My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hitler’s rise to power is one aspect of the Holocaust that I was pretty ignorant of. The Listener illuminates this part of the story while still putting characters – a present-day sculptor from Vancouver, a couple who lived in Germany during the ’30s – first. Although I found the theme of the role of the artist to be a bit unnecessary – and to get in the way at times – overall The Listener is a fascinating read. I liked Lester’s art, too – though his angled figures and the ink washes take some getting used to, he finds very creative ways to tell his story. Bonus for Vancouverites: there’s a brief sequence where the protagonist describes East Van.

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The Sugar Shoppe 1967-1970, by Shawn Conner.

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Books taken:

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
Emma Donaghue, Slammerkin
Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine

The selection of vacation reading material is a task that this reader takes seriously. When planning for my first Momcation (just me and my mom, at a resort in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic), I knew I wanted some light reading (for around the pool) as well as some heavier stuff.

Falling in the “light” category, Gillian Flynn‘s Sharp Objects was the first book I started reading, on the plane trip south.

What a piece of crap.

I know Flynn is currently a critical darling for Gone Girl, which I’d read one chapter of and kind of liked but not enough to buy. However I decided to check out this earlier effort. After about 50 or 60 pages, when I realized what Flynn was up to – that Sharp Objects would basically be about 200 pages of red herrings and development of uninteresting (to me) characters, I decided to just skim it for the plot points and to see how the author resolves the tale of two dead girls. I’m glad I didn’t spend any more time on Sharp Objects than I did; this is one of those psychological thrillers where the psychology is all just a bunch of scenery-chewing thrown in to stall for time before the resolution.

I couldn’t even get through 50 pages of Don Winslow‘s The Winter of Frankie Machine. I liked Winslow’s Savages (which Oliver Stone turned into a movie last year) but this one did absolutely nothing for me. Winslow spends the first part of the book describing the main character’s near-perfect life to the point where I just wanted someone to shoot the son of a bitch.  When this didn’t happen – when, in fact, nothing really happened for the first 40 pages, which is definitely a no-no in a crime thriller unless you’re Patricia Highsmith (and Winslow is no Highsmith) – I was jonesing for some Elmore Leonard.

Then again, not too many crime thrillers could compete with Rabbit at Rest. I’d read all of Updike’s Rabbit series way back in the ’80s, when I was a mere lad, and loved them. I had a hankering to go back and the one I chose was the last in the series (although, in 2000, Updike published short story that picks up some of the series’ characters).

This was one of those great reading experiences – the perfect book at the perfect time in the perfect place. I started it on the plane and read 590-page tome every day of my vacation, usually around the pool, from late morning to mid-afternoon, by which time the rum had usually kicked in.

In Rabbit at Rest, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is 55 and retired, spending part of the year in Florida when he’s not back home in Pennsylvania. There is so much to love about this book I don’t know where to begin, but a few things struck me. One was how concerned Rabbit – and Updike – is about his (American) diet.

Rabbit at Rest was published in 1990, and though fast and processed food was already being blamed for health issues back then, it wasn’t nearly the topic of conversation that it is today, especially with the recent publication of Michael Moss‘s Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. But it’s on nearly every page of this book as Rabbit grapples with his increasingly poor health.

Another of Rabbit’s concerns is terrorism. The 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie air tragedy took place while Updike was writing the book and his protagonist spends a lot of time thinking and worrying about terrorism. Not exactly prescient, perhaps, since it was on a lot of people’s minds because of Lockerbie, but still a little eerie in light of what was to come.

One other thing I want to mention before going onto the next book: there is a scene in the first chunk of Rabbit at Rest that, for nail-biting suspense, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Which just goes to show, I guess, that sometimes you find what you’re looking for – page-turning suspence, in this case – in unexpected places.

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It’s a sad state of affairs when I feel I have to second-guess everything I write. But, as Lawrence Wright‘s Going Clear (Knopf, 448 pps) makes clear, the people heading Scientology are nothing if not aggressive in the church’s defense. Its hounding of anyone who goes up against the, ahem, religion is well-documented, not just in Going Clear but elsewhere.

So what can I say about this book (or Scientology, for that matter) that won’t get my phone hacked or Tom Cruise jumping on my couch? Well, not a whole heck of a lot. (I know one person who uses asterisks whenever he writes about Sc*******y.) It makes me wonder if this – a fear of reprisal – is why Paul Thomas Anderson chickened out in The Master. (Anderson never actually names the church, although ”the master” of the title is apparently based on Hubbard.)

