Allan Melvin - Always in Character, Often in Uniform

 

Rob Petrie had four old Army pals who were tall, had deep voices and wavy blonde hair.

Three were shown in flashbacks (a Dick Van Dyke Show innovation) and were perhaps the same person – the trio were named Sam Pomerantz, Sam Pomeroy, and Sol Pomerantz, depending on the episode. (The blog Toobworld calls them the "Pom-Poms.")

The fourth, a distinctly different character who visits Rob and Laura's New Rochelle home in the present, was an immaculately dressed, pleasant but mysterious jeweler named Harrison B. Harding.

All four (or both, if the Pom-Poms are to be regarded as one fellow) were played by the same person – the consummate TV character actor Allan Melvin.

Melvin also played a prison guard in a Dick Dan Dyke episode, and in another, a gun salesman in the old west in a dream Rob has (dream sequences were another Van Dyke Show innovation).

To further complicate the Pom-Pom legacy, another actor also played an Army buddy of Rob’s named Sam Pomerantz, proving that no one in the ‘60s foresaw home video or the Internet someday enabling sitcom devotees to quibble.

To clear up which Pom is Allan Melvin, behold his familiar face and voice in this Dick Van Dyke Show link as Sol Pomerantz:

As Sgt. Charlie Hacker on Gomer Pyle USMC:

.
And, in one of a series of Liquid Plumber ads he did in the 1970s and ‘80s:

(as though plumbers wear their uniforms to parties)

Now  you know who Allan Melvin was -- if telling Sam from Sol is still a little tricky. Melvin was born in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a New York City-based distributor of silent films to amusement arcades in the Midwest. A young Allan moved with his family to New York City, where he grew up, then was educated at Columbia University.

Before the Dick Van Dyke or Gomer Pyle series, Melvin donned a military uniform as Army Corporal Steve Henshaw in The Phil Silvers Show in the 1950s. But he wasn’t just a screen serviceman; Melvin joined the Navy during World War II, helping build naval vessels at the Port Newark Shipyard in New Jersey, the website philsilversshow.com said.

But entertainment was Melvin's avocation during the war.

"He learned to do voices and he practiced doing impressions of all kinds of people and things," The Phil Silvers website said. "Some College acting friends, Frank Campanella, Thomas McDermott and a young actress called Amalia Sestero had started a theatrical group, The Unicorn Players. Frank invited Allan to one of their meetings -- the die was cast. Allan and Amalia started dating, fell in love..."

In 1944 Allan John Melvin and Amalia Faustina Sestero wed in New York City.  In a pattern of stability that seems to typify character actors, they stayed married until Allan Melvin died in 2008 at age 84. They had two daughters.

        Allan Melvin's debt to the great Phil Silvers:

 

Before going into television, Melvin did superb voice impressions of legends like James Stewart and Cary Grant while he performed with stage comedy ensembles, and won acclaim for his role in the Broadway play "Stalag 17" as an American POW who amid the misery of the camp entertains co-prisoners using similar talents.

Melvin worked in NBC's sound effects department, creating radio show sounds using devices, recordings and sometimes his own voice.

The forceful yet soothing Allan Melvin vocal style had a career of its own, as he also did cartoon voices of Magilla Gorilla, Sergeant Snorkel, Bumbler, Barney Google and Bristol Hound.

Melvin had a small role in the 1968 Doris Day movie "With Six You Get Eggroll," in which he plays a police sergeant who is confronted by hippies played by future M*A*S*H cast members Jamie Farr and William Christopher (yep, the Father played a hippie)

                       Allan experiences the '60s,

                                                         but he "ain't groovy."

 

Other than being in that oddly cast scene, Melvin's on-screen work was entirely through television, unlike character actor icons such as Edward Andrews, Reta Shaw and Whit Bissell, who also intermittently acted in movies. That made Allan Melvin probably the top "Household Face," if not name, in TV.

And every generation of TV viewers has its Allan Melvin peg. For some, it’s Henshaw or Charlie Hacker. Seventies kids knew him as Sam the butcher, Alice’s love interest on The Brady Bunch. There was also Barney Hefner, the Bunkers’ neighbor on All in the Family who was just as blue-collar as Archie, but never expressed bigotry.

Published obituaries of Allan in 2008 tended to reveal the generation of the writer based on which of those characters he was described as "best known for playing."

In several of the obits, Amalia Sestero Melvin said her husband's favorite role had been in The Phil Silvers Show. "I think the camaraderie of all those guys made it such a pleasant way to work. They were so relaxed," said Amalia, who lived to age 100, dying in December 2020.

Just as with playing the rotating Army buddy of Rob, Melvin pulled off a switcheroo on All in the Family, too.

Before being the semi-regular Barney Hefner, he appeared as New York City police officer Pulaski in an episode’s final scene where Archie gets his comeuppance for his characteristic use of an anti-Polish slur:

 

One of the foundations of the character actor profession -- the subliminal semi-recognition viewers have of them – is what enabled Melvin to play two people in one program.

"I went in the same season from Pulaski to Barney Hefner. I think they make allowances for the fact that the audience will accept certain changes,” Melvin said in an early 1970s interview. “I guess they figure since it was a one-shot, I wasn't that established. I've been Barney ever since." This was from a British blog on Phil Silvers Show stars; that great 1950s military comedy had Melvin in the cast as Henshaw, an army cohort of the irrepressible Sgt. Ernie Bilko.

