​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

            August 24...three generations of women react to a flash of light and camera's shutter.  Holding her newborn girl, my daughter and I are visually recorded.  Although I smiled, tears stung my eyes, for this new life carries my deceased mother's first name.
            Propped and posed on the hospital's twin-sized bed, my eyes watched this offspring’s slender arms embrace her infant, but my awkward position made me think about beds.  Funny what goes through the mind at times and seems totally unrelated.
            My cradle, crib, camp bunk, girlhood twin, college cot were all 'temporary' even though they filled two decades.  My twin bed was topped with a wedding-ring pattern chenille spread that covered Canadian wool blankets and starched white flat sheets tucked in using hospital corners.
            The pillow was stuffed with feathers;  tiny bone-like fragments poked through casing.  Sometimes I'd pull a 'needle' until an entire feather emerged.
            Delicate yellow roses patterned my private room's wallpaper, yet my furniture was massive.  Cut from red maple, a sturdy head and footboard supported coil springs while a matching nightstand and dresser, with button knobs carved from the same wood, formed a set.  My family felt that 'substantial' surrounded by feminine flowers 'went together'.
            As a teen, I requested either frills or tailored as both in one rectangle bothered my growing sense of "I am." 
            So, oil based paint replaced wallpaper but my selected color was compromised by the painter.  All my original furnishings remained except the bed.  Goodbye head and footboards, exposed springs, mattress with buttons actually part of its ticking!
            My new bed was on a boxspring.  A smooth, one-piece foam mattress exactly fit, and the shiny-pattern covering on both pieces were identical.  My mother hand-made a beige cotton spread with borders of green for contrast.
            When I sat on my bed, my body leaned against the wall.  The oil based paint showed a greasy-looking impression.  Sometimes I'd prop, behind my back, the pillow that still belched feathers. Headboards were ugly but sensible...I never verbalized this finding.
            My bed heard cries, whispers of my dreams, giggles.  My bed felt high fevers, chills, sunburn, acne, dog hair, my body becoming a woman.
            I moved back into my Long Island room to commute to Columbia University's graduate school after getting a bachelor's degree in Connecticut.  My mother was a widow.  "Goodnight, mom and dad.  Leave my door open."  Echoes of a past.  I now closed it so the audio of the television downstairs would not carry and cause loss of concentration while studying.  Propped on the bed, the body stain on the wall fit the same place;  I stayed 5' 4" tall.  A foam pillow made my head uncomfortable.  I hated feathers but at least I could mold a feather shape;  rubber filling bounced.
            I stared at the overhead light on the eight foot high ceiling and, on the bed, felt anger, grief, confusion, promise.  I mentally rehearsed my future wedding, wondered about truly leaving what was familiar;  I felt guilt and joy that my life was still filled with anticipation of longevity and my mother's was not.
            With a change of last names came the double bed.  Considered a respectable size and 'you can't stay angry with someone you sleep so close to', I accepted the dimensions without question.  Back to headboards, [a footboard was passe], only now it formed a bookcase.  It was certainly functional, as I was a high school teacher and my husband a 4th year medical student, but more uncomfortable to lean against than my childhood walls.
            I'd never shared a bed.  For twenty-two years, I'd slipped in and out of taut covers, or poked a foot into the air to test the temperature.  For over two decades, I was restless or calm, talked to myself, or curled up as an infant.  My spouse didn't manage as badly, as the weight of his muscular body depressed the bed and I rolled downhill.  He could just push me, during sleep; I'd have to try to make my frail form climb uphill and hope he'd move towards my side to balance the mattress.
            I remembered seeing a Hollywood bed when I was about fourteen.  A male friend, from summer camp, had a regional camp reunion at his parents' apartment.  One had to pass the master bedroom to get to the bathroom.  I stood in awe yet wondered why anyone could want such a monstrous size;  it nearly filled that entire room.  My friend said it was a playpen and we giggled.
            Complaining you can't sleep in a double bed is considered a personal affront.  Why didn't anyone understand that it had nothing to do with love or lust?  Pregnancy placed additional burdens on me;  I tried to take up less room than my growing fetus.
            When the second child was two years old, we were financially ready to invest in our first permanent piece of furniture.  I asked for that obscene-sized playpen I'd once noticed. Some family members imagined only stag films were photographed in such a thing;  my husband was embarrassed when the salesperson wanted to know why two thin people wanted such a big bed.  I'd learned a queen was only six inches wider than double;  I also knew those six inches would not be shared.
            I was again pregnant and wanted, this time, to stretch out my arms or kick away cramping in my calves.
            Do my offspring, now adult, wonder if their father and I are too old to enjoy the playpen that has never been a battleground?
            August 24:  squeezed beside me atop coarse hospital sheets covered with a thin nubby spread, what raced through my daughter's mind after the camera shutter clicked?  Was she focused only on her body's ability to nourish the newborn as she moved her nightgown's bodice-flap aside?  Perhaps.  But I was suddenly aware of my single teardrop... tangible proof I'd retreated in time.
 
published June 1997 Rochester Shorts  ©

​Pan.  A piece of cookware, until 1954 when actress Mary Martin flew around a Broadway stage playing “Peter Pan”.  Based on a 1904 novel by J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell soared and I was agreeing with lyrics that stated ‘I won’t grow up’.  In a darkened theatre, I pretended my own Neverland, and knew I’d also enjoy wonder, walking in light rain minus correct clothing as protection from moisture, bubble wands,  cotton candy, wearing macaroni strung like a beaded necklace.
 
Grammar was for the classroom, and Pan was not for meal preparation but Peter’s last name!
 
An Art and Architecture course taught me pantheon, the public building containing tombs.  And Costume Design showed me a pantaloon, a 19th century trousers design. An acting class allowed pantomime to be explored.  And once a week my college dorm offered pancakes, and no definition required for this food.  Panorama was a new and special method for movie film and cameras and one of my earlier one-use cameras could capture such a wide angle snapshot! Panopoly, I learned, was a display that impresses.  So, these samples of the prefix, were pleasant associations.
 
How I remember having lost my two front baby teeth and wanting to say ‘fantastic’.  Minus those teeth, the ‘f’ sound just couldn’t be made so I said ‘pantastic’ as the ‘p’ sound used the lips while the ‘f’ one needed breath blowing.  Later, in grad school, when I took Descriptive Linguistics, I smiled when reading about such.  I then also realized why a baby utters ‘da da’ before it can form the lips to say ‘ma ma’.  Not a preference for a particular parent, but it is a real difference in accomplishing that verbal word.
 
Pandemic.  A world-wide disease!  Impossible.  Not in the 21st century with amazing technology and medical care.  Epidemic is a temporary but quick spread of disease.  But what we have now, spring 2020, isn’t the ‘epi’ but the ‘pan’.  Oh, Peter, can’t you fly that away past Neverland!  So the word’s root is the same, but the three letters that precede it are huge differences in connotation.  And it is a part of speech called a noun.  Sure it can be an adjective, but in the global disease situation, it’s definitely used as a noun.  “Pan” is ‘all’.  All is too much to comprehend.
 
Disease is timeless.  My sisters and I took turns having measles, mumps, chicken pox, roseola, and as one got well, my mother had to climb the stairs constantly again to tend to the middle child, me, and then my younger sibling.  If my mother might have liked us to have these illnesses at the same time, it definitely wasn’t up to her, and these childhood maladies were expected.  We did give her sunburns simultaneously, on occasion, and the cocoa butter, and oatmeal bath soaks were familiar.  We could do parallel colds and coughs, and had little brass bells to ring to summon her for comfort, beverages, company; I rang mine constantly.  If she was tired, she didn’t show it, and if fatigue from up and down the flight of stairs drained her, she didn’t expose that either.  So I rang, enjoying the control I had with that bell, and enjoying the sound and special position it put me in as ‘royalty’ while in bed.  Mustard plaster was applied for chest congestion, and inhaling chamomile leaves steeping in a sink-basin of hot water aided stuffy nose.  Both required my mother’s fixing and nurturing at the same time.  I rather liked being the center of attention.  She would change the bedsheets, then had to wash and iron them in the pre-permapress age, fluff up the feather pillow as synthetic fibers hadn’t been developed yet, and occasionally, tucking in the linens, scratched her fingers on the coil springs as a boxspring under a mattress hadn’t been available either.
 
Pandemic.  Seclusion.  Fear.  Anxiety.  No vaccine.  Total world--- paying no attention to climate, or gender, or language, or financial assets of a country.  An equal-opportunity-invasion of human body causing death numbers too incredible to process.
 
I hand-sewed little face masks, making a pocket from a scarf seldom worn, and affixing the pocket to the mask so I could put in a paper coffee-filter as extra protection.  Protection.  Invisible virus that mocks mankind with its superiority can linger on a piece of mail, a cardboard box, a countertop, a doorknob.  I can’t mask these.  So, thinking I’ve a bit of control, I don my little piece of cloth and venture outside.  I’d like Peter Pan to whisk away my adult fear.
 

 
            One Mother's Day, I wanted to tell my Ohio grandchildren about their great-grandma.  Sure they’d cover themselves with an afghan she crocheted when my daughter was a girl, and been told the piano they played at my house my father bought for her.  But what stories might these children ... I wondered. 
            I thought I could start with an alternate interpretation of a one-parent household since my meaning is different from the current one.
            Single.  My mother was, in a way, a single parent.  At the age of 45, lying on the living room couch, my father died while telling my mother he loved her.  Their 24th wedding anniversary had been celebrated two months before.
            My mother quickly had to learn to balance a checkbook, pay the mortgage, budget funds to pay monthly bills as her 'job' had been running house and children.  I was finishing my junior year at an out-of-state university and had just turned twenty;  my younger sister was two months past her sixteenth birthday;  older sister was married and lived nearby.
            Single.  A pretty woman, talented enough to have played the piano in Carnegie Hall, was now a threat to the couples scene.  Hadn't her 'friends' ever noticed that she only loved her spouse?  Single, to these couples, meant searching, snatching, available;  they didn't really know my mother.
            So, single seemed to join with separate and she lost social contacts.  Alone, she learned to handle funds for education, and I felt guilty yet pleased when I began my expensive Master's Degree at Teacher's College, Columbia University, the same time my younger sister entered a private college.  My mother got a job as a bookkeeper.  Once she'd given piano lessons, also had been a dental hygienist;  now she did accounting and quietly juggled multiple roles.
            A single parent in those days didn't have day care, support groups, social approval.  A widow was an ugly word and none wanted that fate to rub off through association.
            My mother celebrated her daughters’ graduations without allowing us to see her pain, made formal weddings and gave us away without making us feel guilty for leaving home, moved from the house that was so treasured for her to a small apartment she could afford but never burdened her children in any way.  My mother stayed single for the thirty-two years she survived my father, yet never permitted her emotional loss to cause people to be discomforted.
            Although she was never really happy again, she was always cheerful.  She allowed her daughters to understand that life is joyous and precious;  even as she died from contaminated blood received during transfusions at open-heart surgery, she spoke to us about the beauty and wonder of living and not to waste it.
            My three children told her their dreams, squirt her with water guns, listened to her sing lullabies, called her for comfort and advice when I didn't seem to tolerate them.  My children slept with afghans she crocheted, wore hats/ mittens/ sweaters she knit, telephoned her collect (when each phone call was charged by the minute) so I wouldn't know about their needing totally private conversations, accepted her unconditional caring.
            Single.  All the synonyms sound somber.  But one takes what life hands out and makes choices.  My mother's parenting was gentle but firm, close yet with freedom for her daughters to grow independent, giving but not smothering, and she made us aware of what there is to learn.  Being without her love/ best friend/ companion, my father, was something she had to bear all alone; but that single mother/grandmother was a fun, sensitive, outgoing, smiling lady who touched others' lives.
            My daughter still speaks of that comforting afghan as Nanny's quilt.  Handed down to another generation, unseen yet woven between the yarn is the description of the person who smiled and touched others, and that is unchanged.
 
 
published April 12, 1998 Sunday Western Star
reprinted Grit  May 3, 1998
reprinted Rochester Shorts May 2001

I looked at a 1917 picture of my grandfather being sworn-in as an American citizen;  from the camera's angle, he appeared tall.  I remember my green-eyed grandfather was a short man whose nails were stained by photographic darkroom chemicals.
            On Sundays, our family drove from Flushing to Brooklyn so I could watch him photograph brides.
            Grandpa, in white socks, labored on his knees using straight pins to secure each fold of bridal satin to his carpet, then stood on an unpainted wooden stool to adjust veiling.
            He'd roll down a backdrop scene of an archway or chapel,  insert a glass plate into the cumbersome tripod-mounted camera, adjust the bride's head tilt, then squeeze a rubber ball to seize that moment.
            His slender fingers removed each thin dressmaker's pin before he'd put his shoes on and roll up the backdrop.
            In a small room illuminated only by reddish glowing light, I was fascinated with magic images that appeared from blank paper "Teach me, teach me."  Grandpa placed my tiny hands around a hard circular metal gadget that clamped a photo above a mirror.
            "What should I do if I smush one and the thing breaks, Grandpa?"
            "Save your hand-framed picture, but just throw away broken mirror glass.   That you've made something is important."
            He smoothed my limp flaxen strands with fingers that smelled his familiar tobacco and chemicals, praised my efforts.  He allowed me to open his bulky, brass cash register with its big round numbers, hear its bell signal open, remove a nickel for a treat. 
            In the cafeteria below his studio, I bought a nickel Charlotte Russe (sliver of white cake in circular cardboard topped with whipped cream and a crimson cherry) to share as we'd shared mirror-picture making.
            Some Sundays I didn't see Grandpa.  Later I learned that his 'away' was touring with the United States Presidents;  he photographed every one from Taft through Truman.
            "Grandpa," I asked one Sunday morning in October 1945, "can I pretend bride and hold your fake flowers?  Can I?" 
            He kissed the top of my hair as I was still shorter than he was, "Just a few minutes 'til the first bride."
            "But I want to hold the bouquet."
            "Here.  Don't grab or clutch.  Place your left arm underneath, then drape, not drop, your right hand over the handle.  Just the back curve of your hand should gracefully appear."
            Fake calla lillies were not as light as they looked, and its cascade too big for my tiny frame.  I felt pretty, embarrassed, awkward, wonderful all at the same time.  I was the ending of every fairy tale I'd ever read.
            Grandpa grinned.  "Don't grow up too fast, monkey.  Just enjoy being young."  He adjusted the fake bouquet that, in black and white film, looked magnificent, but in real life looked helpless and dull.  "Ready?  Now turn."  He put a piece of veiling over my face.
            "When I'm grown, will you buy me my very own wedding gown?"
            He smiled softly;  the corner of one eye seemed to be collecting fluid.  He pretended to take my picture and I giggled.
            His first appointment came towards me, her lace train pulled along the rug.  Her headpiece was tall and crisp;  my pretend veil now looked like an unpressed hankie. 
            Grandpa labored with lighting forcing it to make faces glow or satin-gown folds shimmer.  But this bride was wearing all lace which didn't reflect light, so he made every detail sharp as snowflakes against a window pane.  Like weighty fake flowers that looked light and lovely, he strained with weight of details so pictures would seem natural.
            After that sitting, which I never knew why it was called a sitting when brides were always standing, Grandpa gave me a penny to buy shelled Indian nuts we'd share.  "Always feel you're important," he cracked shells, dropped crumbs into a metal wastebasket, and passed nuts to me.  "Whatever you do, feel, or think is special."
            My eyes used to smart when I left the red-lit darkroom place and re-entered incandescent lighting of his studio.  He was working;  I was enchanted.
            He developed a technique (using my mother posing in one of her fluffy hats) for photographing a person in front of multiple mirrors without flashbulb reflection.  He made a postage-size stamp of one image for pasting on World War II overseas mail that didn't have to pass through censors as V-Mail.  I glued four  tiny images of my mother on the blank area of a broken picture- mirror.
            Grandpa seemed to do everything: taking cash, moving huge lights, photographing, developing, dusting a counter.  I absorbed this message of self-esteem and dignity with labor;  of making tasks seem as light as pictures of fake flowers when I knew that they, in real life, were heavy and clumsy;  that one could love work. 
            Grandpa taught me, by observation, that nothing is menial.  Whether one photographs a president on geletin silver, a bride, or a Sunday-best-dressed-up-child, each is equally important.  On his knees sticking silver pins into fabric and then wool carpet, or onstage with Eleanor Roosevelt during a speech she delivered to an audience, he still had dignity. 
            He helped me develop pride of completing a task, allowing myself satisfaction, and I knew, from the word refugee, that he had pursued not compromised dreams.  He had courage to accept "no" along with "yes", and this made him 'tall' no matter that the yardstick measured only 5'4".
            Grandpa acknowledged when he lacked dexterity or ability.  At a table filled with sable brushes of various sizes, a retoucher removed a face blemish.  "Retouching fools the eye," said Grandpa, "but what we really are before sable wipes out imperfection is never fooled."  My aqua eyes looked at this giant who knew everything there was to know about everything even when I didn't really understand what he meant.
            I watched photos being oil colored with transparent paint. When I pushed cotton in quick circular strokes over my own children's black and white photographs decades later, I realized some simple creative things do last and remind us of our ability to produce with our fingers, eyes, imagination.  And a 'workers' task of hand coloring, then cleaning up messy cotton ball clumps stained with pigment, wasn't menial.  How that lesson runs through my life!  Grandpa said that I should sometimes 'see' the way I'd like things to be not what really is there. 
            I eventually investigated more about some of his political photographs when the International Museum of Photography decided to start an archives on William Metz, photographer.  But he was Grandpa, who tickled my back, taught me to enjoy creating with courage to accept rejection, and personally prove that all labor has significance.
            I last saw him, in 1956, ill, frail.  I was on my way into the adventure of marriage and he to the retirement of Miami.  But, like his photos in original folders in The International Museum of Photography, he was still tall and strong and 'unretouched'.
 
©1994 The Christian Science Monitor
Reprinted 2007 The Jewish Press  
Reprinted softcover book The Ultimate Teacher, HCI Books, ©2009 Health Communications
 
 

World wars; males pretended to be proud to strap guns to their shoulders, and the public gave them appreciation and approval.  Females, only as nurses, were on battlefields... until 1943 when the first women’s armed corp was recognized.
 
I was just a single digit in age as I carefully hung a silk star on my window; my bedroom faced the street and all who passed knew our household had a loved one who was a soldier. My mother’s three unmarried brothers, and one of her cousins, had been drafted. The silk square was a government issue.
 
Men in uniform. The few women in the neighborhood who put on slacks and went to work in a factory were part of bad conversation: tsk-tsk, they should be in skirts and aprons at home with their children, and happily no aunts or uncles knew a lady-worker in slacks making munitions.  But my father’s oldest niece did something shameful: she enlisted in the newly established Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
 
I didn’t quite understand the distress to the entire family.  A woman in the military was unheard of, and a lady to volunteer!  My cousin had to be pretty old, probably around eighteen then.  She must have felt patriotic or special.  I overheard words about women being citizens and ought to have the same rights to help our country; I overheard that only men should fight wars.
 
People gathered and often spoke with great pride about their sons or husbands being in the armed service. Like some badges of extra-courage, they exclaimed that men were helping to win this war, didn’t they look good in uniform, and they were also seeing so many parts of the world.  Some folks complained about ration books; I really didn’t know what those were and didn’t much care, either.
 
My cousin rang my parents’ doorbell knowing the family had gathered for one of my mother’s  meals.  She was wearing a uniform. And she had on a tie, like a man, and a hat that wasn’t the frilly stuff my mom wore on her head. She said she volunteered for the army, a women’s army had never been before, and some lady named Eleanor Roosevelt had pushed to make that possible. This cousin said she felt patriotic, important. The relatives looked at her as if she were wearing a Halloween costume they didn’t approve of.  The uniform was perfectly ironed, and her skirt didn’t even have one wrinkle.  Would her legs get scratched lying on a battlefield, I wondered?  Is a gun heavy?  Would food be available wherever she went in the whole world?  I liked my pretty dresses and hair bows and my ankle socks with tiny flowers on the cuffs; I liked my Mary-Jane patent leather dress shoes, and looking like ‘me’ and no one else.  A uniform was for the parochial school girls and I was glad I wasn’t in private school dressed like everyone else.  Did this cousin actually like being in a uniform!
 
I collected tin foil, picking up bits of discarded cigarette wrappers and rolling them into balls; my mom poured grease into wide-mouth jars, and every tin can went ‘someplace’ with the foil and grease to ‘help the war effort’.  In school I was told that the collected grease allowed army bullets to  slide through the guns, and a whole pound of that grease really made enough dynamite to blow up a big enemy’s bridge!  And all that tin foil was recycled in tanks and jeep cars.  We even donated rags, also left-over scraps of material from our home-sewn items, and servicemen got bandages or blankets made of those. My parents planted a Victory Garden in our backyard, and we grew real vegetables that we actually ate!  My allowance went to War Bonds and penny candy. I was patriotic, too.
 
My cousin didn’t stay long, not even for dessert.  Just wanted to say goodbye.  She seemed to smile, but a serious one not a giggling grin, and left.
 
She should be married. She should be working as a secretary. She should be.... went on and on as the family expressed upset that a woman, a relative no yet, joined the army. Why were these people so proud of the men and so angry with my cousin? She was in a skirt as part of her uniform. There wasn’t a silk star in any window for a woman in the military. Voices rose in pitch: she volunteered for the WACS! How disgraceful.
The war’s end meant I had to wear long skirts with yards of fabric, something called the ‘new look’, and listen to people speak of horror or something like that. Parties were held for returning soldiers, working women went back to skirts and stovetops rather than slacks and machine tools. Were WACS or the female volunteer naval WAVES given parties after peace treaties were signed? Was my cousin banished once again to domestic duties even though she was army trained like a man? Did she mind that family didn’t recognize her strength or honor?  I never asked as getting a bicycle was much more important to me.
 
How different it is in 21st century.  Many women prefer slacks to skirts, the once-privileged all male universities have co-eds, females fight fires and don police outfits, few would know that housewives contributed so much re-cycling to aid the military during World War II.  Fewer might know that women weren’t officially recognized or compensated for armed service until the 1940's.  Our current volunteer army has no gender issue nor social stigma.   My cousin was among the ‘firsts’, with courage not just to enlist but to deal with disapproval.  If she looked back, would she have considered herself a pioneer or a rebel?
 
My blue box holds newspapers, rinsed-out empty glass bottles/ plastic laundry jugs/ cans/ cartons.  Weekly I bring all plastic wrappings to a recycle bin.  I even return hangers.  My upbringing.  The American flag’s stars were rearranged when two more states were added.  Flag-stars still remind me of the square of silk that covered a section of window glass during World War II.
 
 
 
Published July 2011   614 HBI  (Brandeis University)
reprinted Nov. 2, 2012 The Jewish Press

​“City of Angels” implies a population not alive in the conventional sense. Barbara Payton, whose earthly sojourn ended in 1967 at age 39, is an Angel of Los Angeles. She may not fit the conventional seraphic image, but she has earned her title nonetheless.
          It’s February 1967. Above the seedy drugstore parking lot, a slate and pewter sky fades grudgingly toward dawn. Fog has condensed on a dumpster overflowing with soggy Valentine’s Day decorations; grimy water drools down its flank and drips onto the asphalt beside an inert form beneath a black plastic bag.
          Bruises and welts cover her arms and legs. A livid red worm of a scar, eight inches long, bisects her swollen belly. The fragile blonde hair shows two inches of dark roots matted with grime and blood, bitter truth reclaiming its terrain. The garbage men mistake the woman for a corpse, but this grim scene is merely another night on the town ending for Barbara Payton, once Hollywood’s fastest rising star; now and perhaps for always, its grimmest cautionary tale.
          Three months later, Payton finally succumbed to liver and heart failure, though many believe that her spirit had fled its battered shell years before. By the time she hit bottom, Payton, who had once earned $5,000 per week, was reduced to peddling her bedroom skills for $5 a trick in alleys and backseats. Stoned on cheap hooch, bloated and malnourished, victimized by whatever thug happened past, she trudged the meanest streets in Nathanael West’s “dream dump of Hollywood,” catatonic, profane, insatiable, and mad. In the end, all she had left was a caricature of herself, cannibalizing her life in the incoherent, nihilistic autobiography, I Am Not Ashamed, which she dictated to a hack reporter for a few cases of cheap wine. The book, now considered a minor masterpiece of defiant rue and doomed bravado, withered and died in its paper chrysalis. 
          In the genealogy of Hollywood scandal, Payton was the onetime wife of Franchot Tone, himself the former husband of Joan Crawford. Payton was also the inamorata of Tom Neal, perhaps the lowest-bottom-hitting actor in history next to John Wilkes Booth. Neal’s performance in Detour—for many the film noir that defines the genre—earned him immortality, while eerily foretelling his own dreadful fate.
          If Barbara Payton was the worst thing that ever happened to Franchot Tone, then the mesomorphic Neal was a far worse encounter for Barbara Payton. (However, Neal was truly the Asteroid strike for Payton’s successor, beautiful 29-year-old Gale Bennett, whom he married in 1961 and shot dead four years later in a jealous rage as she slept. A wraithlike, black-clad Payton was spotted in the audience at his trial. Though prosecutors sought the death penalty, Neal served six years for involuntary manslaughter, dying only months after leaving prison.)
          Today, the lovers flung about in these cyclonic affairs lead a second life of sorts on countless web sites, forever careening towards Armageddon, forever young, gorgeous, shabby, and totally, totally nuts.
          Like background radiation, the spirit of Barbara Payton still inhabits the flops and jails where she spent down her years. On the Internet, it’s open season on her for gleeful voyeurs and shock-shamming moralizers. If ever there was a sin left uncommitted in schizoid Hollywood—including that of interracial love—it couldn’t be attributed to Payton.
         
The Wild Child
Barbara Lee Redfield was born an ordinary mortal in postcard-pretty Cloquet, Minnesota; her mother, Mabel, a beauty of Norwegian descent, and her father, Lee, a hard-drinking disinherited scion of the Weyerhauser lumbering dynasty.
          Barbara spent her early childhood suffused in small town midwestern life. Strikingly beautiful, the bright, sociable little girl celebrated Christmases and Easters, cut out paper dolls, tobaggoned and skated, attended school events and county fairs.
          When his precociously striking daughter was barely in her teens, and with WWII raging, Lee moved his family to Odessa, Texas, a hard-partying town overflowing with military men from nearby bases. Here, the parents managed a motel, giving their daughter a running start in flouting public mores. By 16, Barbara had developed the troublesome habit of eloping, earning speedy annulments and paternal beatings; at least three teen marriages took place, one of them to a shoe salesman she had met while shopping.
          In 1944, she married stonily right-stuff-handsome 22-year-old Air Force pilot, John Payton. The couple moved to a modest apartment near Hollywood, where John studied engineering on the GI Bill. Their only child, John Lee, was born in 1947. 
          At this juncture, Barbara Payton was merely another small-town Hollywood hopeful, albeit of arresting natural beauty. No dream has ever exerted such irresistible traction as Hollywood stardom, dragging generation after generation of girls and boys westward to hurl themselves at studio ramparts against brutally short odds, with the single-minded drive of spawning salmon. Following a stint as a carhop, Barbara landed work as a fashion model.
          Magazine ads from the late 1940s reveal a stunning young woman whose prim poses and coyly conservative tea dresses can’t conceal a page-searing sensuality. When the agency sent her to perform a few high kicks in a comedy revue at Slapsie Maxie’s nightclub, Payton caught the eye of Bill Goetz, production chief at Universal-International Studios. A shrewd judge of potential, Goetz quickly signed her to a contract. 
          Under the hot glare of Hollywood attention, the Paytons’ marriage softened and melted like wax, finally collapsing when John left wife and son to return to his parents in the midwest—always insisting that it was Barbara who had left him. Either way, she was now broke, alone, a single mother, and at the mercy of her own demons, which wasted no time in manifesting.
 
