by John Pinkney
As a young actor he was rehearsing for a season of Romeo and Juliet - and for his title role was expected to appear in a simple red velvet doublet formerly worn by Lawrence Olivier.
To his extreme annoyance he discovered that the wardrobe mistress, a Mrs Lewis, had tried to improve this simple costume by covering it with sequins.
‘I blew my top,’ Guinness reveals - ‘(and) said they must all be ripped off or I wouldn’t wear it.’
Still seething, he went home to his theatrical digs, where wife Merula was in the kitchen preparing a haddock dinner. Through the open door to the sitting room he was continuing to rant indignantly about the wardrobe department’s tastelessness when he noticed, on the mantelpiece, a grey lump of plasticine, presumably left there by a previous tenant’s child.
He picked up the plasticine and began to model it into a crude figurine, while telling Merula, half-laughingly, what he was doing. ‘You are Mrs Lewis,’ he said, ‘and I’ve found a needle and I’m going to stick it into you.’
From the kitchen Merula immediately screamed that he must not do such a thing - it was very wicked. Guinness called back that he was only joking, and would not stick the needle into the figurine’s middle, but merely into its left foot. He added a foot, plunged the needle into it, then forgot the entire silly business and enjoyed his dinner.
An hour later he was back at the theatre, where he was greeted by ashen faces. Mrs Lewis had just been taken away by ambulance. She had dropped a hot iron on her foot.
Guinness asked which foot it was and was told - the left foot. ‘She was in terrible agony. I hope they don’t have to amputate it.’
Alec Guinness reports, ‘They didn’t. I have remained conscience-stricken and chastened ever since.’
The Deaths that Dogged a
Famous Family
Sometimes an entire family can fall under the influence of events so malign, and so persistently similar, that they seem to defy coincidence. In that respect, members of Britain’s Guinness family have had much in common with the American Kennedys.
Both dynasties are respected, rich, and (at least in popular belief) jinxed. The ‘curse’ that cut a black swathe of suicide, assassination and illness through the golden Kennedy clan has been endlessly documented. The hoodoo which seemingly has hung over Britain’s leading brewers created a comparably pernicious pattern. The baneful roll-call included:
Olivia Guinness, who choked to death on her own vomit in an Oxford University common room.
Guinness heiress Tara Browne, who died in a Chelsea car smash.
Lady Henrietta Guinness, who drowned after falling from an aqueduct in Spoleto, Italy.
Guinness heiress Janet Moore, who drowned in her bath the following month.
Major Dennys Guinness, who was found dead on his Hampshire estate - an empty pill bottle beside him.
Former prime ministerial adviser John Guinness, who survived a head-on collision in Norfolk, only to find that his four-year-old son had been killed and another son seriously hurt.
The author Arthur Koestler speculated that ‘jinxes’ of this kind might be ‘a form of psychic disease’ infecting a family for a century or more before petering out.
The ‘Unlucky’ Play that Actors Avoid
Macbeth is the only play by Shakespeare in which evil incantations and witchcraft play a prominent part. From its first performance in 1606 the doom-laden drama has been beset by misfortunes - becoming known as the unluckiest play in world theatre.
In his book The Curse of Macbeth (1983) the veteran British actor Richard Huggett opined that Shakespeare ‘went a little too far’ when in Scene Three he introduced the witches’ potion which begins with the words ‘Fillet of a fenny’s snake…’ Out of those verses, Huggett believed, was born a curse spanning four centuries of ‘death, doom and disaster’. The superstitious lawmakers of the Bard’s time were ahead of Huggett. After seeing early performances of the play they banned it for five years.
By 1611, however, opinions had changed - and Macbeth was allowed to reopen at the Globe Theatre. The building burned down soon afterward. The mishap shocked the people of Elizabethan England - and the authorities demanded that all references to black magic be removed from the text. Even in its rewritten form, the increasingly notorious drama did not reappear until 1667.
In 1794, when rationalism, scientific enquiry and abhorrence of credulity were flourishing, a London theatre’s enlightened management decided to restore the original text. With it, the malediction returned. Across England, theatrical companies were plagued by mysterious fires, collapsing sets, genuine injuries inflicted in the fight scenes, and technical failures of many kinds. Particularly disturbing were the numerous ‘freezes’ in which actors forgot their lines at crucial moments.
By the dawn of the 19th century numerous performers were refusing to appear in Macbeth, even if (as most did) they needed the money. And it had become traditional among nervous thespians never to utter the drama’s name - describing it instead as That Play…The Unmentionable… The Comedy of Glamis…The Scottish Play…The Caledonian Tragedy…or even Harry Lauder.
Lowlights of the chronicle of calamities associated with Macbeth include:
Amsterdam, 1672. In a scene involving a dagger, actor Jan de Hoffmeyr used a real knife to kill his rival for the attentions of an actress in the cast. He did not win the lady’s heart.
Moscow, 1907. During a Russian-language performance, the prompter failed to prompt and was found dead in his box.
Leeds, 1952. During the potion scene, one of the witches dancing around the cauldron collapsed and died.
Portugal, 1964. On the third night of a performance the theatre burned down. It had stood for more than 300 years.
New York, 1965. A young actor appearing in an off-Broadway production was knifed to death near the theatre. Several days later the company manager was murdered with a knife in his apartment - and another actor suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on stage.
Samuel Beckett and His
Death-Bringing Dramas
William Shakespeare was not alone in writing dramatic material which seemed to trigger deaths.
Playwright Samuel Beckett: suspended lifelong in a sticky web of ill-luck’.
The Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett (creator of Waiting for Godot) often gloomily remarked that he had been suspended lifelong in a web of ill-luck and black coincidence. Beckett liked to remind interviewers that he was born on Friday, 13 April. And he was openly distressed by the number of actors who had appeared in his plays and died soon afterward.
Other members of his performance teams were involved too. Alan Schneider, who had directed all of Beckett’s productions in the United States, was killed on a London zebra crossing in 1984, moments after posting a letter to the playwright. By an odd coincidence the doctor who attended the dying man was also called Beckett.
The Controversial
‘Curse of Superman’
The ancient Greeks believed their gods would destroy anyone who displayed hubris: arrogance and pride that sacrilegiously trespassed on the deities’ hallowed territory. For much of the 20th century, actors associated with the Superman franchise had reason to ponder on that old superstition. It wasn’t that these performers had been arrogant - well, not unduly anyway. Their error (in the view of those who held such beliefs) was that they’d played the role of a god - a sure recipe for attracting a violent reminder of one’s own mortality.
The Man of Steel movies and TV series brought so much misery to people who prominently appeared in or were associated with them that the media found shorthand to describe the syndrome: The Curse of Superman. Many commentators have disputed that there is any jinx at all, but the victim list makes thought-provoking reading nonetheless.
First to suffer - lifelong - were the two 17-year-old artists who created the interplanetary hero. In 1938, too impatient to see a lawyer, Jerry Siegeland Joe Schuster sold Superman to the company that would become DC Comics
. They received a contract, of sorts. The corporation went on to coin countless millions from Superman comic books, paperback novels, toys, clothes, sponsorships, radio serials cartoon shorts and movies while Siegel and Schuster remained freelance artists struggling to make a living. As they grew older the jobs dried up. At one stage of his shattered career the financially strapped Jerry Siegel was forced to take a job with the US post office, processing parcels.
In the late 1970s America’s National Cartoonists’ Society, backed by the Writers’ Guild and such prominent authors as Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, managed to pressure the corporate rights-holders to pay the two moral owners of Superman $20,000 a year each, for life. Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster welcomed the handout, but it was a bitterly small reward for the creators of what Mailer called ‘America’s great mythic icon’.
The bitterness continued after Siegel’s and Schuster’s deaths, with their heirs continuing to fight the corporations in court. In 2002 Superman comic book No. 1 sold at auction for $US110,000. By 2006 its estimated worth was $250,000.
Actors were next to feel the cold breath of the purported jinx. Kirk Alyn had made 40 Hollywood movies before he was contracted to star in Superman (1948), followed in 1950 by Atom Man vs Superman. Both films were highly successful - but after they appeared Alyn seldom worked again. He later told the Los Angeles Times, ‘After Superman I could never get another job in Hollywood. Playing that part ruined my career. I’m bitter about the whole thing.’ Alyn, who had seemed to embody the glamorous Los Angeles lifestyle, retired to Arizona, where he died.
The second major performer to don the bright red boots and cape was George Reeves, a rising actor who had been one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone With the Wind. Reeves was flattered when asked to play the demigod from Krypton in the 1950s TV series. But when the show ended, he too found it almost impossible to get other work. He believed his breakthrough had come when he was cast in the classic film From Here to Eternity - but his scenes were deleted after members of a test audience laughed and burst into ironic applause when they recognised Superman. Following years of unemployment and alcoholism Reeves shot himself - or was murdered.
Next to play Clark Kent and Lois Lane wereChristopher Reeve (no relation to George Reeves) and Margot Kidder. In publicity interviews for 1978’s Superman: The Movie, both performers denied that they either feared or believed in a curse. But jinx or not, they were to suffer cruel misfortune. Reeve starred successfully in the original film and three sequels. Then, on 27 May 1995, he was thrown from his horse during a cross-country riding event. Paralysed from the neck down he courageously continued his acting career to the greatest extent he could - campaigning also for increased research into spinal injuries. He died of heart failure on 10 October 2004.
The following year Christopher Reeve’s widow Dana Reeve publicly revealed that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She had never smoked. She died of the cancer on 6 March 2006, aged 45.
In 1990 Reeve’s co-star Margot Kidder was involved in a car accident that forced her temporarily into a wheelchair. In 1996 she declared bankruptcy with debts of more than $3 million. She then suffered a mental breakdown, hacking off her hair with a razorblade and accusing strangers of plotting to kill her. Police rescued her from a ditch in Los Angeles in which she was hiding. In 2002 she broke her pelvis in a second road smash. Happily she recovered from her mental and physical problems and has worked steadily, mainly on TV, ever since.
Les Quigley, who appeared as the baby Kal-EI in Superman: The Movie died in March 1991 after inhaling solvents. He was 14.
Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s biological father Jor-EI, was beset by personal tragedies. In 1990 Brando’s son Christian was tried for shooting Dag Drollet, the lover of his half-sister Cheyenne. Found guilty of voluntary manslaughter he was sentenced to 10 years’ jail. Five years later, 25-year-old Cheyenne, still distraught over Drollet’s death, hanged herself. On 1 July 2004 Brando, despairing and ill, died aged 80. The cause of death was lung failure. Chronically obese, he had also suffered from congestive heart disease, diabetes and liver cancer.
* * *
Producers had hoped to begin production of the new film in the franchise, Superman Returns, as early as 2003. Their problem was that they could find nobody to play the leading role. Nicolas Cage said no - as did Brendan Fraser, Josh Hartnett and Keanu Reeves (again, no relation).
But finally, in another of those peculiar name-echoes that resound around Superman, the studio - denied a Brendan - found a Brandon: 25-year-oldBrandon Routh. Working as a waiter when the call came, Routh was ecstatically happy to sign up for ‘the riskiest job in Hollywood’. Like Christopher Reeve in 1978, he was virtually unknown, with only a few tiny TV roles to his credit. But critics and public admired his swashbuckling style and Superman Returns made respectable profits.
In February 2006 Tribune Media journalist Daniel Feinberg asked Routh whether he was worried by the Superman curse. Routh replied, ‘I’m nodding my head, but I’m thinking “What curse?” To me it means nothing. There are a lot of things that happened to people, but I don’t think of it as a curse.’
In July 2006 Routh fell off his motorbike, catapulting over the handlebars. Two women helped him off the road and an ambulance took him to hospital. Disbelievers in the jinx theory would be completely justified in dismissing this minor accident as merely the latest in a decades-long chain of coincidences.