Melvin was recalled to duty as Marine Sergeant Charlie Hacker on Gomer Pyle USMC during the same decade he played the Army "Pom-Poms."

If playing two characters each in New Rochelle and Astoria, N.Y. was a task, Allan Melvin’s work in Mayberry, N.C, was a high-wire juggling act.

On The Andy Griffith Show, he played eight different people, reported the web site fans-pages.com, which labeled Melvin’s constant work on the show: “Mayberry’s Multiple Personality Disorder.”

Among his Andy Griffith Show roles were a jailed suspect whom Barney tries to trick into giving evidence, a roadside vendor who disses the deputy only to learn what authority really means, and a recruiting sergeant who struggles with the not-exactly G.I Ernest T. Bass.

In another roughneck role, Melvin played local bully Fred Plummer, who bedevils Deputy Fife. Barney is impersonated by his judo instructor who overpowers Plummer into respect for the undersized deputy he thinks has clobbered him.

Switching to the right side of the law, Melvin played an eagle-eyed hotel detective in an Andy Griffith Show episode in which Andy and Barney make an out-of-town trip.

Melvin described nearly every TV show he was in as fun more so than work. He regularly praised the entertainment stars he worked with, including Phil Silvers, Frank Sutton, Andy Griffith, and producer Aaron Ruben.

Particularly satisfying to Allan Melvin was the Dick Van Dyke Show:

"It was marvelous, exhilarating," he said. "It was so well written and conceived and the working conditions were so great, working with Carl Reiner and Dick and Mary and the whole crowd. And it was just a joy because it was a very creative show. It was an early kind of a watershed ensemble comedy show."

Those words were posted on Philsilversshow.com, on which Melvin also fondly recalled The Phil Silvers Show -- originally called "You'll Never Get Rich," and also often referred to as "Bilko" -- for timeless TV quality.

"A Bilko show could be funny 50 years from now. Funny is funny. It's as simple as that."

 

            __________________________________________

  

Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, has throughout his life loved watching Sams, Sols, Plumbers and Plummers, Marines and Soldiers, Barney adversaries and Barney Hefners named Allan Melvin.

 

And for a closing act, a few minutes of a rare suit-and-tie clad civilian Allan Melvin as the mysterious old friend (or crook?) Harrison B. Harding:

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For even more on Allan Melvin, CLICK HERE to go to KJ Ricardo's YouTube
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Are You a Whit Spotter? Viewers of TV and movies from the 1950s through the '70s probably are

An ambassador in Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the technocrat who ran The Time Tunnel, a conniving U.S. senator in the tense political movie, “7 Days in May” – all these screen roles highlighted the tightly wired officiousness yet lilting voice that were hallmarks of the man who played them.

Whit Bissell was one of the most prolific character actors, those performers you recognize, yet don’t. Bissell preferred the term “supporting player,” to “character actor,” but either way, he excelled at projecting his own mellow and soothing qualities into a scene, then practicing that courtesy of a supporting player/character actor by bowing out to let the big stars, or younger hot-shots do the iconic parts that made their names household words.

But then if you were born Whitner Nutting Bissell, vocal and facial gifts, rather than your name, likely would be your performing strengths.

An awkward moniker and intense administrator roles belie Whit Bissell’s real-life relaxed, charming and well-read nature. Still, friend Bernie Shine wrote on Leonard Maltin’s entertainment web site that it took some tenacity by Bissell, the son of a New York City physician, to break into the business.

"He told me that when he was starting out he found himself on the opposite side of the desk of a famous Hollywood mogul who bluntly told him that he didn’t have what it takes to be a leading man, stating, ‘I don’t see any women burning with desire when they see you,’ “ Shine wrote. “Whit responded, ‘Perhaps not, but I do think I could make them feel other emotions, such as laughing, crying, or caring.’ ”

Indeed, character actors may be told early in their careers they don’t have the sizzle or the physical stature to be heartthrobs or heroes. But after years of frequent, often brief appearances, the masterful facial skills and appealing voices of the most successful make them recognized, or even craved.

A character actor’s constant moving from one production to another to play unrelated roles makes casting and filming for TV and movies less costly, and it makes the actor something of a rolling stone.

But they can gather the moss of recognition if they achieve long professional life. Many character actors, or supporting players, have sub-cultures of close followers and appreciation of their skills has grown due to the Internet.

A commenter on Silverscreenoasis.com said of Bissell:

“I've often thought of Whit as something of a second-tier Hume Cronyn. I've always liked his speaking voice, which I think very rich, mellow, and distinctive.”

                      2 scenes of Whit in charge of "The Time Tunnel," 1966:

  

A certain studious air helped land the bespectacled Bissell parts as scientists in many of the best sci-fi movies of the 1950s through the early ‘70s, including “I was a Teenage Frankenstein,” “Soylent Green,” “I was a Teenage Werewolf,” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He also had roles in “The Magnificent Seven” and “Pete ‘n’ Tillie,” and appeared in such stalwart TV series as McCloud, Land of the Giants, Here’s Lucy, Gomer Pyle: USMC, Kojak, Cannon, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Ben Casey, generally playing trusted figures like doctors, chaplains and professors.

                                 On the witness stand in The Cain Mutiny, 1954:

Another post on Silverscreenoasis.com said Whit's first name has become a synonym for the supporting player genre to which he devoted his life:

“ ‘Character actor' isn't a good enough term to describe Whit’s talents, so, for many years now, I have referred to any reliable character actor that happens to pop up as a ‘Whit.’ It’s an honorific term, meant to notice and celebrate his and other actors' contributions as support in countless films…. One of the pleasures of watching TV with friends in the 70s was to do ‘Whit-spotting’ and point him out to others. 'Oh yeah! I've seen that guy before!' was the usual response.”

                                              __________________________

Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA has been spotting Whit all his life, but has been aware of it only since becoming fascinated with the movie "7 Days in May" in the 1990s. 

 

Bonus footage: Whit Bissell in a 1965 Profiles in Courage re-enactment of President Woodrow Wilson appointing Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's rather high school civics tame, but displays Whit's skills:

 

4 Realities in Kentucky that have kept Democrats from Beating McConnell

Aside from the classic advantages of an incumbent and his crushing of campaign finance reform efforts, four problems endemic to Kentucky have for the last 30 years made the nationally despised Mitch McConnell unbeatable in The Bluegrass State.

1. Lousy challengers

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes excited the nation with charisma, sharpness, and energy, as well as a small poll lead over McConnell in the early stages of the 2014 campaign. And idealistic people poured into Kentucky to join progressives here to work for her election.

What if she had accomplished the glorious victory over Senator McConnell? Well, since 2014, Lundergan Grimes – momentarily the hope of progressives -- has been accused of receiving illegal campaign money from her father, who is a longtime Democratic fundraiser; misusing data from the Secretary of State office for her partisan career ends; and riding in a state police car at 100 mph for the not-exactly emergency purpose of getting to the Kentucky Derby quickly. 

The previous Democrat challenger was Bruce Lunsford, who in the banner anti-Republican year of 2008 looked strong early against McConnell. Lunsford dripped with Kentucky credentials – he had played high school basketball, cut tobacco and owned a thoroughbred horse. But left and right soured on him as the word got around that the massive health care company Lunsford ran had been fined over alleged dumping of Medicare patients in favor of more profitable cases, and that investors in the firm had accused him of leaving them high and dry.

In the ’08 race, Lunsford had consistently maintained a small lead, but sputtered in the final weeks to a 6 percentage point loss.

In 1990, McConnell was opposed for a second Senate term by the once polished and assertive two-term Louisville mayor Harvey Sloane, a physician, Great Society veteran and Peace Corps volunteer. His lightning-like first mayoral term of 1973 to ’77 had brought the long stagnating city better mass transit, expanded minority business opportunities, EMS services, superb architectural preservation and a fine science museum.

That was then. In 1990, Senate-candidate Sloane was cited by police for open alcohol on his boat, received a letter of criticism from the AMA for the frowned-on practice of prescribing himself sleeping pills, and appeared in his own ads with a sallow face and lethargic voice.

And during a stint in the ‘80s as head of Jefferson County government (McConnell’s former position) Sloane took in campaign contributions from companies which received county contracts. Sounds more like Mitch than the solution to him.

In the 1990 Senatorial election, Harvey Sloane – who as mayor in the ‘70s had been chosen one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Americans -- failed to excite the electorate and lost by eight points.

There have been other flops by McConnell opponents, but that’s enough pain.

2. Unbelievably low voter turnout

I bristled in 1975 when a high school civics textbook comparing attitudes about voting among actual Americans quoted a woman described as a waitress in a diner in Louisville saying, “I don’t have no dealings in politics.”

What an awful image for our community, but then and now, there’s no denying its authenticity – diner workers in this city 45 years ago were basically rural Kentucky transplants (today, they’re immigrants and tattooed undergrads), and looking at voter turnout numbers in the Eastern and Southern Kentucky counties denoted by the above dialect produces some shockers.

In the 2019 primary, Laurel County had an 18 percent turnout, Wayne County had a 15 percent turnout, and Casey County (the home of a recent governor, no less) had an 11 percent turnout. One county’s name may evoke the “of the people, by the people, for the people” oratory, but where were the people of Lincoln County in June 2019? – just 17 percent of them voted. Now you see why those poor counties keep going Republican; voting is overwhelmingly done by the propertied residents and unionized coal miners made scared of climate action by one-sided pundits.  

Statewide, the 2019 primary voter turnout was 19.3 percent, way up from the projected 12.5 percent. Yes, 19 percent was an unexpected surge! And 92 percent of Kentucky’s 3.4 million voter registrations are with the Democrats or Republicans, so the fact that independents can’t vote in party primaries is not a major cause of low turnout.

When the Hillary Clinton v. Bernie Sanders ’16 primary race had passions at an all-time high that produced gigantic crowds in Louisville and elsewhere, the statewide primary turnout was 20.6 percent. (Caveat: the Secretary of State website says voters who had died or moved out of state were not subtracted from the eligible numbers, so turnout may actually have been more like 25 percent, but whoop-e-de-do.)

What about general elections? In 2015, Republican Matt Bevin, a vehement right-winger, won the governorship with a general election turnout of 30 percent. His “mandate” came from 16 out of 100 registered voters.

Mitch owes the power he has amassed in the last 34 years to Kentuckians staying at home the first Tuesday of every sixth November. He has driven the GOP’s nationwide voter suppression crusade because he appreciates the weapon of non-voting.  

There have been some recent positive counter-trends. In the 2018 mid-term general election, the number of people in Louisville/Jefferson County who turned out was about 290,000; that's up from about 255,000 in the 2014 mid-terms. And that increase came in a year with no U.S. Senate race or governor’s race statewide, indicating a big anti-Trump sentiment. (UPDATE: The strongly Trump-endorsed Bevin was narrowly beaten in November 2019 by Democrat Andy Beshear in a clear rejection of Bevin's confrontational method of governing; but all other Republicans won their statewide races that election.)

3. Kentucky Democrats don’t innovate
As said, Alison Lundergan Grimes is the daughter of a well-connected political fundraiser. The 2019 Democrat governor-elect Andy Beshear is the son of the last Democratic governor Steve Beshear. The chairmanship of the state's largest Fortune 500 icon Humana Inc. was handed to David Jones Jr., son of the retiring chairman David Jones Sr. The nine-time Pulitzer wining newspaper the Louisville Courier-Journal was made journalistically great and politically influential by Barry Bingham Sr., then Barry Bingham Jr.
In a state where the right last name and where you went to high school are everything, insularity and imitativeness are bred.
A glaring absence of fresh, original spin was displayed by Grimes in 2014 in a clunky flub that turned a tied race into a sure McConnell win. 
Grimes knew that during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board she’d be asked if she had voted for Barack Obama – McConnell had been asked in 2008 by the paper if he had voted for a George W. Bush who in that year was deeply unpopular. (The senator answered that he had voted for W.)

Imagine Lundergan Grimes had answered this way: “Having given President Obama my vote, and being in his party, I can bargain with him for Kentucky’s interests. Mitch McConnell can’t do that. Since Mitch automatically opposes everything the administration proposes, the White House has no incentive to try to compromise with him. So, Senator McConnell cannot negotiate for our interests. But I will.”  

Instead of confidently re-framing her vote for Obama as this tool of access to benefit the state, Lundergan Grimes dived under the table. She wouldn’t say for whom she had voted in 2012 or ’08, citing the “sanctity” of the secret ballot, adding that it was her right by law to keep her vote private, and an imperative of her Secretary of State position to do so.

 Her lame attempt to appear principled, instead of enabling Lundergan Grimes to sidestep Obama’s unpopularity in a coal and tobacco state, drew cynicism and ridicule. It focused far more attention on the clash between Obama’s climate action plan and the wishes of the coal industry.  Which brings us to…

4. Coal is an emperor with no clothes

The myth that coal jobs are endangered by environmentalism isn’t challenged widely because no leader in the state’s public or private sector will open a discussion about what really took the jobs away – overreliance on coal.

Coal employment in Kentucky had already been vanishing before Obama clean air rules – in 2001, Eastern Kentucky produced 110 million tons of coal, but just about 80 million tons in 2009. The drop has been to 20 million tons in 2017, and Western Kentucky’s surface coal mines have similarly lost business.

But the plummeting numbers are due to competition from natural gas and renewables, not Obama’s clean air plan. The U.S. Energy Information Agency said that 20-million-ton yearly amount in Eastern Kentucky is expected to stay steady through 2035, with or without the Obama climate action plan.

Switching to solar and wind -- and developing cultural resources in the manner of the coal-less and booming Appalachian city of Ashville, N.C. -- could bring jobs back to rural Kentucky, but no one in Kentucky’s power structure dares talk of converting the economy. Instead, the one-note economic strategy is, bring back coal jobs.
 But they aren’t retrievable. An Appalachian Regional Commission study found: “After aggressive mining in Central Appalachia for more than a century, the remaining coal is more expensive to extract, compared to other coal-producing regions, because it tends to be deeper in the ground and/or seams tend to be thinner.”

This is why the price of electricity from Eastern Kentucky coal will no longer be competitive with natural gas, solar and wind. But an isolated and predictable state polity keeps us from hearing this.

Kentucky sorely lacks visionary state legislators, progressive labor unions, a great university, or pluralism in media. The two metro daily newspapers, the Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, have reported about renewables and natural gas causing coal's decline, but out there among the party leaders, chambers of commerce, and the all-powerful political fundraisers, it's as though this has never been said.
Outside of Louisville, Kentucky is as socially conservative as Mississippi, but the state as a whole has an 8 percent black population (as opposed to Mississippi’s 37 percent).

The racial differential, combined with the one-note mythmaking on coal jobs explains why since Donald Trump became president the Kentucky Republican Party has added 72,000 registered voters, to just 1,100 by the Democrats.

Democrats must challenge the coal industry’s official line, or they will continue to inflict numbers like those on themselves.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA, the hometown of a Mitch McConnell known as - would you believe it - moderate and bi-partisan while the head of county government. 

Nurturing Children, Training a Voice, Roughing up a Barber -- Reta Shaw Could Do It All Convincingly

No two characters seen on The Andy Griffith Show were more different than Big Maude, the escaped convict who gleefully dominates Barney Fife, and Eleanora Poultice, the overly sentimental music teacher who wills herself to hear greatness in the deputy's awful singing voice.

One has no sensitivity; the other is overflowing with it. And devoted viewers of the show revel in the hilarious opposite extremes of both women – probably without even realizing they are watching the same performer.

That testifies to the greatness of Reta Shaw. The daughter of a New England orchestra leader, she was one of television’s best character actors – that breed of performer who takes home less money and far less name recognition than an Andy Griffith or a Hope Lang. But knowing you are indispensable to TV and movies is one of the satisfactions of the character actor craft.

"People love to laugh," Shaw said in a 1968 interview. "They love to be entertained. If I can bring a laugh, or please someone, I have accomplished something."

Shaw was deft at the routine of pouring her heart into a role, then moving on, making television programs and movies feasible by being dependable, then expendable. A character actor’s ability to focus like a laser on one or two scenes, then quickly move to another unrelated production also gives her or him a mobility that the wealthy screen idol can’t match.

Reta consoles Will Robinson in a Lost in Space episode that is lost in time, and Vermont's politics 

 

Shaw was famous, yet anonymous – always playing characters with delightfully overstated charm, enunciating each syllable with an evangelical passion. That may have been residual from her one-time aspiration of becoming a religious missionary.

Of playing TV and movie characters, she said: “It's different from feeding souls in one way, but it's feeding them in another way."

As with other successful character actors, viewers fleetingly recognize her, then return their attention to the plot.

 

     Spotting talent - that no one else in Mayberry does

 

 

 

        But as a convict, Reta dances to a different tune

 

 

Shaw’s persuasive, husky style, though never used to preach religious messages, proved perfect for playing people with connections to spirits of another sort. She is remembered as housekeeper Martha Grant on the 1968-70 sitcom The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, an acclaimed show based on the 1940s novel about a widow and her family who move into a seaside mansion which turned out to be haunted by the ghost of the sea captain who once owned it.

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Acne and house calls aren't what they seem to be in Rita's brief role in the 1971 made for TV movie "Murder Once Removed," a love triangle murder tale.

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Prior to Mrs. Muir having a TV house guest from the afterlife, Shaw played Mrs. Halcyon Maxwell in Alan Rafkin’s movie "The Ghost And Mr. Chicken." In Bewitched, she had a recurring role as Samantha’s Aunt Hagatha. One of Shaw's most beloved movie roles was in the 1957 musical "The Pajama Game."

On Andy Griffith, Shaw played those opposite personality types, but the roles were similar in that Big Maude was outside the bounds of the law and Eleanora Poultice was outside the bounds of common sense in seeing Barney Fife as musically talented, going with her heart instead of her ears.

And Shaw played in a chronologically confusing Lost in Space episode in the mid-1960s, which took place of course in the 90s, but with the unique setting of a tiny hamlet in Vermont.

Will Robinson is unintentionally whisked back to Earth, only to long to rejoin his family in the distant cosmos. Vermont is shown as a place of crank telephones, high water pants and backward bumpkins. In this anachronistic portrayal of the Green Mountain State, Reta Shaw plays a folksy, caring aunt-figure for the boy.

Had this Lost In Space episode's conception of 1990s Vermont included the true-to-life socialist in Congress, same-sex civil unions and -- especially -- Ben And Jerry's, what kid Will's age wouldn't have figured they'd landed in paradise? 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA... As a bonus, he links to Reta Shaw singing and dancing in the musical "The Pajama Game":

Misogyny in media -- why you've never hated Frank Turco

You remember in 1989 when the sentencing came down in the Leona Helmsley tax fraud case. Shocked at the wrongdoing, greed and arrogance in the running of her hotel empire, you cheered when you heard prison time was given. And to this day you hate… Frank Turco and Joseph Licari.

They were the two other executives of Helmsley Hotels and related companies who -- before Helmsley’s own trial – were sentenced to federal prison for tax and mail fraud and conspiracy, but in fact, you don’t resent them because you’ve never heard the names Frank Turco or Joseph Licari.

Leona Helmsley’s level of exposure to the public consciousness couldn’t be more different: Newsweek magazine’s cover said of the billionaire hotel executive: “Rhymes With Rich.”

Even though she was one of three people sent to prison in the matter, her image alone from that episode is fused into the American consciousness and permanent lore as the embodiment of selfishness.

And Turco, Licari and Harry Helmsley (Leona’s husband and the hotel corporation founder) never had to pass by newsstands all day where they’d see themselves described as, say, rhyming with “plastered.”

Harry Helmsley was indicted along with his wife, but he was found incompetent to stand trial due to cognitive decline.

And remember how everyone demonized Leona Helmsley’s alleged statement, denied by her but recounted under oath by a one-time personal maid: “We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

Blame Ronald Reagan, Milton Freedman, the Ways and Means Committee and a whole capital full of corporate lobbyists for that – not the messenger who spoke those highly accurate words.

No question, Leona Helmsley was an unabashedly greedy person in business and arrogant at home. It was said in testimony that she once fired an employee because he entered her bedroom to repair a phone chime, and that Helmsley, just after her own son’s death at age 40, sued his widow to make her pay to transport his coffin from Florida to New York.

And spending $3 million for her own birthday party in Morocco right when millions were in danger of starvation from a drought on that continent? Nope, that was Malcolm Forbes who did that in the ‘80s.

Yet Forbes’ image avoids any universal demonization over that self-centered excess, despite his admitting at a press conference that regarding the $3 million he spent, “some of it is a business expense.” If Helmsley had thrown so costly a party and comfortably acknowledged deducting part of it, everyone would know and would scowl over it.  

And if she had said that not paying taxes in times of huge deficits “makes me smart,” average Americans would have rolled their eyes in disgust, but Donald Trump said that at a 2016 debate when accused of not paying taxes, and he was shortly elected president.

And while corporate media such as Newsweek, TV networks and the New York Times waved a baton to coordinate all our outrage at Helmsley’s “Only the Little People Pay Taxes” declaration, the fact that her statement reflected reality  was barely dealt with by any of them.

The intense focus on Leona Helmsley’s awful personal traits revealed in her trial was an old tactic – give the mass public a villain so they think about that individual instead of the policies which enabled their evil deeds. Prompting the people to flail at a persona is a safety valve to relieve the pressure to actually change an unjust system.

And when three of the four people indicted the Helmsley Hotels case were men, but only the woman has her name used as a synonym for heartlessness and greed, the usefulness of sexism to the power structure in maintaining that safety valve is clear.

Massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich sailed through under Reagan and George W. Bush, with lots of Democrats voting for them and media never analyzing how little people’s sales, occupational and income taxes and road and bridge tolls go up because of lowering corporate rates. Oh, but how awful the “Queen of Mean” Leona is.

Recalling the public sector of that same decade, it is Nancy Reagan who is initially condemned for a lack of compassion for people who were stricken with AIDS, and she is the one scoffed at for believing in astrology.

But she didn’t implement the deliberately slow response to the AIDS crisis – her elected husband did. And President Ronald Reagan, not just Nancy, heeded the stars and planets in making many decisions about precise timing of events and ceremonies, but also possibly about the most important policy matter of all.

The first revelations of astrology’s influence in the Reagan administration were by an aggrieved former chief of staff Donald Regan after he was forced to resign because of Iran-Contra. And contrary to the general perception, Regan did not accuse Nancy Reagan specifically of using astrology; it was not the Donald Regan-Nancy Reagan feud of the historical memory.

Don Regan’s 1988 book For the Record said: “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.”

Notice he said, “the Reagans,” not the First Lady. The real story is a U.S. President’s reliance on astrology, yet when people bring up that issue, it’s almost always hinging on Nancy Reagan.

Journalist Allen McDuffee on Timeline dot com quotes San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley in her memoirs as saying: “I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs and landings of Air Force One. I picked the time of Ronald Reagan’s debate with Carter and the two debates with Walter Mondale; all extended trips abroad as well as the shorter trips and one-day excursions.”

McDuffee said Quigley even boasted of having a role in persuading the staunchly anti-Soviet Ronald Reagan to change his stance and negotiate with USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev over arms reductions.

Quigley’s statements, like Donald Regan’s, never focus on Nancy Reagan. Yet today’s right wing spin artists need a sanitized image of Ronald Reagan to line up their constituencies in political battles. So, just as with shifting the blame for a regressive tax code to a Leona Helmsley who did not create it, on the matter of presidential astrology a woman will do nicely as the repository of public scorn.

The left can fall for this. I’ve sometimes heard LGBT activists condemn Nancy’s leadership in stymying the national effort in the ‘80s to stop AIDS.

I imagine I as well have focused disproportionately on Nancy Reagan, instead of the Reagan Administration in discussing that issue. The tendency to go along unconsciously with the false genderizing of an outrage is a subtle but powerful effect of that patriarchy machine we need to – rhymes with rich – off. 

                                Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA.

BIGOTRY, THEN AND NOW -- there was a time when we shrugged it off and protected haters and discriminators

White America believed it was noble of minorities to accept, or downplay racism.

by Brian Arbenz
Yes, summers are always hot in Washington, D.C., but there was much else steaming by the Potomac in August 1973 during H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman’s testimony before the Watergate Committee.
First, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, after maintaining admirable composure and neutrality during Ehrlichman’s stonewalling insistence that his former boss President Nixon was innocent, ended his questioning of Ehrlichman, then made an untoward visceral observation while not realizing his microphone was still on:
“What a liar,” Inouye mumbled clearly to a national television audience.
Though Ehrlichman’s eventual conviction for perjury vindicated Inouye’s words, the former White House staffer’s attorney John Wilson threw a fit in an interview with United Press International during an upcoming break in the hearings.
When asked by the UPI reporter if Senator Lowell Weicker’s questioning of Haldeman, another of his clients, was harsh, the legendarily abrasive and tenacious Wilson responded: “Oh, I don’t mind Senator Weicker.… What I mind is that little jap.”
The TV networks immediately broadcast the audio of Wilson’s slur against Inouye, a Honolulu native and decorated World War II veteran who had his right arm shot off by the Germans while throwing a grenade during a battle in Italy.