Fast Men, Fast Times 
Payton soon became a regular at Hollywood’s hottest clubs, showing the reckless exuberance and appalling judgment that characterizes young celebrities of any era. Her close friends included uber-shady dope dealer and trouble-magnet Don Cougar, 27, and sleazy, star-stalking paving contractor Jerry Bialac. (The archetype of these Mickey Cohen tyros was Johnny Stompanato, whose turbulent affair with Lana Turner—and his life—ended in 1959 at the point of a knife wielded by Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane.)
          Payton also became a regular at the booze-drenched parties of the Mephistophelean Errol Flynn and began keeping company with womanizer George Raft, flaunting the full-length white mink he gifted her.
          Like Clara Bow, Payton radiated attitude, flouting conventional morality at every opportunity. But on closer inspection, something much darker was at work—a restless compulsion to dance ever closer to the scorching flames. Whether in life or literature; whether the Black Dahlia, Madame Bovary, Lily Bart, Messalina, or Katherine Howard, these women rarely make good ends.
          Payton’s relative idleness and availability for mischief made it inevitable that she and Bob Hope, a notorious hound, would find one another. After meeting in Texas on a promotional tour, they indulged in numerous trysts, with Barbara posing as the date of the married Hope’s longtime beard, Louis Shurr. Hope rented her an apartment.
          Soon, the smitten starlet began showing up at Hope’s sacrosanct golf tournaments, throwing herself into his arms in defiance of the rebarbatively wholesome image that Hope wore all his life. He discovered that getting Barbara Payton into his bed was a lot easier than phasing her out of it. Fuming, the notoriously cheap comedian eventually ransomed himself for a rumored $50,000.
          Hope’s role in the messy liaison was deftly hushed up, but Barbara Payton paid for her poor judgment with her Universal contract. Conventions that now seem quaint had sharp fangs in their day; it was all more than enough to summon the juggernaut of bad fortune. 
 
At the Precipice 
Around this time, Luciferian boyfriend Don Cougar talked Payton into providing dope dealer Stanley Adams with a phony alibi for the murder of FBI stool pigeon, “Singing Abe” Davidian, who had been shot in the head in his mother’s home in Fresno on February 28, 1949. Naïve and anxious to please, Payton earned herself years of legal blowback that would blend with other bad cess to write finis to her career.
          But suddenly, fortuitously, Barbara Payton’s acting career hummed to life, and she was cast with Lloyd Bridges in the film noir, Trapped. Bridges, at 36, was already popular, with his own appetite for starlet favors, probably including Barbara’s.
          In 1950, producer William Cagney signed Payton to a $5,000-a-week contract to co-star with his brother James in what came to be her best-known film, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Playing to type as the sultry yet gullible “Holiday Carleton,” Payton had a career breakthrough. Warner Brothers shared her contract option with Bill Cagney and raised her salary to a jaw-dropping $10,000 a week. Fans proliferated. MGM and 20th Century Fox competed to lure her away.
          This career momentum should have spawned countless opportunities for new dramatic roles, but Payton’s soaring trajectory inexplicably began to wobble and drift. Her next two films for Warner’s, Dallas and Only the Valiant, saw Payton’s performance land on the cutting room floor. Likewise with her next movie, the poor man’s Gone With the Wind knockoff, Drums in the Deep South. It was as if some malign unseen force were agitating against Payton.
          As indeed it was. 
          That force was the vindictive, irascible Jack Warner himself. Payton’s lighthearted irreverence toward him had probably lit the fuse; now, her penchant for public ruckus set it burning briskly. Warner, working the phones with his trademark obscenity-laced marching orders, had set out to raze the career of his newest star.          In early 1950, Payton caught the eye of actor Franchot Tone at Ciro’s nightclub, where he was judging a Charleston competition. Tone, who had a taste for troubled beauties. brushed aside the warnings that poured in. He was an educated, eastern-bred bon vivant with a classic profile and a drink constantly in hand. But he was fated to miss the first rank of stardom. The career of his wife, Joan Crawford, quickly eclipsed his, with Tone relegated to playing second male leads.
          Tone was still boiling in the soup of his 1948 divorce from Payton look-alike, actress Jean Wallace. Suicidal and incendiary, Wallace soon dragged him into a custody battle for their two sons during which she spattered Payton with all the mud in her copious arsenal. The couple became a favored target of columnists always on the sniff for dysfunction and profligacy. 
          Their noses were true. Only a short time after announcing their engagement at a lavish party in New York’s Stork Club, Franchot surprised Barbara in bed—at the home he had rented for her—with the strikingly handsome young Guy Madison (TV’s future “Wild Bill Hickock”), now her co-star in Drums in the Deep South. Tone delivered the immortal line—arguably the greatest example ever of heroic restraint—“I’m engaged to this girl and I’m going to marry her. Are you?”
          The red-faced young actor leaped to gather his clothes, mumbling, “I can’t. I’m already married.” The ensuing 1950s incarnation of a viral feeding frenzy provided an abundant feast to the predatory Confidential Magazine and pushed choleric producer Jack Warner to scissor most of Payton’s scenes from the movie.
          Ironically, it was probably Warner who steered Barbara Payton into Jack Broder’s risibly titled Bride of the Gorilla, destined to become a camp classic. The sight of the strapless young Payton aswoon in the hirsute embrace of gorilla Steve Calvert inspired the lifelong crushes of countless boys. Payton even managed to wangle a co-starring role for her young friend, Raymond Burr—broke, unemployed and frustratingly obese. Years later, when Payton was on the skids, Burr tried to repay the favor, but his influence could not land her even a walk-on in Perry Mason.
 
Madness  at Noon
In July 1951, with Barbara filming Bride of the Gorilla, Franchot Tone departed for a short visit to New York. A few days later, Barbara attended a fateful pool party at the Sunset Plaza Apartments. Here, her destiny collided with that of Tom Neal, the impact throwing up a dust cloud that toxified both of their lives from then on.   
          Neal, the only son of a wealthy banker, hailed from Evanston, Illinois. Though just five-foot eight, he had distinguished himself as a boxer at Northwestern University, where he also joined the drama club. In the fall of 1933, he arrived in New York, already a gigolo, and was soon engaged to showgirl Inez Martin, the former mistress of gangster Arnold Rothstein. Neal moved west in 1936, where he signed with MGM, maintaining dual affairs with both Joan Crawford and a studio executive’s wife. For many, Neal’s defining role—prior to Detour—will always be First Yank into Tokyo, in which he played an American Air Force officer who heroically sacrifices his whiteness for his country, undergoing supposed plastic surgery in order to pass as Japanese and spirit an atomic scientist out of Japan. Neal became by this role the most hilariously unrecgognizable incarnation of a homo sapiens—forget an Asian—ever concocted.
          The movie is impossible to watch with a straight face, but Neal quickly redeemed himself, starring in the Edgar G. Ulmer-directed film noir classic Detour in 1945, alongside Ann Savage who staked her claim for all time as cinema’s most psychotically fiendish harpy. Shot in just six days on a $30,000 budget, Detour is almost universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. But if Detour elevated Tom Neal, the fates conspired throughout the rest of his life to send him careening to hell. As he muttered prophetically in the movie, “No matter what you do, no matter where you turn, fate sticks out its foot to trip you.”
          The intersection of Tom Neal’s life with Barbara Payton’s at that fateful party could not have been more precisely calculated to deliver them both to madness. Besotted with desire, Payton was soon introducing Neal to family and friends as her boyfriend—almost as if her fiancé Franchot Tone didn’t exist. 
          By the time Franchot Tone returned from his business trip, his life and Barbara’s had changed profoundly, with even greater upheavals looming. Tone discovered Barbara living openly with Tom Neal in the Hollywood apartment he had rented for her.                   As if under some lunatic spell, Payton bounced between one man and the other over the next months in an alcohol-fueled series of trysts, tracked by the press with slavering rapacity.
          On September 13, Barbara Payton borrowed Tom’s car and met Franchot at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a party that extended deep into the night, leaving Tom waiting—and drinking—alone at the Courtney Terrace apartment. He was raucously drunk by the time Barbara arrived home with Franchot in tow, both drunk as well. 
          The two soused suitors quickly squared off, but to call the following encounter a fight would imply adversaries who were mentally competent by some broad interpretation of the term. Neal’s training as a college pugilist had been reinforced by daily weightlifting on that very patio; a pair of his dumbbells remained on the bloodstained concrete as silent witnesses following the brawl.
          Predictably, havoc ensued, with Tom Neal sending Franchot Tone aloft with a punch that landed the older actor twelve feet away. Delicately boned and drawing-room elegant at 155 pounds, Franchot Tone was never even a putative match for Tom Neal, who then got down to business, slamming the motionless Tone over and over with sodden punches that inflicted critical injuries. Payton, trying to intervene, was herself inadvertently punched and sent careening unconscious into a rhododendron bush.  
          Franchot Tone emerged gravely wounded, with a cerebral concussion, broken nose, shattered left cheekbone and fractured right upper jaw. He hovered between life and death for days as the media entered a fugue state, disgorging hourly updates. 
          Payton, looking gorgeous in a tight, strapless white dress and sporting huge sunglasses to hide her own black eye, soon arrived at the hospital where Tone lay comatose, carrying—with breathtaking ignorance and obliviousness—a pitcherful of martinis to “share” with the comatose man. Trailing hordes of paparazzi, she haunted the hospital staircases and hallways, begging exasperated nurses to let her visit Tone. All this time, she continued to issue oddly disjointed statements denouncing Tom Neal as a savage—despite soon being photographed dancing with him at Ciro’s and hosting him at Tone’s apartment.
          The hungry fates, not yet sated by this blood sacrifice, continued to wreak misfortune on all three addled lovers. No sooner had a skeletal Franchot Tone tottered from the hospital, his classic profile and his voie permanently altered, than he married Payton in a bizarre, hastily concocted ceremony in her home town of Cloquet, Minnesota, attended by Payton’s puzzled cousins and family. 
          Soon, hounded by the media, spurned and booed by the public, the ill-starred couple began to crumble. The Hollywood establishment zeroed in on Payton for dragging down the once-genteel if bibulous older star. “Hag Columnists” Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, soon joined the baying pack and subsequently missed no chance—ever, ever—to savage Barbara Payton in print. 
          After seven weeks, Franchot Tone filed for divorce on grounds of extreme mental cruelty; his seemingly unquenchable passion for Barbara Payton now vanished like smoke. In a final act of pure demolition, Tone hired a private investigator to secretly take graphic photos of Payton and Neal having sex. Tone then circulated these not only to every major studio in Hollywood but to Payton’s friends and family as well.  
          Having obliterated any possibility of his former wife ever again obtaining work in Hollywood, Franchot Tone resumed his gentlemanly alcoholic conviviality, appearing on Broadway and on popular television series such as Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Twilight Zone. One can only speculate on what went through his mind as Barbara Payton spiraled into homelessness, prostitution and death. He could not have wished on her any harsher or more prolonged retribution. 
          Now, in 1952, time ran out Tom Neal and Barbara Payton. In an ironic last performance together, they played another doomed couple in The Postman Always Rings Twice. After Barbara collapsed on stage, probably from a combination of malnutrition and alcohol, Tom Neal departed to follow his own terrible destiny.
 
The Eyes of a Child
Throughout these turbulent years, a small, quiet presence had waited for Barbara, usually at the home of her babysitter’s parents. John Lee Payton had continued to love his mother with a nonjudgmental acceptance that belied his years. Now, still only 26 years old, Barbara Payton resolved to settle down and resume her maternal responsibilities. She rented a large house near the Beverly Hills Hotel, furnished it elegantly, and brought her seven-year-old son to join her Paper Moon-ish lifestyle. 
          Despite her good intentions, however, she left the boy alone a lot while she serviced her unrelenting demons. Constant parties filled the house with drunken strangers, albeit some of them the biggest names in Hollywood. Though John Lee wanted simply to be a part of his mother’s life, she lacked the ability to give him a stable, consistent home. She may also have been experiencing cognitive damage from the alcohol that impaired her ability to exercise parental judgment. 
          When she wasn’t entertaining at home, Payton was a fixture at local hangouts Chasen’s, LaRue’s, and The Cock n’ Bull. Tricked out in furs and jewelry, she seldom left a place unaccompanied. She spent a lot of time dancing on tabletops at a landmark nightclub called the Garden of Allah. Her bedmates included Marlon Brando, but she was not particular when drinking and shared her favors with an unbroken stream of lovers that included small-time hoods, casual barroom acquaintances, and men picked up at gas stations and lounges up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. 
          In 1954, Edgar G. Ulmer—the brilliant German-born director who had immortalized Tom Neal in Detour--starred Payton in what was to be her last artistically meaningful movie, Murder is My Beat. Ulmer seems to have understood how to draw out Payton’s inner conflicts to vitalize and validate her acting. Her strong performance is still well- regarded by critics, but despite its intrinsic quality, the film went unnoticed and remains obscure to this day.  
          In 1955, Barbara drifted to Guaymas, Mexico on the Sea of Cortes, a popular hangout of stars like Clark Gable, Lana Turner, John Wayne, and Bing Crosby. Here, she met her future husband, Tony Provas, a young sport fisherman of Greek background whose family owned a pleasure boat business. Only 21, Tony fell hard for still-beautiful Barbara. Soon, the locus of her life moved to Guaymas, where she became a regular at the Playa de Cortez resort. At thirty, Payton was now a confirmed alcoholic, and the consequences were overtaking her.
 
The Wheels Come Off 
Returning briefly to L.A. that year, Barbara Payton wrote three personal checks to Hollywood’s Sun-Fax Market totaling $129.54, which subsequently bounced. Though she had spent thousands at that very market in better days, the owners pursued her unrelentingly. Unable to make good on the checks, Payton was arrested in front of John Lee, handcuffed and taken away in a police car. The debt was eventually retired for old times’ sake by Herman Hoven, the owner of Ciro’s nightclub.
          Now, having run through her funds and lost her rented home, Payton found washed up against the cleak shore of abandonment. In March 1956, ex-husband John Payton, who had spent 18 months as a POW in Korea, finally filed for custody of his eight-year-old son. The courtroom battle, infested with voyeurs and tabloid hacks, had a predictable outcome. Whisked off to the air base in Germany where his father was stationed, the boy never saw his mother again.
 
Absence of Control
With the last vestiges of accountability gone, Barbara Payton now slipped her moorings completely and began a decade-long free-fall to death. Whether from alcoholic toxicity or encroaching mental disease, Payton recognized no further boundaries, no restraints whatsoever. It challenges comprehension to realize that she still had eleven years to live—years of uninterrupted deterioration and physical and mental anguish that would have shamed an Elizabethan torturer to inflict. 
          By now, the alcohol had blasted her delicate beauty and doubtless her cognition. She began to wear coarse, unbecoming makeup, and her bloated figure contrasted shockingly with the graceful contours of only a few years ago.
          Payton’s parents, themselves alcoholic, had moved to San Diego but were no meaningful resource for Barbara. The persistent hostility of her father endured, while her mother, suffering from botched breast cancer surgery, was herself drunk most of the time. 
          Old friends and lovers watched helplessly as Payton drifted beyond Hollywood’s klieg lights toward the infinite darkness on the other side of the street.
          Payton’s friend, perennial naughty beauty Lila Leeds, had recently moved to Chicago to work as a torch singer and call girl. Leeds was the unfortunate 20-year-old starlet busted with Robert Mitchum in 1948 for marijuana possession. While the studio protected Mitchum, it had thrown Lila under the bus and and incinerated her film hopes. Now, Barbara Payton, with her son gone and her own career in ruins, joined Lila in prostitution in 1957. The two worked from a suite at the Drake Hotel until Lila was arrested, with Barbara making a narrow, doubtless cinematic escape. Sent to prison, Leeds eventually sobered up and became a minister, preaching with credibility to the alcoholics of Los Angeles. 
          By 1958, Barbara Payton was back in Los Angeles after a stint as a prostitute in Las Vegas. She was living with a B-movie actor named Bobby Hall, a six-foot-four-inch, 250-pound mesomorph with a wicked temper. Before long, she landed in the seedy Valencia Apartments. Set adrift, she found work as a restaurant hostess, a cocktail waitress in a strip joint, a shampoo girl at a beauty shop, and a gas pumper on Hollywood Boulevard.  
          Sometimes she scraped together the money for a bus ticket to Palm Springs, where she rented a room at the Riviera Hotel, working out of the bar as a hooker. Evicted, she traveled to Searchlight, Nevada and turned tricks from a tiny studio apartment over a casino. By 1961, she was back at the Valencia, her hair dyed carrot red, her body ballooning from the booze. Her tricks were a depressing cohort of failed actors, drifters, hustlers; fellow alcoholics and rootless wanderers.
          Always drunk now, missing many teeth, her hair matted and unwashed, she began to wander the streets of Hollywood in ragged castoff dressing gowns. When she could afford it, she rented a room in a rat-infested building (now a gas station) at 7655 Sunset Boulevard. Stabbed by a trick, she received thirty-eight stitches, which resolved into a shockingly livid scar that she did not even bother to cover. She was now charging $5 for sex, surreptitiously performed in parked cars on Sunset Boulevard, their motors running.
          Arrested again for prostitution on September 23, 1963, Payton remained in jail for the next 22 days.
 
I Am Not Ashamed
That year, a Hollywood public relations flack named Leo Guild contacted Barbara about writing her autobiography. For $2,000, Payton recorded a series of interviews; the money was doled out to her in periodic instalments, quickly spent on liquor and drugs. Guild would send a check to Barbara at the Coach and Horses—a no-questions-asked hideaway also frequented by William Holden, another heavy drinker. I am Not Ashamed is a pitiable cry of defiance, painful to read the way a missed jab from a punch-drunk boxer on his way to the mat is painful to watch. She stares from the cover, coarsened and bleary, her gaze accusing the Dream Machine and all who betrayed her, including herself.
          Guild ungraciously described Payton in a 1967 article for the men’s magazine Pix: “I knocked [on the door] and she yelled, ‘Entre vous.’ Barbara stood alone in the center of a room of unbelievable chaos. She was pig-fat and wore a man’s shirt and that’s it. The shirt just made it past her crotch. There was a red, angry scar coming from under the shirt and running down her thigh. ‘Of course, I remember you,’ she smiled. I noticed she was unsteady on her feet.”
          Lacking credibility and continuity, I Am Not Ashamed rambles through 190 pages of disjointed stream-of-consciousness recollections. The 86-cent paperback generated only a small blip of media attention before disappearing into the remainder bins.
          Shortly afterwards, Payton was busted for heroin and placed in a locked detox unit at L.A. County Hospital. Released to a halfway house, she was back on the streets within a day. She was legally eligible to be treated at the Motion Picture Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills. But the public poison had been injected deep by tabloids, vengeful executives, casually jealous competitors, the fickle public—and her own actions. No meaningful help was offered her.
          As time passed, Barbara Payton became a familiar fixture of the streets, dragging herself up and down the grimy, decaying skid rows behind Hollywood’s tourist façade, deteriorating visibly. Incredibly, her insatiable need to debase herself continued to gather momentum. She associated now only with those tortured souls on their own respective journeys to oblivion, some dangerously, helplessly psychotic and violent, the detritus of an unforgiving, tough-minded culture. The filthy dives that she called home, nests of depravity and suicidal torment, existed like a parallel universe alongside the slick, vigorous and dazzling Los Angeles of the early 1960s. The energy pulsed and flowed as fortunes and careers soared, innovations were launched. People she had known on her way up continued to succeed, or at least to endure, as Payton lay dying in a boneyard of lost souls, condemned to live out the bleak side of the Hollywood story. 
          At the seedy Coach and Horses bar—now a minor landmark—she nursed shots in her own shadowy corner. The bartender’s son, author Robert Polito, in his book, O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors: “She oozed alcohol even before she ordered a drink. Her eyebrows didn’t match her brassy hair . . . Her face displayed a perpetual sunburn, a map of veins by her nose. [Her feet were swollen], and she carried an old man’s pot belly that sloshed faintly when she moved. She must have weighed 200 pounds.” Soon, even the undiscriminating Coach and Horses banned her as a difficult drunk, too hard to get rid of once she became situated.
          Harassed constantly by police, Payton often sought refuge in dark movie theaters or in the old Hollywood Public Library, a silent, solitary figure at a back table.
 
