Lint

by Steve Aylett

  MAN 2: I don’t like killer bees, and in the spirit of “do unto others”, have never forced them upon acquaintances. Can you honestly say the same?

  MAN 1: Some things are added, others remain—like a live leg on a wooden body.

  Lint’s script specifies that at the end, the two speakers should flip their visors up to reveal the faces of grinning chimps, the camera sweeping from one chimp close-up to another while the soundtrack provides a ‘revelatory blare of horns’. The ‘pirate’ spaceman effigy then bursts into flames and the ruddy conflagration finally freeze-frames behind slowly rising credits and Sinatra’s elegiac ‘It Was a Very Good Year’.

  Turnour knew the script as a whole was a non-starter but spotted an angle—Columbia was working up a screen version of Funny Girl, a stage musical about comedic showgirl Fanny Brice. He saw that Lint’s gift for imagery could be adapted and suggested the burning effigy setup to director William Wyler. A showroom of mannequins would burn, House of Wax-style. ‘The Brice screenplay was still clunky, stagey. They wanted to make it more cinematic—and this was the perfect solution. It dramatised visually the obliterative exploitation of Brice’s and other women’s bodies. It was stark, horrific, unforgettable. We handed it to Wyler on a plate.’ The blistering firestorm was to form the centrepiece of the movie while being presaged by intense nightmares that plague Brice throughout, the hellish inferno even segueing ominously in and out as she sings ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’. Lint also suggested that the wooden Nicky Arnstein (played by Omar Sharif) should begin ‘clacking his jaws and jangling like a puppet’ while laughing demonically at the end of the ‘You Are a Woman’ scene. Wyler drew the line. He had never really understood the idea and finally threw it out altogether. Today the film looks dated, and the only remaining glimpse of the ‘Fanny fire’ can be seen in some prints of the opening scene in the Ziegfield Theatre where Streisand stops at a mirror to say ‘Hello, gorgeous’ as phantom flames rage behind her reflection.

  By the time of Funny Girl’s release in 1968, however, Lint was already working on two major screenplays. This had come about by his taking credit for Barbarella and everything else Terry Southern had ever done and by never mentioning his very real connection with Catty and the Major. The first and biggest project was his screenplay for a biopic of General George S. Patton, focusing on his military career commanding troops in North Africa, Sicily and France during World War II.

  Kiss Me, Mister Patton was a sprawling work full of detail and incredible set-pieces. Lint had been fascinated by the antics of J. Edgar Hoover in Foggy Hen, the much-pirated home movie in which Hoover croaks to camera for three long hours, constantly repeating the words ‘I feel funny. Let’s go and play.’ He wanted to bring a similar sense of precocious inner life to Patton, and wrote him as a fanciful tyrant who wears live otter boots, stands up in moving jeeps and often walks about naked except for a barrel held up with braces. He keeps lurching during parade as though about to topple, but always catching himself at the last moment with a loud burst of laughter. He kills a monkey and makes an impromptu medal out of its nose. As he sits at the sewing machine, flushed and energetic, he shouts above the rattle of stitching, ‘This’ll give Rommel something to think about.’ When he threatens to shoot a soldier in the hospital for refusing to get to the front and fight, the soldier begins larking about, fellating the gun barrel and generally acting the bender. Patton begins to snigger, unable to maintain his stony front.

  Lint was told that the title role was to be played by George C. Scott and soon began modelling the part around the actor’s craggy features and raspy, distinctive voice. Lint admired Scott and the two got on well. A man of robust humour, Scott even agreed with Lint’s insistence that Patton should always look ‘boggle-eyed’ and a pair of prosthetic eyes were created. Screen-tests still exist of Scott barking orders in the strange lenses but the notion was ultimately abandoned due to a coincidental and striking resemblance to Richard Nixon. Scott nearly ruptured himself laughing about the scene in which Patton mutters for eleven minutes on the joys of being a ‘beaver magnet’—Patton finally mumbles into incoherence, trails off and is left staring into empty air for another eight minutes of complete silence.

  ‘The first half of the movie,’ Terry Southern later commented, ‘could be interpreted in so many different ways that the implications really went over the heads of the studio boys. After the tank-dressing scene, though—which was like something straight out of the Consolation Playhouse—the whole thing just flies off the living handle.’

  This scene, based on the ‘well-dressing’ tradition of rural England, has the troops covering the M4 Shermans with flowers and fruits in a celebration of nature’s bounty. Patton then suggests that the tanks should be disguised as gigantic otters. The size would also cause pilots to misjudge their altitude and ascend, he reasons. Karl Malden’s performance as Bradley would have been well served had he been allowed to shout Lint’s dialogue into the field telephone as the bombs exploded around him: ‘I injected the general’s sausages this morning and am flabbergasted at the slow spread of the poison! What the hell did you send me—lemonade?’

  The spectacular ‘Dance of the Tiger Tanks’ which Lint envisaged as a finale, their balletic manoeuvres viewed from above as Strauss’s Tales From the Vienna Woods plays and Patton’s gritty voice-over remarks that he’s ‘Bored with everything,’ can now only be imagined. Upon reading the script, director Franklin J. Schaffner is reputed to have placed it behind his car and reversed carefully over it, rubbernecking backward in silence during the procedure. The movie was rewritten from scratch by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, the title shortened simply to Patton. The only Lint idea that survived was Patton standing up in the moving jeep, but with all haemorrhoid references excised, his behaviour was rendered meaningless.

  At the time of the movie’s release in 1970, Lint was bidding farewell to another project. He had been instantly ejected from Kubrick’s 2001 team when he suggested that the Starchild should have ‘tusks’ and, coming straight off Patton and the previous disaster of his Star Trek episode, Lint wanted to attempt something classical, mannered and epicene. Frightful Murder at Hampton Place was a murder mystery set in an English stately home, all tennis and dinner parties. Intrigue, dispatch and disappearance are interwoven with clever dialogue and ice-cool observation. Mr Singleton Haft calls to take tea with his sometime friend Lord ‘Bumpy’ Bumperton and other guests. Lord Bumperton remarks upon the apparent disappearance of his daughter and though all are suspect, they are more concerned with clever chat.

  ‘Pies exist to provide a mystery that may be quickly solved and then thrown aside in anger,’ says Bumperton.

  ‘I think you and I have quite different experiences when it comes to pies, Bumpy,’ quips Haft. ‘I love ’em, and push my nose through ‘em like a snowplough.’

  The vicar chides him, threatening eternal torment in Hades.

  ‘Hell again?’ Haft remarks to the vicar. ‘This religion of yours is a firetrap.’

  Frightful Murder at Hampton Place is a masterpiece of Firbankian manners, and when Lint signed it away to meet his alimony, it was with a jaded foreknowledge. Totally rewritten at MGM and relocated to contemporary New York, the movie was released as Shaft in 1971.

  Lint was by now utterly embittered with the movie industry and returned to hurling sarcastic, holier-than-thou gibes at Terry Southern. The final blow was the complete eradication of his dialogue work for Brando in The Nightcomers. Brando was supposed to stand in the garden and mumble ‘There’s a peach in the way—my path is blocked. Hey, look at it. Love me, love me.’ Brando, famous for muffing his lines, ad-libbed an approximation that included the half-whispered statement ‘Five curses I lay on thee—lice, failure, leprosy, ambition … and the worst of these is a marrow-deep complacency in regard to our political so-called leaders.’ Ironically, it was the political tone of this remark that soured the studios on Lint’s screenwriting. The scene was removed and Lint quit
movie writing forever. It had been a sorry episode. Rather than a keen mind in high gear, his movie phase shows a creative force utterly muddled and compromised. Lint knew he needed to return to the book, and it was with a blast of fact-based truculence that he did so.

  15

  RIGOR MORTIS: LINT’S JFK BOOK

  Ingersoll · Magic Bullet · accident or frivolity · Flaming Energy Clown · Umbrella man · festival of sadness · knife attack

  Lint had touched upon the subject of presidential assassination in his story ‘The State of the Union Earful’, an alternate history tale in which Robert G. Ingersoll agreed to keep his beliefs to himself and so was allowed the Governorship of the State of Illinois and went on to become President. The story follows the preparations of an assassin in parallel with Ingersoll imploding with guilt and self-hatred, as he senses a swirling black pit at his centre. Finally Ingersoll begins to physically implode during a public appearance, his centre rushing backward into darkness even as the assassin’s bullet approaches. Lint then shows us the screaming soul of the President tearing through infernal dimensions, the tardy bullet forever pursuing him.10

  Rigor Mortis uses the suspicion helix of the JFK murder as a grand staircase by which Lint enters political discourse wearing only a training bra and a sort of seaweed bonnet. It got him into some scrapes that did nothing to improve his state of mind.

  Lint loved the Magic Bullet theory, in which a single bullet had to swerve around to account for several wounds and thus discount the possibility of multiple shooters. ‘The argument resembles an invocation,’ he stated, and in Rigor Mortis coined the phrase he would repeat in the Easy Prophecy series: ‘America’s make-believe is more dangerous than its reality.’

  Extending the Warren Commission’s flight of fancy, Lint theorizes that the Magic Bullet was a ricochet from that fired by John Wilkes Booth at Lincoln in 1865. In outline, the bullet entered through Lincoln’s left ear and emerged through his right eye, swerving out of Washington’s Ford’s Theatre and heading north, felling politician Thomas D’Arcy McGee as he walked to his home on Sparks Street, Ottawa; ricocheting back along its original course, the bullet hit President James Garfield as he boarded a train at the Baltimore & Potomac railroad station, piercing his back, making a dramatic U-turn and piercing his back again, emerging in perfect condition to travel east across the Atlantic to create three separate wounds in King Umberto I of Italy and exiting the corpse at a right angle—in Buffalo the bullet nicked off a button of President McKinley’s vestcoat, then made a 360-degree turn and entered McKinley’s stomach, continuing east again to Finland, where it wounded Russian governor general Bobrikov in the stomach before circling back to pass through his neck at an angle that put it on course for the east coast of America, slamming into Theodore Roosevelt’s chest, where its path was slightly diverted by a metal glasses case and slowed by the fifty-page speech that Roosevelt had double-folded in his breast pocket—it left the unharmed ex-president, picking up speed until it had enough inertial force to penetrate the midriff of President Francisco Madero in Mexico City and ricochet north-east to take out King George of Greece in Salonica. Curving north to Sarajevo, the bullet hit the Archduchess Sofia in the abdomen and Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary close to the heart before spanging southwest to the Mexican town of Chinameca where it looped through Emiliano Zapata, causing multiple wounds and continuing this spiral motion until its encounter with the sleeping Venustiano Carranza, president of Mexico—orbital inertia seems to have sent the bullet hurtling back across the Atlantic to Warsaw’s Palace of Fine Arts, where it blew three distinct wounds in President Gabriel Narutowicz of Poland and spent around four years following Benito Mussolini, occasionally darting at him like a wasp but without any lasting harm until heading Stateside again, blasting through the abdomen of mayor of Chicago Anton Cermak and injuring four other bystanders in Bayfront Park Miami, but missing Franklin D. Roosevelt entirely, turning left in mid-air and hurtling to Vienna, where it connected with Engelbert Dollfuss, chancellor of Austria. The ricochet pattern continued as the round crossed the pond again to the outskirts of Mexico City, where it bounced cleanly in and out of Leon Trotsky’s skull, circling the globe to weave three wounds through Mahatma Gandhi and kill Liaquat Ali Khan, first prime minister of Pakistan, in Rawalpindi; narrowly missing Harry S. Truman in Washington, it fatally wounded Anastasio Somoza, president of Nicaragua, Carlos Castillo Armas, president of Guatemala, and Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike outside his home in Sri Lanka—then set a course for the face of Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister of South Africa, where it was not slow in entering his right cheek, emerging again and entering his right ear, but failing to kill Verwoerd, though upping the wound count the following year with the death of Patrice Lumumba, former premier of the Congo in Katanga in the former Belgian Congo, the bullet entering Lumumba and two of his former ministers so many times that they appeared to have been mowed down by a CIA-appointed firing squad. The bullet made its way to Jackson, Mississippi, hitting Medgar Evers in the back, curving eastward to ricochet wildly around South Vietnam during the US-instigated coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, leaving them dead, and bouncing west to Texas where only twenty days later it entered Kennedy’s back, coursed through his upper chest, sloped upward, came out the front of his neck, swerved right and down, struck Governor Connally in the right of his back, pierced a lung, broke a rib, moved downward to emerge from the governor’s right chest, turned right and plunged into the back of his right forearm, came out the other side of the wrist, dodged sideways and ended its long journey by burying itself in his left thigh, from which it emerged later in near-pristine condition. At this point Lint claimed to fully support Warren’s theory that, though shot from behind, Kennedy threw himself violently backward out of ‘sheer cussedness’.

