Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Dick Powell

The Roaring Twenties descended on Hollywood as it became the film capital of the world, with dozens of young men and women—each dreaming of stardom—arriving daily from across America. It was an era of great affluence, as mansions were erected and stars drove around in made-to-order automobiles. It was also a time of cultural ferment and innovation in Pre-Code Hollywood. The film industry’s financial hub was still on Manhattan’s Wall Street, but its creative production center was in California. Directors could get away with almost anything—providing that their silent flickers made money. Hundreds of good-looking men came from the plains of Utah or the ports of New Jersey, hoping they would get cast in movies based on their looks alone. The women did the same, especially if they’d won a beauty contest such as Miss Indiana. Clara Bow and John Gilbert were typical of those hopefuls. Legends such as Valentino and Wallace Reid had arrived, as had Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Pola Negri. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., already wore their crowns. Studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rose out of the heap, as did Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. At the beginning, studios ruled by men such as Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner had near monopolistic control, from pre-production to release where they often controlled distribution. By 1925, 50 million Americans were going to movie houses every week. That was roughly half of the nation’s population. In poorer areas, a movie ticket cost ten cents. 

A lot of people in the film industry, both male and female, have claimed that they discovered the young Clark Gable. B.P. Schulberg, a pioneer film producer and studio executive, might have made the claim himself, but he never did. However, he did cast Clark in a minor role in the silent film White Man in 1924. Schulberg was born in Connecticut in 1892. As soon as he finished his schooling, he headed west to Hollywood, where he broke into the film industry. After some success, he founded Preferred Pictures, which he built around the silent screen star Katherine MacDonald. He also hired Clara Bow, 18, giving her a three-month option. He may not have claimed Clark as a discovery, but he had found “The It Girl,” the bob-haired flapper who rose to super stardom as the late 1920s rolled on. Schulberg, as a marketing genius, dubbed Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart.” A fixture linked with Paramount, he did much to promote the film careers of such legends as Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, and the French star Maurice Chevalier. In the early 1930s, he discovered child star Shirley Temple, who became a box office champ. However, by 1950, the film industry shoved him aside. He suffered a stroke and retired to Florida, where he died at the age of 65 in 1957. 

Clara Bow continued to date Clark Gable on occasion, but he grew disappointed with her when she vetoed him as her leading man in her next pictures. The first was Mantrap in 1926; the second was “It” in 1927. Producer B. P. Schulberg felt that Bow had great potential to become a major star as the Roaring Twenties moved on. He had tried to promote her as “The Brooklyn Bonfire,” but that label didn’t stick. After he read Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis, he became convinced that its film adaptation would shoot Bow into the upper ranks. He met with Victor Fleming who signed to helm the project. The movie became popular and helped make Bow a star. Its main detractor, ironically, was Sinclair Lewis himself. “I did not recognize my book from this film.” After Clark went to a movie house to see Mantrap, he discussed it with William Haines. “She let Ernest Torrence be her leading man. That’s insane. I would have been terrific in the role. Torrence might be better cast as her drunken uncle.” Producer Schulberg came up with another idea for Clara Bow that he thought would go over even bigger. “It” originated as a novel by Elinor Glyn. Schulberg was right about “It.” This star vehicle for Bow turned her into “The It Girl” of the flapper era. When asked to define “It,” she told the press, “The term is defined as the quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force.” 

Within New York theatrical circles, producer Arthur Hopkins was known as “The Sphinx of Broadway” because he said little, his facial expressions indicating his approval or dislike. He earned a reputation for casting unknown actors in key roles, notably Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Spencer Tracy, and Edward G. Robinson. Clark Gable could be added to that list. Hopkins had also cast a spunky New England redhead, Katharine Hepburn, in the play These Days. Hopkins gave Clark Gable his first big break when he cast him in a minor role with 22 other actors in the Broadway play Machinal, a drama which opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on September 7, 1926. In spite of the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929, Hollywood in the upcoming 1930s entered its Golden Age. After a long and difficult climb up the Tinseltown ladder, rung by rung, Clark Gable suddenly found himself cast opposite such leading ladies as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Norma Shearer. He became so well known that a sarcastic new reprimand “Who do you think you are? Clark Gable?” swept across the country. 

Clark Gable would soon be sustaining affairs with such leading ladies as Mary Astor and Marion Davies, the mistress of the immensely wealthy William Randolph Hearst. Another of his leading ladies, Helen Hayes, claimed, “There are only two actors in Hollywood that I would leave my husband for—Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.” Actors who had previously been allocated only small, sometimes uncredited roles, were becoming stars. Notable among them were Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, William Powell, and Constance Bennett. Legends were being born: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Mae West. From vaudeville emerged such stars as Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Alice Faye, and Bob Hope. Paramount was not the only studio challenging MGM. Competition was intense from Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and Columbia, too. Film historians rate 1939 as the greatest year in the history of filmmaking. In that benchmark year, Gone With the Wind would win the gold as its Best Picture. 1939 also loomed large in Clark’s book of memories. He married Carole Lombard, his third wife, defining for the world at large as “the love of my life.”

Howard Hughes wasn't too enthralled with Dick Powell's fiancé Mary Brian. “She’s a nice girl,” he told Lewis Milestone. “A nice, open, honest face. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Nice blue eyes. But she has the same emotion in every scene. Nice.” “But she’s from Texas like yourself,” Milestone said. “She’s not like any Texas broad I’ve ever met,” Hughes said before turning away. Mary Brian would re-enter Hughes’s life once again several years later, when her lover, Cary Grant, announced that he was going to marry her, angering Hughes. In later life, her career over, Brian took up painting portraits as a hobby. One of her first paintings was of Hughes, depicting him as a giant prick. She ultimately got her revenge on both Cary Grant and Hughes simply by outliving them, dying in 2002. She guarded good memories of her former suitor Dick Powell, though. Bogart had escorted Joan Blondell to the premiere of Night Nurse and later spoke about her to his best friend, actor Kenneth McKenna. “She’s my kind of broad. I like her tremendously, but I’m not in love with her. Besides, Dick Powell is always knocking on her door.” 

Had casting gone differently, Clark Gable might have ruled over the kingdom of Warner Brothers instead of being crowned at MGM. Director Mervyn LeRoy had been intrigued with Clark as an actor ever since he sat through his performance in The Last Mile. LeRoy contacted him the following day and Clark agreed to shoot a screen test for the upcoming film Little Caesar. Variety had already announced that Edward G. Robinson had agreed to play the title role of the Chicago mob boss Rico Bandello, nicknamed “Little Caesar.” Glenda Farrell would star as the female lead of Olga Stassoff. She was instructed to appear in the test in tandem with Clark. After Gable completed his screen test, LeRoy set up an appointment with Darryl F. Zanuck and Jack Warner to watch it. At the end, Zanuck gloomily predicted, “The lug will never make it… he's crude as hell.” “I hate that big-eared son of a bitch, but keep him as long as he makes money,” Louis B. Mayer told to Irving Thalberg. After his departure from MGM, Mayer was frank in his appraisal of Clark. “I couldn’t stand the son of a bitch. But he made money for the studio. MGM made $25 million when I loaned Gable to David O. Selznick for Gone With the Wind.”

