We Accept You. One of Us!

I loved looking through the deadbeat file at Dad's office. Threatening correspondence, returned checks and thrashed prints wove many a tale of deranged obsession. Back in the dark ages before video 16mm prints were a valuable commodity. Rental library prints were numbered and titles never appeared on the cases in case of a break in. There was an alarm system and the steel doors to the library each had two deadbolts. Films were rented only if there were an approved application on file and individual renters were usually required to leave a deposit. One of my assignments when individuals came into the office to rent a film was to slip out via the back door to the parking lot and make note of the make, model and license of the customer's car. Sometimes, despite these measures, films didn't come back and deposit checks bounced.

Cliff and Dave were former college football players. Cliff served on the Signal Hill Police Force and Dave was a school cop for the Compton School District. They were film buffs and in exchange for being big, black and uniformed my dad would give them prints. My dad usually got an indifferent response when he contacted local authorities regarding rental prints shipped to different parts of the country that never came back. Cliff would play the professional courtesy card and pick up the phone and call a local police department and ask for the captain and explain that he was Officer Williams from the Signal Hill PD. More often then not the print would miraculously turn up via special delivery within a day or two.

Vincent Dupree was a Paulette Goddard freak and would drive in from San Pedro to rent prints. Goddard, probably most famous for having been married to Charlie Chaplin, was actually born Marion Pauline Levy in Queens. She was born either in 1905 or 1910. She strove to conceal her age as well as her Jewish ancestry. Vincent after bouncing a third check and being late on returning a print was 86ed. My dad accepted that film freaks would bounce the occasional check or return films late but he also believed in the power of the obsession and that many collectors would cut off their kids' food before they'd burn bridges with a film source, so while they were difficult, the steady stream of income usually made it worthwhile. And when one of the freaks really hit bottom, Dad had the cops.

A print of Second Chorus was shipped to a Mrs. Campbell to show at her church. The order had come in the mail and was accompanied by a cashier's check. The film was over two weeks late being returned and the phone number on the application was disconnected. Mrs. Campbell's paperwork went on the top of the deadbeats folder and I noticed that the address looked familiar and figured out that Mrs. Campbell's church was coincidentally located at the same address as the residence of Mr. Vincent Dupree. My dad called me Sherlock Holmes and even though, per the separate edicts of his wife and my mother, we were supposed to have the diet plate at Burl's we headed over to Micheli's on Las Palmas for spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread. Then we walked up and down Hollywood Blvd. Dad quizzed me on all the stars on the sidewalk and we went to Larry Edmond's, the movie bookstore.

My dad, long before the Internet, created a 500 plus page film catalog every two years or so and between the phone book sized publications, supplements of about 30 pages would come out a couple times a year. We prowled Edmond's bookstore for pressbooks he could cut up and kept an eye out for new reference works. The gold standard was Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion. There are still dog-eared copies of the first 1965 edition and most of the subsequent volumes on shelves at my office. I have every edition up until about the 1990s by which time my dad's eyes were too bad, even using a magnifying glass, to read the small type. I started then to use the Internet Movie Database and print for him whatever information he needed in an 18 point font.

We also browsed the three story Pickwick Books a few blocks east where often coffee table film books with photos he could cut out were remaindered. If Dad were feeling particularly defiant of his second wife, we'd conclude the day with a hot fudge sundae at C.C. Browns. I knew I was pressing my luck given the lunch and the sundae but my mom had reminded me about fifty times to hit up the old man for some dough for a dress for my graduation from Riverside Drive Elementary School. Emboldened by my Paulette Goddard detective work, I asked and was rewarded with a twenty.

I was thrilled to be on the cusp of escaping Riverside Drive Elementary School where I had been left behind to languish with the misfits and the lamebrains while the best and the brightest, including my heart throb, the dreamy Paul Landsburg, had been promoted a semester earlier to Millikan Junior High. We were summoned to the auditorium for a preparatory chat with the principal, Mr. Alviani. The first thing he told us was that the boys had to wear a coat and a tie. And not a clip-on tie. A boy had no business starting junior high unless he could manage a real tie. As for the girls, the dresses were to be no more than one inch above the knee and with this he thumped a tape measure against the podium.

He noted that we were the last class that would ever graduate in February and there was another confluent important event that should help set the tone for the ceremony. “What milestone, boys and girls, am I talking about?” “Woodstock!” Mr. Alviani glared. “The Smothers Brothers got canceled?” “This is serious boys and girls,” screeched Mr. Alviani. “The moratorium!” came a voice from the back. “We could just cancel the ceremony right now,” Mr. Alviani snapped. Some smart-alack yelled out, “Tiny Tim Married Miss Vicki.” “The moon, you pathetic nincompoops!” Mr. Alviani exploded. “We walked on the moon. A man walked on the G-damn moon and all you can think about is sass. And if you think they're going tolerate this sass at Millikan Junior High, you have go another think coming boys and girls. Yes indeed you do.”

