Tag Archives: books

The Godfather: The Film of the Book or the Book of the Film

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve written a few of these ‘book or the film’ posts but in this one I’m going to stick with one particular film and book; The Godfather.

The Book

I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.

Don Corleone is a Sicilian and apparently no Sicilian can refuse a request on the day of his daughter’s wedding. One of those with a request for the don is singer Johnny Fontane whose show business career is waning. He feels that a part in a new film will revitalise it but the producer will not cast him. The don is happy to help out his favourite godson and dispatches his advisor and stepson Tom Hagen to Hollywood to sort things out.

Another supplicant is a funeral director. Two youths have attacked and beaten his daughter and because of political connections the courts of law have only handed down suspended sentences. The father asks for Don Corleone to give him revenge but the Don declines. The funeral director has never shown the correct respect to the Don but when he does and finally calls him Godfather then, and only then, does Corleone issue orders for the youths to be brutally beaten.

Some time afterwards the Don agrees to meet fellow mafioso Sollozo who wants Corleone’s help with a drug smuggling operation. The Don declines and this sets off a violent war between the mafia gangs.

The Film

Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.

Paramount also wanted to shoot the film on their back lot but Coppola persuaded them to shoot on location in New York and stick to the original time frame of the book which was set in the 1930s and 40s.

Various people were auditioned for parts in The Godfather but finally the cast was resolved and shooting began with Brando as the Don, James Caan as Sonny, Al Pacino as Michael, Robert Duvall as Tom and Diane Keaton as Kay Adams.

The Book

The book is a fairly heft one and there is much in there that is not covered by the film. Johnny Fontane for instance features more in the book, while he plays only a supporting role in the film. There is a further story in the book about Lucy, a friend of Sonny’s wife with whom he is having an affair. After Sonny’s death Lucy feels she will never find not only love but sexual pleasure ever again. The reason for this is that Sonny had a rather large penis and Lucy’s corresponding anatomy is rather large, however she falls for a doctor who sorts her out with an operation which restores the anatomical status quo.

Going back to the Johnny Fontane character, there have been various stories and rumours which imply the character was based on Frank Sinatra. Like Johnny Fontane, Frank was tied to a lifetime contract with a bandleader, in this case Tommy Dorsey but Dorsey somehow relented and released Sinatra. Some say mobster Willie Moretti was instrumental in helping Sinatra free himself from the contract. Later when things weren’t going so good for Sinatra, he revived his career by appearing in the hit film From Here to Eternity for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. In the book, Johnny Fontane is after a similar film part but the producer declines to give it to him. At the wedding of Corleone’s daughter, Fontane asks for the Don’s help, cue the famous scene where producer Jack Woltz finds his favourite racehorse’s head in his bed.

The Film

Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.

Sinatra always denied any involvement with the mafia although he did sing at the wedding of mafia boss Willie Moretti’s daughter, just like Johnny Fontane did at the Corleone wedding that opens the film. Anthony Summers, in his book about Sinatra, claims that the story was true and mafia enforcer Johnny Blue Eyes put pressure on studio boss Harry Cohn to give Sinatra the film role that rebooted his career.

Director Fred Zinnemann thought Sinatra might be good in the role so Cohn was happy to go along with the idea.

The Book

As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.

The Godfather Parts II and III

In part II there are two parallel stories. One is the story of Vito Andolini, as described above, played by Robert De Niro and another follows on from the first film. Michael is now the head of the family and gets involved with gangster Hyman Roth with investments in Cuban casinos. After the Cuban revolution Michael realises Roth is out to kill him and so has him murdered. A senate investigation looks into Michael’s activities with information provided by Frank Pentangeli, a former member of his organisation, but Michael brings pressure to bear on the informant and the investigation collapses.

In The Godfather Part III Michael’s story continues. He is reconciled with his sister after the murder of her husband in the original film. He also gets involved in a scheme in Europe where he hopes to become fully legitimate but other mafia bosses have different ideas. The Papal bank scandal and the death of Pope John Paul I are real events that are also thrown into the mix. The film was the weak element in the Godfather trilogy. In 2020 The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone was released. It was just a re-edited version of part III and personally I still didn’t find it anywhere near as good as the other two films.

Marlon Brando worked with Coppola again on the film Apocalypse Now. He played the part of an American Colonel in Vietnam who has apparently gone insane and Martin Sheen is sent to assassinate him. Brando turned up on set hugely overweight and not knowing his lines. He then decided to re write or improvise most of his scenes and the director was forced to shoot Brando in shadow due to his weight. Basically, he pulled all the stunts that Paramount expected of him in The Godfather. Not the best way to repay a director who had resurrected his career with the role of Don Corleone.

In 1990, Brando appeared in the comedy film, The Freshman, playing a parody of Don Corleone. When the shooting over ran, Brando demanded a million dollars to film for an extra week. The producers declined to pay and Brando threatened to badmouth the film to the press. Eventually they paid.

Brando died in 2004.

In 2023 Coppola finished filming his latest project, Megalopolis, a sci fi film about the rebuilding of New York after a major disaster.

Conclusion.

I enjoyed the Mario Puzo novel and I did re-read it for this post but it seems to stray into areas which really have no relevance to the main narrative which I found slightly annoying. The film version, which I also watched recently is a modern classic which continues to entertain everytime I see it. I like both the book and the film but I’d have to say I think the film version has the edge.

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Famous People and Favourite Books

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This isn’t a post about my favourite books. I’m pretty certain I’ve done that one already but I thought I’d talk about the favourite books of some famous people and I’d like to start with one of my film heroes, James Dean.

James Dean and The Little Prince

Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about Dean.

Dean had been killed in a car crash in 1955 and had only appeared in three films and at the time of his death, only one of those films had been released. I read a great deal about Dean and from what I could find out, the biography to read was written by his best friend, William Bast. I never managed to get a copy of that book but Bast produced a made for TV film version, James Dean: Portrait of a Friend with Stephen McHattie as Dean.

In the film William Bast played by Michael Brandon, leaves Dean in a restaurant and Dean later asks why Bast left. Bast was intimidated by Dean’s important looking friends and Dean replies that he was judging by surface appearances. When Bast questions Dean further, Dean produces his favourite book, The Little Prince and then goes on to read his favourite passage.

In the book Dean explains, the Little Prince is from a distant planet. He meets a fox but the fox won’t play with the prince because he hasn’t been tamed.

Later the fox gives the prince a secret which is this: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye, something which Bast claimed was the secret to Dean’s style of acting.

James Dean was killed in 1955 and in later life William Bast wrote another book about James Dean claiming that the two were lovers and that Dean was gay.

The Little Prince was written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry and according to Wikipedia has sold an estimated 140 million copies. It is also the second most translated work ever, only beaten by the Bible.

What did Dean see in the book? Well, it was a childhood favourite of his so perhaps it brought back memories of happy times, or perhaps it was just the undeniable charm of the book that appealed to him.

Donald Campbell and 1001 Nights

Donald Campbell was the son of a famous racing driver and record breaker, Sir Malcolm Campbell. Campbell first broke the land speed record in 1924 at Pendine Sands in Wales which was the first of his nine land speed records. He also set the water speed record in his boat Bluebird K4. He was knighted in 1931 and died in 1948 aged 63. He was one of the few racing drivers and land speed record holders of his era to die of natural causes as many of his rivals were killed in crashes. His son, Donald Campbell, was determined to equal and even surpass his father’s achievements.

He set about doing so with the help of his father’s engineer, Leo Villa. He made various runs at the land speed record, his last was in Australia. He chose to run his Bluebird car at Lake Eyrie and the vast dry salt lake bed offered the perfect course. It hadn’t rained there for nine years but Campbell had just started his trials when the rains came and ruined the course. Eventually Campbell managed to raise the record to 403.10 mph in 1964 but the huge expense and difficulties of the project cast a great strain on Campbell. In November of 1966 he tried for a new water speed record at Lake Coniston but once again, bad weather caused problems. He was still at Coniston in the following January and when the weather improved, he tried for the record. He was killed in his Bluebird boat on the 4th January 1967.

In the BBC film Across the Lake, Campbell was played by Anthony Hopkins and claims his favourite book was 1001 Nights. The book is a collection of Arabian folk tales perhaps more well known in England as The Arabian Nights. The book is about a king who after finding that his brother’s wife has been unfaithful, decides that all women are the same. He decides then to marry a succession of virgins and after their wedding night have them executed to make way for the next, One day he marries Scheherazade who tells the king a story but promises to finish it the next night. The king delays her execution wanting to hear the end of the story but the next night she starts another one, again promising to finish the story the following night. The stories go on for a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade telling more stories in order to save herself from execution.

The screenplay for Across the Lake was written by Roger Milner and was based on true events although whether that includes Campbell’s love of 1001 Nights or not, I’m not sure. In the film Campbell gives a girlfriend a necklace inscribed with a quotation from the book. ‘Beautiful of face with attributes of grace’, a reference to Scheherazade herself.

Noel Coward and The Railway Children

This is perhaps where this post might start to unravel. I know the Donald Campbell link was a little tenuous and only based on a film but this next one was based on my own memory which can be prone to failure. I knew Noel was a great fan of the children’s writer E Nesbit and I’m sure I had heard or read somewhere that when he died, he was reading his favourite of that author’s books, The Railway Children. A quick bit of internet research and I see that Noel died after reading Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. Coward was a lifelong fan of E Nesbit who wrote a series of children’s books. He discovered the books as a child and revisited them many times during his life. In his diary he wrote this about the author:

“Sunday 3rd February 1957. I am reading again through all the dear E. Nesbits and they seem to me to be more charming and evocative than ever. It is strange that after half a century I can still get such lovely pleasure from them. Her writing is so light and unforced, her humour so sure and her narrative quality so strong that the stories, which I know backwards, rivet me as much now as they did when I was a little boy. Even more so in one way because I can now enjoy her actual talent and her extraordinary power of describing hot summer days in England in the beginning years of the century.

All the pleasant memories of my own childhood jump up at me from the pages… E. Nesbit knew all the things that stay in the mind, all the happy treasures. I suppose she, of all the writers I have ever read, has given me over the years the most complete satisfaction and, incidentally, a great deal of inspiration. I am glad I knew her in the last years of her life.””

The Enchanted Castle is about a country estate and three youngsters who meet a princess and discover a magical ring. I have never read either that or the Railway Children although I did find a copy of that latter book not long ago. The film version is a delightful adaptation that has been seen and loved by many generations of children and adults since it was released in 1970. It was written and directed by Lionel Jefferies and stars Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.

Noel Coward died at his home in Jamaica in March of 1973.

Woody Allen and The Catcher in the Rye

Woody is one of my favourite film directors and after a search on the internet looking for more favourite books from my favourite people, I found he was apparently greatly inspired by The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. Woody had this to say about the book:

“The Catcher in the Rye has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so. It resonated with my fantasies about Manhattan, the Upper East Side and New York City in general.

It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. For me, reading Middlemarch or Sentimental Education was work, whereas reading The Catcher in the Rye was pure pleasure. The burden of entertainment is on the author. Salinger fulfils that obligation from the first sentence on.”

I can understand Woody when he talks about books that have a quality of homework about them. Many classic books I’ve tried to read, particularly in recent years, have left me disappointed and with that same feeling that Woody describes.

I read Catcher in the Rye a long time ago and rather than inspiring me, I found it dreadfully boring and pointless. The hero, Holden Caulfield goes to New York and basically moans about all the things he finds false and ‘phoney’ about the city and its people. Mark Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, was obsessed with the novel and left behind a copy after he had shot Lennon with a note saying ‘this is my statement’.

Sorry Woody, you and I will have to disagree about Catcher in the Rye.

So what is my favourite book? Well, I’ve got quite an extended shortlist but I think I’d have to plump for David Copperfield by the wonderful Charles Dickens. I first read it many years ago and perhaps the moral of this post is that the books we love in our youth are the ones that continue to give us pleasure in later life.

What is your personal favourite?

Sources:

James Dean: My own imperfect memory.

Donald Campbell; the film Across the Lake.

Noel Coward: https://www.noelcoward.com/

Woody Allen: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/woody-allen-on-inspiration/

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ULEZ, the Lottery and More Thoughts From a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It always happens to me when I’m away. I know I’ve written about this before but the National Lottery has been annoying me. Here I am away from home and I get an email saying check your account, you’ve won a prize. Great! I wonder what is it? The million-pound jackpot or £3.42 on the Thunderball? I’m guessing it’s the £3.42. Either way, the National Lottery site cannot be accessed from abroad so I’ll just have to wait until I’m back in the UK before I find out if I’m a millionaire -or not.

What would I do though if I won a huge amount, millions of pounds? Well, it would be brilliant of course but me with my council house mentality, what could I do with say three million pounds? Well, the first thing would be to give away a third to charity. Yes, sounds good, doesn’t it? Really commendable but the thing is, I’ve already promised the Almighty that if he stopped for a minute and gave me a multi-million pound win, I’d give a third to charity.

I’ve promised so I could hardly say no and keep all the dosh could I? He would probably bump me off in a car crash or something. The big problem there is that I’ve also promised a third to the other side, you know, Lucifer, The Devil, Satan. I’ve promised him a certain amount of wickedness if he, the devil, will give me the jackpot. It’s shocking I know but I won’t be doing anything really nasty, just something moderately wicked like blocking up a post box on the last posting day before Christmas, just a little something that could be accepted as being wicked. Know what I mean?

Still, once I had the money, what would I do with it? Its ok for these rich people who are used to money. They will invest it and even if they invest it and go bankrupt, they will be still riding around in Rolls Royces and staying at top hotels whereas little old me would be in the nick for insider trading before you can say Gordon Gekko!

So, imagine I’ve got three million burning a hole in my pocket. Well, my old HP laptop is a little behind the times and slows down quite a lot when I try to edit my YouTube videos so a new PC or laptop must be on the cards. A new house? Of course, in fact the lovely villa that we rent here in Parçay Les Pins is a wonderful place. Perhaps I’d offer Rebecca the owner a few quid to take it off her hands. A little updating would be good. The lounge needs a makeover as do the bedrooms and the bathroom. Yes, I could see myself settling here quite happily. Then of course I’d need a nice car. My current vehicle, a Skoda is looking a bit long in the tooth, I quite fancy one of those cars with a lot of leg room. A few years ago the government was encouraging us to buy diesel cars, now those of us who still own them are being penalised by idiots like the Mayors of London and Manchester, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

Both want new low emissions in their towns and Khan has already gone ahead and expanded ULEZ, the Ultra Low Emission Zone from the centre of London to the Greater London area. Now, if you want to use a diesel car in those areas you will have to pay £12.50 per day. Yes, £12,50 per day to drive in the low emission zone, even though your vehicle has an MOT and has passed the ministry of transport emissions test. I’m all for cleaner air but what Khan is trying to do is get the working man who mostly drives a second hand car or van to contribute towards the London Mayor’s almost bankrupt set up. How fines will change the air quality though I’m not sure but what about the companies who designed and produced our polluting vehicles in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better if the government decided to say to the manufacturers, reduce the emissions on your vehicles by 2025 and then allow those vehicles time to gradually drop down into the second hand market? After all, we can’t all afford brand new electric vehicles.

Andy Burnham wanted to do a similar thing in Manchester but the outraged response of the residents of Manchester forced him to back down. Now he will tell you he didn’t want a low emission zone. Actually he did, certainly when he was MP for Leigh. Now as Mayor he says ‘I was forced into this by the Government.’ No, not really, the Government didn’t ask for a charging zone, just a small city centre low emissions zone, it was Andy Burnham who extended the zone to the whole of Greater Manchester, no one else. Sorry but Andy Burnham is a liar.

Funny how you can get onto a rant without meaning to. Time to calm down and read a book.

Faithful by Marianne Faithful.

I picked this book up after reading a blog post that made it seem like the most wonderful book ever written about the 1960s. I knew very little about Marianne Faithful except that once upon a time she was involved with Mick Jagger and I was surprised to find that Marianne was actually a singer. She had a hit in 1964 with a song called As Tears Go By which I thought I’d never heard of but when I played it, I realised I had. I’d always thought this was by the Seekers but of course it wasn’t. Good job that song hasn’t been played on our weekly quiz night as I would have got it wrong.

Marianne seems to have made friends with someone who was a record producer and in the crazy world of the 60s a couple of tracks were recorded, a single was put out and made the charts. Later, caught up in the swinging London scene she met Mick Jagger and began seeing him regularly. This being the rock and roll scene, booze, drugs and sex make a lot of appearances. Marianne was initially attracted to Keith Richards but after the two hit the hay together Keith remarked casually while getting dressed that he thought Mick really fancied her so despite her rather liking Keith she began seeing Mick.

Mick comes over in her book as quite a nice guy really. He seems to have been happy to enjoy booze, drugs and sex just like your average rock and roller but he seems to have always been able to step away from anything, like drugs or booze in particular, and stop it taking over his life.

Marianne did let drugs take her life over later on but at the beginning things seemed pretty amateur. For instance in the famous police drugs raid on the Rolling Stones, circa 1967 I think, Marianne had bought some travel sickness pills quite legally in either Italy or Spain but because they contained speed, they were illegal in the UK, not that anyone knew that of course.

Marianne stayed with Mick for quite a while but her life seemed to be going out of control as she seems to have been stoned for most of the 60s. Eventually she became a major drug user and at one point ended up living in a squat but still seems to have found the time and money to score drugs.

Actually, this book is very like a book I read not long ago about John Cooper Clarke in that when people are drug addicts, all they can think of is getting more drugs. Even though Marianne gets in quite a state, she never thinks that the reason might actually be her drug taking and neither does she ever even entertain actually not taking drugs.

Somehow, even when Marianne is living in a squat someone thinks she might be able to put an album together and make some money which she does. She ends up in New York and eventually manages to get into a detox place from which she finally emerges, in later life, clean and drug free.

Her life has been  -and here I have to use a phrase that I hate but here is actually relevant- a sort of roller coaster ride and the book is written in a sort of stream of consciousness way in which she describes her LSD trips with quite mesmerising clarity.

At the end of the book, she is happy that her albums have done well and people regard her now as a serious artist and not just Mick Jagger’s druggie girlfriend which, sorry Marianne, was my conception of her before reading this book.

One final thing. I clicked onto Spotify and listened to a few of her music tracks and I have to say, even though Marianne seems to be nowadays up there with the gods of rock and roll, I didn’t find anything that resonated with me. Sorry, Marianne.

Here in France we have been really lucky with the weather, it has been lovely, sunny and warm. I’ve been to France at this time of the year many times and usually the summer ends with a big thunderstorm. One day it’s hot, the thunderstorm comes and the next day it’s considerably cooler and the summer has gone. This year we had the usual storm but afterwards it was still muggy and hot. As I write this on the 13th of September, we’ve sat outside for our usual evening meal but as we came to the cheese course I felt cold. After a while I was so cold, I had to nip inside and dig out my fleece.

Yes, the summer is finally over.

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Noel Coward, Pools and Flying Creatures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This could really be a Sun Lounger Post  but for clarity I thought I’d give it the title above because it’s actually mainly about Noel Coward and his autobiographies.

Here in the quiet village of Parçay-les-Pins, Liz and I are having a relaxing time. The weather is good, well actually, it is fantastic. Sunny and warm, perhaps a little too warm but either way, the perfect weather for barbecues, eating outside, reading by the pool and relaxing.

Here’s the itinerary: Up at whatever time we want. Breakfast later, usually before 12 noon but not always, a quick washing up of the pots and then out to the pool. I’ve spent most of this holiday reading the autobiography of Noel Coward and it’s actually three books in one. The first part is his first autobiography, Present Indicative, part 2 is an unpublished segment of his unfinished third autobiography, Past Conditional and finally his second published autobiography Future Indefinite.

Book one, Present Indicative was published in 1937 and concerns Noel’s early years, his childhood and his first tentative steps into the theatre. It’s an account of a vanished world of repertory companies, writers, actors and actresses who have long gone and whose names mean little today in the 21st century. Even so it is hugely fascinating and interesting and as always enlivened by Noel’s supremely witty text. Noel was a homosexual in a time when homosexuality was illegal and most of his private life he keeps private although armed with a little knowledge of Noel we can read between the lines and assume that Jack Wilson who comes to live with him at his home, Goldenhurst in Kent, was presumably his lover.

It is pretty hot here in Parçay-les-Pins and after a little reading it’s time to slip into the cool waters of the pool and have a swim. Just lately, on a physical level I’ve been very inactive. I keep meaning to cycle or take a walk every day but I can never get around to it and I’m conscious my health is suffering. Now, every 20 minutes or so I slip into the pool and do 8 to 10 lengths and go back to my sun lounger for more relaxation and reading.

Book two, Past Conditional is an unpublished and unfinished autobiography that was intended to fill in the gap between his first two autobiographical books. It starts where the first one finished off, in the early 1930s and differs considerably in tone as it was written much later in the mid-1960s and Noel was able to look back at himself in the 1930s and examine himself from a more in depth perspective. Such a pity it was unfinished.

An interesting segment concerns the death of his brother who is scarcely mentioned in the text as he and Noel were never close. The brother was clearly never part of Noel’s theatrical world and the family sent him off to South Africa only for him to return and die of cancer.

In Parçay-les-Pins, we have been tempted to visit our favourite local restaurant however, a couple of things have stopped us. Firstly, it is very hot and the Station Restaurant is only open at lunchtimes so we have decided to wait until next week when the weather forecast is not looking so good. Why waste all that precious sun-bathing time?

Tea time at Parçay-les-Pins

Round about 6 pm or sometimes later, we tend to move from the pool back to the house and crank up the barbecue and decant some wine and eat in the warm evening. One of the great pleasures in France, at least for me, is to sit outside until the sun slides over the horizon and then in the darkness, a darkness here in the countryside so velvety and complete that the view of the sky and the stars is uninterrupted by any ambient light such as traffic or streetlights. Then I can look up at the great vista of the night sky, the heavens displayed above us in such a way that can never been seen from a great city like Manchester in the UK.

The big problem I have found is that this is just the time for the insects of the night to come out and nibble at my legs. One night Liz mentioned that she had some of those citronella candles that are supposed to deter the bugs so at once I dug a few out and lit them. It was rather nice for a while sat in the dark with the candles fluttering away with a rather nice scent. What happened was that the rather nice scent seemed to encourage even more bugs, especially a great number of what I can only describe as hornets. They were two to three times bigger than a UK wasp and then seemed to be honing in on the scented candles. Luckily, Liz is a master of the fly swatter and after a short while a whole flight of the hornets lay dead on the windowsill although by then, I had shot inside to safety.

The final book in the autobiographical series was Future Indefinite in which Noel recounted his time during the Second World War. He seems like many to have had a very low opinion of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, although to be fair to Chamberlain, he was doing his utmost to avoid the horrors of war. Sadly, and clearly unknown to Mr Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler did not want to avoid war, he was in fact wanting war very badly and happily it was Mr Churchill who understood this only too well.

In June of 1939 Noel who was a great globetrotter decided to take a tour of Europe in the light of Mr Chamberlain declaring ‘peace in our time’. He visited Warsaw and Danzig, Moscow, Leningrad, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen. He found that many of the people in those places were just waiting for Hitler to invade, particularly the Poles. In Russia he found a state that declared it had found freedom in Communism but was in fact quite the opposite as the Stalinist regime had choked any kind of criticism or free thinking whatsoever.

When war was declared Noel was asked to be part of an Anglo-French PR unit in Paris which he seems to have enjoyed for a while and then become a little bored with. He was sent on a tour of the USA to gauge opinion there on the war and was on his way back when the Nazis invaded France. He also did a tour of Australia and New Zealand to entertain troops and did charity work for various organisations helping those who were bombed out in London.

By far the most interesting part was his account of the filming of In Which We Serve, a very patriotic film showing the activities of a ship in the Royal Navy and the lives of those who served in her, all the way through to the ship’s sinking. In his very first autobiography, the names of the many actors and actresses he worked with meant very little to me but now I began to recognise a few names, John Mills and Richard Attenborough for instance and David Lean who co-directed the film with Noel although in actual fact, Lean directed most of the film when Coward became bored with the long-winded filming process.

Lying by the pool after a lot of reading and swimming I invariably start to feel tired round about the 4pm mark and tend to nod off although I’m usually awoken by flies buzzing around my ears. What insects seem to find fascinating about my ears I will never know but they always seem to strike just as I am nodding off.

Books, Sudoku and a pool. What could be nicer?

As well as the flies a great horde of swallows seem to be fascinated by our pool and round about 5pm they gather on the telephone line above us, divide themselves into squadrons and make various sorties down to the pool, skimming just above the surface or sometimes dipping into the water with either their wings or their tiny feet. This performance is very remarkable indeed and quite a few times I’ve had to duck as the swallows make their dives from just behind my head.

It actually reminded me about the Dambusters, the raid by 617 squadron of the RAF on the dams of Germany. They had to drop low over the waters of the dams and hit a consistent height of 60 feet before dropping their ‘bouncing bombs’.

Coward goes on to talk about Blithe Spirit, my favourite of Coward’s plays which was made into a film in 1945. Coward was not keen on the resulting film. David Lean added an ending in which Charles Condomine played by Rex Harrison dies and joins his ex-wives in the spirit world. Coward complained that David Lean had f**ked up the best thing I had ever written!  Personally, I loved it.

Final verdict of the Noel Coward biographies; fascinating, always interesting and hugely entertaining.

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Writing Heroes and Making that YouTube Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

What makes someone want to be a writer? Is it a need to emulate our own writing heroes or something else. I mentioned in a post last week that it’s important to be creative and we can be creative in a huge number of ways, not just in traditional artistic pursuits but also in everyday things, decorating our homes for instance, posting on social media, putting together a CD music mix or many other things.

I’ve always been a writer. As a child I used to scribble stories in notebooks and I even wrote short TV and film screenplays. I used to cast the characters from the film and TV actors of the time and I even remember one in particular. I was fascinated by the espionage fiction of the time, things like The Man From Uncle and James Bond 007 and I wrote about my own secret agent, Agent 80.