In the dark history of Superman there is more:
In the late 1930s brothers Max and Dave Fleischer founded Fleischer Studios, which produced the feature-length Gulliver’s Travels and later the cartoon shorts Popeye and Betty Boop. In 1940 the studio secured the rights to make a series of 10-minute Superman cartoons. Staff artists animated and backdropped these beautiful shorts so brilliantly that they still sell on DVD today, 66 years later. Shortly after work on Superman began, the Fleischer brothers fell out. Their quarrel bankrupted the studio, which was then swallowed by Paramount. Dave, his fortune gone, found work as a special effects adviser. Max died in poverty in a film industry charity hospital.
In 1963 DC Comics asked President John F. Kennedy for permission to use him as a character in a planned Superman comic book. The story would support the president’s plans for improving young people’s health. Kennedy and his advisers approved the request. But on 22 November 1963 the storyboard was hastily scrapped. President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Years later, an eerie fact came to light. A collector noticed that a Superman comic book had ‘predicted’ President Kennedy’s murder - 24 years before it happened. The picture story, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, was published by DC Comics in October 1939. It contains names and places hauntingly similar to the events that would occur in Dallas. In the antique comic, reporter Clark Kent’s editor sends him out to cover the killing of a ‘Jack Kennedy’. A suspect asserts, ‘I didn’t do it’ - a statement similar to that of Lee Harvey Oswald who, in his Dallas jail cell a quarter-century later, would tell reporters, ‘I didn’t shoot anybody.’
In the comic, the Man of Steel (alias Kent) traces the real Kennedy-killing culprit to the Hilow Club, where he questions two performers, Evelyn Curry and Bea Carroll. This scene also contains glimpses of future events. In real-life Dallas, Jack Ruby - who later shot Oswald - owned the Carousel Club. Two of the performers who worked there gave long statements to police. Their names were Rose Cherami (a surname with the same initial and e-sound ending as the comic book’s ‘Curry’) and Karen Bennett Carlin (whose middle name and surname bear the same initials as the comic’s ‘Bea Carroll’).
Most intriguing of all are the names of the fictional and real-life nightclubs, Hilow and Carousel. A student of precognition would be entitled to speculate that when Superman’s creators named their club the Hilow, they might unconsciously have been thinking of the up-and-down (high-low) motion of the horses on a carousel.
Superman was always more than a pulp comic. From t
he start it seemed infused with a mythic grandeur, most cogently expressed in the opening scenes of the 1978 film. Superman’s legend-and-religion-inspired theme of a godlike figure descended to earth inspired many imitations, but none captured its soul. Quite possibly the teenagers who wrote and drew the original episodes did not fully understand what they were creating. Nor might they have foreseen the power (and arguably the phenomena) their innocent storytelling would unleash.
* * *
The Man Who Vanished
from the Sky
Strange Disappearances,
Deaths
* * *
International police files contain the names of tens of thousands of people who have quietly exited from their everyday existence: winking out like glow worms in the night. But Alfred Loewenstein, the world’s third-richest man, could not be counted among them. After his perplexing death Loewenstein became even more celebrated than he had been in life. When he perished - in circumstances that defied imagination - news of his fate resounded around the planet, and has been the subject of argument ever since. Loewenstein left two mysterious legacies. The first was the vast and splendid tomb in which he was buried (a marble monument on which his name would never be inscribed). And the second: the persistent legend that his ‘shadow’, a short stocky silhouette, had been uncannily found on an inner wall of the plane from which he vanished in mid-air…
AT 10 MINUTES TO SIX on the warm summer evening of 4 July 1928 Captain Alfred Loewenstein, 51, boarded his private aircraft at Croydon airport near London. Accompanying him were several senior members of his staff. Although he had won considerable renown as a ‘gentleman aviator’, Loewenstein was too busy today to take charge of the plane. His pilot Donald Drew was already at the controls.