www.bizarrism.com
Bizarrism No. 1. Who’s Who in Sydney; The Strange Voyage of
Donald Crowhurst; Amateur Surgery; Charles Fort; Spontaneous Combustion and
more.
Bizarrism No. 2. Here Come the Virgins;
A Conversation with Mr Ponnuswamy; Harry Crosby; The Official UFO Story; The
Key to the Universe and more.
Bizarrism No. 3. Lesbian Vampires; Me
and the Black Death; Hookers For Jesus; S.C.U.M.; Michael Fomenko; Of Teros and
Deros; The Joe Meek Experience and more.
Bizarrism No. 4. William Chidley; The
Family Way; The Brain That Ate Sydney; A Brief Guide to Self-Immolation; Flat
Earth News; Bovver!; Off With the Masters; The Intergalactic Adventures of Kirk
Allen; When I Hear the Word Theory I Reach for My Gun; How to Make a Shrunken
Head; Arthur Cravan and more.
Bizarrism No. 5. Rosaleen Norton;
Monkey Gland Mania; The World’s Top Suicide Spots; The Wonderful World of
Mormons; Drugs Virus Germs; Voutoroonie! - the Slim Gaillard Story; Fishman;
The Life and Death of a Lobster Boy;
Why I Love Cults; Bellerive the Poet and more.
Bizarrism No. 6. Literary Remains;
Mary’s Voicebox; Tales of the Hollow Earth; The Sick World of Sigmund Freud;
The Remarkable Mollie Fancher; A Conversation with Sir Wayne; Craig Shergold’s
Card Nightmare, Kelver Hartley - the Story of a Recluse and more.
Bizarrism No. 7. Looking for the Face
of Borges; The Anatomy of Conspiracy Theory; The Webwork World of Harry Stephen
Keeler; Idiot Boy, Tichborne-Mania!; Ceacescu; Sea Monkeys and more.
Bizarrism No. 8. Eugenia Falleni, the
Man-Woman Murderer; The Nightmare of William Lindsay Gresham; Find that Fish! -
JLB Smith’s search for the Coelacanth; Are Clowns Evil?; Chairman Mao; The
Shaggs and more.
Issues
1 - 3 are SOLD OUT.
Issues 4 - 8 are available.
In
Australia: each issue is $5 cash, or cheque made payable to Chris Mikul.
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Email:
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The genesis of Bizarrism came some time in the early 1980s. I was sitting in a lounge room at a party, getting nicely pissed, when I reached into the bookcase behind me and pulled out a volume at random. It was called The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, but here was no writing on the dust jacket to indicate what the book was about.
Now at this time, I should explain, I was attempting to become a writer of short stories. In composing my little bits of fiction I found myself describing events which had supposedly really happened to someone, somewhere, at some time. Yet I knew that the conventions of fiction were causing me to shape my material constantly, to give it thematic unity and structure - a beginning, middle and an end, to throw in symbolism at every turn and eliminate the randomness which characterises real life.
I knew, of course, that the opposite was also true - that writers of non-fiction often use fictional narrative techniques to enliven their stories. And yet, who could ever mistake a work of fiction for one of fact (outright hoaxes excluded)? Were there, I wondered, any stories from real life which inherently followed these artificial, literary rules? In short, were there any non-fiction books which read like novels?
So I was looking at this book. I opened it to the photo section and saw a shot of a haunted looking man standing on a boat, the eponymous Crowhurst, and beneath it a quote from him. “I am going because I would have no peace if I stayed.”
I began to read the book right there. I saw it was about a round-the-world voyage which had ended in a most unusual way, a news story at the time, now forgotten. And something told me I’d found the book I was looking for.
Cut to a couple of years later. I was recovering from a terrifying Communications course just dripping with impenetrable postmodernist theoretical jargon, and working as a shit-kicker in a government department. By far the hardest aspect of the job was attempting to look busy when there was virtually nothing to do. And in one corner of the office, a photocopier beckoned. It looked bored with copying government documents. Like thousands before and since, I had an idea.
Crowhurst went into the first Bizarrism, along with some of the street characters around Sydney at the time, Charles Fort, spontaneous combustion, a Mass Murderer Crossword Puzzle (these were the days before serial killers had been invented), and far too many clippings from newspapers. A hundred or so copies were collated on my lounge room floor in December 1986, ready in time to give out as Christmas presents. It was only meant to be a one-off, but people kept asking me when the next one was coming out, and then I got curious to see it myself. After that it became a habit.
I continue to put out an issue of Bizarrism every year or two. The basic formula has remained the same - some strange ideas, cults, a bit of true crime, an amiable eccentric or two, a scrap of folklore. My only criterion for including something is if it interests me. Each issue is A4 size, 40 pages long, and packed with stories and illustrations. In 2000, the best articles from the first six issues were collected into a book, Bizarrism, published in the UK by Headpress, and in Australia by Pluto Press.
Along the way I have collected others like Crowhurst. Some of them were artists, like Rosaleen Norton, or poets, like Harry Crosby or Arthur Cravan, or musicians, like Slim Gaillard or Joe Meek, but it seems to me that the greatest works of art they each produced were their own lives. Like Donald Crowhurst, they were the people who went overboard, beacons of shining if erratic brilliance in a world of sensible conformity. I’m enormously glad to have known them.
Chris Mikul
In 1968, in the wake of Francis Chichester’s single-handed circumnavigation of the world in Gypsy Moth IV the previous year, the Sunday Times organised a non-stop, round-the-world yacht race. One of the first to announce his participation was Donald Crowhurst, the 36-year-old owner of a small electronics firm based in Somerset. Crowhurst had spent some time in the air force and navy, but had been asked to leave both because of reckless behaviour. He had turned to electronics after this, and set up a company to market the navigational aids and other devices which he had invented. Although patchily educated, Crowhurst was intelligent and his inventions generally sound, but his company had fallen heavily into debt. This was one of the main reasons for someone who had previously only sailed for a hobby suddenly announcing he would be attempting to circumnavigate the globe - the publicity would ensure the sale of his inventions and the success of his business.
The other reason was that Crowhurst firmly believed himself to be destined for greatness, and he craved the sort of instant fame which Chichester had won. As this was to be the first non-stop circumnavigation (Chichester had made one stop on his trip) the adulation would likely be even greater.
The rules of the race were simple. Any yacht which set out from any port in the world between June 1 and October 31 could be a part of the contest, and as the yachts would be starting at different times there were to be two prizes - one for the yacht which completed the voyage first, and another for the fastest time made. Crowhurst was convinced he could win both.
Crowhurst’s boat builders managed to finish the trimaran in a very short time. She was named the Teignmouth Electron after the port of Teignmouth from which Crowhurst would sail. There was little time to test her though, and the design faults which cropped up had to be fixed hurriedly and inadequately. As the deadline for the race approached, Crowhurst, his friends and sponsors worked frantically to gather the stores and equipment needed. There was simply not enough time. When Crowhurst said goodbye to his wife, Clare, and four children on 31 October, the last possible day, his boat was about as badly equipped as it could possibly be.
Things began to go wrong almost immediately. Screws began to work themselves loose and someone had forgotten to put the spare ones on board. His steering gear broke down. One of the floats on either side of the central hull began to fill with water. His generator flooded too, and somehow it had been neglected to load the hose needed for the pump. The boat was a mass of wiring, intended to hook up Crowhurst’s many electronic gadgets to a central computer, but he had not had the time to build either the computer or the gadgets. Even the device to bring the boat up should she capsize had not been completed.
Two weeks into his voyage, Crowhurst made a list of all the things wrong with his boat, evaluated their seriousness, and came to the conclusion that there was no way he could complete a round-the-world voyage. Returning home however would not only be humiliating, it would mean the bankruptcy of his firm, which was contracted to buy the trimaran from his chief sponsor in the event of his quitting the race. He considered the possibility of saving face by carrying on to somewhere like Australia, but the chances of doing even this were minimal.
It was now, faced with these unpleasant alternatives, that Crowhurst hit upon a plan. Instead of continuing his voyage - down through the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, past Australia, round Cape Horn and back up through the Atlantic to England again - he would simply remain in the Atlantic, out of the way of shipping lanes and hopefully unnoticed, and pretend he had sailed around the world. It was simple in theory, but would be enormously difficult to carry out in practice. He would have to make radio transmissions of false positions, fake the navigational record of his supposed voyage, even write a Chichester-like account of it. Crowhurst thought he could accomplish all this. There was no way he could win in this manner, for winning would mean his logbooks coming under close scrutiny and their inconsistencies being discovered. He could however make it appear that he had completed the voyage.
So Crowhurst spent the next few months sailing aimlessly around the Atlantic, listening carefully to the world weather reports so that he could record the conditions he would have been experiencing had he continued around the globe. After a while it would have become apparent that his radio signals were coming from the wrong part of the world, so he ceased communication, giving a broken generator as his excuse. In his spare time he studied the few books he had brought with him. One of them, a book on relativity, began to increasingly obsess him.
Crowhurst broke radio silence 9 April, when his false itinerary had him about to round Cape Horn and re-enter the Atlantic. He learnt there were two other yachtsmen still in the race. One of them was straggling but the other, Nigel Tetley, was ahead of him. Until Crowhurst resumed contact it had been assumed that Tetley would win the prize for being the first home. Now they predicted a close finish. Crowhurst had only to follow in Tetley’s wake, let him win, then sail home with honour but without too many people interested in the details of his voyage.
His elaborate plans would probably have succeeded had not something unforeseen occurred. In an effort to beat the times he believed Crowhurst to be making, Tetley began to sail more recklessly. On 21 May, while attempting to pass through a storm, Tetley’s yacht capsized and he was out of the race. Crowhurst had only to reach England to win. He would be the first man to circumnavigate the world without stopping. They began to prepare the hero’s welcome.
As Crowhurst entered the Sargasso Sea he began to receive telegrams giving him the details of this welcome - the boatloads of spectators, the helicopters filled with TV cameras and so on. His radio transmitter had really broken now, so that he could no longer speak to anyone. He had entangled himself in a situation from which there seemed no escape.
It is fortunate then that at this point Crowhurst had a revelation of such cosmic significance that it would inevitably change not only his own future but the future of all mankind. It was an idea that had been growing during the previous months, but only now did he realise the true importance of it. Its germ had come from a passage in the Einstein book in which the latter, while theorising about the travel of light, assumes a certain condition to be so. While he does this purely for the sake of argument, Crowhurst took it to mean that Einstein had changed the nature of the physical world by thought. He had therefore achieved what Crowhurst believed to be the next stage of human evolution - the freeing of the mind from the limitations of the body. And if Einstein could do this anybody could, it simply required an effort of will. Here was an idea so overwhelming that it rendered the problems Crowhurst was facing irrelevant. He could change his situation just by thinking about it. By becoming a god.
Crowhurst immediately banished mundane matters like navigation from his mind. He spent the next few days writing a philosophical essay in one of his logbooks, which eventually came to 25,000 words. It must have struck him as odd that the meaning of life had come to, of all people, a yachtsman engaged in a round-the-world race. Still, it had to come to someone, and now it was his duty to pass it on to mankind. He would leave it for them to find, along with the record of his true voyage, for in his new position as a god he mustn’t hide anything. In his words, “Nature does not allow God to sin any sins except one - that’s the sin of concealment.” On 1 July, having put into words the most important discovery in history, he left his body by jumping into the sea.
So now you too can share the revelation of Donald Crowhurst. You too can be a god. All it takes is a little recklesness. Be wild! Be crazy! Go all the way. Go overboard!
The woman who calls herself Anne Hamilton-Byrne is one very successful cult leader. In three decades of breathtaking self-aggrandisement she has suffered only one setback, when police raided a Victorian property in 1987 and freed the brood of purpose-built Aryan children she had been raising and torturing for two decades. Apart from this minor hitch, it’s all been smooth sailing for a woman who loves cats, hates wrinkles, and proclaims herself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne, ‘the Teacher’ to her followers, claims descent from French royalty, but was born plain Evelyn Edwards in Sale, Victoria, on 30 December 1921. Her father, Ralph, was a railway cleaner, her mother, Florence, went mad and died in an asylum. The details of Anne’s early life are extremely sketchy. It is known that she married when she was twenty and had a daughter. In the 1950s she studied yoga, and somewhere along the line she picked up a smattering of Eastern mysticism which has come in very handy indeed. Her big break came in the early ‘60s when her second husband (her first having died in a car accident) was working as a gardener for the respected academic Dr. Raynor C. Johnson. A physicist and former head of Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, Johnson was the author of several books, such as Nurslings of Immortality, which dealt with spirituality, the paranormal and the question of life after death.
Anne turned up at Johnson’s house one Sunday and was invited into his study. We will never know what she said in there, but it must have been quite a spiel. Johnson, by all accounts a kindly and intelligent man, emerged convinced that his gardener’s wife was his spiritual master. The pair formed a partnership, attracting their first followers from Johnson’s circle, and the cult which became known as the Family had begun.
Anne chose her followers carefully, targeting people undergoing personal crises, accumulating information about them, appearing suddenly in their lives as an all-knowing guru, and then, in the coup de grace, administered a heavy dose of LSD. The medical practitioners among her followers provided a steady supply of the drug, and at one stage Anne even had control of a psychiatric hospital called Newhaven. Here new recruits were booked in to undergo the psychedelic sacrament she called ‘going through’, a process lasting some days and guaranteed to break down any remnants of free will.
While the Family never seems to have numbered more than a few hundred at a time, Anne milked them so well that her present wealth is estimated at anything from 50 to a 150 million dollars, and includes properties in Australia, England and the United States. Anne’s grip on her followers has remained firm, and few have emerged from the cult to tell their story. It is in fact highly likely that Anne Hamilton-Byrne would today be unknown outside the small circle of her devotees had she not embarked on the scheme which made her infamous.
In the late ‘60s, Anne conceived the idea of raising a group of children in supposedly ideal circumstances, isolated from the outside world, indoctrinated with her ideas and convinced of her divinity. Once again, her medical contacts came in handy. Most of the children were the offspring of young, unmarried mothers from Australia and New Zealand who had been vetted for racial purity and soundness of stock. They were persuaded by Anne’s followers to give up their children for adoption, sometimes moments after they had given birth. Anne acquired her first child in 1969, and adopted 13 more during the next few years. All were given the name Hamilton-Byrne, and grew up believing they were the biological offspring of Anne and her third husband, Bill. Initially kept at a property in the Dandenongs, they were later moved to a house named Kai Lama, on the shores of Lake Eildon.
The life the children led at Kai Lama has been described by one of them, Sarah Hamilton-Byrne, in a book called Unseen, Unheard, Unknown (which was Anne’s motto for the cult). Their existence was known only to the cult’s upper echelons, and as far as possible they were kept totally ignorant of the outside world, banned from TV and newspapers, and forbidden to leave the property or even swim in the lake it adjoined. They were taught to hide in the cellar whenever strangers approached, and to particularly fear the police who, they were told, would kill them. The children’s lives followed a mind-numbingly strict routine which hardly varied day after day, year after year. Much of their day, which began at 6:30 each morning, was taken up by yoga, meditation and listening to tapes of Anne’s rambling and largely incomprehensible sermons. They were given rudimentary schooling, chiefly languages and mathematics taught by a cult member who was a teacher. (Later, in the ‘80s, the cult was able to con some officials from the education department into registering Kai Lama as a school.) The children were kept on a grossly inadequate and monotonous vegetarian diet, and grew up constantly hungry, even malnourished. At the same time they were given massive doses of vitamins, tranquillisers and other prescription drugs.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne was only infrequently at Kai Lama, spending most of the year at her other Australian properties or in England, but her presence was everywhere in the house, in photos and in her recorded voice. The children believed that she possessed psychic powers, could see when they misbehaved even when she wasn’t there, and could kill them if they tried to escape. They were actually raised by a gang of middle-aged women known as the ‘aunties’. These were trusted cult members, mostly trained nurses who, under Anne’s tutelage, became reasonable facsimiles of Nazi concentration camp guards. When it came to the raising of children, Anne’s ideas about karma seemed to translate into the belief that the harder their lives were the better for their souls, and the aunties were happy to oblige. They rigidly enforced the ridiculously long list of rules which Anne had drawn up and was continually adding to, punishing the children when they infringed them by beating them, ducking their heads into buckets of water, or withholding their already meager rations of food.
It is common for cult leaders to mess around with the identities of their followers, changing their names and cutting them off from their families. Anne raised this to a fine art. She renamed the children regularly, and even changed their birthdays on a whim (she also had multiple passports for each child under different names, presumably so they could be moved easily around the world in an emergency). They were given identical clothes to wear and most had their hair dyed blond (some of them, unaware that the substance regularly applied to their hair was dye, had no idea they weren’t really blond until they had been freed.)
Anne Hamilton-Byrne moved through the world she created behind a fragrant persona of sweetness and love. It can be seen at its most cloying in a home video, shot in England and sent back as a message to the children, which later fell into the hands of Channel 9 (whose A Current Affair program waged a long campaign against the Family). Anne and Bill are seen frolicking in a garden on a lovely summer’s day.
ANNE: Can I talk to the children? We’d just love you to be here, children. We don’t often get days like these. You can count them on one hand...
BILL: Oh, the reason I’m going home - to see the children...I’m going to spend a month with them. Just a month with those babies of ours -
ANNE: Lovely.
BILL: - who were so tiny and they’re all growing up.
ANNE: You love them don’t you, Daddy?
BILL: I do love them, darling, I do.
ANNE: And I love you, darling.
BILL: I love you, Annie.
Sure Bill loved the children. He loved in particular to beat the crap out of them. Whenever Anne and Bill returned to Kai Lama from their travels it was retribution time, with the aunties recounting how each child had broken the rules. If the children were scared of the beatings inflicted by Anne, they were terrified of the normally ineffectual Bill, who would go into a frenzy, striking them repeatedly and throwing them against walls.
Now, what was going on here? What did Anne Hamilton-Byrne think she was doing? She used to tell her followers that these children of hers would survive a nuclear holocaust and go on to repopulate the earth, but that sounds far-fetched even by her standards. Had she become addicted to worship and, no longer satisfied with what she received from her adult followers, craved something stronger, from individuals who had grown up believing their mother to be a god? If that is what she wanted, she achieved it - for a while at least - for Sarah Hamilton-Byrne makes it clear that, in the absence of anything else to focus their affections on, they did love their glamorous and distant ‘mother’. But it is clear that the cult underestimated the money and resources needed to raise 14 children, as well as the impossibility of cutting them off from the world. As they entered their teens they became, not surprisingly, more difficult for the aunties to control, while the aunties, despite the fleeting pleasures of beating small children senseless, clearly loathed their job. The experiment had gotten out of hand. Perhaps it was a relief all round when the police stepped in to end it.
While a number of journalists began to investigate the Family in the ‘80s, no official action was taken against the cult until Sarah Hamilton-Byrne, who had been expelled from it after an argument with Anne, went to the police in 1987. The Lake Eildon property was raided in August of that year and the remaining children taken into care.
Eighteen months after the raid a police task force codenamed Operation Forest was formed to investigate the Family. In June 1993, police and FBI agents arrived at a property in the Catskill Mountains, outside New York City, where Anne and Bill were living with about 30 dogs and 70 cats (cats had always had a much better time in the Family than humans). They had a warrant for the couple’s arrest for perjury and conspiracy to defraud. Anne asked if she could take some wigs with her but was told she could not, and had to suffer the ignominy of having her receding, reddish-grey hair filmed by TV cameras (Anne’s internationally televised bad hair day was, it would turn out, the worst punishment she ever received.) Extradited to Australia, the couple were charged with defrauding the New Zealand registry of births by falsely claiming that three of the children they had adopted were triplets and their biological children. This charge was dropped when it was ruled that the Victorian Supreme Court had no jurisdiction in the matter, and the pair were eventually convicted on a lesser charge and fined $5,000. Some of the aunties were convicted of falsely securing social security payments and given short prison sentences.
Many people were surprised that, after a police operation lasting four years and costing thousands of dollars, no child abuse charges were laid, but the police had problems here. Many of the incidents of abuse were subject to the statute of limitations, while the children, brought up without holidays or newspapers to mark the passage of time, were unable to assign dates to specific incidents. Nevertheless, when you consider the number of influential people under Anne’s spell, the suspicion lingers that someone may have been pulling strings for her.
So, Anne Hamilton-Byrne paid her fine and walked. Even as you read this she may be undergoing another facelift, or having some more fat sucked out of her. I wonder what she thinks of her experiment with the children now. Does she, like Hitler in the bunker in his final days, cursing the unworthiness of the German people, wish she’d had better material to work with? Would it have all worked out differently with another batch of children? But then, good Aryans are so hard to find these days.