Before there was a Louella Parsons, before there was a Hedda Hopper, there was Adela Rogers St. Johns. A daughter of Los Angeles born in 1894, she was a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. She is best known for her reporting about Hollywood movie stars in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was the major writer for Photoplay magazine. It is said that she fell in love with the screen image of Clark Gable when she saw his performance in The Painted Desert, a 1931 Pre-Code Western starring William Boyd. Gable phoned her two days later and asked to meet privately with her. She always wrote glowingly of him. “Clark Gable is the same man on or off the screen, which is true of only a few stars. He has a charm that no psychologist can explain. It probably is the same feeling that Eve had when she first spotted Adam in the Garden of Eden.” In a subsequent article for Liberty magazine, she referred to him as “The Great God Gable. A year ago, not a soul in Hollywood had heard of him. Today, he ranks ahead of any established favorites.” Clark and St. Johns were soon seen riding around Los Angeles in a $10,000 automobile presented to him by press baron William Randolph Hearst, the boss of St. Johns.

Once, in one of her columns, St. Johns ran a widely publicized quote from Clark: “I’m no Adonis. I’m as American as the telephone poles I used to climb to make a living. Other men see me on the screen making love to Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, or Joan Crawford. They say that if I can do it, so can they. They go home and make passionate love to their wives.” The “New Romance” referred to in the March 7, 1936 edition of Liberty was Clark Gable’s romance with Carole Lombard, “The Queen of Screwball Comedy.” The two leading gossip columnists, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons wrote extensively about it. As author E.J. Fleming said, “Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little remembered even there, but as general managers and as heads of publicity at MGM, they were the fixers of Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1920s through the 1940s.” Some secrets were relatively minor, such as Joan Crawford’s adulterous affair with Clark Gable, who was also married. Sometimes, they were more serious, such as when Wallace Beery murdered Ted Healy, the creator of The Three Stooges. When MGM executive Paul Bern was found dead in the home he shared with his newlywed wife, Jean Harlow, Strickling was the first man called. When Clark made his co-star, Loretta Young, pregnant on the set of Call of the Wild (1935), the urgent message went out: “Get Strickling on the phone and get Young out of town until she has Gable’s kid.”

When stardom finally came to Clark, it arrived fast and furious. By December of that year, his name was familiar to movie-goers across the nation. His on-screen (and sometimes off-screen) lovers included Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, Fay Wray, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Greta Garbo, and Joan Blondell, among others. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was still married to Ria Langham—at least officially. At this point in his career, since Clark had been elevated to the status of leading man, the management at MGM was ferociously committed to protecting his reputation. Mayer himself, horrified at the possibility of one of his star’s public involvement in a sex scandal, began defining both Clark and Spencer Tracy as “walking time bombs.”  In his bachelor days, James Stewart seduced as many beautiful women as Clark Gable himself. As he claimed, “My bachelor years were wonderful. Boy, did I have some good times.” Unlike the straitlaced Dick Powell, James Stewart was not the boy scout he seemed. Stewart’s seductions read like a Who’s Who from the golden age: Wendy Barrie, Diana Barrymore, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Mitzi Gaynor, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Jeanette MacDonald, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young. 

Gable had met Stewart when they had co-starred in Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Jean Harlow. One late afternoon, he phoned Clark to ask if he’d help him out of a dilemma he had become trapped in: Confusing his calendar dates, he had invited both Harlow and Patricia Wilder on the same round of nightclub hops through Hollywood. At that point in his bachelor life, Stewart’s main interest involved seducing Harlow, so he asked Clark to escort Patricia. Clark accepted, and he and Honeychile got along fabulously. Thus began Clark’s series of occasional sexual trysts with this Georgia peach. In Manhattan, she became a “regular” during lunch at “21” with her beau of the moment. In a typical late-night spree, she could be seen at the Stork Club, Café Pierre, and El Morocco. Conde Nast would send his limousine to take her to black tie dinners where she met the elite of New York society. George Gershwin asked her to sit next to him while he was composing Porgy and Bess. She went bar hopping with columnist Walter Winchell and his pal, J. Edgar Hoover. Gable was so taken with her that he even promised to marry her, pending his divorce from Ria Langham.

After divorcing her first two husbands Honeychile married Prince Alexander zu Hohenlohe-Valdenburg Schillingfürst in 1951. After that, she became known as “Princess Honeychile.” Patricia Wilder survived a widely publicized encounter on the night of February 22, 1941 at the Café Pierre in Manhattan. Beverly Paterno—whose husband was the heir to a real estate fortune, calculated at 63 million in 1941 dollars—confronted her, slapped her face, and then peppered her with a flurry of rights and lefts. Honeychile fought back, pulling her hair and ripping her gown. Then, Paterno picked up a pitcher of water and doused Honeychile. The fight made headlines the next day. Honeychile later said, “Everyone was my friend, even Clark Gable himself, but I never fell in love. That was, not until I met my Prince Alexander. He was my dreamboat, what I had been looking for all my life and never found.” She married him in 1951. Their union lasted until his death in 1984. After that, Honeychile spent the rest of her life visiting rich friends at their estates around the world. Death came in August of 1995 when she was 81 years old.

James Quirk at Photoplay wrote an article he entitled, “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable”: “Clark meets every woman with a challenge in his eyes, a mocking grin culminating in a laughing dimple. He is an adroit opponent in a duel of the sexes. He is like a magnet that both attracts and repels.” He also defined Shearer as “a hottie who burns up the celluloid. She can simmer, seethe, and scintillate.” St. Johns later, in private, outed the affair between Gable and Shearer: “He made her hormones jump, something her husband, Thalberg, could not do.” In spite of her marriage to Thalberg, Shearer had a penchant for seducing her leading men. Gable, Shearer, and everyone else quickly realized that their sexual involvement was merely a fling, and rather brief. Shearer’s pattern of seduction had begun with John Gilbert during their filming of The Wolf Man (1924), continuing with Lew Cody in A State of Fashion (1925) and John Pickford (the brother of Mary Pickford) in Waking Up the Town (also 1925). By 1928, she moved in on Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance, followed by Ralph Forbes in The Actress (1929). She seduced Robert Montgomery when they made The Divorcée in 1930. 

Shearer was reunited with Gable when they co-starred once again in Strange Interlude (1932). However, by then her romantic radar was focused on the film’s third male lead, Alexander Kirkwood. Burgess Meredith seduced her when they co-starred in Idiot’s Delight (1939). She also sustained affairs with Howard Hughes, James Stewart, David Niven, and director Victor Fleming. Author Gavin Lambert summed up Shearer: “She was the personification of elegance. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, she was the most versatile actress at the most opulent studio in Hollywood. Without ever appearing on stage, she inherited the great Broadway roles of Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, and Gertrude Lawrence.” Norma Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg, asked her why she wanted Clark Gable as her co-star. “He’s nothing but a big-eared mug with bad teeth.” Although Shearer and Clark would spark the screen together again, she almost became his co-star in Gone With the Wind (1939), when she was offered the role of Scarlett O’Hara against his Rhett Butler. She rejected the proposal after she received a ton of mail from fans who protested her playing Scarlett. 

Most of the letters maintained that Shearer was far too sophisticated and refined to play a Southern dame like Scarlett. As Buddy Segal, president of her fan club in New York wrote, “our beloved Norma could never play a woman born in Georgia.” Shearer also rejected the title role in Mrs. Miniver (1942), an assignment that was eventually awarded to Greer Garson. Perhaps even more ironic, before its filming began in 1949, director Billy Wilder offered Shearer the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Although she rejected the role, he adopted her first name (Norma) as the moniker for the faded (and homicidally demented) grand diva of silent films. Shearer later issued her own appraisal of Clark: “He was beautiful from head to feet. He was rhythmic, unconsciously alive with a powerful grace, like a jungle animal.” Gable first met Stanwyck and Blondell in Night Nurse. “When Babs (Stanwyck) and I first saw Clark Gable walk onto the set, we both had to sit down to control our fluttering hearts,” claimed Joan Blondell to a friend of Darwin Porter. She’d been cast as the film’s third lead, Nurse Maloney, Stanwyck’s gum-chewing, wise-cracking roommate. As Blondell remembered it years later, “Babs salivated over Gable, but I was the one who got him. Maybe he preferred blondes. I don’t know.”

Born in 1906 to a vaudeville family in Manhattan, Blondell had become famous in Pre-Code Hollywood working for Warner Brothers. She often portrayed wisecracking, sexy characters over the course of forty/fifty years. She and the also blonde, also wise-cracking Glenda Farrell starred in nine films together. Blondell became one of the well paid actresses in Hollywood during the Depression. James Cagney was one of her early co-stars in such movies as The Public Enemy (1931). “For the rest of my life, wherever I went, I was always asked the same question: “What was Cagney really like?” In the 1930s, she had an affair with Bing Crosby and much later, with George C. Scott. He said, “For me, at least, the sexiest woman on the screen was Joan Blondell and I've bedded Ava Gardner.” “I had a brief fling with Clark Gable,” Blondell admitted to author Darwin Porter during the course of a weekend she spent at his home. “Any dame would be a fool, or perhaps a lesbian, if she turned down Gable.” 

Stridently, Mayer once told Crawford, “Families go to movies, and I’m not going to put any actor or actress on the screen who isn’t a fit subject for father, mother, and their kids to watch. The only exception to my mandate is casting pictures with you and Clark Gable as the stars. For you two, perhaps we should put up a sign in front saying ‘Adult Entertainment.’” Mayer also told his secretary, Ida Koverman, “My greatest desire is that one day in the future, I will be able to summon Crawford and Gable to my office. There, I’ll order both of them to get off the MGM lot within the hour. Once they go through those gates, they are never to return. That will be the day when I will see the last of those two.” When Irving Thalberg learned that rumors about Crawford’s abortion of Clark’s child were sweeping through Hollywood, he summoned both of them into his office. Then he delivered a stern ultimatum: If they didn’t end their affair, Mayer would probably have them fired. Crawford was sent on a month-long press and PR tour of Europe with her alienated husband, with a special emphasis on London. There, they booked into different suites at the same hotel, where he was rumored to have engaged in seductions of three other women. Shortly after they returned to Hollywood, she filed for divorce.

To promote Marion Davies as a film star, William Randolph Hearst had founded Cosmopolitan Pictures, with links to MGM. By 1924, Davies was the number one box office attraction in America, at least temporarily. At the time, she’d already starred in two “big hit” silent movies: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), and Little Old New York (1923). Hearst invested $7 million to promote her career, the equivalent of $145 million in today’s currency. Over a 20-year period, Davies appeared in 40 feature films. During Hearst’s long affair with Davies, he remained married to Millicent Veronica Willson, born in New York in 1882. She had been a vaudeville performer whom Hearst had been attracted to, marrying her in 1903. When his affair with Davies began, she refused to give him a divorce. She died in 1974 at the age of 92. She had remained close to their five sons for all her life. In California, Hearst erected the legendary castle, San Simeon, north of Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The sprawling estate was filled with Greek statues and celestial suites at which Hearst and Davies entertained not only the elite of Hollywood, but major figures in politics, science, and the arts.

Davies became known for her sense of humor. When Albert Einstein came to visit, she asked him, “Why don’t you get a haircut? I’ll lend you the money.” President Calvin Coolidge, a teetotaler, was also an honored guest. She served him a vintage Tokay wine from their cellar, telling him it was a luscious non-alcoholic fruit drink. He liked it so much he asked for another glass and another glass, pronouncing it “the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had.” Marion Davies was famous for her stutter, and many of her film scenes had to be reshot. She often said words such as “v-v—very” and “s-s-short.” There had been an earlier version of Polly of the Circus, a silent version starring Mae Marsh released in 1917. Re-releasing it in 1932 with a different set of stars (Marion Davies and Clark Gable) “seemed like a good and wholesome idea at the time.” As the means to getting it made as a starring vehicle for his inamorata, Hearst established and funded an all-new studio, Cosmopolitan Pictures.

Hedda Hopper: "I had a hunch that some shenanigans put Dick Powell off Marion's company as much as her long romance with WR Hearst. Although I wasn't exactly bosom buddies with Powell, due to his allegiance to Louella, I knew enough about him through Marion's confidences. She talked of him in very lofty terms, saying he was an old-fashioned gentleman and a sweet young actor. I think they had a flickering, secret relationship that lasted until 1935; one of those hurried romances that Marion was so fond of having like her champagne parties." Dick Powell, who played Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother who woos Dixie American Marion Davies in the musical Hearts Divided (1936), would recount his experiences on the set to Tony Thomas. Powell recalled that William R Hearst would not allow Marion to perform unless he was on the set. Usually the mogul would be accompanied by three bulky associates, who said nothing but looked about with great intentness. "Those love scenes," Powell remembered, "were sheer torture. If I didn't make them look real, the director Frank Borzage would never use me again. If I made them too real, I was sure I was going to get a bullet in the back. Marion was doing her part in the long kissing closeups, but I was damn near choking to death. That picture lasted ten weeks, and I thought I'd die before I got out. I was still shaking months afterwards." 

In a private screening room at MGM, Davies had ordered film clips of some of the leading men being considered as her co-star. Clark appeared on the screen in an episode from his recent A Free Soul (1931) in which he seduces Norma Shearer. After watching it, Marion announced to Irving Thalberg, “That brute Gable is not right for my movie. He’d be better cast as a boxer, a gangster. I don’t want him to appear in a picture with me. The part calls for a society man. Gable would not look right in a tuxedo with tails. He looks like Jack Dempsey, a little dumb but muscled.” To her astonishment, when the lights went on, Thalberg made her aware that Clark was sitting nearby, as he had requested the lead in Five and Ten. She looked back at him as he was making his way to the exit, having heard her review of him. After Polly of the Circus wrapped, Clark became part of Davies’ inner circle of star-studded friends. He often drove to San Simeon, which lay midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on weekends. And he was invited to the parties she hosted at the 118-room beach house at Santa Monica.

Over the years, Davies’ reputation has been trivialized, maligned even though Orson Welles claimed she was not the inspiration for Susan Alexander, the mogul’s mistress in Citizen Kane (1941). That film character—an untalented, gold-digging, dim-witted floozie, is familiar to film devotees of Citizen Kane. She was a woman of wit and charm, who captivated the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the King of Siam. When Louis B. Mayer exited from a private screening of Citizen Kane, he was in tears. He tried to buy the negative so he could destroy it. Davies was devastated by what she felt was her caricature. Hearst advised her, “Ignore the clamor. Go on with your life and hold your head up proudly. Continue to entertain your coterie of friends and admirers. Living well and thriving is the best revenge over the “screeching hyenas.” Conceived as an acting vehicle for Marion Davies, whose career was financially supported by her very wealthy lover, press baron William Randolph Hearst, Cain and Mabel (1936) was a reincarnation of an earlier silent film, The Great White Way (1924). Produced by Hearst’s production company, Cosmopolitan, it had co-starred Anita Stewart and Oscar Shaw. In its recycled 1936 version, Davies opens the film—as produced by Warner Brothers—as a waitress and ends up, before the final reel, as Mabel O’Dare, a Broadway star. Production was delayed over confusion associated with who would be her leading man. Although Dick Powell was the original choice for the male lead, Hearst learned that Davies (his protégée and mistress) had developed a powerful attraction for him. As such, Powell was booted from the picture. —Clark Gable, The King of Hollywood (2025) by Darwin Porter and Hollywood Greats of the Golden Years: The Late Stars of the 1920s Through the 1950s by J. G. Ellrod

"Obsession" (2026) is a Gen Z horror hit

“Obsession” hasn’t earned a classic status: When it comes to movies, people will buy into a marketing narrative just to experience it themselves, but that alone isn’t enough to call a movie an all-timer. If box office returns and cultivated hype automatically constituted a place in the pantheon of great films, Curry Barker’s runaway horror hit “Obsession” would deserve to be called a new classic — but they don’t, and “Obsession” doesn’t. Though that hasn’t stopped audiences and critics from making constant comparisons between “The Exorcist” and “Obsession.” As of this week, the film has surpassed “The Exorcist” in worldwide box-office gross (before inflation). Some cinephiles tout the film as a modern classic, measured against the standard “The Exorcist” set, and more formal writing draws worthy comparisons between Linda Blair’s unforgettable performance and newcomer Inde Navarrette’s work in “Obsession.” But all of these praises are missing a key point in determining which movies can be deemed true classics, something that “Obsession” never quite manifests: a sharp yet unexpected correlation between the film and the world it’s released into. 

Barker’s film, about Bear (Michael Johnston) who makes a wish on a cheap novelty toy for his crush, Nikki (Navarrette), to fall in love with him, has occasional flashes of shrewdness. A product of the YouTube generation, Barker has an innate understanding of how technology affects our modern mores. This knowledge supplies his screenplay with a sturdy base on which he crafts his story of parasocial fixation and all its consequences. But just because a movie is relevant doesn’t mean it’s eternal. “Obsession” is a pulpy, prodigious summer hit that checks boxes without posing any new questions. It’s a film that observes without commenting. And it’s that lack of curiosity for the world it exists in that will ultimately keep “Obsession” from competing with the true classics. It’s fair to say that “The Exorcist” is not just a horror classic, but an all-time classic in the history of cinema. 

And if you look at other films that share that distinguished stature —“Citizen Kane,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Social Network,” “Rear Window,” to name a few— it becomes somewhat easier to find the cultural throughline they all share, that irresistibly magnetic aspect that makes them classics. “Citizen Kane” posited that all media moguls are driven by a lust for power that stems from an irreparable brokenness. “The Wizard of Oz” reminded viewers of the necessity for imagination and metaphor at the end of the Great Depression and dawn of a new war. “The Social Network” prophesied a new era of digital media pollution at the hands of an antisocial egomaniac, updating “Citizen Kane” for the world’s next tectonic shift. “Obsession,” on the other hand, wags its finger at projecting a fantasy onto your crush. Doesn’t exactly measure up to the enormity of the classics, does it? “Obsession” is a classic for the digital era, which is to say, a movie whose “classic” status is as ephemeral as any internet trend.

“Obsession” wags its finger at projecting a fantasy onto your crush. Doesn’t exactly measure up to the enormity of the classics, does it? It boasts two great lead performances, and its shoestring budget makes the entire production all the more impressive. But clever craftsmanship and a talented team aren’t enough to call something timeless. Barker’s screenplay is sorely lacking the imagination and ambition needed to stake its place among the true classics, horror or otherwise. Throughout the film, as Bear witnesses the violent repercussions of his tossed-off love wish, Barker continually gestures at the story’s significance. It’s not enough for a film to explain its meaning; it must also say something about that message and its broader significance to stare down the “classic” label. “Obsession” never manages to say anything that hasn’t been said in five more interesting ways by other recent films, several of which were released this year. 

I found “Obsession” to be somewhat misogynistic in its execution, but I don’t think its popularity is a bad thing at all. But popularity isn’t enough to define a classic. And though a film’s contextual significance is an important part of determining what is and isn’t a timeless movie, applicability isn’t everything, either. The fact is, only time can cement a true classic. For all its immortal ideas and all those outsized news reports of people fainting, “The Exorcist” could’ve faded from memory if so much of what came after didn’t prove to be a cheap imitation. Perhaps the same will be true with “Obsession”; Curry Barker’s copycats will try and fail to interpret the trials of dating when personality is a facade, and I’ll be left eating crow. But judging by Barker’s shallow screenplay, I doubt that it will be too long before someone digs deeper, striking an unassailable, solid-gold classic. Source: salon.com

The Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal presided over by capricious deities. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives. This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. It has gasp-inducing landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, his almost cherubic face turned into a careworn mask of sadness. He is the military commander from Ithaca appointed by the Greek king Agamemnon, played by Benny Safdie, his face always mysteriously masked in a Batman-type helmet. Odysseus reveals to Penelope (Anne Hathaway), the wife whom he is about to leave and whom he advises to remarry if he dies in battle, that the notional cause for the imminent war with Troy – the elopement of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) with Trojan prince Paris – is a pretext. 

It is actually a commercial contest for trading routes. How clever it was for Nolan to use the sacking of Troy to talk about standards of fairness, and the violation of those standards. The idea that what happened at Troy was so horrible that something was broken in the world. That this was such a moral transgression which provoked almost ontological ramifications seen in our modern society. It's a message that is both very timeless, but also very timely. I remember when the 'villains' of the day were John McCain and Mitt Romney, and I'm certain that if you told the majority of Republicans circa 2012 what would be happening today they would be legitimately horrified. 

It feels like the world has become so much more insane, that people have become more irrational. Few people seem to have hope anymore and because of that they've decided they're going to do their small part to make the world a worse place. Nolan recreates the Trojan horse as a cross between the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. My biggest takeaway on The Odyssey (and as with great art, I'm sure I'll have different takeaways on subsequent viewings): Civilization will rise again (hopefully). Our mistakes will be forgotten despite our intense regret. Individual humans can be redeemed, but humanity and its civilizations will continue to make the same mistakes. We will continue to destroy our fragile bonds, to open Pandora's Box, to become destroyers of worlds. But we will go on, sailing into the unknown West forever. Source: theguardian.com

Do What You Fear Most: The History of The Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger

In November 1969, America’s greatest rock’n’roll band played at a converted pizza shop, the Matrix, in San Francisco. The audience numbered from thirty to 100 in size, 100 being the small club’s maximum capacity. The Velvet Underground were in label limbo; they had made their last record for Verve/MGM but were not yet signed to Atlantic/Cotillion. Unlike The Beatles, where every session has been completely documented, it was difficult to find concrete information about the making of their records, who played what, who engineered and mixed, etc. There were a couple of momentous decisions that Lou Reed made in the band’s short career. The first: parting ways with Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The Warhol-Velvets association had been quite good for both, but it soon became something of a negative circus that took the focus away from the band and their music. More than half a century later, the cult of The Velvet Underground continues to build and build. They are the granite support of the independent rock foundation. Thirty years ago, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Twenty years ago, their first album was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. According to Lou Reed, many powerful figures that control our society: "They’ll be the death of everyone," he warned us. As a lifeline, there’s rock’n’roll. 

To dance to, to make everything all right. But for Lou, it wasn’t enough just to listen and dance. He had to make a different type of rock music. ‘Rock & Roll’, like everything The Velvet Underground recorded, wouldn’t be a hit record. But the group he co-founded and led would transform rock’n’roll just as much as it had transformed him, helping to save countless numbers of other lives along the way. Lou Reed personally soaked the rock’n’roll explosion up, maybe more avidly than anyone in his musical crowd. “The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock-and-roll records,” he wrote in late 1966 in Aspen, his tone rising to a manifesto. “Everybody knew that it’s the music that keep us all intact,” he continued. “It’s the music that keep us from going crazy. We all made love to the music. And the word love was used in all that music. Over used, again and again, because that’s where it was at.” Although Reed studied classical piano for a few years as a child, by high school rock’n’roll was his focus, and guitar his instrument. He began to play in groups like The Shades, and made then his first attempts at songwriting. Rock’n’roll would be his ticket out of Freeport into an entirely different social sphere.

Stressed his good friend and high school bandmate Allan Hyman in an unpublished 2022 interview with filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, “All of this nonsense about Lou's parents wanting to give him electroshock therapy so that they would in effect prevent him from being gay, it’s all bullshit. In those days, that was a treatment for depression. They were concerned that he was so overwhelmingly depressed that that was like a last resort thing to do. They were too smart to think that electroshock therapy would be sufficient. That was crazy.” The problems between Reed and his parents, and particularly his father, however, can’t be entirely dismissed as the usual family tensions during adolescence. “Lou’s father was really a scary person,” said Victor Bockris. “I talked to him on the phone a couple of times. He scared me by just using certain words. There was something about him that would scare you.” Robert Quine, a major Velvet Underground fan who first met Lou in 1969, told Bockris “we were walking in the Village and bumped into Lou’s parents. Lou started to shake and went completely pale, and lost his power completely.” Reed would allude to the shock treatment in the first line of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s closing track, ‘European Son’– perhaps a veiled reference to his parents killing their European son. Off stage Reed found some fellow bohemians to hang out with, but one in particular served as a reminder that eccentricity could teeter on mental illness. As a sophomore, his roommate was Lincoln Swados–leaving Syracuse after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. 

When The Velvet Underground were still in operation, Lou’s ex-roommate played a more indirect part in Reed’s life; he met his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, in the late sixties while visiting Swados at Creedmore hospital. In Syracuse, the Lonely Woman Quarterly’s illustrations were drawn by Lou’s longtime girlfriend Shelley Albin, to whom he wrote daily letters when she returned to Chicago during summer break in 1962. Some featured short stories, most notably ‘The Gift’, a macabre tale of a young man who mails himself to his girlfriend, only to meet a gruesome end on the other side. Five years later, it was the basis of a Velvet Underground song of the same name on White Light/White Heat. Albin inspired some other songs he began writing around this time. The doo-wop-flavoured ‘I Found a Reason’ eventually surfaced on Loaded; the more emotionally complex ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, a highlight of their third LP in 1969, was also kindled by their romantic relationship, and essentially finished by 1965 at the latest demo. Inasmuch as anyone as wilful as Lou could have a mentor, he found one in poet and author Delmore Schwartz, whose career was in a tailspin of depression and alcoholism. He’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at one point in the late fifties, and though he’d managed to gain a teaching position at Syracuse, even that might have been a comedown as he’d formerly taught at the more prestigious Harvard University. In June 1964, Reed graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Lou nonetheless admired Schwartz a great deal, going as far as to praise him as “my spiritual godfather” in a letter to him shortly after graduation. When Schwartz held court with Lou and other students at the Orange Bar just off campus in the early sixties, he likely wouldn’t have advised Reed to follow the path the youngster chose. Delmore didn’t know or care about rock’n’roll. He did make a point of promising to haunt Reed from his grave if Lou ever sold out. And Reed never sold out when he led The Velvet Underground between 1965 and 1970, nor there were any appreciable musical compromises in his solo career. Reed’s skills as a fingerpicking acoustic folk guitarist are surprisingly accomplished on his 1963–64 tape recordings – not an ability he’s been usually noted for, nor one that surfaces much in his Velvet Underground or post-VU work. In the May 1974 Circus, he huffed, “I’ve never seen Dylan except in the old days, and that was enough.” 

In 1975, he slagged Dylan in the Dutch magazine Oor as a “Woody Guthrie impersonator. He changed his name because he wanted to be someone else.” About his departure from Pickwick Records, Reed said: “I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do,” he recalled. Yet as he confirmed in his KZEM-FM interview, “In the meantime I was writing all the stuff that came out on the first Velvet Underground album.” On his Pickwick sides, whether deliberately or subconsciously, he still couldn’t help let some of his individuality seep into the singing and songwriting. This is particularly true of four tracks featuring Reed’s lead vocals: ‘Merry Go Round’ and ‘Cycle Annie’ credited to The Beachnuts; ‘You’re Driving Me Insane’ by The Roughnecks; and ‘The Ostrich’ by The Primitives. Even had there been no credits whatsoever, they’re unmistakably Lou’s. They could belong to nobody else. Nor could the streak of unhinged glee in these tunes. ‘The Ostrich’ could be considered a deliberately ironic mockery of rock’n’roll at its most vapid, along the lines of Lou's future rival Frank Zappa’s early efforts. At a time when dance craze records were on the wane in the wake of the British Invasion, a disc that urged listeners to get down on their faces and make other people step on their heads seemed to take the genre to its most ludicrous extreme. 

There’s more going on here than meets the ear, however – The guitar that kicks off the track clangs like a metallic siren with an insistence that’s bordering avant-garde. It’s followed by a murky, garage rock variation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with a circular riff inspired by the hook of The Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me.’ As Cale explained in his 1998 BBC Wales interview, Reed was “very concerned about being paid $25 a week to write songs in the style of anybody they decided were fine at the time while the songs he really wanted to record would never get recorded. And in a very heroic mode I said, ‘Hell with them. Let’s go do it anyway.’” But probably John Cale is over-amplifiying his role in Lou's departure from Pickwick. Terry Phillis, producer of Pickwick recalled that "Lou sometimes brought strange looking girls to the studio, some I thought they were his girlfriends, and the ladies who worked as receptionists complained constantly, the staff was really scared by those druggy looking girls." Cale said in the December 2009 issue of Uncut, “I thought if we combined Lou’s literary side and my classical training and what I’d been doing with La Monte Young with the excitement of rock’n’roll and put the furthest reaches of these propositions together, it would take us where no one else had been and no one else was going.” It’s not known exactly when Reed’s association with Pickwick ended, but Philips confirms that “basically, Lou was disappointed, and I was disappointed with what was happening there. The bottom line of it was, I was a good guy and released him. I didn’t have to, I could have held on to his contract.” In Bob Ragona’s view, “The superiors at Pickwick didn’t recognise Lou’s talents. That’s why he left. Everybody else knew.” 

As another passing notion, Reed invited another woman, Daryl Delafield (whose looks had a touch of Jean Seberg), to join the band shortly after the Elektrah Lobel experiment. Daryl is also mentioned in Cale’s autobiography, although he writes not about her musical abilities, but her engagement in simultaneous romantic affairs with both him and Reed. Daryl didn’t join the band, but might have inspired one of Lou’s most durable compositions, as in 2006, John told Uncut that ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was written about her. If so, Reed was quickly learning to pick up ideas from the odd, colourful characters he was meeting in the New York underground. As much as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey liked The Velvet Underground, they felt the group needed a new lead singer. Given Lou Reed’s subsequent fame, not to mention how well his voice and delivery fit his songs even then, it might be hard to believe they thought a change was necessary. Morrissey recalled telling Warhol, “The problem is these people have no singer. There’s a guy who sings but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him. They need someone with a bit of charisma.” 

In late May 1964, Nico had her first brush with a major music icon when she and Bob Dylan had a brief affair. “My meeting with Lou Reed and John Cale was very important – perhaps especially for them,” Nico immodestly asserted in the February 1972 issue of the French magazine Rock & Folk. She was impressed by their dedication, adding in the same piece to Paul Alessandrini, “they believed very strongly in what they were doing, as if possessed by their music. They projected their entire life onto it: the drugs, the despair, the hope – because they found hope in the drugs.” Enigmatically reflecting her own attraction to the drugs that would hasten her post-Velvets downfall, she declared, “It’s when we don’t take anything that it’s the opposite.” ‘There She Goes Again’ exhibits Lou’s natural, nearly unsurpassed gift for street-tough vocal swagger as he spins almost cinema vérité-like vignettes, powered by propulsive riffs. Yet it’s not devoid of the nervy attitude at the fore on Reed’s more controversial songs, with a double entendre that could mean either physically hitting a woman or “hitting” her up with drugs. In a 1977 Penthouse interview with Mick Rock, Lou contended it reflected “just how violent America is,” adding, “I write songs I don’t agree with, or with the characters. It has to do with a movie I saw, or a character who was a certain way. Or somebody I read about in the paper, or met at a party. I put him in a song and I act him out.” 

Richard Goldstein, then a rising rock journalist who’d write the first in-depth piece about the Velvets’ music later in 1966, describes The Factory crowd as “intensely sadistic and often cruel, seemingly waiting for the next suicide or overdose or whatever.” Lest The Velvet Underground be lumped in with their new friends, Goldstein made sure to add, “I didn’t find this to be true at all of the Velvets.” Even Lou Reed “didn’t seem that way to me. I didn’t see any gratuitous cruelty in him.” Edie Sedgwick might have been one of the most notorious casualties of The Factory, but she left an imprint on The Velvet Underground’s legacy when Warhol suggested Reed should write a song about her, asking if he agreed Edie was a “femme fatale.” The resulting song was a highlight of The Velvet Underground & Nico, helping to balance the band’s more ferocious and confrontational material with some much needed – albeit often overlooked – tenderness and delicacy. Lou Reed and Nico had a romantic fling which ended abruptly, after Nico delivering the devastating putdown “I cannot make love to Jews anymore” at a rehearsal. 

Reed took something valuable from the relationship, however: after Nico told him “I’ll be your mirror,” he used the line as the title and inspiration for a great romantic ballad that ended up on, and helped balance, their debut album. That’s one version, at any rate. His Syracuse girlfriend Shelley Albin later contended ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ grew out of a conversation with her when she and Lou were in college. Another of Lou’s early girlfriends, Barbara Hodes elaborates, “I met Lou in the Factory, I think Lou was a bit into astrology. And a friend of his from Syracuse who became a friend of mine, filmmaker Roz Stevenson, was also into astrology. My feeling is that a lot of the songs are just conglomerates of different things and different people. I don’t think that there are that many that are only about one event or one person.” Whatever ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’s intentions and origins, there’s no doubt it held a special place in Reed’s heart, and that he even was delighted that Nico was taking the lead vocals. Asked in an interview for the May 1974 issue of Circus to name “your favorite Lou Reed song,” Lou simply replied, “I like Nico doing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’” It was one of Nico’s favorites as well, the singer telling Twen, “I can identify with that one,” finding its meaning as “to only see the beautiful, without the ugly.” Reed revealed, in the November 1987 issue of Creem, that the lead vocal was given to Nico in part because “she could sing the high chorus. That’s why, at the end of the song, you get those ‘oh-woa-woe’s.” 

Tom Wilson muddied the matters when he spoke about the MGM deal almost a decade later in the January 31, 1976, issue of Melody Maker. After producing The Mothers of Invention’s debut album Freak Out!, he remembered, “We went on a cross-country tour and sold 47,000 copies. I had to sell it or lose my job. Then a few weeks later Lou Reed came by.” Michael Watts reported in the same article, “Reed bore with him a copy of his first album, which Wilson proceeded to buy for $3,000.” But Wilson certainly got some of the details wrong. As Freak Out! wasn’t released until June 27, there’s no way he could have met Reed and bought the album – presumably the Scepter session tapes – after the Mothers’ LP had sold 50,000 copies. The Velvet Underground signed with MGM nearly two months before Freak Out!’s release. As Sterling Morrison later admitted, MGM’s negligent attitude towards The Velvet Underground might have actually given them the leeway to get away with take-no-prisoners music that other labels may never have allowed. “The people at MGM didn’t even know us by name,” he told Creem in 1969. “Obscurity at MGM gave us freedom to do what we wanted to.” The Velvet Underground didn’t get along with Frank Zappa, the leader of the opening band, The Mothers of Invention. Cale later remembered Zappa putting down the headliners on stage, igniting a long-running animosity between Zappa and the Velvets. Mothers' drummer Jimmy Carl Black: “He really disliked the band. For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.” 

Some members later accused MGM/Verve of pushing their debut LP back so it didn’t interfere with the promotion of the debut album by The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! In 2009, Cale told Uncut, “They said, ‘We’re not going to promote the record, the promotion money’s going to Frank Zappa. Why do you need money? You’ve got Andy and Frank needs help.’” In his April 1981 New Musical Express interview with Mary Harron, Sterling Morrison suggested “the problem was Frank Zappa and his manager, Herb Cohen. They sabotaged us in a number of ways, because they wanted to be the first with a freak release. And we were totally naive. We didn’t have a manager who would go to the record company every day and just drag the whole thing through production.” Such speculation didn’t just grow out of decades of bitter hindsight. Even in November 1968, in an interview with Open City, Lou Reed complained “our first album was released six months late… because the record company was afraid of ‘Heroin’ and, two, because the manager of the Mothers didn’t want Frank’s album to be like our first one, and theirs was coming out first… I’m not saying anything evil toward anybody, but there was panic, and ours came out six months later.” It actually came out eight months later. Such was the vitriol towards the Mothers’ leader from the Velvets’ camp that in a 1970 interview with Third Ear, Reed called Zappa “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit, pretentious academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock’n’roll, because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.”

