What the Harry Conover modeling agency didn’t know was that this Dude coming off the Duke’s Trojan Horse on the USC campus, his father a recovering G.I. at the Sawtelle neuropsychiatric convalesce center...20 miles from his son’s discovery on line by director John Ford for a role in “Stagecoach”..... riding shotgun
II
The passengers: gassed up Thomas Mitchell.. bar stool temptress Claire Trevor and squeaky Porter Hall “Doing his thing” as he would characterize it decades later in his archives..
The social media like Face book Twitter the internet digital cosmos had not dominated the information highway’s landscape via “Stagecoach”.... Duke riding shotgun .....
How would Harry Conover and his array of Candy Jones(his frau) models long before Lindsay Lohan met her test at Betty Ford’s rehab center for drug and alcohol abuse at Rancho Mirage..
The Duke’s pop was into his role at his portal..eye loop in, discerning 21 jewels from 17, the hospital providing space for these WW vets all used up from too much living amidst their ego’s obstacle course....”How to get a yes”
Harry Conover and his models cared not a whit about any realities of urban life. ...Ucla’s Frederic Woellner “Heaven is on the way to it” and Charles Titus..Machiaveli and Gracian, the tomes for Erlichman and Halderman, Trcky Dick’s linebackers guarding the oval office after Adlai Stevenson JFK and LBJ had gone the way of unfettered aggression and shadowy like Mafia and Kremlin gun slingers.
III
Didn’t his tennis honcho Jack L, the operational “chief” of the Burbank studio say.”You don’t need a letter. Just call Bill Hearst at his swanky cottage. Tell him you want to write a column..”
So café society had to wait for the Harry Conover Candy Jones models to take the Ucla photo journalist profile.... letting it flow from Kherckoff Hall unto the information highway’s shallows and expectations.
Meanwhile the Whittier College football bencher,, the people be damned. Old Hickory never had it so good. Did he dear reader?
Done did Helen Gahagan Douglas in, winning her Congressional seat.in the rough and tumble of Machiavellian politics.
Where would the riding shotgun surface in the arcane traffic for notoriety and elusive fame and fortune in the Big Apple?. The Pierre hotel? The Waldorf Towers? The Saint George Hotel In downtown Brooklyn? Court Street and Montague.
IV
When the Ucla father figures... Harry Morris, director of publications, Don Padgett (Rugby coach) Don Ashen (treasurer) the athletic director Wilbur Johns basketball coach John Wooden Bill Ackerman graduate manager tennis coach Mike Frankovich (Binnie Barnes ‘h’) Colonel Bing, Air ROTC
Ralph Bunche Ducky Drake trainer and junior varsity track coach Harry Trotter... varsity under grads Craig Dixon (110 220 hurdles) Al Kapp the stamina clad cross country miler at ZBT’s Gayly Avenue fraternity....
Jane Withers home above Joe E Brown field ......watching the jocks chase their dreams.
V
Those father figures seeing him off at the Westwood Village Tom Crumpler Hamburger Hamlet Greyhound bus stop ....
“Good luck . Gimme five, kid.. We’ll miss you. Give our blessings to Broadway and the Great WhiteWay. Bloomy won’t know what hit him.....” said the hunker in the brown flannel coat ,the Babe himself off LeConte&Westwood Boulevard .....in town promoting “Pride of the Yankees” when screenplays had a Prometheus serendipity.
“Babe Ruth a force of nature.” said the Duke riding shotgun alongside the stagecoach morphed as the Greyhound bus .
“Wasn’t the whole romp deja vu, dear reader?”
The Big Apple’s information highway..., November 28 2010
