[Having been laid up with the flu, I have not had a chance to post anything new here in a while. But I've revised and corrected a previous article on Leopold and Loeb that I wrote back in the spring. Enjoy. -- Brooks]

Strange Bedfellows: The Legacy of Leopold and Loeb

Earlier this year, while killing time at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas (during a lull in my research among its amazing Ziegfeld Follies memorabilia), I stumbled by chance upon a mention of Erle Stanley Gardner’s papers in its catalog. Since, as is obvious by an earlier entry on my blog, I have become obsessed with all things related to Perry Mason (see here), I decided to take a quick gander at this intriguing collection. I couldn’t believe what I found! It’s a vast treasure trove of materials relating to mystery novels and true crime, in particular, “the crime of the century.”

Gardner was a tireless workhorse and wrote or dictated reams of prose every day: letters, proposals, lectures, novels and essays. He wrote at least two Perry Mason novels a year, as well as countless others under various pseudonyms. His correspondents numbered into the thousands. He seems to have replied to every fan letter he ever got. His collection runs to over 33,000 items, and includes a replica of his writing studio from his California ranch. It would take a lifetime to pore through, which might explain why there hasn’t been a biography of him written since the 70s. Not even Della Street could make sense of it all. But a reference in the center’s collections guide’s witty “Gay Lives” section (which in a funny twist turned out to be written by John B. Thomas, a friend of mine) led me directly to a pair of folders of letters between Gardner and Nathan Leopold, the luckier half of the infamous duo Leopold and Loeb.

Leopold and Loeb? Those notorious Nietzschean nihilists? Those kinky “killers for kicks”? “Babe” and “Dickie,” as they were nicknamed by their loving parents and later by the tabloid press, were the star-crossed lovers of crime. Their tragic folie à deux was a twisted inversion of the traditional Shakespearean romance. But rather than kill themselves for love, they took the life of an innocent 14-year old boy.

On a summer day in Chicago in 1924, these two handsome teenagers from well-to-do Jewish families kidnapped a young school friend, Bobby Franks (Loeb, who was a cousin of his, had played tennis with Bobby just the day before), and murdered him in cold blood by beating his head in with a cudgel. Then they poured hydrochloric acid over his genitals and face, and stuffed his nude corpse into a culvert before demanding $10,000 in ransom from his parents for his “safe return”. Why in hell? “For the thrill of it,” they said, coolly and without apology.

Clarence Darrow, above, of the later Scopes Monkey Trial fame, defended Leopold and Loeb and saved them from the death penalty. At the time, their diabolical actions were dubbed “the crime of the century,” even though the new century was not much older than the youths themselves. But in some ways the title still stands since the senselessness and naked cruelty of their crime was never equaled. Far worse things were done in the decades that followed. But no single event had the resonance of this inexplicable act.

The boys’ homoerotic attachment to each other gave their maniacal compact as amoral “Supermen” an added frisson of blood lust, at a time when such subjects were strictly taboo. A court specialist, talking about Leopold, revealed that even in jail “a look at Loeb’s body or his touch upon his shoulder thrills him so, immeasurably.” During their trial the judge refused to let the jury, or any women and reporters in attendance, hear the sordid details of their peculiar sexual predilections. This only added to their notoriety, even if references in court to “mouth perversions” and “interfemoral intercourse” were edited out of news accounts or sealed as privileged testimony. In time, rumors fanned by scandal rags and malicious gossips would add whole new dimensions, including necrophilia, castration and rape, to their crimes, tarring them as vicious sodomites as wicked as Gilles de Rais and Jack the Ripper. But the truth is that their crime was absolutely arbitrary and pointless. There was no sexual gratification and no previous pattern of sadistic behavior.

It was ultimately, however, despite their best laid plans, a very imperfect crime, poorly thought-out and executed. They never got the ransom money and were quickly caught. The acid they used concealed nothing, and the eyeglasses Leopold accidentally left (a Freudian slip?) at the scene sealed their doom. Both confessed too easily and immediately blamed the other. In fact, the “crime of the century” was an inept fiasco. And yet rarely has a pair of such mismatched misfits generated so much media attention! Their case has captivated each new generation of writers, jurists, psychiatrists, criminologists, filmmakers, and artists. Perhaps their story is so popular because of their failings, their tragic flaws, which render them more human, less evil. For the truth is that Leopold and Loeb were no different than the rest of us.

There’s no need to go into further specifics here of the killing and the subsequent trial. The casebook has been well-documented on numerous websites and several informative blogs, including this one.

The curious friendship between Erle Stanley Gardner and Nathan Leopold, above, began shortly after Gardner reviewed the novel Compulsion, by Meyer Levin, for the New York Times in 1956. Gardner praised the novel, which was a fictionalized account of the case, as a “masterly achievement in literary craftsmanship.” He wrote candidly of the unique aspects of the Leopold and Loeb story: “When two child prodigies, the highly educated sons of wealthy families, were found to have been experimenting in homosexuality and then went out to commit murder just for the sake of the experience, society shivered with a premonitory thrill.” The key thing here is that Gardner understood that the “thrill” of the kill was just as much in the minds of the American culture that devoured each new revelation as it was for the boys who did it.

At the end of his review, Gardner took issue with Levin’s conclusions, stating that “the last chapter has been omitted.” He wanted to know: “What has happened to the one central character who has remained alive?” That is — Nathan Leopold. It was an open challenge. And one that Leopold responded to immediately. Days later, Leopold wrote a fawning letter to Gardner, thanking him for his supportive words about his right to rehabilitation and telling him how much of a fan he had always been of his Perry Mason novels. Leopold was limited in the number of letters he could write, and had to include his prison number “9306-D.” All his letters were read and approved by censors.

Gardner, who seems to have been flattered by Leopold’s admiration, quickly wrote back and began a lengthy correspondence that led to a close friendship for the rest of their lives. Gardner also ended up writing the introduction to Leopold’s memoirs Life Plus 99 Years. The latter helped Leopold eventually get parole, as did efforts by Gardner and his team at the Court of Last Resort, a legal think tank that Gardner established which took on special cases and examined the pros and cons of rehabilitation. The Court became a popular TV show and book. And in 1957 Gardner’s most famous creation, Perry Mason, was lighting up the tube, with Raymond Burr bringing justice to his falsely accused clients week after week. So it’s no wonder that Gardner was drawn to Nathan Leopold’s predicament. He loved a tough case as much as Perry Mason.

The notion that a confessed killer who barely escaped the death penalty could ever get parole seemed far-fetched when Leopold and Loeb first went to prison. But by the late 50s, public opinion on prison reform had changed dramatically and Leopold saw a way out. This was partly in response to the wave of juvenile crime sweeping across the nation, a point Gardner hammered home in his introduction to Leopold’s memoir. Leopold’s crimes no longer were so singular, or so scary, he said. Far worse things were happening everyday across the country. In fact, the Clutter family murders which Capote immortalized in In Cold Blood were just around the corner. Gardner, along with Carl Sandburg and Elmer Gertz, who represented Leopold, managed to convince the parole board that Nathan Leopold deserved a second chance. He was finally released from prison in 1958, having served 33 years of his life sentence. By then the press, rather than calling Nathan “Babe,” began to call him “Pudgy.”

I find the exchange between Gardner and Leopold fascinating. It’s not often, I would think, that a convicted murderer develops a friendship with a mystery writer and manages to get this famous author to write for him. (Norman Mailer comes to mind but he was not a mystery writer so the connotation is different.) The friendship between Gardner and Leopold is paradoxical too because the entire notion of the “perfect murder” which had been Loeb’s idée fixe stemmed from his reading pulp detective fiction of which Gardner was one of the earliest masters. No doubt for Leopold this added a level of nostalgia to his interplay with Gardner since it had to remind him of Dickie Loeb. He must have been tickled pink by the irony of it all.

The symbiosis throughout the correspondence between Gardner and Leopold is revealing too of Leopold’s uncanny people skills. In all his letters, Leopold is a master at flattery and charm. He downplays his talents and paints Gardner as an extremely generous man who risked his reputation to take on Leopold’s case. Leopold constantly criticizes his own prose style and laughingly admits that he only wanted Gardner to write the introduction so that the reader wouldn’t be too disappointed in the final product. It’s a clever ploy to win over the immensely successful author (who never really achieved literary recognition for his immense output, and only won an Edgar award for his non-fiction book The Court of Last Resort). Leopold must have known that by stroking Gardner’s ego he was nudging the door open to his own freedom.

But there’s no denying that the friendship was genuine. Leopold may have seen the advantages of his connection to a famous writer who went out on a limb to help him achieve parole. But the affection seems completely real and definitely mutual. In one letter Leopold offers to put up Gardner in his tiny apartment in Puerto Rico (after his parole) if Gardner were to visit. The idea of Gardner shacking up with this notorious killer is too good to be true. It’s not clear from the correspondence if Gardner ever took him up on his offer.

What is most surprising about this cache of letters is that no one seems to have read them, at least not in the context of the literature surrounding the case. Hal Higdon’s book The Crime of the Century (Putnam), which came out in 1975, makes no mention of Gardner at all. Likewise in the latest book on the case: Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (Harper, 2008) Gardner’s name does not appear anywhere within its more than 500 pages despite the fact that he was instrumental in helping Leopold get parole. Leopold, himself, said to Gardner that he was the single most important person in helping him achieve it. He was deeply grateful.

In explaining why he felt it necessary to write his new book, Baatz boasts about its importance and uniqueness. He seems to think very little has been written about the case in the past (although John Theodore’s Evil Summer, a scholarly examination of the crime, had come out in 2007 from the Southern Illinois University Press), and makes the odd assertion that Higdon’s book was merely a hack job, even though it was a thorough piece of detective work which revealed a lot of new material, and helped unravel the “ABCD murders” for which Loeb and Leopold had also been implicated.

Baatz also goes off on long tangents about the myriad lawyers and judges involved. He quotes endless reports from the various physicians and “alienists” of the day who examined the two boys. And yet he offers little insight of his own into the mindsets of these troubled youths. (For a much more rewarding take on the case read Paula S. Fass’s brilliant essay, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture.” HERE.)

When discussing the murder, Baatz relies on Nathan Leopold’s version of events, firmly planting Richard Loeb in the backseat, despite the fact that no one knows for sure who committed the actual cudgeling, and Loeb always claimed Leopold did it. Likewise when Loeb is slashed to death in jail in 1936 by punk convict James Day, the author takes the killer’s version of events as gospel. Day claimed he killed Loeb after he made unwanted advances, and he’d wrestled a razor away from him. But evidence was later submitted that James Day had brought the stolen razor in with him and had most likely been set-up to kill Loeb. In fact, Loeb was sliced to death with 56 separate gashes, some as long as two feet. His jugular vein was severed. Despite the grisly details, Clarence Darrow stated at 79 years of age: “I’m glad he’s dead all the same. He’s better off than Leopold.” As for James Day, below; he was found not guilty of murder.

No citations are offered by Baatz for any of his coverage of Loeb’s mysterious murder. He also uses the Chicago Daily Tribune as his source for assertions that Dickie Loeb often had sex in prison with other male inmates, something which many involved in the prison, or who studied the evidence later, either questioned or denied. (Although there is a very interesting letter in the Gardner files from a writer who claims both Loeb and Leopold preyed on inmates.) Loeb’s cellmate Edward Steplowsky claimed Loeb was busy writing a history of the Civil War, and objected whenever Ed turned on the radio. He does not sound like someone chasing punks in shower rooms. Even if it were true that Loeb had lovers in jail, which is certainly understandable, it seems pointless to footnote a newspaper of the period as proof of his predatory behavior since newspapers are notoriously unreliable, and so much better stuff has already been written about it. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to read the book. It never hurts to refresh one’s memory about the specifics of the Leopold and Loeb case.

Like many, I first learned of these two infamous “thrill killers” by watching Compulsion (1959) starring Orson Welles (above). Directed by Richard Fleischer, it’s a potent, underrated film, which thanks to a new DVD release is having a much-deserved second life.

Based on the Levin novel, the movie takes a psychoanalytic view of the case. Dean Stockwell played the part based on Nathan Leopold with a sad neurotic genius while Bradford Dillman took on the smooth, devil-may-care Dickie Loeb in his usual deft manner. Welles’s take on Clarence Darrow is a sight to behold and proof that he was as great an actor as he was a director. Apparently, however, he was a difficult cast member and took off for Mexico before looping was finished. His closing remarks, Dean Stockwell once stated, had to be pieced together from leftover scraps by a clever editor.

What most of us have forgotten is that Compulsion first ran on Broadway as a stage play, above. It was part of Zanuck’s option when he purchased rights to the novel that Levin had to write a dramatic version which would open prior to the film, generating word of mouth and advance hype. Levin eventually disassociated himself from the staged play, after arguments with the producer Michael Myerberg who brought in Robert Thom to revamp the script. Levin later published his own edition of the play (Simon & Schuster, 1959) with a long foreword discussing his battles with the producer.

The play opened in October, 1957 at the Ambassador Theatre with Dean Stockwell in the Nathan Leopold role (he was trying to break out of his earlier goody-good child star roles) and Roddy McDowall, above, (who also needed to move away from being typecast in his Lassie vehicles) in the more glamorous Loeb part. Included in the cast were Howard da Silva, Frank Conroy (who ended up having a near-fatal heart attack during the run) and a very young Suzanne Pleshette as “the Fourth Girl.” Cy Coleman provided the music! It ran for 140 performances. Critics didn’t warm to it much, finding it “muddled” and “too long”. But audiences lapped up its weird psycho dramas, especially when Roddy McDowall cried out: “I want my Teddy Bear!”

Nathan Leopold hated Compulsion, although he acknowledged that Meyer Levin had done a good job of weaving fact with fiction. Too good a job, apparently. Leopold said he threw up after reading it. His biggest complaint was that Levin had only interviewed him for about an hour and made a lot of his assumptions on Freudian theory rather than on the evidence. No doubt Leopold must have been shocked by the innuendoes in the novel about his obsession for Loeb. He ended up suing Levin, Zanuck and others when Compulsion debuted as a film, claiming that the parties had illegally appropriated his name, likeness and life story. Levin countered that the book was a roman a clef and that the names had been changed. But Leopold’s lawyer Gertz proved that the ad campaigns for the book and film relied heavily on Nathan Leopold’s name. Leopold won a million dollar verdict. But the decision was later reversed when it was decided that a criminal as notorious as Leopold could not deny being a public figure, open to fictionalization. He never made a dime from it.

Compulsion, it turns out, was not the only novel based on the case. In 1957 Mary-Carter Roberts wrote Little Brother Fate (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy) which uses the Leopold and Loeb case as part of a tripartite retelling of three famous 20s crimes. The other two being the Snyder-Gray case, used by James M. Cain in Double Indemnity (Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay) and the notorious Halls-Mills “Lover’s Lane” case which remains unsolved. Roberts’ take on Leopold and Loeb is more about the strange hold one boy had over the other, and less about the killing. Anthony Boucher of the Times called it “vivid and penetrating,” a portrait of “larger-than-life characters…in all their torment.” He included it in his list of best books of the year.

