EASY STREET
The 1930s was a good decade for Hammett. He was rich and famous (and single), hopping back and forth between Manhattan and Los Angeles to attend star-studded parties with the likes of Harpo Marx, Jean Harlow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Hammett drank and partied for days at a time. But he was also writing. He would work on movie scripts, first at Paramount and later at MGM—where he was paid $2,000 per week. In 1934 he published his fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, which spawned a series of films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. He wrote script stories for three The Thin Man sequels but found writing for Hollywood less rewarding than writing novels. So he worked as little as he could get away with and drank heavily. Result: Hammett garnered an “unreliable” reputation among the film studios. His earlier impressive productivity soon fizzled into nothing. He wanted to get away from detective fiction and write more serious novels, but could never bring himself to do it. “I quit writing because I was repeating myself,” he later explained. “It is the beginning of the end when you notice that you have style.”
Wyatt Earp was an outlaw before becoming a lawman The Dalton brothers were lawmen before becoming outlaws.
Perhaps Hammett could have written the Great American Novel had he not become such a raging alcoholic. His daughter Jo Hammett recounts in her biography, A Daughter Remembers, that the drinking “turned my father maudlin, sarcastic, and mean.” He lost focus, starting many projects and finishing none of them.
But with a steady stream of royalties coming in, he didn’t have to work, so in the 1940s Hammett became involved in leftist politics. Still stung from his strike-breaking days in Montana, Hammett became a civil rights activist and staunch opponent of Nazi Germany. Despite his age—he was in his 40s—he reenlisted to serve in World War II. They shipped him off to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, where he spent nearly three years editing a newspaper for the troops and helping train young writers to be good news correspondents. Hammett said later that this was the last happy time of his life.
LEFT OUT
When he returned home, Hammett found himself ostracized from the industry that made him famous. Moving further to the fringe, he became vice-chairman of the leftist Civil Rights Congress in 1948, an organization that the FBI called “subversive.” He also quit drinking that year, but the damage had been done—his immune system was shot, making him continuously sick with a hacking cough that was as unpleasant for Hammett as it was for those around him.
Downtrodden and out of the public eye, in 1951 Hammett was ordered to turn over a list of names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress. But he refused. Following in the footsteps of the Continental Op and Sam Spade, he remained loyal and didn’t “rat them out.” Taking the Fifth, Hammett was charged with contempt of court and thrown into federal prison for five months. When he got out, he was informed by the IRS that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. They garnished all his income from new publications or productions of his previous work. His days of being the toast of Tinseltown now seemed like ancient history. Hammett was broke and alone, and his health was deteriorating. He took a job in New York teaching creative writing just to pay the bills.
THE LAST CHAPTER
In 1953—at the height of the United States’ anti-Communist era—Hammett was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy aide Roy Cohn repeatedly asked Hammett if he was a Communist. Hammett repeatedly said no. “Were you a Communist when you wrote these books?” “No.” “Has any of the money you made from these books financed any Communist organizations?” “Not to my knowledge.” Without an admission or evidence, McCarthy could do nothing to Hammett, but the damage had been done.
Financially in ruin, Hammett had a major heart attack in 1955. He was unable to care for himself, and was taken in by a longtime friend and confidant, writer Lillian Hellman. She moved him into her Park Avenue apartment where she saw to his needs while he edited her plays. Hammett contracted lung cancer and died in 1961 at the age of 67.
EPILOGUE
“He very much wanted to be remembered as an American writer,” wrote his daughter Jo Hammett. “He was always very proud of his heritage, and it shows in his treatment of the language. Few people have written American speech as well as he did.”
But more than just an American writer, Dashiell Hammett wanted to be remembered as a true American. As a veteran of two World Wars, he requested that he be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected but was overruled. Hammett’s headstone, located in Section 12 of the cemetery, simply reads:
Samuel D. Hammett
Sergeant, U.S. Army
1894–1961
America’s 5,000 or so prisons and jails employ more than 400,000 people.
CLASSIC HAMMETT
Dashiell Hammett’s style has inspired so many writers, actors, and filmmakers that it’s nice to go to the source himself to read some of his grittiest crime prose.
Poisonville is an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of smelters’ stacks.
—Red Harvest
On Spade’s desk a limp cigarette smoldered in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged grey flakes of cigarette-ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.
—The Maltese Falcon
Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his grey eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.
The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face, a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.
“I beg y’r par’on,” he said. “’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi—eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”
The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.
—Nightmare Town
The Monopoly character locked behind bars: Jake the Jailbird. (Policeman: Officer Edgar Mallory.)
I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to see me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. “Aren’t you Nick Charles?” she asked.
I said: “Yes.”
She held out her hand. “I’m Dorothy Wynant. You don’t remember me, but you ought to remember my father, Clyde Wynant. You—”
“Sure,” I said, “and I remember you now, but you were only a kid of eleven or twelve then, weren’t you?”
“Yes, that was eight years ago. Listen: remember those stories you told me? Were they true?”
“Probably not. How is your father?”
—The Thin Man
“Don Wilson’s gone to sit at the right hand of God, if God doesn’t mind looking at bullet holes.”
“Who shot him?” I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.”
—Red Harvest
“You ought t
o have known I’d do it.” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ear. “Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”
—The Continental Op, “The Gutting of Couffignal”
“Do you think he’ll play ball with you after he’s re-elected?”
Madvig was not worried. “I can handle him.”
“Maybe, but don’t forget he’s never been licked by anything in his life.”
Madvig nodded in complete agreement. “Sure, that’s one of the best reasons I know for throwing in with him.”
“No it isn’t, Paul,” Ned Beaumont said earnestly. “It’s the very worst. Think that over even if it hurts your head. How far has this dizzy blond daughter of his got her hooks into you?”
—The Glass Key
Pretty Boy Floyd’s first robbery: At age 18 he stole $3.50 in pennies from a local post office.
KILLER KARAOKE
“And now, the end is near...” is the opening line of the song “My Way.” Alas, in some karaoke bars in the Philippines, that’s not just a lyric but an eerily accurate prediction.
HE DID IT HIS WAY
In 1968 Frank Sinatra invited 27-year-old singer/songwriter Paul Anka to dinner, where Sinatra revealed that he was thinking of retiring from the music business. He asked Anka to write a farewell song for him. Anka already had a tune—he liked the melody of a song called “Comme d’Habitude” (“As Usual”) that he’d heard while vacationing on the French Riviera. He did not like the self-pitying French lyrics about living in a loveless relationship, however, so he got the composers’ permission to write new English lyrics for it.
Anka began the lyrics that very night. As he worked, he tried to make it a song about Sinatra’s life, written from Sinatra’s point of view, heavy with swaggering bravado. He finished at 5:00 a.m. and flew out to Las Vegas to sing it to Sinatra. The song: “My Way.” It became the archetypal later-Sinatra song, so much so that Sinatra didn’t retire. It became one of the most popular, most recorded songs of all time, and a staple of karaoke bars around the world. But in one country, the Philippines, the song has taken a dark turn.
ALL YOU NEED IS DEATH
The “My Way Killings” is what Philippine newspapers call them. Nobody really knows how many people have been killed during a karaoke performance of the song, but in early 2010, the New York Times reported that there have been “at least a half-dozen” deaths in recent years. (The Asia Times estimates that the number is in the dozens.) Some of the cases include:
• A singer in a San Mateo bar who ignored a heckler who complained that the guy was singing out of tune. Midway through the song, the heckler pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the performer in the chest, killing him instantly.
• Faced by hecklers, another singer took the initiative and shot two audience members, killing one.
Alcatraz could hold 336 prisoners, but it was never filled to capacity.
• A “Sinatra-loving crowd” reportedly rushed the stage en masse and beat a singer to death for his poor performance of “My Way.” The situation so spooked employees and patrons that many karaoke bars removed the song from their machines, and families banned it from their sing-along gatherings.
As an inexpensive form of entertainment in a relatively poor country, karaoke has become an important part of Philippine culture. It’s hard to escape the sound of somebody singing along to synthesized music—you can hear it in bars and nightclubs, at family gatherings, even on the street or in malls, courtesy of coin-operated kiosks. And apparently singers take their performances seriously, taking offense at audience inattention or heckling; hard-core audiences can get ugly when someone steps up to the mike unprepared or out of tune.
MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY
But what puts “My Way” into its own category of karaoke danger? Observers suggest two possible reasons:
1. It’s sung too often. On any given night, a bar-hopper in the Philippines would likely hear “My Way” performed several times, enough to drive a music lover to despair even if it was sung well. When sung badly...well, get ready to duck.
2. Because of its arrogant lyrics. The lyrics brag about being a tough guy who follows his own course, implying that anybody who doesn’t is a loser. Perhaps Sinatra could get away with it, but when a taxi driver sings those lyrics, some listeners just want to pop the guy, or at least put him in his place.
THE END IS NEAR
In a hot, crowded bar, in a desperate society with millions of illegal handguns, it’s easy for irritation to boil up into murderous rage. Many Manila karaoke bars have now banned the singing of “My Way” to protect patrons from alcohol-fueled fights. (Even Sinatra grew to hate it. After performing it in 1984 at London’s Albert Hall, he was heard muttering, “I can’t stand that song.”) Although “My Way” is one of the most played at funerals and is even quoted on gravestones, Sinatra chose another of his songs as his epitaph: “The Best Is Yet to Come.”
Mugging someone on a subway in Britain can get you life in prison.
UNCLE JOHN’S
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Uncle John’s True Crime Page 33