Stealing from the Blind? Not When He’s Around

This is what a hero looks like.

The Secret War of the Lone Eagle

P-38 painting by Jack Connelly

The fact that his political enemy FDR had flatly forbidden his participation in Allied military operations did not prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for Charles Lindbergh.

Wearing a naval uniform without insignia to preserve his anonymity, Lindbergh was able to wrangle assignments in the Pacific theater as a technical adviser on aviation. Once there, he quietly maneuvered himself into a number of dangerous solo combat missions, his pioneering experience in the air permitting him to outfly men half his age.

However, Lindbergh’s greatest contribution to the war effort was as a technical adviser. The crew chief of “Satan’s Angels,” the 475^th Fighter Group of the Fifth Air Force, noticed that Lindbergh’s P-38 was returning from missions with a good deal more fuel than the other planes.

In a thatch-roofed rec hut on Humboldt Bay in New Guinea, Lindbergh explained to skeptical combat pilots that by raising manifold pressure and lowering RPMs, they could burn less fuel in their engines.

Over the next weeks, the technique enabled Satan’s Angels to stretch their 6-to-8-hour missions to 10 hours, surprising the Japanese by striking deeper into their territory.

When Gen. Douglas MacArthur summoned him to Australia, Lindbergh explained that only instruction and training were required to greatly improve fighters’ fuel economy. MacArthur told him that would be a gift from heaven, asked Lindbergh to train his squadrons and ordered that Lindbergh could do any kind of flying in any plane he liked.

But Lindbergh didn’t like some of the sights he saw — Japanese skulls crushed to fragments so that GIs could steal their gold teeth, and Japanese bodies dumped into a ditch under a truckload of Allied garbage.

“To kill, I understand; that is an essential part of war,” Lindbergh wrote. “But for our people to kill by torture and to descend to throwing the bodies of our enemies into a bomb crater and dumping garbage on top of them nauseates me.”

Lindbergh also had troubling thoughts about the air war his accomplishments had helped make possible.

After dropping a 500-pound bomb on a reported anti-aircraft gun emplacement in Kavieng, chief port of the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Lindbergh told his journal, “I don’t like this bombing and machine-gunning of unknown targets. You press a button and death flies down. One second the bomb is hanging harmless in your racks, completely under your control. The next it is hurtling down through the air, and nothing in your power can revoke what you have done. The cards are dealt. If there is life where that bomb will hit, you have taken it.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Helen Thomas: She Launched a Thousand Truths

A great American journalist has left us, one whose courage and honesty were as tall as her stature was small.

I met her once, and she was completely unassuming, completely focused on the professional mission and aware of its consequences for society.

We are diminished, my friends. And we should rededicate in her name.

With Great Failure Comes Great Possibility

Stan Lee at proto-Marvel Comics in the 1950s

Lee was even, sometimes, the Black Rider

In 1957, Stan Lee was an editor in a literally despised industry. A gun salesman he met while vacationing in the Catskills had called him “absolutely criminal” for writing comic books.

His publisher Martin Goodman, having made a disastrous decision about distribution, left Stan to fire virtually everybody on staff except Stan’s best friend, an artist who in 1958 fell between the cars of a commuter train. Lee called the mass firing “the most horrible thing I ever had to do,” and it moved him from a thriving Manhattan office to a cubicle.

Yet within a decade, Stan and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had built the smartest and most popular brand in comics, transforming the industry, and Lee had moved from his 1950s cubicle to lunching with Fellini and lecturing at college campuses around the country.

The point? That the last thing you should surrender is the last thing that flew out of Pandora’s box.
In other words, I finally picked up Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,” which begins just before World War II, when hardscrabble Jewish immigrants’ sons scrambled to sell new, lurid four-color fantasies with sunshine smiles and sharp practices on shoestring budgets. It ends with today’s billion-dollar empire. In between, in the 1970s, the first wave of fans-turned-pro plunged in, including my friends David Anthony Kraft, Jim Salicrup and Roger Slifer. Perhaps the best book of its type I have read. It’s going to a permanently handy place on the prestigious biography shelf.