Another novel that year also examined the case: James Yaffe’s Nothing but the Night (Little Brown). Siegfred Mandel in the Times stated that it was more tightly written and neatly plotted than Compulsion with more stress on the guilt of the parents, but that it “avoids the homosexual tie.” This is odd considering the Bantam paperback version blatantly used gay pulp style cover art to market it, and talked of “abnormal passions.” Yaffe himself said: “My object was to do a novel which would give the feeling that the boys were not obviously different from any other boys, that the same thing would happen to anybody…I give the reader the feeling that these were his boys.”

The effect of three books coming out within one year inspired some soul-searching. Rabbi Newman placed an ad in the Times promoting “Criminal Responsibility,” a sermon he was giving at Rodelph Sholom on the novels by Yaffe and Levin. Nothing But the Night was optioned to be made into a film. Bernice Block, who had produced Dino with Sal Mineo for TV’s Studio One, bought the screen rights and announced that she had contacted Elia Kazan as a possible choice for director. Perhaps she had Sal Mineo in mind for the lead. But alas nothing came of it. It would have been fascinating to see Mineo tackle the part of Nathan Leopold.

In 1964 Don Murray, below, the handsome star of Bus Stop, announced that he had optioned Life Plus 99 Years and was going to produce and star in a film based on Nathan Leopold’s life. It was to be directed by Paton Price (who later directed episodes of Surfside 6 and the Partridge Family). Murray actually went to visit Nathan Leopold in Puerto Rico. But sadly nothing came of it either.

Long before any of these versions appeared, however, the story of Leopold and Loeb inspired a play by Patrick Hamilton in 1929 called Rope. Hamilton set the tale in Mayfair, London, England, rather than Chicago, giving it more of an aristocratic edge. It was produced at the Strand in 1929. Lee Shubert produced it later on Broadway at the Theatre Masque and the Maxine Elliott Theatre. Renamed Rope’s End, it starred Ernest Melton as Rupert Cadell; Ivan Brandt as Charles Granillo, and Sebastian Shaw as Wyndham Brandon. Reginald Denham directed. The BBC made two TV versions of it: one in 1939; the other in 1950.

Few would remember it today if Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t directed a film version of it in 1948 called Rope starring James Stewart, Farley Granger and John Dall. Arthur Laurents and Hume Cronyn adapted it for the screen. In both the play and the movie, the focus is on how two sensually corrupt and spoiled youths (less explicitly homosexual in the stage version) plot to commit the perfect murder. They kill a friend of theirs, stuff his body in a trunk, then throw a cocktail party for him, inviting his family. They are outsmarted by their mentor, a Nietzschean professor, who is appalled that they took his dark philosophical musings to an illogical extreme.

The film is not one of Hitchcock’s most popular, despite excellent performances from Granger and Dall, above, and an experimental approach that involved very long takes. The problem is that James Stewart is miscast as the glib professor who misleads his protegees. If James Mason or Claude Rains had played the part, it would have been a classic. Cary Grant, alas, turned it down. Today it is a field day for queer studies theorists who see endless layers of homoerotic subtext in its campy dialogue. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if Arthur Laurents was aware of the double-entendre in the title since “rope” like “pearl necklace” is gay slang for semen. Ironically the film was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for portraying two Jews as homosexual murderers although neither character is described as Jewish and neither of the actors was.

I have my own peculiar connection to the Leopold and Loeb case. My mother’s guardian, Elmer Gertz, above, had been the lawyer who helped Nathan Leopold finally get parole after being in prison for over 30 years. It wasn’t until after my mother died in 1993 that I finally got to meet Mr. Gertz and talk to him specifically about the case. He told me a lot of interesting things, most of which has been fully documented in his two books of memoirs. When I asked him directly about the rumors of Leopold and Loeb’s being lovers he told me a funny story. He had gone to stay with Leopold and was shocked to find that in his bedroom he kept a photograph of Elmer Gertz, and beside that, one of Richard Loeb. Leopold said they were the two most important men in his life. After Leopold got married in Puerto Rico to the widow of a local doctor, he took the picture of Dickie Loeb down.

I asked Gertz if he had seen the film Swoon by Tom Kalin (1992) which had just come out. He said he had and that he liked it which surprised me since he was a man in his late-80s at the time. Swoon takes the Leopold and Loeb case to a completely different level, offering a post-modern spin on the crime. The homoerotic relationship is made the central theme. With striking photography, anachronistic props (including a TV and touch-tone telephone) and a minimum of period costumes, Swoon breathed new life into a story that by the 90s was becoming routine. The film reawakened interest in the affair and since then there have been a number of plays and films and even graphic novels that touch upon the trial. The film Murder by Numbers, by Barbet Shroeder, is said to be based on the case, although the story line diverges in many directions.

In 1985 John Logan wrote a play called Never the Sinner which was inspired by the actual court transcripts. It won the Outer Circle Critics award and has been revived many times (above). A play version of Rope has been revived, relying on the film script as much as Hamilton’s original.

In 2003 Stephen Dolginoff premiered his musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story. It’s appeared in many productions around the world. In 1999, Kevin Spacey’s Darrow in the series Haunted History recreated parts of the famous trial with Jamie Harrold and Barry Del Sherman as Leopold and Loeb.