I cast Steve McQueen in the role as Agent 80 and put together a dossier on his secret agent character choosing which car he would drive and what sort of a place he lived in, cutting out pictures from magazines to make up the fictional file. Back then I was really interested in espionage and sci-fi and all my writings were pretty much about things like that. Later, as an adult, I started to write about things that happened to me; working in an office and working for the bus company and the pubs and bars I used to frequent. One of my favourite essays that I produced back then was something I wrote while waiting in a pub and I scribbled down notes about two people sat opposite and their smoking ritual involving getting out the packets, taking the cigarettes, flicking the lighter and then lighting up and the way they smoked, the way their hands moved and so on.

These days a lot of people in bars place their mobile phones carefully on pub tables looking over occasionally for messages. Back when I was a young man smokers placed their drinks carefully by their cigarettes and lighters, their table becoming a sort of personal shrine saying this is my space.

Two people who became writing heroes to me were Dylan Thomas and James Hilton. I won’t go on about them too much as I’ve written about both before (click the highlighted links for previous posts) but here are some basic thoughts;

Dylan Thomas

Dylan was a hard drinking, pub going writer and it was perhaps that image which first appealed to me. The other thing which really interested me was the incredible power of his writing but add that to his spirited readings from his work and his radio broadcasts and well, I was totally hooked.

James Hilton

Hilton is the author of one of my favourite books, Lost Horizon and he is also a fellow northerner like myself. Hilton was born in Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester and he made a journey I would love to have taken. He went from Leigh to Hollywood, California and he wrote a number of books and screenplays that were made into classic films. He wrote Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Goodbye Mr Chips starring fellow Englishman, also a northerner, Robert Donat who hailed from Didsbury in Manchester.

Charles Dickens

Dickens is of course a great and famous classic writer. I’ve got to say that some of his books I’ve found a little hard to read. I’ve tried and tried to read Pickwick Papers but I just couldn’t get through it. Not long ago I picked up Bleak House and once again I couldn’t really get started on the book. I have read A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and my absolute favourite, David Copperfield.

My favourite character, apart from Copperfield himself is Steerforth, a friend of David Copperfield but one who ultimately betrays him. The best part in the book probably, for me at any rate, is the storm when David returns to Yarmouth. Dickens builds the storm slowly and each word and phrase adds a new layer to the sense of danger and foreboding and when Copperfield is finally reunited with his old friend Steerforth at the height of the storm’s ferocity, death comes between them and Steerforth is sadly drowned.

My well thumbed copy of David Copperfield

Dickens reveals this in a very unique way, he does not tell the reader Steerforth is dead. He leaves the reader to realise this themselves and, in the process, makes the reader almost at one with the narrative. Throughout the book, Dickens mentions in passing about Steerforth’s habit of sleeping with his head on his arm. It’s referred to many times in the narrative almost as a matter of non interest, something unimportant that the reader doesn’t really need to know, but when David Copperfield spies someone aboard a stricken ship trapped in the fierce storm who evokes some faint remembrance for him, a tiny warning bell is set off.

Finally, when the body of a drowned man is brought ashore and lies mutely on the sand, his head upon his arm, we know just from that simple bit of information, without the author telling us anything more, that Steerforth is dead. The prompts and clues that Dickens has hinted at have paid off for the reader in the most satisfying of ways.

Noel Coward

Coward has really been a surprising writing hero to me. I’ve been aware of him for years through film and television and his slightly eccentric persona has always been a little amusing to me. I remember once seeing an interview with him on the stage at the BFI, (British Film Institute) Richard Attenborough was interviewing him and seemed to me to be treating him as some sort of God that had been beamed down from the heavens. Coward was puffing away on a cigarette and lapping up all the praise.

A favourite film of mine is Blithe Spirit. The film starred Rex Harrison as a journalist who wants some background for a novel and he invites a medium, Madame Arcarti to officiate at a séance at his house. Unfortunately for Rex, Madame Arcarti evokes the spirit of his dead wife who at first is only visible to him. The film and of course the stage play that came before is a wonderful witty comedy. I liked it so much I wondered if the play or the screenplay was in print. I was happy to find that it was and I bought a paperback copy which also contained two other wonderful plays, Hay Fever and Private Lives. Again, these other plays were outstandingly witty and humorous and off I went in search of more works by Coward. As I write this, I’m currently reading a collection of his autobiographies.

Coward liked to arise early in the morning and then write until lunchtime, after which he would then enjoy his lunch and relax for the afternoon. Not a bad set up really and one I could do with taking up myself. Of course, I’m not so keen on lunch as Noel, I’m more of a late breakfast kind of guy, brunch I think they call it in places like the USA. Also, I don’t get up that early. I have done in the past, in fact I once did a regular 6am shift which meant getting up very early indeed.

Anyway, after writing about these four great authors it’s got me in a creative mood. I’ve done quite a bit of writing lately but I’ve realised that I’ve been neglecting the video producing aspect of my creative side. It’s clearly high time I produced something new for my YouTube page. After all, video is important for plugging my media profile as well as the two books I have for sale on Amazon.

I got out my video camera and thought what could I do. Yes, a piece to camera. I’ve been reading up lately about Marilyn Monroe which is why the late Hollywood star has featured in quite a few recent posts. I decided I could talk about my Monroe book collection and articulate a recent post I did concerning an internet debate about Marilyn’s death. I worked out what I was going to say in my head and then shot the whole thing in one take as a sort of rehearsal. I took off my scruffy polo shirt, changed it for a nice shirt and did the whole thing again. Not bad I thought.

Next I went about editing the video. The light wasn’t good so I upped the exposure and added some contrast. I cropped a few of the shots and closed in to a tighter shot covering me and the books I mentioned in my collection. I added the titles and credits and then settled back to review the entire thing. It was a good few hours work and I was ready to upload to YouTube when I spotted something.

During the video I mentioned a BBC documentary a few times. The documentary was called Say Goodbye to The President but for some inexplicable reason I realised that in the video I had somehow managed to refer to it as Shall We Tell the President, which happens to be the title of a novel by Jeffrey Archer, which as far as I know, has nothing whatsoever to do with Marilyn Monroe.

I wonder if any of the writers mentioned above ever had problems like this?

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Marilyn Monroe (and Me)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was looking through my old scrapbook a while ago. I scanned some pages for my blog post Scrapbook Memories and quite a few of them featured Marilyn Monroe. I put my scrapbooks together years ago and even though I stopped making them in my late teens or early twenties, I continued collecting cuttings from newspapers and magazines, as well as books and videos all on the same subject:  Marilyn Monroe.

What attracted me to the persona of Marilyn Monroe? Well, apart from her obvious charms as a very attractive lady it’s her death that has always interested me. I’m a sucker for a modern mystery whether it’s the assassination of JFK, the disappearance of Amelia Aerhart or Marilyn’s own strange death. The obvious solution is that Marilyn committed suicide. She had tried suicide quite a few times before and various people along the years have saved her from death, including her acting coach Natasha Lytess and her third husband playwright Arthur Miller. Suicide is the obvious answer to her death but personally, I’m not so sure.

Anyway, getting back to my personal interest in Marilyn, I’m pretty certain the first book about her was what has come to be thought of the definitive biography, the one by Fred Laurence Guiles. Guiles published his book in 1969 and chronicled Marilyn’s life as Norma Jeane Mortensen and then Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Mortensen was born on June 1st, 1926. She had a troubled upbringing. Her mother was mentally unstable and was in and out of various institutions leaving young Norma to be taken into care. On one occasion in her late teens Norma Jeane was living with a friend of her mother’s but this friend was moving away and rather than send Norma back into a home an idea came about which seems a little mad in retrospect. The idea was for Norma to get married to a local boy, Jim Dougherty. The marriage went ahead only eighteen days after Norma’s sixteenth birthday.

When war came to the USA in 1941, Jim joined the navy. Norma was working in a war factory when an army photographer called David Conover came round looking for a photo article for a magazine. He asked Norma to pose for him and found that she had a natural affinity with the camera. She began a career in modelling which led her to bit parts in films, then a contract with 20th Century Fox and later to film stardom.

In 1946 she divorced Jim Dougherty and Fox offered her a seven-year optional contract. She changed her name to Marilyn Monroe and began her film career. All didn’t go so smoothly at first. She was dropped from her contract but she did meet an influential Hollywood agent named Johnny Hyde.

I’ve got to say that despite her best efforts I’m not sure my interest in Marilyn had a lot to do with her acting skills as in her early days she wasn’t a great actress. What she did have was looks, looks that could turn the heads of a great deal of men. One of her early film roles came about really because of her growing reputation as a model. She was cast in the last of the Marx Brothers’ films Love Happy and had one scene in which she tells Groucho that “some men are following me.” Groucho explains more in the following video.

That of course was nothing more than a walk on part but she was asked to go on a nationwide tour in the USA promoting the film. Marilyn was determined to get on and be a great actress. She was always having acting lessons, in fact she joined the famous New York Actors Studio. The studio had been founded by theatre and film director Elia Kazan and one of the famous acting coaches there was Lee Strasberg. Both Kazan and Strasberg were interested in ‘the method’, a style of acting initiated by the Russian actor Stanislavsky which involved the actor using his own experience and memories to ‘become’ the role rather than just acting a role. James Dean and Marlon Brando were two of the more famous students of the Actors Studio.

Another of my books about Marilyn was the famous biography by Norman Mailer. Mailer actually used Fred Guiles’ book as the basis of his biography but added his own insight into Marilyn’s story as well as a huge collection of photographs. Mailer was originally hired to write an introduction to what was originally intended to be just a photo album but he was so taken by the subject matter, he wrote more and more and his ‘introduction’ became the book. He later wrote other works about Marilyn.

Marilyn: Norman Mailer

Marilyn on the cover of the celebrated book by Norman Mailer

Johnny Hyde was in love with Marilyn and asked her to marry him many times. She always declined, telling him she did not love him. He continued to press her while working hard on her behalf as her agent. In October 1950 he arranged for a seven year contract at Twentieth Century Fox. He also organised some minor plastic surgery for her, apparently, she had her chin built up slightly and the tip of her nose made smaller. In December that year she was recuperating from the surgery at his Palm Springs home when Johnny died of a heart attack. Marilyn was distraught when she heard the news, even so, his family ordered her out of the house.

She moved in with her drama coach Natasha and one day tried to swallow over 30 Nembutal capsules. Luckily Natasha came home early and found her.

Fox put Marilyn into a number of pictures playing a dizzy blonde type but then she was loaned out to RKO for Clash by Night directed by Fritz Lang. It was the first film with her name over the title.

In 1954 she married baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Maggio had retired from the game that had made him famous and Joe wanted her to settle down with him and retire from the cinema. It might be that Marilyn did intend to one day enjoy a more domestic existence. My feeling though is that she could never ever give up her film star life. It had given her all she had; her fame, her money and her status. She could never say goodbye to her creation, the film star Marilyn Monroe.

In the short autobiography published after her death, My Story, which some say was ghost written or partly written by others, Marilyn said this about her fame:

I belonged to the public and the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I never belonged to anything or anyone else. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming and the only home I had ever dreamed of.

Would she give up all that for DiMaggio or anyone? I don’t think so.

Her marriage to DiMaggio ultimately failed but Joe would continue to be a great friend. It is quite possible that in the last months of her life she was even planning to remarry him. However, before that came marriage and divorce to Arthur Miller. Marilyn idolised men like Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein and she put Miller into that same category. They had met years before, even before she married Dimaggio. Miller would write the screenplay for her final completed film, The Misfits, in which she played a character, Roslyn, which was based on herself. She became hugely disappointed in Miller after finding an open diary or notebook of his in which he severely criticised her. They divorced in 1961.

I’ve always thought that The Misfits was her best film and every so often I’ll take my DVD copy and give it a viewing. (I’ve actually only got two of her films on DVD, The Misfits and Some Like it Hot). Misfits was in fact her last completed film. In 1962 she began filming Something’s Got to Give in which she starred with Dean Martin. Marilyn missed a lot of the shoot due to illness and then left for New York where she appeared at a gala performance for the President’s birthday. The President was John F Kennedy and 20th Century Fox was not amused that with their film behind schedule its star had taken time off. They were already having financial problems with another production, Cleopatra. They were paying Elizabeth Taylor the unheard-of figure of one million dollars for her to play the Egyptian queen and their bank account must have been looking distinctly unhealthy. What was the answer? They fired Marilyn.

Fred Guiles first book on Marilyn was published in 1969 and mentions that towards the end of her life she was involved with an ‘easterner’. The man from the east was Robert Kennedy and since then many books and documentaries have mentioned Marilyn’s involvement with both John and Robert Kennedy. The accepted story of Marilyn’s death goes like this. Both John and Robert Kennedy ended their affairs with her, she had been sacked by 20th Century Fox and she became so despondent that she took her own life. Her body lay unclaimed in the morgue until the faithful Joe DiMaggio came and organised her funeral.

In 1966 however, a man call Frank Capell had published a book called ‘The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe’ which called attention to various things that did not add up. Capell also claimed that Robert Kennedy was with Marilyn on the evening of her death. The FBI forwarded a report of the book to Kennedy who was then still the Attorney General and he asked that Capell’s phone be tapped.

In the 1980’s a number of authors began to look further into Marilyn’s death and one in my collection is The Marilyn Conspiracy. The author, Milo Speriglio was a private detective who was asked by Robert Slatzer to investigate. Slatzer was a friend of Marilyn’s and has even claimed that he married the star only for the two to tear up the marriage licence in case it harmed her career. He said Marilyn had a red diary in which she jotted down notes from her conversations with RFK and contained many things that were secret at the time. Marilyn used to call him from a nearby phone box as she felt that her phones had been tapped.

In 1985 Anthony Summers published the book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe in which he also claimed Marilyn was involved with Robert Kennedy. He also explains that Marilyn was not depressed after all. Her dispute with 20th Century Fox had been settled and they had reinstated her to the movie Something’s Got to Give and she was discussing further film projects including a biopic about Jean Harlow.

Summer also collaborated on a BBC documentary film called Say Goodbye to the President in which private eye Fred Otash revealed that he had engaged electronics expert Bernie Spindell to bug Marilyn’s home. The reason? Union leader Jimmy Hoffa who was under investigation by Kennedy wanted derogatory information on RFK that he could use against him.

Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper, admitted in an interview in 1985 for the documentary Say Goodbye to the President that Bobby Kennedy was at Marilyn’s house on the day of her death. Eunice’s son in law and Marilyn’s handyman, Norman Jefferies told Donald Wolfe, the author of The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe, that Bobby Kennedy arrived late on the Saturday evening with two unknown men and asked Jefferies and Murray to leave while he spoke with Marilyn alone. When they returned Marilyn was comatose in one of the guest cottages attached to her house. Jefferies and Murray called an ambulance but Marilyn died from an overdose.

I cannot for a moment imagine Bobby Kennedy as a murderer but he certainly would not want to be associated in any way with a movie star suicide. John Bates, a friend of the Kennedy family, claims that Bobby and his family spent the weekend with him at his ranch in Gilroy, south of San Francisco.

Marilyn died in 1962 and she must have something about her because here we are in 2023 still interested in her. In 2011 a film about her called My week with Marilyn was released and in 2022 came Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Monroe. Blonde was a fictional version of Marilyn’s life. I haven’t seen it but when I looked it up on the internet it didn’t seem to have been rated highly although I’ll be looking out for it on my TV screen in the future.

Norman Mailer’s book about Monroe finished with a photo of Joe DiMaggio, grief stricken on the day of her funeral and he reckons we can perhaps surmise Marilyn’s true worth just by the look on Joe’s face that day. I cannot disagree.

Sources:

The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Donald Wolfe

Goddess by Anthony Summers

The Marilyn Conspiracy by Milo Speriglio with Steven Chain

Norma Jeane: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles

My Story by Marilyn Monroe

Say Goodbye to the President: 1985 BBC documentary

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More Transformations

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been fascinated by transformations either in fiction or in real life but what do I mean by transformations? Well, I have written about transformations before in a previous post. I talked then about Professor Higgins who helped Eliza Doolittle change from a street flower seller to a lady in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion but with this new post I thought I’d start with the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson published his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde in 1886. It concerns Dr Jekyll who creates a potion which transforms himself into Mr Hyde, another personality in which he is free to enjoy his vices without fear of detection. In the book Mr Hyde must take more of his serum in order to change back to his original self. Eventually Hyde finds it is not possible to revert back and commits suicide.

The Jekyll and Hyde story was filmed many times but the most famous version was in 1920 starring John Barrymore. In one scene Barrymore as Jekyll changes into Hyde entirely without special effects. It is an extraordinary scene all achieved by facial contortions which may seem a bit laughable today but back in 1920 audiences were amazed. A 1941 version starred Spencer Tracy in the title role and there have been many other film versions.

One of my favourites was the comedy Carry on Screaming in which police officer Sergeant Bung played by Harry H Corbett is investigating some strange goings on. His investigations lead him to an eerie rest home run by Kenneth Williams as Orlando Watt and his sister Valeria played seductively by Fenella Fielding. In one scene Valeria gives Harry a potion which turns him into Mr Hyde with hilarious results.

Bruce Wayne and Batman

A pretty obvious transformation is one I could pick up from any superhero comic, that of an ordinary member of the public transformed by some accident or circumstance into a crime fighting hero. I’ve chosen two you might already be familiar with from pretty much opposite sides of the super hero spectrum.

Bruce Wayne was a young child when his parents were murdered by a criminal. The story first appeared in issue #33 of Detective comics in 1939. Dr Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha were wealthy socialites living in Gotham City. Their son Bruce enjoyed a privileged existence at the family home, Wayne Manor, until he was eight years old when the family encountered small time mugger Joe Chill on the way home from the cinema. Joe shot Bruce’s parents dead and the young lad swore to avenge his parents’ death by fighting crime.

Batman. Picture courtesy Wikipedia commons.

When he is ruminating on this decision and thinking that he must be able to strike fear into the hearts of the criminal fraternity a bat flies in through the window and Bruce wonders if the image of the bat might be something he can use.

The Batman origin story has changed over the years; in a later comic we find that the murder of the Waynes was organised by a mob boss as revenge for when Thomas Wayne gave testimony which sent the mob boss behind bars.

In the Tim Burton film Batman, we find that the killer was actually Jack Napier who later becomes the Joker, one of Batman’s arch enemies.

In the later Dark Knight Batman films things change again with Bruce travelling to Asia to learn martial arts from the League of Shadows. He later splits from the group and as Batman, he has to battle against them.

Peter Parker and Spiderman

Spiderman was a different kind of superhero made to measure for the teenagers of the 1960’s. Peter Parker was a quiet nerdy kind of teenager. He was a high school student who lived with his aunt and uncle as his parents had died in a plane crash. He was attracted to Mary Jane Watson, a gorgeous redhead but he knew he had no chance whatsoever with the muscle-bound Flash Thompson on the scene. Anyway, one day he and his fellow pupils are visiting the Midtown school of Science and Technology and he comes across a radioactive spider. Yes, not something you run into every day.

Anyway, Peter gets bitten by the spider and as a result develops superhuman powers; super strength and agility and also a sort of sixth sense he calls his spider sense. In the comics Peter makes a special gadget that shoots out a strong web on which he swings through the heights of the city. Peter uses his new found powers and becomes a wrestler, but after his uncle Ben is killed by a mugger, he decides to fight crime as Spiderman.

Back in the 1960’s there was a cartoon TV Spiderman show and I can even remember most of the theme tune.

Spiderman, Spiderman, Your friendly neighbourhood spiderman

Spins a web any size

Catches thieves just like flies

Is he strong, listen bud

he’s got radioactive blood.

They just don’t write them like that anymore.

Tobey Maguire starred as Peter Parker in a film trilogy that was quickly rebooted with Tom Holland as the web swinging hero.

Personally, I still prefer the old cartoon version.

Elton John and Reginald Dwight

Reginald Dwight was born on the 25th March 1947. He lived in Pinner in Middlesex with his mother and father, Stanley and Sheila.   Stanley Dwight joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and elected to stay on after World War II ended. Elton John seemed to think in his autobiography that that was a good thing as together, his mother and father spent a lot of time arguing. While Stanley was away in the air force Reg lived with his mother and his maternal grandmother at 55 Pinner Hill Road, his grandmother’s council house. Elton seems to have been reasonably happy there but understandably distressed at the numerous arguments between his mother and father whenever Stanley came home.

Stanley left the air force and his mother and father divorced when Reg was 14.

One thing that had a very positive effect on the young Reginald was his parents’ love of music and records. He began tapping out tunes on his grandmother’s piano and the age of 11 won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

At the age of 15 Reg got himself a job playing the piano at the local pub and in 1962 he and some friends formed a small band called Bluesology and they soon picked up a regular gig supporting singer Long John Baldry.

In 1967 Reg answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express. It had been placed by Liberty Records and they were looking for new talent. Reg went to audition for the A & R manager, Ray Williams but he appeared to be unimpressed when Reg sang an old Jim Reeves hit and by way of ending the interview Ray handed Reg a sheaf of unopened lyrics written by someone who had answered the same ad.

That someone was Bernie Taupin. He and Reg hit it off instantly and Reg began writing music to Bernie’s lyrics. Six months later Reg changed his name. He took the name Elton from saxophonist Elton Dean and John from Long John Baldry and put them together to become Elton John.

In 1969 Elton’s album Empty Sky became a minor hit and was followed by the eponymous Elton John in 1970. ‘Your Song’, a single from the album went to number 7 in the UK singles chart and Elton John had arrived.

Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe

I should mention that one of Elton’s big hits was Candle in the Wind which leads me nicely into this next section as the song was about Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was born Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1st 1926. Her mother was a Hollywood film cutter and her father was a married man named C Francis Gifford who Gladys, her mother, had an affair with.

Gladys divorced her husband who had deserted her some years earlier and she reverted to her previous name, Baker, that of her first husband.

Marilyn: Norman Mailer

Marilyn on the cover of the celebrated book by Norman Mailer

Norma Jeane had a troubled upbringing. Her mother was mentally unstable and was in and out of various institutions, leaving young Norma to be taken into care. On one occasion in her late teens Norma Jeane was living with a friend of her mother, but this friend was moving away and rather than send Norma back into a home, an idea came about which seems a little mad in retrospect. The idea was for Norma to get married to a local boy, Jim Dougherty. The marriage went ahead only eighteen days after Norma’s sixteenth birthday.

The war finally came to came to the USA when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Jim joined the navy and Norma was working in a war factory when an army photographer called David Conover came round looking for a photo article for a magazine. He asked Norma to pose for him and found that she had a natural affinity with the camera. More photo shoots came her way and soon Norma was convinced by Emmeline Snively, head of the Blue Book Modelling Agency that she was wasting her talents in a defence factory. Within weeks of quitting her job in the factory Norma Jeane became one of the Blue Book’s busiest models.

In 1946 she divorced Jim Dougherty and only a matter of weeks later she went for a screen test at Twentieth Century Fox and Ben Lyon, head of new talent at Fox, offered her a seven-year optional contract. The next issue was her name as Lyon felt that Norma Jeane was not film star material. Lyon suggested the name Marilyn and Norma Jeane provided her mother’s maiden name, Monroe. Norma Jeane had made the transformation into Marilyn Monroe and had begun the long road to film stardom.

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Graham and Damon: An F1 Story

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I haven’t done an F1 post for a while so I reckon it’s time for a new one. F1 in 2023 seems to promise much but so far has failed to deliver. Red Bull seem to be winning everything which is great for them but makes things a bit boring for the average F1 fan. It’s in times like these that I tend to look back to the past for a little F1 drama.

Damon Hill is not exactly my favourite racing driver. He pops up these days as a pundit on Sky TV’s F1 coverage and I’m sorry to say that I tend to fast forward past him until I find someone a little more interesting to listen to. Back in the day when he beat Michael Schumacher to the F1 world title in 1996 I cheered for him but even then, that was mostly a reaction to the tactics of the highly ruthless Michael Schumacher. Anyway, when Liz handed me a copy of Damon’s autobiography, I thought it might be worth scanning through.

Hill starts his story not with himself but with his celebrated father Graham Hill. Hill was a great driver, a double world champion but also one of the great, if not the greatest, characters in the sport. What F1 fan would not instantly recognise the prominently chinned and moustached Graham Hill with his swept back hair and his witty and straight to the point remarks?

Graham didn’t even pass his driving test until he was 24 yet went on to win two world championships. He began by seeing an advertisement offering some laps of Brands Hatch in a racing car for five shillings. He went along, paid his money and subsequently was hooked on motor sport. He got himself a job working as a mechanic for Colin Chapman’s Lotus team and soon talked his way into actually driving one of Colin’s cars.

In the 1960’s, Colin’s star driver was Jim Clark, one of motorsport’s absolute greats. Jim was universally respected as being the star driver of the day and won the world championship for Lotus in 1963. In that year Jim won seven of the year’s races (there were only 10) a record that stood until 1984 when Alain Prost won seven races for McLaren.

Graham Hill had left Lotus for the BRM team and won his first world championship in 1962. In 1967 Hill returned to partner Clark in Colin Chapman’s new Lotus 49 powered by the new Ford Cosworth DFV engine.

In 1968 Clark was entered in a Formula 2 race for Lotus at Hockenheim in Germany. In those days, F1 drivers regularly competed in other events apart from F1 including sports car racing, saloon cars and of course, Formula 2. During the race, Clark’s Lotus veered off the track into trees and Jim suffered a broken neck and was killed. A deflating rear tyre was thought to be the cause of the crash but the racing community was devastated. Clark was a quiet unassuming Scotsman, born into a farming family but is still remembered today as one of the greats of all time.

The Lotus team looked then to Graham Hill to lead them forward into the next round of F1 races and despite initial difficulties with the car and engine, Graham was able to win his second championship title. In 1969 he suffered a terrible crash in the USA when, after getting out to push his car after a spin, he jumped back into the cockpit but was unable to fasten his safety belts. He crashed and was thrown from the car breaking both legs. He later drove for Brabham and finally started his own F1 team with sponsorship from Embassy cigarettes. He was killed in a plane crash in 1975 along with key personnel from his team.

In Damon’s book, he gives an interesting insight into the events above, telling them from a son’s point of view. He knew many of the great drivers and team bosses of the time, meeting them as a child and he tells of Graham’s life from a family perspective; Dad being away from home a lot and always being so busy. He was the first to hear of his father’s death, seeing TV reports of a light aircraft crash just when the family was expecting him home. Graham was an accomplished pilot and owned his own Piper Aztec light aircraft. He had flown back from testing his new car in France but when he arrived back at Elstree, the weather was cold and foggy and he crashed on his final approach killing all on board. Not only was Damon distressed about the loss of his father but he resented the press who reported on not only the plane crash but also the subsequent funeral.

Graham HillAfter Graham’s death it was found that his pilot’s license had expired and this and some other things invalidated his insurance which meant that the other families who had lost loved ones in the crash were forced to sue Graham’s estate for compensation. This meant the Hills had to sell their home and move to a smaller house. These things seem to have weighed on young Damon’s mind for a long time, even into his own days as a racing driver.

Damon initially took up motorcycle racing and worked in a variety of jobs to fund this, including being a motorcycle courier. Later his mother arranged for him to take a course at a car racing school thinking cars would be safer than motorbikes and so Damon began his career in car racing. In his book he describes the difficulties of getting drives and wrestling with the issues of bringing money to the table through sponsorship.

He managed to get drives in Formula 3 and then Formula 3000 and I personally saw Damon quite a few times at Oulton Park in the late 1980’s. I remember meeting his mum in the paddock at Oulton Park when I was photographing her son’s car. She went off to bring Damon back for a picture but alas, she wasn’t able to find him.

Damon at Oulton Park. Photo by the author

Damon struggled with the issues of sponsorship as many race teams were looking for drivers who could bring personal sponsors into a team but Damon was able to get himself a F3000 drive which also led to an F1 drive with the faltering Brabham team. At the same time, he had also replaced Mark Blundell as the test driver for Williams. After a difficult year with Brabham, Williams were having a tough time with their driver line up. Mansell had won the world championship in 1992 but he wasn’t happy about having Alain Prost as a team mate in 1993. Williams were still expecting Nigel to drive for them, after all he had just won the title, but Mansell decided to up sticks and go to the USA to drive in Indycars. Williams signed Prost and Hill got the promotion from test driver to full time driver for the 1993 season.

1993 was an interesting season. The Williams was without a doubt the best car of the field but Prost had just come back from a season out of the sport and was on a learning curve with the new car while Hill, who had been testing was actually pretty familiar with it.

Prost won the championship and Damon scored his first win but for 1994 Frank Williams had signed Ayrton Senna and Prost decided he wasn’t going to work with Senna again and promptly retired. That left Damon to partner Senna. In 1994 active suspension, a system where the suspension and ride height of the car was controlled by an onboard computer, was banned and the car had become rather difficult to drive. When the team came to Imola that year, Senna had scored no points at all and was desperate for a win. Damon says he had not settled into the team well and he was clearly still trying to get used to the way the Williams team operated. In the race Senna had a major accident.

Damon passed the scene of the crash, not knowing it was serious and felt for Senna thinking it would be three races in a row without points for the Brazilian driver. When the race was stopped he sat in his car on the grid waiting for information but little was forthcoming. Later, the team’s press officer advised him that things were serious but it was only after the restarted race had finished that news came through that Senna was indeed dead.

It was almost a familiar scenario to that which Graham Hill had experienced in 1968. The team leader had been killed and Graham had to step up and lead the team. Now Damon had to do the same.

Damon Hill won the world championship in 1996 but his team boss Frank Williams had for whatever reason decided Damon was not the driver he wanted for 1997 and his contract was not renewed. Damon ended up driving for Arrows in 1997 which he thought was a middle of the grid team trying to move up to the front. It turned out to be a back of the grid team, trying to move up to the middle. Damon won once more for the Jordan team and then retired. In some ways it almost seems that Damon had his F1 career in reverse, he started at the top and then drove for lesser teams until he decided to call it a day.

Damon’s book is not one I really fancied but in fact it was really a pretty good read. His younger years as the son of the great Graham Hill are fascinating, especially his behind-the-scenes motorsport memories. His recollections of his early racing days and the complexities of sponsorship and his experiences of F1 also make great reading. The book falters a little when Damon tries to interest the reader in his problems with depression, brought on possibly as a result of losing his father in such a tragic way, however, I do feel I have a little more respect and time for Damon and perhaps in future, when he comes on my TV screen as an F1 pundit, I might not be so quick to fast forward past him.

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Holiday Book Bag: Spring 2023

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A long time ago I was reading a biography about Richard Burton called ‘Rich’ by Melvyn Bragg. The book used Burton’s own diaries and mentioned, amongst other things, Burton’s love of books. When Burton went on holiday he looked forward with delight to the contents of his ‘book bag’. I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but one thing I have in common with Richard Burton is a love of books and when I go on holiday, one of the delights of lying under a warm sun on my sunbed is a good, undisturbed read. I read a lot at home and before I retired, on my lunch breaks at work but it’s a few minutes here and a few minutes there and whenever I get interrupted it kind of breaks the flow. Some books, as we all know, are just made for a really long, uninterrupted read so here are the books I took on holiday with me recently, all sourced from either the internet or secondhand bookshops.

I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke

I’ll start off this book bag with this autobiography by John Cooper Clarke. I wrote about it a few weeks ago so I’ll keep it brief here. This was a wonderful read. It wasn’t the I did this and then I did that conventional autobiography, it was a very observational book and Cooper Clarke paints an interesting picture of Manchester and Salford from the 1950s to his heyday as a punk poet in the 1980’s. The last quarter of the book resembles a more conventional biography and it made me want to read some of his poetry.

Verdict: A fabulous, entertaining read.

10 Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke

This was a poetry book by John and to be fair I found it a little disappointing. The thing is, Clarke is a performance poet and his grammar free poetry doesn’t work as well on the printed page as it does when Clarke performs it on stage. Some poetry I suppose is meant to be read, other poetry needs to be performed and Clarke’s comes into the latter category.

Verdict: Interesting but not my cup of tea.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I first heard about this from seeing a trailer to the new film version and it looked pretty interesting. I do love something that is new and original and so Liz and I went to the cinema to see it which was my first cinema visit for a long time. It’s a good film but not a cinema classic and I wondered if the book would be better. The story is about Harold Fry who is retired and lives with his wife on a suburban housing estate. He gets a letter advising him that a friend and former workmate named Queenie, is dying of cancer and he pens a short note of sympathy in reply. He goes out to post the letter but decides to walk further wrapped up in thoughts about Queenie. At a petrol station where he buys a sandwich the young girl assistant tells him a story about her aunt who suffered with cancer and she -the shop assistant- feels that real faith and positive thoughts can help beat even something like cancer. Harold decides there and then to walk all the way to Berwick-upon-Tweed and see Queenie in person.

Along the way Harold meets various people and when news of his march reaches the media, many others come to join him. Along the way he thinks a lot about the events of his life, in particular his relationships with his wife and son and eventually both he and his wife, who he speaks constantly to on the telephone, seem to reach a sort of understanding about what has happened to them as well as an unspoken desire to reunite and move forward. The book was a great success world wide and many reviews printed on the back cover tell the reader what an uplifting read it was. It wasn’t a bad read at all but I actually found it not only sad but rather miserable and, to be honest, not uplifting at all.

Verdict: Original and interesting but a bit too melancholic for me.

Then Again by Diane Keaton

This is another autobiography and like the one by John Cooper Clarke it was a rather unconventional one. Diane Keaton is a film actress you might remember from the Godfather movies or from Annie Hall. Diane’s mother had died and looking through her effects she had found numerous notebooks and diaries in which her mother had written about her life. In this autobiography, Diane has tried to link her story with that of her mother and has put her own experiences and memories side by side with those of her mother. The result is for the most part a really very interesting book, told in a very open and talkative way by both Diane Keaton and her mother. Diane doesn’t get too personal but does talk quite a lot about her work and her life in particular with Woody Allen and Warren Beatty, both of whom she was involved with for a time. She also had a long relationship with Al Pacino who she played opposite in the Godfather series of films and it seems to me she was expecting to marry Al but for whatever reason he decided to call the relationship a day.

The last part of the book is really about her decision, late in life, to adopt two children and the result for the autobiography is rather like when one of your friends has a child and all they ever seem to do is go on and on about their new little boy or girl. Her mother sadly develops dementia and Diane’s experience of trying to look after her was all too familiar to mine.

Verdict: The book goes off on a bit of a tangent towards the end but generally I really enjoyed it, especially the bits about working with Woody Allen.

The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams

I mentioned at the start of this post about reading Melvyn Bragg’s biography of Richard Burton and how Burton used to always take a ‘book bag’ with him whenever he went away. Bragg’s book was based partly on these diaries which have now been published and are available to everyone.

There is a lot I like about this book and a lot that I don’t like. I tend to prefer paperbacks but I bought this one from the internet and it’s a big heavy hardback and as I’ve dragged it across France it’s generally getting a little tattier every day.

Moving on to the text and I see a lot of the big events in Burton’s life are missing as sometimes he stops writing for days and even months at a time. We don’t hear about the making of Cleopatra and his meeting and affair with Elizabeth Taylor but he does mention some of those events in retrospect.

The book starts with his schoolboy diaries which are rather like mine, brief and to the point. Later, the main diary starts in 1965 and as I write this, I’m up to about 1970. Burton tells us of his immense love for Taylor and how he has given up womanising to be faithful to her but sometimes I get the feeling he isn’t being totally honest, after all Liz has free access to his diary and she frequently jots down her own comments too. Burton was rumoured to have had an affair with Genevieve Bujold during the filming of Anne of a Thousand Days but of course, gives no mention of that in his journal. He does talk a lot about food and having lunch in places like Paris and Rome. He enjoys having money and delights in spending it on jewels for Liz, a new private jet plane and a yacht which he thinks might actually save him money as he can stay on the yacht rather than use hotels. Even so, he continues to use hotels anyway. At one point he considers buying a barge, modernising it and touring the canals of France.

He doesn’t seem to enjoy his acting and in fact rather looks down on it as a profession, although unlike an actor like Brando who had similar thoughts, he did take pride in what he did, learning his part and his lines whereas Brando couldn’t even be bothered to learn the script for the film of Superman despite his million dollar fee.

Surprisingly there is also quite a lot of professional jealousy in the text, for instance, he gives Robert Shaw a bit of a slagging off for his performance as Henry VIII in A Man for all Seasons which I thought was rather good, better or at least the equal of Burton’s Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days.

Burton drinks a lot and frequently argues with Liz, sometimes he is banished to the spare bedroom and usually he regrets his drunken words and wonders why he did what he did or said what he said.

He was though a man who loved books, reading anything from the classics to detective novels. He enjoyed books immensely and even had ambitions of being a writer himself. His entries are peppered with quotations from authors and poets and of course Shakespeare.

I was really looking forward to reading this book but after the first few pages I thought it a little uninteresting. As the narrative moved from 1968 into 1970, Burton seemed to be putting more effort into his journalling and consequently it became more enjoyable to read. Later large gaps appear in the diaries and he doesn’t appear to have written anything about his breakup with Liz Taylor. The entries become less frequent and to be honest, I ended up skipping quite a few pages.

Verdict: A book that promised a lot but failed to deliver.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

I’ve read a few books by this author before and always enjoyed them, this one being no exception, in fact it might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in some ways plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President asks the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

Verdict: A brilliant read.

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John Cooper Clarke and Some Other Thoughts from a Sun Lounger

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s that time again for Liz and me to troll through France in our motorhome, on the look out for swimming lakes, cheese, wine and restaurants. The weather has so far been good but not great so sometimes I’ve been relaxing on my sun lounger, other times I’ve been inside wondering, where the hell is that sun?

As I write this we are about a week into our holiday and the sun has made an appearance. We’ve had three or four really hot days and a few of those spring days where it’s really warm in the sun but move into the shade and yes, it’s freezing. You might be thinking what do we get up to in France? Visit museums? Explore fascinating French towns? Well, we have done all that stuff in the past but these days we tend to relax in the sun, read a lot, sup copious amounts of red wine and visit a lot of restaurants.

In the past we’ve visited the blockhaus in Eperleque, a huge concrete structure where the Nazi V weapons were launched against the UK in WWII. The building was rendered useless by the efforts of the RAF Bomber Command and the heroism of those pilots has guaranteed the freedoms we enjoy in western Europe today. I’ve always been moved by the museums and memorials to those who lost their lives in the war. In one place and I can’t remember where it was, we went to a museum dedicated to the French resistance and an old French chap, noticing that we were English told us how much the freedom fighters were aided by the RAF dropping supplies and ammunitions.

Another thing I look forward to on a long trip is reading. Yeah, I know you might think that’s a bit boring but I do love a really good book and one book that has really inspired me this week is an autobiography by the Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke. I should really save all this for a forthcoming book bag blog post but out on the road, drinking fine wines and eating good food, I really need to knock out a blog post whenever I can.

I love the way Clarke tells his story, maybe because he writes a little like me. I’ve always tried to make my posts chatty and colloquial, using the kind of language I might use when talking and John Cooper Clarke does pretty much the same thing in his book. It’s a very observational book and he talks about life in Salford in the 1950s and later in the 60s and 70s and very gradually slips himself into the narrative. It’s not a me, me, me type of autobiography. It’s not I did this and then I did that and then I did something else. It’s a fabulous book and though I’m not that interested in the punk music scene which John was very much a part of, I still love it.

Salford is the twin town to my home town of Manchester and a lot of the places and people in the book resonate with my own memories, even though Clarke is a north Manchester guy and I’m from the south. Many years ago though, I used to frequent a place just on the Salford/Manchester border. If you turn off Deansgate and go up Bridge Street and cross the bridge over the River Irwell, you are going into Salford. The bar there, the Mark Addy, was actually the last place my small family (myself, my brother and my mum and dad) had an afternoon out together. It might have been my dad’s birthday, I’m not sure. The four of us had an afternoon lunch at the pub where they served these really tasty cheese and pâté platters. They came with chunky bread and salad and were really lovely.

Mum had her one bottle of stout and then she wanted something lighter. I ordered her a tea and she was pleased to see it was served in a very elegant way with a little teapot, a small jug of milk and a bowl of sugar.

Some years ago the bar, of which the lower floor was down on the banks of the river, was flooded when the river level rose during a storm. They couldn’t get insurance and the place closed and remains empty till the present day.

Just across the road is a small square where Manchester’s first sports superstar George Best had his fashion boutique. Back in the 1960’s my friends and I travelled into Manchester by bus to hang about Best’s Boutique. We never saw the man in person although what we would have done if we had? Ask for an autograph perhaps? I don’t know but at that time George Best had a kind of local fame that was on a par with a film star. The newspapers even dubbed him the fifth Beatle in the sixties because of his Beatle like haircut and his undeniable charisma.

Best was born in Northern Ireland and came to Manchester to begin his career as a footballer aged only 15. In the 1970s he seemed to fold under the pressure of his own stardom. He began drinking heavily and was eventually sacked by his team, Manchester United. Best died in November 2005 aged 59.

Anyway, getting back to John Cooper Clarke. He decided early on that like Dylan Thomas he was going to be a career poet and to his credit he eventually achieved just that. He was and is very much a performance poet and became famous performing with punk bands in the 70s and 80s. His big problem from reading his book seems to be that he was a habitual drug user, even becoming a heroin addict. In the later pages of this book, it does seem that he is very laissez faire about his addiction and wherever he goes to perform, he always makes arrangements to score his drugs just like you and I might try to source a bottle of milk or a packet of tea bags. On one occasion he finds himself in New York, desperate for heroin. The only dealer available to him is based in some dead-end part of the city and a friend lends him a gun which he is advised to keep in view while he goes up to the seventh floor of a dilapidated building to score. Happily, all went well for him but this kind of thing appears to have been the norm for him, having to do what he has to do to get his drugs. In later life he realises he must break the habit which he eventually does, helped by the love of a good woman who he eventually settles down with.

Much of the text is written in his own rapid fire colloquial idiom and is for me, at any rate, a joy to read. Like me he is a man who loves his pies although Clarke prefers the meat and potato version to the steak variety which I rather like. Like he says though, a steak pie is full of gravy which makes it a little harder to eat on the move.

A memorable moment in the book is when he arrives in Scandinavia for a gig. He is starving but is advised that after the performance there will be a huge buffet laid on. There was, but this being Scandinavia it consisted of a great deal of pickled fish and not the hoped for pies.

Clearly he is a great rock and roll fan and lists various members of the rock and pop fraternity who he has either worked with or bumped into over the years and if you happen to be a fan of punk, Clarke points you in the right direction for either further reading or music listening.

I thought Clarke would have had a back catalogue of poetry volumes but that doesn’t seem to be the case although I did buy one of his few poetry books, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. That might be my next read.

OK, that’s enough reading and writing for tonight. Time for a glass of some vin rouge and perhaps a nibble on some cheese. Yes, don’t mind if I do . . .

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