13. Jonathan resigned himself to lifelong bachelorhood. Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 9 August 1927.
14. These were dark months for Jonathan and Dandy-de-odor-o. The slump in sales may have also been attributed to a statement made by actor Wallace Beery in Behind the Screen, a popular Hollywood fan magazine. Tough guy Beery bragged, “I don’t need no sissy perfume-counter dabby-doo under my arms. A man’s supposed to smell like a man, not like some guzzied dame in a flower shop.” At the same time Jonathan and the Dandy-D board of directors were hearing the first of a string of charges leveled by the investigative press that the company’s assembly line equipment was unsafe. Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 156-57.
15. The company was in the red due, in part, to blackened business practices Perry Jennings’s exposé on defective assembly-line equipment at Dandy-de-odor-o’s Queens, New York factory represents only a small fraction of this investigative journalist’s prodigious reportorial and literary output. Never achieving the stature of such muckrakers as Tarbell, Stannard Baker and Sinclair, Jennings in his hard-hitting pieces did reach a wide readership, most notably through his monthly contributions to Jest Kids, a periodical for boys and girls (although his wrenching accounts of child labor practices in the textile industry resulted in a severe drop in subscriptions to the magazine). A monthly cartoon to which he several years earlier contributed text and ongoing story lines, “The Continuing Adventures of Li’l Lame Nell, Six-year-old Loom Operator,” was a catalyst for the passage of legislation by the Georgia General Assembly…to ban sales of the periodical within the state.
Late in his career, Jennings’ credibility was undermined by a series of articles for Guv’ner’s Magazine in which he fabricated the existence of feline sweatshops in Lynn, Massachusetts, wherein sweaters and other knit garments were manufactured through energy generated by cat treadmills — the heavily catnip-drugged grimalkins trotting until collapse toward tantalizing mechanical mice-on-sticks.
In his lifetime Jennings also wrote fourteen novels, thirteen continuing the saga of the toothless Gum family which settled in central Nebraska and sold consommé. His fourteenth novel Things My Wife Did to Me was a very loosely veiled account of Jennings’s rocky marriage to silent screen actress Velma DeGraaf, apologist for and possible paramour of doomed comedic actor Fatty Arbuckle and coiner of the tag line “Take your grimy eyes off my sheen.”
Jennings’ last two books, both memoirs published posthumously and heavily revised by widow DeGraaf, sold fewer than two hundred copies in their only printings. In fact, existing copies of Things I Did to Myself and My Life as a Wife-slugging Bastard, with Afterword by Roscoe “Fatty”Arbuckle each now commands a high price in the rare book market. A copy of Things I Did to Myself was exhibit “A” in a lawsuit filed in 2001 by Mauvourneen Heyer, who, when told of the value of her mint condition copy by a book dealer on the television program Video Flea Market, lost consciousness and cracked her skull on a rare Queen Anne highboy being caressed at the time by both of the Keno twins.
16. Accidents and other odd happenings plagued the plant. No one has any idea how Elwin Lyster got inside the box. One moment he was observed by co-workers at his usual station in Section 17B on the assembly line. The next moment he was gone. Elwin was later found curled sleepily among packing material and deodorant sticks. A co-worker recalled that Lyster’s face was beatific, “as if he had been to a wonderful secret place mortals don’t generally get to visit.” For years thereafter Lyster would eagerly relate to those he’d meet all the details of his fifteen minutes in “a place difficult to describe without assistance from the clergy.” Unhappy with the adverse publicity generated by those who found such individuals socially menacing, Blashette would eventually be forced to fire the former game warden and butter-and-egg man without severance or apology, although Lyster was allowed to keep the box, which he nicknamed “My Portal to Paradise” and more informally “Roy.” Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, 162-66.
17. Soon they were crawling out of the woodwork. Dandy-D seemed to attract individuals like Bucky and Mr. Scrum who must have assumed that factories run by men with three legs could be havens for their alternative approaches to life. Jonathan didn’t help matters by hiring many of these strange characters himself and without any form of background check. Among the other oddball workers whom Blashette found himself eventually cashiering or sending off for reorientation sessions at Miss Love’s School of Conformity was conveyor operator Chigger Farrow, who would hold his breath at random moments and occasionally lose consciousness, then topple off the milk stool his mother had given him for the express purpose of mitigating damage to his head and spine when he took his tumbles. Blashette also employed slow-talker Hoyt Spivak and horse-reviler Algernon Accola, Carmine “The Weeper” Morrow, as well as Dabney Whalen, Mormon father of twenty-three who was not only married to seven women simultaneously but who had troubled unions with each of them. Ibid., 166.
18. “Something’s got to be done with this company or we’re going under. All we need now is a major economic downturn and we’re sunk.” Memorandum from Charleton Caldwell to Jonathan Blashette, 15 April, 1929, Dandy-de-odor-o Corporate Records.
19. “Stocks Collapse in 16,410,030 Share Day” New York Times. 30 October, 1929.
20. “Wall Street Lays an Egg” Variety, 30 October, 1929.
11 BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DAME?
1. “I’ve seen one blue tit before, but never two at the same time.” Jonathan would not realize until much later that his drinking companion for the evening was an amateur ornithologist who was referring to the old world titmouse Parus Caeruleus, distinguished by its cobalt-blue crown. Jonathan’s Diary, JBP, 2 November1929.
2. “It was a fabulous party.” The story is totally apocryphal. There is no evidence that T.E. Lawrence, Ted Shawn, E. M. Forster & Bill Tilden had ever met one another, let alone devised plans to gather at Jonathan’s home in his absence to look at magic lantern slides of wrestling Muybridge male nudes.
3. Oliver Hardy was one of the few well-known actors Jonathan never had the chance to meet. The closest he ever came was once mistaking the popular orchestra conductor Paul Whiteman for Hardy in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. The two men strongly resembled each another and were often confused, especially when Whiteman did his Oliver Hardy impression.
A side note from a sideman: Jonathan was never a big fan of Paul Whiteman. He felt that the “King of Jazz” while embracing and exploiting the black jazz idiom, should have, at the same time, demonstrated his gratitude by racially integrating his orchestra. Jonathan sympathized with those African-American jazz musicians who felt that Whiteman was either a racist or too much the coward ever to make the attempt. One trumpeter whom I interviewed several years ago for a book I never completed about the Harlemphiliac author and photographer Carl Van Vechten (and whose name I withhold at the request of his family), passed along this story of his stage door confrontation with Whiteman after a performance by his orchestra in New York City: “I asked the fat lily white ass why he wouldn’t hire any of us Colored folk for his orchestra, especially since he’s always playing our music. He just giggled and did that funny flippy-doodle thing with his tie like Oliver Hardy always does in them Laurel and Hardy pictures. Then when he realized that I wasn’t digging this, he got real serious and said, ‘Look here, my Colored friend. I’m not in the business of losing money by putting any Negroes in my orchestra. Plain and simple. Besides, the name is Paul Whiteman, boy. That’s Whiteman, not Blackman. Now if you will kindly move aside, I have reservations at the Cotton Club.’” Furman, The Story of Jonathan Blash — [ette], 133-34.