The Dick Powell Story by Tony Thomas

No movie star ever made a more radical change of image in mid-career than Dick Powell. The former crooner turned tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (his darkest film), Johnny O’Clock, To the Ends of the Earth, Pitfall, Station West, and Cry Danger, all among the best examples of American film noir. It was, as he admitted, “one hell of a transition.” Dick Powell’s position in Hollywood history is unique in that he is identified as a leading exponent of two vastly different film genres—the musicals of the Thirties and the films noir of the late Forties. The actor of the one is barely recognizable as the actor of the other. Film students might be forgiven for wondering if they are the same man. Despite the complex image, Dick Powell was a relatively simple man. He was the product of an average working-class family, growing up with traditional values, politically conservative with religious views that did not much go beyond a faith in the Golden Rule and The Ten Commandmants. Powell was a classic example of the Great Depression self-made man with a passion for work and seemingly gifted with the Midas touch. Powell believed that anyone can achieve anything if he tries hard enough. For him it certainly worked.

Almost all the songs sung by Dick Powell in his first two years in Hollywood were written by Harry Warren and his lyricist Al Dubin. Dubin quit Hollywood in 1938, but Warren stayed for the rest of his long and productive life. He and Powell remained friends. “Of all the singers I’ve ever dealt with, he was just about the easiest to get along with. I don’t think he ever made an objection to any song we ever handed him. Music was easy for him. He’d been a musician and he’d been singing since he was a choirboy. His only problem at Warners was getting more money. Even when he was doing 42nd Street he was only getting $175 a week, and it was a constant fight to raise it.”

Naughty But Nice brought the long Warner Bros. phase of Dick Powell’s career to a rather abrupt end. The original title of this minor musical was The Professor Steps Out, which indicates the nature of the plot. In something of a change of pace for Powell, he is not a genial dunderhead but a serious minded music professor named Hardwick, who goes to New York to arrange for his symphony to be published. In The Big Apple the poor man is used, abused and confused, and learns that the music business is not run by decent minded academics. 

Professor Hardwick is not equipped to deal with the kind of sharks who run Tin Pan Alley. Part of his problem is that he has been coddled and protected by three maiden aunts who believe him to be a genius. Although far from that he does have some ability with melody, which leads to one of his serious pieces being bowdlerized into a snappy jive song, “Hooray for Spinach,” performed by the slinky Zelda Manion (Ann Sheridan), who is in league with a sleazy publisher. She pursues the professor in order to filch more of his melodies but Linda McKay (Gale Page) falls in love with the sweet natured but thoroughly naive professor. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote four songs for Naughty But Nice. Ann Sheridan, whose career Warners was building, got two of them and Powell got “I’m Happy About the Whole Thing” and “In a Moment of Weakness,” which he recorded for Decca. Sadly it would be the last of the movie songs that he would record. 

Dick Powell and Joan Blondell had been married four years by the time they made I Want a Divorce and still happy enough to hazard a film with such a title. While the critics had praised Powell for his performance in Christmas in July they didn't make many comments about any real change of image. That came with I Want a Divorce. Variety noted that there was no singing and commented that “he handles the straight role in capable fashion, displaying ability to carry both dramatic and comedy situations required by the characterization.” The Hollywood Reporter was even kinder: “Dick Powell is genuinely amazing as the boy, his work opening up a fresh screen career to him. Here Powell proves beyond question that glorified chorus boy roles are definitely behind him. He realizes expert understanding of the character changes in his role and plays each to the hilt.” He had been waiting a very long time to get a comment like that.

Murder, My Sweet continues to be a much studied and admired film. Its qualities are many but pivotal is the performance of Dick Powell. Always a confident man, he was here able to focus his intelligence as an actor. Never before had he been able to take such command of a characterization. His Philip Marlowe is not an especially likeable man but he is basically decent, “I’m just a small businessman in a very messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale.” 

Much of the effectiveness of Powell’s performance was due to his skill in delivering lines, one of which became a classic, “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” Powell could muster the right tone for cynical dialogue, as when seeing the palatial home of the Grayles, “It was a nice little front yard. Cozy. Okay for the average family. Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox.” After this film Dick Powell no longer had to dog anybody to be considered for a good role. He had made the breakthrough. Now they would come to him. Philip Marlowe would be played by other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, but there are those who feel that Powell’s Marlowe was the closest to the part as written by Raymond Chandler. 

