It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about.

After a Clift/Holden combo fell through for budget and scheduling reasons, Stevens ended the debate by taking a look at Paramount’s listing of contract players. Within minutes, he chose Ladd for Shane, Oscar-winning character actor Van Heflin for Joe, and Jean Arthur for Marian, Joe’s wife. All three choices were risky for various reasons.

Alan Ladd was a box-office draw, yes, but as a pretty face rather than as a solid actor. Critics judged him as a lightweight, someone more famous for smiling on magazine covers than for sinking his teeth into the meat of a genuinely dramatic role. Known throughout Hollywood for his self-abasing nature, he was hardly the guy one would expect to rise to the occasion of becoming a gunslinging, two-fisted hero for the ages.

Yet Stevens, his ultimate artistic intentions fully in mind, believed Ladd could provide a shining light at the center of the storm. “You know, it’s against the formula,” he said about his choice, “but Ladd seemed to have a decency on the screen even in violent roles like this one. He always seemed to have a large measure of reserve and dignity.” It was that, and not the silky deadliness, that Stevens most wanted to carry over from Schaefer’s novel.

Unlike so many other directors, Stevens even saw Ladd’s diminutive 5’4” stature as a cup half-full. “It was an interesting thing for the picture,” he said, “because he didn’t tower above the others — the mountains did. We kept him as high off the ground as possible so he wouldn’t be dwarfed by people.” With Ladd’s lithe, genial masculinity now defining the role, Stevens changed Shane’s black silk shirt and matching hat from the book into a buckskin outfit that toned down the character’s more sinister overtones.

Evan “Van” Heflin, like Ladd, was quiet and reserved in real life, a well-read Yale-educated man who shunned parties and kept a low profile away from the silver screen. He was, however, a more respected thespian than Ladd, having won a Best Supporting  Actor academy award for 1942’s Johnny Eager. The two had much in common (both did some growing up in Oklahoma), and soon they became fast friends on the set of Shane. “Alan was a far better actor than he would ever believe himself to be,” Heflin said in an interview many years later. “As with most of us, he needed a director who could bring out the best in him. With George he had it. He was a very sensitive person and he had a terrific inferiority complex. . . Alan later said he thought Shane was a fluke. . . although actors usually go their separate ways after a movie is completed, Alan and I remained very close. God, how I loved that man!”

If hiring Alan Ladd and Van Heflin were gambles — no John Wayne drawls, no lazy cowboy strides, no history of anchoring Western movies — Stevens’ choice of Jean Arthur for the part of Joe Starrett’s pretty, careworn wife bordered on outrageous. She was an actress known primarily for urbane comedies and love stories directed by Frank Capra. Her shyness meant that even in the best of circumstances she could be difficult to work with. “You had to treat her like a child,” Stevens explained, remembering her insecurities. “She was terribly anxious about everything.”

Even more troubling was that her heyday was long behind her. By the time she was considered for Shane Arthur was over fifty years old, her hair completely gray, and she hadn’t acted in a film in years. Why hire someone like that to play a pretty wife and mother figure, when there were many younger actresses from which to choose?

Because “people are always the instrument,” as Stevens was wont to say. “She was interesting,” he believed, “because she seemed to be rising above her personality. Anytime she has a charge to make against someone or a defense of something, it always seemed that she felt herself dangerously exposed, kind of heroic in the most ordinary circumstances — even if she had to put her left hand out in traffic in order to turn.”

It was that delicate brand of heroism that he wanted the character of Marion Starrett to epitomize. With a blond wig and makeup, Stevens believed that Arthur could still pass as an attractive woman in her thirties — after all, as recently as 1950 she had managed to play Peter Pan on Broadway to great acclaim. Thus he lured Arthur out of her self-imposed Hollywood retirement for what would be her last movie (and her only one in color).

Arthur, being the only one of the main actors who had worked with Stevens before, quickly noticed the deep change in the director’s post-war personality. “He was very serious,” she recounted sadly, “No jokes. It was like I never knew him before. He wanted me to look tired and worn. . . I felt kind of sorry for him.”

The last two actors to headline the film were more conventional selections, but no less effective.