The freak show as an institution has all but disappeared. The carnivals that carried them have been in steady decline since the advent of television, while disabilities activists, crying 'exploitation', have made gawking at gross physical deformities socially unacceptable (no matter what the freaks themselves think about the matter). While it's true that a few hardy individuals may still be found exhibiting themselves in America's more out-of-the-way places, and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow does an excellent job of conveying old-time carny thrills to the Lollapalooza generation, the freak show is largely a thing of the past.
This, however, is the story of a freak who was a real sonofabitch.
Grady Stiles, Jr. was born on 17 July 1937, a victim of ectrodactyly or 'lobster claw syndrome', a condition which had run in the Stiles family for generations. Grady's hands were pincer-like claws while his legs ended below the knees in flippers. Grady, Sr. had the condition too and made a living exhibiting himself as the Lobster Man, so it was inevitable that his son should soon join him on the platform as the Lobster Boy. In the winter months, when the carnivals shut down, the Stiles family, like many carnies, retired to the tiny Florida town of Gibsontown. Here their neighbours included Jeanie Tomaini the Living Half Girl, Dolly Scott the Ossified Woman and Percilla the Monkey Girl.
Grady's deformities may have been severe but they were not incapacitating. He got around on his arms, which became immensely strong, or in a wheelchair. He could swing himself off the floor onto a chair in one spectacular, graceful movement. His claws were strong too, and hard. When he was drinking, which he did from an early age, he got mean. He'd hit out at people who annoyed him with his claws, and he was good at headbutting too. Grady's claws came in handy for other things as well as fighting. A lot of women were attracted to him, he once boasted, and what they all wanted to do was have sex with his claws.
Grady married at the age of 17 but the marriage didn't last. Then he met a girl called Teresa who worked in the carnival as, among other things, a Blade Box Girl (whose job was to stand inside a box as a magician stuck swords through it) and an Electrified Girl. Teresa moved in with him and they married a few years later.
They had two children who died young, followed by two daughters, Donna, who was born normal, and Cathy, who had lobster syndrome (ectrodactylics have a 50% chance of passing it on to their children). Grady was by now spending most of his waking hours guzzling whiskey and regularly using his family for punching bags. Teresa, by all accounts an incredibly passive woman, never retaliated, but one day she snapped and walked out with Donna and Cathy. Grady immediately filed for divorce and won custody of his children - to their dismay. He took them to live in Pittsburgh with his new wife, a skinny piece of white trash named Barbara, with whom he had a son, Grady Stiles III or 'Little Grady' (who was not lacking in the lobster department). Teresa had meanwhile taken up with a carnival midget and friend of Grady's, Glenn Newman, aka Midget Man, and had a son with him named Glen Newman, Jr.
Teresa missed her daughters but Grady wouldn't let her see them. One day in 1976 she and Glen went to see Grady to try and persuade him to allow the girls to visit at Christmas. Grady pulled a revolver on them and whistled for his henchman, a 600-pound Fat Man named Paul Fishbaugh, who walked in carrying a shotgun. As Fat Man covered Midget Man, Grady went to work on his ex-wife with his claws.
In 1978, Grady's daughter Donna, aged 15, ran off with an 18-year-old boy named Jack Layne, Jr. Grady was furious, but none of his threats persuaded her to return home and the private detectives he hired couldn't find her. Finally, after Donna had lied to him that she was pregnant, he relented and agreed to sign a paper which would allow them to marry. On 27 September, the day before the wedding, Donna, her stepmother Barbara and brother and sister were busy making preparations for the reception, while Grady was in the local bar, getting drunk. Donna and the others returned after putting some money down on a wedding dress, to find that Grady's wheelchair had apparently been stolen from the front of the house. He sent them to look for it, but as they were leaving called Jack back inside. A few minutes later Grady pulled a .32 revolver from beneath the cushion he was sitting on and shot Jack in the chest, then in the back as he tried to get out the door. Donna heard the shots and ran back to see Jack stagger out and collapse in front of her. He died on the way to hospital. As Grady was being taken away by police he said to Cathy, "Yeah I did it, and I'm glad I did it. I'd do it again."
Grady hired an expert defence attorney and shamelessly went for the jurors' sympathy, playing up his disabilities for all they were worth. He testified that, before the shooting, Jack had mocked him, then lunged at him threateningly, and he had shot him in self defence. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter, but at the sentencing the judge said that Grady's condition made it impractical for him to be imprisoned, and he was released.
So little of Grady Stiles's life makes sense, it's hardly surprising that, a few years after the shooting and having divorced Glenn the Midget Man, Teresa decided to go back to Grady. He was now running his own 'Ten-in-One' show (ten acts under the one roof) with Grady its star attraction, and making good money - up to $80,000 a season. He was again based in Gibsontown and off the booze, and claimed to be a changed man. He even persuaded Donna to forgive him for shooting her fiance. But the new Grady didn't last long. Soon after Teresa remarried him he was drinking again and getting as violent as ever. During one memorable bender he beat up Cathy, who was pregnant, so badly she was rushed to hospital where she gave birth to a premature lobster baby named Misty.
Teresa started to talk about having Grady killed.
Glenn, Jr. had a 17-year-old friend named Chris Wyant, a delinquent who claimed to have killed people. Glen approached him and agreed to pay him $15,000, which Teresa had saved up, for the hit. Chris went out and bought a gun, but didn't do anything for several weeks. Glen grew impatient and confronted Chris on the evening of 29 September 1992, demanding the money back. Chris said that he had already spent it and, showing Glen the gun, told him he would fulfil his part of the bargain that night. At 11pm he entered the Stiles's trailer home by the back door and found Grady in his accustomed place in the living room, in front of the TV with the day's supply of whiskey under his belt. Grady, who knew Chris, yelled at him to get out of the house and turned back to the TV (he'd been watching Ruby, the movie about Lee Harvey Oswald's killer). Chris shot him three times in the back of the head.
As nothing was stolen, this obviously wasn't a robbery gone wrong, and the lack of grief among the family members quickly made them suspects in the eyes of the police. Glenn failed a lie detector test and broke down under questioning. Chris Wyant was tried and convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 17 years. Teresa's lawyers used 'battered wife syndrome' as her defence, but she was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to 12 years, while Glenn was convicted on the same charge and got life.
As with any even mildly interesting murder case in America these days, a quickie paperback soon appeared - in this case Lobster Boy by Fred Rosen, a journalist who covered the trial. Leafing through its "16 pages of shocking photos", as the cover puts it, produces conflicting emotions. It's not often that the gaudy worlds of freak show and murder collide, as they do in the story of Grady Stiles, Jr. Looking at the photos of his misshapen body lying in the morgue, and the three bullet holes neatly drilled into his bald head, you think, nobody who was born like that should have to die like that. But then you think, well, maybe in Grady's case you could make an exception.
In
1866 an overweight and amiable butcher from the NSW country town of Wagga Wagga
arrived in England with a startling claim. He was, he said, Sir Roger Charles
Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne fortune and long believed lost at sea. It was
the beginning of a often farcical saga which would divide the country, lead to
two extraordinary trials, and culminate in a radical political movement which
threatened to overthrow the government. Along the way the Tichborne Claimant
became one of the world’s first media-generated celebrities - a man truly
famous for being famous.