One of them was Chandler himself, who felt that Murder, My Sweet was the best film adaptation of any of his novels. In his book The Detective in Film (1972), film historian William K. Everson noted: “Purely as a thriller, with a complicated yet logically worked out plot, Marder, My Sweet was near perfect. Powell—because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it—became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart, who had several other competing images against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Powell’s emergence as a director and producer was closely tied to the legendary eccentric Howard Hughes when he took over RKO as owner and manager in 1948. The studio’s financial affairs were then in disarray and the assumption was he had acquired RKO as a tax write-off. This proved not to be the case. Production picked up and for a while it seemed as if Hughes would become a movie tycoon, albeit one with highly unusual business practices. Hughes’ office was not at RKO but at the Goldwyn Studios and it is said that he set foot on the RKO lot only once and getting an appointment with him was virtually impossible. RKO functioned as if it had a ghost boss. 

However, Hughes appeared to like Powell and gave his approval when producer Edmund Grainger suggested that he be hired to direct Split Second. Hughes’ respect for Powell increased when he found that Powell was not cashing any of the checks paid to him in the period of pre-production. Hughes called and wanted to know what was wrong. Said Powell, “I told him that the script was being altered without my having any say in the matter. Hughes asked for my ideas and immediately phoned the writer to work directly with me. Then I cashed my checks. The movie was a hit and Hughes started cultivating me.” 

Dick Powell considered many other projects for Twentieth Century-Fox but none materialized. In 1960 he asked that his contract with them be terminated. It was obvious to Fox and to everybody else that Four Star Television had burgeoned into a major production company and Powell was the man who ran it. It was a matter of too much to do and too little time. He had directed five films, while also producing four of them. Split Second and The Enemy Below deserve special mention as very fine pieces of work. He was never pretentious about anything he did and about his work as a director he made no lofty claims. “I do the best I can with the type of material I am able to get. I have no illusions about joining the company of William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed or John Ford. I admire all these filmmakers for the honesty with which they attempt to do their pictures.” Still, it is interesting to wonder how good a track record Dick Powell might have had as a director had he been not so busy. 

Ronald Reagan became friendly with Dick Powell soon after he arrived at Warners in 1937. He played an announcer in the film Hollywood Hotel and afterwards played supporting roles in three other Powell pictures. Recalls Reagan, “On Hollywood Hotel, Dick was the star and I had only two lines, but he couldn’t have been nicer. Easily and smoothly he put me at ease. I was one of thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. He always seemed to feel such genuine pleasure at seeing you. Sometimes our paths took us in different directions and months would pass without our seeing each other. Still in these later years, when we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

Four Star Productions blossomed in the late Fifties, taking over the Republic Pictures lot in Studio City. It quickly became known as a place that gave fresh talent a break. Powell said at the time: “I know what a tough time I had realizing my ambitions, so I’m giving everybody a chance to make money and do what other shows won’t let them do. I’ve been able to sign the best writers and actors in the business because I’m not following the greed principle of the other producers. The actors are coming into my fold because I’m offering them all rights outside of the United States in the shows in which they appear for me. And I’m giving the writers every financial break.” One of the young producers in whom he put his trust was Stanley Kallis: “I was hired as an associate producer for The Law and Mr. Jones and at the end of the first season, we didn’t know if we would be picked up. Dick came to me and told me: ‘I’d like you to stay here. I don’t have anything for you at the moment but I’ll find something.’ I was amazed. This is not the usual way of doing things in Hollywood. I’d been striving to find a niche in this business and he gave it to me. Dick was a very generous man. 

There was a decency about him that is unfortunately rare in this business. He was a ‘no nonsense’ character. He had a genius for business but he did it with charm. Dick was a gentleman. I’d have done anything for this man.” According to Kallis, Powell was also a man of vision. “One evening in his office he showed me some plans he  had drawn up for a future concept of the studio. He always had a keen regard for real estate and he thought the old idea of sound stages covering acres of ground was a waste. His concept was to build new sound stages one on top of the other, to stack them and thereby leave the cleared ground for location use or other buildings. There’s no telling how far he would have gone had he lived.”

Someone who had a good idea of where Powell wanted to go was June Allyson, who always referred to her husband as Richard. Allyson said: “Richard’s wheeling and dealing in TV boggled my mind. At one point Four Star was buying the stock ownership of Marterto Productions, which owned, among other things, ninety episodes of Make Room For Daddy. It would cost us $1,800,000. Time magazine called Richard ‘one of the major, and sharpest, businessmen in U.S. television.’ Richard's favorite phrase was, ‘Nobody loses, everybody wins.’” About Dick's investments, June sometimes complained: "No sooner would I get used to one house than Richard would move us to another—this time to Bel Air. But I loved English Tudor. And I told him "I love this house. I’ll never move. Never." He grabbed me and mashed the hysterics out of me in a big rough bear hug that ultimately turned into a long evening of lovemaking. The next day I sputtered all the way to Bel Air, grumbling about being thrown out of my house and deaf to his lecture on real estate values and the art of doubling your investment. He turned it into a most impressive estate on Copa de Oro."

MGM intended to star Dick and June as the married couple honeymooning in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) based on a best-selling book. Then when I Love Lucy became a sensation, the studio offered Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz the property. June wasn't happy about it, and Dick Powell never made another film, choosing to concentrate on TV productions. Powell justified all the long hours and the many periods away from home by affirming it as his plan for the future—to turn Four Star into a major film studio, one that would rival MGM. The plans were admirable, but the strain on his marriage was severe. He arose at six, conducted business by phone during breakfast and often put in sixteen-hour days, in addition to the constant trips out of town. 

June Allyson complained: “Where was Richard? He was late. He was sorry but he wouldn’t be home early enough, so we'd just go ahead and have dinner without him.” Aside from the fact that they were genuinely in love and attached to each other, the Powell-Allyson marriage was regarded by some friends as a strange one. And in fact they were different kinds of people. He was confident and reserved, she was volatile and emotional. An industry insider once described them as "an oak tree paired with a butterfly." Despite of various rumors echoed by the press, the reality was simple: Dick Powell never really changed despite of his stardom. His views towards his marriage were based on mutual respect, love and family. Despite some obstacles thrown upon Powell and Allyson typical of their Hollywood milieu, it's been difficult to prove infidelity on either side. Powell belongs in that rare category of the consummate Hollywood artist who was also a basically decent man (in the same league of Fred MacMurray or James Stewart). —The Dick Powell Story (Riverwood Press, 1993) by Tony Thomas

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monster: Ed Gein

Horror is derived, ultimately, from the unknown. Ultimately, the core of fear is that something will somehow harm you. Harm may lead to death, which leads to the unknown--fear is possible because in the depths of our minds, we're all agnostics. God takes away the uncertainty behind death, and thus, the terror it inspires. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds at being the finest expression of horror on film because it takes the concept of uncertainty as the source of fear and suggests that if there were no uncertainty, we would still be horrified. It removes the comfort of an afterlife not by delving into the supernatural, but by peeling the veneer of normalcy off reality. 

The film is drenched in a post-Vietnam sense of irony and disillusionment, declaring itself a true story or revelation, which instantly crafts a sense of mythology around it. From the old man at the cemetery rasping that there's things they don't tell you about, things he's seen, to the radio broadcasts describing (an obvious series of lies) that the local sheriff has pinned the grave robberies on international jewel thieves, the film underlines the fact that the truth about the world is not only hidden but it's horrible. It also suggests, especially with its characterization of the unseen sheriff, that these lies are intentional and constructed to control the populace. The five youngsters' world is still holding on to Leave It to Beaver; their neighbors are still friendly and helpful. It has been suggested the film anticipated the death of the American Dream and the dissolution of the nuclear family.