One of the most interesting tidbits I gleaned from Simon Baatz’s new book is that F. Scott Fitzgerald told a newspaper reporter from the New York World in 1927 over lunch at the Plaza (no doubt a wet lunch) that he was writing a novel based on the story of Leopold and Loeb. One can only imagine what might have been. Coming on the heels of The Great Gatsby, a novel by Fitzgerald on the “crime of the century” might just have been “the great American novel” we’ve all lusted for, a serious rival to Dreiser’s classic An American Tragedy.

What is it about these two monsters that still calls to us after 85 years? Throughout that time, the boys’ names have become synonymous with juvenile delinquency — a phrase that is almost quaint in its antiquated naivete since today no one is surprised when a child or teenager commits a crime. But back in 1924, the world was shocked by what these “juvies” had done (Loeb was only 18; Leopold a mere 19), but even more so by what they had set out to do. For their intention was to commit “the perfect murder.” To plan such a brutal killing, including kidnapping and extortion, defied logic and reason, and undercut the normal bonds of society. Their crime was beyond comprehension, sickening in its implications. And yet, despite all its evil overtones, it still thrills us to the bone.

Starved for some decent (or even indecent) reading material, I recently picked up a weathered old paperback copy of The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case by one of my favorite writers, George Baxt. Re-reading Tallulah’s wild exploits as a celebrity sleuth during the heyday of the McCarthy witch hunt (with cameos by Lillian Hellman and Patsy Kelly), I couldn’t stop laughing. The plot may not make much sense, and the prose is not exactly Proustian, but Baxt never fails to amuse and keep you turning pages. I wrote a blog piece on Baxt last December. Virtually forgotten today, he had at one time been a highly successful writer. I was curious to know more about him and why he had fallen out of favor. So I dug around and wrote this tribute to him. Since I am currently on hiatus, at work on a novel myself (and struggling mightily), I thought it would be fun (and easier for me) to revisit this article in case anyone out there missed it. Here it is again, in a slightly edited version.

The Mystery of George Baxt

In lofty discussions of pioneering gay writers in fancy literary journals, the name George Baxt rarely comes up. But Baxt, a former agent turned writer, was far more influential than he is given credit for. His work ranges from theater and film (he wrote the screenplay for the cult fright flick Circus of Horrors) to a series of popular mystery novels, including the ground-breaking pre-Stonewall classic: A Queer Kind of Death.

George Baxt was a true character, the kind of guy you’d love to have at a party, but would hate to have on your bad side. He had a wicked tongue, spitting out barbs like watermelon seeds. I never met the man. But I’d heard over the years about his enormous wealth of knowledge about the theater, old talkies and movie stars. He knew where all the bodies were buried and was never shy about spilling the dirt.  Reading through his hilarious books, of which I have a small collection, I got to thinking. Why isn’t George Baxt better known? It’s a riddle I tried to solve the only way I know how, by reading everything I could find about him.

I first encountered the name George Baxt when I stumbled upon a copy of a strange little book called A Queer Kind of Death. Published in 1966, it featured a campy gay detective, and a black one to boot: Pharoah Love. (The spelling mistake in his first name was deliberate). Pharoah Love was an audacious “cool cat” who loved jazz, his swanky Jaguar and sexy white boys. Campy, outrageous, arch and far-fetched, the novel created a sensation. This was before gay liberation and very few “legitimate” books were published with openly homosexual heroes. (For the record, there had been gay detectives in previous works, most notably, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and The Gay Detective by Lou Rand in 1960.) Baxt was shocked by the response. He hadn’t thought it was that unusual. He was basically writing about people and the life he knew in Greenwich Village and the rest of Manhattan. But the book struck a Pre-Stonewall nerve. It was hip, irreverent and sexy. Anthony Boucher of the New York Times gave it a rave review, noting that the salty tale “deals with a Manhattan subculture wholly devoid of ethics or morality. Staid readers may well find it shocking, but it is beautifully plotted and written with elegance and wit.” Rarely has a first book found such a devoted audience. The love affair with Pharoah Love continued. Baxt followed Queer up with two Love sequels: Swing Low, Sweet Harriet; and Topsy and Evil.

Later, I re-encountered Baxt’s work when I dove into The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the debut title in a series of mysteries he concocted in the 80s, using celebrity sleuths. He commandeered Noel Coward, George Raft, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and even Alfred Hitchcock into his series, penning riotous, madcap capers with each of them that are wickedly clever and entertaining.

For my money, none is funnier than the first one. The Dorothy Parker Murder Case is a marvel to read. The writing is fluid. Self-assured. Totally committed. And absolutely hilarious. It’s as if Baxt were channeling Dorothy Parker herself which is no small accomplishment. It opens with a harrowing bit of black comedy. Dorothy Parker is attempting suicide in the john of her hotel room after ordering lunch. “After slitting her wrists, Dorothy Parker sat in the bathroom waiting patiently to be rescued.” That’s all he needed to say. It sets the wry, but touching tone for the entire tale. I don’t think anyone has written a better celebrity sleuth mystery before or after. But Baxt had the inside scoop. He was always writing about people he knew personally. He was a familiar figure in the worlds he wrote about. The more I delved into his lively, but checkered past, the more I realized where he got the raw material for his scandalous books.

Like his most popular character Pharoah Love, Baxt was a fabulous creature of many talents and a cat of nine lives. But he also shied away from revealing interviews. Armed with very little to go on, I set out to see if I could fit together a few shreds of his life story. There’s no entry on him in Wikipedia, which is odd since he wrote over two dozen books and scripted numerous films. His name appears on IMDB as the screenwriter of such horror hits as the aforementioned Circus of Horrors and Horror Hotel. But there is little or no biographical information given.

Luckily I found an obituary for him written in England. (Except for a few isolated notices, the American media failed to mention his passing in 2003.) The obit focuses primarily on his film work in that country. Baxt had moved to England in the 50s and wrote most of his scripts there. Variety had posted a rather perfunctory obituary, again primarily because of the screen credits. But there was scant material for a researcher to rely on to find out where he came from and who his family was.

His book jackets provided a few more intriguing details. On the back of A Queer Kind of Death he wrote: “George Baxt was a dropout. He left Brooklyn College to pursue a writing career.” In another, he said he was born on a kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York. So taking that as a starting point, I did a little census-scouring and found that he was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1923, the son of Samuel Baxt, an operator at a clothing manufacturer who came over from Minsk, Russia around 1906. George’s mother was Lena Steinhouse whom Samuel had married in 1910. George had several siblings, a brother Morris, a sister Esther and a sister Juliette. They lived on Dumont Avenue. Nearby is an Isidore Baxt whom I presume is his uncle. He also came over from Minsk in 1906. By 1930, George’s father had opened his own grocery store on Avenue L.

Baxt joked later that he had an active sex life as a boy in Brooklyn. He was not shy. One commentator quoted him as saying he “regarded gay sex among the Irish, Italians, and Jews as normal.” Baxt settled down “with a boyfriend in high school, although he claimed to also have sex with teachers, particularly those in Physical Education.” He was probably just being his old provocative self. But it does indicate that Baxt was a rebel with a cause early on. He claimed in yet another wry author’s note that his first published piece appeared in the Brooklyn Times-Union when he was nine. He was paid a couple of dollars for it and got bit by the freelance writer’s bug. He scribbled articles in high school and won the Columbia Scholastic Press Award. He sold his first radio script at 18.

Baxt went to City College and Brooklyn College before dropping out to pursue his passion for the theatre. His first venture was a musical play called Pity the Kiddies which was performed in 1942 for one night only at the Barbizon Plaza’s concert hall. In March that year he performed as an actor in Theatre of the Soul by Nicolai Evreinov, right, staged by his friend William Boyman.

Baxt claimed to have been in the armed services which might explain the gap in his career credits from 1942 to 1945. But I have not found any records of such service. He also claimed to have been a “propagandist for Voice of America.” In 1946, he wrote a one-act play Laughter of Ladies that was produced at a theatre showcase on 47th Street. A year later he penned a comedy, Alex in Wonderland, about a Jewish family in Canarsie. Boyman announced that Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress, was set to star in it, but it never seems to have gotten off the ground. Later he changed the title to Make Momma Happy and it made the rounds. At one point Sidney Lumet (son of the famous Yiddish actor Baruch Lumet, and later film director) was slated to appear in it. In 1948 Blanche Yurka announced she was to star in Laughter of Ladies. Then Estelle Winwood was added to the cast. (In his Tallulah Bankhead book, which features Winwood, Baxt makes it clear that Yurka was fired because the producers and directors found her wanting. He also makes the outlandish claim she was a murderess, but that’s another story.) The play failed to get picked up. It was eventually staged with Grayson Hall (of Dark Shadows fame) in a New Jersey summer theater in 1953, and went on tour to Hartford and Philadelphia in the fall. It never appears to have made it to Broadway. (Baxt actors: Dullea, Picon, Yurka and Zachary Scott, below).

Obviously George Baxt was having a hard time gate-crashing the Great White Way. He often got pocket change by pitching stories to Walter Winchell. “Always on the hunt for new clients,” his UK obit says, “he would ride in the elevator in the Algonquin Hotel to find out who was staying there.” This experience would serve him well later in his Dorothy Parker novel. As an actor’s agent, he was not always a good judge of up-and-coming talent. He admitted to throwing a young James Dean out of his office because the kid needed a shower!

Later Baxt found side work as a disc jockey to make ends meet. An announcement in the Times in 1953 says he had signed a rental lease at 449 E. 58th Street. (Apparently there was nothing odd in those days about publishing one’s address in the paper). Judging by the tony East Side address, he couldn’t have been doing too poorly.

In the mid-50s he segued from radio into television. He scouted talent for The Big Show, helping Tallulah Bankhead land a lucrative gig on there. By 1955 he penned a comedy for NBC called The Way Things Happen starring Peter Lind Hayes. He made a bigger splash with a David Susskind production of Mrs. Miniver for TV, starring Maureen O’Hara in the Greer Garson role. Keir Dullea and Juliette Mills co-starred.

In 1956 he returned to the theater, writing a sketch for Ben Bagley’s show The Littlest Revue at the Phoenix. But nothing came from that. His dream of making his name on the stage came to a crashing halt.

Faced with the distressing fact that he couldn’t catch a break on Broadway, and that several of his clients were blacklisted as Red sympathizers, Baxt escaped to England, and accepted an offer from producer Hannah Weinstein to work on the British TV series Sword of Freedom. “I went to England on a three-month contract and stayed five years,” he later said. The show starred Edmund Purdom, of The Student Prince fame, as an artist and freedom fighter in Florence during the Renaissance. “A lot of later famous people starred,” Baxt quipped.  “Joan Plowright played Mona Lisa. I wrote 10 of the 39 episodes. I used to call it ‘The Sword of Boredom.’”

Eager for a change, Baxt began writing horror films for British producers, and struck gold. Circus of Horrors was cited by the New York Times as “the crispest, handsomest and most stylish movie shocker in a long time.” But horror was not all Baxt was up to. One of his niftiest flicks was Payroll, a taut gangster film, featuring Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw.

In 1961, Baxt wrote the eerie thriller Shadow of the Cat, about a fierce feline seeking revenge on those who murdered its mistress. Creating an aura of suspense, director John Gilling filmed it entirely from a cat’s-eye view. Other credits include Burn, Witch, Burn. Not surprisingly, Baxt also had a hand in the camp classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes starring Vincent Price. Although uncredited, Baxt is said to have come up with the now-famous device of having Phibes rise out of the floor playing his ghoulish pipe organ.

Perhaps longing for his show biz roots, or the gay life of Manhattan, Baxt of The Scarlet Pimpernel returned to Amerca in the early 60s. He landed a plum assignment, writing a new adaptation for CBS. Starring Maureen O’Hara, Zachary Scott and Michael Rennie, it was another David Susskind hit. The Times called it “exciting and richly mounted.” (At left, a pulp Pimpernel released at the time of Baxt’s adaptation on TV.)

He collaborated on a new suspense series My Son, the Detective that was probably too camp for its own good. He also wrote episodes of The Defenders. In 1963 Broadway beckoned anew. Judy Holliday was set to play in Baxt’s latest play, Not in Her Stars, with Martin Gabel. But nothing materialized. Gabel went on to act in Marnie instead. Then in 1964 the play was revived. Nancy Walker the comedian was slated to direct. Jane Wyman hoped to bring it to Broadway with co-star Anita Louise. Alas, it too, like Phibes’s organ, was a mere pipe dream.

No doubt these repeated failures broke Baxt’s spirit. He abandoned the stage completely. For two years he seems to have done nothing, or so reports in the Times indicate. Two years of silence. But Baxt broke that silence with his outspoken first novel, A Queer Kind of Death and his career took a whole new turn. He wrote the two Love sequels, then launched a new series of “wild, wacky, and weird” mysteries featuring detective Max Van Larsen in such farcical fare as A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures. Among Baxt’s other books are The Affair at Royalties (1971) and Burning Sappho (1972).

In 1972 he returned to the silver screen to write Tower of Evil (aka) Horror on Snape Island, based on his novel of the same name. He did not always have the Midas Touch when it came to books. His 1979 novel, The Neon Graveyard, a scathing send-up of Hollywood, was panned by Newgate Callendar in the Crime Books review section at the Times. That proved to be one of the few bad notices he ever got. Even the great doyenne of mysteries, Ruth Rendell, who is not known for dispensing superlatives with ease, described Baxt as “brilliant and hilarious,” adding, “I love reading George Baxt.”

Baxt caught his breath and dreamed up the celebrity sleuth series which put him back at the top of his game. He even wrote himself into a few, depicting a character named George Baxt. It was his own Hitchcock moment. He continued to write until the 1990s. According to Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold, who wrote about Baxt and interviewed him when the latter was living in Los Angeles, Baxt was very proud that the clever epigrams in the Dorothy Parker volume were all his own creation. “He told me that the people who made Mrs Parker & The Vicious Circle,” Feingold recalls, “had tried to get him to share the historical basis for the lines he wrote so they could use them in the script.  He said, ‘I invented them and if you want to use them, you’ll have to pay me!’”

Towards the end of his career, he was wooed back into writing again about Pharoah Love, his most popular creation, whom he’d killed off in Topsy & Evil. He penned two “sequels,” A Queer Kind of Love and A Queer Kind of Umbrella, set in Chinatown and using a second Pharoah Love character. But they did little to revive interest in him or his earlier work. By then his accomplishment in writing successful gay mysteries was overshadowed by the impact of Joseph Hansen and his Brandstetter mysteries which were more in the traditional hard-boiled vein and much more accessible to a wider audience. Most people I’ve talked to who are interested in vintage gay literature (and believe me, it’s a vanishing breed) have never even heard of George Baxt. He died at the age of 80 in 2003. Typically the New York Times didn’t even bother to write him an obituary even though he had been one of their favorite authors.

I wish I had met George Baxt. Maybe somewhere along the line I did, but didn’t know it. Although from what I’ve read that sounds hard to do. Journalist Tom Vallance once described meeting Baxt: “I had lunch with Baxt just once, several years ago in New York, and found him wonderful company with great zest and a rich fund of anecdotes. He could also be caustic, and he had been known over the years to have alienated some of his friends. His family described him as ‘outrageous and curmudgeonly, a complaining, perpetual naysayer’, but added that he always remembered to phone on birthdays and give presents to the children.”