  Lint further claimed that Kennedy fired Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs disaster with the words ‘Pilot the floor of things and stretch like a caterpillar, Allen.’ He also stated that Kennedy named one of his dogs Stingray Hernia, that he told Richard Bissell ‘Don’t worry, I’m just a charismatic cloud’ when firing him, and that he asked J. Edgar Hoover ‘Why so crafty?’ and, turning to Bobby, answered his own question with ‘Perhaps he’s tired of being tiny and goggle-eyed, eh?’ at which the brothers exploded into sniggery laughter. Kennedy often gripped Hoover’s cheeks and flapped them like pants pockets. On one occasion Kennedy is said to have upended a barrel of fat over Hoover’s head and then kicked him down the stairs. Kennedy would flicker his eyelids rapidly when Hoover entered the room in order to give the little man’s movements a visually ‘Chaplinesque’ quality. In the face of such incidents, Lint claimed, ‘the Intelligence community became hostile to Kennedy’.

  ‘Who gave the order?’ Lint asked, and dismissed the orders of authority as a nonsense: ‘When you see clearly you will see how commands have no real basis. They begin at a point in mid-air that happens to be occupied by a person.’

  But elsewhere in the book a handwritten note is reproduced, supposedly in LBJ’s hand, which says: ‘An accident or frivolity must retire his ambitions. Gills work together—let’s do the same. Love always, Lynny.’ Such flowery language doesn’t sound like Johnson, however. Even as Mac Wallace and his team were moving into position on the morning of November 22, LBJ put it more succinctly to his mistress Madeleine Brown: ‘That goddamn fucking Irish mafia bastard Kennedy will never embarrass me again.’

  Even the conspirators’ mistakes fed into the desired result. The term ‘rifle among Oswald’s possessions’ passed into the evidence and Report despite the fact that it was an order, not an evidentiary observation.

  Some of Lint’s assertions are, though harmless, unsupported by anything but his own truss. He seemed to add a bunch of witnesses who didn’t actually exist, such as the ‘Tiger Man’ and Mr. Cracklehat, a high priest who had to be ‘sewn into his morality each morning’. The Tiger Man appears to have begun as his name for m
arksman Billy Sol Estes, but then splits off to become a boss-eyed wondercat that capers cartoonlike through Lint’s scenario. Another witness was simply called the clown, and this chimera has taken on a life of its own in conspiracy circles to become known as the ‘Flaming Energy Clown’. Lint claims this jug-eared performer was responsible for the killing of Officer Tippit on Tenth Street less than an hour after the Kennedy hit and that the clown turned himself in a week later. The story is that the clown’s accomplice deliberately attracted cop attention by reckless driving and, upon being pulled over, signalled the clown to burst from the trunk with guns blazing. It seems the clown stated that the reason he had killed Tippit was the same reason he now came forward to confess it—that no one else had taken the responsibility. Commentators have opined that he was actually resentful at the lack of respect given clowns and that the attention hogged by the assassination earlier that afternoon was the final straw. Either way this concealed evidence blows the Oswald case wide open. JFK investigator Kane Sommers has since presented evidence that the clown had performed regularly at Ruby’s Carousel Club.

  In the days before Oswald’s intelligence links had been uncovered it was standard procedure to focus on the apparently tenuous connections between Oswald and the strange cast of possible intel personnel around him, such as small-fry spook David Ferrie, who had been training anti-Castro Cubans—possibly out of 544 Camp Street, an address used by ex-FBI man Guy Banister and, on paper at least, by fourth gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.11 Jim Garrison had claimed there was a connection between Ferrie and Banister, and Lint pinpointed the connection—Jim Garrison, who knew both men. In fact Lint has a whale of a time connecting the hapless New Orleans district attorney to everything, even suggesting that he might have been the clown who ran amok in the Dallas suburbs after the assassination.12 Lint later explained in a series of letters to Neil Kourbelas of Bellyful Zine: ‘The authorities’ attempt at creating a tamperproof reality from lies had already failed, but instead there was a mass of absurdities too confusing to navigate, which was just as effective. I thought I could make the whole structure sick to dying by injecting it with superior absurdities. Like anyone who wants to really make a case, I should have just stuck to the ballistics evidence.’ Lint had underestimated the extent to which the murder now dwelt in a compound dimension of real life and suspicion, and that whatever nonsense he threw at it would be taken up to further blur matters.