At six-thirty one morning I was up and off to see King Coal, the colored monarch of Mardi Gras, land at the docks with his court off a barge and parade their way through the streets on trucks. Their first stop for a drink was at a celebrated local undertaker’s parlor, which was always jammed with guests for the ceremony. One year a visiting New York newspaperman discovered to his terror how they made room for all the celebrants. In the middle of festivities he opened the door of the men’s room. Three corpses, which had been stood inside upright behind the door, tottered out at him, and he fled, screaming his head off.
My faithful new N’Orleans correspondent was writing more than some of the liveliest letters I’d set eyes on. He has a long string of book credits to his name, from Yankee Priest to Mary Magdalene, which was bought years ago by David Selznick, who retitled it The Scarlet Lily as a vehicle for Jennifer Jones. But by the time he gets around to making it, I suspect we may all be ringing St. Peter’s doorbell.
The good father, too, is a fast gun with a news item.
And how about this front-page violent calm into which you and Louella-la have flown? [he wrote during one Hollywood armistice between us.] By what female magic has yesterday’s equine derrière become a bosom pal of today? Are you quite sure that the embrace is not an osculation de mors or a mutual search for the most vulnerable places in each other’s anatomy? Well, whatever the mystery, the moral shines clear: Anything can happen. After this, I shall not flicker an eyelash if Peace descends on the human race as a certified dove—not an unmistakable bucket of bricks.
In his early days he used to serve as weekend assistant at St. Michael’s in New York, where he met Eddie Dowling, and a bit of grease paint rubbed off on Father Murphy’s Irish heart. He’s been an avid follower of stage and screen ever since.
New Orleans was set on its ear when Elia Kazan went down for Fox to make Outbreak, with Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Richard Widmark, on location there. As supporting players, Gadge rounded up six hundred local characters, from B-girls to skid-row derelicts, from detectives to three extras whom police spotted in the crowd and dragged off to prison.
My faithful correspondent kept his eyes peeled.
Well, [Elia Kazan] went the aesthetic limit the other day, [he wrote,] using some genuine Orleanian streetwalkers. Of course, the ladies were paid for their posing and the wear and tear on their delicate constitutions. A bit later, when a policeman was about to pull them in for loitering (what a name for the world’s oldest profession!) they haughtily gave him the brush-off. “We’re working for Twentieth Century-Fox now,” they said, swishing their skirts.
He had a new sign-off for that note: “Kazanimatedly.”
When a member of the actor’s union led a cavalcade of stars to New Orleans and they were tendered a banquet at Arnaud’s, Father Murphy outdid himself. He gave an invocation to end all invocations. It went something like this: