Cloris Leachman's Lapse Of Memory

While listening to the BBC News on New York's public radio station WNYC-AM 820, I heard that the TV actress June Lockhart (Lassie and Lost in Space) had died at the age of 100. The mention of her death brought to mind the time I had proofread Cloris Leachman's memoir, Cloris, for Kensington Books in 2008 or 2009 and pointed out a factual error.

In the manuscript, Leachman said that she replaced June Lockhart as the mother on Lassie. For verification, I went to The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (Ballantine Books, 1979). I found out it was the other way around--Lockhart had replaced her on the show.  I then corrected the error with my red pencil, citing the source of the correct information. 

Leachman, in her 80s when the memoir was about to come out, obviously had a lapse of memory. (The book, it should be noted, was actually ghostwritten by her ex-husband, the film director George Englund, who later died in 2017.)

**I previously wrote about this subject for the blog on February 17, 2021. To see this blog post, click on "Cloris Leachman" in the Labels section below.

I Enjoy Watching Movies On DVD

I recently heard on a radio news broadcast that the retailer Best Buy was discontinuing the sale of DVDs because more and more people are watching movies via streaming services rather than on DVDs.

My introduction to streaming came about when my upstairs neighbors, Harry and Lilia, would invite me to their apartment numerous times for dinner, conversation, and the use of their laptop computers.

Harry or Lilia, while sitting on the living room couch, remote in hand, would skim through the menu offerings on Netflix, reading the plot summaries before deciding on what to watch.

From what I could see, streaming doesn't offer the kinds of features found on a DVD like audio commentaries, scene selection, behind-the-scenes mini-docs, blooper clips, trailers, etc. (Good reasons not to buy bootleg copies because they lack these important features.)

Being old school, I prefer to have the physical disc in hand. As the novelist Larry Duplechan points out in his memoir/film history book, Movies That Made Me Gay (Team Angelica Publishing, 2023, paperback), the DVD is a good backup because "you can't trust streaming services to keep your favorite old movies posted."

An Omnivorous Reader

In his online New York Times obituary (June 14, 2023), Robert Gottlieb, the noted book and magazine editor (Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf; The New Yorker), was reported to have said that in his teens he read War and Peace by Tolstoy in one day and Proust's  Remembrance of Things Past, described in the obituary as a "monumental" work, in one week.

As a boy, Gottlieb told the Times in a 1980 article, "I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time. Mind you, that's all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library."

The title of his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader: A Life, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed, is an apt description of his reading habits as a child and as an adult.

Hubert Delany, Science Fiction Writer Samuel Delany's Uncle, Needs A Biography Written About Him

Stephen L. Carter's fascinating biography of his grandmother Eunice Hunton Carter (1899-1970), Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster (Henry Holt, 2018), mentions another fascinating figure, Hubert Delany.

I'm hoping someone will write a book or make a documentary film about Delany (1901-1990) who, writes Carter, "was the Negro lawyer who was the GOP candidate in the November 1929 special election for Harlem's seat in the House of Representatives." He lost that election due to the unscrupulous, racist antics of Tammany Hall Democrats.

A graduate of the New York University Law School, Delany went on to become an assistant U.S. Attorney specializing in white-collar crime.

His sisters were Sadie and Bessie Delany, who wrote the famous memoir, Having Our Say. His nephew is the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany.

Until a book about Hubert Delany is written, I'll have to be content with whatever information can be had about him in his sisters's memoir.

Note: The mobster referred to in the subtitle of Carter's book is Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

I sent Samuel Delany a message on Facebook stating that his uncle deserved a full-length biography. He agreed with me. I asked him if he had any information about his uncle not mentioned in the Carter book. Here is what he wrote on June 20, 2021:

"Characters based on both my dad and Uncle Hubert are the focus of much of the first short novel in 'Atlantis:Three Tales.' Certainly he was the biggest influence-for-good on my father. Probably on me, too. At least one scholar was pretty convinced he was gay.

"From another older cousin, dead a few years ago, I had confirmation of a long-term-close friendship (and possibly affair) with a famous black singer who was also his client. There's a bit of not-talked-about stuff in my report of his funeral in 'Letters from Amherst.' But I'd be curious to know more myself...

"He was the paternal uncle closest to me and my father, followed by Uncle Hap."

Scotty Bowers, Pimp To The Stars

I first learned of Scotty Bowers and his memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, 2012) while browsing the Summer Movie Preview double issue of Entertainment Weekly (April 27/May 4, 2018) and found out that a documentary based on the book will be released in late July. The film is called Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.

I immediately obtained a copy of this fascinating tell-all book and I hope to see the documentary version when it is screened in theatres this summer.

Bowers, now 94 years old, was in the Marine Corps during World War II and later became a matchmaker and trick to many famous names in Hollywood in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Customer Service With Courtesy And Know-How

It's been a while since I read the late journalist Nat Hentoff's Boston Boy, a memoir of his youth, but I remember a section of the book regarding a Boston candy store where he worked. The store management required all employees to master from cover to cover the store's rule book before they could be promoted from,say, a stock person to a counter person.

I wonder sometimes how many stores today are as meticulous as that Boston candy store was about training their employees in dealing with customers (especially the difficult ones) as well as the merchandise.

Cleve Jones's Former Roommate

When I read gay activist Cleve Jones's riveting memoir,When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, I was surprised to learn that he and historian Eric Garber were roommates in San Francisco at one time.

In 1982, at New York's Hunter College, I attended Garber's slide lecture on the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I later interviewed him for the New York Native, the now-defunct gay weekly newspaper.

Garber's research inspired me to do further reading on the gays and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance like the artist/poet/novelist Richard Bruce Nugent, who I wrote about for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life.

Note: See my 1983 New York City News interview with Eric Garber that I posted on this blog on April 20, 2013.

No One Can Be Food-Deaf

Book and magazine editor Robert Gottlieb in his memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), described his lack of culinary skills this way: "...I can't do more in the kitchen than boil an egg, and am generally considered food-deaf."

The term "food-deaf "is an inaccurate description. A person can be tone-deaf because that refers to sound. But a person can't be food-deaf because one doesn't listen to food as its being prepared in the kitchen. The terms that are more accurate, although imperfect, would be food klutz and cooking inept.

Gay Activist Cleve Jones's Memoir

I'm looking forward to reading (and reviewing?) When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, the San Francisco gay rights activist and founder of the AIDS quilt project. (I'm rarely on Facebook, so the last time I checked, he and I were still Facebook friends.)

 I learned about the book after hearing him being interviewed on public radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I  heard him again today on another public radio show, Here and Now.

On Bisexuals

"In those days [the 1960s] we always assumed that a bisexual (especially, for some reason, a bisexual man) was really a homosexual in the closet. ....But as I learned a decade later in Paris, the world is full of genuine bisexuals, though most of them keep a low profile, not because they're ashamed but because everyone distrusts and fear them."--Edmund White, from City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (Bloomsbury, 2009).