Elisha Cook Jr., "Dear Prudence", Lord Alfred Douglas

Sometimes if I have the day off- like today- I like to go on the computer and look up random shit. The Maltese Falcon was on TCM so I looked up Elisha Cook Jr., who played Wilmer. He's (or was) a well-known character actor, usually cast as villians, in old movies.

Maybe ten years ago I caught the middle of The Big Sleep, another Raymond Chandler movie starring Bogart; I'd forgotten about the character who gets poisoned- I remember it was pretty upsetting when I saw it and I felt bad for the guy. That was Cook too.

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After Siouxsie & the Banshee's song "Kiss Them For Me" came out I started buying some of their other records. Then Twice Upon A Time came out and I heard their version of "Dear Prudence". You might already know that Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence went with the Beatles to India to study meditation and that's where they wrote most of the songs for The Beatles. I just think it's so interesting that she did all these things when she was so young, and she married Frank Sinatra, was served divorce papers on the set of Rosemary's Baby, and then later married (were they married?) Woody Allen. I guess Farrow says in her autobiography that when all that shit came out about Allen and her adopted daughter, Sinatra called up and offered to have Allen's legs broken.

I mentioned this to a friend who said, "He was still alive then?"

"That all happened in the early to mid 90s; remember he died in May of 1998, of disappointment over the weak series finale of Seinfeld "(that's just my own theory).

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I've always loved Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and I've read it about 5 times. I've also read a lot about his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (did you know that Douglas's father set up the Queensbury rules for boxing- I don't know what that means but I've seen the name mentioned before).

Douglas was in his early 20s and very selfish and immature. You might've seen Jude Law play him in the movie Wilde- I don't think he really captured the Douglas that I have in my mind but he did OK.

The thing about Douglas, a lot of people think that he was the inspiration for Dorian Gray but that was written before they met. Still though, Douglas was very handsome, probably the best-looking man I've ever seen.

In the Wilde biographies they only show pictures of Douglas when the two of them were together so I was shocked when I came across some pictures of him later in life. It's funny, because then it really does make you think about Dorian Gray- Douglas's face is swollen and puffy and it sags.

Douglas eventually married a woman and had a son who spent most of his life in mental asylums. Douglas was once sued by Winston Churchill- slander I think- and lost. He died in 1945, one year after my father's birth, one year before my mother's. His time seems so long ago so it's hard to imagine that he and my father were alive at the same time