Reed explained: “We want an audience who understands what’s going on and who has seen rock music stretch and change and grow. If what we do is confined too much to one state of mind, it won’t last. If rock is used only as a vehicle for something else, like protest, the audience turns off. But profoundness and complexity in music won’t put anyone to sleep. Our performance is approached technically and emotionally.” Sterling Morrison claimed that ‘White Light/White Heat’ was banned in San Francisco. So did Lou Reed while introducing the song at a March 1969 show in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Cale later contended that both ‘White Light/White Heat’ and ‘Here She Comes Now’ suffered radio bans. Even Doug Yule, who wouldn’t join the Velvets for another year, claimed ‘White Light/White Heat’ “was banned on every major and minor station in the whole United States in about 1968. As Lou Reed explained in a November 1968 interview with The Georgia Straight, ‘White Light/White Heat’ got banned because “they said it was a drug song. And the other side, ‘Here She Comes Now’, they said that was dirty.” In an interview with Ian Hoare of Time Out in May 1972, Reed added, “We put out ‘Here She Comes Now’ in San Francisco and they said ‘that’s about a girl coming,’ and I said ‘well, no it’s not, it’s about somebody coming into a room.’ And then I listened to the record and I realised it might be about a girl coming as a matter of fact, but then again, so what? But we were banned again…” 

‘Stephanie Says’ certainly wasn’t a standard love song. An interior monologue by a mysterious woman, it offered more than its share of Reedian enigma, hinting perhaps at a globetrotter facing a tragic fate with bravery. As to why people call Stephanie Alaska in the lyric, that’s part of the enigma, though it's probable that was inspired by Nico. ‘Stephanie Says’ was hardly a sure-fire hit, but would have made for a reasonable A-side. But Verve decided – with the same inscrutable logic it brought to many of its dealings with The Velvet Underground – to leave it on the shelf. It wouldn’t be released until it was unearthed for the 1985 outtakes compilation VU. The other track from these sessions, ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’, presented the Velvets playing in the studio as a good-time, fun-loving rock’n’roll band. ‘Temptation’ is a rousing soul-rock tune with an audible debt to Motown, specifically Martha & The Vandellas, whom Reed cited among his favourite acts in his December 1966 article for Aspen. In a 2023 interview with the author, Jonathan Richman expounded upon what was unique in the Velvets’ use of volume and dynamics. “The Velvet Underground would shock you, not just with the volume of their guitars, but the cacophony of all the instruments loud a making wild overtones together,” he observed. “They would also shock you by playing kinda quietly behind the singer (Lou Reed), and then Lou or Sterling might step on fuzz boxes and the volume would triple.” 

John and Lou came to blows, according to Sterling Morrison, at one of their shows at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground after Cale accidentally stepped on a distortion box and multiplied the volume of Morrison’s guitar fourfold during his solo on ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Cale then shut it off and kicked the effects box across the circular stage. It wasn’t the first time Reed and Cale had physically fought; another omen that whatever stage they shared might have been too small to hold both. It couldn’t have helped their mood when, as Susan Pile recalls, the audience “didn’t like them. I think they did one entire set of ‘Booker T.’, as if to say ‘fuck you!’” The Velvet Underground were taken far more seriously when they made their second set of appearances at Cleveland’s La Cave, drawing more than three hundred fans, though just forty-three came on the third night. The American Federation of Musicians contract for the shows made it clear Lou Reed remained their official leader, as he’s named as such in the document. 

“I remember seeing Lou and the Velvet Underground at La Cave,” wrote Lou’s sister Bunny in her ‘About My Brother Lou’ essay, “when I was at college. Picture maybe twenty people in the audience. Picture not a lot of them liking it. But Lou was Lou. He couldn’t have cared less.” A particularly rabid young fan of the band, Lester Bangs, also supplied a different take in a 1971 Creem piece, writing: “My girl and I wanted to go up and say something to Lou, shake his hand and tell him how much we dug his music, but I was afraid,” he continued. “I thought he would be some maniac with rusty eyeballs or something, so we didn’t approach him, even though she said: ‘It seems to me like that was all they really wanted, for someone to just come up and tell them they appreciate what they’re doing.’ And as usual she was right, as Lou confirmed when I talked to him.” It was the first of several exchanges over the ensuing years between Reed and a man who’d do for rock journalism what the Velvets were doing for rock music. Although the relationship grew testy over time, Bangs had already anointed White Light/White Heat the best album of 1968 in a review he sent to Rolling Stone – though the magazine declined to print it. As Bangs wrote, “The Velvets launched into a new song that was one of the most incredible musical experiences of my concert career. It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully. The lyrics seemed like fantasy from an urban inferno: ‘Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / “Ooohh,” she cried / “This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen…”’ “But,” he concluded, “it was the chorus that was the most moving: ‘Ohhhh, sweet rock and roll – it’ll cleanse your soul.’ That’s classic, and no other group in America could have written and sung those words.” 

The underground press, and the still-young serious rock press, was starting to catch on in a bigger way as well. “Put quite simply, the Velvet Underground is the most vital and significant group in the world today,” wrote Wayne McGuire in the August issue of Crawdaddy, hailing John Cale as “the heaviest bass player in the country today” and Lou Reed as “an incisive lyricist, creating a folk mythology of New York City and our generation which rings deep and true through the pap of fumbling unfocused artificial surrealistic imagery and facile pseudo-mystical-morality lessons produced by most new groups.” He concluded, “They are lyrics which breathe of real life, not empty conjecture, and reveal a very human and loving side, an almost Wagnerian sentimentality.” Oddly, in his New York Times essay, Tony Lioce didn’t recall the Velvets being as popular at the Tea Party as many claimed: “Almost no one came. There’d be maybe forty people on a good night. And generally the same forty people night after night, including one girl who always showed up in a wedding dress.” In the same article, Lioce also remembered often going backstage to hang out with the band, who gave him and his pals a friendly welcome. “Lou was gracious and kind, talking about everything from a weird diet to his love of Dion and his total dislike of Frank Zappa. We’d talk a lot about music, who he was listening to, and he’d ask us what other bands we thought were good (The Jeff Beck Group, we told him, and he nodded knowingly). But we’d talk about other stuff, too: New York, where he still lived; Boston, which he liked because he’d found an attentive audience. He could be very easy to talk to, a good listener, as interested in us as we were in him, or at least polite enough to pretend to be.” 

The closest the public ever came to an explanation from MGM itself was printed in the May 1971 issue of Creem, in which a Los Angeles representative of the label told Lester Bangs, “The Velvets’ lead singer is the most absolutely spaced person I have ever met in my entire life. I think he was on heroin all the time they were here. And on top of all that, he had the nerve to tell me what a fucked-up company MGM is, how much he hates the way we’re handling ’em, and why don’t we give ’em any promotion – he’s sitting there running down the people who are giving me a paycheck every week! What am I supposed to do, agree with him?” Maybe the Velvets talked their way out of any good graces the label might have been able to grant them, although the L.A. rep’s comments didn’t address whether MGM actually gave them promotion. If not a ballad on the order of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ or ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, ‘I Love You’ testified to Reed’s oft-overlooked romantic side as a songwriter.  “I know that his soft ballads were his favourites,” says his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, who began a relationship with Lou in 1968. 

“He used to call them his soft songs. Lewis was a teddy bear, to be perfectly honest with you. He was a sweetheart of a man. It was very, very difficult to see what all the drink and the drugs were doing to him. I’m glad he didn’t spend his entire life using them.” ‘Walk and Talk’ would also end up on his Lou Reed album, where it was renamed ‘Walk and Talk It’, a more satisfying, streetwise roots-rock effort. Like ‘I Love You’, it signalled a slight move towards the more mainstream sound of most of the Loaded sessions. As to why it didn’t make the cut, “It took long to get it to be performed correctly,” Reed told BBC radio in 1972. Geoff Haslam who co-produced Lou Reed's landmark 1970 album Loaded made it clear how much he admired Reed’s abilities. “He was one of the most talented songwriters ever to appear on the scene. He had an incredible gift to communicate a lyric in a completely individual way. He was a rock and roll musician who sang like a jazz musician. He was brilliant, absolutely.” The Loaded version of ‘New Age’ still has merit, but the 1969 Velvet Underground Live performance is far superior, with a far more resonant aura of mystery. ‘Head Held High’ is a pretty blustery hard rock by Velvets standards, but there’s a slight knife-twister – Reed refers to his parents as “disfigured” when evaluating their well-meaning advice. Lou’s vocal is about as frayed and manic as it gets. Reed retreated to, of all places, his parents’ home in Long Island. “He had a nervous breakdown,” was Barbara Hodes’s straightforward explanation. “He was very fragile, and he was very unsure about the future. I think New York became too much for him.” 

Within a few days he was nonetheless urging Sterling Morrison to form a new band with him, without Yule or Sesnick. But Morrison, still angry over Reed’s defection and about things in general, turned it down. “Lou suggested after he left that he and I pick it up and start all over with a different manager, get back to the way it was at the beginning,” he explained to Ignacio Julia. “But the way it was at the beginning wasn’t going to include Cale, we weren’t going that far back… Lou at the time accepted the responsibility for the tensions in the band, he said it was his fault because he was on these crazy diets. I had already thought that perhaps we had accomplished enough – to start all over would be like rolling the rock uphill again. One of the lines I used to Lou, I guess I was trying to tell him not to leave,” he continued, “was that even if we did do it, that it would take us three years to get back to the point that we were. And there was no certainty that we would do it anyway. I was very disillusioned.” Why didn’t Reed simply replace Doug Yule (as Maureen Tucker had already suggested), fire Sesnick and continue The Velvet Underground with Morrison and Tucker? He would certainly have been in a good position to call the shots. 

It might have taken him a while to get back to where the Velvets were on his own, but a Lou Reed-less Velvet Underground couldn’t ever hope to get to that point without him at the helm. Perhaps legal obstacles prevented him from cutting ties with Sesnick and Yule, and carrying on with The Velvet Underground name, which Sesnick soon owned as a result of an out-of-court settlement that saw Reed win back sole songwriting credits for material on Loaded. Sesnick, as Yule confessed to Oor, “credited me as songwriter on Loaded, which is complete nonsense, because they’re all Lou’s songs. I was ashamed when I saw it.” In the February 2000 issue of MOJO, Doug admitted Sesnick “was hoping I would be Reed’s replacement, which we all know could never be the case. All the credits were designed to minimise Lou.” In Diana Clapton’s Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground, critic Richard Meltzer even remembered overhearing Sesnick discussing the possibility of removing Reed’s vocals from the album altogether when Meltzer dropped by Atlantic’s offices to pick up an advance pressing. In Sounds, Reed claimed, “I gave them an album loaded with hits, and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colours. So I left them to their album full of hits that I had made.” 

“I would touch base with Lou and called him, and I got him to come into the city sometimes,” remembers Barbara Hodes. “But he was very fragile. Yet as a writer and musician, what was he gonna do, become an accountant with his father? Or take an office job?” Reed’s first public appearance since leaving The Velvet Underground would not be a musical performance, however, but a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village. Reed recited some new material about his future wife Bettye. A recording made at the reading is in the Lou Reed Archive. According to Bettye Kronstad, the audience “weren’t interested in hearing his heartfelt poetry, and it hurt him deeply. He’d been at his parents’ home for a year at that point, and he either had to go one way or the other, in terms of his career – to try to just work as a writer, or go back to rock’n’roll and write there. He couldn’t live off them forever, he said. I also think that living there, without the pressures of the city, all the people, their expectations, he was better able to build a career as a songwriter, which is incredibly difficult, but throwing it all away and beginning all over again as a writer at his age he thought was impossible. I think he had gotten his strength back by taking the time off and going home where he wouldn’t feel any pressure about a career, and was genuinely restored enough to get back out there again. It was just a matter of which path he was going to take – solely as a writer, and drop rock’n’roll – or as a writer in rock’n’roll.”

It might be tempting to view The Velvet Underground as the Van Goghs of sorts of rock’n’roll – unsuccessful in their lifetime, and hailed as geniuses half a century later. The Velvet Underground’s music has reached and influenced many more listeners than ever, as it will for new generations to come. Ultimately, it just was too good to remain a pure cult band. The themes the band addressed so brilliantly were too universal to remain ignored. Their bold sonic melding of experimentation with pure rock’n’roll energy gave their work a timelessness that has made it sound perfectly contemporary well into the 21st century, enduring far longer, with a far greater multi-generational appeal, than most 1960s acts who sold far more (millions) records at the time. To paraphrase their song ‘Some Kinda Love’, they had the courage to truly face and do what they, and we, fear most. —"Do What You Fear Most: The History of The Velvet Underground" (2026) by Richie Unterberger

“What was so great about the ‘60s and why were people so fabulous? Because it was an incredible time of abundance; there was great openness and mobility, people from all walks of life had access to each other. There were fewer barriers, socially and financially. For a short period, everyone met. There was a breakdown of barriers that had never existed before. There was this fabulous change that happened in cinema and music. You know it happened and it’s almost over. Now it’s running its course. It’s fading away. And then there were all those fabulous people, and one of the reasons they were fabulous was that they were in the audience and everyone could have access to them. Now you can’t anymore. The people are still fabulous, but you no longer have the chance to really get to know them.” -Lou Reed (April, 1976) for Rock News magazine

“Just as the elevator doors closed, Lou shouted out, ‘Sally Can’t Dance is a subversive album. It's about a poor rich girl who was into fashion and lived big. And it's really depressing. This album is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done! People have always been happy that I’ve been happy. I mean, maybe the attitude is: If Lou Reed can get it together, then who can’t?” -Lou Reed (November 1974) for Circus Raves magazine

“I got a call from Clive Davis [president of Arista Records] and he said, ‘Hey, how ya doing? Haven’t seen you for a while.’ He knew how I was doing. I knew then that I’d won. But turning that corner was really hard. When Ken Glancy backed me, that was step one; when Clive Davis gave me a call, was step two; and Street Hassle was step three. And I think they’re all home runs. I’m a long-term player. Saying ‘I’m a Coney Island baby’ at the end of that song is like saying I haven’t backed off an inch, and don’t you forget it.” —Lou Reed (March, 22, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine