Cheesecake Provenance
and other things with which winners are concerned.
Important news! My novel Cubafruit came out a few days early! Long story but I accidentally deleted every single pre-order and also the entire book from Amazon. So I had to upload it again yesterday and make it available right away. If you pre-ordered the book, you were not charged, and won’t be receiving it—sorry to say you’ll have to just buy it again (for the first time) at the link below.
If you’ve got any questions about it, or you’re interested in covering the book’s release, feel free to send me a DM!
1.
One of the movies that stood out in my research for book Cubatooth (which is now on sale!) was Scarface (1932). It’s basically the story of Al Capone except that it has nothing to do with Capone. It’s romantic and moralizing but still exciting 96 years later. It starred Paul Muni as one of cinema’s first Italian-American tough guys.
Muni wasn’t Italian, though. He was Eastern European. Jewish.
The movie was written by Ben Hecht who said at the premiere that he loved the final product but like other men he eventually grew old decided, Actually I am upset.
“I knew [Al] Capone,” said Hecht. “But as Muni played it, Capone was a silent, moody fellow who was a little like Hitler,” as opposed to the chair-throwing coke addict with a brain disease.
In other words, Muni bore no resemblance to Capone while playing a character who was not technically Capone.
2.
For years I thought Paul Muni was one of the many stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age where it was known, around town, that the person was gay or bisexual but reporters didn’t talk about it. Director George Cukor is probably the most famous example. I love his version of A Star is Born with Judy Garland but he’s best-known for The Philadelphia Story which I cannot stand because, back around 2020, I worked at a pizza place that sold pre-packaged cheesecake, except the menu said we sold “home made” cheesecake, and so if somebody ordered the “home made” Cheesecake we had to go to the walk-in cooler, get the single-slice plastic container, open it up, slap the cheesecake onto a plate, give it some ornate little squizzles of strawberry syrup, a dash of cinnamon, and then set it in front of the customer who was sometimes a very particular kind of person, always a man, who would poke at the cheesecake in a suspicious way as I went on making drinks, and cleaning the bar, and if he took a bite it was a small bite, and he’d chew it slowly, “Hey lemme ask ya one quick thing…,” Columbo here digesting at me with observations about the cheesecake’s color, its “body,” its texture — tryna tell me, without saying it outright, that he knew this cheesecake had come pre-packaged.
These are guys who feel walked-on and exploited in their daily lives and so it brings them pleasure to go around the city pulling back various curtains, yanking off masks. It’s less about exposing something nefarious than demonstrating they aren’t gullible.
Which is of course the self-conscious reflex of someone who’s gullible.
Often these men sounded exactly like Jimmy Stewart.
3.
There was a mid-century window in mass media where public figures and the reporters traded some discreet currency of favors: discretion, coverage, looking away when necessary. If Walter Cronkite or Martha Gellhorn walked into a bathroom and caught JFK having sex with a lamp they would say “hello Jackie” and leave.
They could see something private and leave it alone.
Accountability, they understood, can be very invasive to one’s privacy.
4.
Paul Muni was not gay apparently — I might have been thinking of the later actor Rock Hudson, whom he kinda resembled, and who nearly got outed by Confidential magazine in 1955. Allegedly they threatened him and then his agent negotiated something; buying time, it seems, for Rock Hudson to get hitched real fast to that agent’s assistant Phyllis Gates. Friends said the marriage was probably “arranged” but that they did have some kinda love thing going on. Anthony Perkins had that too! He was openly gay for a while and then did electroshock conversion therapy in the early ‘70s and got married and had two kids. Perkins died of AIDS in 1992, seven years after Hudson, same cause.
They lived in stifled flight from a press that could not see something private and leave it alone. Could not enjoy a cheesecake without knowing its provenance.
5.
Al Capone got that big scar on his face while working at The Harvard Inn. He saw a woman sitting at the bar with some fella. He thought she was beautiful. He went and said, “Hey baby,” the exact quote varies from one biography to the next, “you got a fat ass—and that’s a compliment.”
The guy beside her at the bar happened to be her brother and the thing in his hand happened to be a knife. Brotherman stood up, Zorro’d the lecher, grabbed his sister and scrammed.
Years later Capone would complain that it was unprofessional when reporters called him “Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone.” Specifically, he said, it was a great stressor to his poor mother who had to read this bullying nickname about her son’s disfigurement.
Capone was implicated in roughly 33 murders and there was nonstop coverage of the concealed weapon charge and the Volstead violations and the tax evasion and even his welfare in prison and he didn’t seem too bothered by that.
What he didn’t understand is what his scar had to do with anything.
6.
A guy named Will H. Hays wrote a document of “moral” guidelines for movies to enforce. That document became the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930. People referred to it colloquially as The Hays Code. When those people saw an early cut of Scarface (1932), starring renowned heterosexual Paul Muni, they said “this movie is so horny and violent it will kill people in their chairs.”
Director Howard Hawks had to give it a sleek little subtitle, THE SHAME OF A NATION, and also he had to reshoot the ending so that Scarface doesn’t just get killed by cops, in an exciting shootout, but surrenders to the cops. The point now was to show that this killer is afraid to die himself, SEE?, and thus, when his reckoning comes, he doesn’t take it on the chin, like a man, he goes down and begs for mercy, on his knees, like that concierge in Home Alone 2, but then he runs and so they shoot him in the back, and he dies there, in slow writhing shame. Terrified. Lamenting his ways. Scrabbling on the stairs with a stupid face.
They recut the film, dropped the reels in the can, and put a sticker on the lid to mark that it was code-compliant.
The sticker said: “Home made.”
Well I see that you are not a true dessert connoisseur! And also I didn’t think of myself as gullible but I got hustled buying a pretzel at the farmer’s market this week and then this, so it might be time for me to take a good look in the mirror
Home made. And worth more than a pretzel.
I love your writing.
It’s the comments that keep me coming back for more.
Better than pizza shop cheesecake.