(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

November 22, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald at the Movies

For those of a certain age, the mere mention of November 22, 1963 sends chills down the spine. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, fifty years ago today,  has forever changed Baby Boomers’ view of the world. We believe in conspiracies. We resist putting our faith in big institutions. We don’t quite trust anybody, either over or under thirty.

As the fiftieth anniversary drew near, several articles were written about how the Kennedy assassination gave rise to paranoid movie thrillers. A good piece in a Hollywood-based site called TheWrap mentions Blow-Up, The Parallax View and The Conversation as just three of the films shaped by what happened that day in Dallas. On television, in recent years, we’ve had 24 and Homeland. The very fact that Americans continue to puzzle over the Zapruder footage of the assassination (and that the footage were edited into Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK) shows the extent to which motion pictures are intertwined with one of the darkest days in American history.

What’s not generally remembered is that Lee Harvey Oswald, the shadowy former Marine who was long ago named Kennedy’s assassin in official reports, was captured by police at a suburban Dallas movie house called the Texas Theatre. He’d slipped inside without paying, and was watching a double bill of Cry of Battle and War Is Hell when an alert assistant manager notified law enforcement. The lights came on and, following a brief scuffle, Oswald was arrested. (After many financial ups and downs, the theatre survives today as an historic and cultural landmark.)

At the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while researching film in the Sixties, I happened upon an odd little book by someone named John Loken. Loken seems to like arcane research: his only other publication is an analysis of the possibility that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. But in 2000 he released a pamphlet-sized work called Oswald’s Trigger Films. It delves into the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Loken accepts as JFK’s lone assassin, was goaded into lethal action by the movies he favored.

Oswald frequently went to the movies alone. (His Russian-born wife didn’t understand American movies.) The Palace Theatre was a prominent movie palace seven blocks from his workplace, and clearly visible along his bus route. From November 14 through December 12, 1962, it featured a chilling drama called The Manchurian Candidate; this film (in which a young man is brainwashed into gunning down a presidential candidate) also later played at the Texas Theatre, located close to Oswald’s apartment. Loken, unlike some conspiracy theorists, doesn’t think of Oswald as a dupe programmed by outside forces into killing Kennedy. Instead he speculates that Oswald – who loved intrigue and saw himself as a James Bond-type man of action – was moved to imitate the film’s central image of an assassin on high, targeting his prey through a rifle’s telescopic sights.

It can’t be verified that Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate. But in October 1963, according to his widow Marina, he twice watched on television a 1949 John Garfield flick, We Were Strangers, in which a Cuban patriot engineers the death of a dictator. And, just maybe, he also saw 1954’s Suddenly, in which gangsters led by Frank Sinatra plot a presidential assassination. (It was withdrawn from circulation after JFK’s death.) According to Loken, it makes perfect sense that Oswald  -- once he’d changed the course of American history -- sought refuge in “the dream world of a movie theater showing violent films.”