Sometimes when I feel like a nostalgic trip down memory lane, I’ll pull out one of my favorite children’s books: Trouble After School, written by Jerrold Beim in 1957. A true classic, it’s the tale of an intelligent but slightly shy junior high school student named Lee, who feeling neglected by his parents, falls in with the wrong crowd, in particular a good-looking young fella named Terry, in a dark leather jacket, born on the wrong side of the tracks. Lee, who up until he’d met this intriguing juvenile delinquent, was a bit of a Mama’s Boy, now begins to pull pranks in school on other students, and to cut classes so he can hang out with Terry and his cohorts in petty crime. Pretty soon, Lee starts to dress like Terry, getting his parents to buy him a shiny leather jacket just like the one Terry has. It’s a case of hero worship — or more precisely, anti-hero worship. Terry represents exotic, hidden dangers and lawlessness. He’s the tough kid we are scared of, yet fascinated by.

Lee rationalizes Terry’s bad reputation because Terry’s mother had to stoop to cleaning houses to make ends meet. It’s a quintessential 50s juvie tale of yin and yang. Black and white. Good and evil. But it’s not always clear where the lines are drawn. The point of the book seems to be that there’s the potential for good in all of us, just as there is for bad. Lee is drawn to the rugged youth who winks at him all the time because he is lonely, and Terry sees something special in Lee despite his not being part of the gang. Even a hard-bitten old schoolmarm can see that there’s something else going on between the lines. Lee, who is called a “sissy” by Terry and his gang, yearns to be more of a man. So when he is transformed, due to Terry’s masculine influence, it is a rite of passage — a Cinderella tale as old as time, as when Terry first lays eyes on Lee in his new black leather jacket:

“Well, what do you know!’ Terry’s eyes gleamed approvingly. ‘You got one!’ Terry’s hand rubbed the black leather. ‘Boy, do you look great!

It would be hard not to read more into these subtly erotic lines. While pretty tame by today’s standards, this was hot stuff back when I read it in the early 60s. I know I am not alone in thinking this. When I’ve offered the book for sale on eBay I’ve received notes from buyers basically telling me the same thing. That this book meant more to them growing up than any other they’d read in school. We can all relate to the dilemma faced by young Lee. To be the goody two-shoes or the sexy cool kid, and the yearning some of us feel to taste forbidden fruit.

What’s remarkable about this book is that it seems to encapsulate so many of the trends of 50s youth culture. It’s not unlike Rebel Without A Cause in that Lee is similar to Plato, the Sal Mineo character, who falls madly in love with James Dean. But while that film was almost lurid in its depiction of juvenile delinquents and gangs (who risk their lives for hot rods and drag-racing), Trouble After School is as gentle as a cream puff. The story develops slowly with deft strokes, until one is completely swept up by young Lee’s struggles as he gropes his way to manhood. There are moments at the end, when Lee begins to assert himself and challenges Terry to reconsider the direction his life is taking, that are surprisingly complex for a teen novel.

I’d always been intrigued by the kind of man who could write such a sensitive book. The more I delved into Jerrold Beim’s career, however, the less I seemed to know. He was an enigma, a cipher. I’d mention his name to various book collectors or children’s book specialists and no one knew a thing about him, other than the long list of books he’d been credited with writing. Some of these books are now considered classics of children’s literature.

One or two were important milestones in the fields of fighting racism and freedom of the press. His book The Swimming Hole, with a cover illustration that showed a young white boy diving into a pool of water with his best friend, a black boy, caused a scandal at the time it was released. It was boycotted by the Ku Klux Klan. So was Two is a Team, which dealt head-on with issues of integration. Flood Waters dealt with the problems of building communities next to overflowing rivers; something that was not being discussed much in those days. Jerrold Beim was one of the first to confront these gnarly topics and he did it with a unique mixture of honesty and common sense.

To my jaundiced eye, however, there was always something slightly off-kilter and mysterious just under the surface about Jerrold Beim’s books. The titles struck a compelling chord. Beach Boy; Time For Gym; A Vote For Dick; Rocky’s Road; The Big Whistle; Jay’s Big Job; Blue Jeans; The Boy on Lincoln’s Lap; Too Many Sisters; Shoeshine Boy; The Swimming Hole. While there’s nothing at all off-color about the Ole Swimmin’ Hole — in fact it’s the epitome of a kind of lost innocence, as American as apple pie and Huck Finn — it’s also the place where boys would often swim together in their birthday suits, without any girls. It’s a private place of youthful adventure, the locus of adolescent curiosity and devil-may-care tomfoolery.

A good example of what I mean is the curious little book Jerrold Beim wrote called Kid Brother which at face-value seems innocent enough. But when you open its pages you find an illustration of a tyke with his hands tied behind his back, a slightly perverse grin on his very young face.

Is one reading too much into it in hindsight fifty years later? Could there have been anything untoward about such an image when the book was published in 1952? Probably not. I’m always reading too much into things. But that’s what makes it fun, and so bizarre at times. And there can be no denying that for me and others with similar sensibilities, Beim’s books touched a nerve. He often wrote about someone on the outside looking in, eager to be part of a community, but forever feeling like the “other.” On a small scale, his books were odysseys of the soul. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were a reflection of Beim’s own experience.

While Jerrold Beim was a prolific writer, churning out dozens of popular children’s books, some with his wife Lorraine Levy Beim, he also wrote short stories for the romantic pulps including Exciting Love and Gay Love. He also wrote under a pseudonym Neils Anderson, crafting even younger juvenile tales of lessons learned and problems solved. Jerrold Beim was indefatigable, but also a complete unknown quantity. He seemed to have completely stopped writing in 1957. Several of his books were republished over the years, but nothing new came from his pen. I wondered if like Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers, he had “pulled a Rimbaud,” vanishing into the ether after years of success and fame. What on earth happened to Jerrold Beim?

Google searches and inquiries online provided scant answers. But recently, thanks to other online resources, I’ve managed to uncover a few shards of biographical information. First, Jerrold Beim was actually born Gerald Beim. His father Aaron Beim was an Austrian immigrant who moved to Newark, New Jersey around the turn of the century. Gerald was born in 1911. After high school, he got a job in a Newark bank. He was unable to afford college. He moved to a department store where he learned about marketing and sales. He soon relocated to Syracuse, New York and found work as an advertising manager in a large department store. It was in Syracuse that he met and married Lorraine Levy, his first wife. They were wed in 1935. After spending a summer on Nantucket writing, he decided to give up other lines of work. He sold his first short story to Cosmopolitan Magazine. By this time he had adopted the pen name Jerrold Beim, for reasons that are unclear. He and his wife moved to Mexico, then returned to New York City where they adopted twin sons, Seth and Andy. They soon had a daughter of their own.

While Lorraine wrote several books on her own (including Hurry Back, seen above) she worked best with Jerrold. In 1939 they wrote The Burro With No Name, based on experiences they’d had in Mexico, as well as Sasha and the Samovar (1944), an innovative look at Russian culture for young kids. Lorraine wrote for a radio quiz show, coming up with the questions asked to contestants. The name of the quiz show was not mentioned in a piece I read about her, but I assume it was Information, Please which ran for many years on radio and later switched to television.

But a deadly blow struck the family in 1952 when during a return visit to Mexico, a car Lorraine was driving became involved in a fatal accident. She and the Beims’ young daughter were killed. Jerrold Beim was devastated. He’d lost not only his adored wife, but his business partner. In many ways, she was the brains behind the publishing phenomenon they’d become. Jerrold eventually remarried and moved to Westport, Connecticut. His 1955 book Country School was based on one of the elementary schools in that town. For reasons that are not apparent, Jerrold Beim separated from his second wife, and raised his two sons on his own. His 1954 book, With Dad Alone, is a heartfelt tribute to raising his boys as a single father.

In a bizarre twist of fate, tragedy struck the Beim family a second time when a car Jerrold Beim was driving hit a patch of ice in March 1957 and skidded off the road in Westport, crashing down an embankment. The car flipped over, pinning Beim and his son Seth in the car. They were pronounced dead on arrival at the local hospital. Only young Andrew, who was home at the time, survived. Ironically, one of the last works Jerrold Beim had published was a cautionary kid’s tale called Thin Ice.

This horrible accident explains the uncanny silence since 1957, the year he wrote Trouble After School. While Beim’s books remained in print for several more years, his name gradually disappeared from recommended reading lists. It wasn’t until the revival of interest in African-American Studies in the 90s that people began to recall the books he’d written that were so far ahead of their time. And with the dawn of eBay and the internet, Beim’s books began to generate interest among collectors and former fans who recalled the impact his unusual little books had had on them.

I’ve managed to compile nearly a complete collection of his works. Some of the charm of them has to do with their illustrations. Louis Darling and Don Sibley are two of the stand-outs, as was Tracy Sugarman, who lived near the Beims in Syracuse. I think my most favorite of his books are Kid Brother, because it reminds me of my own sibling rivalry at home growing up, and Meet Sandy Smith, about an enterprising lad who makes his way in the jungles of urban life in New York City. And then there’s the hard-to-find collectors item: The First Book of Boys’ Cooking (1957) with “neato” pictures by Dick Dodge.

But of course the book I will always cherish is Trouble After School. It remains a kind of tabula rasa that captured the essence of my own junior high school experience, although in my case, there were several Terrys that came along to spice things up a bit and to remind me that life was not all about getting good grades and earning brownie points as teacher’s pet. There’s a lot to be said for veering a bit off the path now and then, if only to awaken aspects of one’s soul that have long lain dormant.

Half the fun of scouring old bookstores is finding things one doesn’t need, let alone even knew existed. Whenever I am out looking for additions to my various collections, I always make a point of buying something that simply makes me laugh out loud. Sometimes this is a book with a campy cover, or a bizarre illustration inside. But most often, it’s an old tome with a deliciously absurd title, many of them double entendres, whether intentionally or not. Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a few.

I think the first one I ever found that made me chuckle was a book of jokes by Dr. Seuss entitled Boners. I’m old enough to know that the word “boner” had a different meaning, or let’s say, a separate meaning, back in the day. Any kid watching a Superman episode with George Reeves would recognize the term. Lois Lane or Clark Kent often used the term “boner” to describe a gaffe or faux pas. I think Dr. Seuss, who started out writing more risque fare, thought of them in a more ribald light. Imagine my surprise when a few years later I stumbled upon More Boners and its sequel Bigger and Better Boners!

Another campy title that I often come across are those employing the term “gay.” The debates over the use of this word to denote homosexuality are legion. Back in the 19th-century and in the early 1900s, the word had a more benign meaning, signifying cheerfulness and glee. For many, it still does. Later in the 20s and 30s, it began to take on another connotation, having to do with the demimonde, and some scholars insist that it was a euphemism for prostitute. The homosexual underworld adopted it, or it was applied to it. In any case, there are scores of old books with “gay” in the title, including a few from Hollywood where they should have known better.

Some of my favorites include Gay, the Story of a Boy, by Laddie; The Gay Family; The Gay Ones; Teeny Gay; Princess Polly’s Gay Winter; Gay Courage, etc. Perhaps my all time favorite is The Gay Mortician. That’ll be the death of me yet.

Queer is a funny word, even without its sexual connotations. My father used to snap at me whenever I used the word. For a man of my father’s generation, being called “queer” was hardly a compliment. Later, of course, the gay world embraced the term and it is now commonly used without malice or shame. I can’t imagine what my father would have made of the hit TV series, Queer as Folk.

Some of the funnier “queer” books I’ve found include Queer Street; The Queer Island; A Queer Little Man; Queer People; Queer Janet (a popular collectible among the lesbian set) and a strange children’s book about a mysterious fairy called Query Queer.

Not all the campy tomes have “gay” and “queer” titles. A few are more subtle: Hunky, Muscling In; How To Hustle; Anthony in the Nude; The Glory Hole; Hunting the Fairies (which sounds like a book about “fag-bashing”); Young Men in Love (by Michael Arlen!); The Perennial Bachelor; A Touch of Lavender (subtitled “The Gayest Stories of Our Time”); and an odd novel I found called Men & Boys, A Story of Yale. We used to have a joke when I was in college: “How do you separate the men from the boys up at Harvard?” Answer: “With a crowbar.” I guess the same holds true for Old Blue.

I recently uncovered a fun girl’s book entitled Gay Enterprises.

Come to think of it, that would make a great name for this blog!

We stare in horror at their once beautiful, now disfigured-by-fear faces, gloating in their torment, overdosing on schadenfreude as we watch them being subjugated, tortured and abused. We dine out on their disgrace, and get off on their shame. They are the screaming queens of cinema, glittering stars of yesteryear who descend into the nightmare world of sleazy horror flicks. We see them scampering about in torn negligees, or bloody one-size-fits-all kaftans, exulting in their strange zaftig glamour, as we gaze in dismay at their awkward cries of distress.

We see the first vague inklings of this genre of fright flicks in classics such as Sudden Fear (1952), starring a neurotic Joan Crawford taken in by a duplicitous Jack Palance, and Sunset Boulevard, when aging screen siren Norma Desmond (played to perfection by aging screen siren Gloria Swanson) seduces screenwriter William Holden and loses her mind at the same time.

For me the genre really began with Kind Lady (1951), a late noir thriller starring dowager Ethel Barrymore as a rich art collector besieged by ruthless con artists, including a delectably evil Angela Lansbury. Held hostage in her lavish home, Barrymore exudes acres of angst and rubs her hands raw from fretting hysterically. But the real fear is in her voice and her facial expressions. It’s a tour-de-force performance from a legendary actress who only got better with age.

Some grande dame heroines, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, are alchemists who manage to spin gold out of their tarnished downward spirals. Others, like Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Olivia’s insanely jealous sister, Joan Fontaine, wallow in their misery, causing us to shield our eyes from their scarifying decline. Others, like tough girls Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck, straighten their shoulders against misfortune and battle all kinds of devils, but it’s their inner demons we linger on, the turmoil that led them to this disarming fall from grace.

The first time I ever saw Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, I must have been a kid. For me she was that character. I had no idea that Bette Davis had had a stellar career in Hollywood for decades prior to that film. Of course, I was too young to understand that the movie was about Hollywood and how it curses its favorite creatures. For me it was simply a scary movie about a crazy lady who tortures her sister by feeding her dead rats. I remember when I did see one of her early pictures, Jezebel, on the afternoon movie. I could not believe it was the same person. Bette Davis was never more beautiful than she was in that film. I simply couldn’t reconcile the two sides of her career: the glamour puss and the garish ghoul. But Bette Davis could, and so could Hollywood. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for her hellbent Baby Jane.

Her co-star Joan Crawford experienced her own thrill of schadenfreude when she waltzed past Davis at the awards ceremony to give the prize to Anne Bancroft. The fact that the two had an on-going legendary feud only added spice to their appearing in the same film. Audiences relished seeing the two of them go at it. While Bette Davis may have won more accolades for her wildly grotesque tour-de-force acting, Joan held her own as the disabled Blanche, and allegedly got her revenge by padding her bosom during the film’s finale when she died on the beach. She stole the scene without having to say a word. Joan excelled in many horror films, most notably Strait-Jacket and Berserk, two of the campiest and slickest splatter fests of the 60s. She had no shame. That much is obvious when watching her wardrobe tests (now available on You Tube.) She relished the chance to get trashy and demented.

One suspects when seeing her in less successful schlock shockers such as I Saw What You Did and Trog that she did it merely for the thrill of working again, of being in front of the camera. One of her finest hours is the first episode of Night Gallery (Rod Serling’s less successful successor to The Twilight Zone) in which she played a rich blind woman who will stop at nothing to see again, paying a man a fortune in exchange for his eyes. The twist is that she will only be able to see for a short time, at night, and New York is about to experience a prolonged blackout. Spielberg directed the episode. His first job, I think. But it’s Joan’s show all the way.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, we were inundated with other examples of the genre. Tallulah’s Die, Die My Darling (also known as Fanatic) is the ultimate camp classic. Playing against type as a religious zealot, Bankhead is preposterously ugly. Her voice is a lethal weapon. It’s hard to believe she once dazzled London and New York on the stage, or ever caused Alfred Hitchcock to blush when filming Lifeboat. Darling has its flaws, no question (Donald Sutherland is insufferable in it.) But who can stop watching it once it starts? Tallulah Bankhead gives a mesmerizing performance. Her last film, as it turned out, since she died three years later after tackling the Black Widow on Batman.

The same thing happened to Miriam Hopkins, another of the old school Hollywood gals, and one of Bette’s favorite betes noires. Some may find her comeback role in the 1961 remake of The Children’s Hour (she had starred in the original film version of Hellman’s play, These Three (1936)) pretty frightening. It was hard to see any vestiges of the colorful beauty who had played Becky Sharp in 1935. But it’s her final film The Savage Intruder (1970) that earned her entrée into the pantheon of fagged hags. She plays an aging actress, an invalid in a wheelchair in her Hollywood home, beset upon by a bizarre retinue of scoundrels.

Ida Lupino was another Bette Davis rival, although mostly in the eyes of the studio heads. Audiences loved her for her unique talents. Unlike her sisters in the Hollywood factory, Lupino was her own woman. She not only acted but directed. She had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. But even Ida couldn’t resist the thrall of cheap thrills. She starred, alongside an enigmatic Ernest Borgnine, in the now classic The Devil’s Rain, 1975, about a coven of Satanists with extraordinary powers to melt their victims. The final relentless sequence is among the most ghoulish and hilariously horrible endings of all.

Those gay sisters Olivia and Joan, of course, are no strangers to the genre. Joan proved she could play the victim beautifully in Rebecca, falling prey to Judith Anderson’s evil schemes. Dame Judith went on to make a few bad movies herself, including the uninviting Inn of the Damned (1975). But it was at the end of Joan Fontaine’s career that she truly was victimized. In The Witches (1966), she is manhandled by a coven of devil worshipers led by another British dame, Kay Walsh. Say what you will about Miss Fontaine, but Joan always gave good gasp. Seeing her flee from a devil doll in her nightgown (several years before Karen Black did the same in Trilogy of Terror) is better than any Victoria’s Secret video.

Olivia always took chances in her career, being one of the first to challenge the unfair studio system. So it was no surprise when she stepped into The Snake Pit in 1948. Seeing the usually dignified de Havilland pulling her hair out in a madhouse was shocking stuff back then, but she went on to star in the even more shocking Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte opposite Bette Davis in 1964. Olivia didn’t sport any ghoulish makeup but her character bore an evil mask. Joan Crawford was slated to play the part, but backed out at the last minute. De Havilland makes it her own, however and gives the movie some much-needed class. Agnes Moorehead, who would go on to make a trashy horror film herself (Dear Dead Delilah, 1974), seems to think she’s in an Outer Limits episode as she tears up the screen in a blazingly de trop performance.

De Havilland lost her haughty glamour in the TV movie The Screaming Woman (1972), above, and graced the smarmy The Swarm in 1978, where the biggest threat to her beehive hairdo were killer bees from Africa.

Olivia did star in one of my all-time favorite thrillers, Lady in a Cage (1964), co-starring a young James Caan. Its creepy opening credits, with a black girl on roller skates kicking a bum, over a frenetic jazz score set the tone for a feverish fright flick that broke new ground in psychological suspense. Olivia looks as beautiful as ever, but she plays an invalid, reliant on her elevator and a suicidal gay son, who is besieged by a gang of psychotic hoodlums. Caan is evil incarnate, as he terrorizes her in his tight white jeans, exposing his hairy chest.

Katharine Hepburn had her own star turn in an elevator five years earlier in Suddenly Last Summer. Although Tennessee Williams’ play was not intended as horror, the Manckiewicz film seems to take its cues from the campy Drive-In horror pics of the 50s. Hepburn makes her first appearance descending in a stylized gilded cage, part of a bizarre avian theme underscored by her fondness for exotic plumes and hothouse plants. The shocking finale, in which we see Elizabeth Taylor lose it as she watches her husband get eaten alive by vengeful waifs (a Freudian sparagmos about the evils of fellatio?) was too funny to be frightening. No, the real horror in this flick is watching Montgomery Clift’s creepy, wooden performance, his face like a disfigured Cigar-store Indian’s, following his near fatal car accident.

Elizabeth Taylor, it is said, was nearby when that awful crash took place. She ran to Monty’s side. In some of her later films we see her running. It’s as if she wanted us to see her suffer. Why else would she choose to star in Night Watch, a stylish thriller from 1973 that paired her with her former co-star in Butterfield 8, Laurence Harvey. It’s one of her “lost pictures,” along with X,Y and Zee, The Blue Bird, and Hammersmith Is Out. (Thanks to You Tube and the internet, many of these previously obscure films are now readily accessible.) While nothing more than a new take on Gaslight, with a twist, Night Watch is highly effective and deserves acclaim if only for Taylor’s wardrobe, which includes several larger-than-life kaftans and form-fitting period pants-suits. Plus her purring paranoia is deliciously deceptive.

I wish I could say the same for performances by Lana Turner in such high camp as The Big Cube (a 1969 psychedelic LSD trip) and Persecution (1974) but they can’t hold a candle to her earlier work in haute trash like Portrait in Black and Madame X. Watching Lana Turner emote in The Witches’ Brew (1980) one feels like Johnny Stompanato, with a knife in one’s back.

The real queen of the screamers is Shelley Winters. During the 60s, she made two films in the aging spinster vein. The first The Mad Room (1969) has her playing a loony widow kept cooped up by a psychotic Stella Stevens. The next year she played Ma Barker in Bloody Mama, one of Roger Corman’s cheesy splatter flicks. In 1971 she went berserk again as a demented widow in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (a true rip-off of the Bette Davis canon). This time the distinguished actor Ralph Richardson co-starred. That same year she unreeled another “questionable” film, What’s the Matter with Helen? opposite a game Debbie Reynolds, below. You’d think that would have been sufficient, but she went on to make Poor Pretty Eddie (aka Redneck County Rape), Journey Into Fear, and Tentacles.

Gloria Grahame, Helen Hayes, Joan Bennett, Simone Signoret, Ruth Roman, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth all descended into the pit, filming chiller thrillers that defied easy categorization. Veronica Lake, of the lovely locks, combed the depths by slumming in the less-than-appetizing Flesh Feast. The great Ann Sothern, who had warmed the cockles of our hearts as Maisie, suddenly reappeared as a smothering mother of a gang-rape murderer (the aptly named John Savage) in the slasher The Killing Kind (1973).

The Baby Jane craze continued with a film starring Geraldine Page, who almost didn’t need to join in the fun as most of her onscreen performances were already pretty bizarre. But in 1969 she appeared in a frightful little film called What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? alongside Ruth Gordon, another actress who always seemed a bit off-kilter.

These cinematic excursions into the macabre don’t have to be strictly schlock fests. The Fan in 1981 gave us Bogart’s babe, Lauren Bacall, in a stylish slasher film co-starring Michael Biehn. It was the first time the killer was prettier than his prey. The film boasts several frightening sequences, although the scariest moment was a close-up of Bacall’s eyes.

The screaming queen frenzy sort of died out when Betsy Palmer appeared as the psycho killer in Friday The 13th. Sure there have been countless horror movies with big name stars since then, but the thrill is gone, the key guignol glamour is missing. Perhaps the novelty got washed away by too much blood and gore. I wouldn’t mind, however, seeing Meryl Streep or Debra Winger take a stab at the genre.

I had no idea when I started delving into this subject that it has such a devoted following. In fact, I thought I had coined the term “Hollywood Guignol,” but I see that a new book has just been published by McFarland Press entitled Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother, by Peter Shelley.

The $45 cover price is enough to make you scream.