One of the benefits of visits to family and
friends are occasional gifts which find their way into one's suitcase on the
journey back home...
For me, one of these occasional gifts
collected during a recent visit to my family was a book, Louisiana Curiosities, written by Bonnye Stuart, who teaches at the
university level and whose family has lived in New Orleans for some nine or ten
generations. Ms Stuart is also a poet and
playwright and author of textbooks about communications...
Good luck had come my way, I realized, as I
began thumbing through the book. There
was an entry about the Caddo Lake Drawbridge at Mooringsport, possibly the only
bridge in the United States to have been bombed with sacks of flour during
World War II as part of maneuvers aimed at preparing American troops for an
inevitable invasion of Nazi-dominated Europe.
Even should it not be unique in having been pelted with flour, surely no other bridge which utilized
Alexander Low Waddell's vertical-lift design made similar contributions to the
war effort...
 |
| Caddo Lake Drawbridge: Mooringsport, Louisiana |
Bonnye Stuart's book might serve as a source
of ideas for many weeks of future blogs...
Louisiana, my home state, has more than its
share of historical and culture uniqueness.
How many other places were home to characters like Jean Lafitte, a man
whose exact birth and death dates remain as unknown as the exact places of his
birth and death...
Pirate or privateer, that's another question
about Lafitte for which there are no quick or easy answers. He and his brother Pierre likely came to
Louisiana as children or very young men in the 1780s. Within a decade or so, they operated a
lucrative smuggling operation in New Orleans.
After the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the brothers
Lafitte found it advantageous to move their base of operations to an island in
Barataria Bay...
 |
| Jean Lafitte, The Gentleman Pirate |
By 1812, Pierre and Jean Lafitte had grown
more restless and more ambitious. They
purchased a schooner and hired a captain named Trey Cook to command her. A Spanish brig sailed Cook's way in January
1813 and he did what came naturally to him: he captured the ship. The sale of the Spanish brig's cargo netted
the Lafittes $18,000 and guaranteed their devotion to the business of capturing
ships without official or legal authority to do so...
Jean Lafitte enjoyed few friends in the
American government of Louisiana.
Governor Claiborne, initially indifferent to Lafitte misdeeds, found
their open flouting of the law extremely tiresome and prejudicial to good
order. Thus began a campaign against the
two which resulted in Pierre's arrest, conviction, and sentencing to jail on
piracy related charges...
Then came the British to the city of New
Orleans in the War of 1812, Jean Lafitte's offer to put himself in the service
of the United States and Andrew Jackson in exchange for a pardon for himself
and his men, Pierre's "escape" from jail, and the now famous Battle
of New Orleans fought several weeks after the 32 month conflict ended with the
Treaty signed at Ghent...
 |
| Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans |
Any decent encyclopedia or history book
provides a fairly detailed look at Jean Lafitte's activities in the period
immediately before, after, and during the War of 1812. But what none of them can actually state with
authority are answers to questions about his origins or demise. Lafitte reportedly claimed at various times
to have been born in France at Bordeaux or Bayonne. Other accounts from the time place his
birthplace at other towns in France, the city of Orduna in Spain, and even
Westchester, New York. Some of his
biographers think his eyes first saw light in in what was then called Saint-Domingue
and is now called Haiti. He was born in
1776. Perhaps it was 1780...
He was a Catholic, or so they say. One probably fraudulent document that claims
to be Lafitte's autobiography suggests an entirely different background...
In 1817, Lafitte sailed to Galveston to act
as a Spanish agent. Here his fate
becomes as murky as polluted waters. A
persistent rumor claims he rescued Napoleon from his exile and brought him to Louisiana
where they both died. Others say Jean
Lafitte was dead by 1843, or 1823, in Spanish Texas or South Carolina or
Illinois or the Yucatan or Nicaragua or the Azores...
 |
| The Buccaneer, a Hollywood version of Jean Lafitte's saga, was the only film directed by actor Anthony Quinn |
A century or so after Lafitte's death, a
privately funded search in the mid-1920s for his pirate's treasure concentrated
on the Natalbany River near Springfield, Louisiana. It ended suddenly after several weeks of work
and the finding of a Native American canoe which was placed on display in New
Orleans. For reasons never known, the
workmen broke camp one night and never returned to the site...
Ms Stuart's book contains a list of horror
movies set in or filmed in Louisiana in addition to her account of a patriotic
drawbridge at Mooringsport and references to the infamous Monsieur Lafitte...
Cat
People
has a place on the list. There are
actually two films so entitled. A 1942
effort directed by French born Jacques Tourneur (who sometimes worked in the US
as Jack Turner) chronicles the travails of a Serbian immigrant, Irena Dubrovna,
who goes to New York and becomes an American housewife. Unfortunately, she believes she suffers from
an ancient curse that will transform her into a killer panther whenever, ah,
shall we say, certain passions are aroused...
 |
| Movie Poster: Cat People, 1942 |
Forty years later, erotic thriller meister
Paul Schrader turns Simone Simon's haunted character into Irena Gallier who
travels to New Orleans at the behest of her brother, Paul. Nastassja Kinski takes on the role of Irena
to Malcolm McDowell's Paul. The brother
understands a dark truth of which his sister is but dimly aware: he and she are
were-creatures, beings who turn into black leopards when sexually aroused, who
must kill before they can resume human form.
He sees her as his perfect (and only possible) mate...
Alas for Irena. She has no desire for her brother. But passions burn deep in her soul for zoo
director Oliver Yates...
 |
| Director Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of Cat People relocates the story to New Orleans and emphasizes the erotic and violent elements hinted at in the 1942 story set in New York |
The Schrader tale has no happy ending despite
lovely eerie music by David Bowie and a number of delightful nude scenes in
which Ms Kinski tromps about the swamps in search of snacks not named
Oliver. Nor is there a happy ending for
Beverly Garland's misfortunate character, Joyce Webster, in 1959's science
fiction clunker The Alligator People. Her husband disappears from a train on their
honeymoon. Doggedly, Joyce travels to
his family's remote estate in the Louisiana bayou country. It would've been better had she stayed
home. Not only is she nearly raped by a
brutish servant played by Lon Chaney, Jr, but she learns her man is the victim
of a medical experiment gone horribly and terribly awry...
[Two years earlier, in 1957, Garland made
television history as star of the single season Decoy, the first program featuring a woman as the star of a police
procedural drama. A goodly number of
Beverly Garland's roles were in B movies as a strong and emotionally tough
woman. Late in her career, she returned
to television as Kate Jackson's clueless mother in the spy comedy Scarecrow and Mrs King.]
 |
| The Alligator People |
Literary Louisiana gets several nods in
Stuart's potpourri of Bayou State oddities in her book which both informs us
that Tennessee Williams' original working title for A Street Car Named Desire was Poker
Night AND offers a photograph of a statue celebrating Ignatius J Reilly, a
character in John Kennedy Toole's critically acclaimed (and posthumously
published) A Confederacy of Dunces...
Dunces caught the eyes of
senior editor Richard Gottlieb when Toole submitted it to Simon and Schuster in
1964. Gottlieb had taken another writer,
Joseph Heller, in whom he saw much promise and worked with Heller until he
produced the satiric and classic anti-war novel, Catch 22. The editor
believed Toole had the potential to be a very good writer but couldn't convince
the New Orleans born writer that his story failed to come to a satisfactory
conclusion that tied its various episodes together satisfactorily. Despite several years of correspondence,
neither Gottlieb nor Toole could reach an agreement on what to do with the
novel...
 |
| Once common in New Orleans, the Lucky Dogs vending stands found their way into A Confederacy of Dunces as "Paradise Hot Dogs" |
Eventually, after showing increasing signs of
mental illness, Toole committed suicide in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1969, by
using that time-honored device of a hose attached to the exhaust pipe of an
automobile...
His mother eventually badgered writer Walker
Percy into taking a look at A Confederacy
of Dunces. Percy had trained as a
medical doctor and was a formidable figure in the world of Twentieth Century
American literature. The Moviegoer, his first novel, became a
critical success after its publication in 1961.
The story-- like much of Percy's other work-- married themes of a
declining Southern aristocracy in a modern age to existential explorations ala Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky...
 |
| A postcard view of New Orleans' Canal Street as John Kennedy Toole and Ignatius Reilly would have known it |
Percy, to his surprise, liked what he read
and began a campaign to have Toole's odd tale of an odd man named Ignatius
Reilly published. The Louisiana State
University Press finally agreed to a print run of 2500 copies. But, then, A Confederacy of Dunces received a Pulitzer Prize. To date, it has sold over one and a half
million copies in eighteen languages...
 |
| Beverly Garland in a publicity photo for Killer Leopard |
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| Louis Nugent: Fan Dancer |
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| Karen Slagle: Getting The Kinks Out |
Fine Arts America now
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Caddo
Lake Drawbridge from caddolakedrawbridge.com; Jean Lafitte from
experiencejefferson.com; Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans from
floridamemory.com; poster for The Buccaneer (1958) from iceposters.com; poster
for The Cat People (1942) from doctormacro.com; still photograph of Nastassja
Kinski disrobing from Cat People (1982); scene from Alligator People from
Alligator People (1959); Beverly Garland publicity still for Killer Leopard
(1954) from tadtoomuchtanfortaupe.blogspot.com; Lucky Dog Cart from Louisiana
State Museum, Baton Rouge
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