Browning Without a Cause

by Peter Corris

The Porsche was a silver grey, low-slung speed machine. It had the number 130 painted on it along with the words 'Little Bastard'.

  'Ain't she a beauty? She'll do more'n a hundred and doesn't much like it under eighty.'

  'Great,' I said. 'The movie all done?'

  'Sure. Couple days ago.' He ran his hand over the dyed hair. 'I finished up aged around fifty somethin'. What d'you think about that?'

  'I'm sure you did a great job. I need the money, Jimmy. I need it real bad.'

  He took a packet from his pocket and flicked up one of his king-size Chesterfields. 'I can give you a check, Dick.'

  'Where's the bank?'

  'Beverly Hills.' He cackled in the way I'd heard so often. 'Hell, I got more money than you ever dreamed of havin'.'

  I smiled. 'Make it out to cash.'

  He lit the cigarette, ducking his head down to the flame from the lighter. He sucked in the smoke and let it filter out through his nose as he reached into the car and pulled out a jacket. He took a check book and a pen from a pocket, rested the book on the bonnet of the Porsche and scribbled. Then he tore the check out and handed it to me.

  'Wish me luck, Dick.'

  I examined the check — it was for a thousand dollars cash and he'd signed and dated it.

  'Thanks, Jimmy.' I offered my hand and we shook. 'Good luck, you little bastard.'

  He laughed, flicked his butt away and got into the car. He started the engine, gunned the motor and roared away onto Highway 41. The station wagon followed but I wasn't aware of it. I watched the grey Porsche until it was out of sight.57

  Notes

  1 See Browning Sahib (1994).

  2 Browning married Elizabeth Macknight, Coral Canetti (bigamously and under a false name) and, after being divorced by Elizabeth Macknight, May Lin. See 'Box Office' Browning, Browning in Buckskins and Browning PI.

  3 Browning has already detailed two sojourns, approximately twenty years apart, in Canada in which he served, unwillingly, in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and army, see Browning Takes Off and Browning PI. Given his career, this incident could have occurred at either time.

  4 See Browning Takes Off (1989).

  5 Rocky Graziano (1922-90) was born Rocco Barbella in New York. He started fighting in the ring in 1942 after a violent and lawless adolescence. He held the world middleweight title briefly in 1947-8 after beating Tony Zale. He lost the title back to Zale in June 1948. Retiring from the ring soon after, he worked for some years in small acting roles on television and in films. His autobiography Somebody up there likes me, was filmed in 1955 with Paul Newman playing Graziano. The role was to have been played by James Dean.

  6 Vicenzo De Mora, aka Machine Gun Jack McGurr, was a Chicago gangster. See Browning Takes Off, p. 142.

  7 Nat Fleischer was for many years the editor of Ring magazine. The author of many books on boxing, he was the final court of appeal in any dispute about the history and lore of pugilism.

  8 'Slapsie' Maxie Rosenbloom held the world light heavyweight title in 1933-4. He was a clever boxer and light hitter, hence his nickname, who lost very few of his several hundred fights. He appeared in night clubs, on television and in films, often playing a punch drunk fighter. Max Baer won the world heavyweight championship in 1934 by beating Primo Carnera. He lost it the following year to Jim Braddock. His younger brother, Buddy, was a moderately successful heavyweight during and after the Second World War. Both appeared in films and on television, usually as 'heavies'.

  9 Katharine Hepburn was an accomplished sportswoman who displayed her abilities most clearly in Pat and Mike (1952), in which she golfed with the legendary 'Babe' Didrikson and played tennis with the glamorous Gussy Moran. Browning was in Hollywood at the time and it was probably then that he helped her with her tennis.

  10 Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel (1904-47) was a New York gangster, associate of 'Lucky' Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who is thought to have been an executioner in the east before he moved to the west coast to expand the activities of organised crime. He borrowed millions of syndicate dollars to build the unprofitable Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas, eventually ran foul of powerful criminals and was shot to death in the Beverly Hills home of his mistress.

  11 A German V1 rocket of a kind used against London in the blitz. Essentially, the V1 was a flying bomb with sophisticated navigational equipment installed.

  12 Jack L. Warner and his brothers Harry, Albert and Sam — the principals of the Warners Bros studio.

  13 Browning is mistaken. The Cheers' hit song 'Black Denim Trousers' which had the chorus:

  He wore black denim trousers

  And motor cycle boots

  And a black leather jacket

  With an eagle on the back

  He had a hopped-up cycle ['sickle']

  That took off like a gun

  That fool was the terror

  Of Highway 101

  was not released until 1956.

  14 George Stevens (1904-75) was born into a theatrical family and was performing on the stage at a very early age. In Hollywood he moved from writing to directing shorts and eventually became a director of features. He was renowned for his painstaking craftsmanship, the amount of film he shot and the length of time he spent in the editing process. He won directing Oscars for A Place in the Sun and Giant. He directed successful comedies like Woman of the Year and The Talk of the Town, but perhaps his most enduring film was the western Shane (1953).

  15 Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, famous Hollywood gossip columnists.

  16 Charles 'Lucky' Luciano (1897-1962) was born Salvatore Luciana in Sicily and came to the United States at the age of ten. Growing up in the Lower East side of New York, he became a thief, narcotics trafficker and hit man. He participated in several gang wars in the 1920s and eventually came to control narcotics, vice and extortion rackets in New York. Arrested in 1936, he was tried and sentenced to fifty years imprisonment on a variety of extortion charges. He continued to direct criminal activities from gaol, and during the Second World War his influence was sought by authorities to stop a stevedoring strike that was hampering the war effort. His reward was a parole and deportation to Italy in 1946. In 1947 he travelled to Havana, Cuba for a top level meeting of American mafia bosses, including Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. American influence was brought to bear and he was deported from Cuba, returning to Italy after failing to gain admission to several Latin American countries. He is thought to have directed narcotics smuggling into the US from Europe until 1962 when he died of a heart attack in Naples. Through this period there were frequent unconfirmed rumours and reports of visits by Luciano to the United States.

  17 See Browning Takes Off, pp. 136-43.

  18 See Browning PI.

  19 Vito Genovese (1897-1969) mafia chief, associate of Albert Anastasia in the notorious Murder Inc. organisation responsible for many gangland killings. Although instrumental, directly and indirectly, in many murders he was eventually convicted of smuggling and distributing narcotics in 1958 and was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. He continued to direct criminal activities and arrange the elimination of rivals such as Anastasia from gaol. He died of natural causes in Leavenworth penitentiary.

  20 Browning had helped Federal agents frustrate the activities of a Hollywood chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in return for concessions about his status as an illegal immigrant. The FBI did not honour its undertakings to him, see Browning in Buckskin, pp. 162-87 and Browning PI, p.1.

  21 In fact, Browning was nearing sixty, having been born in 1895, see 'Box Office' Browning, p. 231. Throughout his memoirs he progressively reduces his age.

  22 Al Hibbler was a popular singer of the 1950s who was blind. His version of 'Unchained Melody' was the number eight single on the Cashbox hits chart for 1955.

  23 See 'Box Office' Browning, pp. 8-9.

  24 'Truck farming' was a system whereby vegetables were grown in rural areas and freighted to the cities in refrigerated rail and road trucks. Previously, the vegetable ne
eds of large centres were served by farms on their outskirts.

  25 Roger Bannister, a twenty-five-year-old medical student, ran 3 minutes 59.4 seconds for a mile on 4 May 1954 at the university track in a match between the university and the Amateur Athletic Association. The first man to run the distance in under four minutes, he broke the previous record by almost two seconds.

  26 On May 8, after a 55 day siege and battle, the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu fell to the forces commanded by General V. N. Giap. This marked the end of the French effort to retain its colonies in Indo-China.

  'Crazy Man, Crazy' by Bill Haley and the Comets, released in April 1954, was the first 'mainstream' rock 'n' roll record. It did well but the follow-up record 'Rock around the Clock' attracted little attention until it became the theme song for the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle. The song became the top Cashbox hit for that year. In 1954 Doris Day had a hit with 'Secret Love' and this may have been the song Browning heard.

  27 In 1922 Browning was arrested in Canada for gun-running. In a manoeuvre that mis-fired, he took the place of a deserting member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and found himself serving in that corps in his stead. Browning eventually deserted himself. See Browning Takes Off, chaps 1-11.

  28 The scene Browning refers to is a standard one in Westerns, but perhaps he had in mind the 1957 Gregory Peck movie The Bravados in which the action happens as he says.

  29 The husband of Annie Oakley, brought to the screen by Howard Keel in the 1950 MGM musical Annie Get Your Gun.

  30 See Browning in Buckskin, pp. 64-5.

  31 Research into baseball, Olympic and boxing records has failed to reveal any trace of Slocum's alleged involvement. It is possible, of course, that, like Browning, Slocum was going under another name in 1954. When Jack Dempsey knocked out the fifty-eight pounds heavier Jess Willard in Toledo, Ohio in 1919 in three rounds, it was widely rumoured that the tape around Dempsey's hands had been hardened by soaking in plaster of Paris. Jack Sharkey lost the world title to Primo Carnera, who could neither box effectively nor hit hard. In 1933. Sharkey, accused of throwing the fight by almost everyone including his manager, maintained that Carner a had improved and that he was inhibited by the death of his friend Ernie Schaaf who had died after a fight with Carnera. See Peter Heller, In this Corner: Forty World Champions tell their stories, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973, pp. 159-60.

  32 The opening sequence describes the privately-owned airplanes converging on Jett Rink's birthday celebration as 'Monsters in a Jovian quadrille'. Edna Ferber, Giant, Gollancz, London, 1952, p. 5.

  33 Dennis Hopper gives a slightly different version of this incident. In his introduction to James Dean: Behind the Scene, Leith Adams and Keith Burns (eds), Smyth Griphon, Los Angeles, 1990, p.9, he says that Dean told him why he had urinated as they were driving back to the hotel. He also says that there were about a thousand people watching. We know from other sources, e.g. John Parker, Five for Hollywood, p.104 that Dean was not living in a hotel but sharing a house with Hudson and Wills. Also it seems unlikely that Stevens, even if 'playing it smart' in the way Browning suggests, would have permitted a thousand people to watch the filming. Browning's account must be given equal credibility.

  34 See Parker, Five for Hollywood, p. 104, for a reference to the death threats. According to this source, the antagonism was to sentiments expressed by both Bick Benedict and Jett Rink, as Browning surmised.

  35 See 'Beverly Hills' Browning.

  36 In all probability this was Buddy Holly (1937-59) who had acquired a local reputation as a country singer before becoming a major recording star with his band, The Crickets. Along with two other popular singers, Holly died in a plane crash in January 1959.

  37 See 'Beverly Hills' Browning, passim.

  38 In fact twenty-eight minutes.

  39 See 'Box Office' Browning, 'Beverly Hills' Browning', Browning PI and Browning Battles On.

  40 I've wined and dined on Mulligan stew

  And never asked for turkey

  I've hitched and hiked and grifted too

  From Maine to Albuquerque

  Cole Porter, The lady is a tramp'

  41 Department of Motor Vehicles.

  42 Since 1966 American law officers have been obliged to inform arrestees of their right not to answer questions and to be represented by legal counsel. That year the Supreme Court reversed an Arizona court's conviction of Ernesto A. Miranda who had confessed to rape and kidnapping but had not been advised of his constitutional rights when arrested.

  43 Clyde Barrow (1909-1934) was born in Telice, Texas and led a criminal life for almost all of his twenty-five years. Along with his brother Buck and Bonnie Parker, he went on a two-year spree of violent crime in the southwestern states — car theft, bank, store and gas station robbery, prison-breaking and murder. He and Bonnie Parker were shot to death by a posse in Louisiana in 1934. The pair died in what was literally a hail of bullets, 187 shots being fired.

  44 Browning is referring to the 1967 Warner Brothers production of Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn who won the Academy Award for his effort. A highly romanticised but dramatically effective version of the Barrow/Parker story, the film was critically and financially very successful and launched the career of Faye Dunaway.

  45 See 'Box Office' Browning, pp. 1-3; 'Beverly Hills' Browning, pp. 176-9.

  46 See 'Beverly Hills' Browning, Introduction; Browning in Buckskin, passim.

  47 John Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under eight Presidents for almost 50 years, died in Washington, D.C., on 2 May 1972. This provides an approximate dating for the recording of this part of Browning's memoirs — to use his own expression, 'around 1982'.

  48 See Browning PI, pp. 1, 206.

  49 On 23 July 1934 a man, claimed by police and FBI to be the notorious bank-robber and prison escapee John Dillinger, was shot to death outside the Biograph theatre in Chicago by a police officer. Medical and other evidence supports the view that this man was a small-time hoodlum named James 'Jimmy' Lawrence who bore a physical resemblance to Dillinger, although having eyes of a different colour, a heavier build and lacking Dillinger's many scars. Some crime historians now believe that Lawrence's death was part of a carefully orchestrated plan, using criminals and corrupt police and officials, to provide Dillinger with a smoke screen behind which he disappeared forever. According to this theory, the FBI went along with the deception in order to gain kudos for its role in the supposed elimination of the then public enemy number one. See Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen, Evans, N.Y., 1973, pp. 176-8.

  50 Browning was prescient. Lewis Hoad had not won a major singles title at this time, when American Tony Trabert was the world's leading player. In the following year Hoad would win three of the four 'grand slam' titles — the Australian, French and Wimbledon, and finish runner-up to Ken Rosewall in the American championship. Hoad possessed all the shots and many authorities believe that, but for back injuries, he could have compiled an unrivalled record.

  51 A species of small shark known as a 'gummy shark' was commonly eaten in many parts of Australia until the 1960s. Called 'flake' in some states, it is still the usual fish sold with chips and potato cakes in Melbourne fish and chip shops.

  52 See Browning in Buckskin, pp. 82ff.

  53 At the time Browning was writing, anti-biotics such as streptomycin had become available for the treatment of tuberculosis.

  54 A further indication that Browning intended his memoirs to be published.

  55 On September 21, 1955 Rocky Marciano, thirty-two-year-old world heavyweight champion, fought Archie Moore, then forty-one and the holder of the light heavyweight title. Marciano knocked Moore out in the ninth round. It was Marciano's last fight. He retired, undefeated as a professional, the only heavyweight title holder to do so.

  56 As usual, Browning's grasp of anthropology was at fault. The Indians who occupied the area encompassing Sherman Oaks were members of one of the tribes collectiv
ely known as the Yuman.

  57 James Dean was killed instantly on the afternoon of 30 September when his Porsche collided with a Ford sedan at the intersection of routes 466 and 42 at Cholmas, California.