social dereliction. These nomadic packs of scavengers burrow in wherever they can, scam and victimize each other however they can and fast-shuffle simply to get by—to survive. In human terms, the Sunshine City is the bottom of the bird cage. The predatory hustlers in St. Pete’s down-and-outer bars are aware of their plight and even discuss it among themselves with perverse relish, referring to the town as Salt Petersburg, a “city of the living dead” populated principally by “newleyweds and the nearly dead.” A visitor quickly gets the impression that all the dead are grateful in St. Petersburg. In the winter of 1973/1974, as if to commonly underscore the stupefying desolation of their bar-bound lives, the snow buzzards elevated a homely little country-and-westem ditty titled Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott? to the status of a runaway jukebox hit. A Gospel-flavored tune performed bouncily by the Statler Brothers, the song posed the musical question: Whatever happened to Johnny Mach Brown and Allan Rocky Lane Whatever happened to Lash LaRue, I'd love to see them again Whatever happened to Smiley Burnette, Tim Holt and Gene Autry Whatever happened to all of these has happened to the best of me. Whatever happened to Lash LaRue was: Dano Cooke, a selfpromoter who goes under the theological alias The Reverend John 3:16 Cook (the 3:16 tag semaphoring the Biblical verse: “ For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten” blah-blah). A satanicvisaged self-professed former pimp and camy hooligan turned missionary evangelist, Brother 3:16 “ministers” these days to St. Pete’s latest incursion of snow buzzards. As his reward for graveyard duty, he dresses in florid showbiz threads,, eats steak, sleeps between satin sheets and drives a late-model Lincoln Mark IV to service-club luncheons. Brother ^:16 has got hold of some power, you understand. And he wouldn’t mind some more. In late 1973, the evangelist got wind that Lash LaRue, the B screen’s once-mighty King of the Bullwhip, was also reduced to dogging the ministerial trail, popping his trusty whip for the Lord in red-neck tabernacles out yonder in the Dixie sticks. Brother 3:16 promptly jumped on the horn and proposed a Jesus-peddling detente —in, p re sumably, his name. Lash accepted and, in October 1973, hied himself to St. Petersburg, where he moved into a $180-a-month apartment in a sleazo-slick singles complex called Porto Cadiz. Brother 3:16 footed the bills for the antiseptic little crib, doled out walking-around money for the once-rich actor and promoted him a clunker car and a wardrobe of spiffy black outfits much like the ones LaRue wore in Frontier Revenge, The Black Lash and 40-odd other cheapies of the Forties and Fifties dreamscape. All for a consideration, of course. Brother 3:16 was hell-bent on putting together what his Cinecolor letterheads would soon proclaim as ‘‘America’s ‘No. 1’ Missionary Team.” To that end, he had cards, posters and fliers printed in bulk. With Lash as his shill, he set his sights on whizzing every lucrative hick church in the country, and there are more than a few. A grandiose scheme, Brother 3:16’s brainstorm— only it didn’t quite work. When, in the full-moon phase of March, a writer from San Francisco flew in to give witness to God’s “No. 1” team at close hand, the whole enchilada had already begun to crumble. Brother 3:16 greeted the writer in oh-so-pious embrace, smarmed and stalled a lot for three days’ running but, in the end, was unable to conceal the circumstance that he and his erstwhile teammate were in the process of parting ways because of a dispute over the division of their hard-hustled love offerings. It is full-moon-madness time, remember, so when Brother 3:16 finally snaps that he can’t hide the fact of his rift with LaRue or the shabby reasons behind it, the barrel-bodied evangelist turns triggerish. “Lash is a low-life lush, is all,” he rasps to the writer on the final day of their mercifully brief acquaintance. “That’s his nickname, you know, and it’s the Lord’s truth— Lush LaRue. He’s got sick ideas: astrology, reincarnation —all that junk. When I first found him, he was ate up with disease and I took care of his medical bills. I carried him as long as I did because he’s a good draw. People everywhere still recognize him, but if folks knew what he was really like, why” —Brother 3:16 shudders in tropistic pulsations—“why, your ordinary Christian would take one look and just purely shit. ’’ / Fortunately, the writer has sniffed this situation brewing for days, and with the genially larcenous connivance of one of Brother 3:16’s own henchman-styled apostles, he contrives to head Lash off at the Porto Cadiz pass that same evening. The cowboy actor’s one-bedroom apartment in the singles complex is wall to wall with .Exorcist-green carpeting and a truckload or so of antiqued fumitureYA small balcony overlooks the standard spirocheteshaped pool in the community garden at the rear. Lash arrives around dusk, wheeling up in a blood-red Eldorado ragtop. Speaking in camy argot, an elaborate concealment of meaning related to schoolyard pig Latin, he tells the apostle that the flashy car belongs to a Mafia-owned franchise outfit in Jacksonville, a company Lash hopes to go to work for the following week as a high-salaried PR man. “I’m clearing out of this chicken-shit dump and this chickenshit town,” he grunts balefully. Slim and trimly clad in black down to his dyed hair and eyebrows, Lash doesn’t look all that different from his cowboy image of 1952, when Lash LaRue Western Comics sold thousands and thousands of copies in four languages. He conceals his ageravaged eyes behind mirrored shades, and his face always had a puffy and pallid cast, so that doesn’t exactly mark him for early transit to Boot Hill. But whoa dp now— what’s that old cowboy doing in the living room? Well, he’s breaking out his stash and rolling and smoking luxuriant cigars of it continuously throughout the evening, chased down with bottled Miller’s beer. Lash often affects a scrambled, runamuck commingling of Lord Buckley shuckand-gibes, Kahlil Gibran blissninnyisms and the autocratic commands of a bad and pompous movie director. Lash’s laugh is boyish and nasally rushing and sometimes full of feral terror. He is damaged goods and he shows it. With one smoke or another in his hand, Lash stalks around the living room and the adjacent balcony with demented energy, making stagy exits and entrances, ranting aloud at times with the force of a fissure opening in the earth. His manic candor, you realize pretty quickly, spurts and bubbles out of some helpless incapacity to restrain himself—simply to shut up. The result is quantum leaps in logical association, an addled eloquence choreographed in a spastic scherzo of tortured bodily gyrations. Abruptly, at random, Lash shouts. He is a most unsettling and apocalyptic cowboy. “ Nothing is accidental,” he begins in a firm, instructive basso. “Nothing—no thing. I’ve had a taste of everything the world has to offer. I still get fan mail addressed to ‘The Cowboy with the Whip, U.S.A.’ I’ve been through the Vale of Death countless times, but I’m not permitted to reveal the details. There are certain implantations into the human mind so fantastic that if I were to tell you the whole truth, it would make a schizophrenic out of you. How old am I? Well...huh-huhhuh...counting Lincoln’s last birthday, I ’d say about two hundred and seventy-five. ‘‘I can tell you a certainty, though. There is a Day of Judgment coming and the Old Man is going to be very difficult to bargain with. Before I have yet another funeral, I may get married again. If so. I ’ll have a big wedding in Dodger Stadium and sell tickets. “Myself, I've been rehearsing forty years for a one-night stand and I'm not yet booked. I ’ll tell you this, though—when I get the time on TV to speak and I have the attention worthy of that which will yet be said, 1 won’t ask anybody how to say it. And if they don’t like my language, they can go fuck themselves. “ I came in from an area of time and space the human race is not heir to and may not be for years to come. The direct current that abides in me would knock the average person out of his shoes. Why? The Old Man dug me, I think. My guess is, He’s a Western fan. “Oh, I bother ‘em, you know. I spook most of the church people. I get to a point where somebody will s a y o u just lost me there, Lash.’ I spoke to a Bible class once, and when I finished, they all looked like they were a painted flat out there. Nobody moved. I thought, Well, the Old Man has hypnotized ‘em, and now how the fuck am I going to pull ’em out of it? “ I ’ve been in and out so many times that I know it won’t hurt when I go again. I know I’ll have to pay God for my poor judgments, but I have to abide by what I see as right and wrong. I’ve been here much too long, baby, to get fucked without gettin’ kissed. “Solomon had wisdom and it was a gift of God. And he misused and abused it when he couldn’t understand the Jew gods d idn 't dig niggers. “Now I'll tell you this: I have been, in another package, black. I f you don't like my color now, you 'll wish you hadnever been born. “CUT. PRINT IT. “Huh-huh%d^ huh-huh-huh.... That sort of rap makes John 3:16 turn to clabber, you see. That’s because he had a ridiculous appetite and a terrible over-all attitude. I scared him when I looked him in the eye and told him, 'John, everything you think I am, you are. You can't be me, but he that is with me can be instantly you. ’ “ I don’t like to be condemned for my personal weaknesses and the things I enjoy. I enjoy a good steak, I do. I still enjoy a beautiful woman and I love good music and poetry. And there is nothing namby-pamby about me. “ Poetry, yes—I hesitate to write it myself because I get into Different Areas that people really don’t understand. I could never be classed as a commercial success, but I’ve done a few little things. I did a hip-talk version of The Shooting of Dan McGrew that was kind of cute. I dig Robert Service. There are times when I feel as though I could go mentally back and relive portions of his life. And Shakespeare’s, also. I have some notes that I made when I believe the spirit entity of Will Shakespeare was coming through me. It’s a wild bit. “Nothing is accidental. My mother, Sarah, was the first angel of my life. She was raped by her stepfather when she was a lass of thirteen, and the Old Man allowed me to know the details of that as if I were her at the time. Not that she ever told me, but the painful details were revealedto me. “Gretna, Louisiana....That’s as far as they can trace me back. My mother was widowed by the First World War, and she and my sister and I grew old together in the moneygrubbing concentration camps of the late, great Great Depression. All across the country...and then I got involved with the Filthy Game of Hollywood. “CUT. PRINT IT. “ Huh-huh-huh....The way I got to Hollywood was, I went to the College of the Pacific at a certain era of time. I played football—left end—and I was muy fast. I studied dramatics because I had a lisp and a hesitation stammer. Through a teacher, I met George Brent, a very Big Player. George registered even above RinTin-Tin at that time and he introduced me to a Big Operator who ran Universal Studios. “ I went by the name of Al LaRue when I was in that package, and the first picture I made for Universal, in 1945, was a serial called The Master Key, starring Milbum Stone. Then I worked in one of Deanna Durbin’s pictures, Lady on a Train. It was a small paqf, but I dug Deanna. “She and I almost....If it hadn’t been for my stupid agent, she and I probably would’ve been in love. We were very close. She needed me and I heeded someone who knew which way to go. “Deanna was an angel, but she was a little on the suggestible side. Myself, I was an idealistic young buck who wanted a vine-covered cottage and a wife who would love me for all my endearing qualities. And an evil-minded idiot bastard son of Stan proceeded to poison my mind with hearsay about Deanna’s ‘sordid sex life.’ I tried not to listen to him, but afterward I could never be around her without hearing those words echo in my mind. I never believed them, but Deanna and I stopped seeing each other. Isn’t that sad? “I was on the verge of hanging it all up. When J. Arthur Rank joined Universal, I was due for a raise and I didn’t get it. I said, ‘Fuck you,’ and went home and started working on my custom-built car. Then I got a call from another Operator, Bob Tansey at PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation). ‘‘Tansey was casting Song of Old Wyoming, one of the first B color Westerns. He looked me over like I was a piece of horse meat and asked me if I could act. I told him I was probably the best actor who’d ever been in his office. He looked at me as if I was nuts and asked me if I could use a whip. I told him sure—I’d been messing around with whips since 1 was a kid. Well, of course, that was a lie, but I got the part. I immediately ran downtown and rented a couple of whips to practice with. I beat myself half to death before Tansey figured out what was going on and hired an expert named Snowy Baker to teach me a whip act. By the time I finsihed that picture, I could pop a cap off a Coke Bottle. “And that was the beginning of the Lash package. The black costumes were left over from a flop series made by George Houston, a very Small Player. I enacted Lash in forty starring roles. Later, I played opposite Hugh O’Brian on the Wyatt Earp TV show. To this day, I wish the Old Man had allowed me to snuff that twerp.... Continued onpage 30 13
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