Source: "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" by Sean Howe

My Kind of Guy

Courage is the necessary precondition of all other virtues.

Talent, Courage and a Pair of Alec Baldwins

Actor Johnny Pruitt

By Dan Hagen

At 19, not long out of Sullivan High School, Johnny Pruitt figured if he could make it there, he’d make it anywhere.

“There” being New York, New York, a brass ring of a place to make it as an actor.

Dropping out of Webster Conservatory of Theatre Arts in St. Louis, the young man went east in January 2001.

"Leaving school early was, at the time, the easiest decision I remember ever making,” he recalled. “I was enjoying my time at school, but opportunities came up in New York that really anyone in my position would have jumped on. An agent and a place to live at 19 was a no-brainer.

“Thinking about doing something like now at 30 — terrifying. At 19, not a care in the world, sounded fun,” he said. “And I've tried to do my best to live up to that decision which drives me.”

Pruitt’s boyish looks and assured acting style won him in roles in films like “Kinsey,” “Confess,” “Whirlygirl” and ”Once Upon a Time Never Comes Again” and in TV shows like “Boardwalk Empire,” “30 Rock,” “Mercy,” “Ed,” “Chappelle’s Show,” “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Now he wants to be a producer — well, a co-producer and a co-star, with Percy Rodriguez, in “Death and McCootie,” an original comedy-fantasy play to be performed at the prestigious New York International Fringe Festival this summer. Written by Clayton Smith and Rodriguez and directed by Michelle Boss, it’s “a film noir-style farce that goes a little haywire when Edgar P. McCootie, P.I., matches (a lack of) wits with the Grim Reaper in a desperate bid to escape his own death.”

“We're asking for donations to get the show produced,” Pruitt said. “We have perks set up for every level of donation and our gratitude will never go away. No amount is too small (or large, ha)."

You can check the show out, and/or donate, at www.deathandmccootie.com/

"This show represents a lot for my partners and me,” Pruitt said. “This is the first time that I'm really doing my own producing so the stakes are high. Usually I just show up and do the job and leave. This is a lot more gratifying and personal. I use skills that I’ve learned from everyone I've ever worked with. Especially those from Little Theatre.”

The son of John Pruitt and Jean Wood of Sullivan and the brother of SES teacher Melissa Haegan, Pruitt grew up with and IN the Little Theatre, landing starring roles there in shows like “The Jungle Book” while in his mid-teens. 

Unlike young people from towns without a professional theatre, Pruitt was able to learn that a viable acting career was not merely possible for him, but plausible.

“It was something that was available to me,” he said. “I still had to work at it and learn, but it certainly made it seem like something that was attainable. And when you’re young and fearless, it was a great combo for me, ha!

“From the first show I did at LTOTS, which was the 40th anniversary season, I knew that this is what I was going to do. Some of the people that I met working there are my best friends and most trusted contacts today. Which makes any successes really special because I share it with all of those people.

“My family have been always supportive and enthusiastic as well. But there’s something about show biz type folk who really understand each other. And I learned that at a pretty young age at the Little Theatre. It would be hard to say that anything had a bigger influence on life and career.”

Springboarding from the Little Theatre, Pruitt appeared in productions with some familiar names, including Liam Nesson, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O’Donnell, Laura Linney, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Steve Buscemi and a favorite of Pruitt’s, Tina Fey.

Tina Fey

“I shot ‘30 Rock’ with Tina Fey who was super great and incredibly inviting,” Pruitt said. “I had actually had dinner with her and her husband years before that shoot. Some friends of theirs who I was friends with invited me when she was still on SNL and hadn’t told the show that she was pregnant yet. She said we were the first people she told.”

“She remembered me from that dinner when I asked her about it on the ‘30 Rock’ set.”

And while a fair number of actors can claim to have worked with Alec Baldwin, how many can say they have appeared with TWO Alec Baldwins?

“I didn’t have the nerve to tell Baldwin that I had worked on ‘30 Rock’ prior to shooting the Capitol One commercial with him. Just never got the opportunity, only being with him one day.”

Pruitt played a man buying a wedding ring with the advice of the two Baldwins, one of whom was busy flirting with his fiancé.

"Alec Baldwin was cool and easy,” Pruitt said. “A little intimidating at first as he’s known to have a bit of a short fuse. But I shot with him on the last day of a four-day shoot so by then, they were all at the end and he was in a good mood. He had one moment of ‘I’m here and ready why aren’t we shooting?’ but if you've ever shot anything, no matter who you are, you've said that 100 times. It’s tedious but he was a pro and dropped what was probably about $30,000 on jewelry for his girlfriend. All in all, nice guy.”

And Pruitt had another reason to be happy about that shoot. “Anytime you do a commercial with a celebrity, you know it’s going to have a healthy run on TV.”

Malkovich Plays the Hero

Actor John Malkovich reportedly just saved the life of an elderly man who tripped on a curb, cut his neck on scaffolding and was bleeding profusely.

Malkovich is from Benton, IL, and an alum of my school, Eastern Illinois University. I interviewed him when he wowed New York in "True West,” and he recalled then how much admired the motto of the Daily Eastern News: "Tell the Truth and Don't Be Afraid."

Yellow Star and Pink Triangle

Fighting homophobia in the 1980s, Gore Vidal cited author Christopher Isherwood’s encounter with a young Jewish Hollywood producer. “After all, Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals,” Isherwood argued. Unimpressed, the producer snapped, “But Hitler killed six million Jews.”

“What are you?” replied Isherwood. “In real estate?”

Vidal’s editor Barbara Epstein told him, “The Jewish situation is in no way analogous to that of homosexuals.” Vidal replied, “Well, Hitler felt otherwise.”

Vidal’s point was that gays, Jews and blacks all suffered precisely the same kind of unprovoked persecution. “I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed,” Vidal said.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

And Nothing Has Changed

“Gore was himself angry, and very disappointed in what human beings had done and were doing to our planet. His country was among the most powerfully predatory destroyers. Its puritan tradition devoured people’s natural instincts and chances for happiness by rigid, self-serving moralism. Its expansive and self-deluding greed was making dollar materialism more triumphant than ever. In Vietnam we were destroying a semi-helpless people, wasting our own substance, coarsening our national life, dividing America with an intensity that threatened national chaos. And literature seemed to be fading away into either an artifact from the past or the preserve of an elite few.”

Those were Gore Vidal’s reflections in 1965, and none of that has changed, except that we’ve added a couple of more Vietnams and moved closer to national chaos. The people on the tracks who can see the approaching lights of a train are called "pessimists" by those facing in the wrong direction.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Vidal and Capote: Those Catty Literary Lions

They were both famous authors and professional celebrities, vain and gay, catty literary lions who concealed a claw behind every purr and competed for attention on several levels at once. Having so much in common wasn’t entirely a good thing for Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

In the late 1940s, Vidal was visiting composer/author Paul Bowles in Morocco, and his frenemy Capote was coming but didn't know Vidal was already there. Vidal, delighted at the idea, insisted on going to the ship with Bowles to surprise Capote. There was Capote on deck, waving in his Dr. Who scarf, right up to the moment when he saw Vidal. Then his face fell like Daffy Duck's and he literally sank beneath the railing.

“When he assumed a standing position again, he was no longer grinning and waving,” Bowles recalled.
They crossed paths at a party in New York, where Vidal recounted that, not wearing his glasses, he sat down "on what I thought was a stool and it was Capote."
"Of course, I'm always sad about Gore," Capote told David Susskind. "Very sad that he has to breathe every day." Vidal later called Capote's death a "good career move."
Vidal dryly observed that Capote had "raised lying into an art — a minor art" and that he "belongs less to the history of literature than the history of public relations."
"I find on TV I am often supposed to talk about fashions and famous society ladies," Vidal said. "I then remind the host that I am the one who talks about politics and Capote is the one who tells naughty stories about the rich and Mailer is the messiah."
As for Norman Mailer, he famously threw the contents of a drink and an ineffectual punch into Vidal's face at a glitterati gala thrown in honor of Princess Margaret (who had sent her regrets, perhaps wisely). The incident prompted Russell Baker to write a column about the beatings that the "bloodthirsty" Henry James had delivered to his literary rivals. "James finally retired from pugilism after Edith Wharton knocked him out for 35 minutes with her famous powder-puff uppercut during a chance meeting at Alice Roosevelt's coming-out party," Baker wrote.

In 1965, Capote showed up in Rome, where Vidal was living. “We had a pleasant drunken evening recalling who said what about whom, and I must say my blood pressure began to rise, but then all ended well,” Vidal recalled. “He has apparently finished that book (‘In Cold Blood’), though the last two times I saw him he had just finished the book on each of those occasions.”

“I can’t get over how his appearance has changed (I can hear him on the subject of me), but he is an interesting brackish color now, rather lined, with a jaw worthy of Somerset Maugham. For the first time in 20 years I suspect that he is intelligent.”

“I found him positively affectionate, which is sinister,” Vidal said. “What can he be up to?”

Vidal found he became even more popular once he acquired that apartment in Rome with Howard Austen. "Dear Maureen O'Hara," he once wrote. "Yes, you .... will be welcome (to come stay) ... You had better have a lot of gossip and better than your meagre letter suggests. Meanwhile I remain, as always, a Great American." 
Vidal was a godfather to the children of Joanne Woodward, Kathleen Tynan, Claire Bloom and Susan Sarandon. "Always a godfather, never a god," he said.

— Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Goodbye to a Lady

In the gray rain at Hyde Park on Nov. 10, 1962, Gore Vidal attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt. “This was one of the rare occasions on which he wanted to pay his last respects in the traditional way…”

“As he drove through the heavy traffic, the crowds were almost impenetrable. The rain kept falling. For him it was a dismal, funereal day filled with thoughts about the death of a great American who had been a friend to both his father and to him. He ‘stood alongside the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth and the thirty-sixth presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for the funeral… She was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went by me, I thought, well, that’s it. We’re really on our own now.’”

— “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Human Potential

Anybody who's paying attention these days has doubts about human potential but this will leave you 'Spellbound.'

Government Shutdown? No Problem. Just Send Your Household Bills Directly to Congress

Ivan S White's excellent, superb, very good idea: “I am putting New Mexico's congressional delegation on notice that if a budget deal cannot be reached and the government defaults, causing a disruption in my wife not receiving her Social Security monthly annuity and myself not receiving my monthly civil service retirement, we will send to those members who voted for 'going over the cliff' our monthly utilities and grocery bills.”

She Invented the Woman She Required

By Dan Hagen

One night in Australia in 1909, with rain swelling a nearby creek, 10-year-old Helen Goff’s widowed mother told the girl to take care of her two younger siblings. Mother was going to drown herself, she explained. And she walked out into the storm.

Terrified, Helen gathered the children on the rug in front of the fire and made up a story about a magical flying horse — a perfect symbol of escape — to distract them. Unsuccessful in her suicide attempt, Helen’s mother returned later, but her daughter never trusted her again. 

Helen grew up to wear trousers, have an affair with an older man and a long-term relationship with a woman, and become an author.

She changed her name to P.L. Travers and wrote famous stories about a no-nonsense, supernatural protector of children whose parents had failed them.

Naturally.