By way of an introduction to this selection of lobby cards from the spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic, let me tell you something about the film’s author, Derek Marlowe who wrote a series of bestselling novels in various genres during the sixties and seventies.

You could say Marlowe is one of my favorite writers. I was drawn to his work in my early teens because of the artfulness of his writing, the beauty of his style. I’d had a fill of the MacLean’s and Innes’s and all the other boyhood adventure yarns and was edging towards something heavier—Kafka and Camus and Sartre, Hemingway, and Chandler—when I first picked up a copy of Echoes of Celandine, or The Disappearance as it was later reissued to tie-in with the Donald Sutherland film. This was a story of a hitman, a rather disillusioned hitman, who has one final job to complete which results in some rather tragic events. Unlike the hard-nosed prose of other thriller writers, Marlowe told his tales with a spellbinding lyricism which knocked me for six.

Maybe it was the confluence of age, location, and teenage years, where passions can turn both absurd and romantic, or perhaps a kind of generational thing, as the similarly-aged eminent author Nicholas Royle (who you should also read) tuned in around the same time and still considers Marlowe his “favorite author.”

Marlowe’s style made me aware of the joy and tremendous power to be found in good writing and how a story could be told in oblique and very unexpected ways. A big influence on Marlowe’s writing was, perhaps unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I suppose it could be argued there are elements of The Great Gatsby filtered throughout Marlowe’s work—even the title of his last novel The Rich Boy from Chicago is a trifle Fitzgeraldean. Marlowe kept a copy of Fitzgerald’s Afternoon of the Author with him throughout his life. His copy had been given to him as a Christmas present in 1960, which he annotated with notes until his death in 1996. To reuse a quote from Arthur Mizener’s introduction to this book, Marlowe, like Fitzgerald, wrote books where the sense of the past is sharp with a “memory for the precise feelings of a time and for the objects to which these feelings cling.” This is seen in nearly all his books but most notably A Single Summer with L.B., Echoes of Celandine, Do You Remember England?, The Rich Boy from Chicago, and his very first novel A Dandy in Aspic.

Born in 1938 into a London east end working-class family, Marlowe first came to note after being sent down from university for writing a satirical piece on exams and lecturers. By a circuitous route, this led Marlowe to write plays for the Royal Court Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s, which as he once told me was always quite “off-the-cuff”:

“Someone comes along in a bookshop and says, ‘Would you adapt The Lower Depths for the Royal Shakespeare Company?’ which to me seems extraordinary.”

Though highly proficient at it, Marlowe found writing plays all a bit too easy. Through his work, he became friends with a variety of artists and writers, like actor Corin Redgrave, artist Pauline Boty (who painted his portrait) and most notably the writers Tom Stoppard and Piers Paul Read with whom he attended a writer and filmmaker’s course in Berlin sponsored by the Ford Foundation. [Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre was also a part of this course.] On return to London circa 1965, Marlowe, Stoppard, and Read roomed together. While Stoppard focussed solely on writing plays, Marlowe decided to try his hand at writing a novel something which he had started while in Berlin. This was A Dandy in Aspic which Marlowe had originally intended as a play, but he “wrote it as a novel and found [he] suddenly enjoyed it.”

“I wrote it on trains, on the loo, everywhere. I loved actually writing prose, I thought it was smashing. When the book was actually bought, and published by Victor Gollancz and then became a bestseller in America, then made a movie out of it, I thought, ‘My God, writing is easy, isn’t it?’ I learned, of course, that I had the luckiest four-years in my life.”

When Stoppard first heard about Marlowe’s plans to write a spy thriller, he thought him mad, as Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre had more than cornered that market. But when Marlowe told Stoppard what his story was about, the playwright quickly changed his mind. A Dandy in Aspic tells the story of a spy, Eberlin, assigned to find and kill a Russian assassin called Krasnevin. Unfortunately for Eberlin, he is a double-agent working for the Russians and is himself this murderous assassin Krasnevin.

Marlowe once told me how he recalled watching television with Stoppard and Read while idly discussing where their careers might take them.

“I remember once, we were watching Top of the Pops, and Mick Jagger was singing ‘Satisfaction’ and we talked about who was going to get the first million dollars—or whatever. And we all thought Tom would be it—the first person, not a question of top dog, but make big money. [As it turned out] It was myself with Dandy merely by a whisker, because Tom got it with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Piers with Alive.”

Marlowe’s novel was an immediate and enormous success on both sides of the Atlantic. The film rights were sold and a movie made starring Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtney, and Peter Cook, with a soundtrack by Quincy Jones. Marlowe was then “whipped around America” by his publisher Puttnam. He felt wonderful and was “arrogant, cocky, absolutely appalling.”

