#howard hughes
Ginger Rogers and then fiancee Howard Hughes. Read all about Hughes’ mysterious presence in Hollywood here: https://www.classichollywoodcentral.com/background/howard-hughes-and-hollywood/
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While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos: “Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance … rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human … To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. Technology is the so arranging of the world that it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing. Machine-made consciousness, man content to serve as an obliging cog, is unable to connect the past to the present, the present to the past. The failure to do so breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.
(Image Credit: Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke)
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It’s not just that the concept of Western civilization is bankrupt, racist bullshit … it’s that it’s much fresher bullshit than you might think. Kwame Anthony Appiah provides an excellent primer: “European and American debates today about whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the West … If the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe—something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if Western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.
(Image Credit: The Plumb Pudding in Danger, James Gillray)
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Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Saunders, Whitehead: the literary luminaries of the nineties made their names on a fantastical escapism, more determined to entertain than they were to provoke. Now that the world’s gone even more to shit, Sam Sacks wonders if their appeal has worn thin: “the central dilemma of the nostalgist’s aesthetic: Can a novelist both recapture the innocent pleasures of storytelling and at the same time illuminate the complex realities of experience? In stable and prosperous times, truth and entertainment can overlap. But periods of crisis wedge them apart, and being faithful to one compromises the other … I find myself missing ambivalence—a quality that rarely squares with entertainment. There must be precious few readers who don’t already feel well disposed to tales of World War II heroes, fugitive slaves, and Abraham Lincoln.”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.
(Ilustration: Nathan Fox)
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Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday, though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the great written ruses of the past fifty years, isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. ‘I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.
(Image Credits: By Nick Cunard/Rex/Shutterstock (Lehrer), Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images (Albert), Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images (Frey), Steve Helber/A.P./Rex/Shutterstock (Erderly), from Bettmann/Getty Images (Irving, Cooke).)
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Runway Behind Us
Runway behind us is only useful as a memory. The TWA Hotel presents a series of memories that anyone can inhabit for a while…60s pop culture, whimsical architecture, a little aviation history, and a travel experience to remember.
Howard Hughes, pre Desert Inn, nails, banana nut ice cream etc.
click to purchase prints etc etc
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Melvin and Howard (1980). The story of hard-luck Melvin E. Dummar, who claimed to have received a will naming him an heir to the fortune of Howard Hughes.
There’s a warmth and a charm to this film that tended to make up for some really strange narrataive choices, like having the crux of the story and the titular dynamic play out only really in the last twenty minutes of the film (excluding the opening, of course). I appreciated some of it’s themes, and I definitely appreciated a young Mary Steenburgen tap dancing to The Rolling Stones, but I don’t think overall it really landed in the place it wanted to. 6.5/10.
Abduction and Murder: The Case of Little Sophie Hook
Just after 7am on 30th July 1995, 55 year old Gerry Davies set off from home to begin his usual dog walk down North Shore Beach in Llandudno, Wales. However, what was normally a peaceful morning routine would turn out to be a day he would never forget.
While walking along the beach, he spotted what appeared to be a discarded mannequin nearby. However, when the strange behaviour of his dogs led him to inspect more closely, he discovered the “marble white” body of a little girl. Gerry was quickly able to determine that she was deceased, at which point he used his t-shirt to cover up her unclothed body before running to the nearest phone box to alert the police.
The body was identified as that of 7 year old Sophie Hook, who was snatched from her uncle’s garden just hours before, in the early hours of 30th July. At the time, she was having a sleepover in a tent with her cousins.
Wearing her Winnie the Pooh nightie and pink floral socks, Sophie was wrapped up and sleeping soundly when her uncle carried out one final check on the children at 12:40am. Two hours later, one of the cousins woke and saw the time to be 2:30am, noting that Sophie was still sleeping. However, when they woke again at 7:15am, Sophie was gone. Realising that she was nowhere to be found, the family reached out to police at around 8:20am - at which point, her body had already been found.
Police were quick to arrest a 30-year-old local man named Howard Hughes. Standing out at a height of 6 ft 8 inches, Hughes had already drawn attention to himself for other more sinister reasons.
Hours prior to Sophie’s disappearance, Hughes was seen by several witnesses lingering on a path which overlooked her location. One woman actually found him hiding in the bushes, and he told her he was looking for money he had dropped. The path was so close to the property that he would have been able to eavesdrop in on the children’s conversations, and was therefore aware they would be sleeping in the garden that night.
Hughes already had a long history of offences, including accusations of assaulting girls aged between 3 and 9 years old, and a search of his home following Sophie’s death turned up a collection of indecent images of children. He was subsequently charged with her abduction, rape and murder.
An autopsy report documented that Sophie had sustained injuries with such force that her upper right arm and ankle had been broken, and she was covered in bruises consistent with being gripped and punched. She had also suffered internal bleeding and had been violently sexually assaulted. Her injuries were likened to those received in a high-impact car collision, and sickeningly, most were sustained while she was still alive. Dr Donald Waite - the pathologist conducting the autopsy - further explained that Sophie had endured so much pain that she had bitten down hard on both sides of her tongue and the inside of her lip, leaving wounds. Eventually, she was strangled to death in an ordeal which lasted up to 3 minutes, and was then dumped into the sea.
On 24th June 1996, Hughes’ trial began. In the absence of any forensic evidence tying him to the crime, the jury heard the testimony of three witnesses - one being Hughes’ own father. Gerald Hughes addressed the court and spoke of how his son had confided to him that he had murdered Sophie, although Howard went on to deny this confession. Another man named Jonathan Carroll told the jury he had seen Hughes lugging a sack on the night of Sophie’s murder, and he had caught glimpses of a nude body. Carroll also admitted that he himself was burglarising a property at the time he saw Hughes, therefore willingly implicating himself in a different crime in order to do the right thing. Third witness Michael Guidi - already convicted of child sex offences - recalled having a conversation with Hughes a few years prior about the defendant’s fantasy to “rape a girl of 4 or 5”.
In July 1996, Howard Hughes was convicted of all charges and rightfully sentenced to life imprisonment. On 24th November 2002, it was announced that he would have to
serve a minimum imprisonment of 50 years before consideration for parole. This ruling means that Hughes will only be eligible for release in 2045, at the age of 80.
Howard Hughes studying a script on the set of his 1943 Western, THE OUTLAW.
Photo by Bob Landy for Life magazine.
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