I can see Baxt as a doting crotchety uncle. But one also gets the sense reading about George Baxt that he was pretty much a loner. On one book jacket he described himself as “a collector of film and theatre books [who] sits up till all hours for old movies on television.” He said his best friend was his VCR. Clive Hirschhorn, author of The Warner Brothers Story, recalled to Vallance that Baxt’s “knowledge of movies was truly vast — he could name all the girls who dance on the aeroplane wings in Flying Down to Rio!”

While there is not much else about George Baxt online or elsewhere, he is mentioned in a fun book of recollections by Wendy Werris called An Alphabetical Life. In it she describes a luncheon at Pete’s Tavern in Manhattan in 1986 when she first met him. “Baxt was a rather small man in his mid-sixties, plump yet graceful and with thinning gray hair. Although I was friends with several gay men at that time, I had never met such a flamboyant queen as he. If you can imagine a swish, fey and girlish Phil Silvers, you’ll have a picture of George Baxt. He was hilarious and irreverent. He batted his eyelashes to make a point when telling a dirty joke. His Brooklyn accent was delicious, and he had stories to tell about every great star from the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond. You never heard dirt dished until you heard it from the mouth of George Baxt.”

Werris goes on to tell some sizzling anecdotes involving Sal Mineo and what nasty things Baxt wishes Gidget had done in her movies besides just going to Rome and Hawaii. In just a few snippets of conversation, Werris captures the ribald spirit of the man. It’s the same priceless humor you can enjoy simply by reading any of George Baxt’s campy books or seeing one of his thrilling movies.

Sometimes it takes a warm cadaver for people to take notice of forgotten novelists. I had hoped that would happen with James Purdy, above (photo by Robert Giard), who died on Friday the 13th, this past March. But even though the New York Times honored him with a perfunctory obituary, few others in the media paid homage. The “In Memoriam” segment of This Week with George Stephanopolous, for instance, cited several celebrity deaths that Sunday, but made no mention of James Purdy, whom some have argued was one of America’s finest authors. When I mentioned this to Alfred Corn, a writer and friend, he turned to me with obvious surprise and an unspoken “duh” and said “Well, of course not. He was gay.”

I guess that’s what it comes down to in the end, although James Purdy’s work covered a much wider and far more bizarre terrain than simply homosexuality. He wrote of serial killers, society misfits, and what New Directions cited as “the paradox of love and loneliness.” Perhaps you’ve never heard of him. I wouldn’t be surprised, even though he wrote numerous darkly comic novels, including the acclaimed Jeremy’s Version; The Nephew; Cabot Wright Returns; and Narrow Rooms. One of my favorite works of his is Colour of Darkness, an eerie short story first published as 63: Dream Palace. It was the first of his pieces that garnered accolades, thanks to a rousing recommendation from Dame Edith Sitwell who, only occasionally prone to hyperbole, claimed he was the most significant writer to come along in a hundred years.

John Powys called him “certainly the best kind of original genius of our day.” The Times of London said, vis a vis Malcolm, perhaps his best-known novel, “Mr. Purdy writes like an angel… a fallen angel, versed in the sinful ways of man.” Dorothy Parker, who knew a few things about humor, called Malcolm, “The most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times.” Orville Prescott, who so famously dissed Gore Vidal, championed Malcolm’s young author, stating that “Mr. Purdy is in some danger of becoming the center of a literary cult.”

What also surprised me about Purdy’s death — certainly not unexpected since he was 94 — was that the New York Times obituary felt like it had been rushed into print, without any preparation. It left out two very prominent facts of his wide-ranging career. First, it made no mention of Edward Albee’s play version of Malcolm which opened on Broadway in 1966 and ran a scant seven performances. Not every writer can lay claim to such a monumental flop.

And second, William Grimes, who wrote the obit, completely overlooked the cult film In A Shallow Grave, directed by Kenneth Bowser, starring Michael Biehn and Patrick Dempsey, which was adapted from Purdy’s novel of the same name. It was produced by American Playhouse in 1988. As far as I know it has never been released on DVD.

As a tribute to James Purdy, who lived in Brooklyn and whom I once met briefly at a literary party, I decided to devote last night to rewatching In A Shallow Grave. Sadly, it’s not on Netflix; I had to make do with a scratchy old VHS copy. Of course, I’ve seen the film a dozen times. But I wanted to savor its dark, tortured mysteries yet again. Michael Biehn gives the performance of his career in it, as a soldier returned from the war with severe disfigurements to his face — a far cry from his Terminator beefcake roles. In fact, he is so unattractive in this film that you can hardly recognize him.

Categorized as a gay film when it came out, because it included some homoerotic themes, In A Shallow Grave is anything but. It’s a deeply disturbing film about war, race relations, male bonding, and the redeeming power of love. When the book was first released, the New York Times Book Review stated emphatically: “In A Shallow Grave is a funny…and touching book…a modern Book of Revelation, filled with prophesies, visions and demoniac landscapes. It will bring to Purdy the wider audience he deserves.” Perhaps it still can.

ADDENDUM

Here are links to two fascinating interviews that will illuminate much more than I can say about James Purdy: Here and There.