Elissa, Joe, Marty & Others
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on over the air antennas in NYC, ran After the Thin Man (1936), the second in the lively series starring the legendary William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. No screen couple ever had better chemistry. Others can only hope to equal it. In researching the cast, the name Elissa Landi, who had the pivotal role, rang a bell but I was unable to place it. She starred in the Cecil B. DeMille epic The Sign of the Cross (1932), which ran quite frequently on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and now seems to have vanished from airplay. Born in Venice in 1904, Landi shined brightly in a life cruelly cut short by cancer at 43. She starred on the London stage opposite all-time greats such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Noel Coward. Her film career on the continent was not too successful, so she decided to go to Hollywood. Her career in the states was also checkered, but she had another passion — writing. Aside from her 33 movie credits, she had at least six novels published: Neilson, The Helmers, House for Sale, The Ancestor, Women and Peter and The Pear Tree. Almost all are available at Amazon, used copies, prices ranging from ten bucks to $150. Here she is:
I had long conversations with two gentleman that made today’s session of the floating book shop fly by. Crazy Joe, as he’s been dubbed by talk radio host Mark Simone, was forced out of his teaching job decades ago, accused of racism because of something he’d once written, and it left him bitter. These days, when he’s not giving the business to on-air personalities, he spends a lot of time on Facebook, where he has 15,000 followers. His account has been suspended several times for posts deemed incendiary. He believes whites are threatened. Fortunately, we discussed a lot more than that today. He worked for many years at Thomas Jefferson H.S. and was friends with its legendary football coach Moe Finkelstein. He claims MF paddled misbehaving players until the end of his tenure, which was in the ‘80’s, and that the kids loved him despite it because they knew he had their best interests at heart. He mentioned names from my playing days in the mid ‘60’s, great running backs John Brockington, who graduated at least two years before I did and who went on to play at Ohio St. and for the Packers, and Jesse Claire, a little jet our great Lafayette H.S. defense held in check. Unfortunately, we lost the game 0–6 on a play action pass, our only defeat in ‘66… Marty, NYPD retired, revealed that his younger daughter, now 23 and still living at home, interned at an Indian reservation on the Arizona-New Mexico border when she was 16. I asked his opinion on Pantaleo’s firing. He was open-minded about it, and didn’t get angry when I said I couldn’t evaluate a situation at which I was not present, but that I believed there needed to be a sacrificial lamb to appease the yahoos, who probably won’t be appeased. His most memorable confrontation came after he retired. He was working private security at an NYC protest of Michael Brown’s shooting by the St. Louis cop. Most of the demonstrators were white, well-dressed. A young woman approached and asked him what was going on. She hadn’t heard about the case. Marty’s explanation was overheard by a middle aged woman who shot him a look that gave him chills. He moved a few paces away and she continued to give him a death stare. And he was thinking to himself here’s this middle class woman who was a thousand miles from the incident, passing judgment on someone who had been exonerated. She obviously had no faith in the justice system. In his eyes she was an anarchist. Like many Americans, he is somewhere right of the middle politically, but not far right, although his leftists daughters would disagree.
My thanks to Crazy Joe, who bought a book I hope will help him: Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering by David A. Kessler M.D.; and to Marty, who purchased a handsome little pictorial on Native Americans he will give to his younger daughter when he’s done with it; and to the young man who selected Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan; and to the folks who bought books in Russian; and to the woman who donated nine pristine hardcovers by the same Russian author.
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