I really loved this. I haven’t read too many reviews – just one, which called it an “erotic thriller” – but that doesn’t really fit. Yeah, there’s sex, but … it’s not ABOUT that. The sex comes from a very specific emotional place. Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke are amazing. This is my kind of movie. I reviewed for Ebert.
I reviewed the documentary about controversial countercultural “visionary” Stewart Brand – he of the Whole Earth Catalog, which I remember seeing piled around in people’s houses in my childhood – but beyond, to his spearheading of the computer revolution and now the so-called de-extinction movement. It’s an interesting doc in its presentation of Brand AND all of the issues surrounding his work. I think the film tends towards his POV – one I do not share – emphatically – particularly in regards to the idea that technology is essentially neutral. But I enjoyed the history lesson as well as the environmental lessons. I reviewed for Ebert.
I am currently re-reading Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball.
There is no other book like it. A gossipy telling of the “Soviet proletariat aristocracy” of the late 1920s, which Malaparte witnessed firsthand. (“Curzio Malaparte” was his pen name, chosen because it kind of sounded like “Bonaparte” and he loved Napoleon. He was born “Kurt Erich Suckert,”) Sympathetic to the aims of the Russian Revolution (he eventually joined the Italian Communist Party, but don’t credit that too much because he also became a staunch Catholic. He was an admirer of Trotsky, and he was an ardent member of Mussolini’s initial movement. He was eventually imprisoned by Mussolini for his trouble. So. Grain of salt for ALL of Malaparte’s convictions. Did he just float from one extreme to the other? Or did he follow whomever gave him the best offer? I’m thinking it was the latter.). The 20s and 30s were a wild time, in general, for flip-flopping convictions and aligning yourself with some gruesome people in order to fight the powers that be. Malaparte was a big part of all of that. During his time in Moscow in the late 1920s, as a member of the diplomatic corps (or a guest of said corps? I can’t remember), he saw something extraordinary: he saw the rise of a Soviet elite, a petit bourgeois elite, no less, the biggest class enemy in the “Socialist” system. He felt betrayed at what he saw, although … his betrayal never seems quite genuine, because you don’t get the feeling he believed in much anyway. He was a cold and calculating outsider, so – unlike other true believers – he could actually see clearly. He witnessed bizarre things like Karakhan, a revered and famous revolutionary, arranging to import tennis balls from England because the Soviet tennis balls were no good. Details like this are so random they have the ring of truth.
Although you never know with Malaparte. Don’t trust him as far as you can throw him.
Kremlin Ball, along with Malaprte’s masterpiece Kaputt – a “travelogue” through the wartorn landscapes of Eastern Europe — and The Skin – a description of the “invasion” of Italy by Allied forces in WWII, Malaparte’s work is basically a tour of the Axis powers, written by someone so seemingly sympathetic that he can clink glasses with the grotesque inner circle, and then race home to make fun of all of them in print. Malaparte was a political flip-flopper, who rubbed shoulders with some of the most unsavory individuals of the 20th century. His amazing work comes from behind the front lines on the BAD side. We don’t have much of that.
Malaparte wasn’t ever on my radar. I’ve mentioned my “problem” many times before, a problem I’ve taken a lifetime to overcome: I have an education, okay, but my college years were dominated by theatre (it was my major). So I took acting classes, singing classes, movement classes, I designed sets, I ran costume crew, I acted in plays, etc. Alongside all of this, I would take the required amount of electives. Once I got through the requirements (a science class, a math class, whatever), I could take whatever I wanted. So I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance. I took a class on the Industrial Revolution. I took a class on the history of science. I took a class called African-American History. I just took classes in whatever interested me. You dig? They were all great and I learned a lot. But the problem, if you want to call it that, is that my formal and well-rounded education ended in high school. High school exposed me to the canon – the Great Gatsby/Scarlet Letter/Tale of Two Cities canon (no complaints). But after high school, all that stopped. In terms of reading, I was on my own. I wasn’t required to do anything. I could read or not read, whatever. And so, I had to DECIDE to read Tolstoy, since it hadn’t been on the high school curriculum. I just didn’t feel like I could properly or fully participate in anything called “culture” if I didn’t read the big Russians. So I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Thank God I was already a voracious reader, but still: one can’t catch everything. In those post-college years, following my own whims, I read current fiction and discovered a lot of my favorite contemporary authors: AS Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, Nancy Lemann, Mary Gaitskill, Joy Williams (no surprise they’re all women. Only Emily Bronte was on the high school curriculum. It took my self-educating years to discover all the GIRLS). Therefore: to quote Rocky Balboa: I’ve got gaps. I am still filling gaps.
