Sleaze Merchants

Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free,
sleaze goes right out the window.

— Cintra Wilson

Cover by Al Rossi

My first exposure to sleaze—I was age eight—was the paperback tower at the front of our corner drug store.

 

It was six or seven feet tall—dwarfing me—and pentagonal and would rotate unsteadily on a hidden axle when you gave it a whirl. 

Top heavy from its burden of potboilers, the tower always threatened to fall on me when I spun it. At the very first squeak, my inattentive mother would glance up from her shopping and siss at me, "Robert, leave that alone."

The book tower's presence in the drug store suggested to my eight-year-old mind that its weird offerings must somehow relate to grownups' healthcare (although I would soon discover a comparable rack of sulfurous paperbacks in the confectioner's store down the street—where absolutely nothing healthy was sold).

Although I had no clue at the time, three of the artists who created the covers for many of the books on display were among the finest illustrators of the day, rivals of the famous Norman Rockwell.

They were Norman Rockwell's lurid twins.

Al Rossi was a prolific magazine illustrator and a masterful merchant of paperback sleaze. He was the original cover artist for Junkie, a 1953 novel by beat writer William Burroughs (published under the pen name William Lee). The Bronx-born Rossi was a prominent supplier to Balcourt, a New York-based stock house that provided cover art to paperback publishers in the 1950s and '60s. A professional jazz musician until World War II, when he served with the Army in Europe, Rossi was compelled after the war to try his hand at illustration to make ends meet, attending Pratt and the Arts Student League to learn the craft. Before associating with Balcourt, he worked for several publishers of pulp magazines, the forerunners to paperback books. Rossi liked to use his male neighbors and their wives as his models.

Cover by Ben Stahl

Ben Stahl was exposed to fine art in the seventh grade, thanks to a scholarship he received to attend Saturday morning lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. After high school, he landed a job at a commercial art studio in Chicago that provided illustrations almost exclusively to The Saturday Evening Post. His success as a studio artist prompted Stahl to move to New York and go freelance. There, he began illustrating paperback book covers, as well as continuing to supply artwork to The Post (he illustrated more than 750 stories for the magazine during his career). Stahl soon earned a reputation as a serious fine artist and, along with Norman Rockwell and Connecticut illustrator Albert Dorne, co-founded the Famous Artists School, a mail-order course whose graduates include Pat Boone, Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston. In 1965, as his career was reaching its zenith, Stahl painted 15 life-size pictures of the stations of the cross and opened his own museum in Sarasota, Florida, to house them. But the paintings were stolen four years later and never recovered. Stahl was left nearly penniless due to the theft.

Cover by Paul Rader

Paul Rader, at age 16, was one of the youngest artists ever to have an art museum exhibit his paintings. His early mastery of portrait painting earned him awards throughout the '20s and '30s and brought him commissions to paint wealthy judges, lawyers, and businessmen in his hometown of Detroit. Rader switched to illustrating pulp magazines after World War II, finding the work more lucrative, and moved to New York, where he became another leading supplier to Balfour. When painting paperback book covers, Rader liked using professional models and actors, supplied to him by talent agencies. One of his favorite male models, Guy Williams, went on in the mid-1960s to play Dr. John Robinson in the TV show Lost in Space. 

Whether Rossi, Stahl and Rader set the floor of our society's sleaze index, I don't know; but I do know their art depicted truths—truths most Americans, Puritans at heart, wished to deny in the 1950s.

The risks they took in defying mores and good taste and giving free reign to sleaze may not have contributed to the world's trove of art, but these three artists helped millions of Americans remain literate members of the book-buying public, which is a lot more than you can say about today's media consumers.

Above: Cover illustration for The Bump and Grind Murders by Al Rossi. Cover illustration for The Creepers also by Al Rossi.  

Let Your Discourse be Short and Comprehensive

To practice his penmanship, the 16-year-old George Washington copied the entirety of Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a 110-page book compiled by the Jesuits in 1595.

Rules contained the standards of morality and etiquette for Colonial America's elite—the class the impoverished Washington was anxious to enter.

Showing humility and respect—especially before superiors—was the keynote of Rules. Humility and respect formed the very pillars of civility.

Rule 35 applied that civility to writing and speaking: Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

Today, we'd do well to alter that rule: Let your communication with customers be short and comprehensive.

When your customer communications are long-winded, you show them they don't deserve your respect. You signal you think they're stupid. Not a formula for sales or retention.

Here's an example of silly verbosity from a large insurance company's website:

Property insurance is a type of insurance policy that can provide coverage for property owners or renters. Examples of property insurance include homeowners, renters, and flood insurance policies. These policies can provide coverage for damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. Let us help protect where you live and what you own with our different types of property insurance. Get a property insurance quote for your home, apartment, and more. We also make managing your policy easy with online access. You can make changes, request documents, and make payments.

The company asks you to suffer through nearly a hundred words, simply to tell you it will sell you property insurance. The same message could be stated in fewer than half the words:

Property insurance protects owners and renters from bearing the costs of damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. And managing a policy is easy: you can make changes, request documents, and make payments on line. Contact us for a quote.

By George, show customers a little respect! Sharpen your red pencil before you publish.

Let your discourse be short and comprehensive.

We're All Trash

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

— Emma Lazarus

Twice daily, some news item triggers me and I fulminate against my fellow Americans. 

Nowadays, they're stories about the unvaccinated—and their loathsome cheerleaders.

How can these fools deny science, eschew common sense, and cling so adamantly to moronic beliefs? How can they be such trash?

But then the words on the base of Liberty remind me: we're all trash.

Some trash gather at motorcycle rallies; some, at country clubs; some, on street corners; some, on private islands; some, in megachurches; some, in art museums.

Some trash don't gather anywhere, but sit alone on the couch watching Fox News or The Bachelor or reruns of Barnaby Jones; some sit alone watching TikTok, reading Facebook, or writing blog posts.

But, all the same, we're all trash.

You're here because your forebears were refuse.

The quality folks—the gifted, good-mannered, powerful people—stayed in the old country.

Only the trash came—or were deported—here.

That's American exceptionalism.

Get your shots, trashy people, so the rest of the trash doesn't catch Delta Plus (or, as I like to call it, Covid with Cheese).

No Matter How You Slice It

No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

— Al Smith

A series of interviews with literary agents about their pastimes in the current edition of Poets & Writers has convinced me college educators have stuffed everyone's head with baloney.

I arrived at this conclusion when one of the agents, self-described as "passionate about creating spaces for those from historically marginalized communities," mentioned she was using her free time to ponder whether or not "to cling to one's own marginalization."

Another, self-described as "queer," said she was using her free time to study the "rise of the feminist anachronistic costume drama."

A third, self-described as an avid foodie, mentioned that she was using her free time to "exchange tweets with a BIPOC travel blogger" while she studied "decolonizing veganism."

WTF?

These are bright, educated, well versed people.

Why do they think and speak in these patently silly terms, leftover scraps from French philosopher Michel Foucault's lunch?

Teachers are to blame—and what conservatives call the "absence of intellectual pluralism" in colleges. 

Teachers have allowed '70s-era jargon to substitute for thought, and identity for virtue.

Ask yourself: before you can "decolonize" veganism, you have to "colonize" it in the first place.

But how do you do that?

Do you sail a ship full of conquistadors to the New World and take over a vegan coop by storm? Do you loot and pillage the kale section and enslave all the stock boys? Do you seize all the kale, repackage it as Swanson's Cheesy Spinach, and ship it back to Spain? Do you cite divine rights to justify all this?

Possibly.

I had a logic teacher in college, a Brit, whose Cambridge training prohibited him from ever telling a student that his or her comment in class was inane. 

He'd just listen politely, smile, and reply, "Possibly."

After a couple of weeks in his course, you understood he was saying, "That's utter nonsense!"

While I have nothing but admiration for queers, feminists, vegans, BIPOC, and literary agents, I cringe whenever I hear one of them say she wants to "decolonize" something or "open a space for the marginalized" (lest we be "uncritical" and "non-inclusive").

A voice inside me—with a British accent—says, "Possibly."

Because, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.

Ice Cream Blonde

You might remember Thelma Todd, the "Ice Cream Blonde," from her appearances in Marx Brothers movies. 

She so attracted men that, at age 15, Thelma was fired from her job as a dime-store clerk in Lawrence, Massachusetts, because the owner disapproved of the fellas lurking in his aisles.

Jobless, Thelma enrolled in teacher's college and began entering beauty contests for cash.

A Lawrence theater manager spotted her at a tryout for the Miss America pageant and wired Thelma's photo to a Paramount Pictures executive in Hollywood. 

The 20-year-old's career path was settled, overnight. For her part, she was glad for the opportunity, glad to get away from Lawrence, and glad to get away from an abusive Irish father.

Her first movie role (as a dance-hall girl) was in 1926's God Gave Me 20 Cents.

On the beach at Malibu

Studio-head Hal Roach noticed her in the film and quickly plunked Thelma into his Laurel and Hardy comedies. 

She was so funny on screen, Roach soon gave Thelma her own series of slapstick shorts, and began loaning her to other studios, which was how she wound up playing with the Marx Brothers.

Thelma made, in total, 50 films in less than nine years. 

But she knew her looks wouldn't last, and did what many aging Hollywood stars do: she opened a gambling casino.

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café—a 15,000-square foot nightclub on the ground floor of her Malibu home—proved an immediate sensation among tourists, screenwriters, celebrities, studio executives, gangsters, and gamblers. 

It appeared Thelma was now set for life.

But it wasn't to be.

The Ice Cream Blonde had a dark side.

An inveterate "party girl," Thelma drank heavily and played around with married men. She dated mobsters; eloped with one, then got divorced and took up with another. She cracked up cars and was arrested for drunk driving. And she gobbled amphetamines to fend off weight. (Hal Roach inserted into her studio contract the proviso that she'd be fired if she gained five pounds; he named it the "Potato Clause.") The amphetamines made her manic.

Friends said she was drawn to dangerous men, men who, like her father, were physically abusive.

Thelma was found dead by her maid on the morning of December 16, 1935, her body wedged behind the wheel of her Lincoln, which was parked in the garage of her business partner and lover, who lived next door to the casino. 

The Lincoln had been running, and the garage door closed, when the maid came upon her.

The actress's nose and mouth were bloody.  

A grand jury ruled the 29-year-old actress's death was a suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning.

The ruling came despite the fact that an autopsy revealed Thelma had a broken nose, bruised throat, and two cracked ribs; and despite the fact that none of her acquaintances believed she was suicidal.

In the trunk of Thelma's Lincoln, the grand jury was informed, were wrapped Christmas presents, meant for lovers, friends and family.

Postscript: In 1987, Hal Roach (age 90) told writer Marvin Wolf that three Los Angeles sheriff's detectives visited him the day after Thelma Todd's death and told him her business partner and lover had confessed to murdering the actress. Roach, wanting no scandal, advised the detectives to cover up the crime. "I told them I thought they should forget about it," Roach said. "He wouldn't have gone to jail anyway." Thelma's partner and lover confessed to the murder a second time 16 years later, while on his deathbed.