The Cats Meow Update

I spotted this in today's Liz Smith's column in the New York Post...

ROBERT DOWNEY JR., looking good and attracting a lot of attention, took in Steven Peros' new play, 'The Cat's Meow' in Los Angeles. (Downey's best friend, Neill Barry, has a significant role in it.) This is a fictionalized re-telling of the famous Thomas Ince tragedy of 1924. Ince was a movie pioneer of the silent era who died mysteriously aboard the yacht of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. (Louella Parsons, just coming into power as a showbiz scribe, was also on board. Or was she? For years Hollywood buzzed with the tale of Parsons being 'paid off' by Hearst with a syndicated column. Louella was violent in her denunciation of this calumny.)

Also in the audience that night were three of Ince's relatives; they reacted well to the play's premise that Ince was accidentally shot by Hearst, who was really aiming at Charlie Chaplin. (The legendary screen star and satyr was rumored to have indulged himself with Marion Davies, Hearst's beloved mistress.) Although most of the principals, with the exception of Chaplin, are fairly cloudy figures to today's audience, the story of murder aboard a luxury yacht is still gripping, especially since we'll never know the truth, and the 'what if' possibilities are endless. (Maybe Louella murdered Ince?) 'The Cat's Meow' is Broadway-bound.

<snip>>Also in the audience that night were three of Ince's relatives; they reacted

I don't know about anyone else, but the more I read about Ince's death, the less certain things become. I think David Robinson does a goob job in 'Chaplin His Life & Art' of undermining a number of excuses and explanations, without offering a definitive interpretation. In particular, he shows that CC couldn't have been entirely truthful in his autobiography.

I think I'll have to see this play

The author has read his/her _Hollywood Babylon_. And maybe dear Lita as well. As for that book, I wouldn't take much of it too literally. It is a ghostwritten potboiler, and its resemblance to pulp fiction is no accident.

Connie K.

..

Remember that photo in 'Hollywood Babylon' of Marion Davies holding bunches of balloons, and the caption 'On board the Oneida, Marion Davies welcomes Tom Ince'? I recently spotted that very same photo in a newspaper published more than a year BEFORE the death of Ince. The caption in the newspaper photo indicated she was welcoming her director, Robert Vignola, on his return from Europe.

Bruce Long

More creative interpretation of history by Mr. Anger.

But considering some of the mistakes that are made on the evening news (like ABC reporting Lita Grey's death more than a year before her actual demise), maybe we shouldn't be too hard on the Babby books. They were low-budget operations. ABC News has no such excuse.

Connie K.

Was it 20/20 that resurrected 'Buckwheat' as an attendant at a supermarket years after his death on an evening news show?

I worked on a commercial with 'Spanky' MacFarland for Choice Hotels. (I didn't get to meet him personally, I was only involved in the post-production.) In some behind the scenes footage, Spanky said he heard about the Buckwheat story before it aired and called the network to tell them that the guy was a fake, but they ignored him and ran the story much to their embarrassment.

Sadly, Yes. The man was a fake, indeed. Billie 'Buckwheat' Thomas had passed on years earlier. The Phoney Buckwheat was put in his place by Buckwheat's son, Billie Jr. Can you imagine the feeling the son had during all this fuss? Spanky was furious too. He had put up with many people claiming to be one member of the gang or another for years.

Happily, The Sons Of The Desert, the organization dedicated to the preservation of Laurel and Hardy, reunited the 'Our Gang' kids over the years and many of them had not been in touch with each other since their filming days. But that is another story!

My wife and I attended a Sons of the Desert convention in Los Angeles circa 1980 and Spanky was there. Richard Carnahan