Before I make too much of a claim for my spotty literary education, I must point out that a BFA in theatre is a great education because it encompasses so many different fields: You learn history, philosophy, religion, cultural stuff … If you’re studying plays through history, then you are not just studying the text, you’re learning about the world surrounding the text. Because of my BFA, I know the timeline of theatrical history and could rattle it off with no notes. I have read all the major works. Greek. Roman. Restoration comedy. 1930s agitprop. Moliere. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Odets. Tennessee Williams. Vaclav Havel. August Wilson. Chekhov. Arthur Miller. Lanford Wilson. Lorraine Hansberry. Stanislavsky. Meyerhold. Experimental theatre of the 60s. Weirdo visionaries like Gordon Craig and Antonin Artaud and Peter Brook. Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre, his “Voodoo Macbeth” and Julius Caesar. I could go on and on. Also contemporary playwrights like Tina Howe and Edward Allen Baker and John Patrick Shanley. I know them all. My education is fine. When you read these plays and act in those plays you absorb the history of entire eras and places and times.
But I can actually feel the gaps I have in literature. So I have spent years “addressing” those gaps. I have no overall plan, just a desire to better myself and expand my mind. History has always been a major interest so over the years I’d get interested in the history of different countries – Yugoslavia (RIP), Russia, Iran, China – and so I’d read works by writers from those countries. Novels are a great way to deep dive. Last year I read Somali author Nuruddin Farah’s masterpiece, his trilogy called Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. It blew me away. I’m just so glad I read it. I guess I’m an autodidact in a lot of ways.
Because I just wasn’t educated widely beyond a high school curriculum, Curzio Malaparte didn’t reach me at all (this was exacerbated by the fact that the majority of his works were not translated into English except recently. I think Kaputt was the only one widely available). My good friend Farran – who knows me very well and has never led me astray (she’s the one who encouraged me to read Balzac, another “gap”)- said to me, “Sheila. You of all people need to read Kremlin Ball.” (It was translated into English for the first time only a couple years ago. That was when it came on my radar because there was a review in the Times. I was like “how had I never heard of this before??” People mock you for statements like this. Well, as I explained, I was not a literature student or a global studies student. I was down the street, in the theatre department, learning how to juggle.) When Farran said “You, of all people …” I bought Kremlin Ball immediately.
Malaparte’s work is so up my alley. His books include wild mood-swings, from poetry to gossip and back. His tone is often heartless. He looks at people in a brutal unsparing way. He exposes them in print. In Kremlin Ball, his description of Moscow in the late 1920s, everyone in it is a real person. He names names. Many of the people we meet in the pages were executed in the following 8 years. (The book wasn’t published until the 1950s, for obvious reasons, but still … there are vested interests, not just in Russia, but in the post-modern lit-crit studies programs in the West, to keep the revelations made in Kremlin Ball out of circulation. The book suggests that nobody “betrayed” the Revolution. The Revolution WAS a betrayal. And remember: Malaparte was a Communist. His observations are even more brutal, then, since hw WANTED to see a happy glorious society and instead he saw rot and corruption, similar to the French court of Louis XVI, right before heads started to roll. Malaparte cruises from party to party, flirting with Soviet ballerinas and wives of generals, and revolutionary hangers-on, taking long walks with Mikhail Bulgakov … it feels like a Soviet version of Truman Capote’s La Cote Basque.
Malaparte demolishes the myth of the proletarian revolution. There’s not a “worker” in sight in this Moscow. Moscow is filled with glittering gleaming nouveau riche grotesques gliding from the ballet to the opera to ballrooms, kissing up to Stalin, gathering around to watch Karakhan play tennis with imported balls (but … I’m confused. Isn’t Russia supposed to be self-sufficient? Why do your tennis balls suck so bad? Can’t the “workers” figure it out? I’m confused.) Revolutionaries like Karakhan were celebrities – with all the privileges that that implies. (Karakhan was, of course, executed just a few years later. Hopefully he is playing tennis in an atheist heaven, where the tennis balls are to his liking.)
The book is a cutting portrait of how power corrupts. There are no exceptions. Farah’s books on African dictatorship show that too. Colonialism does massive damage. But human nature is more damaging. Nobody FORCES you to become a dictator. You can’t blame everything on somebody else. Power corrupts. Nobody can be trusted with power. This should be self-evident but it seems every generation has to learn it again.
Malaparte’s work is queasy-making. He’s a character in his books, cozying up to truly vile people, flirting and bantering and flattering grotesque hangers-on, leeches and wannabes, fascists and murderers – he parties with all of them, but then he trips home at dawn and scribbles down how disgusting everyone is. Like Truman Capote, Malaparte clearly was a good-time sort of guy who got people to trust him. These “corrupt ambitious parvenus” (Malaparte’s words) in the new Soviet aristocracy thought he was their friend. And … in a way … he was.
This is a fascinating film – which could have been a stylistic experiment only – and instead becomes a fascinating marriage of form and content: the form – a very very strict form – leaves space for the “content” (that word has been ruined, but nevertheless). I’m very impressed. I reviewed The Cathedral for Ebert.
From Newsweek: Scenes from the invasion of Poland
From MSN: Friends, foes, mark WWII’s start in Poland
Hitler’s speech on Sept. 1, 1939, from Berlin:
To the defense forces:
The Polish nation refused my efforts for a peaceful regulation of neighborly relations; instead it has appealed to weapons.
Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes. The series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. In order to put an end to this frantic activity no other means is left to me now than to meet force with force.
German defense forces will carry on the battle for the honor of the living rights of the re- awakened German people with firm determination.
I expect every German soldier, in view of the great tradition of eternal German soldiery, to do his duty until the end.
Remember always in all situations you are the representatives of National Socialist Greater Germany!
Long live our people and our Reich!
Hitler reviews the troops in Warsaw, October 5, 1939.
Excerpt from Viktor Klemperer’s stunning diary I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941
September 3, Sunday afternoon
This torture of one’s nerves ever more unbearable. On Friday morning blackout ordered until further notice. We sit in the tiny cellar, the terrible damp closeness, the constant sweating and shivering, the smell of mold, the food shortage, makes everything even more miserable. I try to save butter and meat for Eva and Muschel, to make do myself as far as possible with still unrationed bread and fish. This in itself would all be trivial, but it is all only by the way. What will happen? From hour to hour we tell ourselves, now is the moment when everything is decided, whether Hitler is all-powerful, whether his rule will last indefinitely, or whether it falls now, now.
On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher’s lad came and told us: There had been a radio announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was under way, England and France remained neutral. I said to Eva, then a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us, our life was over. But then we said to one another, that could not possibly be the way things were, the boy had often reported absurd things (he was a perfect example of the way in which people take in news reports). A little later we heard Hitler’s agitated voice, then the usual roaring, but could not make anything out. We said to ourselves, if the report were even only half true they must already be putting out the flags. Then down in town the dispatch of the outbreak of war. I asked several people whether English neutrality had already been declared. Only an intelligent salesgirl in a cigar shop on Chemnitzer Platz said: No – that would really be a joke! At the baker’s, at Vogel’s, they all said, as good as declared, all over in a few days! A young man in front of the newspaper display: The English are cowards, they won’t do anything. Ad thus with variations the general mood, vox populi (butter seller, newspaper man, bill collector of the gas company etc. etc.) In the afternoon read the Fuhrer’s speech. It seemed to me pessimistic as far as the external and the interal position were considered. Also all the regulations pointed and still point to more than a mere punitive expedition against Poland. And now this is the third day like this, it feels as if it has been three years: the waiting, the despairing, hoping, weighing up, not knowing. The newspaper yesterday, Saturday, vague and in fact anticipating a general outbreak of war: England, the attacker – English mobilization, French mobilization, they will bleed to death! etc., etc. But still no declaration of war on their side. Is it coming or will they fail to resist and merely demonstrate weakness?
The military bulletin is also unclear. Talks of successes everywhere, reports no serious opposition anywhere and yet also shows that German troops have nowhere advanced far beyond the frontiers. How does it all fit together? All in all: Reports and measures taken are serious, popular opinion absolutely certain of victory, ten thousand times more arrogant than in ’14. The consequence will either be an overwhelming, almost unchallenged victory, and England and France are castrated minor states, or a catastrophe ten thousand times worse than ’18. And the two of us right in the middle, helpless and probably lost in either case … And yet we force ourselves, and sometimes it even succeeds for a couple of hours, to go on with our everyday life: reading aloud, eating (as best we can), writing, garden. But as I lie down to sleep I think: Will they come for me tonight? Will I be shot, will I be put in a concentration camp?
Waiting in peaceful Dolzschen, cut off from the world, is particularly bad. One listens to every sound, watches every face, pays attention to everything. One learns nothing. One waits for the newspaper and can make nothing of it. At the moment I do tend to think that there will be war with the great powers.
