Cessation of a Dangerous Mind

Chuck Barris, America’s best known secret assassin, has died at the age of 87. Developer of a reality show empire 40 years and possessor of a fluid relationship with the truth before those were qualifications to be president, Barris is best known for hosting the original version of America’s Got No Talent, The Gong Show. Despite its craptastic production values and “celebrity” judges like Jaye P. Morgan who couldn’t have booked the C story on an episode of The Love Boat, the show lasted 6 years on network TV and in syndication and landed in the pop culture firmament, in part thanks to Barris’ performance as the antithesis of the composed host, with exaggerated clapping between sentences and leading into commercial breaks with the promise that "We'll be right back with more er ... stuff.” Other shows Barris created that didn’t take advantage of his matinee idol looks and charisma included The Dating Game, setting up ill-conceived romantic pairings, and The Newlywed Game, mocking same, while determining the most embarrassing place they’ve made whoopee; and the $1.98 Beauty Show, where unattractive women endured the witty musings of Rip Taylor and Marty Allen to earn a plastic tiara, rotten vegetables and bus fare. Barris also was a songwriter, with his biggest hit being Palisades Park for Freddy Cannon. He came to this life of pseudo-reality by way of the Central Intelligence Agency, at least to hear Barris tell it. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin in the 1960s and ‘70s, notching at least 33 kills. The resulting movie of the same name directed by George Clooney took a decidedly tongue-in-cheek look at his clams. The CIA denies his claims, as one would expect.

Rockefeller of Aged

Or

Come let's mix where Rockafellers

Cross the Styx with umbrellas

In their mitts

David's on the fritz

David Rockefeller, who knew he couldn’t take it with him so he held onto it as long as he could, has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 101. The grandson of John D and son of John D Jr., David was the patriarch of the crazy loaded Rockefeller clan and was worth an estimated $3.3 billion when he died. David had been chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation, a position held in the family since Chase acquired the Equitable Trust Company of New York – which John Jr was the largest stakeholder of - in 1930. Chase National Bank traces its history back to the founding of The Manhattan Company in 1799 by Aaron Burr as a rival to Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of New York, because in 2017 everything ties back to Hamilton. After graduating Harvard, Rockefeller spent a year at the London School of Economics where he met future President John F. Kennedy, which led to his briefly dating Kennedy's sister Kathleen, a familial merger that could have replaced the Pentaverate as the ruling force of the planet. He served as an intern for New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, then worked at the United States Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services before enlisting during World War II to establish political and economic intelligence units in North Africa and France. After the war, he went to work for Chase Manhattan, rising to become chairman and chief executive, during which time it developed the largest network of banks in the world, including the first American bank branches in the Soviet Union and China. Rockefeller relished his reputation as an international mover and shaker, hobnobbing with oil-rich dictators, Soviet party bosses and the leaders of China’s Cultural Revolution, favoring the company’s interests over anything that might resemble morality or even common decency. He played a significant role in convincing Jimmy Carter to allow the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the United States for hospital treatment for lymphoma, which led to the Iran hostage crisis, without which Ben Affleck wouldn’t have won a Best Director Oscar, but did he thank Rockefeller during his acceptance speech? Of course not. After leaving Chase, he and his brothers organized the family’s vast financial and philanthropic efforts, with David taking a more active role as each brother died off. In 2005 he gave $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art and $100 million to Rockefeller University, two of the most prominent family institutions; as well as $10 million to Harvard and $5 million to Colonial Williamsburg, and he pledged $225 million to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund upon his death, so there was motive…

Cold Off the Presses

David Berkowitz’s pen pal Jimmy Breslin, best remembered for hosting Saturday Night Live in its disastrous 1985-86 season when it had no idea what it was doing, has died of complications of pneumonia at the age of 88. Breslin spent 50 years with the New York Post, New York Daily News, and New York Newsday laying siege to the occupants of New York’s gilded towers and championing the nobility of the working class, preferably its white male members, one hunt and peck at a time. With a straightforward, blunt style, his columns felt like the meanest kid’s readers ever, such as the famous profile of Clifton Pollard, the man who dug John F. Kennedy’s grave: Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II”. Breslin kept working almost to the end, because he never ran out of the motivation to keep filling column inches: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.” Among the things that angered him, the plight of David Camacho, struggling with AIDS when no one outside the gay community really noticed or cared about its impact, in a column from 1986, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That same year he broke a story that Queens borough president Donald R. Manes had been implicated in a payoff swindle involving city officials; two months later, Manes committed suicide. Breslin bragged about applying the sportswriter’s creed – skip the winner’s locker room; the best stories are in the loser’s – from the early days of his career. As a sportswriter for The New York Journal-American, Breslin chronicled the foibles of the first season of the inept New York Mets in the book “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” From there he got a chance to become a news columnist, where he fostered his image as the Everyman with the dark wit that everyone wanted to tell their stories to over a beer, even as he befriended many of the city’s elite, who then had to wait for the fountain pen in the back when Breslin felt he had been slighted or that his pals had gotten too big. Breslin shared the real and fictionalized stories of union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, Mafia boss Un Occhio, arsonist Marvin the Torch, bookie Fat Thomas and Klein the lawyer. He took a tongue-in-cheek stab at politics in 1969, running for City Council president on the oddest ticket ever with Norman Mailer for mayor. In 1977, Breslin received a letter from the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who had already killed five people in New York and wounded several others with a .44-caliber revolver, and who signed off: “P.S.: JB, Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck.” Breslin published the note with an appeal for Son of Sam to surrender, but the killer, David Berkowitz, struck twice more before being captured. Though he was criticized for publishing the note, he actually had done so after consulting with detectives, who thought it could encourage the killer to write another note that might bear clearer fingerprints. Not everyone was as big a fan, and Breslin received a concussion in a beating from Jimmy Burke in Henry Hill’s restaurant after a column mocking another underworld associate, in a scene that didn’t make Goodfellas.

Move Over Beethoven

or

Chucky B Not So Good

(An epitaphany shared by Monty and Pat Burns)

Chuck Berry, who basically invented rock n’roll with incredible guitar licks, fancy dance moves, brash confidence and songs good enough to represent the planet to the deepest reaches of the cosmos, all of which he stole from a 5-foot-nothing time traveler, has died at the age of 90. His predilection for watching ladies pee, which cost him $1.2 million after cameras were discovered at several restaurants he owned, was all his. While the slightly more acceptable white Elvis Presley became rock’s first star and teenage heartthrob, Berry was it’s heart, soul and wit, elevating music from pop pap with songs like Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, Rock and Roll Music, and Sweet Little Sixteen. The true OG, Berry spent three years in reform school after a spree of car thefts and armed robbery, but redeemed himself with a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology. Eventually, he picked up a guitar, first singing R&B, pop and country, all of which he melded with his signature sound: bending two strings at once that he would rough up, the Chuck Berry lick, which would in turn be emulated by the Rolling Stones and countless others. Toss in the duck walk, a guitar-thrusting strut that involved kicking one leg forward and hopping on the other, and a legend was born. His sound influenced – or more – countless later performers. The Rolling Stones and Beatles covered many of his hits, and The Beach Boys reworked Sweet Little Sixteen into Surfin’ USA, at which point Berry sued and got a songwriting credit. For all his songwriting prowess, his biggest hit and only #1 single was 1972’s My Ding-a-Ling, a cover of a novelty song with a single entendre. Although he never won a Grammy, he did receive a lifetime achievement award in 1984 and was in the first group of musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 1977, when NASA launched the Voyager I and II spacecraft, they included a gold record including a wide range of information about life on earth to serve as a roadmap to alien invaders, and alongside Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and various regional music forms, there’s Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. So if you happen to see a phalanx of duckwalking aliens in search of someone who can play a guitar just like ringing a bell, you’ll know why.