These youngsters cannot conceive a world where Leatherface exists, no matter how grim the news reports. So Kirk, Pam, and Jerry, in the space of about 15 minutes, walk to their bloody dooms. Sally's terror is the terror of anyone faced with the dismantling of their illusions. The hypocrisy is shown casually when the cook says he can't take watching the cruelty, but when Grandpa tries it [sorta], he cheers it. Sally, as her horrorscope suggests, is awakened, and is thus able to react to the events before her, whereas her friends all died before they could process it. The only time the score and the sounds come together is to emphasize disorientation and terror, in the single greatest scene in horror movie history: the dinner table scene. Even if she survives, she will be scarred emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. This is as much a metaphor for America as it is PTSD in its significant change. As dawn comes, it shifts from a misty white (like emerging from the clouds of the afterlife) to the summer gold flare as Leatherface does his infamous dance of frustration. 

This is Hooper's true masterpiece. From the moment Sally enters the dining room until she breaks free, everything is composed for the utmost agony. The characterization going on here is chaotic. The hitchhiker snarls and scorns the old man, who insists he doesn't like the cruelty. Leatherface has donned his 50s matronly garb, jarringly discordant with the idyllic domesticity it evokes. Grandpa rests there like a mummy, encased in hard human leather. Marilyn Burns gives one of the most intense performances in horror history, her eyes doing the work of a million lines of dialogue. Hooper zooms into them, lingering on the veins and irises, watching them twitch (and reinforcing his themes of seeing what's truly there), and Burns, drenched in sweat, writhes. It's here that hypocrisies are laid bare, where any vestige of mundanity is scored away by burning light, where the cow stops being meat and becomes a person, where the uncertain becomes certain, and that certainty is a godless, empty void of suffering.  Hooper's sense of irony and understanding of hypocrisy is crystal clear in that moment. —Review by Sally Jane Black. Source: letterboxd.com

Sally (Marilyn Burns) is the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Within this horrific tale ("You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it") Sally is regarded as a hero and not simply as a heroine. Classically the heroine was saved by the male and the hero endured the hardships that follow in conventional horror films. Yet Sally is the only survivor of her group and has endured the hardships of a ruined society to literally laugh in the face of her iconic assailant. Carol Jeanne Clover (teacher of American Film at the University of California, Berkeley) states that even if often predominantly male, the audience is able to engage and identify with the Final Girl due to the fact that “the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.” 

Therefore it is for this reason that the audience, male or not, is able to sympathize with Sally and identify with her anguish and then to her rise to power. Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”) similarly states that ‘Not only does this dinner scene provoke a visceral reaction from the audience but the viewer more intensely sympathizes with the femininity of the character. During multiple points within this scene, the audience is given the perspective of Sally who is strapped to a chair. 

The fact that she escapes her assailants and laughs in the wounded face of Leatherface demonstrates her new found empowerment and reaffirms her sexuality.' The Final Girl must subvert the patriarchal Texan society which is represented by the all male family that is impotent, perverse and gender confused.' Power is for this reason ushered away from the family and given to Sally. Therefore, the film allows the audience to identify with the Final Girl and celebrate her triumph over the killer. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. 

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what the film revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Charlie Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn't "really like the horror genre or dark, bleak stories," and so the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. Hunnam was "truly gobsmacked" when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. Of the episodes, Hunnam said, "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could."

And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann

Red Sheet by James Ellroy (2026): "It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O." Source: amazon.com

Mystery writer Megan Abbott has already proclaimed Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) the best book she has read on the Black Dahlia case, evidently not pausing to consider just how low the bar is on this subject, given the dismal quality of the aforementioned books, plus John Gilmore’s Severed (1994), Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995) and Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files (2006), a work so fraudulent that it earned the author a lifetime ban by the district attorney’s office. Mining the well-traversed district attorney’s files in the Black Dahlia case, augmented with FBI reports, news accounts, public records, and occasional interviews with less-informed descendants of the main figures, Mann has amassed the ponderous resources for what could have been a strong book. Mann sets out with two laudable goals: To strip away the numerous myths surrounding Elizabeth Short, and to eschew any attempt to solve the case, which he views as hubris. Mann’s depiction of Elizabeth Short plunked down in Hollywood as Tom Sawyer in ankle-strap shoes brings us no closer to her. The book speculates wildly on one of the usual suspects in a far-fetched solution, then attempts to recant with a “never mind.” Elizabeth Short, the enigmatic victim of the murder, crossed paths with hundreds of random people during her brief time in Hollywood in the summer and fall of 1946. Instead of being the Black Dahlia, who went on hundreds of dates, Elizabeth Short was the woman who went on one date hundreds of times, a carefully scripted encounter with a parade of presentable men who were a safe escort. All but one, apparently. Source: ladailymirror.com

Jon Hamm (Your Friends & Neighbors-Neo Noir), Dick Powell (Pitfall-Classic Noir)

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact. 

It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!" 

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt). Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Bikini Kill & Kathleen Hanna)

Sara Marcus: Three days before the appointed Sunday in April 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in a greenhouse in Seattle. I remembered that Newsweek had referred to Courtney Love, now Cobain’s widow, as the riot grrrls’ “patron saint,” but I’d never cared about Nirvana or about Love’s band, Hole. Fearing that a grief-filled meeting would separate me from the other girls right off the bat, I nearly stayed home. Still, I went, and when I finally stepped over the threshold of Positive Force House into its first-floor living room, I found that nobody else at the meeting cared about Nirvana or Hole either. We talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television. These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. I was going to be one of them. A friend of a friend at school gave me a Bikini Kill tape—I knew that the band was somehow linked to Riot Grrrl—and for a while no other music mattered, just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, “Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!” 

Jessica Hopper FedExed a reporter a big package of zines, Hit It or Quit It as well as others. And she went on record in an hour-long phone interview. On the day the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek hit the streets, a regular Wednesday night Riot Grrrl meeting took place at the Emma Center. Jessica arrived late; she had stopped off at a newsstand to buy the magazine. The other girls had already picked up a copy of the issue—and although Jessica had warned them of an article—they were aghast at what they saw. “Revolution, Girl Style” occupied a two-page spread in the Lifestyle section, complete with a photograph of Jessica (the caption dubbed her a “prototypical Riot Grrrl”), a portrait Alice Wheeler had taken of Angie Hart and a photo of Courtney Love, whom Jessica had described as “Riot Grrrl’s patron saint.” 

That designation stemmed only from the fact that Love had passed out copies of Hit It or Quit It at Hole shows in England. Love actually had an odd antipathy for Riot Grrrl and especially for anybody associated with it who had been close with Cobain before she had met him, namely Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail. Love had recently left a long, rambling answering-machine message for a girl named Nina Cunzio, who was trying to get a Riot Grrrl group started in LA: “We should totally have meetings at my house, I’d love that a lot,” Love had said, sounding to Nina like somebody on drugs. “But you gotta lose this Kathleen Hanna bullshit.” Nina never called back. In just a few months, Love would write a vicious column in Melody Maker, blasting Bikini Kill. How could Jessica Hopper have done such a thing—spoken for the entire movement, to a national magazine, without even consulting with the rest of them? It felt like a gargantuan betrayal of trust, like Jessica had just been using all of them to gain more exposure for her own projects, no matter who else got hurt along the way. 

Another malignant rumors about Kathleen spread by Courtney Love: One thing that immediately comes to mind about what Kathleen Hanna's MO is when Mike Watt (from the Minutemen) asked her to be a guest on his first solo album and she wanted to prove a point that she didn't want to be in the company of bros so her contribution was to leave a message on Watt's answering machine with a fake story about how someone who was on the album had raped a girl. Really distasteful stuff. She called it her anti-contribution. To honor this offer, Watt put it on the album. She's just someone who seems to rotate around her own gravity. She's straight up falsely accusing someone of raping a 13 year old girl and calling it art. That's very distasteful at any level. Also she laughs it off as it just being during one of her lying phases, which is ridiculous. Did you see her interview with V magazine? She admitted as a child she would steal her dad's credit card and buy silk blouses. She sounds like a scammer and then she married to a guy who'd bragged about “fag-bashing.” Source:  www.hootpage.com 

But, unlike Courtney Love, Bikini Kill were always surrounded by controversy just because they were an outwardly and aggressively feminist band. They were very much needed in the 1990s punk scene and respected by all from that scene and Adam Horovitz changed his views considerably since his days in the Beastie Boys. Bikini Kill were one of the best bands of the grunge era, and way more important politically than Hole. Aside from their aesthetic and political differences, I think the motivation of Love to punch Hanna at Lollapalooza festival was mainly jealousy of Hanna's close relationship with Kurt Cobain. Although Cobain ended up dating Tobi Vail, it's between the lines that his main attraction was towards Kathleen, but she allegedly only agreed to a friendship because she was scared of Cobain's substance abuse and wary of his obsessive claim to fame. 

Kathleen Hanna: Bikini Kill and The Nation of Ulysses (I was dating Tim Green at that time) all drove back back to Olympia in late August to play K Records’ one-time-only convention, called the International Pop Underground (IPU). “Defeat the Corporate Ogre” was their slogan, and the repetitive mentions of being “anti–corporate rock” seemed pointed at Nirvana, since they’d just signed to a major label (Geffen) and had left Olympia. It felt like a line was being drawn in the sand: Nirvana was no longer welcome in K’s indie purist clubhouse. Kurt had been nothing but supportive of the Olympia scene (he even got a K Records tattoo) and it felt gross that they were publicly slamming him that way. Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie vs major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on to me. 

Sara Marcus: Ian MacKaye had introduced Jett to Bikini Kill, and she was instantly impressed by both the music and the zines. She was particularly heartened that a rock ‘n’ roll feminism was catching on; she could have used some of that in the late ‘70s, when she was a teenage guitarist playing in the Runaways. “The Runaways had nobody,” she said. “I felt like a feminist, but I felt completely dissed by other feminists, ‘cause they were like, ‘Well, you can’t dress sexy.’ Number one, I’m not dressing sexy—even though I did have my pants open from time to time. But what do you mean? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck! You know why they say that girls ‘can’t play guitar’ and ‘can’t play rock ‘n’ roll’? Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. So meeting people like Kathleen and all those girls, it was really incredible, because I felt like maybe people were starting to get it.” 

Bikini Kill had recorded a full-length album that past October, titled Pussy Whipped, but it wasn’t due out till the following fall, and they had already written new songs to record with Jett—glammy, triumphal anthems that explored pleasure and play. And for the introduction to “Demirep,” Kathleen and Jett sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and played a hand-clapping game they’d both learned when they were little girls: “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black.“ These two songs, along with a new version of “Rebel Girl,” would be released on a 7” in September 1993, a month before Pussy Whipped. Five nights later, the band played a sold-out Rock for Choice benefit to an audience of four thousand at the Hollywood Palladium. Stone Temple Pilots, King Missile, and Kim Gordon’s project Free Kitten were also on the bill, but the biggest buzz was around Bikini Kill. 

Kathleen performed in a dress with the words KILL ME printed on her chest, and some men shouted boos at the band. The Los Angeles Times ran a review noting that “while much of the audience seemed unsure of just what to make of this Olympia band, there was a contingent of female fans that seemed wholly enthralled—as if they had found that music really mattered.” Working with Joan Jett had been Kathleen’s first major-label experience, but now the big guys were starting to come calling for Bikini Kill. “Kathleen had a hot band,” Jett’s manager, Kenny Laguna, recounted. “Every label in the business wanted them! Warner Brothers, Capitol, Interscope: everyone.” Kathleen Hanna: Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so Kathi, Bill and me met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. To show us how edgy Interscope was, Jimmy Iovine showed us a Marilyn Manson video that hadn’t come out yet. “You guys could do an edgy video like that!” he said. “Could I hang you from a meat hook?” I asked. Iovine pretended he hadn’t heard me and continued his spiel about how great his label was. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.”

At the time, probably influenced by his abrasive wife Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain hinted to various press outlets that he didn't understand why "those riot grrrl groups took themselves so seriously." Kathleen didn’t think Bikini Kill should abandon Kill Rock Stars, but she was curious about getting wider distribution for her music and ideas. Plus, she explained later, “I wanted to say to myself, ‘I looked into it and it wasn’t the right thing,’ as opposed to just assuming things.” Tobi didn’t even want to look into it, though; she saw what Nirvana’s success had done to them. “I was very saddened to see that that success did not make them happy,” she said. “I knew that things were really really bad: Kurt was on drugs and the band was falling apart.” —Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) by Sara Marcus 

Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment! 

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear. 

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light. 

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon