Helene Stanley

            Friday was a day for getting caught up on my journal after going dark to study and then write my exam.

            In the late morning I saw my phone light up with a Toronto number and so I answered it. The woman’s voice asked if I was Christian. Always suspicious of bill collectors I asked, “Who’s calling?” It turned out to be Goldie. It turned out that she was in the hospital and was surprised that I didn’t know. Cad had mentioned on Facebook that he’d gotten barred from the hospital but he hadn’t mentioned Goldie at all.

            Goldie was recovering from surgery in the burn unit at Sunnybrook after sustaining third degree burns in a cooking accident. Apparently Cad had gotten kicked out of the hospital after resisting wearing latex gloves while visiting Goldie’s room but also arguing with and threatening the nurses with a lawsuit over Goldie’s food. Goldie had told the hospital that she was a vegetarian but they had given her a vegan diet, which she didn’t like because she’s a lacto-vegetarian.

            Goldie was upset and disappointed with Cad because she considers him inconsiderate and selfish. He’d gone down to the hospital food court and Goldie had asked him to bring something back for her, but he came back with nothing. She also thought it was pretty selfish that he didn’t care about visiting her enough to comply with a few simple rules.

            She may have been talking through her immediate emotions and not her long-term thoughts, but Goldie confessed that she’s considering either kicking Cad out of the apartment they share or moving out herself. I told her that she could probably find legal grounds to evict Cad, since she’d had the apartment first.

            I suggested that I might visit her but she said she didn’t want any visitors. She might have just been saying that though.

            I left an angry comment on Cad’s Facebook page about him not following the rules for visiting burn victims. A few hours later he called me to give his side of the story. His hospital excuse was unconvincing. A lot like Vicky Pollard’s “Yeah but, no but …” excuses on Little Britain.  He did tell me that he pays the entire phone and cable bill plus half the rent in their shared apartment, while Goldie had only told me that he never buys any groceries or helps her with gas for her car. I don’t know how that all balances out financially but Cad seems to get the better of that relationship.

            That night I watched an episode of Mike Hammer that had an interesting actress playing the femme fatale. Her name was Helene Stanley and five years before this episode she’d been just divorcing her husband of two years, the gangster Johnny Stompanato who was an enforcer for the Cohen Crime Family. He had been a marine fighting in the South Pacific during World War II. Then he was stationed in China just after the war where he fell for a Turkish woman and converted to Islam to marry her. He took her back to Indiana and they had a son but she walked out on him shortly after that. He moved out to California where he became a bodyguard for Mickey Cohen. He started dating Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra asked Cohen to tell him to back off but Cohen told Frank to mind his own business and go back to his wife. In 1948 Johnny married Helen Gilbert but she divorced Johnny a year later. In 1952 he left the Cohen Crime Family when he met Helene Stanley and started dating her. He married her a year later and became her manager. They divorced two years later. Throughout the 1950s he was arrested seven times for everything from vagrancy to suspicion of robbery. In 1957 he entered into an often abusive relationship with Lana Turner. He became so jealous of her relationship with Sean Connery that he flew all the way to the UK to threaten Connery with a gun on a movie set. Connery was a bit of a tough guy himself and he easily disarmed Johnny by just grabbing his wrist and forcing him to drop the gun. In 1958, while Johnny was having a violent argument with Lana Turner, Turner’s teenage daughter stabbed Johnny to death.

The Death of Johnny Stompanato”

(from the point of view of Lana Turner) by Rene Ricard

Give me a coffee, no sugar to go

The night is black as a limousine

The streets are as wet as a drunk’s kiss

and my mouth’s as dry as a martini

9:00 P.M.

Good morning Hollywood!

Was my name in the papers today?

Take me home Joe,

the long way

You think I’m no good

No, of course you don’t

You’re safe if you don’t fuck me, right?

Relax, that was a joke!

You think I did it

No, I didn’t even say anything

I hate my life

What movie was that from?

I wanted to die for months but didn’t pick up the option

Hate can give you life

I hated him so much

His threats cheered me on

Each time he fucked me I hated him more

He got smaller and smaller as my hate grew

He crawled on my famous body

I paid for it

When you pay for a man he becomes the woman

He called me old and I was paying for it

Brother, the screwing I was getting wasn’t worth the screwing I was getting

The papers call him a gangster

Are all men in dark suits gangsters?

He was no gangster

He was a whore

I need a drink

Oh sure, he beat me regular

and I paid for it

When you’re rich you pay for everything

When you fuck a star you’re an extra

and I never let him forget it

the pussy!

I loved to make an asshole of him

and became addicted to his humiliation

The lower I could make him crawl the taller I stood

Of course he understood none of this

He thought it was his possessive Latin blood

It wouldn’t occur to him that every time he hit me

he became more of a woman

I paid for each slap

All men in dark suits are gangsters

As a starlet I was frightened of grown men

They all looked like gangsters

Who else goes to nightclubs?

I learned that they would do anything for my tits

but all the men that you meet in this town are gangsters

or ferries

The brass at MGM: gangsters of movies

The industrialists gangsters of industry

The restaurateurs: Cocktail gangsters

The society boys: Gangsters of family

and all the gangsters I fucked

Grown men became little girls to me

sucking on my white tits

the cum drooling from my famous pink hole

I learned to love danger

and as I got older, even greater danger

and as the men got younger

and less powerful

I would make them gangsters

I bought him the suit

and the gun

for my protection

the only protection I needed was from him

I’m only 36

In this racket that reads 136

Wrinkles don’t really show up on film

but the makeup girl treats you like the mummy’s mother

We’ll need more work today!

And then they light you like a cracked jar

They give you Beulah Bondi’s rejects to read

And when you get home

exhausted

and only want a drink

a pill

and pyjamas

because you have to be back there at 6:00

the gigolo calls you an old fart because you don’t want to go to Ciros

so you submit to that mild form of boxing called love

Then, happy he’s earned his keep

he picks your pocket

drives off in your blonde Lincoln

and then you pass out

There’s only one definite thing about movies

when you have a tight shooting schedule:

they’ll keep you up

they’ll make you cry

they’ll beat you

they’ll leave you

but they won’t leave you alone

and you get to the studio with a headache

looking like “who did it and ran?”

You ask them to light the jewellery

the props

anything but your face

We need more work today

and tomorrow

and the next day

And then the reviews come out

“No more just a beauty!

This performance was dazzling

mature

and was an unexpected depth of character!”

I wasn’t being paid for depth

or character

or maturity

I was supposed to be beautiful

I want a drink

I don’t know what happened

I was young then I was old

I was paid for then I paid

Everything seems like it happened yesterday

Or so long ago

it happened to someone else

I’ve been called a bad woman

I don’t know

I was in a bad business that does bad things to people

And I don’t know

I was young to die

but so was he

He died in a movie star’s white bedroom

That’s better than the gutter

And I matured

as they say

I think it was him or me

I may have been part of a tragedy

but I’m not sure if the tragedy was his death or my life

or just the story around us

or if I’m capable of …

What’s the use

It was so long ago

Now we’ll never know what happened

Maybe I did it

Helene Stanley was apparently the live model on which several Disney animated characters, such as Cinderella were based. In this episode of Mike Hammer, she had some interesting mannerisms and took on more than one voice. When she thought Mike Hammer was connected in the entertainment industry she began talking like a dumb blonde. She sang “I’ll Never Smile Again” by Canadian songwriter, Ruth Lowe twice. Lowe wrote it after returning to Toronto to mourn for her husband, Harold Cohen, who died in surgery. This song was a big hit in 1940 for Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra and his young lead singer, Frank Sinatra. It was Sinatra’s first big hit.