:00

Red Sheet by James Ellroy (2026): "It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O." Source: amazon.com

Mystery writer Megan Abbott has already proclaimed Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) the best book she has read on the Black Dahlia case, evidently not pausing to consider just how low the bar is on this subject, given the dismal quality of the aforementioned books, plus John Gilmore’s Severed (1994), Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995) and Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files (2006), a work so fraudulent that it earned the author a lifetime ban by the district attorney’s office. Mining the well-traversed district attorney’s files in the Black Dahlia case, augmented with FBI reports, news accounts, public records, and occasional interviews with less-informed descendants of the main figures, Mann has amassed the ponderous resources for what could have been a strong book. Mann sets out with two laudable goals: To strip away the numerous myths surrounding Elizabeth Short, and to eschew any attempt to solve the case, which he views as hubris. Mann’s depiction of Elizabeth Short plunked down in Hollywood as Tom Sawyer in ankle-strap shoes brings us no closer to her. The book speculates wildly on one of the usual suspects in a far-fetched solution, then attempts to recant with a “never mind.” Elizabeth Short, the enigmatic victim of the murder, crossed paths with hundreds of random people during her brief time in Hollywood in the summer and fall of 1946. Instead of being the Black Dahlia, who went on hundreds of dates, Elizabeth Short was the woman who went on one date hundreds of times, a carefully scripted encounter with a parade of presentable men who were a safe escort. All but one, apparently. Source: ladailymirror.com

Jon Hamm (Your Friends & Neighbors-Neo Noir), Dick Powell (Pitfall-Classic Noir)

2025-06-01T05:21:00.011+02:00

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact.

It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!"

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt). Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Bikini Kill & Kathleen Hanna)

2025-04-28T01:38:00.024+02:00

Sara Marcus: Three days before the appointed Sunday in April 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in a greenhouse in Seattle. I remembered that Newsweek had referred to Courtney Love, now Cobain’s widow, as the riot grrrls’ “patron saint,” but I’d never cared about Nirvana or about Love’s band, Hole. Fearing that a grief-filled meeting would separate me from the other girls right off the bat, I nearly stayed home. Still, I went, and when I finally stepped over the threshold of Positive Force House into its first-floor living room, I found that nobody else at the meeting cared about Nirvana or Hole either. We talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television. These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. I was going to be one of them. A friend of a friend at school gave me a Bikini Kill tape—I knew that the band was somehow linked to Riot Grrrl—and for a while no other music mattered, just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, “Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!”

Jessica Hopper FedExed a reporter a big package of zines, Hit It or Quit It as well as others. And she went on record in an hour-long phone interview. On the day the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek hit the streets, a regular Wednesday night Riot Grrrl meeting took place at the Emma Center. Jessica arrived late; she had stopped off at a newsstand to buy the magazine. The other girls had already picked up a copy of the issue—and although Jessica had warned them of an article—they were aghast at what they saw. “Revolution, Girl Style” occupied a two-page spread in the Lifestyle section, complete with a photograph of Jessica (the caption dubbed her a “prototypical Riot Grrrl”), a portrait Alice Wheeler had taken of Angie Hart and a photo of Courtney Love, whom Jessica had described as “Riot Grrrl’s patron saint.”

That designation stemmed only from the fact that Love had passed out copies of Hit It or Quit It at Hole shows in England. Love actually had an odd antipathy for Riot Grrrl and especially for anybody associated with it who had been close with Cobain before she had met him, namely Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail. Love had recently left a long, rambling answering-machine message for a girl named Nina Cunzio, who was trying to get a Riot Grrrl group started in LA: “We should totally have meetings at my house, I’d love that a lot,” Love had said, sounding to Nina like somebody on drugs. “But you gotta lose this Kathleen Hanna bullshit.” Nina never called back. In just a few months, Love would write a vicious column in Melody Maker, blasting Bikini Kill. How could Jessica Hopper have done such a thing—spoken for the entire movement, to a national magazine, without even consulting with the rest of them? It felt like a gargantuan betrayal of trust, like Jessica had just been using all of them to gain more exposure for her own projects, no matter who else got hurt along the way.

Another malignant rumors about Kathleen spread by Courtney Love: One thing that immediately comes to mind about what Kathleen Hanna's MO is when Mike Watt (from the Minutemen) asked her to be a guest on his first solo album and she wanted to prove a point that she didn't want to be in the company of bros so her contribution was to leave a message on Watt's answering machine with a fake story about how someone who was on the album had raped a girl. Really distasteful stuff. She called it her anti-contribution. To honor this offer, Watt put it on the album. She's just someone who seems to rotate around her own gravity. She's straight up falsely accusing someone of raping a 13 year old girl and calling it art. That's very distasteful at any level. Also she laughs it off as it just being during one of her lying phases, which is ridiculous. Did you see her interview with V magazine? She admitted as a child she would steal her dad's credit card and buy silk blouses. She sounds like a scammer and then she married to a guy who'd bragged about “fag-bashing.” Source: www.hootpage.com

But, unlike Courtney Love, Bikini Kill were always surrounded by controversy just because they were an outwardly and aggressively feminist band. They were very much needed in the 1990s punk scene and respected by all from that scene and Adam Horovitz changed his views considerably since his days in the Beastie Boys. Bikini Kill were one of the best bands of the grunge era, and way more important politically than Hole. Aside from their aesthetic and political differences, I think the motivation of Love to punch Hanna at Lollapalooza festival was mainly jealousy of Hanna's close relationship with Kurt Cobain. Although Cobain ended up dating Tobi Vail, it's between the lines that his main attraction was towards Kathleen, but she allegedly only agreed to a friendship because she was scared of Cobain's substance abuse and wary of his obsessive claim to fame.

Kathleen Hanna: Bikini Kill and The Nation of Ulysses (I was dating Tim Green at that time) all drove back back to Olympia in late August to play K Records’ one-time-only convention, called the International Pop Underground (IPU). “Defeat the Corporate Ogre” was their slogan, and the repetitive mentions of being “anti–corporate rock” seemed pointed at Nirvana, since they’d just signed to a major label (Geffen) and had left Olympia. It felt like a line was being drawn in the sand: Nirvana was no longer welcome in K’s indie purist clubhouse. Kurt had been nothing but supportive of the Olympia scene (he even got a K Records tattoo) and it felt gross that they were publicly slamming him that way. Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie vs major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on to me.

Sara Marcus: Ian MacKaye had introduced Jett to Bikini Kill, and she was instantly impressed by both the music and the zines. She was particularly heartened that a rock ‘n’ roll feminism was catching on; she could have used some of that in the late ‘70s, when she was a teenage guitarist playing in the Runaways. “The Runaways had nobody,” she said. “I felt like a feminist, but I felt completely dissed by other feminists, ‘cause they were like, ‘Well, you can’t dress sexy.’ Number one, I’m not dressing sexy—even though I did have my pants open from time to time. But what do you mean? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck! You know why they say that girls ‘can’t play guitar’ and ‘can’t play rock ‘n’ roll’? Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. So meeting people like Kathleen and all those girls, it was really incredible, because I felt like maybe people were starting to get it.”

Bikini Kill had recorded a full-length album that past October, titled Pussy Whipped, but it wasn’t due out till the following fall, and they had already written new songs to record with Jett—glammy, triumphal anthems that explored pleasure and play. And for the introduction to “Demirep,” Kathleen and Jett sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and played a hand-clapping game they’d both learned when they were little girls: “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black.“ These two songs, along with a new version of “Rebel Girl,” would be released on a 7” in September 1993, a month before Pussy Whipped. Five nights later, the band played a sold-out Rock for Choice benefit to an audience of four thousand at the Hollywood Palladium. Stone Temple Pilots, King Missile, and Kim Gordon’s project Free Kitten were also on the bill, but the biggest buzz was around Bikini Kill.

Kathleen performed in a dress with the words KILL ME printed on her chest, and some men shouted boos at the band. The Los Angeles Times ran a review noting that “while much of the audience seemed unsure of just what to make of this Olympia band, there was a contingent of female fans that seemed wholly enthralled—as if they had found that music really mattered.” Working with Joan Jett had been Kathleen’s first major-label experience, but now the big guys were starting to come calling for Bikini Kill. “Kathleen had a hot band,” Jett’s manager, Kenny Laguna, recounted. “Every label in the business wanted them! Warner Brothers, Capitol, Interscope: everyone.” Kathleen Hanna: Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so Kathi, Bill and me met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. To show us how edgy Interscope was, Jimmy Iovine showed us a Marilyn Manson video that hadn’t come out yet. “You guys could do an edgy video like that!” he said. “Could I hang you from a meat hook?” I asked. Iovine pretended he hadn’t heard me and continued his spiel about how great his label was. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.”

At the time, probably influenced by his abrasive wife Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain hinted to various press outlets that he didn't understand why "those riot grrrl groups took themselves so seriously." Kathleen didn’t think Bikini Kill should abandon Kill Rock Stars, but she was curious about getting wider distribution for her music and ideas. Plus, she explained later, “I wanted to say to myself, ‘I looked into it and it wasn’t the right thing,’ as opposed to just assuming things.” Tobi didn’t even want to look into it, though; she saw what Nirvana’s success had done to them. “I was very saddened to see that that success did not make them happy,” she said. “I knew that things were really really bad: Kurt was on drugs and the band was falling apart.” —Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) by Sara Marcus

Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

2025-04-16T03:48:00.022+02:00

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment!

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear.

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light.

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon

"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

2025-04-03T20:01:00.011+02:00

We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.” When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground.

Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away. Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio. Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen.

I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice.

Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.

I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me.

“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back:

Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.

After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”

I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.

After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.

