MU TUNC: THE DIRECTOR OF TURKEY’S FIRST PUNK MOVIE. OR, THE FALL OF EASTERN CIVILIZATION

 

Ceren Moray

 MU TUNC: THE DIRECTOR 

OF TURKEY’S FIRST PUNK MOVIE. OR, THE FALL OF EASTERN CIVILIZATION

 

BY BURT KEARNS JUNE 5, 2019

 

Filmmaker Mu Tunc describes his film, Arada, as “Liquid Sky meets The Decline of Western Civilization,” which, of course, automatically makes it worthy of attention. Mu Tunc will present his film at the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibit on June 6 and at the Philadelphia Museum of Contemporary Art on June 9. Burt Kearns spoke with the Turkish director for PKM on the eve of his arrival in New York.

 

The message showed up in my inbox on April 1.  “Hi Burt, I hope my email finds you well. My name is Mu Tunç, a film director from Istanbul. I recently found your insane article, ‘Zeki Müren, The David Bowie of Turkey.’ And I want to share my story with you because what you wrote was in my film and we thought the same insight… In my film there is a record store scene where they talk about Zeki Müren and compare him to David Bowie. I thought no one think it this way, however reading your article literally made me have tears in my eyes…”

 

Mu Tunç, a 32-year-old filmmaker from Istanbul, had gone online and found the PleaseKillMe.com story about the male Turkish classical singer who performed in elaborate feminine costumes, makeup and high platform shoes, who lived his life openly as a gay man in the 1950s and 1960s, and was not only accepted but revered in the macho, conservative Muslim country. In Tunç’s film, Arada,  Zeki Müren is cited as an example of the artists who foreshadowed Turkey’s punk scene. “This guy was taking the stage on platform heels way before David Bowie was even around,” the record store owner explains to a young punk. “Look at that outfit. He spreads his wings like a butterfly.”

 

Still of Zeki Muren in Arada

 

Arada, released in April 2018 in Turkey before hitting the international film festival circuit, is considered Turkish cinema’s first punk movie. Set in the 1990s amid civil unrest and the rise of Turkey’s underground hardcore scene, it tells of a young punk, the son of a former Turkish singing star, attempting to leave Istanbul to pursue his punk music dream in sunny California. Tunc describes his film as “Liquid Sky meets The Decline of Western Civilization.” It’s an accomplished work with DIY touches, reminiscent of Sean Baker’s Tangerine and John Cassavetes’ Husbands. When the music hits, it’s like the fall of Eastern Civilization.

 

Arada movie poster

 

The story is autobiographical, Tunç explained in a subsequent phone conversation hours before he boarded a plane for New York City, where he’ll present Arada at the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibit this week. Our talk has been edited for space and tweaked to avoid losses in translation.

 

BIG BROTHER

 

MU TUNÇ: My father’s name is Altan Tunç. He was a famous musician in the 1970s, performing Turkish art music. It’s what Zeki Müren was a master of. But then the coup happened, and they forced everyone to join the Army. Even though he had a university degree, that was the law. He went into the Army for 15 months, and when he returned —  this is a time there was like, only one channel on television — no one remembered him. My brother was born when he was in the Army and then basically my father just had to earn money in order to support his family. So I grew up with him saying, “I’m going to return to music one day.” But that day never came for him. I see sadness in his eyes now. He didn’t follow his passion.

 

PKM: That’s a universal story.

 

MU TUNÇ: And that’s the crazy part! My brother is nine years older than me. And he basically shared the DNA. I don’t know if it’s a curse or whatever, but he ended up with music, too. He became a drummer. However, my brother’s taste was different.  He found speed metal, and heavy metal and thrash metal — especially thrash metal.

 

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When the music hits, it’s like the fall of Eastern Civilization.

 

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PKM: This was in the early 1990s. How did American punk make its way to Istanbul?

 

MU TUNÇ:  Cassette tapes. This is crazy, this part! I put this into my movie, but it was very fast: basically, how punk entered the country is through pilots. A bunch of pilots bringing in these weird records.

 

PKM: Airline pilots, right?

 

MU TUNÇ: Airline pilots. Yeah, like normal pilots. At that time, there were not so many ways of going out and coming back. So these pilots are really special people. They were going abroad and bringing back these records with them. And they were giving them away to people who have cassette shops. Then (the shop owners) would pirate and compile songs from a bunch of artists on cassettes. So my brother went to this cassette shop one day and he finds a compilation with a couple of very important American hardcore bands. One of them is D.R.I. (Houston’s Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) and the other one is Methods of Destruction, M-O-D (laughs). Surfin’ in the USA. And through that, he found American hardcore music. My brother and his friends,  they were like 13, 14 years old, and they wanted to form a band. And they started the band Turmoil.

 

Character's wall in Arada

 

PKM: Was there a scene at the time? And was it really happening underground?

 

MU TUNÇ: The scene was so underground that no one even knew it existed. The kids were having concerts inside my family’s apartment building, in the basement without other people knowing. And they didn’t know that there were other people like them in other cities. Think about them like a bunch of kids in Harlem and a bunch of kids in Brooklyn, but they don’t even know that they exist at the same time.

 

PKM: That’s how it was in the early days of punk in the 1970s. You’d go to a Ramones concert and see somebody with a Ramones T-shirt and talk to them.  Because you knew a kindred spirit.

 

MU TUNÇ: Here there were not even concerts. They were making fanzines and putting those fanzines into the cassette shops. That’s how they first found each other. And afterwards, they sent mail to addresses they found on the sleeves of records. It was a very common thing in punk culture. You look for addresses on the album cover designs. And many American hardcore bands put their addresses on the covers. They started to write back and forth in order to find a connection. It was like searching the Internet before the Internet. These guys are understanding the idea of Internet — but through punk music! And my brother’s band found the connection and released one of the first Turkish punk records.

 

(In 1996, Turmoil split an EP with the anarcho-Mexican-hardcore band Regeneración.  The disc was released in Belgium and Mexico, and is still available online. Mu’s brother Orkan Tunc is a successful producer who’s worked with Janet Jackson and produced the Arada soundtrack.)

 

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The scene was so underground that no one even knew it existed. The kids were having concerts inside my family’s apartment building, in the basement without other people knowing.

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DIFFERENT

 

PKM: So you’re from a very artistic family. What about you? Your bio on IMDb mentioned your work with the McCann ad agency. Have you worked in the States?

 

MU TUNÇ: I’ve never worked in the States, but my way of understanding grew with McCann, which is a very important American advertisement company. I was dealing with Coca Cola, Starbucks, whatever you name, I worked it for them. Sony, Mobil — everything that is against punk, I was in it! I was not sharing my background, about me, about my family, that my brother was one of the first persons into punk music in Turkey. I was not sharing these kind of things, because I was ashamed.

Mu Tunc by Jiyan Kizilboga

 

PKM:  You put all that into Arada?

 

MU TUNÇ: It wasn’t easy, what was I was trying to tell in the movie. I grew up being different. And being different is painful in Turkey. It can be painful in places like New York. But here it’s literally double that, or even triple or four times more hard. In my film, there’s a scene, a conversation in my house, where my father — and he’s a very liberal person — tells my brother, “You’ll not going to get married if you keep on being punk.”

 

This is harsh. This is too harsh. My mother was a teacher. So (my parents) care about education a lot and they sent us to private school. And I studied with full scholarship all my life. However, when I was a little kid, I was into punk. I grew up fantasizing about Los Angeles. I was listening to Suicidal Tendencies and all these crazy bands from LA. all the time, like I was a Chicano punk.  I was listening to Black Flag, Santa Monica bands and all these San Francisco Bay area bands. I was obsessed with Dead Kennedys. I was listening to all this stuff, but my taste was also making me feel alone. Because there were no one to speak to.

 

----

I was not sharing my background, about me, about my family, that my brother was one of the first persons into punk music in Turkey. I was not sharing these kind of things, because I was ashamed.

----

 

The first girl that I liked, her name was Jamie and she was from South Africa. Somehow her family was moved to Turkey and I ended up in class with her. And the reason why I liked her so much is because she asked me what kind of music I like, and I responded that I’m listening to punk music. And she understood. She said, “Oh, something like Green Day?” And I was like, “Wow.” Like finally, a girl understands me. And Green Day is the worst thing you can say to a punk person. Green Day normally makes you vomit! But it was the most romantic thing that I have ever heard in my life. (laughs)

 

ANTI-HEROES

 

PKM: You went on to study cinema. Where did you study?

 

MU TUNÇ: Istanbul. I studied design first. I come from design perspective. And I have a master’s degree in cinema, so I understand cinemology. That’s where I actually come from, that’s why I am aware this background of punk movies, all this serious stuff. Like Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan. They were pioneers of anti-hero movies. I wanted to make an anti-hero movie. That was my mission actually in the beginning.

 

Arada star Burak Deniz as Ozan

 

PKM: Have you seen the movie Tangerine?

 

MU TUNÇ: I love Tangerine.

 

PKM: I thought of Tangerine when I watched Arada. The two main characters were on a quest — and that’s the movie they shot on iPhones.

 

MU TUNÇ: That’s what I want to do right now! Yesterday, I just finished a documentary about the whole process of making Arada. The reason why I’m doing that, Burt, is just to give hope to my younger generation. Just follow your passion, and follow your dream, you know? I know this is a very cheesy word nowadays, like all the brands are saying, “Be an influencer” or “Inspire people.” It becomes like chewing gum. But especially in my country right now, young people are really desperate. They’re even nihilist. It’s like even the nihilism is good compared to their situation, because they don’t even have a dream anymore. And I want to become a case study. That’s why I’m very passionate. And going to New York, going to all these places, I’m not earning any money, Burt. Like literally, I lost all the savings for this movie. I know money will come. But I just want to become a hope in young cinema. That’s my mission.

Record store scene from Arada

 

CASSAVETES

 

PKM: Arada played in 20 cities, in 80 theaters in Turkey, and now it’s streaming there. What’s been the response as you take the film around the world?

 

MU TUNÇ: It’s really growing in a very interesting circle nowadays.  I’ve been to a lot of film festivals.  However, more cultural and art people understand me better than the critical film people.  So it’s interesting to see this connection. It’s not like a typical movie journey that I’m experiencing. Turkish cinema is one of the most successful nowadays. It’s crazy, we’re in every major film festival in the world.  But the storytelling is not experimental.

 

PKM: That’s where you stand out.

 

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But especially in my country right now, young people are really desperate. They’re even nihilist. It’s like even the nihilism is good compared to their situation, because they don’t even have a dream anymore. And I want to become a case study. That’s why I’m very passionate.

----

 

MU TUNÇ: You can see in Arada, I’m influenced a lot by the John Cassavetes style of storytelling. Or Harmony Korine or the old Derek Jarman, all these experimental ways of telling things. I come from that perspective.

 

PKM: Now are you part of a filmmakers community in Istanbul, or are you on your own there?

 

MU TUNÇ: Let me put it this way: Arada is seen as one of the first punk movies ever be made in the history of Turkish cinema. I mean, punk movies is a very micro genre. Also the way Arada was made is also very punk. I shot the whole movie in 13 days. Almost every person working on the film was young. The sound recorder is a young person, my film photographer, it was his first film. It’s like everyone’s first film. I wanted it to come from the punk spirit of doing things by yourself. If you want to shoot a movie, do it. I know it’s hard, but just do it. John Cassavetes really affected me a lot. The way he approached film like, “I want to do it this way and I’m going to do it.” And challenging the narrative storytelling. I don’t want you to love the characters. I want you to hate them even. It’s not just a systematic formula to get your love.

 

And in Eastern cinema, you don’t see the cultural thing like you do in American independent cinema. When you watch Clerks, you sometimes end up seeing really random bullshit talk. But behind the lines, there are a lot of important cultural elements they share with you at the same time. You don’t see that kind of genuine approaches in Turkish cinema, and I want to bring it. And what’s interesting is that people are seeing that, too. One of the first serious academic books about independent Turkish cinema is going to be released very soon. Before it was always a problematic question whether there is independent cinema in Turkey or not, and now it’s coming up in this academic book. And my film Arada is on the cover.

 

GREATEST PUNK ROCKERS

 

PKM: Now, getting back to that record store scene. The shop owner points out the traditional artists from Turkey who were influential and were very punk-like in their attitude and expressions. Like Orhan Gensebay (a music and acting star since the late 1960s).

 

MU TUNÇ: Exactly, exactly. His lyrics are insanely dark. Like insanely. Literally it’s one of the darkest lyrics that’s ever come out at that time (in the late 1960s). And it was a very problematic time because the left and right in Turkey were having a fight in the streets. Almost like a civil war going on. Every day, random teenagers were killing each other in the streets of Turkey. So it was a serious time. And Orhan Gencebay, made this music telling that this whole world is fucked up. And that’s how he became famous.

 

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It’s like everyone’s first film. I wanted it to come from the punk spirit of doing things by yourself.

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PKM: In the record shop scene, they called him “the greatest punk rocker Turkey ever raised.”

 

MU TUNÇ: No! I just tried to make people to look at themselves from a different perspective. The problem with the Turkish people is that they think that punk music is a rebellious approach. However, in the movie, I try to show that the punk aesthetic is a way of existence. Of being true to yourself and being independent. And being just yourself is an approach of punk.

 

PKM: Yes it is. And it was always there. How is that that Turkey, on one hand it’s majority is Muslim and potentially repressive, yet it opened its arms to artists like Ohran Gencebay and especially somebody like Zeki Müren?

 

MU TUNÇ: That’s the crazy part! That’s why I put that scene into the film. Right now, we are having a lot of problems, too. But what I was trying to show is that these guys were making this kind of music in the ‘60s. And with Zeki Müren’s outfits!  Guys, we’re almost in the 2020s. Just do something!  Don’t tell me, “Oh, these people are in power and doing this.” Just do whatever you can do. Don’t say, “Oh well, we are losers.” No we are not. No one is losers.

 

When I found the story you wrote about Zeki Müren, you made my tear drop. Like literally, because I said, how come on the whole planet, someone like you can find out this connection, and my people are supposed to think these things that no one is speaking. For you and I to meet up, normally in this world is completely impossible.  Fifty years ago, it was impossible. And you and I, we think alike, having completely different backgrounds. I put exactly your words into my movie, without knowing you.

 

Mu Tunc

 

PKM: It’s a small world, after all. (laughs)

 

MU TUNÇ: That makes me go crazy! Because this comparison — Burt, really, I never read it anywhere. That this guy was David Bowie before David Bowie — the first time I read it was in your article — and it was in my movie. It’s beyond wild. And think about it, this is a Muslim country, and I just want to show this to young people, teens. They need to hear these things, because whole cultures are nowadays dying.

 

PKM: Yeah. I think kids don’t have a sense of history because they’re constantly bombarded with so much information. There’s just so much going on, they don’t have time to process all of it. It’s a whole different language, it’s a whole different world with kids today.

 

MU TUNÇ: It’s a noise at the same time. When I was a little kid, I was a straight-edge punk and I was putting X’s on my hand. And my teachers were not understanding me. I was thinking, ‘if these people understand what this X is about, they will love me’. Punk and hardcore music, especially American hardcore punk, taught me so many important values that I should care about when I grew up. Such as pollution. Such as global warming. Such as human rights. Such as animal rights. That I should not use cosmetics. All these important humanistic elements, I learned through listening to punk and hardcore music.

 

PKM: It’s always been there.

 

MU TUNÇ: And when I grew up, people were telling me, “Oh, there’s global warming.” I was like, “Hello, guys! Everybody was speaking about these things more than twenty years ago.” Punk kids were speaking about these things. The first punk people were really emotional people. They were not at all into noise. Noise was just a tool to make people wake up. Like literally, wake up.

 

Mu Tunç will be there when ARADA is screened at 6:30 PM at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) New York’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” exhibition on June 6, and at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art on June 9.

 

 

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Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.

SHE SHOT ANDY WARHOLS: THE DIRTY LIFE & CRIMES OF DOROTHY PODBER

SHE SHOT ANDY WARHOLS: 

THE DIRTY LIFE & CRIMES 

OF DOROTHY PODBER

 

BY BURT KEARNS  MAY 20, 2019

 

 

She called it ‘performance art’ when, in 1964, she casually strolled into Andy Warhol’s Factory, pulled out a handgun and shot a bullet through four paintings of Marilyn Monroe, then strolled back outside. This wasn’t Dorothy Podber’s only claim to infamy—a ‘shooting’ that would be relegated to back burner after Warhol was shot for real in 1968. Burt Kearns chronicles Podber’s strange story.

 

I shot Andy Warhol. Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol. Dorothy Podber is the only one who shot Andy Warhols, leading to very unintended consequences after she pulled the trigger.

 

I shot Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s. I was living in a building in the West Village in which Christopher Makos, the acclaimed photographer and Andy Warhol collaborator, had an apartment on the first floor. One afternoon, I walked into the building and literally bumped into Andy Warhol in the hallway. After exchanging greetings with him and Chris, I bolted up to my place on the fourth floor, grabbed a camera, pushed open the bedroom window over Waverly Place and snapped photos of Andy as he got into a car. What a shot! Andy Warhol, seen clearly through the fire escape slats as he slides into the passenger seat. Well, at least you can make out the silver wig on the top of his head. If I point it out.

 

Valerie Solanas used a gun. A paranoid schizophrenic feminist man-hater and Warhol obsessive, she walked into Andy’s office on Union Square on June 4, 1968 and shot him twice with a .32 Beretta. Warhol was declared dead at one point, but survived another nineteen years before complications killed him. Solanas served three years in prison.

 

Valerie Solanas at her arrest

 

Dorothy Podber shot first. She was a different story altogether, a “performance artist” whose life and love of drugs, booze and crime has been told in broad, legendary strokes.  She was the baby who managed to be born in the Bronx in 1932, despite her mother’s attempts to abort, which included throwing herself down a subway stairs; the girl with a father who ran a speakeasy for Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz until he went blind and opened a newsstand; the woman who dedicated her life to crime for the hell of it. She went to jail for running an illegal abortion referral service out of her apartment (she pleaded guilty with the disclaimer that she was a Buddhist), was an expert check counterfeiter, and ran a doctors’ office cleaning service as a means of obtaining keys to the drug cabinets.

 

All the while, she was deep into New York City’s late 1950s druggie beatnik avant-garde art scene, moving in a circle that included the likes of Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jasper Johns, and Billy Name, the artist who designed Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory workspace and became his collaborator.

 

Her place in the crowd was solidified in 1957, when she and Eunice “Skid” Shality opened the Nonagan Gallery at Second Avenue and Sixth Street. The long, narrow room on the second floor showcased the work of artists like Yoko Ono and hosted concerts by the likes of Charles Mingus. Podber was also a member of a clan known as the “amphetamine rapture group,” and was said to keep a bowl of methamphetamines, like M&M’s, on her coffee table.

 

“She was a friend of mine,” Billy Name told Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain when they were researching their book Please Kill Me. “But she was the dangerous type of witch who would never stop pressing you beyond – beyond aesthetic, beyond intuition, beyond anything you could ever think of. She could always take you to the next step beyond.”

 

“I’ve been bad all my life,” Podber confirmed to a journalist. “Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty.”

 

Her biggest trick, the one that included a gun and Andy Warhols, the one that elevated her to an esteemed place in art history, almost never happened, because of a crime that made headlines a year before the gun went off. The incident made headlines and caused great scandal but has been lost to history and never included in any of Dorothy Podber’s biographies.

 

Yet, it’s crucial to postmodern art because, if not for the integrity of a scumbag junkie ex-con thief, Dorothy Podber would have been stewing in a prison cell 250 miles away from the Factory on East 47th Street, and might never have shot Andy Warhols.

 

Doc Dale’s Missing Medical Bag

 

It was the second week of October 1963 and Dorothy Podber was traveling beyond the East Village toward the mountains of Vermont. She and two friends were heading to a small town north of Montpelier, Vermont, supposedly to meet a guru. The Indian spiritual master Sant Kirpal Singh was on his second world tour, and after stops in Washington D.C. and Chicago, was speaking at the local Goddard College on Saturday, October 12, and attending a party at a house.

 

Dorothy and her pals were staying with a woman named Barbara Stevenson in Calais, a small rural town about ten miles north of Montpelier. Calais had fewer than 700 residents and probably as many cows and sheep. It once contained a village called Sodom (because it held no churches) until 1905, when residents petitioned to change the name to Adamant.  Dorothy and her pals would help bring a little bit of Sodom back to town.

 

Barbara Stevenson was thirty years old, but still a poor little rich girl, living in a house owned by her father. Daddy was a big attorney in California who owned more in land in Vermont than just about anyone else. That would come in handy in the days to come.

 

Dorothy Podber pulled in with her usual dark arts aura and traveling companions who were even darker. Ken Knollenberg, 37, was a photographer. Frederico Cartinali, 29, was a printer. Both haunted the fringes of the avant-garde arts scene. Both were dopers, hopheads, addicts.

 

The two overgrown bad girls and their dangerous man friends had themselves a good time all the way out in the middle of nowhere in the house owned by Barbara’s daddy. But on Thursday, October 10, two days before the guru was set to pull into town, there was an emergency. Whether he was jonesing or going along with another of Dorothy’s dirty tricks, Ken Knollenberg was said to have some kind of medical problem. Everyone piled into the car to take him to Heaton Hospital in Montpelier. Doctor Porter H. Dale was called upon to treat him. The women entered the hospital with Knollenberg. Cartinali waited outside in the car.

 

After everyone had gone and Doc Dale was done, he returned to his car and realized something was missing: his medical bag. The leather case contained more than a tongue depressor and stethoscope. Inside were many vials and bottles of drugs, from pep pills to painkillers, including heavy narcotics like morphine. It was a dope fiend’s delight.  It wasn’t hard for the doctor to come up with possible suspects.

 

The hospital where the theft took place

 

Vermont state troopers Clement Potvin and Billy Chilton were assigned the case that night. They worked into the next day to track down the missing bag. It turned up, empty, in the village of Worcester. It didn’t take the cops long to get a warrant to raid Barbara Stevenson’s pad not four miles away. Montpelier Police Chief George J. Connor and Sheriff Harry Potter came along for the raid on Saturday night — the night guru Sant Kirpal Singh was speaking.  They busted in and encountered Cartinali, whom they later described as being in a “high” state, and along with the other three hipsters, empty vials of morphine and other narcotics, all over the house, all lifted from Doc Dale’s medical bag.

 

The four of them were hauled down to the Montpelier police lockup.

Doctor’s bag

 

Can’t Make Bail

 

On Monday, they appeared before Judge John P. Connarn in Montpelier Municipal Court. Knollenberg was charged with “attempting to procure the administration of a narcotic drug by fraud, deceit, misrepresentation or subterfuge” and with stealing the medical bag from Doc Dale’s car. Federico Cartinali faced the same charges, as well as possession of a switchblade knife. Barbara Stevenson and Dorothy Podber were charged with grand larceny for stealing the medical bag. All four pleaded not guilty. Bail was set at $7,500 for Knollenberg, $10,000 for Cartinali, $1,000 each for the women. Barbara Stevenson’s daddy posted her bail immediately and she walked. The other three were sent to the Washington County Jail.

 

It turned out that the two men were not mere dope addicts. Both were ex-cons.  Knollenberg had once been sentenced in California to a term of ten years to life  for robbing a narcotics firm. Cartinali’s record dated back to 1945, and he’d served time in in New York’s Sing Sing prison.

Cartinali and Knollenberg escorted to jail handcuffed

 

While the group was in and out of court over the next two weeks, the story made big news in and out of Montpelier. None of the New Yorkers was able to post bond, and Cartinali’s $10,000 bail was believed to be the highest ever set in Montpelier Municipal Court.

On Friday, October 25, the affair reached a dramatic conclusion in Judge Connarn’s courtroom. All four were facing serious time in prison. Then, suddenly, the junkie Federico Cartinali stepped up and pleaded guilty to all charges.

 

He told the court that this was his first trip to Vermont.

 

“Why did you come here?’ the judge asked.

 

“I came to a friend’s house to stop using drugs, to kick the habit,” he said. 

 

Cartinali said he’d last been treated for his habit in at a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky back in 1953. “I stood off drugs for about fifteen months after that,” he said.

 

Most significantly, he shouldered all the blame, absolving the others. State’s attorney John E. Bernasconi confirmed he was satisfied that druggie Cartinali had acted alone. If Judge Connarn was impressed with Cartinali’s honesty, it wasn’t reflected in what happened next.

 

The judge sentenced Cartinali to five years in prison for narcotics possession, another two to five years for stealing the medical bag, and ninety days for carrying the switchblade.

 

At least the sentences would be served concurrently.

 

Cartinali was hustled out of the courtroom, straight to the Vermont state prison in Windsor and cold turkey in a cell. The other three, Knollenberg and the two women, were free to go.

 

Judge Connarn dropped all charges against them, but not before adding some judgely advice. “I would, in your position, feel rather grateful. If you are going to consort with people of this kind,” he said, “you are heading for trouble.”

 

People of this kind. Dorothy Podber probably got a big laugh out of that one. She returned to the New York City underground meth and art scene with new dark stories to tell. She’d made big news in the capital of Vermont, but what was that worth? It was all performance art.

 

Shot Marilyns

 

“She had this power of this thrilling challenge and daringness — in her presence, people would just crumble into the rubble,” Billy Name told Legs and Gillian with an amused laugh. “But I could handle it. Andy didn’t want to, because he knew that if he let people like Dorothy, and other people of that genre, into the Factory scene, that most of the people who were buying his work wouldn’t come around anymore. They would be absolutely destroyed.”

 

In the fall of 1964, a year after Vermont, Dorothy Podber showed up at the Factory with a few friends and her dog, Ivan De Carlo. Andy Warhol and Billy Name were there.

 

“She just walked in with her Great Dane, Ivan. She had these black gloves on and a black bag,” Billy recalled. “And she said, ‘Hi, Billy.’ And she took her bag and – she actually, I think, took her gloves off, and opened the bag and took the gun out of the bag.” He laughed at that part, too.

 

Stacked against a panel were four 40-inch square portraits of Marilyn Monroe that Andy Warhol had painted recently. The pictures, based on a still photo from the movie Niagara, were identical but with different colored backgrounds: red, orange, light blue, and sage blue. A turquoise version was somewhere else.

 

“And she just took out the gun and shot Marilyn right through the forehead,” Billy  said. “And it went through all of them. And then she put the gun away in her bag and put her gloves on. ‘Bye, Billy!’ she said. And she just went. It was like a performance piece, you see?  Intentionally.”

 

Maybe to Billy Name it was a laugh. Andy Warhol was terrified. Before shooting the stack of paintings, Dorothy had pointed the gun in his direction. Can you imagine? Someone walking into Andy Warhol’s workspace and shooting him? Unthinkable.

 

“Well, they were his paintings, and Dorothy didn’t ask him if she could do it. Andy, of course, was a great control person. Anything in the Factory he wanted to be the producer of. And this was something that had happened out of the world he knew. And it happened to his paintings, and he hadn’t authorized it. So he was a little pissed about it. So Andy asked me, ‘Please. Tell her not to come over anymore.’”

 

Dorothy Podber was banned from the Factory for life, but her “performance piece” was well-received in the avant-garde arts scene. In 1973, ten years after the incident in Vermont, her work was featured in a Women’s Art Exhibition in Saratoga Springs, alongside acclaimed artists Dotty Attie, Margo Hoff, and Carol Abraham.

 

Dorothy Podber

 

Over the years, Dorothy Podber was married three times and had many casual sexual encounters. According to the London Telegraph, “one boyfriend was a banker with whom she would have sexual intercourse only on the banknote-strewn floor of his firm’s vault.”

 

Her third husband, Lester Schwartz, was a bisexual stevedore and the shared lover of Living Theatre founders Judith Malina and Julian Beck. Lester died in 1986. Dorothy Podber died in her East Village apartment in 2008, at age 75.

 

And what of Andy Warhol’s shot Marilyn paintings? In the postmodern art world, Dorothy Podber’s bullet did not wind up destroying the hard work that went into them. In fact, the gunshot added a new dimension — and value — to Warhol’s works. The four paintings were patched up and became known as the “Shot Marilyns.”

Red Marilyn

 

On May 3, 1989, a little more than two years after Andy Warhol’s death, ”Shot Red Marilyn”‘ was auctioned at Christie’s. It went for double the price expected, $4.07 million.  It was the highest price ever paid at auction for a Warhol painting. On May 14, 1998, the record was broken when Shot Orange Marilyn went for $17.3 million.

 

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    Burt Kearns’ photo of Andy Warhol. See if you can find him.

 

 

Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.

