(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

May December : The Crashing of Symbols

The old song says it: “It’s a long, long while from May to December.” As a film about the consequences of long-ago horrific behavior, May December sounds more interesting than it is. As a Todd Haynes project featuring two of Hollywood’s boldest actresses, May December is most surprising in that it’s a male character  (and a relative Hollywood newcomer) who largely captures our attention. The premise is intriguing: an older woman (Julianne Moore) once shocked the nation with a series of horrific acts, which involved a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old boy, whom she later (following a jail term and the birth of a baby while incarcerated) married. Into her small-town domestic life, some two decades after all this sturm und drang, comes an ambitious young actress (Natalie Portman) who’s planning to star in an indie film in which she portrays the female half of the mismatched couple.

  I came into the film curious to see how the two women would evolve, and how one might influence the other. I’m leaving aside here the question of how a radiant performer like Moore could (at 63, though her character must be slightly younger) represent December. In the film, she’s—from start to finish—a happy housewife, doting on her three kids and her hunky (much younger) husband. Any doubts she might have about the unbalanced nature of her marriage to a 36-year-old seem non-existent, from start to finish. The result: I didn’t much enjoy watching her onscreen. It’s only near the very end, when she says something about her troubled older child from a previous marriage that may or may not be true, that I started to wonder if there was more to her character than a placid, rather addled, acceptance of the status quo.

 I had wondered, too, if this film might be an exploration of merging identities, somewhat in the way that Bibi Andersson’s and Liv Ullmann’s characters seem to coalesce in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona. This may be the filmmakers’ goal, but I mostly remember Portman wandering around Moore’s small town, taking notes as she unearths character nuggets from Moore’s screen family and friends. Though, as a buttinsky, she’s treated with a surprising amount of courtesy by everyone she meets, there’s an air of Hollywood fakery about her. This seems confirmed when—late in the film—she turns a moment of compassion into something different, something definitely predatory. And then, at the film’s conclusion, we see her in character, playing Moore’s Gracie in a way that seems to undercut our previous sense that she’s on Gracie’s side.

 Writing this, I realize that the film sounds quite provocative. But it’s also infernally slow, scored with doleful music and missing any real spark of life. Both female leads lacked appeal for me; the only character for whom I felt compassion was the young husband (the critically praised Charles Melton), trapped in a domesticity that doesn’t match up with his biological stage in life. He’s the one who has, appropriately, garnered most of the film’s awards this season, for delineating the awkward tension between his character’s role as pater familias and a  young man’s restless wish to explore the wider world. Still, his hobby of tending the cocoons of monarch butterflies is so obviously meant to be symbolic of his own personal needs that it quickly becomes irksome.

 The story of May December is clearly based on the long-ago case of Mary Kay Letourneau and her much-underage paramour, Vili Fualaau. An L.A, Times columnist notes that Fualaau, still alive at 41, wishes the world would stay away from his tricky story. 

 

Send In Glynis Johns (A Heartfelt Send-Off)

The headlines announcing the death of actress Glynis Johns at the ripe old age of 100 tended to focus on her 1964 appearance as Mrs. Banks (both a mom and a daffy suffragette) in Disney’s mega-musical, Mary Poppins. Sevcral newspapers, notably the New York Times, spotlighted her as a Tony-winner for her 1973 role in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, in which she introduced the poignant “Send in the Clowns.” But her stage and screen successes started early. Coming from a long line of performers on both sides of the family, she made her British stage debut at age 12. In 1936, she played the trouble-making schoolgirl at the heart of Lillian Hellman’s bold-for-its-time The Children’s Hour. Her move into movies came in 1938: film brought her roles that were both dramatic and comedic. By 1949 she was starring in a British fantasy called Miranda that today sounds uncannily like the Tom Hanks-Daryl Hannah 1984 romance, Splash. Playing a mermaid who comes ashore to see London, she was highly praised by New York critic Bosley Crowther, who gushed, “Glynis Johns is bewitching — one half of her is, at least — as the coyly flirtatious finny creature.”

 She made her Hollywood screen debut circa 1950, again being cast in a wide variety of roles. Though comedy was her forte, she was Oscar-nominated as a talkative innkeeper in a major 1960 drama set in the Australian Outback, The Sundowners. My own first screen encounter with Johns came when I was a small girl delighting in Danny Kaye’s funniest movie, The Court Jester (1955). This is a mock-medieval romance in which Kaye’s meek character is persuaded to masquerade as the king’s jester in order to overthrow a usurper to England’s royal throne. The film is enlivened by hilarious wordplay I can still recite (“The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle,” and so on). There’s also some wacky jousting and an unforgettable sword-fight in which Kaye’s character, dueling the great Basil Rathbone in his final onscreen bout, swerves madly back and forth between timid and bold,

 In the Court Jester there are two important female characters. Angela Lansbury plays Gwendolyn, an imperious English princess with eyes for the jester. Johns is Maid Jean, one of the rebels dedicated to removing the usurper from the throne. As a small girl, I was confused. Jean seemed both bold and smart, admirable qualities, to be sure. And she had a wonderful throaty speaking voice I instinctively liked. Yet Gwendolyn was a princess, and (more than that) a tall blonde. So familiar was I with the social norms of the era that I figured she’d be the one who’d end up with the guy. Happily, though, it turns out to be the short(er) brunette who gets her man. Here, for a change, was a case in which blondes don’t have more fun.

 Some twenty years later, Johns IS a blonde, and she too is apparently unlucky in love. (In real life, she was married and divorced four times.) On-stage, in A Little Night Music, she originated the role of Desiree Armfeldt, a celebrated stage actress whose multiple romantic affairs never pave the way for a permanent union with the one man she wants. In compensation, she gets perhaps the most memorable song in the Sondheim canon, a rueful acknowledgment of where her life has led. It was written in a limited range to accommodate Johns’ modest vocal powers while giving her a chance to convey strong emotion. Though many famous singers have recorded it, Sondheim insisted that Johns’ original version was his very favorite.