But
let’s start with the brief but eventful life of Roger Charles Tichborne - the
real one, that is. He was born in Paris in 1829, the son of James Tichborne, a
member of an old Catholic family with an estate in Hampshire, and Henriette,
his French-born wife,. Henriette England and the English with a passion, and
kept Roger in France until he was 16, when his father managed to spirit him
away to England. He was educated at Stonyhurst, then joined a dragoon regiment,
the Carabineers. He also fell in love with his young cousin, Katherine Doughty.
Her parents objected to their marriage, however, for Roger, despite his
prospects, was a moody, thin-chested, sallow-faced young man with a fondness
for travel, hard liquor and spicy French novels. Eventually Katherine’s father
agreed to the match, but only on the condition that the couple wait for three
years. Roger announced that he was off to South America. Before leaving he gave
his best friend, Vincent Gosford, a sealed packet for safekeeping.
Roger spent 10 months in South America,
shooting rare birds and sending their colourful skins back to England. Arriving
in Rio de Janeiro, having drunk most of his funds, he booked passage to
Kingston on a ship named the Bella. She set sail on 20 April 1854, and was
never seen again.
When Gibbes put this to Castro, the butcher
looked apprehensive, saying, “I do not want my family to know.” But he made no
attempt to hide the fact that the pipe he was smoking had the initials ‘RCT’
engraved on it.
Despite the apparent reluctance of Castro
(who will, in time-honoured Tichborne tradition, be henceforth referred to as
the Claimant), Gibbes persuaded him to write to Lady Tichborne. His letter,
poorly written and full of spelling mistakes, was duly sent in June 1866. In
it, the Claimant requested £200 for his
passage to England.
Two later, the Claimant’s third child was
born. Gibbes was financially supporting him by now (thus becoming the first in
what would be a long, long line) and, in return, persuaded the Claimant to draw
up a will which named him as a beneficiary. The resulting document (in which
the Claimant managed to get the first two names of his supposed mother wrong)
was full of non-existent properties.
Lady Tichborne was initially sceptical, but
she did send £40, which got the
Claimant and his family to Sydney. Here, in a moment of overexcitement, he
bought a hotel for : £10,000 with funds from a non-existent bank account. He
also passed his first real test, for living in Sydney was an elderly Negro,
Andrew Bogle, who had been a servant of the Tichbornes and knew the young Roger
well. Bogle met the Claimant and recognised him as his old master (after all,
Bogle reasoned, the Claimant had recognised him). When the Claimant raised
enough money to take himself, his wife and month-old child to England, he took
Bogle too.
They arrived in London on Christmas Day,
1866. That night, the Claimant slipped away from their hotel and paid a visit
to the dockside suburb of Wapping. Here he inquired about a local butcher named
George Orton. He learned that Orton and his wife were both dead, as were four
of their sons. Another son, Arthur, had gone to Australia. But there were still
two daughters living in the East End. The Claimant was eager to have their addresses…
A
few days later the Claimant set off for Paris and his long-awaited meeting with
Lady Tichborne. The affair had received wide coverage in the newspapers and a
crowd gathered at London Bridge to see him off - a taste of things to come.
Upon his arrival, Lady Tichborne summoned him, but he said he was feeling too
ill to go to her (as well he might be). Instead she went to his hotel. She
found him lying fully clothed on his bed and recognised him immediately.
Back in England, the Claimant visited the
Tichborne estate in Hampshire, where he was generally well received by the
locals and recognised by the family’s solicitor and doctor. A few members of
Roger’s former regiment also came to the party, as did his cousin, Anthony
Biddulph, who became one of the Claimant’s strongest supporters. The rest of
the family proved harder to persuade. Roger’s uncle, Henry Seymour, questioned
the Claimant in French and found that he had forgotten it (despite the fact
that it had been Roger’s first language); showed him a sample of Roger’s
father’s handwriting, which he failed to recognise; and asked him about a
mutual friend, whom he could not recall. This was enough for Seymour who
declared “I cannot recognise you in any way.”
The Claimant explained his memory lapses as
a result of the hardships he had endured during his missing years. According to
his story, after the Bella was wrecked, he survived in a lifeboat until he was
picked up, delirious, by a ship bound for Australia. Arriving in Melbourne in
July 1854, he adopted the name of Thomas Castro and went to work as a stockman
on a cattle station in Gippsland. According to the sketchy details he gave of
his life over the next few years, he had been a horse breaker, mail rider and
gold prospector, before moving to Wagga Wagga and taking up the butcher’s
trade.
The family despatched a man named Mackenzie
to Australia to check this story. Producing photos of the Claimant, he soon
found people who recognised him, but they identified him as Arthur Orton,
formerly a butcher from Wapping. Mackenzie reported back to England, and the
family sent a detective to Wapping who uncovered the story of the Claimant’s
Christmas Eve visit and inquiries about the Ortons. When confronted with this,
the Claimant was that Arthur Orton had been a friend of his in Australia, and
he had asked him to look up his family while in England.
In March 1868, Lady Tichborne died - a
disaster for the Claimant. Not only had she been his most important supporter,
but her weekly cheques for £20 were his only regular income, and as usual he
was heavily in debt. Salvation came in the shape of the good gentry of
Hampshire. They had been mightily impressed by the Claimant’s prowess in
shooting, fishing and other country enthusiasms, and reasoned that he must have
been born one of them. After Lady Tichborne’s funeral, they got together and
voted him a yearly income.
Meanwhile, preparations for a trial by jury
to settle the matter were under way. Two commissions, composed of lawyers for
the family and the Claimant, went South America and Australia to interview
witnesses. The Claimant was supposed to go too, and he actually made it to
South America but then, complaining of ill health, he returned to England
without having met the commission. This didn’t go down well with his
supporters, most of whom quit. Faced with this loss of income, the Claimant’s
solicitor had the brilliant idea of issuing ‘Tichborne Bonds’ with a face value
of £100 (the amount to be paid to the bearer upon the Claimant coming into his
inheritance) but which were sold for much less. They were a great success,
raising some £40,000 for the Claimant’s cause.
If the Claimant had forgotten much of his
past, he had clear memories of his time in South America, and in particular his
stay in the small Chilean town of Mellipilla with the family of one Tomas
Castro (whose name he had adopted in Melbourne). Interviewed by the South American commission, people in
Mellipilla did remember the visit of an English boy. Alas for the Claimant,
they had believed him to be poor, knew him as ‘Arturo’, and had never heard the
name ‘Tichborne’.
The commission sent to Australia had more
mixed results. The family’s lawyers found plenty of people who recognised the
Claimant as Orton, with some of them suggesting that Orton had changed his name
to cover up a past crime such as sheep stealing. But the Claimant’s lawyers
found witness who swore that Orton and Castro were different men. What was
abundantly clear was that identity was a fluid thing in Australia at this time.
People changed their names often, rarely gave their surnames, and it was not
done to question someone too closely about their past.
The trial finally began in May 1871, with
the solicitor-general, Sir John Coleridge, acting as chief counsel for the
family. Coleridge’s main goal was to demonstrate the Claimant’s ignorance of
Roger Tichborne’s early years, and in this he was successful beyond his dreams.
The Claimant was totally, spectacularly, blissfully ignorant of vast areas of
Roger’s life.
COLERIDGE:
Have you studied Greek?
CLAIMANT:
Yes.
Did
your studies in Greek go as far as the alphabet?
I
don’t know.
You
surely remember that?
I
went there unprepared.
Could you make out Greek at that time?
Perhaps
a sentence.
Could
you read the first chapter of St. John?
No.
Does
any of it linger in your mind now?
Not
a bit of it.
Could
you give us the Greek for ‘and’?
No,
I am not going to do anything of the kind.
Did
you get on better with Latin?
I
believe I got further in Latin.
Did
you learn the Latin alphabet?
Of
course I did.
Could
you read a line of Latin now?
I’m
certain I could not.
The
most notable aspect of the Claimant’s testimony was not his inability to recall
minor incidents, which might be expected, but his ignorance of facts on public
record - the details of Roger’s school and regiment, for example. It was now
four years since he had embarked on his claim - surely in that time he would
have taken the trouble to check such things. So profound was his lack of
knowledge, however, that some people began to feel he might be genuine.
Faced with Coleridge’s onslaught, the
Claimant remained completely unfazed. It seemed that no demonstration of his
failings could upset him in the slightest. Coleridge had expected an easy opponent,
but soon he was confiding to his diary “He will kill me before I do him. I am
seriously wearing out and getting ill.”
The Tichborne trial was the biggest news
story in Britain. Each day’s proceedings were eagerly discussed, and everyone
had an opinion. It was celebrated in pantomimes and burlesques, satirical songs
and illustrated booklets. Quotations from it became catchphrases, while the
despairing cry of “No Tich!” meant that the speaker could not bear to hear
another word about it.. Contributing greatly to the sense of fun was the
Claimant’s physical appearance. A heavily built man when he arrived in England,
his weight had now ballooned to a massive 26 stone, making him an instantly
recognisable subject for caricature. The contrast between the thin,
sallow-faced and missing Roger, and the fat, cheery and ever-present Claimant,
was irresistible. He was like a sort of one-man Laurel and Hardy.
The Claimant now made a grave tactical
error. This involved the sealed packet which Roger had given to his friend,
Gosford, before leaving for South America. The Claimant had previously made a
statement to his solicitor regarding its contents, and he now repeated this in
court. What he said amounted to this: that, prior to his departure, he had
seduced his cousin, Katherine Doughty, and she had told him she was carrying
his child, but he had not believed her. As Gosford, who had rejected the
Claimant soon after meeting him, had already stated that he had destroyed the
packet long ago, the Claimant had nothing to gain by saying this. But his real
blunder was to thus blacken the name of Katherine Doughty, now the respectably
married Lady Radcliffe. These charges were shocking stuff in those days, and
even many of the Claimant’s could not forgive him for them.
The Claimant’s lawyers began their case by
calling a hundred witnesses to back up his claim. Coleridge, in his opening
address for the family, said he would call two hundred and fifty to deny it.
The trial had been going for seven months now, and the jury was growing weary.
Coleridge’s first witness, Lord Bellew,
introduced a new and startling development. He testified that Roger had tattoos
of a cross, heart and anchor on one arm, and that he himself had added the
letters ‘R.C.T’ to these while they were at school together. Other witnesses
called by Coleridge corroborated this (although their recollections of the
tattoos differed somewhat). The Claimant, needless to say, had no such marks.
This was enough for the jury. They let it be known that they had heard enough
to declare the Claimant an impostor. The judge, Bovill, agreed with them, and
ordered that the Claimant be arrested for perjury.
That the jury had clearly decided the case
on the tattoo evidence troubled many. If Roger had been tattooed in this way,
then no further proof was needed that he and the Claimant were different men.
Why then had the family not spoken up about the tattoos earlier, saving
everyone an awful lot of time and money? Could it be true, as the Claimant’s
supporters maintained, that there was a conspiracy against him?
Released on bail, the Claimant made a
barnstorming tour of the country, speaking to thousands and soliciting money
for his defence fund. It was from this point that the Tichborne cause became a
great popular movement. From the beginning, opinions about the case had been
polarised along class lines. Whilst the upper classes, with a few exceptions,
looked on the Claimant with contempt, the masses took an instant liking to
‘good old Sir Roger’ with his love of sport and his ability to get on with
anybody. The newspapers, for the most part toeing the establishment line,
looked on aghast as support for the Claimant soared. How could people be so
stupid?
The first point that needs to be made about
all of this is an obvious one - if the
Claimant really was a missing baronet, returned to have his inheritance, he
makes no sense at all as a working class hero. But this is to misunderstand
what was going on. The Tichborne case was not about identity, but
transformation. The Claimant started life as an aristocrat, turned his back on
this to rough it in wild and woolly Australia, then returned to regain his
birthright. He was the man who had transcended class barriers.
And then too, there was probably a more
mundane reason behind the popular support for the Claimant. When the
establishment attacked him for his ignorance, his boorishness, his illiteracy
and lack of manners, they could easily recognise a slap to their own faces.
The Claimant’s supporters had trouble finding
a barrister to represent him in the coming criminal trial, and it was only a
few weeks before it began, in April 1873, that Edward Kenealy stepped forward.
Now this Kenealy was almost as interesting a character as the Claimant. He was
an Irishman, a fiery orator and dabbler in radical politics, and he was already
identified with lost causes, having taken part in the defence of the
notoriously brazen poisoner, William Palmer. He was also, in his spare time, a
mystic who turned out enormously long religious books, including The Book of
God, a commentary on the Apocalypse. Kenealy wrote that a new Messiah arises
every 60 years. Adam had been the first, Jesus was in there of course, and the
12th one was now due. This new Messiah, he strongly suggested, was
Kenealy himself.
In the criminal trial, unlike the previous
civil trial, the prosecution’s object was to prove not only that the Claimant
was not Sir Roger Tichborne, but that he was Arthur Orton. The prosecuting
counsel, Hawkins, began by calling numerous witnesses who had known Orton in
England, including his former girlfriend.
Kenealy, having come to the case late, never
mastered its complexities. He made up for ignorance in bluster, painting the
picture of a massive conspiracy against his client involving lawyers, the
Government, the Tichborne family and Catholics (it had been rumoured that,
should the Claimant be recognised, he would halt the family’s regular donations
to the Church). He flatly accused the prosecution witnesses of being paid to
lie. In building his case he received no help whatsoever from the Claimant, who
seemed thoroughly bored with the whole business. A peculiarity of the law at
the time was that defendants in criminal cases could not themselves testify, so
the Claimant sat mute as the lawyers argued, sketching caricatures of the
courtroom personalities, waiting for each day’s adjournment so he could get out
and about and enjoy himself. He laughed uproariously at the jokes Hawkins made
at his own expense, and seemed completely oblivious to his fate should he lose
the case. Faced with such a useless client, Kenealy adopted a two-pronged
strategy. On the one hand, he painted the young Roger Tichborne as a dissolute
wastrel, thus making his transformation into the Claimant more plausible. On
the other, he portrayed the Claimant as an utter fool who lacked the
intelligence to come up with such a fiendish imposture. In doing so, he
disputed many of the things the Claimant had said in the first trial. As it was
perjury that the Claimant was now being charged with, this was an unusual
strategy, to say the least.
In his month-long summing up at the trial’s
conclusion, Chief Justice Cockburn made no bones about the flimsiness of the
Claimant’s case. He concentrated on the Claimant’s ignorance, the
dissimilarities between him and Roger, and the matter of the tattoos. He also
registered his disgust at Kenealy’s behaviour (Kenealy would be disbarred after
the trial).
Cockburn’s summing up was due to end on 28
February 1874, and a verdict was expected almost immediately. Fearing civil
unrest, even rebellion, the government despatched 600 police to Westminster,
but the crowds took the guilty verdict calmly. Historian Michael Roe suggests
that “the Claimant’s supporters wanted his freedom less than they wanted
confirmation that he was a victim of conspiracy”. The case had lasted 180 days,
making it the longest trial in British history, and it would remain so until
the recent McLibel case.
Britons
all come pay attention
And
list awhile to my sad song
And
when you’ve heard some facts I’ll mention
You’ll
say they’ve proved that right is wrong
That
the claimant is the right man
To
many people is quite clear
But
the jury found him guilty
His
sentence is fourteen years.
(From the ballad ‘We’ll Not Forget Poor Roger
Now’.)
The Establishment breathed a collective sigh
of relief that the case was over, but they had not reckoned on the
bloody-mindedness of Kenealy. Riding on the back of the incredible popularity
the case had given him, Kenealy started a newspaper, The Englishman, which
mixed pro-Claimant polemics with other populist causes such as crusades against
compulsory vaccination, the Contagious Diseases Act (which gave the police
power to examine alleged prostitutes for venereal disease) and the lunacy laws
(which were said to make it too easy for doctors to commit people). Kenealy’s
paper was a great success, as was the political movement he started - the Magna
Charta Association - which called for the dismantling of the party political
system and the abolition of taxes on the working classes. Some 250 branches
sprang up around the country, and 200,000 gathered for a Magna Charta
demonstration in Hyde Park in March 1874, supposedly the largest crowd ever to
gather in London.
Kenealy’s movement was beginning to look
like a real threat to the social order. Then, in the following year, he was
elected to Parliament, where he quickly moved for a Royal Commission into the
Tichborne case (it was defeated in a vote of 302 to one). But Kenealy’s
political movement began to falter due to lack of funds, the vast majority of
its members being poor. He achieved nothing further in Parliament, and was
defeated in the 1880 election. He died two weeks later, and the Magna Charta Association
eventually petered out.
The Claimant was released from prison in
1884. He immediately resumed touring the country and once again thousands
turned up to hear him speak. Many of his appearances were now made in music
halls and circuses. Some of his supporters found this demeaning but the
Claimant loved music halls, and even found a new, young wife in one of them
(having become estranged from his first wife while in prison). With Kenealy and
other staunch supporters dead, however, the Tichborne movement was in decline.
Seeking funds, the Claimant travelled to New York in 1886, was treated with
indifference there and ended up working as a bartender. Back in England, still
strapped for cash, he signed a confession for a newspaper, in which he admitted
to being Arthur Orton. As soon as he received the payment for this, he
retracted it. He was living in as abject a state of poverty as he had ever
known when, on April Fool’s Day, 1888, he was found dead in his bed. He was
buried in a coffin with ‘Sir Roger Charles Tichborne’ on its lid.
It is now almost universally agreed that the
Claimant was Arthur Orton, born in Wapping in 1834, who had travelled to South
America like the real Roger Tichborne (only four years earlier). All the
evidence suggests that, when he first made his claim from the safe distance of
Wagga Wagga, the most he had hoped for was to squeeze a little money out of
Lady Tichborne, and he had never expected to actually go to England in the
guise of Sir Roger. But then the affair developed its own momentum, spurred on
by the greed of others hoping to get a piece of the Tichborne pie. And Orton, a
man who seems to have lived only for the moment, went along with it.
Yet other mysteries remain. An enormous
amount has been written about the case, and Orton was, for many years, perhaps
the most closely observed man in Britain, but he remains an enigma. How did he
cope, every day, with the knowledge that a vast machinery of humanity had
arisen, all built upon the idea that he was someone he wasn’t?
Why did so many people recognise the
Claimant as Roger Tichborne, including many who had known Roger well? It’s hard
to believe there was no physical resemblance between the two men, yet it’s
impossible to see any in the photos of them.
And then there is the transformation that
took place in the Claimant over the years. He arrived in England inarticulate
and barely literate, the very model of a country butcher, yet he soon became an
effective public speaker, and by the end of his time in prison his letters were
as expressive and elegantly written as anything the real Roger Tichborne could
have turned out - perhaps more so. While he remained ignorant of many details
of Roger’s life, at the same time he constantly came up with snippets of
information about Roger which convinced people he was the genuine article. To
explain this, some have surmised that Orton was an illegitimate son of one of
the Tichborne men. Others have suggested that Roger survived the wreck of the
Bella (if she was wrecked) and made it
to Australia, where he met Orton. Douglas Woodruff, author of the definitive
account of the case, The Tichborne Claimant, is inclined to believe this, and
cites persistent rumours that Orton and Tichborne were bushrangers together.
But there is no real evidence that any of these theories are true.
Arthur Orton may have been a liar and a
rogue, but once you start researching the Tichborne case it’s hard not to warm
to him. He may have put a considerable dent in the bank accounts of his
backers, but he certainly provided them with a lot of entertainment in return.
In some ways, he was a sort of 19th century version of Barry
McKenzie, the gormless Australian comic strip (and later movie) character
created by Barry Humphries in the 1960s. “Fresh from the shores of the
Antipodes,” the wide-eyed Bazza arrives in England ready to cause havoc,
initiate a thousand piss-ups, and basically get up the noses of the Poms. It’s
a description which fits the Tichborne Claimant to a ‘T’.
"We're going to cook up a fine dish, real groovy.
Wrap up some fine grape leaves and chip up a little lamboroonie. Sprinkle on a
little fine riceorootie and a little pepporoonie, a little peppovoutie. And
sprinkle on a little saltoroonie to put the seasoning in there, that makes it
really mellow. Then you take and you nail an avocado seed up in the ceiling and
let it vout for a while..."
From the intro to 'Gaillard Special' (1946)
Jazz is so goddamned serious, tasteful and self-reverential these days, it's easy to forget a time when it was dangerous, morally suspect and, at times, just plain mad. Jazz history teems with all sorts of eccentric, larger than life characters, from the shadowy figure of Buddy Bolden, reputed inventor of jazz, who is said to have lost his mind while playing in a parade, to the self-proclaimed Venusian-born Sun Ra and his 'Arkestra'. But the most surreal imagination ever to spread itself over a syncopated rhythm undoubtedly belonged to a singer, dancer, multi-instrumentalist, fast food gourmand and god to the beatniks by the name of Slim Gaillard.
Jazz singers had been scatting and making up nonsense words before this - Cab Calloway immediately springs to mind - but Slim Gaillard took the artform to new heights. "I'm going to schooloreenie to study chemistereenie and voutie" he sings on 'School Kids Hop', demonstrating two of the main principles of Vout, namely (a) add 'oroonie' or 'oreenie' (or something like it) onto the end of every other word, or every word if you wish, and (b) say 'vout' or one of its variations whenever possible, assigning to it any meaning you want. MacVoutie? Solid! Listening to a Slim Gaillard recording is like eavesdropping on a convention of Tourette's Syndrome sufferers where the coffee has been laced with acid. Songs are regularly interrupted by other songs, snatches of nursery rhyme, parodies of Spanish radio broadcasts or outbreaks of wild Cuban rhythms. It's a style which in some ways foreshadows the sampling found in rap records today
For Slim, song ideas could come from anywhere. One night he began to sing the menu in an Arabian (or perhaps it was Armenian) restaurant and the result entered his repertoire as 'Yep Roc Heresy'. A record company having commissioned him to record four songs, he turned up at the studio with only three, then heard a cement mixer out in the street. 'Cement Mixer Putti Putti' became his third big hit. And if there was nothing else to inspire him, there was always food. Countless Gaillard songs extol the joys of eating - 'Fried Chicken O Rootie', 'Matzoh Balls', 'Dunkin' Bagels', 'Avocado Seed Soup Symphony', and 'Potato Chips' ("Crunch crunch, I don't want no lunch / All I want is potato chips!") to name but a few. Slim's amazing verbal inventiveness sometimes obscured the fact that he was no slouch as a musician either, although of a suitably eccentric bent. Recalls jazz historian Arnold Shaw, "He could play the piano with the backs of his hands, palms up; the vibraphone with swizzle sticks... He could play 'Jingle Bells' on a snare drum, producing the pitch by sliding the fingers of one hand along the drum head as he beat out the rhythm with the other hand."
Slim and Slam broke up when Slim was drafted in 1943. He served in the airforce as a radio operator and mechanic. Invalided out after a year, he went to California, where he found another bass player in the rotund form of Bam Brown and a drummer, Leo Watson, who was a pretty good scat singer in his own right. They got a residency at Billy Berg's nightclub. Stars like Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich and Gregory Peck would come in to see the "skyscraping, zootie negro guitarist" (as Time magazine called him) who sang about cement mixers and avocado seeds. Slim would spot them in the audience and do little musical parodies of whatever happened to be their current film. Stories about him abounded, such as the time, turning up a whole week late for a nightclub engagement, he attempted to pacify the irate owner with a genuine doctor's certificate stating, "In my opinion this man is perfectly sane."
Slim and Bam had another hit with the sing-song 'Down By the Station' (which has since become a children's standard) and followed it up with 'Opera in Vout', an insane masterpiece spread over four 78 rpm sides, in 1947. They broke up when Bam, sadly, went insane for real (running on stage one night, high on something and waving a knife around, he was carted off to a mental institution where he died eight years later).
Jazz was changing. The bebop revolution had begun - young musicians playing a harder, faster more complex sound which most of the older musicians hated. Slim became identified with the movement, more for his quintessential hipster attitude than his musical style (although he did record with bebop greats like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie). He was a natural role model for the Beats. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy used to go and see him in a San Francisco nightclub called the Safewind, and Kerouac immortalised a Gaillard show in On The Road.
"But one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying, 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-orooni'. In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his shirt and undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on for as long as an hour...
Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two Cs, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a revery and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger in the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking... Finally the set is over; each set lasts two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody's head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. 'Bourbon-orooni - thank-you-ovauti...' Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is.... Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. 'Right-orooni,' says Slim; he'll join anybody but he won't guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, 'Orooni,' Dean said, 'Yes!' I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni."
Slim continued to make appearances as a singer, comedian and MC, but his musical career began to wind down during the '60s. He did a stint as a hotel manager in San Diego, grew apples on a farm in Washington State and made occasional appearances as an actor on TV, popping up in Roots, The Next Generation, for example, but by the early '80s he had pretty well dropped out of sight.
Cut to London, 1984. I was visiting there for the first time and, never having seen any Slim Gaillard records in Australia, was extremely pleased to find three of his albums in Ray's Jazz Shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a few minutes walk from Trafalgar Square. When I went to pay for them the guy behind the counter said, "Do you want these signed?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He's downstairs."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, I'll go get him."
Mightily impressed by the service you got in Ray's Jazz Shop, I stood and watched as an immensely tall, slightly stooped figure with a grizzled Santa Claus beard slowly ascended the stairs. Grinning broadly he extended a huge hand like a cured ham which I shook. At this point, I'm afraid, I dissolved into your typical fan, mumbling inanities as Slim signed my records.
I raced back to the Chelsea flat where my girlfriend and I were staying. "I met Slim Gaillard! I met Slim Gaillard!" I said, bursting through the door.
"Who's Slim Gaillard?" she said.
Oh well.
Slim, it transpired, had been in London since the previous year, after Dizzy Gillespie had suggested he play some of the European jazz festivals. He'd gone to Paris, then London, and liked the welcome he got so much he decided to stay. London rejuvenated Slim's musical career. He played all the jazz clubs, recorded for the first time in 25 years, wrote advertising jingles for TV and encountered punk rock. "Sometimes I go on a Tuesday when they have the punk bands," he told the NME in 1985. "I like what they do, it's far out in a way... They lie down on the floor and jump on each other... It's something to see." In 1989 the Arena TV program set out to make an hour-long documentary on Slim, but found his life so fascinating that Slim Gaillard's Civilisation, as it was eventually called, clocked in at four hours.
Slim Gaillard continued to tour Europe and the US, dispensing voutie to all and sundry, until his untimely death on 25 February 1991.
Well done-oroonie!
“I
believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdom of ages, and
from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that
isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities.”
- Charles Fort, Lo!
Pluto Press are the Australian publishers of the Bizarrism book, as well as my other book TV Poems.
http://www.plutoaustralia.com/
Headpress are the UK publishers of the Bizarrism book, as well as a whole range of cutting edge publications including the magnificent Headpress journal itself.
Strewth! is Australia’s most outrageous satire/humour magazine. Check out our website, even though we’ve probably been too slack to update it for a while.
Sick Puppy is Australia’s foremost underground comix anthology, published by the estimable Stratu.
http://www.sickpuppycomix.com/
Visit the society dedicated to one of my favourite eccentric authors, Harry Stephen Keeler.
http://xavier.xu.edu/~polt/keeler/index.html
If you’re after Australian (and some overseas) zines, check out Kristy’s fantastic zine distribution site: