(Jack) Ruby on Tuesday

My colleague Danny Fingeroth has had a full career that includes a long stint as  editor of the Spider-Man comics line for Marvel Comics. He’s also a writer, having produced several volumes on Stan Lee and his Marvel-ous Universe. But Danny’s most recent publication leaves the comic book world behind, as he takes on a long-time fascination with Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television, thereby upending the American justice system and prompting decades of conspiracy theories to flourish. 

 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.” 

                                                    Danny Fingeroth and his book

Spike Lee Does the Right Thing

For the past week, I’ve been following the fortunes of my current favorite baseball player, the extraordinary Mookie Betts. It’s all part of rooting for the sometimes infuriating L.A. Dodgers, now locked into a playoff series with the Atlanta Braves. As I write this, the Dodgers have kicked away more than one opportunity to come out on top. But I count on my man Mookie to always DO THE RIGHT THING.

 The irony, as I discovered when re-watching Spike Lee’s 1989 breakout film, Do the Right Thing, is that Lee himself plays an important character named Mookie. Like many of the roles played by Lee in his early films, his Mookie is sometimes funny, sometimes lovable, sometimes confused, and sometimes dead wrong. He starts out the film as the gofer and all-around sidekick of Sal (the late Danny Aiello), who owns an Italian pizzeria in a mostly Black Brooklyn neighborhood. The good-hearted Sal, ignoring the rantings of his bigoted son (John Turturro), does his part to be an active member of the Bedford-Stuyvesant community, giving handouts to those who need them and generally making nice. He won’t budge, though, when local toughs demand he add Black faces to the Italian-American Hall of Fame that decorates his restaurant wall. His heroes are Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, not Dr. King and Malcolm X, and he refuses to make any changes. 

 On the hottest day of the year, all the locals are steamed up. The young punks are agitating against the pizzeria, where Sal’s angry son is already driving him crazy. The old codgers are bickering among themselves, and the sweet local drunk (Ossie Davis) is being spurned by the tough neighborhood matriarch played by Ruby Dee. Meanwhile Mookie pays a quick visit to his on-and-off girlfriend (Rosie Perez in her screen debut), who’s furious with him for ignoring her and their infant son. The only one staying cool is the local radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson, who was then still calling himself Sam). As the sun goes down, the tension rises. Radio Rahim invades the pizzeria with his blasting boom box, and Sal finally snaps. After the police get involved, with tragic consequences, Mookie takes the lead in hurling a trashcan through the pizzeria window. 

 What’s disturbing about Do the Right Thing is that after more than three decades it still seems so timely, as current as the disturbances surrounding the death of George Floyd. Since 1989 we haven’t gotten any better at answering Rodney King’s plaintive question: “Can’t we all get along?”  I give Spike Lee credit for not being a total ideologue. The film shows he can see all sides of an issue, even that of the immigrant  Korean grocers so desperately trying to fit into the ‘hood that at one point they try to claim kinship with their Black neighbors. Appropriately the film ends with two on-screen quotations, a hopeful one from Martin Luther King, followed by far more militant words from Malcolm X. But the final dedication to the families of Black victims of police brutality makes clear that when it comes to issues of law enforcement, Lee knows where he stands.

 He also knows how to look to far different movies for inspiration. The Lee exhibit at the new Academy Museum reveals where he came up with the film’s opening moments, featuring Rosie Perez in closeup, doing a wildly militant dance to “Fight the Power.” Where’d he get the idea? From Ann-Margret, looming large on the screen, in the first few minutes of a mindless musical from 1963, Bye Bye Birdie. Who would have guessed?

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In Memoriam: After the Parade Passes By

As that exasperating year 2019 wanes, it feels appropriate to look back on the famous movieland folks we’ve lost. TCM has put together a short  but poignant video segment reminding us of some of the indelible faces and voices who now remain only in our movies and our dreams. I’ve written my own Beverly in Movieland tributes to some of these great performers: Doris Day,  Peter Fonda, Valerie Harper, Albert Finney, Bibi Andersson, Machiko Kyo. And I’ve lamented the loss of outstanding filmmakers like John Singleton, D..A. Pennebaker, Franco Zeffirelli, and Stanley Donen. In the field of music (for the screen as well as for the stage and the concert hall) there have been several indelible passings: André Previn, Michel LeGrand, and Broadway’s Jerry Herman, the exuberant composer of Hello, Dolly and Funny Girl.

Of course deaths don’t stop when the memorial video is posted online. Jerry Herman, who died last Thursday at the age of 88, didn’t make the final cut. A recent edition of The Hollywood Reporter also lists a few passings that TCM overlooked. One was D.C. Fontana, the very first female writer on Star Trek. (In an era less politically correct than our own, women writers found it smart to conceal their gender by turning their given names into male-sounding initials.) Another was Carroll Spinney, the gentle, spritely puppeteer who impersonated Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch and wore the feathers of Big Bird for nearly half a-century. I was particularly moved when Karen Pendleton passed on in October at the age of 73. Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers, was a regular on The Mickey Mouse Club for its entire nine-year run.  Though several of the Mouseketeers led tawdry adult lives, Pendleton was a major exception. After the show ended, she devoted herself to her education. When a 1983 car accident that damaged her spinal cord left her paralyzed from the waist down, she went back to college, earning a master’s degree in psychology. Putting her academic training to work, she served as a counselor at a shelter for abused women, while supporting the rights of the disabled by joining the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped. A life well lived, indeed.

I was sorry to read about the loss of masterful actors like Ron Leibman (so moving in Norma Rae) and Moonstruck’s Danny Aiello. And I shook my head ruefully at the passing of Jan-Michael Vincent, a talented action hero but one who cut his career short because of his personal weaknesses. (In later years he was reduced to appearing in Roger Corman war epics, like my own Beyond the Call of Duty, flying off to Manila to star in quickie flicks undermined by his drinking habits.)

But of courses the deaths that most moved me were those of celebrities with whom I’ve personally interacted. It seems like yesterday that I, as a writer of profiles for Performing Arts magazine, was welcomed at the home of the versatile character actor René Auberjonois, who lit up stage and screen with his eccentric portrayals. I will always think fondly of the late Dick Miller, my buddy in my New World Pictures days and years later a valuable source of information when I was researching my Corman biography. How wonderful that Dick          inspired both the loyalty of some of Hollywood’s finest directors and an affectionate 2014 documentary (That Guy Dick Miller) summing up his long career  And then there is good-guy Robert Forster, whose resonant baritone is—and always will be—on my answering machine. Hail and farewell. .