Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (67 page)

BENEFITS

According to
U.S. News and World Report
, as many as 94% of hospital patients who are hypnotized as part of their therapy “get some benefit” from it. Some examples cited by the magazine:

• “Cancer patients can undergo chemotherapy without the usual nausea if they are first hypnotized.”

• “Burn patients recover faster and with less medication if they are hypnotized within two hours of receiving their burns and told they will heal quickly and painlessly. Researchers think hypnotherapy gives them the ability to will the release of anti-inflammatory substances that limit the damage.”

• “J. Michael Drever, a cosmetic surgeon, finds that postsurgical hypnotic suggestions can see his patients through breast reconstructions and tummy tucks with less bleeding, fewer complications and quicker recovery.”

NONBELIEVERS

One of hypnotism’s most outspoken critics is Las Vegas performer “The Amazing Kreskin,” who dismisses it as “just a figment of the imagination.” Kreskin worked as a hypnotherapist under the supervision of a New Jersey psychologist in the 1960s. But he ultimately became a skeptic: “Anything I ever did with a patient who was supposedly under hypnosis I was able to do without putting them in the slightest trance—by persuading them, encouraging them, threatening them, browbeating them or just giving them an awful
lot of confidence.... All that’s happening is what Alfred Hitchcock does every time he terrifies you and changes the surface of your skin with goosebumps. You’re using your imagination.”

The first all-talking movie was called
The Lights of New York
.

HYPNOSIS FACTS

• It is impossible to hypnotize someone against their wishes.

• A hypnotized person, even when they appear to be asleep or in a trance, is physiologically awake at all times. Unlike sleepwalkers, their brain waves are identical to those of a person who’s fully awake.

• A hypnotized person is always completely aware of his or her surroundings—although they can be instructed to ignore surrounding events, which creates the appearance of being unaware of them.

ANOTHER FORM OF HYPNOSIS?

Here’s some background on America’s most pervasive credit cards
.

American Express.
Formed by American Express in 1958 to complement its lucrative travelers-check business. According to
American Heritage
magazine, “American Express came to dominate the field partly because it could cover the credit it was extending with the float from its traveler’s checks, which are, after all, a form of interest-free loan from consumers to American Express.”

Visa.
California’s Bank of America began issuing its BankAmericard in 1958. At first it was intended to be used at stores near Bank of America branches, but it was so profitable that the bank licensed banks all over the country to issue it. However, other banks hated issuing a card with B of A’s name on it. So in 1977 the card’s name was changed to Visa.

MasterCard.
Originally named Master Charge, the card was formed in 1968 by Wells Fargo Bank and 77 other banks, who wanted to end BankAmericard’s dominance of the credit card business. They succeeded: Thanks to mergers with other credit cards, it became the biggest bank card within one year. Can you remember why it changed its name to MasterCard in 1979? According to company president Russell Hogg, they wanted to shed the card’s “blue collar” image.

Q. What was the name of the Wright brothers’ first plane? A. The
Bird of Prey
.

You’ve heard about his liaison with Marilyn Monroe. But there’s more. A
lot
more. Here’s some of the gossip you probably haven’t heard
.

B
ACKGROUND

Rumors of marital infidelity have plagued a number of Presidents, but perhaps none as much as John F. Kennedy.

According to books like
JFK: A Question of Character
, many of the rumors are true. While he was president, Kennedy’s youth and charisma proved irresistible to scores of attractive young women who found themselves in his company—and JFK made the most of the opportunity. One member of the administration remembers: “It was a revolving door over there. A woman had to fight to get into that line.”

As Traphes Bryant, a White House employee who served under the Kennedys and other first families, says, “Despite all the stories I’ve heard about other past presidents, I doubt we will ever have another one like Kennedy.”

Here are a few of the
tamer
details that have surfaced since JFK’s infidelities became public in 1977.

A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

• The White House staff were directly involved in Kennedy’s womanizing. Top aides such as Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary, were responsible for sneaking women in and out of the White House unobserved by Mrs. Kennedy or the press.

