Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (86 page)

LOONEY LAW

In Hong Kong, wives who’ve been cheated on may legally kill their two-timing husbands, but only with their bare hands.

43% of women want their boyfriends to “commit” before they sign “love” on a card.

CROSSED PATHS

Take note of who’s near you right now—you may meet again later in life, as these people did
.

N
OW:
William Rehnquist was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, where he served until his death in 2005. Sandra Day O’Connor was named to the Court in 1981, the first female justice in the court’s 200-year history.

THEN:
Rehnquist and O’Connor knew each other long before they served on the Supreme Court. They attended Stanford Law School together and graduated at the top of the class—Rehnquist was #1, O’Connor was #2. While students, they even dated.

NOW:
In 2010 filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow’s movie
The Hurt Locker
won the Oscar for Best Picture, and Bigelow won the Best Director prize, the first woman ever to do so. Her main competition: the blockbuster film
Avatar,
and its director, James Cameron.

THEN:
Bigelow and Cameron were married from 1989 to 1991. They divorced when Cameron left her for actress Linda Hamilton, whom he met on the set of his movie
The Terminator
.

NOW:
In the 2010 NBC “late night wars,” Conan O’Brien was forced out of his job as host of
The Tonight Show
and his contract bought out so the network could give the show to Jay Leno, from whom O’Brien had taken over just seven months earlier. The NBC executive who orchestrated the squeeze-out of O’Brien: NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker.

THEN:
In the mid-1980s, at Harvard University, O’Brien was the president of the
Harvard Lampoon,
the university’s famous humor publication. Zucker was the president of the
Harvard Crimson,
the sedate daily college newspaper. The publications had been rivals for decades and frequently pranked each other. In 1985 O’Brien’s staff stole an entire print run of the
Crimson
. When Zucker found out about it, he knew exactly who’d done it and sent police to the
Lampoon
’s office. “My first meeting with Jeff Zucker was in handcuffs,” O’Brien later told a reporter.

21 members of the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team were over 40. Five were over 50.

THE LOST EXPLORERS:
SALOMON ANDRÉE

Our final installment on lost explorers looks at a screwball Swede who flew off into the wild blue yonder—and stayed there
.

F
LY ME TO THE POLE

Another quixotic quest of 19th-century explorers was to be the first man to the North Pole. Geographers knew as early as the 16th century that the North Pole was probably just a spot on the open ocean covered with pack ice. How would anyone get there? The earliest expeditions tried to
sail
to the top of the world. None succeeded. Then teams of explorers using dogsleds and sledges tried to
slog
across the pack ice to the pole—the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen even tried it on cross-country skis—but to no avail. After more than half a century of attempts, the North Pole remained unconquered. Then in 1896, a 43-year-old Swedish engineer came up with a novel alternative: He’d
fly
to the North Pole in a balloon. Salomon August Andrée was an experienced balloonist, having already made several crossings of the Baltic Sea, so he had little trouble convincing wealthy backers and the Swedish public that a balloon was the easiest way to the pole. Armed with reports that a steady wind blew northward from Spitzbergen all the time, Andrée was convinced the stiff Arctic breeze would carry his balloon over the pole all the way to Alaska.

“WE CANNOT FAIL”

His first attempt, from Spitsbergen, was such a failure that Andrée went from being Sweden’s biggest hero to Sweden’s biggest fool overnight. The extreme temperature variations in the Arctic—something Andrée hadn’t considered—had caused the seams of the balloon to crack and leak, bringing the airship down almost immediately. Stung by scathing criticism in the media, Andrée worked furiously to mount another expedition. His spirits and reputation lifted when famous inventor Alfred Nobel became his chief financer, and on July 11, 1897, the
Örnen
(Eagle) lifted off from Svalbard, part of an archipelago of islands off the northwest coast of Norway
and close to the Arctic Circle. The balloon was huge—97 feet high and 68 feet in diameter. The silk alone weighed a 1½ tons. The basket carrying Andrée and his team, fellow engineer Knut Fraenkel and photographer Nils Strindberg, was a double-decker affair made of wicker and wood. The upper level served as an observation platform, the lower as sleeping quarters and darkroom (Andrée brought along 36 homing pigeons to send back photographs and reports of the expedition’s progress and ultimate success). The small crowd of Swedish naval officers and sailors cheered as the balloon rose into the air and drifted off to the north and out of sight forever.

E.T. phone Rome: The Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

A GRIM DISCOVERY

The disappearance of the
Örnen
became one of the great mysteries of the Arctic. Only 1 of the 36 pigeons made it home, and that one was released only hours after takeoff with a scrawled note that everything was going well. After that there was no word, no sign, nothing—until 33 years later. In 1930 a Norwegian sealing ship hunting the coast of White Island, just off the northeastern tip of Svalbard, made a grim discovery: two skeletons, one propped against a rock, the other curled up on the ground. Both still wore fur parkas. A third skeleton was found in a shallow grave nearby. The man sitting up held a diary. It was Andrée, and the journal in his dead hands told all. The balloon had crashed on July 14, just three days into the flight and only 160 miles north of takeoff.

WRONG-WAY ANDRÉE

It took the men a week to make a sledge of their basket and load it with supplies. Then they started walking—the wrong direction. Two weeks and 60 miles of slogging later, they realized their mistake. Then the ice pack began to break up around them, and they converted the sledge to a boat. For weeks they drifted, finally sighting land—White Island—on September 17, and reaching the island two weeks later. They had enough food to last out the winter, but they were physically spent and suffering from food poisoning caused by eating raw polar bear meat. Strindberg was the first to go, apparently from a heart attack. On October 17, Frankel died in his sleep. Andrée made a final note in his diary and died soon after. Another 12 years passed before Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and four Inuit guides became the first humans to reach the North Pole. They arrived on April 6, 1909…on foot.

During Robert Peary’s trek to the North Pole (1909), he lost eight toes to frostbite.

JOE STALIN VS.
JOHN WAYNE, PART II

Conspiracy theorists take heart: Here’s Part II of the story. (Part I is on
page 276
.)

S
TRANGER THAN FICTION

The tale that Michael Munn tells in his book
John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth
is more exciting than the plots of many of Duke Wayne’s own films. And it raises some interesting questions. Did Stalin really send KGB agents to kill Hollywood’s most outspoken enemy of communism? And if so, how did all of the Duke’s other biographers miss the story?

One thing that makes Munn’s story difficult to verify is the fact that it’s based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Wayne died in 1979, a quarter-century before Munn’s book was published, so he can’t vouch for any of the things that Munn claims he said and did. All the other firsthand witnesses to the events described—Orson Welles, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, stuntman Yakima Canutt, and others—have been gone for many years as well. Another problem: Wayne’s 48-page FBI file, made public as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, makes no mention of
any
communist conspiracies against him, let alone a KGB hit ordered by Stalin and thwarted by FBI agents.

THE DICTATOR

Munn’s story does seem to fit with what historians know about Joseph Stalin’s personality, his interests, and the bizarre way in which he ruled the Soviet Union after World War II. Stalin turned 70 in 1948, and although Soviet propaganda still presented him as a vigorous man with an iron constitution, his health was failing and he had just five more years to live. He never really recovered from the strain of waging war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, and within weeks of the war’s end he suffered what was either a heart attack or a stroke. More attacks soon followed, and by 1948 visitors to the Kremlin began to notice what one described as “conspicuous signs of his senility.” By then, Nikita
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet government had “virtually ceased to function” at the highest level as the failing Stalin lost interest in the day-to-day business of governing. He almost never convened meetings of the Politburo, the Central Committee, or any other formal organs of government. Instead, Stalin hosted
in
formal gatherings of his cronies several nights a week in the Kremlin movie theater.

Foulmouthed: 40% of American men do not brush their teeth every day.

SHOWTIME

Movies, not affairs of state, were the first order of business at these gatherings. What little work that could be done had to be done between the film screenings, or at the drunken dinners Stalin hosted at his country house after the movies were over.

Stalin liked Soviet films and had a large collection of European and American films, many of which were seized from the collection of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at the end of WWII. Among his favorites: detective films, boxing films, and any Charlie Chaplin comedy (except
The Great Dictator,
which he despised). He also liked Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and was a big fan of James Cagney gangster movies.

But most of all, said Khrushchev, Stalin liked cowboy movies. “He used to curse them and give them a proper ideological evaluation and then immediately order new ones.” Stalin especially liked Westerns by director John Ford, who gave John Wayne his breakthrough role in 1939’s
Stagecoach
. Ford cast Wayne in more than 20 films, eight of which were released during Stalin’s lifetime, and though few records of the Kremlin screenings survive, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’d seen at least a few of the Duke’s films and knew who he was.

NO WONDER THEY CALL HIM MARSHAL

Stalin identified with the characters in Western films. He saw himself as the Soviet equivalent of a town sheriff or U.S. Marshal, biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
. “Stalin regarded himself as history’s lone knight, riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.”

Stalin’s contemporaries reported that he had trouble distinguishing
between reality and life as it was depicted in the movies. Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev learned this when he was invited to a Kremlin screening in the 1930s: “Stalin didn’t watch movies as works of art,” he wrote in
Sight and Sound
magazine, “he watched them as though they were real events taking place before his eyes, the real actions of people—beneficial or destructive—and he immediately gave vent to his irritation if the people on the screen didn’t work well, and praised them when they acted correctly.”

TASER is an acronym for “Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle.” (The A was added later.)

CECIL B. DE STALIN

For years Stalin had been, in all but name, the head of the entire Soviet film industry as well as its chief censor. He personally assigned film projects to directors and actors, instructed screenwriters on the ideologically “correct” means of presenting historical events, made editorial changes to screenplays, and even composed lyrics for songs used in films. He had the final say on everything. If there was something he didn’t like about a film, it was done over. Period. No film was released to the public without Stalin’s personal approval.

Even foreign films—which were almost never shown outside the Kremlin walls—had to meet Stalin’s approval: Once when Minister of Cinema Ivan Bolshakov showed a foreign film containing a brief nude scene, Stalin pounded the table and yelled, “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” then stomped out of the theater. Bolshakov was luckier than his two predecessors—when they displeased Stalin, they were taken away and executed. (Bolshakov
never
showed Stalin a nude scene again. From then on he previewed every film before showing it to Stalin and cut out any scene containing even a hint of nudity.)

WHITE HATS VS. RED HATS

It’s conceivable that Stalin could have ordered John Wayne killed. After all, Stalin was nuts—“not quite right in the head,” as Khrushchev put it. He certainly had no hesitation when it came to killing people: Stalin is believed to have murdered as many as 20 million of his fellow citizens during his 30 years in power, and he wasn’t shy about reaching beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to kill them, either. In 1940, for example,
Stalin dispatched KGB assassins to kill his rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico.