JFK Through the Looking Glass (Oliver Stone), Gail Raven & Jack Ruby (Jefferson Morley)

Oliver Stone's memoir, "Chasing the Light," was published last July. It is just now out in paperback. Oliver Stone: The causes of Kennedy's death, I had no idea of. I accepted the Warren Commission at that time. So, when I got back to the States, I went to NYU film school and tried to funnel what I had seen of the world into learning film. But looking back, at the time, I didn't see the Vietnam war in this perspective. I went to Yale University, but I couldn't last. I didn't see the point of that whole life, and I think that's part of the problem we've had in this country, this dislocation. A lot of people have felt this, and certainly, I was one of the early people who felt this because I never recovered in the sense of going back into society in a normal way.

MS. HORNADAY: You did mention the murder of John F. Kennedy as one of those ruptures, right? It's one of those lies that maybe you didn't recognize as a lie at the time but that you came to. I'm interested to hear you optioned--to make JFK, you optioned two books that were advancing pretty out there, conspiracy theories about the assassination. Were you intending for JFK to meet the audience where they already were? Because more than 70 percent of Americans did not believe the Warren Commission at that time. I mean, it's interesting to me that JFK comes out in '91, the same year that the internet comes out. 

MR. STONE: Honestly, I had no opinion of it. I was making movies. I started with--as you know, "Salvador" was my first successful movie as a filmmaker in 1985 and then "Platoon" in '86, which was a huge success worldwide. I mean, it was like the dream come true. I had always wanted to be a filmmaker since NYU film school at the age of 23, and here I was around 39 years old finally connecting in a big, big way. After 1986, after "Platoon," a whole other set of things happened. I make more films. I learned how to make films better. I make "Wall Street." I make "Born on the Fourth of July," "Talk Radio," "The Doors," which was a raucous, big film. I was always interested in the world news and politics; later I met this woman, Ellen Ray, who had published this book by Jim Garrison called "On the Trail of the Assassins," which was his second attempt to write about this assassination--he had written another book in 1969, "Inheritance of Stone," but this one was "On the Trail of the Assassins." But now, 30 years later, we live in rabbit holes. It almost feels like the rabbit hole of JFK has become our collective way of life, and the mistrust of institutions that "Mr. X" is sort of an avatar for is now among us. 

Well, as one of our interviewers, David Talbot, says in the film, once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal and say, "Oh, wow! We found this whacky--this crazy lone nut who killed him." It doesn't work. It doesn't really work as a narrative for this country. What happened was much deeper than that, and there was so many inconsistencies, so many holes in the Warren Commission. The point is that you cannot remove legitimacy from government like that and get away with it, and the people knew something was wrong. They didn't know exactly what was wrong, but they sensed that something had gone astray, like anarchy has set in. Some method of control was being exerted because forces that were more powerful than one person were able to kill him, forces that were somewhat, I mean, clearly related to intelligence agencies, to possible military agencies, and these forces came to dominate American life. Nobody asked what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well, it's a very interesting story, and we go into it in this documentary called "JFK Through the Looking Glass," which is coming out this year at the Cannes Film Festival (July 6-July 17), and the story of Vietnam is one of many stories in the world picture. But JFK was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it. Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam.

Listen, I don't follow conspiracy theories in general. The point is I've been interested in this case, and I've done a hell of a lot of work with it, and so have a lot of researchers. And we went to a war on a false basis. It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster. Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us. We're still stuck in this. We're stuck in a military industrial syndrome, but we don't really know who the enemy is. We're in this loss of purpose, this anarchy, which came about, started really in 1963 on that day. That's what the link is, and we make that link in this new film. So, I think I've been very humanist in my interviews and allowed the subjects to express themselves and ask very intelligent questions. We have to change our point of view because we are seeking to still be the only power in the world that is in control of the world. We cannot continue on this path; it's a suicidal path. And I think many Americans agree with me, but it's never been allowed to be stated politically. People who say this type of stuff never win elections because they're ridiculed or marginalized in the press, to be honest. Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Jeff Morley (author of CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files): After JFK Facts recounted Jack Ruby’s pursuit of an exotic dancer named Gail Raven in January 1963, I received a message from a woman who identified herself as Raven’s daughter. She told me that her mother was still alive, and she confirmed that her mother and Jack Ruby were close. I asked her if her mother would share her memories of the man who killed accused assassin Lee H. Oswald. She said yes. In 1963 Gail Raven was the stage name of a precociously mature 20-year-old woman who danced on the national nightclub circuit that included Ruby’s Carousel Club in Dallas. Ruby (born Jack Rubenstein) was a Chicago tough guy who took a shine to her, and they became friends. Now close to 70 years old, Gail Raven is living in the southern United States. I have confirmed her real name but have agreed not to publish it here to protect her privacy.

Jack Ruby never mentioned President Kennedy, Raven said. “He was not in love with the Kennedys and he did NOT like Robert Kennedy by no means,” she says. This is not surprising, according to journalists and historians who have studied Ruby’s life. Phone records reviewed by JFK investigators showed that in 1962-63 Ruby made phone calls to no less than seven organized crime figures who had been prosecuted by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. The Warren Commission did not consider this evidence relevant to Ruby’s motivation for silencing Oswald. Why did Ruby kill Oswald? Raven's reply: “He had no choice. Jack had bosses, just like everyone else.” Raven says she believes “he was instructed on what he needed to do, therefore he did it. And when the opportunity presented itself he went ahead and took it.” Did Ruby kill Oswald to spare First Lady Jackie Kennedy the ordeal of a criminal trial? “That was absolutely made up,” Raven said. Ruby and the Dallas police: “He was very close with Dallas authorities, including the police and sheriff’s department. He helped them out and was friends with many,” she says. 

Raven thinks those friends may have informed Ruby about the transfer of Oswald and let him be there to witness it, but she stresses these are her thoughts only.  After the shooting, Raven visited Ruby in the Dallas jail. She says Wally Weston, the house MC at the Carousel Club, took her to see him. During the visit Ruby kept repeating to her that she shouldn’t worry, and that everything would be OK after the first of the year. He wanted to take her on a trip to Cuba to “gamble,” Raven says. She worked in Las Vegas but wasn’t allowed to gamble in the casino because she was only 20. She only worked in the floor shows. Raven remembers “a gambling friend” from Cuba who visited Ruby on the occasion of a big horse race. “The race didn’t turn out as everyone said it would and a lot of money was lost in Vegas,” Raven says. 

Ruby as suitor: After Ruby ended a long relationship with a young woman, he continued to ask Raven to marry him. They were friends. He liked her because she didn’t drink or smoke. She told him she didn’t want to get married. He teased that they needed to get married for the “shock factor” and to surprise her friend Tammie True (stage name). But in Raven’s words they were “always just good friends.” “Jack was NOT crazy as he has been portrayed,” Raven says. “He did have a temper and when he saw something going wrong he would take care of things himself instead of depending on his bouncer like others.” “He was good to my grandmother when she visited,” she said. “He was good to everyone he was close to.” Source: https://jfkfacts.org

Happy 104th Anniversary, JFK!

Happy 104th Anniversary, John F Kennedy!

Steven Kossor: New ideas evolve by linking together the known with the possible within a vessel made of memory. There are two kinds of memory: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive memories are what we know. Emotional memories are how we feel about knowing. Healthy emotional memories give us hope and courage about using what we know. Negative emotional memories give us pessimism and fear about using what we know. Emotional memories always trump cognitive memories. Minds poisoned by negative emotional memories will believe things that are not true, correct, adaptive or healthy. When too many people become afflicted with negative emotional memories, hope turns to despair and courage is overcome by fear. In both the foreign "target" country and in the domestic population as well, these outsiders go about implanting negative emotional memories to coerce the population to embrace changes that are not adaptive or healthy, but which meet the needs of the outsiders. Large portions of both the foreign and domestic populations come to embrace the take-over because its necessity is confirmed by the negative emotional memories that have been implanted and nurtured in them. The last straw in the overthrow of foreign governments is the replacement of the former leaders by outsiders. That is how the government of Hawaii was overthrown in the 1800's, and how the overthrow of other foreign governments in the 20th century has been accomplished through the covert actions of US corporate-intelligence operatives, as Stephen Kinzer has documented in Overthrow (Henry Holt & Co., 2006). John Perkins gave us an insider's view of the process in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, 2004). Twentieth century corporate-intelligence leaders have learned from and expanded upon the tactics of their forebears. They utilize modern technology (in all their forms and popular outlets) to implant negative emotional memories that further their ends and conceal their machinations.

In 1963, the inevitable happened. Our own government lost control over its plotters of change in foreign governments. They turned their tactics against our own leaders and against our own people. It's worked for the past fifty years, and the manipulators of unhealthy emotional memories (nobody can ever really know the truth, nobody can really be trusted because everybody is out for themselves, a bad end awaits anyone who causes trouble, the future could be much worse, you have nothing to fear from monitoring if you have nothing to hide, etc) mean to keep it that way. In the last fifty years, as the threads of the Kennedy assassination cover-up started to unravel, renewed efforts were made to create reinforcing negative emotional memories to sustain the old ones. New books and motion pictures emerged, filled with unhealthy emotional memories. They pandered to the same dismal, pathetic, pessimistic views of ourselves and our future – saying things like: “It could be so much worse….” How we responded to this has determined the path of our country, just as it determined the future of every other overthrown government for the past 100 years. That path has been downhill. There is new hope today, because we have some things that didn't exist before -- the internet and digital technology -- but knowledge isn't enough. It takes strong healthy emotional memories to pursue and achieve the healthy changes that we need. We can take the action necessary to fix our situation without compromising our Constitution. We can honor it by restoring power to those we elected and stop allowing secret abuses of it. We will strive to honor and practice, truth and justice. If we have gone astray in the past we will correct our course and move forward confidently, not secretively. Hypocrisy, deceit and greed will not be encouraged by rewarding it.

The Zapruder film has been unequivocally unmasked as an edited record of the events in Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed in 1963. You can find some of the scientific proof of these edits at http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro. Abraham Zapruder was a member of the Dallas Council on World Affairs and he was also a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club, which had many prominent members, including George H. W. Bush and George de Mohrenschildt. And Zapruder had employed de Mohrenschildt's wife, Jeanne LeGon, a fact not mentioned in Zapruder's granddaughter's book. Zapruder's son, Henry, worked for the Justice Department at the time of the assassination. Kennedy's assassination and the doctoring of the evidence was so much more than "a mafia hit." We desperately need leaders who have the courage to take government funding away from the occult corporate-intelligence war making machine. It cannot be allowed to run toward goals that violate our Constitution. The roots of the CIA were created to help the President get untainted information during a World War, and those roots should have been cut down drastically at the end of the war, as President Truman ashamedly admitted after Kennedy was assassinated. John Taylor Gatto’s books, especially An Underground History of Education in America (Oxford Village Press, 2006) document the devastation wrought by the corporate-intelligence interests that have insinuated themselves into the school business and effectively hijacked the future of the American people. We rushed to judgment in 1964 under the pretense of avoiding a global nuclear holocaust, preventing World War III, and other such imagined catastrophes and concluded that a "lone nut" killed the President of the United States. Still, many have talked. Their stories were unpublished and unreported, or vigorously discredited, by the mainstream media “assets” of the corporate-intelligence cult. But healthy emotional memories persist and continue to fuel the urge that almost all of have: to tell the truth. Congress reacted to manufactured fear in 1964 in founding the Warren Commission to suppress independent investigations of the Kennedy assassination. It happened again in 1990 to justify going to war in Iraq. In 2008 when fabulously wealthy and comparably amoral thieves had failed to run their businesses responsibly for decades, taxpayers were hit with a bum's rush and gave away $700 Billion dollars to save the US economy. Michael Crichton, in State of Fear (Harper Collins, 2004) argued for removing politics from science and used global warming and real-life historical examples in the appendices to make this argument. In a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology he expressed his concern about what he considered the "emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy." 

President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Later in that same speech, Eisenhower said: "Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow." Finally, former President Truman warned us on December 22, 1963 in the Washington Post about the monster that the CIA had become through its covert operations capability that he had absolutely never intended it to have. He wrote: "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President. But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere." Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com

(Noir) Dream State: California in the Movies

Despite a confluence of influences—hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s, German expressionist films of the 1920s, and the censorship that arrived in the mid-1930s—film noir is very much a California thing. It is a product of the aspirations and the lusts it inspires and the confusion and disappointment it generates. The eroticism in noir relations rather consists of the drama of initial seduction, which is sometimes synonymous with the drama of breaking a man’s spirit, or at least his willpower, or at the very least his normal instinct for self-preservation. The men invariably end up damaged or broken, though it must be said that the women of noir usually don’t fare well, either. The Killers, Tension, The Maltese Falcon, and D.O.A. end with the femme fatale heading to jail. In Detour, Criss Cross, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, Scarlet Street, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, Too Late for Tears, Decoy, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Murder, My Sweet, and really too many other noirs to count. 

Yet the destructive women of noir weren’t identical. They had in common the possession of a certain intense allure that could result in death, and yet within that broad definition, there was lots of room for variation. On the benign end of the spectrum we find Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), who just wants to get free of Dan Duryea, her menacing mobster lover. She sees Burt Lancaster as her ticket to freedom, and they both end up dead. But she’s not a willful agent of destruction, nor is Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945), who is merely sloppy and self-indulgent and willing to go along with her boyfriend’s criminal schemes. In their respective films, De Carlo and Bennett were, in a sense, simply relaxed and natural, and the movies were paranoid fantasies of what might happen to a man who became ensnared by temptation. Most noir women were more actively amoral. They represent fantasies of a female sexuality completely divorced from the constraints of morality. They are male projections, and as such they can be thought of as misogynistic creations, but they were also fantasies of female power. And the attraction they hold for men in these films is the opportunity they offer of sex with a free woman—a completely free woman who is, at the very least, the man’s equal. Yet from early in the film noir cycle, the women in these movies became something more than examples of greed supercharged by amorality. There was something additional to their natures, something skewed. 

Audrey Totter in Tension (1949) leaves her husband (Richard Basehart), a perfectly nice pharmacist who is devoted to her, and then ends up killing the lover she left him for. In Too Late for Tears (1949), Lizabeth Scott is not just greedy but demented by greed. When she and her husband find $50,000 in a gangland drop-off, she persuades the husband not to turn the money over to the police. Soon, the gangster who missed the money shows up at her doorstep, but her avarice and ruthlessness are such that she ends up scaring him. But in a way that’s just a corollary of the California idea—freedom is worth the risk. Speaking of female perspective, Born to Kill (1947), set mostly in San Francisco, did something perhaps unique: It reversed the sexes and thus created one of the more fascinating examples of the form. 

Claire Trevor in Born to Kill is like a combination of the men and women that usually populate noir. Like noir’s evil women, she has a streak of perversity. While on a trip to Reno to get divorced, she stumbles onto a gruesome murder scene, but, not wanting to get involved, she doesn’t call the police but instead remains curiously detached, even though she knew one of the victims. Soon after, she figures out who the murderer is—a big, hard, brutish man with no discernible charm at all, played by Lawrence Tierney. But again, she fails to call the police because, of all things, she finds herself physically attracted to him. In this, she is like the noir men—she knows better but can’t help herself. As photographic entities, both cities (San Francisco and L.A.) are beautiful, and being beautiful, they convey the California idea that here is a place so lovely that people must make their own problems. And people do. Even divorced from the ugliness, bad weather, miserable atmosphere, and strategic difficulty of navigating life that we find in other cities, people in film noir find the means to screw up their lives in catastrophic ways. Yet there’s a difference in the beauty of San Francisco and Los Angeles and what that beauty means on screen. In film, San Francisco represents a pristine ideal: You may be having a rotten time, but the city is perfectly fine. 

In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum takes time off from watching his life circle the drain to ask Rhonda Fleming if she has ever been to New York. When she says no, he tells her, “You take a trip there one time. You’ll find out why I’m in San Francisco.” San Francisco is like a pure essence, sometimes a moral rebuke, sometimes an impervious ideal, against which the impurity, perfidy, or unhappiness of the characters can stand out in sharper relief. This brings us to a key difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles in the movies. San Francisco doesn’t care if you live or die. But Los Angeles? Los Angeles wants to kill you. L.A.’s beauty is the beauty of illusion. Its beauty is the face that the devil shows you for the sake of luring you in. And then the head slowly spins around and there are worms coming out of its eyes. It’s not something phony that’s hiding something dark and true. Rather, it’s something irresistible and empty that’s hiding the true depths, implications, and consequences of its emptiness. San Francisco is Olympian, disinterested. L.A. tempts you—that is, you the movie protagonist—with everything you know you shouldn’t want but do—pool parties, sex with strangers, indolence, unearned status. In the history of cinema, there has never been a Hollywood party presented on screen in which any protagonist ever had fun. 

Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) introduces a group of wealthy sharks, all with a blood lust to devour each other. But then they do—and somehow manage to devour no one else. Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth turn an amusement park hall of mirrors into a shooting gallery. Both end up dead, but the one almost-innocent bystander—the Irishman played by Welles himself—walks away with barely a flesh wound. In a Los Angeles noir, he could have easily been killed, too, or better yet, he would have been executed for their murder. One of the most seductive and mad of femme fatales is the relatively unknown Jean Gillie in the film Decoy (1946). She played a woman obsessed with a buried treasure. Her bank-robbing boyfriend is in prison, and she is desperate to get a map to where he buried the money. Along the way, she kills several people and thoroughly enjoys it. She kicks the jack out from under a car, causing it to collapse on a man underneath it, and laughs. In San Francisco noir, the world can make sense. In Los Angeles noir, the whole point is that the world does not make sense. In fact, it’s almost as if everything is made subordinate to that assertion, so that the story becomes secondary. Every movie becomes a quiet scream: Something is terribly wrong. It has become a commonplace in noir studies to say that the rise of film noir is related to the detonation of the two atomic bombs that ended World War II, and to the nuclear arms race that followed. In this way, the nihilism of noir becomes an expression of the existential terror inherent in people’s belief that civilization was on borrowed time and that humanity would soon destroy itself. Noir would have no power, no resonance, and could make no connection if we didn’t fear the cold implications of the modernity that noir and Los Angeles express. In noir, we wake up to the nightmare that follows our seduction. It’s a world in which God doesn’t matter—or worse, has decided that we don’t. 

Consider Petulia, set in San Francisco and released in that disturbed year of 1968. At one point, someone introduces “Bobby Kennedy” as a conversational topic. Meanwhile, Kennedy died four days before the film was released. Such was the ever-changing horror show of America that the film was made in and released into. The title character, played by Julie Christie, is a married British woman who tries to pick up a doctor (George C. Scott) at a charity ball at the Fairmont Hotel. In Petulia, director Richard Lester presents San Francisco as a trendsetting archetype, interesting in its way and glamorous, if observed from a distance. Lester knew something about glamour and about universal loci of cool, having filmed the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night in the London of 1964. But while that earlier film presented a burst of joy, Petulia shows a world in which love has been corrupted, perhaps cheapened by casual encounters, so that it no longer has meaning; or perhaps it’s that the casualness of sex has detached it from mystery, so that the meaninglessness of it all has been revealed for all to recognize.

Matthew Bright’s Freeway, an independent film from 1996, offers an interesting inflection on the usual California serial killer genre. It presents a teenage girl (Reese Witherspoon) when she runs off on her own, to avoid being placed in foster care, she gets picked up by a seemingly nice, respectable school counselor (Kiefer Sutherland), who turns out to be a serial killer. What makes the film a comedy (believe it or not) is that the movie invests its teenage protagonist with a completely unaccountable sense of self-worth and a skewed but definite moral center. “Why are you killing all them girls, Bob?” she asks accusingly, a line that invariably gets a laugh from the audience because of its bluntness and purity. Why, indeed. The fact that there isn’t and cannot be an answer to that question places Freeway very much in the California tradition. But the fact that it features a heroine who has not only a sense of right and wrong but also an ability to stand outside the madness and react with more anger than despair or cynicism makes it a California story with a difference. —"Dream State: California in the Movies" (2021) by Mick LaSalle

JFK's love letters, JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette

Love letters that John F. Kennedy wrote to a Swedish paramour a few years after he married Jacqueline Bouvier are going up for auction. “You are wonderful and I miss you,” Kennedy scribbled at the end of a February 1956 letter to aristocrat Gunilla von Post, whom he’d met on the French Riviera a few weeks before he wed Bouvier in 1953. Kennedy was a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts at the time, and the handwritten letters were written on Senate letterhead. He signed one simply: “Jack.” Von Post, who died in 2011 in Palm Beach, Florida, wrote a 1997 memoir, “Love, Jack,” about her relationship with Kennedy. A 1955 letter began: “Dear Gunilla, I must say you looked well and happy in the photograph you sent me at the Regatta.” Kennedy then sketched out his plans to head to Europe after Congress recessed early in August of that year, writing: “I shall be in Sweden on the 12th. Where do I go. Send me your address at Bastad where you shall be.” In the 1956 letter, Kennedy expressed regret that von Post wouldn't be traveling to the U.S. as he'd hoped. "I must say I was sad to learn that, after all, you are not coming to the U.S.," he wrote. "If you don't marry come over as I should like to see you. I had a wonderful time last summer with you. It is a bright memory of my life," Kennedy wrote. "I am anxious to see you. Is it not strange after all these months? Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers - but not strangers - and I am sure it will all work and I shall think that though it is a long way to Gunilla - it is worth it." "This is the only Kennedy letter that we have offered that displays open affection to another woman while he was married," the auction house said. 

In her memoir, von Post recounted Kennedy's efforts to end his marriage to Bouvier and bring her to the U.S. In the end, the future president's hopes of doing that were thwarted by his authoritarian father, Joseph P. Kennedy; JFK's own political ambitions; and the future first lady's 1955 miscarriage and 1956 pregnancy. Von Post and Kennedy saw each other only one other time: a chance encounter at a gala at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in 1958, when the Swede was pregnant with her first child. Source: edition.cnn.com

JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married for less than three years when they were killed in a plane crash on July 16, 1999, but their romance remains the stuff of legend. Richard Bradley, who served as executive editor at George magazine, says in Taraborrelli's The Kennedy Heirs: "When you were with them," Bradley continued, "you felt John had really put forth a new power couple in the family, and there had been a lot of them, like Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice [Shriver]. John had always had a thing about the Kennedy power couples of the past, and this was how he wanted to view himself and Carolyn. So, I guess one could say that Carolyn was becoming the woman behind the man, and John was happy and proud about it. I think his mom would have been as well." And importantly for Carolyn, who did her best to ignore the women of all ages who shamelessly threw themselves at her fiancé, John wasn't too old-fashioned. Unlike so many of the men in his family, including his late father, President John F. Kennedy, he aspired to take their relationship, and their eventual marital vows, seriously. "I see what goes on in this family, and it scares me," Carolyn had admitted to her friend Stewart Price, according to The Kennedy Heirs. Price reminded her that John was different, to which she replied, "It's a good thing, too. I know myself and I'm definitely not that pathetic Kennedy wife who'll stay home with the kids while her husband is out screwing around. No. I'm that pissed-off Kennedy wife who'll be in prison because she took matters into her own hands." Friends of the couple encouraged Carolyn not to engage with the press—don't worry if they call you names, you can't win either way, they advised her—and equally encouraged John to be more sensitive to Carolyn's concerns. After all, she didn't grow up with that life. But the story didn't change: not their clashing temperaments, not their communication issues and certainly not the press's consistently rabid interest in their lives, the paparazzi obviously hoping for a follow-up to their February 1996 performance in the park. "She told me she felt manipulated and compromised, as if she had no authority over her own life," Carolyn's friend told Taraborrelli. 

"She said she was putting John on probation. 'I'm going to give it three more months and see how I feel,' she said." Carolyn admitted she might be over-dramatizing the situation, but she said she needed "a cooling-off period and that in a few months she'd have more clarity. They'd been having a lot of marital problems lately, she said, and she was worn down by then." The couple had started marriage counseling that March. "It's all falling apart," John lamented to another friend from his perch at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue. And he didn't just mean his marriage. George was in serious financial trouble, the publishing business being notoriously difficult even then, before the death knell of print had sounded, and John went to meet potential investors in Toronto in early July. He flew himself up there, with a copilot. But even if he lost his magazine, he was determined to not lose Carolyn, and he was looking forward to putting that plan into action somehow during Rory's wedding weekend. Source: eonline.com

An editor familiar with the 2003 Ed Klein-sponsored Carolyn smear book opined: "Clearly he writes from a biased perspective. The smear campaign against Carolyn's reputation continued on with the publishing of some extracts from The Kennedy Curse to Vanity Fair, a magazine ambivalent towards the Kennedy family. Indeed it appears that this smear campaign may have started earlier than the crash - when, according to sources close to the couple, JFK Jr's behavior flew out of control. Apparently, Carolyn had caught JFK Jr cheating on her and he even boasted about the 'desire' he felt for other women. A friend told The Mail on Sunday: 'John was an egomaniac, a sybarite and a womanizer. He wanted to have children to perpetuate his genes. All Kennedys marry for that reason. This poor girl was there to bear his son and perform as First Lady. If she didn't care for life in the fishbowl, tough. John thrived on public attention. Even before the wedding, the Kennedys began to work on Carolyn, telling her how she should dress, how she should behave. Her self-confidence was never great.' 

'She came from a broken home in the suburbs. She was beautiful but she felt she was never beautiful enough. When John began to neglect her, she went into a downward spiral. If Carolyn took drugs it was as a sort of escape. But they made her more depressed until she didn't even want to leave the house. Early in their marriage, she became convinced John was cheating on her. She found it impossible to trust him, even when his motives were innocent.' Another friend of Carolyn thought John could exhibit chauvinist-like behaviour at times, so the couple started to have bad arguments. However, journalists began to receive calls from sources in the Kennedy inner circle who wanted to give them 'the real scoop'. 'I was told Carolyn was a drama queen, always complaining and frigid. She didn't want to get pregnant, and didn't want to do anything except hang out with her "fag friends",' one columnist reveals. 'There also was a tip that she was doing so much coke she had white circles under her nose.' The sensational 'white circles' slur featured prominently in Klein's book and grabbed headlines around the world. But many were unconvinced by these false claims. 'It seemed unlikely she could be as crazy as they claimed,' one journalist told me. 'It would be hard for anyone to be more screwed up than a male Kennedy. I also knew, of course, about how dangerous this family can be when they perceive anyone to be a threat to their image. Carolyn clearly was that threat. John was hoping to run for Senate and the last thing he needed was to be tarred as the latest Kennedy adulterer. The air of breeding which captivated John when he first met Carolyn was deceptive. He told friends he saw her as the embodiment of his elegant mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.'

'But Carolyn's heritage was more modest. She was the youngest child of William J. Bessette, who was the Chief Civil Engineer for Whiting Turner Contracting Company. William J. Bessette helped to build international airports all over the globe and was brought in to fix the Statue of Liberty renovation projects - which were behind schedule. Carolyn's mother was Ann Messina, an administrator in the New York City public school system. Carolyn had two older sisters, twins Lauren and Lisa. The Bessette family shared ancestral lineage with André Bessette, more commonly known as Brother Andre of Montreal. Carolyn's parents were divorced and Ann later married the chief of orthopaedic surgery at a large hospital and settled in Connecticut. The family were comfortably off, but Carolyn attended a redbrick university and considered a teaching career. But one day, while temping at a Calvin Klein shop, she was  discovered by one of Calvin's associates.' A friend says: 'She got this whole new sophisticated look and became quite a party girl. I think she was very confused. There was a lot of ill-will between her parents and the New York scene was an escape, but not a very well thought-out one. She really didn't like living in the city but John refused to leave. He believed it was the perfect base for his career.' 'Carolyn used to do drugs recreationally before she met John,' recalls a friend. 'Everyone did in New York, John included. But when John started straying, she just couldn't take it. There were times he would come home after fooling around and find her hollow-eyed, she was so stoned. He'd scream that she was a cokehead. But it was his behavior that did it. She was so sad. He was going on at her about having a baby. He'd even chosen a name, Flynn - he was certain it was going to be a son. Carolyn couldn't cope. She was deeply depressed. She'd lost interest in sex. She'd seen a psychiatrist who gave her antidepressants but they couldn't solve the real problem: John.' 

Furious at being banned from his wife's bed, John told colleagues he was going to get a divorce. 'No Kennedy will stand for that kind of treatment,' one of them says. But relatives tried to convince him to save the marriage. 'Divorce is never the best thing for a politician,' he was allegedly told by the Kennedy clan. Friends say the Bessette family were inconsolable about the traducing of their daughter's memory and false allegations, but they insist on maintaining a dignified silence. “John’s life was huge—with dozens of friendships and involvements—but Carolyn couldn’t handle that,” one of her closest friends told. “She didn’t want to go out. She would ditch John’s friends, not show up for dinner, refuse to go to people’s houses or events. She burned a lot of bridges.” Sources: Vanityfair.com and other anonymous sources

Last Second in Dallas, Fred Hampton, Civil Rights

Josiah Thompson may have just cracked the John F. Kennedy assassination case. Fifty-four years after the publication of his 1967 book “Six Seconds in Dallas,” he is back with a follow-up book, “Last Second in Dallas,” that amplifies and revises his findings, using scientific means that weren’t available decades ago. Thompson, who lives in Bolinas and was a private detective in San Francisco for more than 30 years, is unique among writers in the genre in that he has never advanced a conspiracy theory. He doesn’t know who killed Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, or why. Instead, Thompson only concerns himself with what can be proved through forensics, photography, ballistics, sound recordings and witness testimony. His mission, which has lasted from his early 30s through today, at age 86, has been simply to find out what happened as the president’s motorcade passed through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. I’ve seen Oliver Stone’s “JFK” six or seven times. So, what happened?

Josiah Thompson: “What happened that day was really simple: It’s what your eyes tell you happened when you see the Zapruder film,” Thompson tells me, referring to the recording of the shooting by Abraham Zapruder on his home-movie camera. The sequence of events, according to Thompson, is that there were five shots fired, in three bursts. First, Kennedy was shot in the back. Then came the fatal shot from the right front. And finally, less than a second later, Kennedy was shot in the back of the head. Thompson postulates that the shots were fired from three different directions. What makes Thompson’s findings a big deal is that, without setting out to do so, he all but proves that there was, indeed, a conspiracy. There had to have been one, by definition, because — according to Thompson — at least three people were involved (unless you believe that three lone assassins woke up that day with the same idea). Thompson further suggests that the very effectiveness of the assassination — it was practically a slaughter — argues in favor of professionals, not amateurs. Source: datebook.sfchronicle.com 

The first definitive account of the rise and fall of the Secret Service, from the Kennedy assassination to the alarming mismanagement of the Obama and Trump years, right up to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6—written by the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America. Carol Leonnig has been reporting on the Secret Service for The Washington Post bringing to light the secrets, scandals, and shortcomings that plague the agency today—from a toxic work culture to dangerously outdated equipment to the deep resentment within the ranks at key agency leaders. The Secret Service was born in 1865, in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but its story begins in earnest in 1963, with the death of John F. Kennedy. Shocked into reform by its failure to protect the president on that fateful day in Dallas, this once-sleepy agency was radically transformed into an elite, highly trained unit that would redeem itself several times, most famously in 1981 by thwarting an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. But this reputation for courage and excellence would not last forever. By Barack Obama’s presidency, the once-proud Secret Service was running on fumes and beset by mistakes and alarming lapses in judgment. Carol Leonnig is a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. Zero Fail will be released by Random House (May 18, 2021) Source: amazon.com

In Warner Bros.' Judas and the Black Messiah, Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the former chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and a co-founder of the Rainbow Coalition, whose killing in a 1969 raid was the result of an FBI counterintelligence operation. That government plot placed a petty thief named William O'Neal (played in the film by LaKeith Stanfield) undercover to infiltrate the party's dealings and undermine its community organizing. Speaking with THR, Kaluuya reveals the extensive research he did to prepare for the role, working with rising-star director Shaka King and how Hampton's philosophy can be applied in our current political moment. -How much about Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers did you already know coming into this role, and what did you learn right away?

-Daniel Kaluuya: I actually went through my stuff the other day, and I saw a school textbook that mentioned the Black Panthers. You learn about American history, and I think they really just scoot past the Black Panther section of it. [There's] a lot on Kennedy, quite a bit on Martin Luther King, not that much on Malcolm X, and then kind of just moving forward [to the] Vietnam War. I knew about the Panthers and chairman Fred Hampton just from living life and hearing stories from others and having conversations with others and realizing that's something later on in my life I would love to have a deep-knowledge dive on it, to understand that philosophy and those people. It was from references in art, references around me and in my community and the people I knew, where I got all my information about the Black Panthers before the film was proposed to me.  Source: hollywoodreporter.com

Sexual Rejection, Rumors on JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, So Fucking What (1994)

Americans are guaranteed the right to ‘pursue happiness’ for themselves. But might they be better off if they pursued happiness for others? In five studies, they compared the two strategies, showing that, ironically, the second pursuit brings more personal happiness than the first. Retrospective study 1 (N = 123) and experimental studies 2 (N = 96) and 3 (N = 141) show that trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy. In all three studies, relatedness need-satisfaction mediated the condition differences. Study 4 (N = 175) extended the findings by showing that trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy. Study 5 (N = 198) found that feeding strangers’ parking meters produced the effect even though the participant did not interact with the targeted other. Source: www.tadfonline.com

While declining a partner’s sexual advances is a normal part of long-term relationships, new research sheds light on the fact that some ways to turn down a partner are less harmful than others. The findings were published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (published March 11, 2021). Given that sexual rejection can be very painful for the receiver and is associated with reduced relationship satisfaction, researchers were motivated to explore whether there are specific ways to turn down a partner that are better received than others. “We were interested in this topic as limited past research had looked at the impact of sexual rejection in relationships, especially in terms of the specific ways that romantic partners reject one another for sex,” said study author James J. Kim of the University of Toronto. “As couples regularly experience sexual conflicts in their relationship, it can be difficult to navigate situations where partners have divergent levels of sexual interest. We wanted to know whether there might be optimal ways that people can decline their partner for sex to help maintain the quality of their sexual relationship.” In two initial studies among samples of sexually active men and women in relationships, Kim and his colleagues identified a list of common sexual rejection behaviors and came up with a 20-item scale they deemed the Sexual Rejection Scale (SRS). “We found four distinct types of behaviors that people use when rejecting their partner for sex, characterized principally by: reassurance, hostility, assertiveness, and deflection,” Kim told PsyPost.

Interestingly, certain behaviors appeared to protect against the harmful effects of rejection. People who perceived their partners to be using reassuring behaviors (i.e., showing care and love when rejecting them) showed greater relationship and sexual satisfaction. Those who perceived hostile behaviors from their partners showed lower relationship and sexual satisfaction. When people experienced rejection that was communicated in a reassuring way, they felt greater perceived responsiveness from their partners, and in turn, greater relationship and sexual satisfaction. “Importantly, we found that conveying reassurance during rejection (letting your partner know you still love them or are attracted to them) helps to buffer against the negative effects of sexual rejection, and that this type of reassurance uniquely predicted higher relationship and sexual satisfaction in couples,” Kim told PsyPost. These findings are in line with Risk Regulation Theory, which posits that feeling accepted and valued by one’s partner offers a feeling of security that dissuades the self-protection response and promotes the goal of seeking connection. “As these situations are highly sensitive and emotionally charged in nature, the current research revealed the importance of demonstrating responsiveness and positive regard when rejecting a partner’s sexual advances,” Kim and his team wrote in their study. “Our study focused on sexual rejection dynamics between partners in established long-term relationships,” Kim added. “In this relationship context, our findings highlight how crucial it is to communicate reassurance when declining a partner’s sexual advances given the sensitive nature of sexual rejection.” -The study, “When Tonight Is Not the Night: Sexual Rejection Behaviors and Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships”, was authored by James J. Kim, Amy Muise, John K. Sakaluk, Natalie O. Rosen, and Emily A. Impett. Source: journals.sagepub.com

British journalist Annette Witheridge was one of the main promoters of the rumor of Carolyn Bessette denying sexy quality time to his hunky husband John F. Kennedy Jr. Witheridge published an article in The New York Post in November 1999, exposing an alleged rocky marriage, although most of her sources were anonymous under the guise of confidentiality. One of these anonymous sources told Witheridge: "John broke down and in the course of many conversations he told me Carolyn had moved out of the marital bed. At that point they weren't having sex, and it was taking a toll on him." But shortly before their fatal plane crash, on July 15, 1999, John and Carolyn went to Lenox Hill Hospital, where a surgeon removed the cast off his ankle and according to a nurse, the two were very affectionate, kissing passionately. Besides, Carolyn had said to Carole Radziwill that they were having sex, her on top due to his painful ankle. Carolyn was very compassionate and protective of her own, which made her irresistible in John Kennedy Jr's eyes. She had a heart of gold and a fantastic sense of humor; and she allegedly dated actor Stephen Dorff in the early 90s.

An iconic rebel type during the 90s, Stephen Dorff played anti-hero Cliff Spab in the grungy film "S.F.W." (So Fucking What?), directed by Jefery Levy (1994). As an anonymous viewer in a review for Amazon submitted: "A FILM WAY AHEAD OF ITS TIME" (July 25, 1999): "Take a look at this film and you will be amazed at how it predicted the future -- from OJ to JFK Jr. Also, how many films have there been since SFW that have dealt with the same themes, but not nearly as well? NBK; Mad City; Truman Show; Ed TV -- SFW is, quite simply, a work of genius -- even more amazing: the book was written by a 17 year old college kid in 1987! The film also deals with the way popular culture (not just the media) takes a person or event, uses it to sell, sell, then discards it, usually destroying it/him. The big cycle of pop culture. Check it out for yourself." Source: amazon.com

One of Dorff's latest roles roles was in the romantic musical drama I'll Find You (2019), being its original title Music, War and Love, directed by Martha Coolidge. Inspired by stories of Polish musicians from the 30-40's, the film's an uncommon love story; romantic, but with the love of music which draws the characters together. A young couple - Robert, a catholic opera singer and Rachel, a Jewish violinist, dream of one day performing together at Carnegie Hall. When they're torn apart by the German invasion of Poland, Robert vows to find Rachel, no matter what. His search takes him on a journey through the heart of Nazi Germany, to a reckoning - that Rachel may be lost to him forever. Stephen Dorff plays General Huber. Source: imdb.com

JFK Jr.’s better half was more than just a trophy wife, insists her friend RoseMarie Terenzio. “She loved making people feel good about themselves. She was so generous and down to earth,” says Terenzio. “That was her mission.” Despite Carolyn Bessette’s rarefied fashion background, she was surprisingly grounded in her approach to style, Terenzio told The Post. She never attended fashion shows after she left her job at Calvin Klein, and she regularly wore many of the same everyday basics—her go-to casual separates were Levi’s jeans and T-shirts from the Gap and Petit Bateau. Her closet was neat but not a walk-in. And unlike many of today’s parasitic celebrities, she never accepted freebies to pad her enviable wardrobe. “She always said, ‘I have to pay for it and if not, unfortunately, I have to send it back,” says Terenzio. Bessette also was generous with her friends, lending them clothes or giving them away. She even made over Terenzio with a shopping trip to Barneys and expensive highlights — a moment that is documented in her best-selling book, “Fairy Tale Interrupted”: “I get e-mails from women telling me their favorite story in the book was the shopping trip that Carolyn took me on. It was a fantasy, a real Cinderella story,” Terenzio says. “She wanted my career to take off.” But Terenzio admits she became the envy of George magazine staffers after Bessette took her under her wing. “People in the office were jealous. They’d say, ‘Oh, she’s trying to look like Carolyn.’ And who wouldn’t want to look like her?” Source: www.newsweek.com

JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette, Breakfast at Tiffany's

John Kennedy Jr. often spoke about the stresses endured by any woman photographed with him. These pressures were embodied by his wife; photos of Bessette, looking haunted and hunted, clutching her Calvin Klein coat protectively around her while the press pack chased behind, became as much a staple of the 90s New York tabloids as gossip about who Jerry Seinfeld was dating. Kennedy had found, somehow, a woman as beautiful as he was, who managed to make even the dreariest of clothes – beige skirts, small sunglasses – look absurdly elegant. Yet she hated the attention that came with being a Kennedy, and who could blame her? On 16 July 1999, they lived out the most Kennedy destiny of all, dying young when he crashed the plane they were flying in, with Bessette’s sister Lauren, en route to a cousin’s wedding. I watched the news coverage the next day, and the only positive thing anyone could say was, “Thank God his mother didn’t live to see this.” John Kennedy told USA Today in 1998: "The only person I've been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife. The second it was legal, she came up with me. Whenever we want to get away, we can just get in a plane and fly off."

Two years ago, Q Anon types were adamant that John Kennedy Jr. would emerge from hiding and be Donald Trump’s VP pick for the 2020 election. Spoiler: didn’t happen. But – and I swear this is the only time you’ll hear this phrase from me – Q Anon were on to something here. Kennedy and Trump are each other’s yin and yang, two sides to a very New York coin, blessed with absurd opportunities because of their families. The 2016 election will never make any sense to me, but maybe, I now think, my brain softened from a year of lockdown, it was always meant to be that a telegenic quasi-celebrity with a famous name would win the presidency that year. It’s just that we got the wrong one. I have a weakness for alternative histories that play on the idea of fixing a past wrong: Quentin Tarantino’s fantasy about saving Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; or Doctor Who showing Vincent van Gogh how beloved he would one day be. Preventing the Kennedy Sr assassination is the ultimate alt-history fantasy, because his murder has long been seen by many as a downward turning point in American history, a theory mined by Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63. The Kennedy family will, to Americans, always represent a golden promise that was never realised. And what else is there to do, when the present feels so much bleaker than the bright future you were promised in the past, but to sit on the sofa and think: what if, what if, what if? Source: www.theguardian.com

John F. Kennedy Jr., unlike PEOPLE’S previous selections as Sexiest Man of the Year—Mel Gibson, Mark Harmon and Harry Hamlin—isn’t a professional actor. He doesn’t make his living by being on public display. The folks around him argue that he is a private citizen, and his mother, Jacqueline Onassis, has gone to some lengths to keep the press away from her family. The nation has followed his life through his studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and on through Brown University, from which he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in history. When did we first notice his social conscience? You really don’t care about his work for his aunt Jean Kennedy Smith’s Very Special Arts program for people with learning disabilities, or that he’s considered a friendly, decent, remarkably down-to-earth guy who once followed a stranger down the street to return the five bucks the man had dropped? There were some “obnoxious types” in the Phi Psi fraternity house, an old frat brother says, “but John wasn’t one of them. At Brown he was very undercover, and he didn’t have any attitude.” He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a messy, book-filled apartment. He prefers to get around, even in winter, on his bike. He’s been an amateur actor since college, and when he goes for a hamburger at his favorite spot, Jackson Hole on Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, he sprawls at an outside table. 

It is not merely his looks—his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s striking body. (He’s 6’1″ 187 lbs.) It is that he has something that no film star, no athlete, can duplicate—the aura, the excitement that charges a room when he enters it, simply by virtue of being Kennedy. The energy, however, hasn’t inflated his ego. “I used to pay my rent to the 42nd Street Development Corporation, which was co-founded by Jackie Onassis,” says Manhattan restaurateur Jean-Claude Baker. “JFK Jr. was in the office once, wearing big Texas boots with his feet up on the desk. When he saw me, he stood up and said very politely, ‘Yes, can I help you?’ There is no arrogance in the guy.” Although privately he was nervous, his introduction of Senator Kennedy at the Democratic convention got a two-minute standing ovation. “I can’t remember a word of the speech,” says conservative Republican consultant Richard Viguerie, “but I do remember a good delivery. I think it was a plus for the Democrats and the boy. He is strikingly handsome.” During his summer job at the law firm (one of its founding partners was Ted Kennedy’s law school roommate), JFK Jr. did not, like some summer associates, turn down assignments. He worked, according to one attorney, on “anything he was given.”

As yet unlike his father and grandfather, who were legendary ladies’ men, JFK Jr. has long relationships with his girlfriends. His steady for the last two years has been another Brown alumna, Christina Haag, 27, daughter of a marketing executive. A graduate of the upper-crusty Brearley School in Manhattan, Christina has known Kennedy since they were both 15. She too is Catholic; like Kennedy, she loves to keep in shape. They’ve acted together, playing the young lovers in Brian Friel’s Winners at Manhattan’s Irish Arts Center in 1985. This summer, when Haag appeared in a one-act comedy, Sleeping with the Past, at Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater, she and JFK Jr. shared a house in Venice. “They bring out the best in each other,” says Robin Saex, the play’s director and one of Christina’s closest friends. He was also spotted a few times with Click model Audra Avizienis, 22. “We’ve been on a few dates, but I’m not seeing him,” says Avizienis. “I’m not a girlfriend. He has a girlfriend. Or have they broken up?” Did she find young Kennedy sexy? “Oh, yes,” she says. “He has this quiet sadness. There’s something pensive and sad about him.”  —Victoria Balfour for People magazine, first published on September 12, 1988.

John Kennedy Jr’s work with the underprivileged and disabled, his experience bridging the public and private sectors, his inquisitive mind, sense of obligation, and determination to avoid the obvious, a quick run for elective office, reveal a commendable sense of purpose. “He makes good decisions, not facile ones,” says a New York University School of Law pal named Stevelman. Friends say that now, though John rarely brings up his father, he is gracious when others do. Nevertheless, awkward moments do occur. “One time he was hanging out in somebody’s room,” recalls a fraternity brother, “and they were playing the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (which contains the lyric, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ / When after all / it was you and me”). Everyone realized, ‘Uh-oh.’ But at some point, he’d just walked out and then he walked back in again. He just avoided the situation.” Friends are careful with him. “It’s never come up and I wouldn’t bring it up,” says Stevelman. It’s not that he won’t want our votes eventually. He just doesn’t want them now, when all he would be is JFK II. But John F. Kennedy Jr. will always be America’s son, and that’s a hurdle he’ll face for the rest of his life. “I honestly think,” says one friend, “in 100 years, they’ll say that whatever he did, he succeeded not because he was John F. Kennedy Jr. but in spite of it.” —Michael Gross for New York Magazine, originally published in March 20, 1989 

A federal judge refused to send a legal battle over a “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” remake back to state court, despite pleas by attorneys for writer Truman Capote’s trust that they mistakenly alleged copyright infringement. Paramount Pictures has designs on producing a feature film or television series remake of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” the 1961 classic starring Audrey Hepburn, and has a screenplay ready for the reboot. The film was based on the novella of the same name, which Truman Capote wrote in 1958. After his death, domestic property rights to the novella transferred from Paramount to the Truman Capote Literary Trust, a charity Capote established before his death. In 1991, the charitable trust entered into a settlement with Paramount granting certain rights for an eventual remake of the classic film. The controversy in the current legal battle arises from the parties’ differing interpretations of the 1991 agreement. Paramount claims the agreement granted it full rights to the novella and allows the studio to produce a “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” remake at any time. The trust has received seven-figure offers for a television series remake of the novella, the lawsuit said, adding that Paramount executives are allegedly also hip to the idea and hope to pitch a series to a streaming platform. Source: www.courthousenews.com

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the tale of the romantic misadventures of two gold-diggers, Holly Golightly and her upstairs neighbor, Paul Varjak, both of whom are skating through their 20s by having sex with and taking money from older and richer people. Of course, they both maintain their self-respect by keeping a discreet distance between the sex-giving and money-taking, so that the quid pro quo is not too brazenly obvious. Capote said that Holly was an “American geisha.” Both Holly and Paul rationalize their choices by reference to a mission. Holly wants to buy land and horses and Paul is a writer who needs a patron to give him time to work on his great novel. But it is not working. Both show symptoms of social isolation. He’s got writer’s block. As Holly notes, he doesn’t even have a ribbon in his typewriter. Paul is the prouder and more serious of the two. Holly is top banana in the flake department. Which, of course, means that Paul suffers greatly at Holly’s hands when he falls in love with her. 

The basic plot of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is quite simple. Paul Varjak—played by George Peppard at the peak of his Nordic-preppy good looks—moves into an apartment on Manhattan’s upper east side and meets his ditzy downstairs neighbor. Holly Golightly is rootless, a drifter, a flake. She has an orange cat, but she hasn’t given him a name. Her favorite place in the world is Tiffany’s, the jewelers on Fifth Avenue. She declares to Paul that if she ever finds a place that makes her feel like Tiffany’s, she’ll put down roots and give the cat a name. Paul’s apartment isn’t exactly “him” either. It looks like an expensive European hotel room. It was decorated before his arrival by his patron, Mrs. Failenson, nicknamed “2E,” played by a radiant Patricia Neal. The movie creates the character of Paul from the novel’s unnamed narrator. 2E and her relationship with Paul are inventions of the screenwriter, which considerably deepens the character and his relationship with Holly, creating dramatic conflict through “irreconcilable similarities.” For Paul, gold-digging is a short-term strategy, to get his start in life, at which time he will settle down with a nice girl and take care of her. For Holly, however, gold-digging is a long-term strategy to find a husband, who will take care of her forever.

Holly is just not Lula Mae anymore. She has constructed a whole new identity for herself. She got rid of her Okie accent with French lessons, courtesy of a Hollywood producer, Berman, and she has a fabulous circle of rich male friends—whom she rates as “rats” and “super-rats”—competing for her attention. When she sees a heartbroken Doc off at the Greyhound Bus station, she tells him that she’s a “wild thing” and that one should never fall in love with wild things, because they will just break your heart. In truth, Holly is just a flake who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants and is afraid of real relationships and real commitments. Berman thinks Holly is a phony, but he debates whether she is a real phony or not—a real phony being someone who believes his own nonsense. The whole sequence moves from creepy, to comical, to corny, to deeply moving. That’s the magic of this film. Paul now knows her story but loves her all the more. He hopes that she will get a little more serious about life, and maybe about him. 

Paul enjoys taking care of Holly. It makes him feel strong and manly. Being taken care of by 2E is convenient but emasculating. Unsurprisingly, Holly proves to be the better muse than 2E. Awakening Paul’s manliness also awakens his creativity. Thus Paul is appalled when Holly declares that she is no longer going to play the field. She is going to set her sights on marrying Rusty Trawler, the ninth richest man in America under fifty, despite the fact that he is a tittering pig-faced manlet. Paul gives Holly a powerful talking to. He tells her that people really do belong to one another and that it is the only real chance we have of happiness. In today’s rabidly individualistic society, these are unfashionable sentiments, but deeply romantic and stirring ones. Paul actually reaches Holly. He actually changes her heart. She runs into the rain, searching for the cat, whom she finds, then Paul and Holly embrace, the prototype of a human family that may come to be. The end—a happy one, we hope. Unsurprisingly, modern arbiters of virtue don’t like Breakfast at Tiffany’s very much. It is obviously heteronormative, anti-feminist, and otherwise “problematic.” I highly recommend Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But what is most enchanting about this film can’t be captured in prose. It simply must be seen—for the beautiful people, the iconic fashions, and its portrayal of a glamorous, safe, overwhelmingly white New York City. It's a character study that even manages to have a “message”—and a wholesome one at that. It communicates the joys and follies of youth in America at its peak—an age of seemingly infinite potential—and the necessity of finally growing up and actually taking a stand. Source: unz.com