We played with Nirvana at the Paramount in Seattle on Halloween of the same year. We were the opening band. I knew he’d called Tobi over the summer and asked if we wanted to be in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video as anarchist cheerleaders (an image he borrowed from a drawing in our zine). I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the “meritocracy” of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band. Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline. Kurt was hiding in the corner of the biggest dressing room backstage, and he seemed really far away. I assumed he was freaked out by all the attention. Nirvana was touring constantly and probably living out of hotels, so I tried not to take it personally and instead focused on how sweet it was that they’d asked us to open for them. I don’t think any of us realized how huge they were about to become, but something had clearly changed. I knew Kurt was using heroin, because he’d asked me to get him some the last time we’d hung out in Portland. After the show, I was sitting in the van next to the window when Tobi scrunched in next to me. I told her I felt like we’d never see Kurt again, and she knew exactly what I meant. I could tell by her expression and the cadence of her speech that she was also in a lot of pain, but she still played the big sister and calmed me down. She told me she’d lost people to heroin before and knew the drill.

Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did.

And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.

Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing.

He’d married Courtney Love, who’d been putting Bikini Kill down in the press for a while, so it felt like seeing him with her around was a bad idea. But then Kim told me Kurt was going to be in Seattle without Courtney for a month and encouraged me to go visit him. The last time I’d spoken with Kurt was two years earlier when I was living at the Embassy in DC. He’d called for Tobi, but I’d picked up. When I told him Tobi wasn’t home, he asked if I had time to talk. As we began to chat, he brought up a Seattle show we’d played together at the OK Hotel a while back. After Nirvana’s set that night, a bunch of punk girls had yelled at him about Nirvana’s new song “Rape Me,” and he thought I was the leader of the campaign against him. I was confused by that song and had talked about it with some girls that night. We were all in agreement that a guy making a comparison between being sold out by a friend to being raped wasn’t the best idea, but I hadn’t spearheaded anything. I knew he was still doing heroin and wanted to at least let him know I cared about him and was there if he ever needed help, before it was too late. Just as I was packing my car to drive to Seattle to go see Kurt, I chickened out. I thought: He has a whole new life. He’s in one of the most famous bands in the world!

After Kurt's suicide, everywhere I went I saw pictures of Kurt, which made me feel physically ill. I felt like he had died because he was sick of being exploited and treated like an object, and now that he was gone people were lining up to make money off his suffering. His death made me more secure in my strategy of eschewing fame whenever possible and working toward things that actually mattered. I was having a hard time dealing with the minuscule amount of fame I had; I couldn’t imagine how he had lasted as long as he did. But more than anything I was sad. Sad about the heroin, about the gun, about his not having the happiness he deserved. Sad we would never be old together, sitting on a porch talking about when we were stupid young musicians who thought we could change the world. Why hadn’t I had the courage to go see him when he asked me to? To tell him I loved him and to reassure him that I in no way thought he was a bad person for signing to a major label? I was a fucking coward. Scared of Courtney Love. Scared of Kurt rejecting me when he never had before.

Courtney Love got in my face and started hissing like a cat. She began screaming stuff at me like, “Are you leaving now, Kathleen? Go home and feed the poor!” She held her lit cigarette up to my face and traced my features with it, like she was going to put it out on my face. Then she coldcocked me in the face. I’ll never know why she did it. Maybe because “trauma begets trauma.” Maybe she was on drugs and mourning Kurt’s death; maybe it was the fact that Tobi had dated Kurt while he was writing Nevermind, and it was widely speculated that Tobi was the inspiration for much of that record. Maybe Courtney was embarrassed because I’d seen her using my stage banter as an empty schtick. Whatever set her off, it was ironic that a woman attacked me for no reason and then claimed she was a better feminist than I was. As we left the theater’s parking lot, I got directions to the nearest police station. I just wanted the assault to be written down so no one could pretend it had never happened or say that it was a “fight,” like they had when Courtney assaulted singer Mary Lou Lord.

Later Courtney told the media I provoked her by whispering “Where’s the baby, in a closet with an IV?” referring to her daughter. I absolutely did not say that. The “fight” became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a “catfight,” which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, “Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?” A few days later we played the Warfield in Los Angeles, the same venue we’d played with the Go-Go’s a year before. Before the show, I went to a deli and looked at magazines. I flipped through Spin, the one with Green Day on the cover. Inside was an essay by Courtney about Lollapalooza. She claimed I was “Kurt’s worst enemy.” I looked up and saw Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, walking toward me. Even though we ran in the same circles, we didn’t know each other well. He made a beeline straight for me, sat down at the table, and started talking. And from what he said, it was like he knew I’d just read the interview: “Kurt would have been really upset to hear that someone hit you in the face. He loved you, I know he did.” —"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

2025-03-31T03:18:00.004+02:00

Born in London in 1970, Ione Skye is the daughter of folk singer-songwriter Donovan and fashion model Enid Karl. Her father Donovan is known for the hits “Catch the Wind,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

"My parents met in 1966, at the Whisky a Go Go in LA. She was twenty-one and Donovan was twenty. Mom had dated famous men before—Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas. But the night she spotted Donovan across the crowded Whisky, that was it for her. The Sunshine Superman, as they called him, swept her off her feet and away to Greece, then London. When she got pregnant with my brother Dono, they moved into a fairy-tale house in the English countryside. Mom was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, but England was her happy place. As she once told me, sounding New Agey: “It was as if I’d lived there in another life.” Donovan was happy there chopping firewood and writing poems and songs about their budding family. His album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden is pretty much all about that time. In “Song of the Naturalist’s Wife” you can even hear my brother’s first cries. Donovan ticked all the boxes for Mom: creative, exciting, handsome, and a good provider.

By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and initiated a new life. Mom hired a lawyer to get child support, using her first check to move us into a small apartment in Los Angeles, my first real home. Mom didn’t love her husband Billy the way he loved her, but it didn’t hurt that Billy was gorgeous—tall, dark, and shaggy, like a 1960s Keith Richards. After a dozen or so proposals, she’d agreed to marry him, and I was all for it. While shooting River's Edge I was careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu Reeves and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach. “Cut!” said Tim. “Nice work, kids. Stand by.” We pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. “You good?” said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, “Can I come to your place after wrap?” On the way there, we stopped at an all-night retro diner, Norms.

It was busy and bright inside, but the clatter and voices fell away as we slid into our booth. I could only marvel at every little thing Keanu did. The way he slung his arm across the back of the booth, tore a sugar packet with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Each gesture was sexier than the last. Spacey from lack of sleep and maybe even love, I felt the old diner drifting upward, lifting us into the sky. Just above the city. Just above real life. Keanu had his own barebones studio apartment to stay in during filming. A brown carpet, a mattress on the living room floor. We lay on our sides on his mattress and I ran my hands over Keanu’s smooth back as he kissed my face and neck. I felt both shy and proud of my body, my soft skin and full breasts in my Calvin Klein bra. I knew I was nice looking but wished I were the most beautiful girl in the world. This might have been the most beautiful boy. He was different from any boy I’d known, self-possessed and calm. But when I tried to maneuver him on top of me, he wouldn’t budge. “Let me drive you home,” he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap.

I wound my way up Mulholland, then Woodrow Wilson, finally pulling up outside the Zappas’ compound. The road was empty, but the canyon was rippling and alive. I sat on my hood and lit a shoebox joint, checking over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke often—yet—partly because you couldn’t at the Zappas’. It was no secret that Frank was staunchly against drugs of any sort, unless you counted the Winstons he chain-smoked. Anything stronger dulled the intellect and killed ambition, he believed. And because Frank was no ordinary father but something more like a cult leader to his kids, they were proud straight arrows too. Me, I was whoever they wanted me to be. Inside the compound, at least. You never knew who you might find there. That was part of the fun. Maybe it was Molly Ringwald on a pool float, pale and lovely as a forties Vargas girl. Molly and Dweezil Zappa were no longer together but still friends. Though newly famous, thanks to Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Molly was wonderfully un-stuckup.

I found her worldly and proper, in a vaguely old-fashioned way. “That’s what makes Hollywood so dynamite,” Anthony Kiedis said. “That desert energy, blowing in. I can really get down with it.” I liked that he thought Hollywood was great and wasn’t too jaded to admit it. But it was the thing about the wind that got me. I’d always had a connection with the Santa Anas. They brought up something in me, a wild yearning feeling. Anthony was now staring at me with focused intensity, his eyes tracing my hair, my mouth, my neck, as if memorizing me. No defensiveness, no beatnik shtick. For hours, we lay there, shedding layers, words flowing into kisses flowing into words. He stroked my face and said I was like an angel and I understood that we were falling under the same spell. And then, like it was Christmas in August, we shared all the things we loved: the Santa Ana winds, and perfect pieces of fruit, and Marilyn Monroe’s arched eyebrows, and the joy of a warm, still ocean, and getting comfortable after being shy and uncomfortable.

The Chili Peppers had just released their third studio album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, to not much of a bang. Anthony was broke and living with the band’s manager, Lindy Goetz, in the Valley. I’d pick him up at Canter’s Deli, or sometimes we’d just drive around, shouting our life stories over the radio. Anthony drove fast and reckless, and I was driving like a maniac too. Anthony would have to hit rock bottom to quit drugs, just as I’d have to hit my own rock bottom to quit the feeling I had to take care of Anthony. The need to save him was an addiction in itself. I was hooked. If Anthony’s sex drive had a soundtrack, it would be Fun House, the Stooges album he’d turned me on to. He liked to brag that he only exercised in bed and onstage, though I saw him doing push-ups all the time. He was obsessed with leading me to climax, and the pressure could be a lot. After five years of struggle, the Chili Peppers were finally moving on from being just a fringe local band to being played on KROQ. Tickets for the upcoming Uplift Mofo Party Plan tour were selling out and the record was sidling up the charts. If using was what kept Anthony alive, I was willing to help him.

“If you’re going to do it,” I told Anthony that night, trailing him out the kitchen door, “just do it here with me, where you’re safe.” “I don’t deserve you,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m coming with you,” I said. In my pajamas and robe, I drove Anthony to meet a dealer on the corner of Wilton and Franklin Avenue. Then we came home and I watched, biting my knuckles, as Anthony shot up in my bathroom. The same bathroom where Karis Jagger and I used to stand on the tub’s edge, lip-synching in the mirror. That was the first of many times I went with him to score. He didn’t like me tagging along at first, but then we discovered I had a sixth sense for the fuzz. One time we were parked in the Mayfair Market parking lot and Anthony had just smoked some dope; I got a weird feeling and put the tinfoil in my pocket seconds before a cop car swooped up. They searched the car and questioned us separately, and miraculously, we had the same story: We were just going to the market to get bagels. Heroin would make Anthony remote but also snuggly. We’d curl up on the waterbed, listening to Neil Young or Lou Reed. Sometimes we watched old movies, and not just because I wanted to.

Anthony had a thing for Veronica Lake and might have seen Sullivan’s Travels as many times as I’d seen The Blue Dahlia. But then there were the nights he shot speedballs, a mixture of coke and heroin. Those nights weren’t sweet at all. I’d try to sleep while he crouched on my floor. “Don’t look at me!” he’d snap when I tried to pull him into bed. “I’m bad. I feel like a demon.” I’d look away for his sake, but Anthony wasn’t a bad person, he was just in a bad way. In the New Year, Anthony and I moved our joint belongings—his duffel, my three suitcases, and whatever else fit into the Toyota—into a quite glamorous 1940s triplex on North Orange Drive. I loved the apartment, with its original pink-tiled bathroom and Art Deco moldings. Heroin was “the worst drug in the world,” the “crossing the line” drug, and needles were so gross. All the same, I’d grown curious about heroin, now that it was in front of me so much. I wanted to know how the drug felt from the inside, why it was so bewitching. “Can I try some?” I asked one night as Anthony laid his lighter and tinfoil on the bathroom sink.

Anthony looked horrified. “No,” he said sternly. Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get hooked. Not long after Hillel’s death, Anthony had gone back to rehab and gotten clean again. My worst nightmare was that he’d relapse if he found out I was falling in love with Adam. People thought Anthony was indestructible, but I wasn’t convinced. I was bound by a strange belief that I had to be with him to keep him safe. Then one beautiful September day—just a perfect day, as the Lou Reed song went—everything changed. Anthony sent me a letter. He was working the Twelve Steps and making his amends.

Once it occurred to my brother Dono that he might actually be able to date the models he worked with, he went on a mission to woo his big crush, Kate Moss—and by God, he succeeded. I went to see Nirvana perform on MTV Unplugged in New York while Dono and Kate were briefly an item. That winter I met Anthony on Becky's in Brooklyn, I knew that would be our last date. When Anthony started to yell at me, I was on the verge of tears, but fortunately there was Lou Reed who was leaving the bar and stared him in disapproval, which shut Anthony up on the spot. While we were shooting Four Rooms, all the actors shared a makeup trailer, but Madonna was soon moved to a private space because we couldn’t stop staring at her. I mean, it was Madonna. I’d only seen her in the flesh once before, from the audience at her Blond Ambition concert in LA in 1990. Adam had scored prime seats because the Beastie Boys’ first tour had been opening for Madonna. He and I were secret fans. Commercial pop was uncool to us, so we were acting like, Oh, isn’t it ironic that we’re here at this mainstream pop show?

But from the minute the Blond Queen strutted onstage in her Jean Paul Gaultier bondage gear, all our judgment went out the window. Madonna was very fun and a little bit of a mean girl too. She loved taking the piss out of Tim Roth, who played the bellboy in all four stories. My old friend Paul Starr was Madonna’s makeup artist. Near the end of one long day of filming, when he swooped over for a last touch-up, she playfully smacked his hand and snapped, “If you put any more makeup on my face it will crack!” Paul just laughed and went on doing his thing. “Go ahead, hon,” said Madonna, patting the bed. I’d been summoned! Cinching my terry cloth bathrobe, I lay down next to Madonna. Her eyes were still closed, so I closed mine and we lay quietly, side by side on our backs. Turning my head ever so slightly, I opened one eye to look at her. She was almost otherworldly, with her feathery black lashes and fantastic bone structure. I had the urge to wrap her in a maternal embrace but didn’t dare.

Madonna took care of herself. Madonna might not have been a fan of my brother, but she took a small shine to me. When Four Rooms wrapped, just before Christmas, I was invited to a holiday dinner party at Castillo del Lago, her Mediterranean-style estate perched above Lake Hollywood. A few decades before Madonna, another bigwig, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, had lived there. It was magnificent, the whole exterior painted in ocher stripes inspired by a church in Portofino. The view from the grand dining room, with its honeycombed Moorish ceilings, stretched from Lake Hollywood to the ocean. Best of all, a Frida Kahlo painting, Self-Portrait with Monkey, hung over a small table in the foyer. It was a small group that night. Debbie Harry was there, with a spiky new haircut. I still worshipped Debbie but my attention was mainly focused on Madonna’s ex-lover and best friend, Ingrid Casares. A few years in the future, when Howard Stern asked me about our romance on his show, I’d say she was my true initiation into the lesbian nation. When I married Adam, my bridesmaids were Karis Jagger and Mick Fleetwood's daughter, Amelia.

Adam and I had never once fought in our entire seven-year relationship. I’d always thought that was our strength, but in fact it was our greatest weakness. I was reading a letter that had been sent to Adam, handwritten. It meant something. I scanned the lines, trying to understand what. It was from Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill. They’d met at the Summersault music festival in Australia. They were only friends, Adam said. The letter was not overtly flirtatious or inappropriate. She knew he was married and was trying, at least, to be respectful. But I could tell she wanted to leave an impression by the way she wrote—cool and smart and witty. And he must have liked her too, or why else would he have shown it to me? I handed it back to him, my hand shaking. “Should I write back?” Adam asked, his voice soft. I couldn’t, in good conscience, promise to be faithful to him. If my husband was going to like someone else (“like” was as far as I could let my imagination go), at least Kathleen was a good person. I admired her punk feminist mission and loved her songs, especially “Rebel Girl.” —Say Everything: A Memoir (2025) by Ione Skye

Before the End, Lou Reed (Endless Cycle)

2025-03-22T03:29:00.029+01:00

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, documentary directed by Jeff Finn. Release date: January 13, 2025 on Apple TV.

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is less an excavation of truth than an exercise in indulgence, a quixotic pilgrimage through the mists of conspiracy and nostalgia. Directed by Jeff Finn, the documentary styles itself as an investigative probe into the final days of The Doors' frontman, but in reality, it is more séance than scholarship. It toys with the well-worn whispers of Morrison faking his death without the burden of serious evidence. Finn and his parade of interviewees seem convinced that the "official story" is somehow suspect, yet they produce little more than speculative embroidery on an already rich tapestry of myth. To his credit, Finn unearths rare archival material and interviews that offer a glimpse into Morrison as a man, not just a spectral figure in rock 'n' roll lore.

But where the documentary might have explored Morrison's literary ambitions, his existential unraveling, or the paradox of his self-destructive genius, it instead opts for the well-trodden path of counter-narratives that fail to hold up under scrutiny. The introduction of a shadowy "Mr. X," hinted to be Morrison himself is laughable because his name is Frank Wagner and he's younger than Morrison. Critics seem divided, with some lauding Finn's passion and others dismissing the documentary as a hallucinatory echo chamber. Jonita Davis of The Black C.A.P.E. magazine acknowledges its compelling storytelling, while audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes skew toward exasperation, one viewer branding it "filled with innuendo, half-baked theories and outright fiction." Before the End is not an exposé but a testament to our inability to let our icons rest. This documentary does little but add another layer of fog to a legend that scarcely needs it.

Jeff Finn: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker: JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on Kennedy is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in The Doors. I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim Morrison as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. We all have a dark side. I was doing street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the Oliver Stone movie. So, I’ve tried to do damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic. Everybody has their version of Jim. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent is not what we generally think of Jim Morrison. I want people to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god. Where are The Doors of today? Why people today aren’t rising up and forming bands the way it was in the late 60s and protesting? I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said that it was an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, and it couldn’t be replicated. Source: bandsaboutmovies.com

“I’m most concerned with compassion and happiness these days. I know things that impede happiness; drugs impede it, anguish impedes it, tension impedes it. People just don’t want to believe there’s any integrity. They’re always looking for some really ugly little thing. I think drugs are some of the worst, terrible things. And if there was any single thing that I thought would be effective to stop people from dealing in drugs and taking them I would do it. However I don’t think there is, apart from telling people to use them with caution. I find self-destructive people very boring. I would like to think that I’m not one of them.” —Lou Reed, interview for BBC Radio 1 (June 5, 1980)

It took years for The Velvet Underground to be understood. Most people caught on with the rise of alternative rock in the ‘90s, 30 years later. Now matter how bad, low, worthless someone feels there is Lou saying: 'I find it hard to believe you don't know, the beauty you are...' You are being told how, despite what you feel, that you are valued and loved. And Reed pulls that trick again and again in his solo work. And the fans of John Cale must know it’s hard to imagine The Velvet Underground commercially successful with Cale staying in the band longer. If they’d delivered another album like White Light/White Heat there’s no way they'd make the jump to Atlantic from Verve.

MGM kicked the Velvet Underground off the label around the beginning of 1970 as part of its infamous "purge" of artists who supposedly advocated taking drugs. In November 1970 Mike Curb announced the termination of the contracts of eighteen bands that "advocate for drug use." In a December 1970 Rolling Stone news item, an MGM rep claimed that "The cuts were made partly to do with the drug scene—like maybe a third of them had to do with drug reasons. The others were dropped because they weren't selling." Certainly the Velvet Underground would have been at the top of the drug purge list. Sterling Morrison thought so, telling Mix magazine that Curb "wanted to get rid of the controversial bands, including the low-selling Velvets."

Despite of the chronic painting of Lou Reed as the miscreant in his fallout with John Cale and later with Robert Quine, the reality is in fact quite different. In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day by Richie Unterberger, Michael Carlucci, longtime friend Lou Reed's guitarist Robert Quine said: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of John Cale in The Velvet Underground was Cale's ideas were just too out there," says Carlucci. "Cale had some really wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't stand it." Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, which was written in collaboration with Victor Bockris is a clear example of one-side reporting. After the dissolution of The Velvets, Sterling Morrison explained that Cale could be also a hard pill: “People talk about Lou, but John was also truly difficult to work with. Once we were doing “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is a quiet song. I’m playing the solo, which is also quiet, and in the middle of my solo, he purposely steps on the button that turns on my distorter. It’s a Vox distorter, so all of a sudden there’s this blast of sound distorted and three times louder than all the rest. John looks at me like I’m the crazy one, turns it off, and then kicks it! I look over at Lou and we’re both going, OK, what the hell?! But if I had done that to him he would’ve had a stroke.”

John Cale obsessively blames Lou Reed of the acrimonious reunion of The Velvet Underground in 1993, with a great deal of jealousy. In What's Welsh for Zen? Cale whines about Reed to no end: "We supported U2 for Swiss stadium dates. As soon as we did that we were no longer the focus of attention and Lou could not bear the fact that he was a small fish in a big pond. Everybody else was having a great time, U2 were fun people to be around. Eden and Rise joined the tour in Switzerland. Rise was very worried and tried to understand what was going on between Lou and me, via Sylvia, which was a big mistake. One afternoon in the first week I was sitting around with a bass riff and Lou started playing guitar through this echo machine he had that was just making gorgeous noise. It was floating around in a miasma and then he started singing. I asked 'What did you say? You said "coyote"?' He said, 'Yeah.' So that song got done. And I expected that when we got out on the road we'd start trying new songs. In the middle of it all, I brought up this thing about publishing. All of a sudden Lou stopped the rehearsal, went outside and got on the phone. Sylvia showed up and came up to me and said, 'You can't talk like that to Lou. If you do, you're going to be very disappointed.' 'This is band business,' I said, 'are you a member of the band? You're not, are you? Right, so why don't you stay out of it?' She said, 'I manage Lou Reed.' That was a dead end. We knew we would attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who wanted to see us fail. I read an article that said, 'There are some bands who shouldn't even think about re-forming.' We were one of them.

Lou was trying to control everything and I knew a storm was coming. One night in Italy, I was doing 'Waiting for the Man' with a huge orchestral introduction, and I was trying to give them the tempo from the piano, but I was too far away. Lou went and told my tech to turn the piano off. At that point I was ready to knock his teeth down his throat. He was getting stranger and I couldn't deal with that. As soon as the tour was over, Lou was completely lost. I looked at him on the plane back from England to the US, and I realized: this guy is empty. He does not know where to draw the line. He's completely adrift. MTV wanted the Velvet Underground as part of their series of 'Unplugged'. Lou was insisting that he had to produce the 'Unplugged' album. 'I'm the only one who can produce the VU,' he said. I pointed out that we could have Chris Thomas or George Martin. Lou likes to obsess over things. I have different production values, in that Lou will go for the audiophile situation and I will go for the excitement. Everybody left Lou alone and he was very quiet, saying only, 'I must produce.' 'Absolutely not,' I replied. That night I dreamed he did not drive back to Manhattan; he swam away, just drifted off into the wild blue yonder and drowned. The thing about being a star is it's so one-sided that it's corrosive.

Nico, for instance, was really in need of being completed as an artist and at the same time she could hold that grandiose position of being a star. Lou attempted to do the same, but he wasn't truly elegant enough in his demeanour to pull it off. People laugh at Lou a lot, but the thing is, Lou doesn't know when he's funny. He can be absolutely hysterical and have you rolling on the floor grasping your stomach, begging him to stop, and he still doesn't know what's going on. The point is, I don't think that Lou would like it if you told him. Lou and Sylvia had earlier insisted that the reunion tour would only happen if everyone refused to cooperate with Victor Bockris's work on his Lou Reed biography. And now they demanded that the mixing and production of any Velvet Underground recordings be Lou's domain. To me, if he did not want our input, fine, he would not get it. Certainly our only reason to refuse him was our conviction that we were best served by an outside ear. As a solo performer, I had been earning an income the equivalent of what we each could have expected from the reunion tour. What attracted me to the reunion tour, therefore, had not been the financial bonuses that were on offer, but the artistic stimulus of recreating the still uncompromised values of the original entity.

The final stroke in this conflict was a fax Lou wrote Moe in reply to a gentle note from her suggesting another producer. Moe told me it said something like, 'Moe, of course your drums sounded great because I made them sound great. John of course doesn't realize that, because his viola never sounded better because I picked the amplifiers and the PA system.' Now I wanted to say to him, 'While you were making holes in your arm, Maureen was raising her children, so fuck you! And as far as making remarks about my knowledge of recording and production, I've been known for producing people and I've been a successful at it, so I'd be careful if you're accusing me of not knowing what goes on in studios too, because I have my own studio that's fairly well equipped and I know what I'm doing down there.' So I said, 'If you don't stop doing this, you're not going to have me as a friend anymore.'

Moe called me up again and said, 'I just got a very nice fax from Sylvia.' I saw red. Yeah, what does it say?' 'Well, it says, "John's a musician, don't listen to him." The resentment I felt at the end of the day was the same I had felt throughout the years. The situation with him and Sylvia just went on and on like that. I don't want to see Lou and I don't want to talk to him and I don't want to hear anything about him. I went through the roof. My subsequent letter to him was intended to purge him of even the slightest doubt of what I saw as his motives, total control. Moe could not have known how deeply offended I was by the meanness of his tone. I was not going to forgive him again. So I wrote Lou a nine-page fax that I knew he wouldn't get up from and he hasn't. There were many blow-ups. I'm sure there will be many more. The fax machine should have been taken away from Lou and me."

Lou Reed in RockBill magazine (August 1984): “I’ve never wanted to offend anybody. I’ve never wanted to make fun of anybody. This might sound strange coming from me. I have written songs where the characters are very bitter or are borderline psychotics. But I try to be non-judgmental about things.” After his break-up with Bettye, Lou rekindled a relationship with Barbara Hodes, a clothing designer that Lou had met at the Factory. She designed knitwear-style mohair jumpers. Betsey Johnson had given Barbara a whole corner of her boutique Paraphernalia. Barbara and Lou reconnected—he moved in with her and they had a romantic and sexual relationship before Barbara married Michael Gross, a reporter from The New York Times. According to Barbara, Lou was 'tender and polite' while he was not on drugs. She said Sally Can't Dance was critiziced by Lou because of Steve Katz's involvement. "I fear that I am a lone voice in proclaiming the brilliance of that record! Seriously. I think it contains some of his loveliest melodies. “Sally Can’t Dance” is actually about a woman who lived life on the edge and was always into the latest fashions, but later wound up in a rent-controlled apartment living a hum drum life."

“When Lou Reed talks in Coney Island Baby about wanting to play football for the coach and “giving the whole thing up for you,” he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. And it hurts all over again. It's also a way of recapturing his more innocent days.” —Paul Nelson for Rolling Stone magazine (25 March, 1976)

Bob Quine had a singular sound but he was just a sideman. Quine was a Velvet Underground superfan—something Reed’s wife Sylvia appreciated when she scouted him for The Blue Mask. A musicologist, Quine gave Lou a thorough analysis of why Lou’s particular guitar playing was genius and what an impact it had. “We recorded it in this gigantic orchestral soundstage that was built inside a mid-century office tower on 6th Avenue in Midtown,” Fred Maher says about those sessions: “Lou was in very good humor and we really stretched out. It was just me on drums, Lou, Bob, and Fernando Saunders. During the recording, everything was hunky-dory, and Bob and Lou were getting along. But when the final mixes were done, I think Bob wasn’t very happy with the mixes. He complained bitterly to Lou, and that was pretty much that.” “Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Richard Hell recalled: “He didn’t like having his stuff edited. He couldn’t handle it. I talked to him about it. I was like, ‘Bob, it’s their record, not yours.’ But he was not rational that way.”

Even those who say that Lou Reed had "normal parents" acknowledge that his father had a cutting sense of humor, cutting people down to size. That might seem innocuous from the outside, but for a child it can have a big impact. "Beginning of a Great Adventure" shows us Reed facing down the impossibility of being a father. Reed had grown as an artist, as a writer, and tapped into universal truths in New York and Magic & Loss and expressed them in such a crystalline way that almost everyone could relate. The true depth of Reed’s artistry sunk deeper and deeper whereas most of his 60s contemporaries were out of ideas and churning out drivel. The last song on his last album Lulu: Junior Dad is absolutely heartbreaking. It belongs alongside with other songs that paint negative or frightening portrayals of father figures: Kill Your Sons, My Old Man, Endless Cycle, Sex With Your Parents, Rock Minuet, etc. —Sources: Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall and Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Lou Reed: Another Complete Unknown

2025-03-09T00:26:00.088+01:00

Some fans of The Velvet Underground keep dreaming of an adaptation of Lou Reed’s life in a similar style to Bob Dylan's A Complete Unknown. The crux would be in how to approach such a complex character. A scholar fan suggested that adapting Reed’s life to the big screen would play host to a series of difficulties: “I think it’s an interesting idea precisely because Lou Reed seems so unlikeable as a person, but he wasn’t afraid to show his vulnerabilities. I saw a film about John Lennon (played by Ian Hart who then went on to play Lennon in Backbeat) and Brian Epstein, where Lennon mercilessly taunted Epstein about his sexuality. A Lou Reed/Velvet Underground movie could explore Lou’s ambivalent attitude towards Andy Warhol and their fallout. Also introducing his first love Shelley Albin. Lou Reed would have to be some kind of anti-hero and then find a redemption in the figure of Laurie Anderson. I’m totally down with that, but it would be tough for a wide release.” Source: cultfollowing.co.uk

“We were inseparable from the moment we met,” Shelley Albin recalled. “We were always literally wrapped up in each other like a pretzel.” Soon Shelley and Lou could be seen at the Savoy, making out in public for hours at a time. “He was a great kisser and well coordinated. I always thought of him as a master of the slow dance.” For both of them it was their first real love affair. They had a great sexual relationship. They played tennis together. For all of Lou’s eccentricities, Shelley found him “very straight. He was very coordinated, a good dancer, and he could play a good game of tennis or basketball. His criteria for life were equally straight. He was in essence a fifties guy,” Shelley said. “His appeal was very sexy. It was the combination of a gentle lover and romantic and strong. He had the strength of a man. The electroshock treatments were very fresh in his mind. He immediately established that he was erratic, undependable, and dangerous, and that he was going to control any situation. I could play Lou’s game too, that’s why we got along so well. That’s what really attracted me to him. But he wasn’t controlling me. If you look back at who’s got the power in the relationship, it will turn out that it wasn’t him.” Shelley agreed that Lou had picked up many of his twisted ideas about life from Lincoln Swados. “You couldn’t get much crazier and weirder than Lincoln,” she said, “without being Lou.” Reed wrote two songs, “My Friend George” on New Sensations, and “Harry’s Circumcision” on Magic and Loss inspired by Lincoln Swados.

Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. If he wasn’t popping amphetamines, he was smoking pot, dropping acid, taking Placidyls and alcohol. In 1964 he added heroin to his drug menu. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin and he was having some bad LSD trips too.” But Shelley didn't want to show sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. Moreover, Lou had gone into a total decline when he realized that Shelley was not only not coming back to him, but was in fact living with two other adult men just three doors down from his apartment. Once when Shelley was at the Orange Bar with her new lover Ron Corwin and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou came frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully understood that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “Lou, if you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!” Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou couldn’t have a good time, it was not in his genes,” she stated. “He felt that he didn't deserve it. Because if you said he was nice, then you didn’t see how terrible he was. He couldn’t have a happy time nor he could accept that people liked him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

Onstage Reed erases all memory of the undignified way people like Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger have lurched into middle age. “I’ve always liked this basic thing,” Reed said. “I like to say that any kid could pick up a guitar and knock one of these songs out. They’re not hard to play or sing, but it is hard to write them: they’re very deceptive." “New Sensations” was one of 1984’s great records. Reed is a man with an impassive face and a New Yorker’s acerbic tongue. Asked about which rock lyricists he rated highly, he gave me a typical, “Generally speaking I like catchy lyrics. Like that Foreigner thing, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”. Now that’s a nice dumb lyric, that I find attractive. I like that kind of sappy music. I always have." Reed often equates his musical work with the cinema, but when more personal matters are raised, so are Reed’s hackles. He simply refuses to talk about the mid-seventies, a time when his drug addictions had him shortlisted for the rock’n’roll casualty ward. It wasn’t until his marriage to Sylvia Morales in 1980 that Reed’s career found a consistent direction.

How much does his new marriage have to do with the new equilibrium in his career? “I don’t want to answer anything that has to do with my personal life,” he replied in a flat drawl. “I understand why people might have an interest in how Clint Eastwood’s divorce is going to affect his next Dirty Harry movie. I like gossip too. I read the ‘National Enquirer’ when I have nothing else to do and I need some real garbage. And that’s what I think of it – it’s real garbage.” Reed’s latest songs seem to have narrowed the gap between the writer and his songs. “I’ve thought about that. I think the distance between Lou Reed as an image and Lou Reed as a person has shortened on the last couple of albums. Before, a lot of what I wrote about was extreme situations. Also, because I write so much in the vernacular, I always try to present it as though it’s true, as it had happened to me. But it isn’t true, and it didn’t always happen to me.” While Reed continues to have minimal commercial success, nostalgia for the New York art scene which spawned him is rampant. —Interview for The Sydney Morning Herald (January 10, 1985) by Richard Gulliatt

Lou Reed was not a fan of The Who, once proclaiming how much he disliked the band’s rock opera Tommy. He humorously sneered: “Tommy is such – Jesus, how people get sucked into that.” He added, “So talentless, and as a lyricist Pete Townshend is so profoundly untalented and philosophically boring to say the least… like the record ‘The Searcher’ [meaning ‘The Seeker’]; ‘I ask Timothy Leary…’ I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud!” Financially, things began to turn around for Reed in 1984. His lawsuits with his ex-manager Dennis Katz (target of his vitriolic song Dirt), which had dragged on for over a decade, were finally settled with the assistance of Eric Kronfeld, a successful music industry lawyer.

The settlement cost Reed a lot of money, but it did free up royalties from his RCA catalog, notably for “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed’s relationship with his wife became more complex when she began to function as his default manager, after Reed, following a familiar pattern, fell out with and parted ways with Eric Kronfeld, the man responsible for pulling him out of his financial troubles. In a letter dated December 4, 1991, he confirmed Sylvia her new role as vice-president of Sister Ray Enterprises, overseeing all his projects. Reed dedicated Between Thought and Expression to his family: Sid, Toby, Bunny, and, “most of all,” Sylvia. In his obituary for Lou Reed, Mick Rock wrote: "I really valued our friendship and I always had a fascination with his image, weathering the slings and arrows of that crazed decade, the '70s. Lou was a true gladiator, a fearless warrior and also a man of extreme kindness and compassion. If he was your friend in the fullest sense, he was your friend forever. He had a singing soul. And I miss him so much already." Source: www.content.time.com

Those who met Rachel found a sweet person with a stoic nature. “In my experience of Lou,” longtime friend Dave Hickey said, “all these supposed digressions from the ‘norm’ were just bullshit. Anyway, if you took that much speed for that many years, you don’t know what the hell you are. Physically, you cannot get an erection. Lou was mostly a voyeur. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” Reed’s relationship with Rachel was clearly under strains external and internal. How often she started trouble is harder to say. One story came from a neighbor who saw Rachel in bad shape one morning, bruised and curled up on the lobby couch, evidently locked out of their apartment. A recording made in 1977 of Reed’s side of a phone conversation captured him and Rachel bickering over drugs and cash, though the exact context is unclear. “I know you have money hidden,” Reed insisted, exasperated. Around this time, a couple of Reed’s associates noted a nasty abscess on his forearm, the sort caused by frequent injections, which he made barely any effort to conceal.

Barbara Hodes, a former lover, recalled a harrowing scene in which Reed, in a gesture of bravado and need, stuck a loaded hypodermic into the open wound. Rachel finally had to move out of the apartment they’d shared on Sixty-third Street. On one occasion, Reed received a late-night call from a friend of Rachel, who reported Rachel was suicidal and in need of money. Reed met the friend at an ATM and gave her money to take to Rachel. But Reed wouldn’t go with her to deliver it. After a lifelong struggle with his mental health, his Syracuse roommate and co-conspirator Lincoln Swados died in the fall of 1989. And on January 31, 1990, at age thirty-seven, Rachel Humphreys died. According to Corey Kilgannon's reporting “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field,” Rachel Humphreys was among the thousands AIDS victims buried anonymously on Hart Island, though the specific cause of Humphreys’s death remained unknown.

The between-song spiels in Take No Prisoners reflected Reed’s satirical writing at Syracuse, his fondness for Lenny Bruce and Henny Youngman. Reed challenged the audience, channeling Yeats. The verbal riffs came fast and furious. He mocked Patti Smith (“Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man, I’m Radio Brooklyn. I ain’t no snob, man”) and Barbara Streisand. “I Wanna Be Black” was performed with Reed ad-libbing T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” and taking mock offense at his backup vocalists when they echo his line about wanting to “fuck up the Jews.” Recasting the song as more overt comedy with Black collaborators in front of an audience clarified its sarcasm. The band comping behind a wired, frequently unintelligible Reed as he spat verbal shrapnel: about working at Jones Beach as a teenager; about quitting the Velvets; about Candy Darling and how he missed her (“and I didn’t even know her that well, she was a scam artist. I’m such a scam artist. She had leukemia from silicone injections, and I’m supposed to feel sorry?”), about Little Joe (“an idiot with an IQ of 12”) and meeting Norman Mailer (“he tries to punch you in the stomach to see how tough you are—he’s pathetic… I told him 'Go write a bible'”).

By turns absurd, appalling, hilarious, and occasionally touching (a stirring “Coney Island Baby” was personalized with Long Island township shout-outs), the brakes-off flow on Live: Take No Prisoners is also a bit frightening. Reed declared he’d “rather have cancer than be a faggot,” then backpedaled vaguely; he savaged the critics Robert Christgau and John Rockwell. Arista issued Live: Take No Prisoners with a warning sticker that read: “This Album Is Offensive.” Reed recorded Legendary Hearts, his follow-up to The Blue Mask, at RCA Studio C. The sessions were marred by Reed’s studio tantrums. The session engineer, Corky Stasiak, fielded worried calls from Reed at all hours about technical glitches. “I had to turn off my phone,” he recalls. “Waves of Fear” describes his DIY rehab as a rough ride. He hadn’t quit drinking entirely: Stasiak noticed his hands often trembled, especially when he first arrived for a session. Reed had worries about his liver, and was exploring channels of alternative medicine. “We had a great discussion about Finbarr Nolan,” Stasiak recalls. By all indications, Sylvia was Reed’s greatest asset in his struggle to stay healthy. Stasiak is among many who believe she likely saved his life at the time.

In 1983, Lou contributed “Little Sister” to the film Get Crazy and made a playful comment about aging rock stars by appearing in his first scene covered in cobwebs in the famous Bob Dylan pose on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Despite the film’s failure the song was well received, particularly by his little sister Margaret Ellen (who would change her name to Merrill), who was proud to be the only member of his family to receive good press in a Lou Reed song. At the Bottom Line in 1977 he’d snapped, “Nixon was beautiful, if he had bombed Montana and gotten away with it, I would have loved him. I am not scared easily.” In private Lou could still not control his shpilkes. Why was Bob Dylan always getting these awards and special editions when Lou received virtually nothing in the way of honors? You could see his point. The Velvet Underground are generally now considered to be the second most influential rock band of the 1960s. Lou Reed had always been an artist on the same level as John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but, until the 1990s, without anything like the recognition afforded to his peers. —Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (2014) by Victor Bockris

"Laurie if you’re sadly listening, the phones don’t work, the birds afire, the smoke curls black. I’m on the rooftop. Liberty to my right still standing, Laurie, evil’s gaunt desire is upon we. Laurie if you’re sadly listening know one thing above all others, you were all I really thought of as the TV blared the screaming, the deathlike snowflakes and sirens screaming." —Poem Laurie Sadly Listening (September 2011) by Lou Reed

Gen Z women on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed's "Women"

2025-02-28T05:33:00.012+01:00

‘I’m literally Joan Baez right now’: Gen Z women relate to Bob Dylan’s toxic situationship: Joan Baez met Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village venue, in 1961, when she was a bonafide star and he was new to the scene. They became creative partners, with Baez believing she inspired Dylan classics such as Visions of Johanna and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan ended the relationship in 1965 as he shot into superstardom, and Baez has since forgiven him: “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody for ever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.” Now 84, Baez has emerged as the unlikely hero of A Complete Unknown: yet another woman who stepped out from the shadow of a guitar-playing alt boy. Another woman analyzes their Newport performance of It Ain’t Me Babe, when Baez and Dylan shared the microphone. “Whenever I see this video of Bob and Joan it lowkey fills me with annoyance. I’ve always loved him but ever since watching the biopic it’s like sir why are you screaming over her.”

One counterpoint, per a comment: “that’s just how he sings I’m afraid.” Stephen Petrus, a scholar of 1960s folk music and director of public history programs at LaGuardia Community College, believes that gen Z is “expressing solidarity” with Baez online. “I think there was a sense of mutual opportunism between the pair,” he said. “But Dylan was not always kind to her, and he wanted to be the dominant one on stage, which is pretty clear both in the movie and certain performances.” Diamonds and Rust was the 1975 confessional Baez penned about her relationship with Dylan. For a generation accustomed to modern dating drudgery, lyrics like “Well I’ll be damned / here comes your ghost again” still hit. Source: www.theguardian.com

‘I’m not in this game for the money or to be a star,’ Lou Reed insisted early on. Of course, all rock stars said that, early on, when they were striving for money and stardom. Lou Reed actually meant it. It was, perhaps, the most truthfully shocking thing about him. Reed grew up playing high-school baseball and taking classical piano lessons. Although he later complained about his musical education (‘I took classical music for fifteen years – does that make me legitimate?’) it left him with an impressive grasp of musical theory and composition and ‘a natural affinity for music’. By 1959, Sidney could stand it no longer and made arrangements to have his terrified but still defiant son admitted to Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital, a state-run facility housing more than 6000 patients. For the next eight weeks, Reed underwent hour-long bouts of ECT. It was a devastating experience that would stay with him, mentally and physically, for the rest of his life. The adult Reed would recall with disgust ‘the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue’. The electrodes methodically attached to his head, held in a brace. His juddering body strapped tight to the bed.

He was eventually put on a tranquilliser, Placidyl, and would continue to take a daily dose for several years. Known on the street as ‘jelly bellies’, it became a contributory factor in the deadpan expression Reed was to assume for the rest of his life. He also began having weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. It could be argued Reed never stopped writing about the therapy that nearly robbed him of his mind. That he would never forgive the ice-cold father who put him in the ward or the ruthless doctors who performed the ‘therapy’ upon him. That he would never trust anyone again until his life was almost over, throwing up a shield that only the similarly damaged could ever truly see through.

When John Cale married Betsey Johnson in April 1968, it drove a further rift between him and Lou. Many assumed Lou was so deep into his drugs and his musical trip that he simply had no time to love anybody but himself. It wasn’t true. In fact, Lou was secretly seeing his old flame from Syracuse, the beautiful Shelley Albin. Shelley was now married and had moved with her husband to New York in 1966, since which time Lou and she had begun seeing each other again but only – much to Lou’s disappointment – as ‘good friends’. By 1968, however, the rumour was that this friendship had blossomed once again into a full-blown love affair. Certainly, Lou would claim so, to friends, and by mentioning his love for someone who was married in Pale Blue Eyes. ‘Lou and I connected when we were too young to really put it into words,’ Shelley would recall years later. But, though she loved his fierce intelligence, his flare for the extraordinary bon mot or surprisingly romantic gestures, Shelley had always been wary of what she saw as his ‘crazy side’. And the more he begged her to leave her husband and come and have a real life with him, the more she shrunk from the idea. No matter how hard he implored, accusing her of choosing ‘security’ over ‘love’, Shelley refused to leave her husband.

The first solo album of Lou Reed (1971) was produced by Richard Robinson for RCA Records. At the insistence of Reed, the cover was designed by Tom Adams, a former illustrator of Raymond Chandler's paperbacks, featuring a forlorn chick looking parentless and doomed. This album bombed in USA and also in the UK. In fact, without the intervention of David Bowie, it seems highly unlikely that Lou Reed would ever have had a career. The two had finally met for real in September that year, when Bowie was flown into New York to great fanfare, in order to celebrate his signing to RCA. Dennis Katz, via Richard and Lisa Robinson, brokered the meeting, organising a party at the Ginger Man, around the corner from Madison Avenue. Lou turned up with Bettye and David showed up with Angie.

Tony Zanetta had bonded with David and Angie in London, and nervously affected introductions. Despite of Nick Tosches having remarked that hordes of girls would never have pursued Lou Reed and John Cale like all the girls who went hysterical for The Beatles, Bowie, however, expressed to Melody Maker that for him "The Velvet Underground talked to me more than the Beatles ever did. For me, Lou Reed is the greatest songwriter in rock and roll." The Robinsons felt that they had brought Lou out of retirement and saw his alliance with Bowie move as the ultimate betrayal. After the breach when they weren’t speaking, Lou would say of the Robinsons: ‘They’re just little pop people.’ To promote their new star, Reed had fashioned himself in the image of what his English fans imagined he was—a junkie hustler.

However, Andy Warhol, a man with a telling eye for these things, pointed out, “When John Cale and Lou were in the Velvets, they really had style. But when Lou went solo, he started copying other people.” At their meeting, Lou didn’t shut up, his insecurities raging as he confronted the English star he’d been told had been featuring Velvet Underground songs in his set, and who he was now connected directly to through their shared relationship with RCA and, specifically, its vice-president of A&R, Dennis Katz. Bowie for his part remained relatively quiet, overwhelmed by the force of the always heavily loaded New York conversation, not sure who was putting who on, or who was being put down. While Angie Bowie, of course, could match Lou or anyone else for fast-track trash talk, NY-style. Bettye, meanwhile, sat quietly, obediently, in her pants suit, looking like ‘an airline stewardess’. Lou, for his part, hardly looked like the hip young former Factory imp that Bowie had been expecting. While David was going through his ‘Lauren Bacall phase’, his blonde hair long and swept over one shoulder, his eyelashes fluttering under the weight of heavy blue shadow, Lou had turned up looking like the guy who came to fix the plumbing; dressed down in head-to-toe denim, paunchy, his hair cut almost Army short.

As Angie wrote in her autobiography: "David always had that knack of looking you in the eye and making you feel you were his only priority at the time. I think David saw Lou and to a lesser extent Iggy as his competition, and his master game was to drag them to his dominion and try to neuter them in some capacity." Leading the backlash in Britain was the NME, whose Charles Shaar Murray characterised Transformer in his review as ‘a collection of songs witty, songs trivial, songs dull, songs sad, none of them really much cop’. It was in America, though, where Lou and Bettye returned home, in time for its release, that the knives were really out. The New Yorker called the album ‘lame, pseudo-decadent lyrics, lame pseudo-something-or-other singing, and a just plain lame band’. Henry Edwards also panned the album in the New York Times. So it was that Lou Reed began recording the album Berlin, that would both become his masterpiece and effectively end his career as a major recording star at that time. Considering where Lou Reed had spent his entire musical career – in the backrooms of the music biz, making records for the doomed to gaze at their reflections in – the subject matter of Berlin is arguably in keeping with the arc of his own artistic narrative. Yet considering he was now coming off the back of a bona fide worldwide hit, it’s staggering how prepared he was to risk it all for an album, masterpiece though it is, as profoundly disenchanted as Berlin.

That while shrewd David Bowie was busy releasing crowd-pleasers like Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed would almost deliberately sabotage his own career in the name of what? Art? Arrogance? Disdain? While in Creem magazine, Robert Christgau refused to be shocked, just merely "too bored to puke at it." He said that the story was lousy and ‘coughed up by some avant-garde asshole’ and he gave it a C. In response, sales were abysmal. Recorded at New York’s Bottom Line club in May 1978, and featuring a superbly splenetic Lou Reed in absolutely blistering form, Take No Prisoners was the live summation of everything the post-Velvets Lou Reed had become. Before the band comes absolutely smashing into the riff of ‘Sweet Jane’, which then goes on for over eight minutes as Lou digresses again into the kind of backstories that future MTV-style story-behind-the-song programmes could never hope to match, including how much Lou hates fucking Barbra Streisand for thanking ‘all the little people’ in her Academy Awards. From there the album takes off into something that is part rock’n’roll, part Lenny Bruce comedy act, part confessional, part pure confrontation. ‘Hey, shut up!’ when someone interrupts his flow. ‘Are you fucking deaf?’ at another juncture. A weird musical milieu where ‘I Wanna Be Black’ is suddenly hilarious and self-mocking: ‘Let’s ask the chicks…’ Where ‘Satellite Of Love’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ are soulful and wincingly revealing, played virtually straight. ‘So now everybody’s gonna say Lou Reed’s mellowed, he’s older. He didn’t act mean, he talked. Oh boy. I say we’ll mug you later, all right? You feel better?’

Along the way we are treated to some more classic asides: ‘I do Lou Reed better than anybody else, so I thought I’d get in on it,’ he announces to braying laughter. ‘Hey, watch me turn into Lou Reed!’ He also takes the opportunity to mock his critics, raging at Robert Christgau, calling him ‘a toe fucker’ for his pathetic A, B, C ratings system, telling on John Rockwell of the New York Times, who ‘comes to CBGBs with a bodyguard’. Back home in New York, when pressed whether it was true he had actually hit David Bowie, an unrepentant Lou snapped: ‘Yes, I hit him – more than once. It was a private dispute. It had nothing to do with sex, politics or rock’n’roll.’ That he had ‘a New York code of ethics’. He scowled. ‘In other words, watch your mouth.’ Word eventually crept out though that the basis of Lou’s rage was in David’s response to Lou’s only-half-joking inquiry about whether he would like to produce Lou’s next album. When Bowie answered in the affirmative, but only on condition that Lou ‘clean up his act first’, Lou went insane. His second wife and manager Sylvia would occasionally accompany Lou on his tours, but mainly her role would be as the traditional homemaker. According to Lou, “Sylvia’s very, very smart, so I have a realistic person I can ask about things: ‘Hey, what do you think of this song?’ She helped me so much in bringing things together and getting rid of certain things that were bad for me, certain negative people. I’ve got help, for the first time in my life. And that’s a real change. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

As Lou told one reporter a couple of months after the wedding: ‘I now know that certain things will get taken care of and looked out for on the home front… I’ve found my flower, so it makes me feel like a knight.’ There was a temptation for those that had followed his career for longer than 15 minutes to treat such quotes as the further stoned ramblings of an arch-deceiver. But this time Lou actually meant it. Opening with the spellbinding ‘My House’, a hymn to his and Sylvia’s new life at the farmhouse in New Jersey, underneath there was a startling evocation of his old friend and ‘the first great man I ever met’, Delmore Schwartz. ‘My Dedalus to your Bloom,’ he almost weeps, ‘Was such a perfect wit…’ Dissolving into the next track, ‘Women’, a subtle, joyous, almost unbearably straight-talking paean to Sylvia and to the whole concept of womanly love, something Lou had never fully embraced since he’d been a boy, wrapped tight in the arms of his former beauty queen mother Toby. Opening with the rockabilly pop ‘I Love You Suzanne’, a hit single for anybody else, a total flop for Lou Reed, New Sensations was so listenable that attracted the attention of an advertising agency executive, Jim Riswold, then chief copywriter for the Madison Avenue's Wieden & Kennedy. As Sylvia approached thirty, she told Lou the time had come for them to have children, characterizing it as a great adventure. Lou, however, saw the question of children through realistic eyes. Stated one friend, “There’s no way Lou would ever have children, he’s the archetypal constant child. At least he can admit that it would be a big disaster if he had children.“

Then Lou met Laurie Anderson. Ironically, the impending collapse of Lou’s marriage did not do him any harm on the professional front. By the time Lou completed work on Magic and Loss, he and Sylvia had begun to talk about getting a divorce and consulted their respective lawyers. Sylvia knew she was going to be comfortable financially—Lou’s financial situation had changed for the better since they had joined forces and even he openly credited Sylvia for this—but the realization that she was going to lose the glamour and drama of being Mrs. Lou Reed weighed upon her. Meanwhile, her lawyer advised her not to move out of their Upper West Side apartment because that would put her in the position of desertion. “He’s got an image to keep up,” said a friend. “Beyond the fact that he’s thinking, ‘God, I’m alone, I’ve got to find somebody else.’ I’m sure in the middle of the night, that’s the reason he calls Sylvia, because that’s when it hits him—‘Oh my God, I’m by myself.’ That picture of him on the cover of Vox [in May 1993] was so awful. He looks like a ghoul. You heard this thing about his liver.

I’m surprised he’s still alive.” For the most part, the positive chemistry of the former Velvet Underground members overcame their collective fear, and Sterling and Moe worked as a buffer between Lou and John. In fact, the reunion might have been a great success if it hadn’t been for the added pressure of Sylvia, whose ego had ballooned out of proportion. According to several people involved with the shows, Sylvia made no secret of her contempt for John, whom she called stupid and untalented. John was convinced that Sylvia had learned everything in this department from Lou, but others were not so sure. She virtually showered contempt on Cale, going so far at one point as to make the curious remark that as he had grown older John had become exceedingly ugly while Lou had grown more and more handsome. Sources: Transformer (2014) by Victor Bockris and Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall

A Complete Unknown (Bob Dylan), All Through the Night (Lou Reed - Not Attention Junkie)

2025-02-21T00:07:00.093+01:00

Why A Complete Unknown should win the best picture Oscar: James Mangold’s biopic – told very much with the backing of Bob Dylan – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with Blowin’ in the Wind. And that’s perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it’s an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man’s art can give people hope for change.

A Complete Unknown might not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s already one of the great mainstream films about the visceral power of art – and at a time when the modern political moment is overwhelming any sense of cultural resistance. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan is so good that it’s been written off by some as no more than a feat of imitation. There are also impeccable supporting turns. Ed Norton is utterly taken by the kind utopian spirit of Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro repositions Joan Baez as a vital artist who exists separately from Dylan's shadow.

Unlike in the movie, Dylan traveled to Italy in 1962 in pursuit of Suze Rotolo — named Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) — who had left New York to study abroad. In 1962, Rotolo left the Greenwich Village apartment where she had been living with Dylan and went to Perugia, where she attended the famed University for Foreigners. The Perugia institution has retrieved from its archives an enrollment document in the name of Susan Elisabeth Rotolo, and issued a statement in which professor Sabrina Cittadini claimed that “the love story between Suze and Dylan was full of painful searches.” Cittadini has done some interviews and gathered testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man emerged from a black taxi” in Perugia’s central Corso Garibaldi, near the university, “with a bouquet of red roses.”

“It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia to look for his Suze,” who had moved to a different address, she said. Rotolo was 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, not long after his arrival in New York. A self-described “red diaper baby,” she was the daughter of two Italian immigrants: Gioachino “Pete” Rotolo, an illustrator and union organizer, and his wife Mary, an editor and columnist for the American edition of communist Italian newspaper L’Unità. Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who didn’t want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo famously appeared arm-in-arm with Dylan on a slushy Greenwich Village street on the cover of his breakthrough 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” After their relationship drifted, as is shown in the film, Rotolo went back to Italy and in 1970 married Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian filmmaker whom she had met while a student in Perugia. Bob Dylan called Suze Rotolo his "Soul Twin" in his book "Chronicles" (2016). Source: variety.com

WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A LOU REED MOVIE YET: I mean, usually Hollywood can't even wait for the body of a pop/rock star to get cold before the biopics begin to get on production. And Lou Reed's story is unique within the Rock world, full of twists, unexpected turns, and odd life experiences. If handled properly, it would make for a great musical film. So what are they waiting for? Maybe enough drugs but probably not enough sex, and very strange rock'n'roll? Maybe a theatrical release would never fill enough seats or maybe it's Laurie Anderson who acts like an angel custodian of her partner's legacy. There's certainly plenty of source material, like those weird and lengthy conversation between him and Lester Bangs, just imagine the glorious wreck of a set you could have with them. When Lou Reed was asked by VH1 in 1999 about some of his favorite songs, Reed picked “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Redding, “Stay With Me” by Lorraine Ellison, “Outcast” by Eddie & Ernie, “Belle” by Al Green, “I Can’t Stand The Rain” by Ann Peebles and “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies.

Lou Reed was one of the coolest and most vitriolic music artists ever. The stuff that rock and roll legends are made of. It would probably be impossible to make such a film without incorporating his attacks on rock journalists, and possibly offering some straightforward insight into the machinery of the music industry. After all, here is a guy who contributed to Paul Simon's One Trick Pony, which has its own harsh critique of the industry's marketing methods, so it wouldn't be certainly PC. So I really don't think any major studio would invest in a film based only in its ability to draw Lou Reed fans to the theaters. Lou Reed was a cult figure, and with the exception of Take a Walk on the Wild Side and his album New York, he spent four decades in a sort of well-publicized semi-obscurity. What would be the dramatic arc of a Lou Reed biopic? Besides, the most notable highlights of his personal life are probably events a mass audience could not assimilate easily. Another reason why a Lou Reed biopic has never been mooted might be due to some legal protections from Reed's sister Merrill Weiner and his widow Laurie Anderson. Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv

Lester Bangs: Lou Reed just may have a better perspective on this supposed upheaval in sexual roles than any of these Gore Vidals and Jill Johnstons. Dudes are coming outta the closet in droves and finding out they are heterosexual! Ha! After recording Transformer, Lou returned to his New York home and surprised the glam-rock fans in 1973 by getting married to a theatre actress named Betty (stage name Krista) Kronstadt. Today I'm going to walk into the dining room of the Holiday Inn, filled with expectation at finally getting to interview at length one of the musical and psychological frontiersmen of our time, Lou Reed. Although it does disturb his friends and fans to see him in such failing health, Lou can find a joke even there.

At one point I asked him when he intended to die. Lou replied: "I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming." About the glam hysteria, he deadpanned: "The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won't necessarily involve to wear makeup. The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say that if my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something. But I don't feel that way at all. I don't think an album's gonna do anything. It's beyond the control of a straight person to turn gay or a gay person to turn straight. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?" —Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth (interview by Lester Bangs for Let It Rock magazine, November 1973)

The Bells is by turns exhilarating, almost unbearably poignant and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar anyone’s heard from him in ages. As for the lyrics — well, people tend to forget that in numbers like “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning” and “Oh! Sweet Nothing,” Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. This album is about love and dread — and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical death is ample reason to testify, but it’s love that brings both artist and audience, back from that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue empyrean ever. In “Stupid Man,” someone who’s been self-exiled too long, “living all alone by those still waters,” rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of Reed’s people on this record, he’s looking for love. “City Lights” isn’t only about Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in the world might not be enough to bring us together. In “All through the Night” Reed sings: “My best friend Sally. She got sick. And I’m feelin’ mighty ill myself. It happens all the time. All through the night. I went to St. Vincent’s. And she’s lyin’ on the ground. And I sat and cried. All through the night.”

“Families” is the most personal of all them: “And no Daddy you’re not a poor man anymore. And I hope you realize it before you die. There’s nothing here we have in common except our name. And I don’t think that I’ll come home much anymore.” With “The Bells,” like in “Street Hassle,” Lou Reed achieves his often stated ambition — to become a great writer, in the real literary sense. Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we’ll be your family. We promise to respect your privacy. It’s like what Tennessee Williams said to Dotson Rader when, as described in Rader’s Blood Dues, the latter made an anguished confession about wanting children. Williams just touched the head of a young artist sitting nearby and said: “These are my children.” Lou, you gave us reason to think there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. —The Bells Review by Lester Bangs (June, 14, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine

Lou Reed - America (Star-Spangled Banner song), 1992.

Reed explained: “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus but they were wrong. It didn’t matter since I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore Schwartz’s funeral.” “Into the destructive element, that is the only way,” Schwartz had written on a note found in his hotel room. It proved to be a destructive guide Reed would follow for many years. Before The Velvet Underground, there was no such thing as alternative rock. You either had hits or you didn’t. “‘Lou Reed was a character, you know,” said Bob Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth, who ran into Reed at Max’s a number of times. “There was Lou the kid from Long Island, and then there was the public persona, the professional Lou Reed. But he was very casual. He wasn’t really an attention junkie. Lou didn't like being pursued by groupies like David Bowie or Iggy Pop. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dance on tables, much less so than people like Bowie and Iggy, who were more obsessed with enticing their audiences. Lou was much more dignified. I never found him to be in competition with anybody else. I never felt he was comparing his music to anybody else’s.”

Reed and the Velvet Underground are often perceived as representing a kind of anti-sixties, a tough corrective to the era’s psychedelic utopianism. As always with Reed, however, that impulse in him was counterbalanced by his intense interest in transcendence. Reed attended the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In in March of 1967. Rob Norris from Hoboken, who would later join The Bongos, met Reed at the Boston Tea Party. “Lou would hold court,” Norris said. “Jonathan Richman was always there, very quiet. People would ask Lou stuff like, ‘How’s Nico?’ or ‘What’s Jackson Browne [who wrote for Nico on Chelsea Girl] doing now?’ Lou would say, ‘What do I look like, a billboard?’ I remember this fan girl who screamed at Lou, ‘You make me so crazy, I just want to kill you!’ Lou just looked at her very kindly and said, ‘Why don’t you just bake me a cake instead?’ It was the sweetest thing.” Jonny Podell, the agent who managed Reed in 1975, asked about Reed’s relationship with Rachel, replied, “You want me to tell you my real feelings? I almost feel bad saying this, but I mean it with real love. I think Lou was a total act. Look, we all present ourselves a certain way, and for me, he was Lou from Long Island seeing how far he could rebel against Daddy the accountant. I thought he became a drug addict because it was cool and rebellious. I thought he wanted to be with Rachel because it was shock and awe. Lou’s feelings about music were real, but the rest was shock and awe.”

Reed himself would later observe that “I always thought one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business. It was only kids trying to be outrageous.” According to his biographer Victor Bockris, Reed later denied any involvement in homosexual relationships, insisting he had seen Rachel as a woman. The edgiest moment of Rock'N'Roll Heart comes on its closing track, “Temporary Thing,” a grippingly dramatic confrontation between lovers that Reed acts out as if it were a play. The singer’s bitterness and angry insistence that the relationship is “just a temporary thing” suggest, conversely, that he’s much more deeply invested than he is letting on, and more than he even understands. The effect is powerful and unsettling. On a few occasions, Reed would admit to having done too many interviews while drunk or stoned. The anger he would often express to reporters was, in part, a projection of the anger he felt toward himself for having allowed himself to lose control. He felt humiliated and, consequently, lashed out. Reed once surmised, “You’re going to get interviewed, and you’d better figure out who you are right now, because that’s who you’re going to be forever for them.” That was a fate Reed viewed as a kind of hell, all the worse because he had condemned himself to it with his excesses. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Psychotic Reactions: Lou Reed vs Lester Bangs

2025-02-17T06:19:00.009+01:00

Lester Bangs's “feud” with Lou Reed comes to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex in 1975, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. But Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 16 he would die if he kept it up. And he raced to the bottom.

Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene, and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is bored by polite chit-chat. Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes. This was published in Creem in 1975. It was one of the many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BS, shall we?” – he is extremely obnoxious. As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. But drugs notwithstanding, I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester. Lester wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle.

Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture. LB: “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?” LR: “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” LB: “David Bowie has ripped off all his stuff that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!” LR: “What does Iggy have to do with it?” LB: “You were the originals!” LR: “The original what?” I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with an unexpected blast at Iggy: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is… stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while… I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five chord change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was never any good anyway….” Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin.

I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?” He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rant Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do–hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams…?” The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, man!” “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself.” Then he’s pressing me again. “What’s an Obetrol?” I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time!” “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out. But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.” The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s addicts and then there’s speedfreaks… Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of Dextroamphetamine.”

“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?” “No… You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…” “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting Ralph J. Gleeson for some reason. I was getting a little dazed. “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…” I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months. “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?” He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, and he shook his head. “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”

“That’s three percent out of my songs.” “Like with all this decadence and glitter – how much of it would have happened if not for you–” “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.” “What’s decadent about that?” “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.” “You are. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just full of crap. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.” I let it pass. Because he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated and stood for so many years. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance, he's apparently ready to clean up much of his act’s exoskeleton. “I dismissed decadence when I wrote ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….” Barbara interrupted, “Lou… it’s getting late.” Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He seemed now a petulant kid, up past bedtime. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.” “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.” “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy guy, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album. -"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature" (1988) by Greil Marcus

“Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Once Hyman missed Reed’s cue to end a song one night while playing with The Jades. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles very hard. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.” While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “All of a sudden Lou would show up with these girls. They were all weird. I had no idea where he found them.” Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” Sigal noted that some boys in their school were “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “faggots,” in the nomenclature of that time. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Jeff Tweedy: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are the only lyricists I've heard that come close to Bob Dylan's level. Reed and Dylan are going to rock out. Cohen, no so much.

Anthony DeCurtis: Lou Reed started many genres and he inspired as many artists as Bob Dylan, usually better artists than Dylan inspired. Without Lou Reed (and The Velvet Underground) it’s likely we wouldn’t have punk music, post-punk, college rock, indie rock, noise rock, grunge, new wave, no wave, etc. Dylan reimagined and molded folk-rock genres into his vision and his is a really beautiful vision. But Lou Reed created new genres out of whole cloth. Also, Dylan’s an invented person, a fact he doesn't like to reckon, unlike Lou Reed who has projected a character in order to protect his real self.

There is no real Bob Dylan and almost nothing he says can be taken as the truth with regards to himself or his life. He’s an entirely manufactured character. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a plain observation. Of course, it doesn’t diminish the greatness of Dylan's music, but we shouldn’t assume that his songs have much basis in his real life (whatever that is). Indeed, Dylan once got an award from the ASCAP in 1986. There was a celebratory dinner, which Dylan showed up to with Elizabeth Taylor. Leonard Cohen was there and he actually did a little press conference with Jennifer Warnes. Warnes said that at one point Dylan took Elizabeth Taylor by the hand and marched her over to meet Cohen and said, "Liz, I want to introduce you to a real poet." Source: medium.com

Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

2025-02-14T03:45:00.009+01:00

Bad Valentine (featuring Classic and Modern screen couples) video. Song "Bad Valentine" by Transvision Vamp.