So naturally, Wilson was dropped by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, apologized for the remark, was reprimanded by the bar association, lost numerous other clients, maybe faced a boycott and decided to retire (he was 72). The shock and outrage overshadowed the purpose of the whole hearing, and the “WaterHate” 1970s equivalent of a hashtag was born.
Nope.
Here’s how a racist verbal attack, aka hate speech, was responded to 46 years ago:
When informed of Wilson’s statement, Inouye, the U.S. Senate’s first Asian-American member and a passionate supporter Civil Rights laws, told the press, “Well, it must be the summer heat.”
Asked for a specific response, Inouye said, “I think his statement speaks for itself.” And on went the Watergate hearings, uninterrupted by, and to this day not recalled for a racist put down of a Senator and war hero by a lawyer representing the two most powerful witnesses.

Some might say it was better that way. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the president were the real villains and bringing out the truth about their actions was the hearings’ aim. John Wilson, a master of legal technicalities, was known for trying to provoke judges and prosecutors into actions that could make for an appeal and eventual dismissal of charges against his clients.
A 1975 Rolling Stone article regarding the trials of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the court of Judge John Sirica, who it so happened was an acquaintance of Wilson, said:
“While most of the other lawyers were careful to address Sirica in tones of courtly deference, Wilson immediately struck a note of aggressive familiarity. Each day the familiarity became more petulant, disrespectful, contemptuous. By late October, Wilson was openly picking fights with the judge…. He claimed to be keeping an ‘error bag.’ ‘It’s getting pretty full,’ he crowed. Naturally, Sirica got mad.”
So, whereas Inouye may have been showing he was too smart to be provoked into a fight with Wilson, the outrage is that Wilson could use open racism as a tool of this provocation and continue to thrive professionally in the epicenter of the lawyering profession.
What did he have to say about his calling Daniel Inouye a “little jap?”
“I consider it a description of the man,” Wilson told UPI. “I wouldn’t mind being called a little American.” Trivializing calling someone by a racial slur, and conflating ethnicity with a person’s nationality reflected Wilson’s lifetime of racism.
That 1975 Rolling Stone story said: “Wilson was a self-proclaimed reactionary who had fought the desegregation of the D.C. Bar Association, and who had long ago belonged to an exclusive lawyers’ club….”
While Wilson smugly walked away from damage after making his racial and ethnic slur, the target of his hate actually enjoyed a rush of public support following the attack, and the Senator from Hawaii quickly garnered favorable publicity from the wider story of his serving on the highly visible Senate Watergate committee.
Sixty Minutes immediately did a profile of Inouye, whose life story and personable, judicious style were instantly winning to an American public starting in the mid-1970s to face their nation’s racism.
Everyone was rallying around Daniel Inouye, but the fact that he had shrugged off being called a “little jap” by a powerful lawyer was part of the equation. In those days, White America believed it was noble of minorities to accept, or downplay racism. Doing so was not making excuses for your oppressor, but showing you had class.
Another case from the early 1970s that involves this misplaced applauding of a person’s refusal to call racism what it is happened not in Washington, D.C., but that other entertainment capital, Hollywood.
Iowa native Marion Morrison, best known to us all as John Wayne, was simply too big to allow to fail. Too big an icon, but more importantly, too big in the bank account; Wayne’s name on the marquee could make a movie a financial success. For instance, Darryl F. Zanuck’s “The Longest Day,” a 1962 portrayal of D-Day, put Wayne in a few scenes that took only four days of work by him. Yet, Wayne was paid the most money of anyone in the otherwise overworked cast of a massive and arduous re-creation of the 1944 invasion.
Wayne also got top billing. Oh, and the actor was 54 and played a commander who was 27 during the actual D-Day landing. Yea, a natural.
But John Wayne was John Wayne, the embodiment of hyper-Americanism to impressionable fans of a movie industry made puerile by McCarthyism and studio anti-unionism.

In 1971, John Wayne launched a series of bigoted salvos similar to John Wilson’s – with the same immediate “all is forgiven” result. In a Playboy interview, Wayne called himself a white supremacist, though he kept wavering in the interview about whether he meant that in the genetic superiority sense. The full quote was: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”
So, was that just saying that more education will enable blacks to live better? In an interview full of outlandish statements – including that American Indians were ”selfishly” keeping their land by fighting off American invaders -- Wayne paints a curious picture of the era of Plessy v. Ferguson during which he lived: “I don't know why people insist that blacks have been forbidden their right to go to school. They were allowed in public schools wherever I've been.”
Wayne revealed himself in this interview as a racist, or at least too myopic and simpleminded to be a qualified spokesperson on the issue (of course, what does qualification matter to someone who condemned Vietnam War draft resisters when he got out of fighting in World War II using two kinds of deferments to avoid the draft?)
As in the case of lawyer John Wilson, those who were poised to hold Wayne accountable for his statements instead excused him. When Dick Cavett asked Kirk Douglas about Wayne’s Playboy interview, the liberal Douglas made no mention of Wayne’s white supremacy self-label, his calling Native Americans selfish, or the fact that in the interview, Wayne called gay men “fags.”
“I’ve made a lot of movies with John Wayne," Douglas said. "We’ve never seen eye-to-eye -- on a lot of things. But professionally, I think he’s one of the most professional actors I’ve ever worked with…. We get along very well. We never discuss politics.”
A wide-eyed Cavett added: “He really is a giant personality on the screen.” Cavett also fails to mention Wayne’s white supremacy or homophobic remarks, then, noting that John Wayne is 6-foot-4, wraps up the whole issue with a jovial, “No wonder you don’t see eye-to-eye.”
The audience laughed at that, and earlier they had broken into applause after Kirk Douglas’ praise of his politically counterpoised co-star’s professionalism, as though Douglas’ refusal to criticize Wayne was the good character of restraint. In fact, it was just economic self-preservation; “The Duke” was too big to allow to fail.
To the left of Kirk Douglas, gifted singer and activist Cass Elliot left us too soon at age 32, dying in London of heart failure during a performing tour in 1974.
The specifics of why she died are related to an obstacle rare among young pop music stars, but which Cass Elliot faced – weight discrimination. And 50 years ago, just as with racism by screen icons and D.C. lawyers, that issue as well was kept out of the spotlight by the victim.
Elliot, a Baltimore native born Ellen Naomi Cohen, was an eclectic talent who loved folk, classical music and Broadway show tunes more than rock. Despite having spectacular singing ability and fluid finesse on stage, it reportedly took Elliot two tries to persuade co-founder John Phillips to admit her to the group that was developing into the Mamas and the Pappas.
Rather than just state candidly the reason for the initial rejection, Cass Elliot, who had struggled with overweight since she was seven, explained it with a legend.

Writer and researcher Linnea Crowther wrote on Legacy dot com in 2012:

“Elliot claimed that she was only invited to be part of The New Journeymen (the band that was later to become the Mamas and the Papas) after she gained three notes at the top of her range – thanks to an unfortunate collision between a copper pipe and her head. In Elliot's version of the story, she had a headache for two weeks after the accident and then, miraculously, she was singing higher. She could then hit the notes in The New Journeymen's songs, and the rest was history.”
Crowther wrote that the rather out-there explanation is false.
“Friends of Elliot and the rest of the group have since asserted that her range was just as impressive before the accident as it was after – there was no change. The real reason she was kept out of The New Journeymen, they say, wasn't a limited singing ability – it was her weight.”
Michelle Phillips, in a 2007 Vanity Fair profile, denied that Cass Elliot had been passed over by the New Journeymen, saying Elliot’s first proposal that she join the group was agreed to.
However, band member Denny Doherty said in a documentary film that Elliot indeed had been turned down at first by John Phillips. Crowther wrote that Elliot “didn't fit band founder John Phillips's image for the group, so she wasn't asked to be a part of it (though she hung around with the band members quite a bit). Eventually, Phillips realized how fantastic her voice made their songs sound, and he got past her appearance and made her a band member. Elliot made up the pipe story to cover for her embarrassment and Phillips's prejudicial attitude."

Cass Elliot, on a 1972 Midnight Special, excels at music, wit and concern for democracy.

After the Mamas and the Pappas broke up, Cass Elliot eagerly started off on a successful and liberating solo career making better-than-ever use of her performing skill.
But despite singing joyously captivating songs like “New Day Coming” and “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” and speaking upliftingly about social justice, voting and individuality, Cass was hampered by societal pressure about her weight from start to the literal finish.
An attempt at starting a Las Vegas act crashed after just two nights because her voice very uncharacteristically became strained while she was singing. Other ailments kept cropping up, until the fatal heart failure in July 1974.
“She’d been reporting symptoms of illness, including regular vomiting for several weeks, which… possibly was the result of strict dieting,” Linnea Crowther wrote. “She’d already canceled a TV appearance after falling ill just before broadcast. A previous diet regime saw Elliot eating almost nothing for four days of every week, according to friends, and that may have done permanent damage as she tried to reboot her career in the late ‘60s.”
It isn’t clear whether illicit drug use contributed. Elliot may not have used drugs much then; she had been greatly cutting back on alcohol recently as part of a health emphasis.
As news of Cass Elliot’s death broke, an incorrect report by a first responder of a half-eaten ham sandwich by her bed launched a fallacy that lives on that she choked to death. In fact, the autopsy said the sandwich had not been touched and heart failure was what killed Cass Elliot.
If the ham sandwich falsehood as an overweight vibe unfairly stays with Elliot’s image, it was errors of omission that were the sins of obituarists and the public memory in 1979 when John Wayne died.
A 5,300-word Los Angeles Times story of marvels and plaudits for the movie legend includes not one mention of “white supremacy” and in unprecedented hypocrisy tells of Wayne’s creed that “a man’s first commitment must be to his duty as his inner instincts define it,” while leaving out the elephant in the living room that John Wayne’s inner instincts led him to evade fighting in World War II.
Journalistic whitewashing also pervaded coverage of Washington lawyer John Wilson’s passing in 1986. Obituary stories by The Washington Post and Associated Press made no mention of Wilson’s segregationist efforts, or the slur against Daniel Inouye.  The Los Angeles Times mentioned the “jap” outburst, but the most straightforward adjective the Times used in describing Wilson was “outspoken.”
The Post’s opening sentence called him “sometimes abrasive, sometimes charming, generally resourceful,” and quoted a one-time opposing lawyer as saying of Wilson: "I thought him very nasty and petty at first. But he just fights like hell for his client. And once you get over that rough, gruff exterior, it's a pleasure to deal with him.”
And thanks to the Washington’s Post’s amnesia about the blunt public racism of one of the capital’s power hitters, it always will be.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA