Monday, March 19, 2018

BOOKS: HELL'S PRINCESS


Hell's Belle
A master of true crime writes about one savage lady
by Don Stradley


When people ask why a cheerful, clear-eyed fellow such as myself is so interested in ghastly crimes of the past, I refer them to Harold Schechter. What Bert Sugar was to boxing, what Charles Bukowski was to drinking alone, what Laura Hillenbrand was to Seabiscuit,  so is Schechter to murderers, especially the American brand. His latest, Hell's Princess, is another  master class in combining history with ghoulishness. In it, Schechter goes deep into the colorful saga of Belle Gunness, the La Porte, Indiana woman whose crimes shocked America more than a century ago. At the peak of her depravity, husbands and farmhands tended to die around her, either from poison or a crushed skull. Or both. By the time investigators dug up her "murder farm," the body count set a record that wouldn't be broken until John Wayne Gacy's vile exploits 70 years later. Belle Gunness was the Babe Ruth of serial murder, right down to her massive gut and the way she captured the country's imagination.

The Belle Gunness style was as sly as it was blunt. Posing as a helpless woman, she'd post ads in local newspapers looking for a partner to help run her farm. Men, usually Norwegians like Gunness, answered these ads by the dozen. At Belle's insistence, they'd empty out their savings and cash in their insurance policies. Belle was waiting, with her arsenic and her axe. She knew how to extract money from dumb men, but Schechter insists that, "greed alone could not account for the sheer savagery of her crimes, the evident gusto with which she slaughtered her victims like farm animals." When the public learned of her murders, the frenzy of interest lead to the Gunness house, which had mysteriously burned down, to became something like a carnival attraction, with vendors selling ice cream as digging crews uncovered mutilated corpses. "Many visitors brought Kodaks and took their own photos," Schechter writes, "posing their families before the ruins of Belle's farmhouse or at the edges of the pits on the excavated hog lot."

What makes the story different from most, and what no doubt provided a challenge for Schechter, is that Gunness vanishes halfway into the narrative. The focus then turns to Ray Lamphere, a scrawny halfwit who may have assisted her in disposing of bodies, may have been her lover, and may have set her place on fire. The second half of the book is a flurry of false confessions and deathbed delirium. No one knows what happened. Did she die in the fire? Did she stage the inferno and escape? Did Lamphere kill her? Ultimately, Gunness becomes a figure of evil, as one historian put it, "whose malevolence seemed to match that of the unseen beings peopling Norwegian folk tradition."
 
Schechter has been producing books like this one since the late '80s true crime boom. I remember his early efforts, garish little paperbacks about Ed Gein and Albert Fish. He even wrote an intriguing book about the history of violent entertainment called Savage Pastimes, which had him exploring everything from cap pistols to public whippings. Though Hell's Princess ends with a  shrug - Schechter is mystified as to what may have happened to Gunness  - it's still a strong read, full of strange old characters from the 19o0s, a time of mustachioed sheriffs in polka dot bow-ties, exploitative newspaper publishers who blended fact with fiction, a time when the old world was still encroaching on the new,  when psychologists of the day, or alienists as they were called, made observations based on the shape of a person's head, and came to the generally accepted conclusion that Belle Gunness was an  "evolutionary throwback...born by some hereditary glitch into the modern world," a woman with dead emotions, yet one with undeniable allure for lonely men of the Midwest and the cold prairie states. They were pushovers for a simple farm woman who wrote in her letters, Come to me and be my best friend forever.  




Wednesday, March 14, 2018

THE NIGHT STALKER (1972)


How to describe what The Night Stalker (1972) meant to us in the 1970s? By us, I mean scrappy little kids who couldn't believe a vampire had made it onto prime time television. We went to school the next day after it had aired - and it seemed to play throughout the decade -  as giddy as kids of today would  after a Marvel comics movie. More so, perhaps, because we hadn't been saturated and weren't jaded about monsters and such.  I remember reading a quote from Barry Atwater, the actor who played the fiendish Janos Scorzeny, and how it made the movie seem so adult. He said, "I played the vampire as if he were a drug addict, and wouldn't let anything stand between him and a fix."

Now The Night Stalker is seen as a cheesy old thing. Made-for-TV films of the '70s are an unappreciated genre. Only true TV buffs react to the name of producer Dan Curtis, for his projects had none of the '70s camp or funky soundtracks that  keep other movies of the period in a kind of nostalgic memory cloud.  Yet, the news that Kino Lorber will be releasing a newly remastered Blu-ray edition later this year has fired me up.

Actually, even a shitty old VHS tape of The Night Stalker can do it for me, or the regular DVD that came out years ago, or even a poorly transferred post on YouTube. Starting with Darren McGavin's opening narrative, explaining that he's about to tell a story that we won't believe, to the first shot of the dark Las Vegas streets, to that first scene of a woman in a short skirt being grabbed in an alley, and I'm a kid again. I remain a kid until it's over.  I'm not surprised that it received a 33.2 rating and a 54 share of viewers when it originally aired on ABC. It was one of those nights where people called their friends and told them something unique was on the idiot box - a vampire was eating hookers in Las Vegas.

The plot is deceptively, beautifully simple. Women are being killed in Las Vegas, the bodies found with bite marks on their necks. Carl Kolchak (McGavin), a rumpled reporter, is sent to cover the story. He's reluctant at first, until he begins to suspect there may be a vampire, or someone acting like one, on the loose. After the usual exchanges of "Surely, you don't expect me to believe in vampires," Kolchack takes it upon himself to find the devil. What does he have to lose? He's been fired from various jobs, and his editor (Simon Oakland) hates him. He has a girlfriend who works as a call-girl (Carol Lynley), and his only dream is to get out of Las Vegas and return to New York where he once worked. The vampire murders might be the big story that gets him out of his rut.

Director John Llewellyn Moxey got his start in British television before landing in America to direct shows like The Mod Squad and Mission Impossible. In that mood, he takes this vampire story and makes it feel like a cop drama. This, perhaps more than anything else, is what gives The Night Stalker its unique feel. It's not cobwebs and organ music we're getting, it's squad cars and fist fights. There's a Gothic menace, sure, but in the land of Starsky and Hutch.

The scene that bagged us all was when Scorzeny simply strolls into a hospital to raid a blood bank. Granted, a vampire in a blood bank sounds like a joke from MAD magazine, but what else should a vampire do? Tall, pale, with what looks like a cheap toupee on his head, the vampire looks right, his eyes glowing like Christopher Lee's in an old Hammer horror. The difference is in the way he handles himself. When hospital orderlies try to prevent him from stealing bottles of blood, he starts throwing these guys around, bashing them against walls. The vampires I'd seen in other movies were stately, hypnotic. This one was a flat-out brawler.

Kolchack, though, is a formidable foe. The  TV series that this movie would spawn gave us a Kolchack who was constantly running in fear from various creatures, his arms overloaded with tape recorders and cameras. But the Kolchack of the movie was a tough bastard. McGavin was already 50, but he was an athletic, broad shouldered man. We believe that he could slam a wooden stake into the heart of a vampire. He also delivers the dialogue by screenwriter Richard Matheson with a kind of weary sarcasm, like he's channeling William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. "A newspaperman is the loneliest guy on earth," Kolchack says early on. "Socially he ranks somewhere between a hooker and a bartender. Spiritually he stands with Galileo, because he knows the world is round. Not that it matters much, when his editor knows its flat."

The movie gradually eases into a traditional horror format, with Kolchack tracing the monster to his lair. He finds a woman chained to a bed, still alive but being used by the vampire as a kind of long lasting treat. (The image of a chained woman, incidentally, seemed quite seedy to  those of us brought up on Happy Days and The Waltons). There's a showdown of sorts, and so different was Scorzeny from other vampires that he actually held Kolchack down as if to bite him. That went against the legends, too. Bela Lugosi only bit young women. Scorzeny didn't care. Get in his way, you became his lunch. Kolchack manages to wriggle free and kill the vampire, but the story has a downbeat, almost noirish ending. The press, the cops, just about everyone in Las Vegas, had been against Kolchack from the start.

The movie owes a lot to McGavin's performance. A veteran of TV and films - he began his career as an extra in A Song to Remember (1945) - he'd already played a variety of soldiers, cops, and detectives. He even played Mickey Spillane's hardboiled hero, Mike Hammer, for 79 episodes in 1958-59. Some of Kolchak's weariness may have been McGavin's.

Even Kolchack's suit, as definitive as Columbo's raincoat or Archie Bunker's chair, was McGavin's idea. Matheson's script, based on a novel by Jeffrey Rice, had described Kolchack as a kind of beach bum, wearing  a Hawaiian shirt. McGavin figured Kolchack had been hired as a reporter back in the 1950s, so he'd probably still be wearing the suit he first bought for the job. Hence, Kolchack's look was born.

The movie is lean,  having been shot in only 12 days. There's no fluff in it. The supporting cast includes some great character types from the past - Ralph Meeker and Elisha Cook Jr. -  plus Claude Akins, whose career went back nearly as far as McGavin's. Unfortunately, the filmed spawned a dull sequel, The Night Strangler, and a weekly series that lasted one season. The formula could be stretched only so far. McGavin, unhappy with the program, bowed out after a mere 20 episodes. That's just as well. The show had grown increasingly cheap and shrill. Had it gone on much longer, we might have seen Kolchack wrestling a giant squid.

What made the original movie work so well was the idea that a vampire could lurk around Las Vegas. Not Transylvania, not London, but Las Vegas. Dan Curtis once said that no one on location took a second glance at Atwater when he was in vampire garb. For a laugh, Curtis sent the fully made up Atwater into the Sahara casino to see if he'd create a stir. For 40 minutes a pale, red-eyed vampire strolled among the gamblers and tourists. No one noticed. There may be no such thing as vampires, but one could certainly slip around Las Vegas, claim a victim, and stalk the night.


Wednesday, March 7, 2018

BOOKS: LOU REED, A LIFE



If it's true that everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album went on to start a band, then it may also be true that they've all written biographies of Lou Reed. There have been at least a dozen in recent years, each as unsatisfying as the last, with authors not sure if they should focus more on Reed's  weird sex life, or how smart it was for him to combine Hubert Selby with rock and roll. They're torn between condemning his rotten behavior, or worshiping him. This is always a problem when an artist is deserving of praise and appreciation, but also happens to be a jerk.

Anthony De Curtis is the latest to take up the task, but there's a problem with Lou Reed: A Life. DeCurtis smartly avoids the usual mistake made by Reed's biographers, in that he doesn't try to match Reed's verbal daring. The downside is that he's too tasteful, too careful. It's not totally his fault, because no writer has ever successfully captured Reed. Still, DeCurtis' measured style feels anemic when discussing a songwriter who, in his late 60s was still writing lyrics like, "The two whores sucked his nipples 'til he came on their feet."

As a teenager, Reed seemed like a character out of a Patricia Highsmith novel, a naughty Long Island boy in a crew neck sweater who played on the school's tennis team, read voraciously, and sneaked off to gay bars. His parents feared he was not only gay, but possibly schizophrenic, so in what was a reasonably acceptable thing to do at the time, attempted to curb Lou's queer ways by subjecting him to electroshock therapy. He came home from these treatments, his sister described, "unable to walk, stupor like."

During these strange years, Reed discovered rock and roll, enrolled in Syracuse University where he fell under the sway of poet Delmore Schwartz, and later worked as a staff songwriter for Pickwick records, a company that distributed made-to-order records by cashing in on whatever was hot at the time (ie surfing, bikers, etc). Learning that ostrich feathers were to become a craze, Reed wrote a song called "The Ostrich." When the company hired musicians to play the thing, in walked John Cale, who would soon be Reed's partner in the Velvet Underground. By now, Reed was already writing songs like "Heroin," which he obviously kept from the bosses at Pickwick. He and Cale would play it on street corners, which must've been a hoot for the tourists.

The music Reed recorded with the Velvet Underground, plus his remarkable, if not always commercially successful, solo career, was alarming, frightening, beautiful, darkly comical, and violent. The interest in mixing hard-edged rock with literary storylines never left him, and the fact that he bounced from one record label to another didn't stop him from pushing the limits of what was acceptable in a rock song. He sometimes resented that his only big radio hit, "Walk On The Wild Side," overshadowed just about everything else he did, and at times it appeared he was purposely sabotaging his career, not only by recording incomprehensible albums like Metal Machine Music, but also with his barbed personality, and his massive intake of drugs and alcohol. Any amateur shrink would say this is a guy who doesn't want to be liked.

DeCurtis, a longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone, gives us the Lou Reed that he wants to give us, a sort of wounded genius who was actually quite nice underneath the angst. It's not the air-brushed version of Reed that was done by PBS' American Masters back in the 1990s - DeCurtis includes some of Reed's lower moments, like the time he had a homeless fellow physically removed from a bank kiosk, and his immature treatment of guitarist Robert Quine  - but DeCurtis' version of Reed feels somewhat pampered. Yes, Reed was horrible at times, but, as DeCurtis suggests, his past shaped the man he became. Besides, he ended up with a nice home in the Hamptons with Laurie Anderson. If a few women got beat up along the way, well, we still have Rock and Roll Animal.

Then there's Reed's two-year relationship with the enigmatic Rachel, the towering transsexual who remains one of the enduring mysteries of the Reed saga. DeCurtis gives Rachel more coverage than most biographers, but there's still room for speculation. Was she a hooker? During the '70s, Reed had a penchant for interviewing the transvestite whores in Times Square, and one wonders if Rachel had been one of his subjects. Reed's feelings for  Rachel were never in doubt, though once he met second wife Sylvia Morales, Rachel was dismissed quicker than a drummer who had missed a cue. There must be an enterprising author out there who can write Lou & Rachel: The Glass Coffee Table Years. (Read the book and you'll get the reference...)

Reed's ability to constantly rise from defeat, first from the ashes of the Velvets as a strange glam rocker, later as a prickly elder statesman who could still compose  challenging music well into his 40s and 50s, made him a rarity in the rock business. Even the albums that didn't sell well at first were eventually hailed as classics. The Velvets were given the dubious honor of being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though Reed wasn't enshrined for his solo work until after his death, which was an astonishing oversight.

DeCurtis gives us a lot to consider, but he also leaves out some things. Reed's movie work, for instance, gets no coverage at all, not his contribution to Ralph Bakshi's Rock & Rule (1983), or his role in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony (1980), or his portrayal of a loopy folk singer in Get Crazy (1983), or his funny cameo in Blue in the Face (1995). There's no mention that Reed's music appears on 258 soundtracks, or that "Perfect Day" became a huge UK hit in 1997. Perhaps DeCurtis felt these items weren't worth mentioning, though he found space for every one of Reed's stinking Tai Chi instructors, and Reed's love of a nice prosciutto.

Maybe, like all Reed biographers, DeCurtis simply couldn't figure out how to cram it all in.

DeCurtis also seems too pleased with his own relationship with Reed,  noting a bunch of meaningless encounters at restaurants and concerts, and assuring readers that "my having a PhD in American literature, writing for Rolling Stone, and teaching at a prestigious college all meant a great deal to him, though that's the sort of thing he would never admit." There's no explanation of how DeCurtis knew what Reed was thinking, unless another of his achievements is the ability to read minds.

The book is not totally without merit, though. The best parts are when DeCurtis examines Reed's odd relationship with his father, who seemed to have been abusive enough to leave Reed permanently in search of daddy figures, from Schwartz, to Andy Warhol, to Doc Pomus. "The horror he had always felt about his father's imagined vengefulness was there," he writes about "Junior Dad," written by Reed as he neared 70, "along with an unnerving empathy." Oddly, some of DeCurtis' liveliest writing is when he chronicles Lulu, Reed's 2011 collaboration with Metallica, especially the "sonic impact" of their live performances that left the father of punk and the kings of metal "sweaty and beaming."

Still, DeCurtis is guilty of bending the Reed story to fit his theme, which has something to do with Reed's redemption, how he learned to love wholly, and then, when his body failed after years of abuse, faced death bravely. He paints Reed as a flawed man, a kind of martyr. "If Reed occasionally went too far," he writes, "personally or artistically, that was just the price that had to be paid for everyone else not going far enough." He even excuses Reed's violent streak as "cathartic, a necessary purging of the inessential, rather than offensive." 

Right. Tell that to Reed's first wife. 

DeCurtis gives a lot of thought to "Street Hassle," deservedly so because it is one of Reed's masterpieces. He observes that the song is likely an ode to Rachel, and notes how Reed's final, heartbreaking verse includes the line, "How I miss him, baby." As DeCurtis says, it is probably the only rock song in history where a male expresses his love for another male, which was quite daring of Reed. But DeCurtis misses something key. I've listened to dozens of Reed bootlegs and have noticed that starting around 1980 or so, Reed left that final bit out. He could still sing the parts about prostitutes and overdoses and the hopelessness of life and love, but not that last, haunting line. 

Ultimately, DeCurtis offers some good insights, but a lot of mush, too. The secret to writing about Reed has yet to be solved. Should it be two parts music, one part personal life? Should it be all music? No one knows. Reed always kept us guessing when he lived. It's no different now that he's dead.