At the butcher an old dear puts her hand on my shoulder and says in a voice full of tears: He has said that he will put on a soldier’s coat again and be a soldier himself, and if he falls, then Goering … A young lady brings me my ration card, looks at me with a friendly expression: Do you still remember me? I studied under you, I’ve married into the family here. — An old gentleman, very friendly, brings the blackout order: Terrible, that it’s war again – but yet one is so patriotic, when I saw a battery leaving yesterday, I wanted more than anything to go with them! No one is outraged by the Russian alliance, people think it is brilliant or an excellent joke – Vogel’s optimism (yesterday: We’ve almost finished off the Poles, the others won’t stir themselves!) is to our benefit in coffee, sausage, tea, soap etc. — Is this the general mood in Germany? Is it founded on facts or on hubris?
The Jewish Community in Dresden inquires whether I want to join it, since it represents the National Association of Jews locally; the Confessing Christians inquire whether I shall remain with them. I replied to the Gruber people that I was and will remain Protestant, I would not reply to the Jewish Community at all.
Note how on September 1 the Fuhrer declared lasting friendship with Russia in two words. Is there really no one in Germany who does not feel a pang of conscience? Once more: Machiavelli was mistaken; there is a line beyond which the separation of morality and politics is unpolitical and has to be paid for. Sooner or later. But can we wait until later?
September 1, 1939
Excerpt from William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941
BERLIN, AUGUST 31 three thirty a.m.
Tonight the great armies, navies, and air forces are all mobilized. Each country is shut off from the other. We have not been able today to get through to Paris or London, or of course to Warsaw, though I did talk to Tess in Geneva. At that, no precipitate action is expected tonight. Berlin is quite normal in appearance this evening. There has been no evacuation of women and children, not even any sandbagging of the windows. We’ll have to wait through still another night, it appears, before we know. And so to bed, almost at dawn.
BERLIN, September 1
At six a.m. Sigrid Schultz – bless her heart – phoned. She said: “it’s happened.” I was very sleepy – my body and mind numbed, paralysed. I mumbled: “Thanks, Sigrid,” and tumbled out of bed. The war is on!
later
It’s a “counter-attack”! At dawn this morning Hitler moved against Poland. It’s a fragrant, inexcusable, unprovoked act of aggression. But Hitler and the High Command call it a “counter-attack”. A grey morning with overhanging clouds. T he people in the street were apathetic when I drove to the Rundfunk for my first broadcast at eight fifteen a.m. Across from the Adlon the morning shift of workers was busy on the new I.G. Farben building just as if nothing had happened. None of the men brought the extras which the newsboys were shouting. Along the east-west axis the Luftwaffe were mounting five big anti-aircraft guns to protect Hitler when he addresses the Reichstag at ten a.m. Jordan and I had to remain at the radio to handle Hitler’s speech for America. Throughout the speech, I thought as I listened, ran a curious strain, as though Hitler himself were dazed at the fix he had got himself into and felt a little desperate about it. Somehow he did not carry conviction and there was much less cheering in the Reichstag than on previous, less important occasions. Jordan must have reacted the same way. As we waited to translate the speech for America, he whispered: “Sounds like his swan song.” It really did. He sounded discouraged when he told the Reichstag that Italy would not be coming into the war because “we are unwiling to call in outside help for this struggle. We will fulfil this task by ourselves.” And yet Paragraph 3 of the Axis military alliance calls for immediate, automatic Italian support with “all its military resources on land, at sea, and in the air.” What about that? He sounded desperate when, referring to Molotov’s speech of yesterday at the Russian ratification of the Nazi-Soviet accord, he said: “I can only underline every word of Foreign Commisar Molotov’s speech.”Tomorrow Britain and France probably will come in and you have your second World War. The British and French tonight sent an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw his troops from Poland or their ambassadors will ask for their passports. Presumably they will get their passports.
Later. Two thirty a.m. – Almost through our first blackout. The city is completely darkened. It takes a little getting used to. You grope around in the pitch-black streets and pretty soon your eyes get used to it. You can make out the whitewashed curbstones. We had our first air-raid alarm at seven p.m. I was at the radio just beginning my script for a broadcast at eight fifteen. The lights went out, and all the German employees grabbed their gas-masks and, not a little frightened, rushed for the shelter. No one offered me a mask, but the wardens insisted that I go to the cellar. In the darkness and confusion I escaped outside and went down to the studios, where I found a small room in which a candle was burning on a table. There I scribbled out my notes. No planes came over. But with the English and French in, it may be different tomorrow. I shall then be in the by no means pleasant predicament of hoping they bomb the hell out of this town without getting me. The ugly shrill of the sirens, the rushing to a cellar with your gas-mask (if you have one), the utter darkness of the night – how will human nerves stand for that long?
