The Crack of Dawn

Volume #85

8/27/22

Newsletter85

The Crack of Dawn

Darkness pervades the land.

On April 24, 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession slowly and solemnly made its way down Broadway in New York City past 160,000 onlookers.  In a famous photograph of the event, right in the center is a large house that belonged to Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt.  There are two dark little figures in one of the many windows and they are 6-year-old Teddy Roosevelt and his 4-year-old brother Elliot.  Elliot was the opposite of his industrious brother and managed to drink himself do death by the age of 34.  Elliot’s daughter was Eleanor Roosevelt, who ended up marrying to her cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

British author and screenwriter, Grahame Greene, subsidized his early writing career by writing movie reviews.  In 1937 he reviewed Shirley Temple’s new film, Wee Willie Winkie (directed by John Ford), and managed to not only get himself fired, but 20th Century Fox sued the magazine, Night and Day, and Greene personally, for defamation and won.  Greene was in such hot water that he fled to Mexico – over a movie review.  This is what he wrote:  “It is clever but it cannot last. Her admirers — middle aged men and clergymen — respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.”

The first “freeway” or “expressway” in the world is here in Detroit.  It is the Davison Expressway built in 1944.  For two-and-a-half miles you could go 60 miles-per-hour without a stoplight.  The one serious aspect of freeway construction that they had not figured out was “the shoulder.”  The Davison has no shoulder, so if your car breaks down there is nowhere to pull off the road.

As we continue into this new PC/Puritan age where dirty words must be removed from old rock songs, like, “Too goody-good bullshit” from Pink Floyd or “Funky shit going down in the city” from Steve Miller, I kept wondering when this would happen to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing.  Yet for at least ten more years they didn’t get around to excising, “That little faggot with the earrings and the makeup/Yeah, man, that’s his only care/That little faggot’s got his own jet airplane/That little faggot he’s a millionaire.”  Well, it’s finally been cut.  Thank God.  My morals were being destroyed every time I heard it.  I actually just bought a new CD copy of that album, Brothers in Arms, having worn out the old one, and it says in the new liner notes that it is the largest-selling album ever in the U.K.  I think Money for Nothing contains the last great rock & roll guitar riff.

But staying on the subject of the words “fag” or “faggot,” which are now unacceptable slurs, I always found it amusing because of its multiple meanings.  As a kid I constantly watched movies on TV hosted by Bill Kennedy.  Bill had actually spent quite a while in Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s trying to break into the movies as an actor, and had quite a few one- or two-line parts, which we call Day Players.  When Bill would show a movie that he was in he’d always let you know.  His best part is probably in I Died a Thousand Times (1955), a remake of Bogart’s 1940 classic, High Sierra.  The remake stars Jack Palance, Shelly Winters and Lee Marvin, and isn’t bad.  Bill Kennedy plays the police chief at the end and has several lines, like (I’m improvising here), “We’ve got you surrounded,” and “Come out with you hands up.”  But Bill’s best line is in the opulent, expensive, utterly terrible, Technicolor epic, Joan of Arc (1948), starring Ingrid Bergman.  At the very end, nearly two-and-a-half hours in, as they’re finally burning Joan at the stake, a villager portrayed by the young Bill Kennedy turns to the camera and hollers, “More faggots!”

Summer is ending, and at 6:07 there is no trace of light.  The dawn has failed to crack.