• According to Bryant, “there was a conspiracy of silence to protect his secrets from Jacqueline and to keep her from finding out. The newspapers would tell how First Lady Jacqueline was off on a trip, but what they didn’t report was how anxious the President sometimes was to see her go. And what consternation there sometimes was when she returned unexpectedly.”

• The Secret Service was also in on the act. They helped remove traces of JFK’s affairs from White House bedrooms, and were responsible for ferrying Kennedy to and from “love nests” undetected
during presidential trips. Charles Spaulding, one of Kennedy’s closest friends, remembers one such trip when the president was staying at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. He and Kennedy traveled to their mistresses’ nearby apartments via a network of underground tunnels beneath the hotel. “It was kind of a weird sight,” Spaulding remembers. “Jack and I and two Secret Service men walking in these huge tunnels underneath the city streets alongside those enormous pipes, each of us carrying a flashlight. One of the Secret Service men also had this underground map and every once in a while he would say, ‘We turn this way, Mr. President.’”

Dieter’s nightmare: The baby blue whale gains 10 lbs.
per hour
.

• On occasions when Kennedy felt he couldn’t trust his Secret Service detachment with his affairs—or simply didn’t want them around—he just ditched them. Once he even became separated from the army officer carrying the “football,” the briefcase containing the nation’s nuclear launch codes—and went to a party unescorted. “The Russians could have bombed us to hell and back,” one aide remembered, “and there would have been nothing we could have done about it.”

JFK’s THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT

• JFK liked to sleep with famous women—Marilyn Monroe and actor David Niven’s wife among them. According to one story, a White House staffer once asked Kennedy what he wanted for his birthday. According to another staffer’s diary entry, the President “named a TV actress from California....His wish was granted.”

• In addition to actresses and models, Kennedy had relationships with numerous female employees on the White House staff. He also slept with female reporters in the White House Press Pool. He even had an affair with Judith Campbell Exner, the girlfriend of a reputed mob boss Sam Giancana. And according to some accounts, the Mafia recorded the President’s lovemaking sessions and used the tapes to blackmail the White House into going easy on them.

• Kennedy loved to frolic nude with girlfriends in the White House pool and let his mistresses streak through the White House corridors. Once Bryant was riding in an elevator when it stopped on the President’s floor. “Just as the elevator door opened, a naked blonde office girl ran through the hall. There was nothing for me to do but get out fast, and push the button for the basement.”

Michael Landon played the title role of
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
in 1957.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS

On at least one occasion, Kennedy’s romances came close to destroying his presidency. Not long after being elected president, he talked his wife into hiring Pamela Turnur, a striking 23-year-old brunette with whom he was having an affair, as her press secretary. “That way [Pamela would] be right there close at hand when he wanted her,” one friend remembers.

Although Jacqueline apparently knew about their relationship from the beginning and seemed to grudgingly accept it, Turnur’s landlady, Mrs. Leonard Kater, did not. She waited and snapped a picture of Kennedy leaving Turnur’s apartment early one morning. Determined to expose the president as a “debaucher of a girl young enough to be his daughter,” Kater contacted the media and told them her story.

But luckily for JFK, the photo she took didn’t actually show Kennedy’s face (he was covering it with his hands)—so nobody could be sure it was really the president. When the reporters refused to cover the story, Mrs. Kater wrote a letter to the Attorney General (Bobby Kennedy)—and when that failed, she marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying a sign that said, “Do you want an adulterer in the White House?” and gave away copies of her photograph. Kater was dismissed as a crackpot.

KEEPING SECRETS

No matter how hard he and the White House staff tried, Kennedy couldn’t prevent his wife from finding out about his numerous affairs. Mrs. Kennedy apparently became aware of JFK’s extracurricular activities soon after their marriage in 1953. And according to one close friend, she took the discovery hard. “After the first year they were together, Jackie was wandering around looking like the survivor of an airplane crash.”

But as time went on she became resigned to Jack’s womanizing, and even a bit cynical. Once when she discovered a pair of panties stuffed into a pillowcase on their bed, she confronted him with the evidence. One witness remembers, “She delicately held it out to her husband between thumb and forefinger—about the way you hold a worm—saying, Would you please shop around and see who these belong to? They’re not my size.’”

Edgar Allen Poe’s
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
was the first detective story ever written.

“There’s a whole generation growing up without any kind of fairy tales. And kids need fairy tales—it’s an important thing for society to have for kids.” —George Lucas

B
ACKGROUND.
In July 1973, George Lucas was an unknown director working on a low-budget 1960s nostalgia film called
American Graffiti.
He approached Universal Studios to see if they were interested in a film idea he called
Star Wars.
Universal turned him down.

It was the biggest mistake the studio ever made.

Six months later, Lucas was the hottest director in Hollywood.
American Graffiti
, which cost $750,000 to make, was a smash. It went on to earn more than $117 million, making it the most profitable film in Hollywood history.

While Universal was stonewalling Lucas, an executive at 20th Century-Fox, Alan Ladd, Jr., watched a smuggled print of
American Graffiti
before it premièred and loved it. He was so determined to work with Lucas that he agreed to finance the director’s new science fiction film.

Star Wars
opened on May 25, 1977, and by the end of August it had grossed $100 million—faster than any other film in history. By 1983 the film had sold more than $524 million in tickets worldwide—making it one of the 10 best-selling films in history.

MAKING THE FILM

• It took Lucas more than two years to write the script. He spent 40 hours a week writing, and devoted much of his free time to reading comic books and watching old Buck Rogers and other serials looking for film ideas.

• Lucas insisted on casting unknown actors and actresses in all the important parts of the film—which made the studio uneasy. Mark Hamill had made more than 100 TV appearances, and Carrie Fisher had studied acting, but neither had had much experience in films. Harrison Ford’s biggest role had been as the drag racer in
American Graffiti
, and when he read for the part of Han Solo he was working as a carpenter.

The first hot airplane meals were served on a Pan Am flight in 1935.

THE CHARACTERS

Luke Skywalker.
At first Lucas planned to portray him as an elderly general, but decided that making him a teenager gave him more potential for character development. Lucas originally named the character Luke Starkiller, but on the first day of shooting he changed it to the less violent Skywalker.

Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Lucas got his idea for Obi-Wan Kenobi and “the Force” after reading Carlos Castaneda’s
Tales of Power
, an account of Don Juan, a Mexican-Indian sorcerer and his experiences with what he calls “the life force.”

Darth Vader.
David Prowse, a 6′7″ Welsh weightlifter, played the part of Darth Vader. But Lucas didn’t want his villain to have a Welsh accent, so he dubbed James Earl Jones’s voice over Prowse’s. Still, Prowse loved the part. “He took the whole thing very seriously,” Lucas remembers. “He began to believe he really was Darth Vader.”

Han Solo.
In the early stages of development, Han Solo was a green-skinned, gilled monster with a girlfriend named Boma who was a cross between a guinea pig and a brown bear. Solo was supposed to make only a few appearances in the film, but Lucas later made him into a swashbuckling, reckless human (allegedly modeled after film director Francis Ford Coppola).

Chewbacca.
Lucas got the idea for Chewbacca one morning in the early 1970s while watching his wife Marcia drive off in her car. She had their Alaskan malamute, Indiana, in the car (the namesake for Indiana Jones in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
), and Lucas liked the way the large shaggy mutt looked in the passenger seat. So he decided to create a character in the film that was a cross between Indiana, a bear, and a monkey.

Princess Leia.
Carrie Fisher was a beautiful 19-year-old actress when she was cast to play Princess Leia, but Lucas did everything he could to tone down her femininity. At one point, he even ordered that her breasts be strapped to her chest with electrical tape. “There’s no jiggling in the Empire,” Fisher later joked.