Last Days
Barbara Payton’s quest finally delivered her to the home of her parents in San Diego; it should have been a sanctuary, but lifelong conflicts with her father had made the place only one more locus of pain. Payton’s stony path ended on May 8, 1967, in the early afternoon. Her final agonies unreeled unattended; nobody in her parents’ household seemed to have taken the obvious step of bringing a desperately ill woman to the hospital or even calling an ambulance.
          The official cause of death was “acute pulmonary congestion with focal pulmonary hemorrhage due to portal cirrhosis.” She was six months short of her fortieth birthday. Following her death, Barbara Payton’s father grimly gathered up her few pitiful belongings and set them outside at the curb to be hauled away by the garbage truck.
          Even from the grave, Barbara Payton has the power to bring us up short against our own dreams and demons—the archetypal girl who threw it all away, loving always unwisely and far too well. But the overwhelming emotion she elicits, along with deep sadness, must be bitter perplexity. Even as she delivered lines onscreen that aimed straight for the heart, she treated her own heart with self-destructive fury. It is the tragic destiny of this beautiful, once hopeful woman to serve as a reminder of the depths to which we can fall, and the suffering we are capable of inflicting on ourselves and those we love, all with the best of intentions. 

The understanding of society structure and function is often subjected to study under the lenses of scholars of the social sciences. Such fields may include political science, sociology, anthropology, and human geography. But one field often overlooked is the creative arts. By stringing together multi-disciplines and forms of art such as literature and film-making, one can cover other ideas that provoke questions that social science and non-fiction cannot. A commendable example of a work of literature that explores both internal and external conflict of a society, is Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs.
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian writer from Cairo that wrote 34 novels and over 300 short stories. He studied philosophy at Cairo University and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. The plot of The Thief and the Dogs revolves around the journey of Said Mahran since he’s come out of prison at the beginning of the novel. The thief in the title refers to Said, as he is a skilled and intelligent thief put into jail for being exposed to the police by his former friends. The dogs refer to those very characters that betrayed him, and the center of his vengeance. The setting of the story takes place between the 1950s and 1960s when Egypt had undergone the 1952 Revolution prior to Said’s release. There had been a circulation of novel revolutionary and philosophical ideas that emerged at the time, but since Said had been in prison for four years, by the time he came out, those ideas had changed as well as the circumstances of the characters.
As mentioned above, Said Mahran is the protagonist of the story. Upon introduction to the character, Said had just been released from prison. Instead of aiming to readjust his life and reintegrate himself into society, he is determined to get revenge on those that have betrayed him. But he isn’t looking to just punish them, but to end their lives. Albeit having just been in jail, he believes that through deviant means only would he be able to accomplish his goals. The ones that betray him that are known as the dogs include his ex-wife Nabawiyya that married his ex-friend and lackey, Ilish Sidra. Ilish was once under the wings of Said but was the one that ended up revealing him to the police. Another dog is Rauf Ilwan, who used to be Said’s mentor and was the one that instilled the revolutionary ideas into Said, but has since Said’s imprisonment, become a rich and successful businessman that opposed the very ideas he advocated. Readers are introduced to other characters that play different roles. There is Tarzan, a café owner that aids Said and provides him with information, Nur, the prostitute that shelters Said, and the Sheikh, the religious clergy that attempts to enlighten Said with spiritual advice. All of these characters represent different class, generation, and roles in both the Egyptian and global context.
Post the 1952 Revolution, a drive for nationalism heightened. (1) Said, a keen nationalist that recognizes the inequalities in socioeconomic classes, firmly believes that his theft is justifiable, since he mainly steals from the wealthy, upper class and believes that they are undeserving of their status. A parallel can be made with the popular English folklore of Robin Hood. (2) Said’s one chance at redeeming himself, was if he had won custody of his daughter, Sana. But as she had rejected him, he allowed himself to be consumed by resentment and decided to stop at nothing to get his revenge. Through his plots, readers uncover Mahfouz’s views on class, gender, generation and affects of such conditions as a revolution.
One can draw from the novel that there is an inevitable hierarchal structure. There are the elitists that constitute the upper class, such as Rauf Ilwan, and like Rauf Ilwan, seemingly abuse their power and are corrupt. Rauf is a case of this because he once had revolutionary ideas himself but switched points of view in favor of power. Then there are those that are part of the middle or working class, like Ilwish Sidra, Nabawiya, Tarzan, and presumingly Said before prison. Ilwish, Nabawiyya, and others of Said’s community see him as a criminal, therefore can be noted as a passive group that see the way of the world as reasonably just, and class structure and divisions of authority as things not to be meddled with. Meanwhile, Said feels that he has been framed and there are wrongs needed to be fixed even if it’s at the risk of his own life.
Therefore, there are varying views of class, gender, generation, etc. The characters’ view on these elements relies on their very standings on these different categories. These concepts would always be contested because of competitive interpretation on what’s valid and what is not because people from different classes and roles will have different arguments.
At the end of the novel Said is caught by the police and is shot to death. The relevance is that for one being hooked on revenge, there can only be negative outcomes. Although he was in fact rejected by his community, he had a chance to regain stability in his life had he listened to the Sheik’s or Nur’s advice to escape and flee Cairo. But he chose to continue to isolate himself. Ignoring his allies and trying to control actions beyond him only lead to his doom. The irony is that he was haunting “the dogs” but ended up being hunted down. Mahfouz’s lesson might be that a path of violence can only be self-destructive. This relates to the theme of invented traditions because Said’s personality and situation wasn’t arbitrary.  The evidence for this is that the novel revealed him to have changed over time. When he was younger was optimistic and care-free, then he became interested in the revolutionary ideas of Rauf and started and aimed at being an intellectual, and then became depressed when his daughter rejected him, until finally he was left with only pure hatred. Therefore, it was the social conditions that pushed him into becoming the pessimistic and cynical character that he is. In this sense he was a tragic hero.
The reflections of Egyptian culture derived from the novel can be applicable to other cultures too. The social alienation that drove Said to be marked by hatred, to steal, and to continue looking for the dogs despite being searched for the police, being talked about in the press, and accidently killing two innocent people, is not an experience exclusive to him, or to one conditioned in a post-revolutionary Egypt. There have been cases of domestic violence committed by individuals that felt pressured and driven to the brinks of their sanity in places around the world. Crimes as atrocious as terrorism can be traced to individuals that have radical claims of doing what they did to be justifiable just as Said had done. To counter a sense of powerlessness, these individuals attempt to overcome agents that are beyond their control in order to exert their freedom and will to mend impracticalities in their favor, in the same way that Said attempted to take justice into his own hands. This was an occurrence in which the theme of existentialism was expressed in the novel. It is in this manner that Mahfouz was able to humanize his characters and their state of affairs in Egypt.
 
 
 

 
End Notes/Citation

1. Jazeera, Al. “Arab Unity: Nasser's Revolution.” Egypt News | Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 20 June 2008, www.aljazeera.com/focus/arabunity/2008/02/200852517252821627.html.
2. History.com Staff. “The Real Robin Hood.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2010, www.history.com/topics/british-history/robin-hood.

 
Other References
September 20, 1989.” The Thief and the Dogs: Naguib Mahfouz, Trevor Le Gassick, M. M. Badawi, John Rodenbeck: 9780385264624.