“Don’t forget this was ’65-’66, this was the time of The Beatles, of Julie Christie, of Swinging London, of Time magazine going crazy over this small city we’re in now. And because, I was then, what 25? 26? I had a Beatle haircut, and of course, I was the most obnoxious person ever, but adorable.”

A Dandy in Aspic was directed by Anthony Mann, who is best-known for his westerns like The Furies, Winchester ‘73, Bend in the River, and The Naked Spur, his film noir movies like Strangers in the Night, Two O’Clock Courage, and Strange Impersonation, alongside his mainstream hits like The Glenn Miller Story. Mann died of a heart attack during filming and was replaced by Harvey as director, which as Marlowe said, was a bit like the Mona Lisa touching up her portrait when Leonardo was out of the room. Though it was scripted by Marlowe, the film excised much of what was good about the novel and veered between a gritty realism (probably Mann’s direction) and a rather camp pop art sensibility (probably Harvey’s) take for example, Tom Courtney’s performance as Gatiss with his oddly phallic machine gun umbrella—WTF?.

Released in 1968, A Dandy in Aspic did reasonably well and has since become something of a kind of cult flick for its compelling story and strange filmic style. Marlowe went on to write a total of nine novels, which are currently being republished by Silvertail Books, and a load of movie and television scripts. He died from a brain hemorrhage while working in Los Angeles on November 14, 1996.
 

 

 

 
More dandies for ‘A Dandy in Aspic,’ after the jump…
 

 
My love for Rosemary’s Baby is a paradox I navigate deftly, considering how much I loathe both Mia Farrow and Roman Polanski as human beings. With Polanski, my complaints are predictable, but Farrow is a far less frequent object of scorn, so I’ll just say I find her support of Polanski hypocritical, her kid-collecting a tad excessive, and her acting often cloyingly twee. I’ve long suspected the canned ingenue thing is really just an extension of her own affected persona; the woman makes Godard’s female characters look like Sarah Conner. Still, I’d argue that Mia Farrow’s simpering sweetness and Roman Polanski’s predatory instincts are exactly what make Rosemary’s Baby work so well—who better to paint a nightmarish situation in which women are repeatedly victimized and never believed? The 1968 mini-documentary on the making of that masterpiece—Mia and Roman-pretty much confirms my instinctual distaste for both of them.

Polanski’s pretentious and macho, driving race cars and callously expounding on how Farrow was not his first choice for the lead—“I saw a more healthier, more stronger maybe a little more sexy girl in the beginning.” Farrow—just back from the infamous trip to India where she meditated with The Beatles—fawns breathily and paints her trailer with flower-power schmaltz. Even Polanski admits there is something contrived about her public face. Perhaps portending of her future child menagerie, Mia goes on about her extensive pet collection.

I think the worst part is the charts they both make—Mia for the crew, and Roman for Mia—that attempt to measure the “good behavior” of their subjects. I’m not sure exactly what made Mia Farrow think this was cute and not crazy diva bullshit (Obliviousness? Did she think her unintimidating haircut inoculated her from accusations of prima donna eccentricity?) and Polanski’s elaborate revision of her original design has the additional feel of a creepy paternalism. I cannot imagine working with two such insufferable people. I checked though—Rosemary’s Baby? Still an amazing movie.
 

 
There’s no denying that Rosemary’s Baby is one of the scariest and creepiest movies ever made. The first time I saw it, I was up “late” with my mother, who was waiting for my father to come home from a night shift, and it was on TV. I don’t know how old I was—young—but even if I didn’t exactly get what was going on, I certainly got the gist of it and that was enough for it to be, well, fucking frightening.

The whole friendly old people and Satan routine was a new one in screen horror and when you throw in those primordial maternal fears of a pregnant woman, holy shit is that film intense. Rosemary’s Baby is an evergreen movie masterpiece. It’s a film for the ages and will still be watched as long as the human race exists. It’s a perfectly cut cinematic diamond.

This fascinating time capsule piece “Mia and Roman” was made soon after the film had wrapped production—this isn’t a made for DVD extra produced decades later—and features tons of behind-the-scenes footage. Polanski discusses how supreme attention to the smallest details are of paramount importance to him as a director and describes how he likes to watch the actors block out their scenes without any suggestions from him before he decides where to place his camera.

We also see Polanski driving race cars and fencing. Farrow lists all of the animals she has in her menagerie and spouts some “love and peace” stuff that she’d learned hanging out at the ashram with the Maharishi and the Beatles. Farrow says that she and Polanski just “groove together” and he (very sincerely) praises he professionalism as an actress to the hilt.

Krzysztof Komeda’s haunting score for the film is used throughout. Komeda would die from a head injury not long after completing work on Rosemary’s Baby.
 