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master.

First, why did I want to read Going Clear? I guess I find the subject of Scientology fascinating in a weird, twisted way. When I was but a wee lad of 19 or so, a friend of mine and I sauntered into Scientology headquarters in Winnipeg one evening. I recall taking the church’s patented personality test (oddly, not mentioned in Going Clear) the questions of which are so open-ended that no matter how you answer will reveal at least one flaw – a “ruin” in Scientology bafflegab, according to Wright’s book – that Scientology can fix.

It’s a numbers racket; we didn’t go back, but how many people take the test, and do?

Numbers racket or not, it still seems totally bizarre to me that something that is a well-documented product of the imagination of a sci-fi pulp writer (L. Ron Hubbard) could be taken seriously. Helloooo, people, he’s a science fiction writer! Science fiction. All he does is make shit up!

Scientology also has a weird patina of glamour about it. How many people know of it in the first place solely because of its celebrity adherents? And yes, there’s plenty of juicy Tom Cruise (and John Travolta) tidbits in Going Clear, including an incident where the church “apparently” pimped for the Mission: Impossible actor. Or should I say, set him up on a blind date?

Probably the main impetus for Going Clear was the defection and subsequent confession, if it can be called that, of Canadian-gone-Hollywood director/writer Paul Haggis (Crash, Casino Royale). Haggis joined at an early age and quickly moved up in the Hollywood hierarchy, thanks in part to the church. (One of the interesting facets of the Scientology phenomenon is Hubbard’s genius in targeting Hollywood from the beginning.) Haggis’s story frames Going Clear.

Another thing I find fascinating about Scientology is how it’s managed to survive this long, and if it can continue to do so. The church, it seems, has survived because it’s been able to keep many of its practices and beliefs, not to mention allegations of abuse, secret or at least hidden. Notwithstanding the fact that the church has pockets deep enough that it can buy airtime during the Superbowl, and that millions more will see the commercial than will read this book, it’s all there on the Internet.

Then again, Haggis could’ve found out just about any of this stuff at any time. If he’d bothered to look.

Vancouver content: a lot of early Scientology activity happened in Oregon, and Hubbard lived for a time in Washington state. The only direct Vancouver reference I found however was on page 91: “Dr. Stephen Wiseman, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who has been a prominent critic of Scientology, speculated that a possible diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality would be ‘malignant narcissism,’ which he characterizes as ‘a highly insecure individual protecting himself with aggressive grandiosity, disavowal of any and every need from others, antisocial orientation, and a heady and toxic mix of rage/anger/aggression/violence and paranoia.’”

Who thought this was a good idea for a book cover?

That was my first thought on coming upon this paperback in a Powell River used book store last summer.

(The cover folds out, btw, to reveal even more Hugh Hefner and fluffy-tailed cherubs.)

I bought it on a whim; I’d never heard of this particular volume, although I knew (if I’d thought about it) there had to be at least one or two biographies of the king of the Playboy empire.

Anyway, last week I finally pulled it down from the Shelf of Books Bought and Which I’ve Been Meaning to Read (which is actually several shelves). It was a quick read – I burned through its 250 pages lickety-split, in three days.

The first half is low on titillation and heavy on Hefner’s Early Days of Struggle, his resourcefulness  and the 1950s publishing industry. As a wannabe publisher myself,  I found this part of the book fascinating. I especially appreciated the portrait of Hefner as a publisher; he didn’t set out to put together what would become the world’s best-known girly magazine, at least at first. His prime directive was to become a publisher, period. That he ended up buying that famous nude Marilyn Monroe calendar photo (the first brick in the making of Playboy) was just the result of a series of (happy?) accidents.

The second half of Hefner is a little less interesting. The author, Frank Brady, was a Playboy magazine editor and had access to Hefner, the Playboy offices and the Chicago mansion, it seems, but is obviously constrained by some remaining loyalties as well as timing. When this book was published, in 1974, Playboy was still more or less in its infancy – reality TV, Pamela Anderson and so much more still in its future — or at least, adolescence.

In this section, Brady’s description of the mansion, and how Hefner squirreled himself away in a publisher’s equivalent of a panic room (i.e. a luxuriously appointed one) for nearly a decade, reads like something out of every introspective teenage boy’s dream – imagine a room you never had to leave, where every want and desire is fulfilled and you control an empire from your bed.

However, the stuff about Playboy’s legal battles and former Playboy employees’ sour grapes is just not all that compelling. I guess there’s only so much you can do when the story you set out to tell is nowhere near complete. Hefner was published in 1974, while the magazine was still good, Jimmy Carter wasn’t yet in the White House and Hefner had just moved to his Los Angeles mansion.

It’s never clear, either, just how much of the quotes Brady uses are from interviews he conducted with Hefner, or were overheard in other contexts. Some notes about sources would definitely go towards the book’s credibility. (Coincidentally, or not, I also recently had problems about the lack of credible sources in Teresa Carpenter‘s wretched piece of yellow journalism about murdered Vancouver Playmate Dorothy Stratten, which I touch on here.)

Also it’s never quite clear, outside of the money (which may have been substantial), why Brady wrote the book. It’s neither a hagiography or a hatchet-job. The author seems mostly fair to his subject, although he does slip into a slightly hectoring and judgmental tone now and then. His feelings about his (former) boss are obviously a complicated mix of admiration, envy, loyalty, and a desire to distance himself from the whole thing.

Hefner is by no means the last word on its subject. But, with its mid-70s insider’s perspective into an unparalleled publishing phenomenon, it’s a start.

This is what starring in a sitcom with Bill Cosby does to a girl.

Continuing with the (young) Mickey Rourke + ’80s movies kick I’ve been on, this week we revisit Angel Heart.

The 1987 movie, based on the novel Fallen Angel by William Hjortsberg, stars a Rourke just starting to go to seed (also released that year: Barfly. After that, the highlights of the actor’s IMDB portfolio are basically Wild Orchid until Sin City in 2005. And let’s face it, even that was a piece of shit.) and Robert DeNiro.

The less said about the plot the better – not because it’s bad, but you’ll enjoy the movie more the less you know. Suffice it to say, we almost always know more than Harry Angel, Rourke’s private detective character, who is continually playing catch-up with the plot. DeNiro plays a not-very-mysterious-but-still-kind-of-scary character named “Louis Cypher” (think about it. But not too hard).

Also in the movie: Charlotte Rampling in a thankless role as a fortune teller and Lisa Bonet, desperately trying to escape her Cosby Show image by showing her boobs and messing around with a chicken.

In fact, there’s a good drinking game to be had during Angel Heart – take a gulp every time someone says “chicken.” You will be drunk by the end of it.

Anyway, Angel Heart - which I’d seen only once, around the time of its release – holds up well, even in a post-Sixth Sense world. Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning among many others) directs the mix of supernatural and film noir/detective elements to the point just before the whole thing bubbles over into camp (although the movie comes dangerously close  towards the end). I wouldn’t call Angel Heart scary but it is effectively spooky and the unraveling of the mystery is quite expertly done.

The movie does get under your skin, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Elizabeth Whitcraft has a brief roll as Harry Angel’s helper.

“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” – Hugh Hefner, in an editorial in the first issue of Playboy

Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts in Star 80 (1983).

On Aug 14, 1980, Paul Snider shot and killed 20-year-old Dorothy Stratten. He then turned the shotgun on himself.

The murder-suicide did not go unnoticed; Stratten was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year for 1980, after all.

Two movies were spun from the tragedy—a TV-movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Star 80 (in 1983).

As part of my ’80s movies retrospective, Star 80 was a logical next step following The Pope of Greenwich Village (watched earlier this week, but which I haven’t had a chance to blog about). Both feature star-making performances by Eric Roberts (brother of Julia).

In Star 80, he stars as Paul Snider opposite Mariel Hemingway as Stratten. It’s another great performance as Roberts gets under the skin of the oily Snider, but also finds the thin wire of humanity that still exists in his grasping frame.

Hemingway too is wonderful, but in a Mariel Hemingway-esque way—she brings the same vulnerability to the role as she did to her character in Woody Allen‘s Manhattan.

In fact, Hemingway is brilliantly cast as the Vancouver-born-and-raised beauty. Her Dorothy is a lot more sympathetic than the Stratten who appears in this clip from The Tonight Show:

One of the things that I really enjoyed about Star 80 was the Vancouver references. When I first saw it on its release 30 years ago, the city meant nothing to me—I was 18 years old and living in Winnipeg. Now that I live in Vancouver, though, it came alive for me in a whole new way, from the title card reading “Vancouver, B.C.” that introduces the first part of the story, to scenes shot in Vancouver, including a shot of Snider being dangled outside a top-floor window of the Blue Horizon Hotel on Robson and  Snider and Stratten’s sister visiting the PNE.

There’s also a line in the movie: “You know what, you’re not that girl from Vancouver anymore.” As my girlfriend pointed out, this took place pre-Expo 86, when the city was still a town, or regarded as such.

The movie was partly based on “Death of a Playmate”, a story that ran in the Village Voice in Nov 1980. Written by Teresa Carpenter, the story is the worst kind of yellow journalism, using conjecture (no sources are cited)  to fill in the gaps between facts and taking on a self-serving, judgmental tone.

Even worse, Carpenter gets facts wrong. It’s obvious she never came to Vancouver to research the story. Here’s this farcical statement: “Snider grew up in Vancouver’s East End, a tough area steeped in machismo.” Well, for starters, it’s the “East Side”, and unless he grew up around Main and Hastings, lady, you’re just talking out of your ass.

Carpenter also quotes an unnamed source who is apparently one of a gang called the “Rounder Crowd”: “‘He never touched [the drug trade],’ said one Rounder who knew him then.” Give me a break.

Unbelievably, Carpenter wasn’t bounced out of the publishing industry after this piece of shit writing. In fact, she won a Pulitzer Prize. Check out her Wiki page if you don’t believe me.

However, Star 80 is an excellent, affecting film. For his last movie, writer/director Bob Fosse (All That Jazz, Cabaret) managed to turn a sensational story into a sympathetic portrait of both Stratten and even of Snider, without ever letting the latter off the hook. In Star 80, Snider has no back-story; with Roberts in the role, he doesn’t need one.

The story doesn’t end there, not quite.

Director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon; also an actor, a psychologist in The Sopranos, among other roles) cast Stratten in his movie They All Laughed (1981). During filming he hooked up with her, and after her death even wrote a book, The Killing of the Unicorn (“a bizarre, unclassifiable book,” according to one goodreads.com reviewer). He went on to marry Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise Stratten. A sometime-actress, Louise’s most recent role was as a saloon girl in Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained.

While researching this story, I also dug up some interesting info on one of the photographers whose pics of Stratten attracted Hugh Hefner‘s attention. Vancouver photog Alex Waterhouse-Hayward wrote this blog post about Ken Honey, who was basically the Vancouver stringer for Playboy and helped discover Pamela Anderson and future Mrs. Hefner, Kimberley Conrad. In this blog post about Honey, you can see a photo of Stratten with Vancouver music potentate Bruce Allen (Bryan Adams‘ manager).

Movie—Atlantic City (1980)

Recently, I’ve been revisiting movies from the ’80s, an undervalued cinematic decade, I believe.

A flick I loved as a kid—I was probably 15 or 16 when I saw it the first time—is Atlantic City.

I hadn’t seen it for years if not decades, but watching it again last week I was happy to see that it’s stood the test of time.

Burt Lancaster plays Lou, a washed-up bag-man for the mob; Susan Sarandon is Sally, the neighbour he spies on (never mind the fact that, though they’re shown to live side-by-side in an apartment building, they somehow have windows that look in on each other’s kitchens) watches her rub lemons on her breasts to get the fish smell out (she works at an oyster bar in a casino while she’s learning to be a dealer).

When Lou falls into a cache of mob-money thanks to Sally’s no-good ex-husband (Robert Joy), Atlantic City takes a turn for the desperate as the two go on the lam from a threatening Moses Znaimer and his silent, menacing goon. The plotline is decent but Atlantic City shines in the performances, especially Lancaster and Kate Reid, who plays the ex-mob wife whom Lou looks after.

Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City (1980).

Louis Malle, who directed, finds the burnished soul of the city; there’s a great cameo by Robert Goulet. Speaking of cameos, that’s Wallace Shawn (credited as “Wally Shawn”) as a waiter in a later scene.

Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City (1980).

What is perhaps most curious about seeing the movie 30+ years later, is the weird Canadian component, something I didn’t pick up on the first time(s) I watched it.

The movie is a France-Canada co-production (hence Malle directing). This means that there are plenty of Canadian actors (Ried, Joy, Al “King of Kensington” Waxman), that Sarandon’s Sally is learning French, and there are lots of references to her hometown of Moosejaw (“It’s near Medicine Hat” she says at one point). Needless to say, she’s determined not to go back to Saskatchewan, a motivation that drives the plot somewhat.

Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City.

It’s a cliché to say this is the kind of movie that couldn’t be made today, but in the quirkiness of its co-production requirement and the attention paid to character development in the screenplay (by John Guare) and direction, Atlantic City really is a gem from another era of filmmaking. In heart and soul it’s more of a ’70s movie, but it helped usher in a decade that included some pretty great movies as well.