The girls were all getting their dresses from a neighborhood shop on Riverside Drive called “The Gunny Sack” or from the newly opened, and so cool it made our hearts go pitty pat, Judy's at Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. My mother insisted we hit Orbach's in Panorama City first. In the teen section there were only two size sixteen dresses and I hated them both but my mom said the price was right and was disgusted when both were too snug. She dragged me upstairs to the woman's section. There were cute dresses in 6 and 8 but the 14s and 16s were matronly and I started to sob so pathetically my mother didn't go into her usual “go on a diet” rant. We tried Judy's and they didn't even carry sizes above a 12. My mother hadn't even finished enunciating the word “graduation” when the lady at the Gunny Sack looked me up and down and shook her head.

My mother realized that the only alternative was to have a dress made and said I would have to ask my old man for more dough. We went to “Sir Richard's Salon” on Van Nuys Blvd. and I was measured by Sir Richard, sporting striped bell bottoms and a snow white pompadour, himself. He said he usually made gowns and evening wear so he didn't have any material appropriate for a graduation dress. He said he felt for my mother and would charge only $20 if we brought in our own fabric. Mom took me to Quigley's and the cheapest material was a rough cotton of the sort I would later buy in huge quantities for numerous failed home economics class attempts to sew a gym bag. I chose turquoise yardage and conned my mom into springing for a machine made indian braid trim for the waistline and hem. We dropped the acquisitions at Sir Richard's along with a magazine photo of Judy Carne in a granny style dress with a cinch waist and puffed sleeves.

My dad honked for me in the driveway and my mother reminded me to make sure I collect for the addition expense incurred by the custom graduation dress. We stopped at the El Portal Guest Home, on Cahuenga, a contractor with county mental health services, to deliver some films. Dad honked at the steel gate and then an attendant came out and opened it. My dad never let me get out of the car but I craned my neck and once in a while spotted patients in housecoats or baggy pajamas shuffling between the buildings. The first recreation coordinator was a real film buff and he said that the audience was usually so thoroughly tranked that it didn't much matter what he ran. He loved Antonioni and Bergman and even though my dad advised him against it, he ordered a print of Alain Resnais' holocaust documentary “Night and Fog.” He returned a stack of prints to the office on a Friday and said that it was his last day. The screening of “Night and Fog” had gone badly and he had been fired. His replacement was extremely careful to choose only family films.

The cops came in with the print of Second Chorus. They'd taken a Signal Hill squad car to San Pedro and knocked on the door. They heard some shuffling towards the rear of the house and circled to find Vincent Dupree scooting out the backdoor. There was a jump in their story from their apprehension of Vincent to the actual retrieval of the print and when I asked if they'd used their guns they just chuckled and filled the trunk of the police car with musicals.

My dad put the print of Second Chorus on the inspection machine and it came up 800 feet, about fifteen minutes, short. He put it on the projector and discovered that every scene with Paulette Goddard had been excised. He sent me to get Dupree's file from the “Deadbeat” folder and we pulled out prints of Roman Scandals, Pot 'o Gold and The Young in Heart and put them on the inspection machine. Paulette Goddard no longer appeared in any of them.

My friend Jerry was the first kid I ever met who was a crazy about movies as I was. I'd given him a Budget Films catalog and he'd x'ed out the films he had no interest in with a big black marker. The films he was DYING to see were circled in red and the films he would consider if the red films were unavailable were marked in green. On the inside of the front cover, and, I thought somewhat arrogantly, over the picture of my dad, Jerry, had written in big purple marker “FREAKS” which I explained to him was long out of distribution and that my dad didn't have.

There was a graduation party at Nancy Vaughan's house mainly dedicated to the playing of Spin the Bottle and Jerry and I were wise enough to know that in our cases this would only result in humiliation. The Spin the Bottle Party was technically for the whole class and it was rumored that the smart boys who'd started junior high early would be attending, but we knew we weren't really welcome. Jerry said we should have our own party at my house and watch some movies. My wussy cousin Beth had been disturbed one time too many at a scary movie and my mom had told my dad to not let me bring home any more films. I told my mom that there was a graduation party at Nancy's house but that it was also her birthday so I'd have to bring a gift. I said if I could bring some movies home, Jerry would bring the snacks and we'd skip the party so she wouldn't have to buy Nancy a birthday present and she agreed.

In the very back aisle, almost hidden between the boxing and the archery films was a rack of features that were not part of the rental library. They were in cardboard cartons and not fiber shipping cases like the rest of the features. The films weren't numbered but the titles were written on masking tape and always abbreviated. I realized years later that these prints weren't assigned numbers so they would appear to be items Dad was just innocently “storing” for someone else and not part of his library. “SNGRN” was Singing in the Rain. “CSBLCA” was Casablanca. “WZDOZ” was “The Wizard of Oz” and CZKN was Citizen Kane. This was referred to as the “special” rack, as “special” as the wads of cash it generated which my father kept hidden from my stepmother. I was allowed to watch any of these that I wanted at the office but I was not permitted to take any of these films home or mention that they were in Dad's possession. I noticed a new print on a bottom shelf. “FRKS” I tore the box open. It was indeed the Tod Browning feature which was still banned in Great Britain and incredibly difficult to find in the U.S.

I switched the print with a black and white print of a color western that I knew no one would ever rent and added the fiber case to the stack of titles I was taking for our alternative party for two. I called Jerry the second I got home to tell him what I'd scored. He waited behind the cypress in the driveway until my mother and Sumner left on their regular date and then demanded I show it immediately, refusing to wait until graduation night. Freaks is not a horror film. It is a stupid murder mystery but the cast is comprised of genuine circus freaks and includes “the human skeleton,” a bearded lady, a couple of “armless wonders” and the Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. The Hilton Sisters starred also in a title from the Budget Films International Classics collection, called “Chained for Life” in which one of the girls commits, unbeknownst to the other, a murder. Freaks also featured Prince Randian who was known as the “human torso” and propelled himself on a primitive skateboard and rolled cigarettes with his nose. A pair of microcephalics were referred to in the film as “pinheads” and in perhaps the most famous scene, the Koo Koo Bird Girl, who suffered from Virchow-Seckel syndrome (known as bird-headed dwarfism) dances on a table.

Freaks' main character is Cleopatra, a corrupt trapeze artist who upon learning that one of the midgets stands to inherit a fortune, contrives to marry him, all the while carrying on a lusty affair with Hercules, the strongman. In the original version, the freaks castrate Hercules. The emasculation appears off camera but it is obvious what the vengeful freaks have been up to when Hercules speaks in a falsetto. This scene was excised by MGM before the film's release and is apparently lost forever. The freaks, at the film's climax, perform a ritual that transforms Cleopatra, by melting the flesh of her hands so that they resemble webbed feet and tarring and feathering her from the waist down, into the “Duck Woman.” The ceremony complete, the freaks chant, “We accept you. We accept you. One of us!”

Jerry hurried me as I warmed up the amplifier and threaded the projector. The freaks of Freaks are still etched indelibly but for us, the story was so lame it mitigated the shock factor. My cousin Beth had gone through a lives of the saints phase and she read me lots of mortification stories and showed me pictures of nuns in caskets. Jerry and I shared a penchant for Ripley's Believe it or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records and I think we found after the initial shock a weird comfort. The existence of such anomalies made our own oddness seem kind of small potatoes.

My mom took me over to Sir Richard's to pick up my dress and it looked nothing like the Judy Carne picture. It was a-line and the braid had been used to create a nehru type collar. Mr. Richard explained that a fitted waist was not slenderizing and that the collar drew attention to my pretty face. I hated the dress but my mother said I should be happy because he was a professional designer and this special creation was quite slimming.

My parents both took off work for the ceremony and, although she denied it was because she was seeing my dad and said it was just in honor of the auspicious occasion, Mom went for an emergency Thursday night comb-out by Mr. Al Lepré at Miss Carney's Beauty Salon. I also noticed that she would not have passed muster with Mr. Alviani's tape measure but thanks to Sir Richard's decision to conceal my pudgy thighs, I didn't even have to squat to position the hemline closer to my knees like most of the other girls did. Someone read some poem about the moon landing and then there was a speech about how because we were the last class to graduate in February the fate of the universe rested in our hands. The chorus sang “America the Beautiful” and Jerry had pressured Mr. Aliviani for a solo. Jerry had chosen an aria but compromised when Mr. Alviani said it was “The Star Spangled Banner,” or nothing. Mr. Alviani did raise his eyebrows a nonce when Jerry arrived in a white dinner jacket, red silk cummerbund and patent leather slip-ons.

Jerry showed up right after dinner on Friday night. He had a tiny bag with two apples and some dry Jewish cookies which he conspicuously unpacked in the kitchen in front of my approving mother. He also noted how delicious she'd looked at the graduation ceremony and put her at enough ease to retreat to her bedroom at the other end of the house. I was pretty disappointed with the lousy snacks after all the trouble I'd been through to get the print of Freaks but he rushed me out to the rumpus room. There was a separate entrance from the driveway and Jerry opened the door to reveal three big bags from Von's with Coke, Lay's Potato Chips, Mal-o-mars and a couple dozen Three Musketeers. He'd even mixed some Lipton's Onion Soup Mix in a pint of sour cream and made dip. I noted that I only had two other features besides Freaks and while it was a huge improvement over Jewish cookies, there was a bit too much food for six hours. He winked and perused the films I'd brought home. He said to put on Mr. Roberts and we'd watch Freaks again later.

Jack Lemmon had just thrown Jimmy Cagney's palm tree overboard and there was knocking on the door from outside. I opened it to find five of the boys who had been promoted to middle school when Jerry and I had been judged unworthy, including the apple of my eye, Paul Landsberg himself. Jerry was in the same Hebrew school class as Paul and had told him about Freaks for which the whole group decided to blow off Nancy Vaughan's make out party. I rewound Mr. Roberts and threaded up Freaks. Jerry and I talked sarcastically and gorged on snacks but the rest of the audience was stone silent and didn't touch a single bite. When the film was over Paul burst into tears and the others struggled to contain their sobs. Paul's dad came and picked up the boys. The bikes were picked up by their owners' parents the next day and a few dads even knocked on the door to have a word with my mom and Jerry said he guessed it was worse for the boys to get a bit shaken up than to stick their tongues down some girl's throat.
My dad picked me up and loaded my films into the trunk. I puttered around the office waiting for a chance to switch the print of Freaks back into the carton and return it to the special shelf. The cops came in with a pillowcase containing a huge tangle of Paulette Goddard scenes. They told my dad that he wouldn't have to worry about Dupree or any of his aliases messing with him again. I saw my dad load a bunch of features into the trunk of the cop car. After Dad had pulled out all the Goddard features to spice back in the excised scenes I sneaked Freaks back to where it belonged. I noticed that the prints of the musicals SNGRN and WZDOZ were gone. The booking sheets for each individual library print had notes regarding the condition and on each of the Paulette Goddard prints I had to note with a big black marking pen “Splicy.” We were locking the steel doors and my dad said, “Did you put that print of Freaks back?” I nearly fainted but he just said, “Your mom said it scared the shit out of those sissys,” and he laughed.

Way more important to me than the moonwalk was that for the first time, girl students at L.A. Schools would be permitted to wear pants. My dad took me to a shop in North Hollywood and the lady brought out a whole bunch of pants and they weren't bad and it was amazing that they all fit. The shop was one of the first Lane Bryant's and it wasn't until several months later that I actually realized what the specialty was.

We had a few days off before we started Millikan. My mother took me to Dr. Weiner's office with her on Wednesday, her short day, and I read magazines in the waiting room. We went for lunch at the Brighton Coffee Shop and then walked over to Saks. We went to the mark down racks and there were some blouses that were made in France. They were made of soft thick muslin in a deep blue, shot through with white. The seams were hand finished and the cut was like an artist smock with big blonde wood buttons. There was delicate hand embroidery around the the cuffs and collars. They were too artsy I guess for the Beverly Hills crowd and the beautiful garments were marked down to ten dollars. My mom purchased one for herself in small and let me buy the large one. We never wore them at the same time, united in having no interest in mother/daughter dressing. Thirty five years later when I was packing up my mom's stuff to move her to assisted living, I noticed the well worn smock was still hanging in her closet.

I knew that seventh graders were referred to as “scrubs” and subjected to endless humiliations by their upper-classmen but I was still pretty excited on the first day of Millikan. I was wearing pants and my new French blouse and I found my homeroom pretty easily. I was told that we had two weeks to purchase our gym suits so there was a bit of reprieve from having to get undressed in a locker room. My homeroom teacher gave me a list of my classes and a locker number and combination. We were sent out to find our lockers and practice opening and closing them but every time a kid got the locker open an eighth grade boy would jump out from a doorway and slam it closed and scream “Scrub!” The din rattled me and I couldn't get the numbers lined up or figure out if they meant left and right from the locker's POV or my own. Someone grabbed my combination and when I turned to protest, it was Paul Landsberg. “Hey scrub,” he said and then he showed me how to open the locker.


© 2011 Layne Murphy