 
Save for the Kennedy assassination, coincidence has perhaps never coagulated with the same deeply improbable intensity as it did around the Manson killings.

Stranger still is the manner in which coincidence seems to knit the Tate/LaBianca murders together with both Rosemary’s Baby (a great film) and “the White Album” (a great record), as if all three were somehow of a piece—and in a sense that goes beyond the former’s being directed by Polanski, or the latter’s inspiring Manson’s derided “Helter Skelter” scenario.

Take, as a mere appetizer, the possibility that the Beatles may have stayed (and dropped acid) at 10050 Cielo Drive in the mid-sixties, something (apparently unwittingly) implied by John Lennon during a 1974 Rolling Stone interview.

And then, well, we just decided to take LSD again in California…We were on tour, in one of those houses, like Doris Day’s house or wherever it was we used to stay. And the three of us took it. Ringo, George and I… And a couple of the Byrds… Crosby and the other guy, who used to be the leader… McGuinn. I think they came round, I’m not sure, on a few trips.

Terry Melcher, of course, was Doris Day’s son, the Byrds’ producer, Manson’s almost-producer, and Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s predecessor at 10050 Cielo Drive.

In normal circumstances, Mother Superior could very well be accused of having jumped the gun were we to therefore conclude that the Beatles probably had sat turning their minds inside-out within the very walls that would—a few years later—have their as-yet unwritten song-titles scrawled upon them in blood (as if the killers were tracing indentations made by psychic shrapnel). Circumstances, however, are anything but normal…
 

 

In the spring of 1968—a handful of years after those mooted sojourns at Cielo Drive—the Beatles made their pilgrimage to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Valley of the Saints in Rishikesh, part of a sparkling celebrity coterie that included Mia Farrow and Mike Love. For the next couple of months, the days were mostly spent in epic bouts of Transcendental Meditation, as the Maharishi attempted to guide the most famous men in the world—who he himself described as “angels”—towards “total consciousness.” The Beatles, though, would spend much of their spare time writing songs – particularly Lennon, who found they were veritably “pouring out.”

Many of these new tunes would find their way onto the Beatles’ next LP, “the White Album.” One such was Lennon’s “Dear Prudence,” which playfully chided Prudence Farrow, Mia Farrow’s sister, for excessive metaphysical studiousness.

Mia Farrow herself had only recently completed filming Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Her exquisite performance as Rosemary—a resident of New York’s Dakota building, impregnated with an anti-Christ by a coven of neighboring witches—surely meant she arrived in the Valley of the Saints carrying some very interesting inner baggage. Certainly her stay would leave its mark on history—most chroniclers ascribing some rumored sexual impropriety (or worse) on the part of the Maharishi towards Farrow as being the principal reason for Lennon and Harrison’s (the last remaining Beatles) acrimonious departure that August.
 

 
Lennon later claimed that, while packing his bags, he came up with the rudiments of another tune destined for “the White Album,” “Sexy Sadie,” four syllables that supplanted the original—and extremely libelous—“Maharishi.” The same four syllables would also find themselves supplanting the name of Manson Family Tate/LaBianca murderess Susan Atkins—known in the Family as “Sadie Mae Glutz” prior to Manson’s fateful encounter with “the White Album.” Before falling in with Manson, Atkins was an associate of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. LaVey is said to have served as an unaccredited technical adviser on Rosemary’s Baby.

Incidentally, Lennon and Harrison’s jaded view of the Maharishi was such that, when their protracted flight from Rishikesh was impeded by a series of disruptions—they were abandoned in a broken-down taxi, and Harrison soon thought he was coming down with dysentery— our ruffled angels feared they had been cursed by their unceremoniously discharged guru. (Echoes, here, of Bobby Beausoleil’s attempted escape from Kenneth Anger, legendarily curtailed by Anger’s magickal locket.)

Around the very time the Beatles were arriving in Rishikesh, meanwhile, Mike Love’s cousin and fellow Beach Boy Dennis Wilson would reportedly pick up hitchhikers (and Manson Family members) Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey in Malibu.

Whether or not this actually happened (Charles Manson, for one, would later contradict this account, saying he first met Wilson at the house of a mutual friend’s) Wilson would definitely spend the following months as a sponsor and de facto member of the Family—footing the bill for their VD treatments (and much more besides), introducing Manson to industry figures like Neil Young and Terry Melcher, and so on.

Although Death Valley—in apparent contradistinction to the Valley of the Saints—sounded like an overtly hedonistic and nihilistic environment, Manson arguably presided over a commune no less spiritually preoccupied than the Maharishi’s, and Mike Love and Dennis Wilson seemed similarly as well as simultaneously attracted to their Ying/Yang gurus. But it appears positively miraculous that Wilson would be fraternizing with Manson while his cousin, on the other side of the world, would be fraternizing with the Beatles at the very time the songs were “pouring out” for “the White Album,” some of which would find themselves daubed on the walls at Cielo Drive in Sharon Tate’s blood, and two of which concerned Prudence and Mia Farrow, the latter having only just starred in a role once earmarked for Tate herself…

And that, as aficionados know only too well, ain’t even the half of it. (A little more to come from me on the topic though, shortly.)
 

 

Mark Reeve’s superb essay on the Beatles and the occult is a clear predecessor to the above piece, and can be read in the Headpress collection Gathering of the Tribe

 
Naturally his mother Mia Farrow retweeted it!

“Boom” indeed!

Via Dlisted

 
After making one remarkable self-titled psych-pop album in the ‘60s that’s been a collector’s staple for years, Jamme are one of those bands that somehow slipped through the net. Their debut has just been reissued for the first time, 40 years later (via Now Sounds), and has a fantastic story attached to it.

In 1968, Jamme—a four-piece made up of two Brits and two Americans—were just another young group of musicians trying to make it on the Sunset Strip when they were handed the opportunity of a lifetime after John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas offered to produce an album for them, thinking he had found the new Beatles.

So far, so good. However, not everything went quite to plan. The band came into Phillips’ life in the summer of 1968, just as the Mamas and the Papas were breaking up, his marriage to Michelle Phillips was on the rocks and he was having an affair with Mia Farrow (right under the nose of Frank Sinatra!).

All of that contributed to a rather bizarre recording experience, all of which took place in the studio Phillips had installed in the roof of his Bel Air mansion—the same studio Sly Stone later used to make “There’s A Riot Goin’ On”—the entrance to which, incidentally, was hidden (James Bond-style) behind a secret panel on the first floor of the house.

The whole amazing story of the Jamme is detailed in the pretty lengthy liner notes that come with the reissue. For now, listen to their groovy signature tune, “Strawberry Jam Man”, which sounds it like it should be the theme to some whacked-out Saturday morning kids TV show, and enjoy this little nugget from the notes:
———-
One night, Michelle Phillips, Mia Farrow and Jamme drummer Terry Rae all dropped acid together in the lounge below the studio, while John was upstairs leading a session with the band. When the panel that lead out to the main house was closed, the room was cast into pitch blackness. They all laid underneath a table with their heads pressed together, legs sticking out like the spokes of a wheel, all giggly and loose.

“Wouldn’t it be great to go to France,” squealed Mia. “Just jump on a plane right now and go.”

“Let’s go to France, then,” added Michelle. “Let’s just go!”

Rae’s 18-year old acid-fried mind was having trouble taking all this in. He was sitting under a table in the dark with Michelle Phillips and Mia Farrow as they were discussing taking him with them halfway across the world on a Lear jet. When the talk turned to more intimate matters, Rae began to get feel uncomfortable.

“What would the sleeping arrangements be,” Mia asked out loud.

“What if John was here? You wouldn’t be talking like this,” Rae stammered.

But no sooner had he said it then the panel opened up, the room was flooded with bright white light and John Phillips’ voice boomed out: “I am here.”

He had been there all along, standing silently at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the studio, listening to every word. Rae was mortified. “Being on acid, it blew the whole thing up in my mind. I was just totally blown away that he might have thought I was doing anything. But he took the opinion that I was a threat and had all the intentions of going to France with them to get laid. It was just a crazy fantasy. A joke, basically. We were having fun. But it turned out to be my demise.”

Shortly afterwards, John pushed the other members of the Jamme into firing Rae. As he was not only acting as their producer but also bankrolling the sessions, they had little choice but to comply.

“Funny enough,” Rae reflects, “both Mia and Michelle were in love with John. There were obviously problems with Michelle, but I don’t think she would have ever frivolously just gone off with some guy to get laid.”

A month after he was fired from the band, Rae was bemused to get a call from Mia Farrow. She invited him to the house on Copa De Oro Road that afternoon on the pretext of showing him some candid photographs of her with the Beatles in India.

“Nobody had photos, you know, actual 4x4 photos of the Beatles. You never saw stuff like that,” he says, even while acknowledging that he again found the situation alone with Mia Farrow in Frank Sinatra’s house“really weird”.

After a fashion, Mia sighed. “I have a problem,” she said, gingerly. “My best friend is Michelle, but I’m in love with John. What should I do?”

“Stick with Michelle and don’t mess with John,” Rae offered, his advice colored by his own recent experience at the hands of John Phillips.
 

 
Buy Jamme at Amazon