Young Brandon de Wilde (pronounced duh-WILL-duh) was the only choice for Joey. He had made his name a year earlier by stealing scenes and charming audiences in a Broadway production of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. Hailed as a child prodigy, he soon became the best-regarded boy actor of the period. Alan Ladd’s step-daughter Carol Lee recalls the “infinite patience” Stevens displayed while directing De Wilde, saying that the kid “drove all the actors a little crazy because his idea of fun was jumping up and down in the mud — splashing mud all over everyone. But George Stevens knew how to work with him.”

When famed director (and, to his credit, reformed communist) Elia Kazan directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the stage, he had Marlon Brando playing the part of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and Anthony Quinn performing the same role in Chicago. The understudy he hired to act as their backup in case of illness was, in Kazan’s opinion, “the most menacing, the most sinister, and the most frightening Stanley Kowalski ever to appear on the stage.”

The man was an ex-coal miner and ex-boxer, tough as nails, muscular and mean-looking. His face was bony and gaunt, marred both by numerous beatings endured in the ring, as well as by reconstructive surgery due to burns received while bailing out of an Air Force training flight during World War II. His name was Jack Palance, and in hindsight, the character of Jack Wilson in Shane was the role he was born to play.

When Stevens hired him, Palance was still largely unknown — Shane was lensed between June and October of 1951, and Palance’s first Oscar nomination for his memorably ominous role in the Joan Crawford noir vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) was still a year away. But such was Palance’s presence that Stevens didn’t need to be told that he was up to the job.

Unlike some of the other actors, Palance came from the then-new and novel Method school of acting. Before each take, he would make the cast and crew wait while he went off into a corner by himself and worked his emotions up to the proper temperature, burrowing deep into the role until the character of a bloodthirsty assassin infused his very being.

Woody Allen, of all people, is a big fan of Shane, and in a New York Times piece a few years back he aptly described Palance’s priceless contribution to the picture: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance. . . he’s so poetically evil. He looks like he’d gladly kill the guys who hired him if they looked at him wrong. He’s just bad news. Serpentine. In our minds, he’s set off against Shane, one particularly good, almost too good to be true, and the other is totally evil.” Allen’s right — it’s hard to imagine any other pair of actors pulling off this basic good/evil struggle in such mythic terms.

Of his director on Shane, Alan Ladd said that “I learned more about acting from that man in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then. Stevens is the best in the business. He knows exactly how to handle actors, how to relax them and win their confidence.”

That might sound like typical Hollywood butt-kissing, but go ahead: sit there at your computer and try to say some of Ladd’s now-famous lines with his combination of iron-clad conviction and mannerly grace. Try to mimic Palance’s equally famous lines with his deadly, gleeful hiss of ice-cold menace. Do that, and you’ll begin to understand what amazing acting truly is. The fact is that after Shane, neither Alan Ladd or Jack Palance would ever achieve a more perfectly tuned and modulated performance. Under the patient, guiding hand of George Stevens, the movie represents a high-water mark for the depictions of both implacable good and unfettered evil.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Woody Allen talks about Shane. The New York Times invited Allen to screen one of his favorite movies with them, and give a running commentary about why he considered it so great. Allen chose Shane, and gave some interesting reasons as to why he skipped all of his favorite foreign films to do so. Well worth a read.

A Short Biography of Van Heflin. A nice rundown of his life and career, showing what made him tick. Hard-working, unpretentious, and good natured, Van Heflin was one of Hollywood’s good guys.  

The “Low-down Yankee Liar” bronze. If you have some serious dough burning a hole in your pocket, you might blow it on this cool bronze statue depicting Jack Palance’s character of Jack Wilson from Shane. Wicked cool.

And while we’re talking Palance, here’s some fun YouTube items related to him.

David Carradine as Shane on TV. I’m not old enough to remember this, but if you were around in the 1960s perhaps you recall this ill-advised attempt to turn the character of Shane into a folk-rock hero. Did they substitute Peter, Paul and Mary for Victor Young on the soundtrack? Needless to say, it didn’t take off.

What I remember best about the show, the tunes aside, is that at the point when Tinkerbell’s light was flickering, and she was supposedly at death’s door, the audience was urged to start clapping in the hope that our applause would somehow save her.  Suddenly a woman seated behind me leaned forward and said, “Little boy, you aren’t clapping.  Don’t you want Tinkerbell to live?”

“I know the story,” I told her.  “She’ll live even if nobody claps.”

You can see that, as young as I was, the die was already cast.  Even back then, I had zero tolerance for baloney.  That is one of my many problems with Barack Obama and his crew of cronies and stooges.  They’re trying to make me clap for crapola like cash for clunkers, cap and trade, trillion dollar stimulus bills, AmeriCorps, ACORN, unlimited funds for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, socialized medicine and global warming.

On top of all that, look at the cast he’s rounded up for this tacky production.  People used to say they wouldn’t buy a used car from Richard Nixon.  Well, I wouldn’t buy a used hubcap from the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Alan Grayson, Christopher Dodd, Barbara Boxer, Charles Rangel, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein or David Axelrod.  Furthermore, I’ve seen guys selling “genuine mink coats” out of the trunk of a ’94 Buick I’d trust more than Robert Gibbs.

It struck me the other day how beneficial a nickname can be.  For instance, would Magic Johnson have been quite as magical if people had called him Earvin?  Would Tiger Woods, however good his golf game, been quite as effective a pitchman if we’d all called him Eldrick?  And would Barack Hussein Obama been able to pull the wool over so many eyes if he hadn’t been called the Messiah?

Barack pretends to be George Bailey, everyone’s best friend, but from the way he pushed ObamaCare through the Senate by using any means necessary — including bribes and intimidation — it’s obvious that behind the nice guy facade, he is actually Henry F. Potter, weaving his web like a giant spider, plotting to turn beautiful Bedford Falls, otherwise known as America, into the nightmarish Pottersville.

Two centuries ago, King George III was told that President George Washington, who had eight years earlier turned down the opportunity to be the king of the United States, was planning to give up the presidency at the conclusion of his second term and return to his farm in Mount Vernon.  The astonished monarch, who had lost a war to General Washington, said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Washington did, and he was.

Does anything more clearly illustrate how far we have fallen in 210 years?

[Ed. Note: Our duelling "Wonderful Life" posts are nothing more than one of those odd coincidences.]

They called her: The American Venus.

She lived in a Hollywood mansion with a staff of servants. Her chauffeur drove a limited edition limousine. But she ended her days in an upscale trailer park in Ventura, California.

One of the enduring mysteries—for yours truly—are the scores of Hollywood starlets, innocent young women, who are attracted to bad men: drunks, gamblers, liars, tinsel town sociopaths.

Esther Ralston is a prime example of an early Hollywood star who showed great promise as an actress—she played drama and comedy with equal craft—but three ill-considered marriages effectively derailed Ralston’s career and drained away her considerable fortune.

Esther On the Road

Esther spent her childhood as a member of The Seven Ralston’s, an entertainment troupe made up of her four brothers and her parents. It was a hardscrabble, gypsy life, traveling across rural America performing in carnivals, town halls, revival tents, high school gymnasiums, colleges, even insane asylums, anywhere there was an audience.

In her tender and revealing autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh, Esther remembers:

As children, my four brothers and I never knew what it was like to have enough to eat or to be sure where we would sleep that night. In this modern world of disposable diapers, detergents, and specialized medicine, I often wonder what mama used for diapers and how she washed them, or us, in theater dressing rooms or railroad station waiting rooms.

Quite often, when there was no money for railroad fare, a kind station master would persuade the brakeman of a freight train which was stopping by for water, to allow us to ride to our next destination in the caboose. This was high adventure for us kids.

Billed as “Baby Esther, America’s Youngest Juliet,” Esther performed Shakespeare at the tender age of six.

The Ralston Family, 1917, from left to right: Esther, Howard, Bradford, Carleton, Mama, Clarence, and Papa.

In spite of poverty, hunger and the uncertainty of where the next job and buck would come, Esther’s memories of her childhood are, for the most part, bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia. Being poor was a minor annoyance when placed against the overwhelming security of a close, loving family.

But then, as now, human monsters preyed on innocent children.

In the Summer of 1911, in West Virginia, alone in a shabby rural hotel room, a traveling salesman promised seven-year old Esther a “surprise” if she would visit his room:

Esther was uncertain but remembered that her mother cautioned never to be rude to their public.

… he grabbed me and threw me backward across the bed, trying to pin me down by my arms. Terror-stricken as I was, the training in boxing, wrestling and gymnastics I’d had from my father since I was two stood me in good stead now. I was scratching, biting, kicking and squirming like a wildcat and the startled young man was no match for me; freeing myself from his clutches, I beat him to the door, raced down the hall and out of the hotel.

Esther sobbed out her story to her family and her father, in cold fury, ran back to the hotel to deal with the child molester, but the traveling salesman had already fled.

Esther in Hollywood

In 1917 the family moved to California in order to escape the infantile paralysis scare. Esther, growing into an American beauty, attended Glendale high school. Soon, Esther was picking up work as a movie extra and in 1920 she signed a three-month contract with Charlie Chaplin Studios to play an angel in The Kid, 1921. Unfortunately, her footage ended up on the cutting room floor.

In 1922, Esther appeared with the great Lon Chaney in Oliver Twist. The veteran actor mentored Esther on set, advising her to relax between scenes or she would rapidly burn out due to her nervous enthusiasm. Playing opposite Chaney, a huge movie star, proved a valuable boost to her career.

A few months later, on the set of a western, Phantom Fortune, 1923, Esther met actor George Webb, a reliable character actor well known for playing heavies.

Esther recalls:

I was immediately attracted to Mr. Webb, and he to me.  He often drove me home in his fine car. This was much better than hitch-hiking.

One late afternoon, when we had finished work earlier than usual, Mr. Webb invited me to have dinner with him at the Hollywood Athletic Club, where he was living. I had had very little experience eating in a fine restaurant and I was enthralled but very conscious of “minding my manners.”  When Mr. Webb, ordering a lovely dinner, asked me, “Would you like to have a fruit cocktail?” I answered with dignity, “Oh, no thank you. I don’t drink.”

Raised on the road with few creature comforts, often eating out of tin cans and having absolutely no experience in polite society, we sense this young woman’s excitement and excruciating self-consciousness as she fumbles for the right fork and tries desperately to impress the seemingly sophisticated and worldly George Webb.

George Webb, Esther’s first husband.

Esther in Love

Women are attracted to powerful men and Esther, a stunning if insecure ingénue, perceived Webb as a Hollywood player, a well known actor who seemed to know everybody in the business.

But of course, there were warning signs that Webb was a leaky vessel:

As the picture progressed, so did our friendship. To me, Mr. Webb was the epitome of elegance and sophistication and one of the best actors in Hollywood.  But George was an inveterate gambler. He’d bet on whether it was going to rain the next day. Sometimes he would drive me to the beach after work and I would watch him in adoring silence while he spent hours playing the local pinball machine.

Reading this paragraph, I wanted to travel back in time, sit down with Esther and explain that this guy is big trouble, certainly not marriage material.

Soon, George Webb confessed to Esther—they were in love and so it was truth time—that his real name was George Webb Frey and he was still married, but separated from his wife and waiting for a divorce.

Esther’s family was appalled at this romance. Esther was twenty-one years old. Webb was old enough to be her father.

The close-knit Ralston family demanded that Esther stop seeing Webb, but Esther, gripped by romantic illusions, stubbornly defied her brothers and parents.

After the preview for “Phantom Justice,” on a dark side street where Webb’s car was parked, Esther heard the sounds of shouts, blows and scuffling:

I jumped out of the car and ran around back in time to see Clarence [brother] holding George by his arms while Howard [brother] beat him unmercifully.

Screaming for help, and yelling, “You cowards, two against one!” I grabbed Howard by the hair and clung with my legs around him while nearby doors opened, lights went on and the police arrived.

We were all driven down to the police station in Los Angeles, where the two boys were booked for “Disturbing the Peace and Assault.” George, his eyes blackened and his nose dripping blood, managed to give me a dime to call his lawyer, and then I was left alone in the waiting room.

“How am I going to get home?” I sobbed to the policeman behind the desk. “I don’t have any carfare.”

“Too bad you didn’t think of that, girlie, before you got mixed up with a married man,” smirked the policeman.

Waves of shame and humiliation washed over me and I buried my face in my hands and wept.

Already an action-filled evening, it only gets worse as Esther accepts a ride home from a reporter who was hanging around the station.

In the car, Esther pours out her heart to the sympathetic journalist, who promptly makes a crude pass at her. Horrified, Esther jumps out of the car at the next red light and runs all the way home, where she throws herself at her mother’s feet:

“Oh Mama, Mama, why would you let them do that to me. Why would you betray me. Why… why?”

Mama coldly pushed me away and stood up, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

Ouch.

Financially independent due to her film work, Esther packs a bag and moves into her own apartment.

And then, another great role comes along. Esther is cast as Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan, 1924. At first, Esther is horrified at playing the part of a mother. After all, she’s a rising star, a beautiful ingénue, hardly the mother type, but director Herbert Brenon explains that he wants to cast Mrs. Darling as every child sees his mother—as a young girl.

Peter Pan, 1921, Esther Ralston, left, plays Mrs. Darling. Mary Brian is her daughter Wendy. Esther was just four years older than Mary.

After the success of “Peter Pan,” Esther’s star rises in Hollywood and she is offered more roles. George Webb, a classic manipulator, gives up acting in order to “manage” Esther’s career. He shrewdly reads her scripts and coaches Esther on her acting technique. Esther writes that sessions with Webb often reduced her to tears, but she freely admits that she emerged a far more skilled actress.

Esther in Marriage

More sinister, Webb has Esther alter her contract at Paramount so that her weekly paychecks are paid to George Webb, “for services rendered.”

Esther does not have a checkbook, not even her own bank account.

One day Esther asks George for a dollar—yup, one single American dollar—to keep in her purse in case she wants to buy something. Webb smoothly assures Esther that whenever she needs money she only has to ask. “I’m going to make sure, sweetheart, that you will never be poor again.”

In a screenplay this is called a foreshadowing moment.

Far from stupid, Esther Ralston comes across as hopelessly naïve and trusting. Separated from her family, Esther Ralston substituted George Webb as her primary emotional support. Webb became lover, father, mother and brother to the fragile young woman who found herself abruptly thrust into the confusing world of Hollywood stardom.

At this point in Esther’s narrative, I was gnawing my handkerchief in alarm. Here was a good and decent woman surrendering control of her professional and financial affairs to a stone cold sociopath.

Webb uses Esther’s hard earned money to purchase a diamond ring. Nothing like buying your own engagement ring, right ladies?

Predictably, Webb invests Esther’s money and in a sure-fire real estate deal that conjures the Marx Bros. in “Coconuts:”

While I was filming Trouble with Wives, George invested in four lots in Eagle Lake, California; total price $200.00. When we visited Eagle Lake some time later to look at our beautiful property, we discovered that all four lots were under water—IN the lake, not beside it, as the real estate salesman had assured us. It wasn’t the last time “Gambler George” was to be swindled.

In 1925, Esther and Webb are finally wed and the surprises keep coming: Esther discovers that she is now stepmother to Webb’s children. Esther takes it in stride, she loves the children and adores being a mother.

By this time, Esther is under an exclusive seven-year contract to Paramount. Esther is cast by the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld—a man who knows something about beautiful women—to play the lead role in The American Venus, 1926, a film about the Miss America contest in Atlantic City.

Years later, reports Anthony Slide in Silent Players, Esther Ralston read a biography of Louise Brooks that describes Brook’s performance as eclipsing Esther’s work. Ralston commented: “Hell, I didn’t even know she was in the film!”

Esther in Close-Up

Almost every page of Ralston’s modest volume contains a telling anecdote about her career and the people with whom she worked. Her recollections are razor-sharp and invariably shed a welcome light on early Hollywood.

On the set of Victor Fleming’s The Blind Goddess, 1926 Esther was having trouble conjuring tears for an important scene:

…Mr. Fleming ordered the cameraman to set up for a big close-up of me crying for my dead father I couldn’t squeeze a tear.

Mr. Fleming was getting disgusted with me and I felt miserable. Just then the lovely and marvelous actress, Louise Dressler, came over and knelt beside me and, taking my hand in hers, she said quietly, “Esther dear, my beloved mother is in the Hollywood hospital, dying of cancer. They just phoned me and said if I could get right over there, I’d be able to see her once more before she dies.  I can’t leave until we do this scene.” Before she finished talking to me, I was sobbing like a child. Mr. Fleming signaled the cameraman to “get her close-up… quick!” It turned out to be one of the best scenes in the picture, but I couldn’t stop crying for an hour afterward. Later that day, I found out that Miss Dressler’s mother had passed on an hour after she reached the hospital.

After shooting Old Ironsides, 1926, Esther’s favorite film, she has another talk with George Webb about money:

“I know you handle all our money,” I complained. “I’m grateful for that, as you know I don’t know anything about business, but I never have even a quarter in my purse. Suppose I’m stuck somewhere where you can’t get to me and I can’t get home? I can’t even buy an ice cream cone without asking you for money.”

Webb magnanimously agrees to give Esther an allowance of ten dollars a week.

Esther comments:

I knew my salary was twenty-five hundred a week, but I was so glad to get an allowance, I stopped complaining.

George continues showering Esther with extravagant gifts—he’s generous with her money.

By 1927, Esther was enjoying a high standard of living. Here, she’s posing with her limited edition Lincoln Town Car. Esther did not know how to drive.

On Christmas Eve of 1927:

…George gave me a gorgeous diamond bracelet with a square-cut emerald in the center, and a new Lincoln Town Car which had just won first prize at the auto show in Chicago. Only two of these town cars  were ever built, mine and the one Sue Carol bought. I reveled in at last reaching stardom and riding in the back of this elegant green car with its rabbit-fur lap robe, crystal rose vase, and phone to my chauffeur.

Esther in Peril

Esther Ralston has reached the upper level of Hollywood stardom, but there is an abyss of danger and darkness in the starlet’s life:

In February, George and I drove to the Grand Canyon on our vacation. While we were crossing the lonely desert up to the canyon, George suddenly stopped the car and turned to me.

“I’m sorry, Honey,” he told me, “But … I brought you up here to kill you.”

I stared at him in horror. There wasn’t a house, a tree, or another car for miles in any direction. “You mean,” I faltered, “because of my life insurance?”

George gazed at my startled face for a moment and then patted my knee. “Honey,” he said, as he started up the car, “I was only kidding.”

Esther deadpans:

I didn’t think this was funny at all.

Does Esther take the hint that she’s married to a sociopath, does she walk out on him and serve him with divorce papers?

Sadly, the answer is no.

Esther Crashes and So Does America

George fast-talks a group of Hollywood stars into investing in a sure fire gold mine in Arizona. Big surprise, the mine turns out to have been “salted” and vast amounts of money are lost.

George buys a mansion, 2212 Hollyridge Drive, befitting a Hollywood star. There is a swimming pool and a staff of servants. George and Esther go on a spending spree furnishing the home with valuable antiques.

And then comes the stock market crash of 1929:

About three-thirty one morning I awoke to find myself alone in bed. I saw there was light in George’s office den, so I got up and went out to see him. He was slumped over his desk, his head on his arms, and he was sobbing. I rushed over to him and put my arms around him.

“What is it, darling,” I whispered. “Why are you crying?”

He sat up and stared at me and then blurted out, “Oh, my God honey, don’t hate me. I’ve lost all your money! I bought stock on margin, four-hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, and it’s all gone down the drain.”

Esther is pretty darn upbeat for a woman whose fortune has just been stolen and lost by a husband who has already admitted to homicidal tendencies.

Let’s be clear: Esther now moves from simple naivete to an entirely other level.

All together, let’s spell, e-n-a-b-l-e-r.

“Oh my poor darling,” I cried. “Can’t you save any of it? I know, my jewelry!” I ran to my dressing table and collected all the beautiful diamond jewelry I owned and dumped it on his desk.

“There,” I said. “Take these, they’re certainly worth something. I don’t need any jewelry. Besides, we’ve still got my contract.”

George looked at me sadly and said, “Honey, that jewelry is only a drop in the bucket. And besides, I didn’t want to tell you, but Paramount didn’t take up your option.”

Indeed, sound has arrived and there is panic in Hollywood with the studios undermining and destroying scores of careers.

Coming soon, Part II: Here comes husband #2, and guess what, he too wants to murder Esther.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Read Brown’s Article Here.

An interview with Jackson’s ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley by Chris Heath in Rolling Stone in April 2003 would support the “secretly sane” theory. “I was always saying [to Jackson] people wouldn’t think I was so crazy if they saw who the hell you really are,” Presley told Heath. “That you sit around, and you drink and you curse and you’re [expletive] funny and you have a bad mouth, and you don’t have that high voice all the time. I don’t know why you think that works for you, because it doesn’t anymore.”

Ms. Presley, to be sure, has a reason to portray Jackson as less bizarre than people assume. Marrying someone most people regard as an extraterrestrial freak didn’t do a whole lot for her image. (“Ok. Hello,” she expounds. “I was delusionary. I got some romantic idea in my head that I could save him and save the world.”) But it might add some genuine dramatic tension if Jackson turned out to be pop music’s version of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the Mafia boss who fooled the justice system for years by shuffling around the streets of Greenwich Village mumbling to himself in his bedroom slippers and bathrobe. If this were true, of course, it would also mean Jackson is just a plain old garden-variety ped, albeit one who instead of hanging around public playgrounds built his own at Neverland.

Amy Holmes, a frequent guest on CNN and HBO’s Real Time, was a speechwriter for former Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Before you tell me it is just a movie, recall the words of series creator Gene Roddenberry: “I have no belief that Star Trek depicts the actual future,” Roddenberry said, “it depicts us, now…”  And right now, the latest Star Trek depicts men as insecure, impulsive lechs who need women and aliens to keep them out of trouble.

Consider four attributes of the ideal man: self-control, bravery, confidence and sex appeal.

In the original series, Kirk has supreme self-control. He sacrifices himself for the safety of his crew and, in more than one episode, even chooses duty over true love. In the latest “Star Trek,” Kirk is Peter Pan, an irresponsible, reckless man-boy.  (Warning: plot spoilers ahead.) The new Kirk tears down an empty Iowa highway in a stolen hot rod and drives off a cliff, jumping out to save himself, not the car.  He gets into bar fights to serve his vanity, not some higher cause like rescuing the crew from aliens. 

While the original Kirk used reason, the new one mostly leaves that to Spock.  Even when the new Kirk does sometimes get things right, he does so by being impulsive not shrewd.   The 1960s Kirk destroyed evil computers with logic problems to save the ship. The new Kirk almost gets thrown out of Starfleet Academy for manipulating the computer program to his advantage. 

Even bravery gets a dressing down in the new “Star Trek.”  In the film, Captain Pike lectures Kirk about the importance of the peacekeeping and the humanitarian missions of Starfleet to the multi-cultural, multi-world Federation.  The original Kirk bluffed aliens, threatened planets, started wars and keenly understood the necessity of maintaining peace through strength.  The new “Star Trek” punishes Kirk on an icy planet because of his aggressive desire to take the fight to the enemy rather than consulting with the bureaucracy of the Federation.   But then again, what do we expect with the headquarters of Starfleet being based in San Francisco?  In the end, Captain Kirk is honored for his correct decision to attack the enemy, but only because, I suspect, the producers do not want an empty box office.

One of the most dramatic differences between 1966, when the “Star Trek” series first aired and today is the diminishing role of the father – and that change is mirrored in the two “Star Treks.”   In the 1960s series, Kirk and Spock respect and honor their fathers, who were clearly present in their earlier lives.  Today’s Kirk is fatherless.  Naturally, he is also reckless, aggressive, impulsive and desperately seeking guidance.  While the original Kirk was an authority, the new Kirk is openly insubordinate. The film’s producers consider these behaviors normal tells us how much American society has changed in the past 40 years. 

The 1960s Kirk was a skillful seducer of women across the universe, a trait feminists now find unacceptable.  So the new Kirk is a lecherous lad who suffers rejection by confident, professional women throughout the film.  In fact, Mr. Spock gets more female attention than Kirk.  When Kirk first meets Uhura, she immediately dismisses him as an uneducated Iowa farm boy.  She later passionately kisses the emotionally distant Spock. Women are a civilizing force in making men accountable for their behavior throughout history.  Feminism changed that. It was only in sexual liberation that women unleashed the Kirks from of their cages, transforming the male-female relationship into one of suspicion and cynicism.  In Kirk’s old days, men’s adventurous freedom-loving thirst was quenched with a love of women and new landscapes.  Today’s Kirk gets the blow off while Uhura throws herself at the emotionally unavailable Spock.  (Of course, feminists are still unsatisfied.  Melissa Silverstein writing for WomenandHollywood.com summarized the new “Star Trek“: “The three female characters of significance were insignificant – one gave birth, one was a mother, and one was a girlfriend.”)

“Star Trek” might be set in the 23rd century but the emasculation of men affects us today. How are we going to fight war and recession without a country of Kirks? 

Heather Smith is a radio and documentary film producer based in Washington, D.C.  www.politicaldiva.com