Danny seems to know everything there is to know about Ruby, his family, and his sad little life. You can’t fault him for a lack of details, about (for instance) Ruby’s pathetic forays into show biz as the owner of a Dallas nightspot. (Danny calls him, with a nod to Arthur Miller, “the Willy Loman of strip-club operators.”) Frankly, all those tidbits about unruly dogs and patrons thrown down staircases can get a bit much. The very strongest parts of his book are its preface and its conclusion. The preface comments sagely regarding the impact of the JFK assassination and its aftermath on the era’s young children, like Danny himself. For little boys like him, what was happening on the living-room TV on that Dallas weekend was not so different from what they were used to seeing on the era's popular crime shows, like The Untouchables.
Danny speaks of television, but I was personally struck by the role played by motion pictures in Ruby’s story. Certainly, he himself was starstruck, and even had showbiz aspirations via a nightclub act he promoted, featuring Little Daddy, a song-and-dance kid. Regarding Ruby’s tangled motives to go after Oswald, who was then in police custody, Danny wonders, “Was he starring in some movie in his head that only he could see?”
Then too, movies continue to be part of the public’s memories of what happened on a Dallas weekend in November 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin (or was he?) was arrested by Dallas police while seated in the Texas Theatre, watching a flick called War is Hell. Then there’s the infamous Zapruder home-movie footage of the assassination, which has long been studied for the possibility that it explodes the lone-gunman conclusion of the Warren Commission. And of course we can’t forget all the commercial movies inspired by aspects of the Kennedy assassination, particularly Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-focused JFK (1991). Ruby is portrayed in that film, and Danny’s book ends with a listing of other places that Ruby and his associates have ended up in American pop culture (including a Stephen King bestseller). I had no idea that Danny Aiello starred in a 1992 film, simply called Ruby, which totally falsifies history by turning Oswald’s bungling killer into a slick criminal mastermind. As recently as the summer of 2020, the second season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy found itself set in Dallas, circa November 1963, with Ruby (and his beloved dachshunds) prominently—and accurately—pictured.
Even Ruby’s Dallas rabbi, Hillel Silverman, got the showbiz treatment. Silverman, who spent many hours counseling Ruby in his jail cell before decamping for Los Angeles, played himself in a 1978 made-for-TV movie, Ruby and Oswald, directed by Stan Lee’s cousin, veteran filmmaker Mel Stuart. (Danny thinks the world should know that Rabbi Silverman—having gone Hollywood all the way—produced an actor-son, Jonathan, who starred in Weekend at Bernie's.)
And what is Danny’s
conclusion about the importance of this odd and troubled man? “He certainly
impacted history, helped change the way we view the very notions of justice and
even our concept of agreed-upon truth. Whether he was a lone nut or part of a conspiracy,
the repercussions of his actions will be with us forever.”
No comments:
Post a Comment