One curious thing about Berlin on this first night of the war: the cafes, restaurants, and beer-halls were packed. The people just a bit apprehensive after the air-raid, I felt. Finished broadcasting at one thirty a.m., stumbled a half-mile down the Kaiserdamm in the dark, and finally found a taxi. But another pedestrian appeared out of the dark and jumped in first. We finally shared it, he very drunk and the driver drunker, and both cursing the darkness and the war.
The isolation from the outside world that you feel on a night like this is increased by a new decree issued tonight prohibiting the listening to foreign broadcasts. Who’s afraid of the truth? And no wonder. Curious that not a single Polish bomber got through tonight. But will it be the same with the British and French?
Auden, an ex-pat sitting in New York, wrote the following poem about it. The poem has an interesting history in and of itself. Auden deleted the final two stanzas. (They’re included in the collection called Early Auden and are included below.) Auden proclaimed later that he was ashamed of this poem. Auden edited the famous valedictory line “We must love one another or die” to “We must love one another and die”, a totally different meaning, indicative of his conflicting feelings about this poem. Auden didn’t like that it sounded like he was patting himself on the back for his own humanism. E.M. Forster declared that because Auden wrote the words “We must love one another or die” he would follow Auden anywhere. Forster’s was a common response to the poem, and maybe one of the reasons Auden disliked it so much. But still, it’s an astonishing piece of work and it stands as a document of that day: Auden’s feelings about it, his editing of it, his rejection of it, is also part and parcel of those horrible chaotic end-times.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Myrna Loy in the delightful funny Double Wedding. Dress by Adrian.
This is some pretty bleak shit. But also entertaining. Dark. Weird. I had no idea what was going to happen from one moment to the next. I reviewed for Ebert.
— My good friend Charlie Taylor is on fire in the LA Review of Books, reviewing Steve Erickson’s American Stutter.
— Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney. Like everybody else on the planet, I read and loved Rooney’s Normal People (I did read it a full year after everyone else read it, because I was being a contrarian and was resisting the zeitgeist. Then I read it and thought, “Oh. Okay. That’s why everyone is talking about this book.”) If I had more free time, I’d probably finish Conversations with Friends in a day, the way I did with Normal People. Her stuff is compulsively readable. The “plots” are really just the interactions among 20something Dubliners, and her social observations come from the inside. She’s in the thick of it. Also, it’s interesting: there’s no subtext. She doesn’t do that. She just describes what happens. Sometimes you get a glimpse of the interior life, but her prose is kind of flat, surface-level, which – interestingly enough – makes it all the more moving. The final pages of Normal People, for example, made me cry.
— Midnight in the Century, by Victor Serge. Victor Serge’s novel – but really not a novel – about being arrested by Stalin in 1933, and sent into exile. Serge was an insider, a revolutionary, who moved BACK to Russia after the Revolution so he could be a part of it. And he saw early – late 20s – almost before anyone else – what was happening, that a Strong Man had arisen, and that something was being unleashed that could not be UN-unleashed. Serge remained a staunch Socialist, but he was one of the first who called out what was really going on, and he was a VICTIM of the purges, and was hounded, chased, arrested multiple times, fled, etc. because of this regime. His work is essential. I’m almost done with it.
— Divorcing, by Susan Taubes. Never read this before and it’s blowing me away. Her tone is confessional but chilly – hot AND cold, avant-garde and impressionistic. The knowledge of the author’s suicide – right after the book was published – makes the reading experience eerie. It’s sad. This is an amazing book. Taubes was married to a fairly famous man, and this is the story of their divorce. Taubes was an immigrant from Hungary: her family fled with Hitler’s rise to power, they felt the threat to Hungary (boy, were they right). She was displaced, she was 10 when she came to America. So this is the story of a divorce, but it is also an immigrant story. Seriously: this was an unfairly ignored book, unfairly forgotten. It feels pretty major. It was resurrected by New York Review Books Classics. I highly recommend it.
— Another friend has hit it out of the park with a deeply researched piece about the rumor that John Wayne had to be “restrained by six security guards” when Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage at the Oscars in Marlon Brando’s place. The rumor about Wayne has been around since the early ’80s and was recently resurrected because the Academy finally apologized to Littlefeather last month for the treatment she received. Farran is not whitewashing Wayne’s attitude to the event, but she doesn’t believe the rumor, and she used her critical thinking skills, her research abilities, AND reached out to Scott Eyman – who wrote the celebrated biography of John Wayne – to ask about it (Eyman hadn’t included the “six security guards” incident in his book. There’s a reason why.) Anyway: Farran’s essay is more than worth your time. It’s real investigative journalism.
This story is developing …
