Charles Willeford's Library

Though Cockfighter, arguably his finest novel, was based on The Odyssey, Charles Willeford was primarily a reader of modern literature, whether pulp schlock or high art. At least that is the conclusion one arrives at after going through his reviews and essays. When, in an interview, Ed Gorman commented that Jim Thompson would rather read Jonathan Swift rather than mysteries, Willeford replied, “I read Swift in graduate school, so I don’t have to read him again, but I don’t confine my reading to mysteries. That would be too limiting... If you only read mysteries, you could easily become like the people who only watch “Donahue” on the tube and think that all the people in the U.S. are sexual deviates.”

As his Master’s Thesis, “New Forms of Ugly,” illustrates, Willeford not knew his modernism, but was aware of its philosophical implications. Amongst those he cites in his thesis are Dostoevsky, Bellow, Beckett, Kafka, Nathaniel West, Hesse, Joyce, Walker Percy, Robbe-Grillet, Himes, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, John Barth, Salinger, Thomas Wolfe, Waugh, Capote, Joseph Heller, Carson McCullers, Dalton Trumbo, Jim Tully, Camus, Michel Butor, Malcolm Lowry, Sherwood Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Erskine Caldwell, Pound, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Tom Kromer and Horace McCoy.

Willeford calls on these writers to illustrate what he terms “the immobilized hero.” Though others have pinpointed such a condition, Willeford at least coined an original term, while throwing a few names, either unfamiliar or under-appreciated into the cauldron of modernist practitioners. That Camus’s Sysiphus must forever push the rock up the hill, is one thing, but, for Willeford, the immobilized hero is content to do so. Beckett’s famous words, “I can’t go on, I won’t go on, I can’t go on, I will go on,” is not only a celebration of the human condition, but a statement regarding the writer in contemporary society, about which Willeford has few illusions: “[As] the electronic impact of immediate information forces literature of all kinds into microfilms where it can be stored and forgotten, the immobilised hero novel will gradually disappear.” Later he adds, “Instead of man reading about man writing about man writing, immobilized hero novel readers will be reduced to small groups of semi-literate men reading the immobilized hero novel as small groups of graduate students meet today to read Beowulf.”

No wonder Willeford opted for popular literature over literary experimentation and regular punters over high-brow readers. Nevertheless, writing, for Willeford, was not just a profession, but something akin to a subversive activity, what he called the Burnt Orange Heresy, a phrase that would later form the title of his excellent novel about art forgery. Back in the late 1960s, a couple years before completing his existential western, The Difference, Willeford, sounding like Marshall McLuhan trapped in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, wrote, “The only real difference between the rock-and-roll of The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the rock-rolling of the Burnt Orange Heresy is the serial consistency and orderly arrangement of movable type rearranged by an unmoving writer for an immobilized and highly literate reader.” It can only occur in the hiatus that exists between experience and observation, which Willeford likened to the false calm created by playing a record containing three minutes of silence on a jukebox in a noisy bar.

Though those mentioned in “New Forms of Ugly” were important to Willeford, he relied on others when it came to the genre in which he made his living. For instance, in courses on the Mystery and Suspense Novel he taught in 1974, Willeford had students read Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Chandler’s Little Sister, Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Dorothy Uhnak’s Policewoman, Mailer’s An American Dream, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Lawrence Sanders’ The First Deadly Sin. While in a study guide for students, he also suggested students read Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and Dell Shannon’s novels about the LA Homicide Squad.

When asked what writers had influenced him, Willeford replied, “I have no idea. I read a lot of people- Jim Tully, Nathaniel West, Robert Tasker, Jack Black, Dreiser, John Sanford, Malcolm Braly. But I don’t write like them.” Nor did he write like those he’d read as a young man: Wolfe, Joyce, Kafka, Henry Miller (”responsible for the honesty of my writing”), Kafka and Hemingway. For Willeford was, in a sense, trying to create his own path between modernism and pulp fiction. Yet it would take him, by his own admission, some ten years before he could find a voice that would allow him to do so.

A particular favourite of Willeford’s was Chester Himes. Singling out The Primitive for praise, Willeford maintains that its author was too hard-boiled and uncompromising to be widely appreciated. It’s no coincidence that a volume of Willeford’s autobiography is entitled I Was Looking For a Street, the same title as the novel that Jesse Robinson in Chester Himes’s novel The Primitive is writing, and Jethro Adams in Himes The Lonely Crusade.

As for Hammett, Willeford wrote, “Every year, when I remember to do so, I reread...The Maltese Falcon. It reconfirms a lot of important things about American life: The business of America is business; romance is a worthwhile delusion; it’s hazardous to sleep with your partner’s wife; women who engage in serial relationships will lie to you when the truth would do them more good; existentialism is a practical philosophy for urban males to follow; and if a man develops a professional attitude towards his work, he will probably succeed where others fail.” Amongst other crimes writers mentioned by Willeford are Joseph Hansen, William McGivern (Rogue Cop and Shield for Murder: “masterpieces of the bent cop genre of tough detective fiction”), Frederic Brown (Night of the Jabberwock: “bizarre and classic mystery”), and Ross MacDonald (“a major American novelist”) adding that the latter “was not a stylist...but he wrote with a great depth of feeling, and his characterizations ring true.”

But it was Ross’s namesake, the prolific pulpist John D. MacDonald that Willeford named as “a spokesman for our times.” Not only a superb story-teller, but, according to Willeford, a social historian and moralist, who “speaks as well for and of the Sixties as Scott Fitzgerald did for the Twenties, Nathaniel West for the thirties, Raymond Chandler for the Forties, and Jack Kerouac for the Fifties.” MacDonald’s Travis McGee isn’t “trying to save America, he is trying to save himself.” Though acknowledging MacDonald’s deficiencies when it comes portraying female characters and the dynamics of sexual relationships, Willeford believes a novel like Cape Fear illustrates that “the veneer of our modern American civilization is as thin as the gold on a rented wedding ring.”

One senses that it was a particular perspective, defined during the Depression, as much as a hardboiled style, that attracted Willeford’s attention. While many today have assumed that style- perhaps under false pretences- its accompanying perspective, derived from proletariat fiction- has become diluted in the libertarian cynicism of past decades. Not surprisingly, some of the writers Willeford recalls have, by now, gone out of fashion or have been simply forgotten. As an insight into his literary world- one that is in danger of vanishing from public consciousness- it would be fitting to end this investigation by briefly mentioning some of the more obscure writers cited by Willeford.

-Jim Tully. Willeford discovered Tully in 1935, age 14, while searching through the L.A. public library stacks. He had planned to write a book on Tully, whom he considered one of the outstanding writers of the century, but other commitments prevented him from doing so. “Together with Dashiell Hammett,” wrote Willeford, “Tully was the founder of the hard-boiled school of writers in the U.S.” In Willeford’s estimation, Tully possessed “a finer intelligence than he was ever given credit for during his lifetime.” An ex-prize fighter, chain cutter and occasional jailbird, Tully wrote a number of books- Beggars of Life, The Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, Shadows of Men, Blood on the Moon (all out of print)- about hoboes, prize fighters, circus performers, and other outcasts. Later he would go to Hollywood where he became Chaplin’s press agent. While in Hollywood, Tully contributed “additional dialogue” to a handful of films, and ended up writing about Hollywood movie stars for mass circulation magazines. So widely read was Tully that he could make or break most Tinseltown careers. Championed by the likes of Mencken and Damon Runyon, Tully was, at least in his early work, a true proletariat writer. It was Tully’s perspective as well as his writing style that impressed Willeford, who maintained that, since Tully’s day, little had changed in America: rich men get parole, the poor go to prison and the military industrial complex is as powerful as ever.

-Robert Tasker. Knopf published his novel, Grimhaven, in 1927, which Willeford undoubtedly read (Grimhaven was also the name of one of Willeford’s unpublished novels). Tasker’s book concerns life in San Quentin where, in 1924, he was sentenced from five to life for robbing a dance hall in Oakland, California. After relieving patrons of their money- but telling the band, “Not you coloured folks. You’ve suffered enough”- the police found him on the stairs, smoking a cigarette, an unloaded gun at his side. In San Quentin, Tasker, who came from a wealthy family, encouraged fellow-prisoners to write (the warden would complain that so many inmates were submitting manuscripts to publishers that Quentin was in danger of turning into a literary agency), corresponded with Mencken, and wrote his novel. Upon his release, he travelled to Hollywood where he worked as a screenwriter and occasional actor. A condition of his parole was that he was not to write about prison life; consequently Frances Marion, with whom he was having an affair, received an Academy Award for The Big House, which was essentially Tasker’s script. Unable to publish his second novel, and having no desire to take part in WW2, he went to Mexico where he died under mysterious circumstances.

-Jack Black. Another immobilized heroes. You Can’t Win was published in 1926, and later lauded by not only Willeford but William Burroughs. Another gentleman of the road, Black wrote about America’s underbelly: small-time criminals, inhabitants of seedy rooming houses, pool halls, brothels, mining camps, opium dens, burglars and hobo jungles. A small-time criminal, burglar, safe-cracker and ex-con, Black writes about a time when there was apparently honour amongst thieves. Before settling down to a secure life in San Francisco, Black, like Tasker, served time as a Hollywood screenwriter. Unlike Grimhaven and Tully’s classic tales, Black’s novel remains easily available (Amok Press).

-John Sanford- Willeford doesn’t specify which Sanford books he read, but they would have included The Old Man’s Place (1935), Seventy Times Seven (1939), The People From Heaven (1943) and That Land That Touches Mine (1953). Born Julian Shapiro in Harlem in 1904, Sanford, a committed Marxist, was a lawyer by trade, and a friend of Nathaniel West’s. It was West who urged him to turn to fiction and to change his name. After the publication of The Old Man’s Place- written in the style of James M. Cain and W.R. Burnett- Sanford went to Hollywood where he wrote the occasional film script at Paramount and married screenwriter Marguerite Roberts (True Grit). He would be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Rediscovered by Black Sparrow Press two decades later, his anti-racist People From Heaven- judged too leftwing by the Communist Party- would be reprinted in 1995 (University of Illinois).

-Malcolm Braly- His novels Shake Him Till He Rattles, It’s Cold Out There, The Protector, On the Yard and Felony Tank, were honest and evocative depictions of prison life. A burglar, armed robber and four-time loser who, between the ages of 18 and forty, spent most of his time in prison, Braly began writing fiction during his third stretch in San Quentin, and would write his first three novels while behind bars. Had they not been published by Gold Medal, Braly (1925-1980) might have been more widely acclaimed. Hailed by such diverse writers as Vonnegut and John D. MacDonald, On the Yard offended the California Adult Authority so that Braly had to wait until he was off parole in 1967 before it could be published.

-Hamlin Garland. An early American Realist. It’s Garland’s ground-breaking collection of short-stories, Main-Travelled Roads, published in 1891, to which Willeford refers. But Garland (1860-1940) wrote some 40 other books, including four volumes of autobiography, Middle Borders (1917). During his day, he was involved with various literary, social, and artistic movements, as well as a recipient of the Pulitzer prize. He campaigned for Native Americans,and was a proponent of impressionism in art, an unabashed advocate of literary and cultural elitism, and a dabbler in research on psychic phenomena. Thanks to University of Nebraska, Main-Travelled Roads, which explores the brutal reality of farm and rural life in the Midwest, remains in print.

-Erskine Caldwell. Once a best-selling author- those lurid Signet covers obviously contributed to his success- with novels like God’s Little Acre, Tobacco Road Trouble in July, Caldwell (1903-1987) explored the brutality and tensions- racial, sexual and economic- of life in the American South. It’s a world of poor whites from the hills and backwoods of southern Georgia, where Caldwell was born. Willeford’s Cockfighter and The Black Mass of Brother Springer bear the Caldwell mark. After 1940 Caldwell was content to live on his laurels and spent his time touring rather than writing anything of importance. These days inhabitants of the New South might find Caldwell’s world- with elemental forces, buffoonery, desperation and hopelessness- somewhat offensive.

-Tom Kromer. Waiting for Nothing, published by Knopf in 1935, was Kromer’s only book. Born in 1906 in Huntington West Virginia, Kromer was another Mencken protege. Waiting For Nothing remains one of the great books to come out of the Depression. It was an era in which Kromer was an itinerant worker, scrambling for what crumbs he could find, and willing to try his hand at anything, from picking fruit to hustling homosexuals- a description of which would cause problems when it came to publishing his all-but-forgotten classic. Unlike Edward Anderson, Kromer’s hard-bitten view of the Depression was not something Hollywood could easily co-opt. Writing for a number of radical periodicals including the 1930s California socialist Pacific Weekly, Kromer contracted TB in 1935 and moved to New Mexico, where, having lost interest in writing, he taught in a school for Native Americans. When his wife died in 1960, Kromer, in poor health, suffered a nervous breakdown, and died nine years later, age sixty-two.

-Leonard Gardner. Not so much lost as missing in action, Gardner’s only novel, Fat City, is one of the great hardboiled boxing novels. Originally published in 1969, the novels takes place in and around Stockton, California, where Gardner was born and raised, and would be adapted, with a script by Gardner, for the screen by John Huston a couple years later. Other than this novel, Gardner has, to this day, published very little, though his stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire and Southwest Review. During the 1990s he contributed to a number of NYPD teleplays. Fat City, which takes place in gyms, seedy hotels and bars, prefigures the likes of Raymond Carver and Russell Banks.

-Arthur Crew Inman. Willeford called Inman’s Diary, published by Harvard University in 1985, a masterpiece. Subtitled A Public and Private Confession, it reads like H.P. Lovecraft crossed with Howard Hughes. At 1661 pages, it’s a extremely bulky but classic study of one man’s thoughts. Inman (1895-1963) was a would-be poet from a wealthy family who, after a mental breakdown in his early twenties, withdrew to his bed in a darkened room. At the time of his death, he had written some 17 million words and had filled 155 volumes. Amongst his entries were descriptions of contemporary Georgia and New England, as well as his own bigotries and fantasies. A mixture of social history and case study, Inman, who committed suicide in 1963, was a racist, inveterate lecher, and compulsive voyeur. A case of egoist-deviant as visionary chronicler of American culture.

-Don Robertson. “[Read] Dan Robertson’s Ideal Genuine Man, the best books I’ve read in years,” wrote Willeford. Reprinted by Stephen King’s Philtrum Press in 1988. Willeford must have liked Robertson’s characters- fat, troubled and ordinary. And that, in Robertson’s world, everyone, good or bad, suffers. Currently out of print, Robertson’s book is as vulgar as it is poignant. Having written two best-sellers- Praise the Human Season and Paradise Falls- Robertson is now all but forgotten. Said King, “[In] an age when New York publishers have become more and savagely focused on best-selling genre novels and highly praised ‘prestige’ novelists…guys like Robertson have become expendable.”

-Waldo Frank. Born in New Jersey, Frank (1889-1967) was very popular during the 1920s-30s when he personified the writer as rebel, hitting out at bourgeois puritanism and American capitalism. Educated at Yale, his radical socialist views appeared in such journals as The Liberator and New Masses. His novels, which advocated social and political reform were poetic, psychological, symbolic and, above all, critical of society. They included City Block (1922) Holiday (1923), Chalk Face (1924) and The Death and Birth of David Markand (1934). He also wrote about politics, like Our America (1919), Salvos (1924), The Rediscovery of America (1929), America Hispania (1931), In the American Jungle (1937), Birth of the World (1951) and The Prophetic Island: A Portrait of Cuba (1961). Once again, Willeford would have been attracted by Frank’s perspective and his analysis of society during the Depression.

-Dorothy Uhnak. Willeford was nothing if not democratic in his tastes. So long as a book was tough in perspective and written from experience. He would have been impressed that Uhnak, a retired NYC Transit Police Detective, sought in Policewoman to tell like it is, or, at any rate, like it was. In doing so, she preceded writers like Wambaugh and Petievitch. Moreover, she was probably the first female police officer to depict the travails of her profession, and would later win an Edgar for her NYPD novel The Bait which combines the police procedural with a multi-generational family saga. As her book illustrates, she experienced more types of harassment than even she was aware. Having grown tired of the discrimination, she quite in 1964 after 14 years on the job. Observant and angry, this is an interesting, if routinely written, portrayal of law enforcement during an era of repression and permissiveness.

Anthony Boucher

The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Vol. 1, Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947, As Crime Goes By; Vol. 2, Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947, The Week in Murder; Vol. 3 Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1948, A Bookman’s Buffet. Ed., Francis M. Nevins. 001086-001088. $19 each.

No wonder the Bouchercon is named after him. Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) was a prolific writer of classical detective novels and an early advocate of the genre whose reviews appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Herald Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. With catholoic tastes, he championed Jim Thompson and David Goodis, and found relevance in Gold Medal paperbacks as well as in traditional mysteries. These three volumes, edited by Francis Nevins, cover Boucher’s early Chronicle columns, and provide proof that Boucher’s pithy critiques invariably hit the nail on the head.

Despite his appreciation of hardboilers, Boucher despised Spillane- “so vicious a glorification of force, cruelty and extra-legal measures that the novel might be made required reading in a Gestapo training school.” This was someone who could be eloquent (“Hughes’s novels, like olives and the Marx Brothers, are never simply tolerated.”), poetic (“Even if Woolrich has never written a tenser, more jolting, novel; if you’re heart goes no further than your throat, you’re lucky.”) and all-encompassing (“[Goodis] has an originality of naturalism, as precise feeling for petty lives, a creatively compelling vividness of detail that you might perhaps match if you could combine top Woolrich with early Odets.”), Hopefully Ramble House (www.ramblehouse.bigstep.com) will treat us to Boucher’s subsequent criticism.

Summer Reading

Twilight by William Gay
Provinces of Night by William Gay
Fay by Larry Brown
Paris, a Secret History by Andrew Hussey
The Paperboy by Pete Dexter
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Cripple Creek by James Sallis
Lonely Avenue by Halberstadt

William Gay has been my latest discovery. What an excellent writer he is, in terms of language and evocation of place. Fay, the UK edition of which must have the worst cover ever, is another fine novel from the late Larry Brown. Having spent 12 weeks in France, I had to read Paris, a noir history in itself. While The Paperboy completes my reading of Dexter’s work. Up to his usual standard, with his journalistic ear and eye never far off. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is entertaining and imaginative, and might have been better had I not been acquainted with the work of Jerome Charyn. Haruf's Plainsong is one of those engaging novels that’s impossible to put down. I’m surprised no one has adapted it for the screen. As with Gay, Haruf creates a world in which, for all its faults, one would gladly live. Cripple Creek may not be the best Sallis novel ever, but it sneaks up on you and delivers a knock out punch. As usual, it’s about redemption, survival, and recovery. Lonely Avenue, Alex Halberstadt’s biography of the great Doc Pomus is also well worth checking out. A larger than life character in a larger than life world.

Between Hells Highway and The Big House Part 3

Between Hells Highway and The Big House Part 3 Together, Tasker and Bright, in 1933, worked on a precursor to Ship of Fools, entitled Luxury Liner, followed by Here Comes Trouble for Sol Wurtzel. In 1936, Ben Schulberg (Bud’s father) hired Tasker and Bright in a deal brokered by Marx brother Zeppo. Recently bankrolled by Adolph Zukor, Schulberg was a compulsive gambler- he had once lost $500,000 at single gambling house- and notorious womaniser. But at least he had the sense to hire writers like William Saroyan and Edward Anderson- never mind that both turned out to be screenwriting failures. Though he talked about signing-up left-wingers Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, he settled Tasker and Bright. While Tasker thought this might ensure a lucrative future, Bright hoped the deal would lead to the fulfilment of his long-held dream of adapting B. Traven’s The Death Ship. Unfortunately, both would be disappointed. A right-winger who considered FDR a communist, Schulberg surrounded himself with leftists because he thought that through them he could cash-in on the vogue for films with a social conscience. His first assignment for Tasker and Bright was an adaptation of a book, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives for actor Edward Arnold. It turned out to be a biography of Allan Pinkerton, a man whom Tasker and Bright hated, the same Pinkerton whose job it had been to break up some of America’s most heated strikes. Ironically, neither Tasker nor Bright was aware that Pinkerton, the son of a Glasgow blacksmith, grew up as a Chartist agitator. It was only during an 1839 strike, when he himself was informed upon, that the now disillusioned Pinkerton shipped out to the New World, where he would become the boss of an entire army of informers. It might have made an interesting film. But the two screenwriters wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately, Schulberg received a letter from a woman who had heard the studio was planning to make a film on Pinkerton’s life. She wrote that Pinkerton had been responsible for her husband’s murder, and if the studio were to make such a film, they would have his blood on their hands. Schulberg relented, saying, “Do you think I would knowingly contribute to the death of this poor woman’s husband? Or glorify his murderer? Cancel the picture as of now.” Schulberg was never to know that it was Bright who had written the letter, and had given it to his mother to send to the studio. Following the aborted Pinkerton project, Tasker and Bright put their hand to a message movie- tycoon marries farm girl- for Schulberg entitled John Meade’s Woman. Directed by Richard Wallace, with a script by future Citizen Kane writer Herman Mankiewicz, and also starring Edward Arnold, it became a small box office success and was well received by critics. The writing team then moved to Universal, where they worked on The Notorious Gentleman and, in 1937, The Accusing Finger for Paul Hogan. In 1939, Tasker and Bright were credited with writing San Quentin- a subject with which Tasker was obviously familiar- for Warner’s. By this time Tasker and Bright were making $900 a week, with an added clause stipulating they were to receive an extra $2000 should their scripts meet with studio approval. Yet their salaries did not quite match their division of labour, for Tasker was getting only $300, while Bright was pulling-in $600 a week. They also worked on a script for Back Door to Heaven, directed by William K. Howard, about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who wants to go straight but is arrested on a murder charge, exonerated, then killed by gangsters. Howard had been at Fox, then at Paramount where, as a director, he was once considered the equal of F.W. Murnau. A misjudgement perhaps, but Howard had at least known the great director and was a pallbearer at his funeral. A one-time anarchist, Howard had known Jim Tully at school. While the latter took to the road, to become a petty criminal, circus worker and boxer, Howard went a step further, and took up with John Dillinger’s gang, opting for a more profitable, if criminal, existence. Another indication of just how close the criminal world was to the world of making movies. Back Door to Heaven was inspired by Howard’s early years in Ohio. A copious drinker, Howard would eventually be fired by Louis B. Mayer from MGM’s The Power and the Glory after he was caught imbibing on the set. At the time Howard had been one of Mayer’s highest paid directors, making $3,000 to $4,000 per week, and one of the few to have his own personal cinematographer. But the producer had put a clause in the director’s contract forbidding alcohol on the set. It was Tasker who suggested to Howard that he put his whiskey in a bottle of Coca Cola. No doubt Tasker had the best of intentions when he suggested this small deception, for this was someone who simply liked to lend a helping hand, regardless of the consequences. Alfred Lewis Levitt, who wrote The Boy With Green Hair, and who would also be blacklisted in the 1950s, maintained that, when he first came to Hollywood, Tasker and Bright were the only writers willing to give him pointers. He also recounts their fondness for Mexican culture, particularly when it came to women: “John was then married to Josefina Fierro and Bob was also married to, or living with, a woman who was Mexican.” There is no indication as to the identity of Tasker’s girlfriend, but Fierro, at the time, had been a mainstay in the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples, a leading Popular Front organisation representing the rights of Mexican-Americans. During the McCarthy era, and following her divorce to Bright, she would be deported to Mexico. Interestingly, Levitt claims that Tasker’s “social conscience developed as a result of the response that the novel [Grimhaven] elicited from the public,” and that his “background fit in with John’s experiences in Chicago.” According to Levitt, Tasker and Bright got into trouble at Paramount not because they refused to do the Pinkerton film, but because they wrote a story about an older man in love with a younger woman. Without realising it, the story called to mind the adulterous relationship between Schulberg and Sylvia Sidney. When they gave the script to Schulberg, he was convinced they were portraying him and promptly fired them. Levitt said, after that “They found it difficult to get a job… and this was long before the blacklist.” Having divorced “the Shit Pill Heiress,” Tasker, with no work coming his way, moved to Mexico in 1942, thanks to John D. Rockefeller, who had begun to send those in the arts to foreign countries as part of his Good Neighbor Policy. Tasker saw his trip as a means of escaping the draft, which, despite his politics, he considered just another prison sentence. Once in Mexico, he said he wanted to work on a script about the torpedoing of the petroleum tanker Porfidio Laredo by the Nazi’s in the Gulf of Mexico. Writing the script was, for Tasker, a way of remaining in Mexico for much of the war. There he worked on domestic films like Dama de las Camelias and Los Miserables, and married Gladys Florez, the granddaughter of the former Costa Rican president. Together they lived in a large house in Mexico City’s ritzy Chapultepec district. When Tasker discovered that Gladys was having an affair with the son of the chief of police, he became paranoid that, if he objected, it might lead to some trumped up charge and a prison sentence. Whether this had anything to do with his decision, in December 1944, to kill himself by mixing seconals and tequila, is not known. According to newspaper reports, Tasker, age forty-one, had been heard quarrelling with his wife two days before his death, and had threatened to kill himself. Because of his politics and the war, there would be various rumours surrounding his death, and the possibility that it was not a suicide at all. Sam Brown, brother of Rowland, was the last American to see the writer alive. Brown spoke of shady circumstances. Not only had Tasker been found with a pillow over his face, but, adding to the mystery, a Mexican actor, who was also known to be a homosexual, had been present when the body was discovered. Though Bright thought it was a matter of Tasker preferring suicide to the possibility of returning to prison. After all, he had always had a depressive streak. “I should have killed myself in San Quentin,” Tasker had said to Bright before leaving the country. Whichever, it was a sad end to someone who skirted the edges of Hollywood, where he reaped some success while succumbing to the industry’s excesses. To this day, mystery still surrounds his life. Tasker may not have been a great writer, but he did produce one interesting book, and, in Hell’s Highway, an important and memorable screenplay. What’s more, he was one of those Hollywood characters who, however peripheral, lived the life of a protagonist in a film noir of their own making.

Between Hell’s Highway and The Big House: Robert Tasker and Those Who Knew Him. Part 2

Between Hell’s Highway and The Big House: Robert Tasker and Those Who Knew Him. Part 2 Though Tasker was hardly a threat to society, the same could not be said of his fellow-inmate Ernest Booth, aka Ernest G. Granville and Roy W. Reeves. In a letter to John Fante, Mencken concluded that Booth was “probably an incurably dangerous man.” Born in 1899, Booth began his criminal career in 1912, quickly moving from house burglary to bank robberies. He would be imprisoned on five separate occasions. In his book, also published by Knopf, Stealing Through Life, he makes no attempt to apologise for his life, yet remains eloquent in his defence, saying, “We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias.” A prison doctor, and an acquaintance of John Fante’s, sent Booth’s fiction to Mencken (though, in Grimhaven, Tasker claims he was responsible for convincing Booth to send his work to Mencken). While Fante had little regard for Booth as a writer or as a criminal, he was of the opinion that he had been badly treated. Particularly since Booth, having spent time in the prison infirmary feigning TB, actually ended up contracting the disease. Unlike Fante, Mencken had been impressed by Booth’s writing, as well as by the circumstances surrounding his life. Even so, Mencken, ever the reformer, thought it would be a good idea for the unreconstructed Booth to remain in prison. While in Folsom, Booth was interviewed by Tully for American Mercury. Like Mencken, Tully also left with the belief that Booth should remain inside. But, according to Fante, who was not known to be unnecessarily magnanimous towards fellow writers, Tasker and Booth were both “phonies,” while Tully’s article was “so unfair and inaccurate that from the date of its appearance the prison writers to a man have hated Jim Tully’s guts.” Fante even maintained that, after reading Tully’s article, Warden Court Smith stopped all such interviews and barred prisoners from publishing in periodicals outside the prison walls. Mencken not only helped Tasker, but provided Booth with the necessary contacts that allowed him, between convictions, to make a substantial amount of money in Hollywood. In 1930 he sold his story, “Ladies of the Mob,” to Paramount for $15,000. It would be turned into Rouben Mamoulian’s City Streets, a film best remembered as being Dashiell Hammett’s first screenwriting credit. He was also able to peddle his autobiographical novel Stealing Through Life to MGM for $11,000. On conditional release- a proviso to his parole was that he could not write about prison life- Booth, in 1937, moved to Placerville where he wrote treatments for Warner Brothers, and the occasional screenplays about gangsters. Though he did contribute to Ladies of the Big House (1931), starring Sylvia Simms, and was an adviser at $100 per week, on Men of San Quentin. Meanwhile, Horace McCoy penned a script based on Booth’s Women Without Names, which Robert Florey directed at Paramount (1940). Booth was destined to become one of L.A.’s most sought after suspects, to the degree that whenever a major crime was committed in the area, the police would automatically seek him out. In 1941 he was interrogated for a murder, but eventually released. However, in 1947, while leaving everyone’s favourite Hollywood watering hole, Musso & Frank’s, he was arrested and charged with committing a hold-up in another part of Los Angeles. He was subsequently found guilty of a string of robberies stretching from Seattle to Pasadena, and was dispatched to San Quentin where he died of tuberculosis in 1954. Stealing Through Life’s dedication reads “To Robert Joyce Tasker, who said, ‘Jim Tully isn’t the only Bum who can write- why don’t you have it a try?’” The dedication indicates Tasker’s willingness to encourage other writers. It was a trait that Tasker would demonstrate throughout his life. It was this sense of generosity combined with his self-destructiveness and a touch of megalomania that made him such an interesting personality. With the presence and physique of a movie star, the charismatic Tasker had, according to Bright, an uncanny resemblance to the debonair actor of the 1920s, Lew Cody, and, at the same time, said Bright, “the air of a man determined to commit suicide.” Paroled in 1929, Tasker, most likely with Mencken’s help, landed a job writing for Photoplay, the same periodical that had employed Tully. Like Booth’s restrictions, one of the conditions of Tasker’s parole was that he was supposed about prison life. Working for Photoplay meant Tasker was able to peruse the margins of Hollywood film culture, where he met screenwriter Frances Marion. At the time married to director George Hill, Marion took Tasker under her wing and taught him the finer points of scriptwriting, while paying $300 him a week for the privilege. It wasn’t long before Marion was Tasker’s mistress. Notorious for having a way with women, particularly if they had money, Tasker’s relationship with Marion gave him with an entrée into the movie industry. But Marion also benefited from their arrangement. According to John Bright, she was able to get Tasker to ghost write The Big House, a movie for which, in 1930, she, rather than Tasker, would receive an Academy Award for best screenplay. Though she had been writing films since 1915, The Big House, directed by her husband, and starring Wallace Beery, established Marion’s career. The following year she would win another Academy Award for The Champ, which, like The Big House, was a vehicle for the pugnacious Beery. But Marion’s relationship with Tasker did mean that criminals would suddenly be depicted in a compassionate manner. Though, with Tasker’s assistance, she was able to add a glimmer of reality to gangster and prison movies. As Carlos Clarens, in Crime Movies, has noted: “Marion...wasted no sympathy on hoods,” and, further on, “Marion’s underworld was an assortment of misfits, mental defectives, stoolies, the vermin of society; and she let them have it.” Either she learned about such creatures from Tasker, or was making an ungainly attempt to parody Tasker’s world. When Knopf rejected his second novel, Tasker decided to give up writing fiction and, in 1931, landed a small part playing a hit-man opposite George Raft and Spencer Tracy in Rowland Brown’s first film, Quick Millions. At the time, he was also giving advice to men recently released from prison. Come December of the same year, after parting company with Marion, he married Lucille Morrison, a sometime actress and heiress to the Fletcher’s Castoria fortune. Accordingly, Tasker, to his friends, called her “the Shit Pill Heiress.” As far as Bright was concerned, Morrison was not only vulgar but emotionally disturbed, while, in a letter to Mencken, Fante reports refers to her as “a handsome blond animal in her middle thirties. Her eyes ooze sex.” In that same letter, Fante said of Tasker, “with plenty of dough his brain has gone soft on him,” “His literary output...is done orally at night clubs,” and “when he says he and Ernest Booth were members of the same gang of crooks, and were sent up on the same charge, it’s a patent lie to anyone who knows the facts.” Why shouldn’t Tasker have stretched the truth? After all, he was in Hollywood, a city renown for truth stretching. On the other hand, his collaboration with Samuel Ornitz on the screenplay for the influential Hell’s Highway would reach a level of truthfulness rarely seen in Hollywood. Working again with Rowland Brown at RKO, the film, released in 1932, concerns a convict’s attempts to escape from a forced labour gang. It was released two months before its celluloid doppleganger, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, but is harder-edged and marginally superior to Leroy’s film. Though Brown would direct only three films: Quick Millions, Hell’s Highway and Blood Money. Constantly at odds with the studios, Brown was his own worst enemy. Not only did he punch his producer in the face, but, in Quick Millions, he portrayed a strike in sympathetic terms, perhaps the first Hollywood movie to do so. Highly talented, he was fond of portraying ruling class idiosyncrasies, like the nymphomaniac society woman in Blood Money or the fiddling warden in Hell’s Highway. In Quick Millions, he depicts a working-class trucker who climbs the economic ladder, moving from trucker to organising a protection racket for garage owners, the profits from which he uses to obtain a fleet of trucks that enables him to enter the construction business. With help from Tasker, Brown, in Hell’s Highway, and then in Quick Millions, provided audiences with a different perspective regarding gangsters and prison life. Tasker teamed up with Ornitz on other occasions, writing screenplays for Edward Sutherland’s Secrets of the French Police (1932), and J. Walter Ruben’s The Great Jasper (1933). It was Ornitz who introduced Tasker to John Bright. Before teaming up with Tasker, Bright, with the more conservative Kubec Glasmon, had penned a half-dozen successful movies at Warner Brothers, most of them with James Cagney (Public Enemy, Blonde Crazy, Smart Money) and contributed to the multi-storied If I Had a Million. But Bright, a former Chicago newspaperman, had quarrelled with Zanuck, who not only fired him but attempted to run him out of Hollywood. Both Bright and Tasker were active members of the Communist Party. According to screenwriter and blacklist victim, Allen Boretz, Tasker and Bright attended his Marxist study group along with the likes of Hammett and John Howard Lawson, but did not join the party until 1934. Besides a political perspective, Tasker and Bright shared a penchant for gambling, horse races and all things Mexican. They made a good team. Bright, who would also be blacklisted, had a substantial Hollywood track record, while Tasker knew the penal system and the criminal class. Outside the studio, they socialised and did political work together. When Tom Mooney was released from San Quentin, Tasker and Bright chauffeured him around town. Tasker had tried to tell Bright that, despite his status amongst the left, Mooney had been universally disliked by fellow convicts. This was in an era when other political prisoners in San Quentin, such as the McNamaras (convicted of blowing up the L.A. Times building), had been amongst the most popular of inmates. Bright did not want to believe that Mooney was just “’a half-educated celebrity who...picked up a few Marxist phrases and looks upon himself as a real martyr.’” But Bright realised Tasker was right: “The way he behaved...was just dreadful. He insulted everyone.”

Between Hell’s Highway and The Big House: Robert Tasker and Those Who Knew Him. Part 1

Between Hell’s Highway and The Big House: Robert Tasker and Those Who Knew Him. Part 1 Mystery and myth surround the life and death of ex-con, essayist, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, Robert Tasker. What one knows about him derives primarily from a handful of books. The first, Grimhaven is by Tasker himself. Though based on the author’s experiences in San Quentin where he was incarcerated on a five-to-twenty-five year sentence for armed robbery, Grimhaven barely mentions the author’s pre-prison life. For those years comprise another narrative, one that Tasker, who was born in North Dakota in 1903 and raised in Canada and Portland, Oregon, preferred to compartmentalise. Following Grimhaven’s publication and the author’s release from prison in 1929, Tasker moved to Hollywood where, for some fifteen years, he pursued a career as a moderately successful scriptwriter and sometime actor. With Grimhaven helping expose prison conditions during the 1920s, Tasker’s life should have been the stuff from which Hollywood legends are made. Yet his name and brief cinema presence has all but been erased from literary and Hollywood history. Another book that deals with Tasker’s fascinating life is John Bright’s novel It’s Cleaner on the Inside. For better part of a decade, Bright and Tasker were not only friends, but a screenwriting team. Consequently, Bright was an appropriate person to write a novel based on Tasker’s life. Published by Neville Spearman in England in 1961- sadly, it was never to find an American publisher- it’s Cleaner on the Inside begins with Tasker’s ill-fated robbery and moves back in time, to the Tasker-like Peter Jameson’s childhood in the Pacific Northwest. While the similarities between Tasker and Jameson are plentiful, the reader should be warned against relying on Bright’s novel as purely biographical. A third book relevant to Tasker’s life is Stealing Through Life by friend and fellow San Quentin inmate- though he could also be found at neighbouring Folsom Prison- Ernest Booth. Arguably the more literary of the three books, this account of Booth’s life of crime is of interest because Tasker writes at some length in Grimhaven about their friendship while in San Quentin. Finding themselves in similar circumstances, and with similar literary interests, they struck a bargain: Tasker promised to only write about life on the inside, while Booth would devote himself to writing about life outside their prison walls. Dissimilar though they might be, these three books challenge the orthodoxy of American cultural and political life during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, they add to one’s understanding of Hollywood as a place of possibility, where renegades such as Tasker and Booth, or the politically subversive John Bright, could be co-opted and deemed important to the creation of Tinseltown’s extravagant dream machine. One could add to these books the work of another jailbird writer, Jim Tully. Today Tully’s writing, like that of Tasker, Booth and Bright, has been largely forgotten, yet, in its day, it was widely read and influential. Such was his talent that, when it came to hardboiled prose, Charles Willeford always considered Tully the equal of Dashiell Hammett. Even though Tully did not do much writing for the screen, he certainly wrote a great deal about Hollywood. In fact, during the 1930s, his pen was considered something akin to a lethal weapon. Prior to that, Tully was known for autobiographical books about hoboes, circus life, and boxing. One of the few directors to adapt his work was William Wellman whose Beggars of Life, starring Wallace Beery with Louise Brooks playing a young girl who murders her sexually abusive guardian, was based on Tully’s 1924 book of the same time. Tully would receive a writing credit for the movie. His only other credits would be for Lew Landers’ Poe-inspired The Raven (1935) starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and for Edward L. Cahn Laughter in Hell (1933), starring Pat O’Brien, which was also based on a Tully novel of the same name. In Grimhaven, Tasker mentions Tully’s visit to San Quentin where, besides Tasker, he interviewed Johnny the Flying Tramp, the boxer Kid McCoy, Paul Kelly, and the renown Tom Mooney. Of these latter names, we know that ex-middleweight boxing champion Kid McCoy was, at that point, serving time for murder, while Mooney was inside for allegedly throwing a bomb into a 1916 San Francisco parade in support of America’s entry into WW1. Mooney was a cause celebre amongst the Hollywood left, who launched a well-publicised campaign to free him. However, the most recognised name at the time was Paul Kelly, who, two years earlier, had been the subject of a major Hollywood scandal. An actor whose speciality was playing cops and criminals, Kelly had been convicted for killing fellow-actor Ray Raymond in a fight over actress Dorothy MacKaye. Though MacKaye had been married to Raymond, she later testified in Kelly’s favour, and even hired a doctor to claim her husband had died of natural causes. Charged with manslaughter, Kelly would spend only two years in San Quentin, subsequently appearing in such films as The File on Thelma Jordan, Springfield Rifle, and The High and the Mighty. Tully used these interviews in his article, “A California Holiday.” However, interviewing these characters was not his main reason for travelling up the coast to San Quentin. For Tully was there to witness an execution, which would make this one of the most moving essays ever written regarding the barbarity of capital punishment. At one time Charlie Chaplin’s press agent, Tully, who, in his youth, had spent five years behind bars, describes Tasker, at the time, as “twenty-four, tall, good-looking, a sheik type for society girls and stenographers, with black hair carefully combed, doing five to twenty-five years for holding up a crowded dance hall.” Tasker only began writing while incarcerated, contributing and editing the prison journal, the San Quentin Bulletin. It was during this time that he began corresponding with H.L. Mencken. In one of his first letters to Mencken, Tasker wrote, “I graduated from high school in Portland in 1921. One year later I'm in California, go through a bad patch, buy a gun -- there you have it. I'm now serving a five-to-life sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery… Don't hesitate to call me whatever you want: thief, hood, knockover artist. It's all the same to me. As to where I'm from, I can't really say -- except maybe from here." Mencken, in 1927, published Tasker’s “First Day,” and “A Man is Hanged” in his American Mercury. They would ultimately appear in Grimhaven, which Tasker, in that same year, and to avoid the prison authorities censoring his work, had to smuggle out of his cell. The final paragraph of this autobiographical novel gives a further clue regarding Tasker’s state of mind: “And here in the midst of it I am. I have no certain fault, and I have no certain virtue. My ignorance is neither little nor great. I am neither fortunate nor unfortunate. I would seem to be a bit of a mechanism, responding to certain mechanical impulses, reacting in a mechanical way. I have no certain knowledge at all, except that I am, and that I am here.” On Mencken’s recommendation, Knopf published the book in 1931. As a thief, Tasker was not so much inept as hell-bent on self-destruction. He had been convicted of robbing patrons at Sauer’s Dance Parlor in Oakland, California, a crime committed less for the money than to embarrass his father, a conservative banker with a puritanical outlook on life. If one is to believe Bright’s fictional account, Tasker’s mother, a preacher’s daughter, killed herself while Robert was still a teenager. Though this might be fanciful on Bright’s part, it has a more accurate ring to it than his claim that his Tasker-like character worked as a bellboy in a San Francisco hotel, where he ran errands for the comedian Fatty Arbuckle up to, and including, the night he allegedly raped and killed Virginia Rappe. However fanciful Bright’s portrayal, his description of Tasker’s crime is, by all accounts, accurate. On St. Valentine’s Day, 1924, a twenty-three year old Tasker walked into Sauer’s Dance Parlor and mounted the bandstand where Les Hite’s band was playing. Good-looking enough to be mistaken for the band’s master of ceremonies or recently acquired white crooner, he commandeered the microphone, reached into his jacket pocket and produced a revolver. He waved the gun from one side of the dance hall to the other, telling everyone to put whatever paper money they had into a tablecloth that he had provided for the occasion, after which he turned to the band and, in words that, according to Bright, “became astonished gossip in Pacific Coast Harlem for years,” said, “I’m skipping you folks. Coloured people get pushed around enough. Keep your money.” The police had little trouble catching Tasker, who was found sitting on the steps of the dance hall smoking a cigarette, the bulging tablecloth at his side. When a police officer grabbed the gun, he saw that Tasker hadn’t bothered to put bullets in it. Because it was an era when an assortment of rich young men, like the notorious Leopold and Loeb, were committing “thrill” crimes of supposedly Nietzschian proportions to spite conservative father figures, Tasker was given the stiffest of sentences. The judge did not hide the fact that he was handing out a harsh sentence as a warning to other young men. While in prison, Tasker mellowed somewhat; he even asked Mencken to send the check for an article in American Mercury to his father. “I’m rather fond of the old chap,” said Tasker. Though one could interpret Tasker’s apparent generosity in various ways: perhaps it was to tell his father that literary success was just around the corner; maybe he was trying to pay back money he had stolen from him; or it could even be that he simply meant the gesture as an insult. Whichever, it looked like Tasker might be on the road to a limited kind of literary notoriety. At the time, thanks to the likes of the crusading Mencken, jailbird writing had become a small growth industry. During Tasker’s tenure in San Quentin at least a dozen inmates were trying to publish their work in periodicals on the outside, while a prison writing competition, organised by Tasker, attracted over 400 entrants. Writing had become so popular amongst inmates that the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, in 1930, issued an edict forbidding Tasker and fellow-inmates from sending their work to magazines and newspapers outside the prison walls. “We are not literary agents,” said Judge C.E. McLaughlin, adding that prison officials did not have time to comb through each manuscript in search of objectionable material. Eight years after it was begun, the San Quentin Bulletin was terminated, said by prison authorities to be catering more to the outside world than to inmates.