THE DEATH OF SGT. CARTER

THE DEATH OF SGT. CARTER

Burt Kearns

April 29, 2019

Frank Sutton, who played the gruff sergeant foil to Jim Nabors’ country bumpkin Gomer Pyle, was a talented actor on screen, tube and stage. He lived and died, quite literally, for his profession as an actor, but there was a side that few outside celebrity circles knew—Frank Sutton the cultured Ivy League grad and serious student of theatre history.

by Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham

Funny how in the turbulent, anti-authority, Vietnam War-torn 1960s, many of our favorite and long-lasting television comedy characters were military men. Army Corporal Randolph Agarn (F Troop), Navy Ensign Charles Parker (McHale’s Navy), Army Colonel Robert Hogan (Hogan’s Heroes), Air Force Captain Tony Nelson (I Dream of Jeannie), and Marine Private Gomer Pyle were only some of the uniformed defenders whose antics keep us laughing to this day. 

Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter from the series Gomer Pyle – USMC may have been the greatest and funniest of them all. Portrayed by Frank Sutton over five seasons on CBS beginning in September 1964, the character evolved from the cigar-chomping, gasket-blowing, slow-burning and mugging antagonist to the father figure and best buddy of Pyle, the naive, bumbling country boy with the incongruously booming baritone singing voice.

Sutton’s Sgt. Carter was a parody of, or at least a take-off on, Jack Webb’s Gunnery Sgt. Jim Moore in the 1957 film The D.I., and surely influenced R. Lee Ermey’s over-the-top Parris Island Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket thirty years after Webb’s movie.

In real life, Frank Sutton was never a Marine (not that he hadn’t tried).  From an early age, he was a thespian. Born in in 1923 in Clarksville, Tennessee (destination of that train in the Monkees’ classic antiwar single), he was acting onstage in student and community theater productions while still in high school. “The first time I walked out on the stage, I had a warm feeling,” he said. “I wanted to be an actor.”

After graduation, he worked as a radio announcer and did indeed attempt to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.  The man who’d become a living recruiting poster for that branch of the Armed Forces was rejected because he was colorblind.  He was good enough, however, for the United States Army.  Sutton served in the Pacific during World War II, participated in fourteen assault landings, and was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.  After the war, he attended Columbia University in New York City.  That’s where he met his future wife, Toby Igler.

“The first time I saw him he was reading a monologue from Hamlet,” she once recalled. “I never expected to be so impressed by a young actor.”  

Frank Sutton was, and remained through his life, in his words, “starved for knowledge.”  “I never thought Frank would get through school,” a former classmate told a Hollywood columnist. “He was always reading books that had absolutely nothing to do with the courses he was taking. The only time I ever saw him studying anything that seemed pertinent was when he was preparing for a part in a play.”

Even before he graduated cum laude in 1952, Sutton got a taste of success with a role in television’s first sci-fi series, Captain Video and his Video Rangers.  Stardom beckoned in 1955, when he was cast in the film Marty (starring Ernest Borgnine, future television Navy lieutenant commander Quinton McHale).  The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  More movie roles followed.  Sutton would appear in plays as diverse as The Andersonville Trial and The Barretts of Wimpole Street.  He worked in many television dramas, including “The Dummy”, a classic episode of The Twilight Zone.

In 1964, he took on the Sgt. Carter role in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show.  It led to the spin-off, Gomer Pyle – USMC.

During the run of the show, Sutton cashed in on the popularity of his character with public appearances, including starring roles in circuses, in character as Sgt. Carter.  A 1969 newspaper article about his appearance with the Zembo Temple-Hamid-Morton Circus in Pennsylvania, promised: “He will arrive at center stage in a jeep ‘in command’ of a group of Harrisburg Area Marine Reserves.  After some precision drills, the gravel-voiced TV sergeant will close his act with a monologue to musical accompaniment.”

Sutton footed the bill when he performed one-man shows for Marines stationed in Vietnam (according to the Clarksville website, “he performed… fifty-six shows in just eight days in cities like Da Nang, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai”).

 Sutton on the Jim Nabors Comedy Hour.

After the Gomer Pyle series ended in 1969, Sgt. Carter and Pvt. Pyle stayed together when Sutton (along with Pyle regular Ronnie Schell) joined The Jim Nabors Variety Hour.  One television writer at the time described Sutton as the show’s “singing, dancing, buffooning costar,” while pointing out that “there is another side of Frank Sutton that few people know about…. That hidden side: Frank Sutton, the intellectual.”  The show lasted two seasons, until it was canceled in CBS Television’s “rural purge” (which also claimed The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D., and Green Acres).So where would an intellectual with 3,000 volumes in his personal library, an Ivy League drama degree and an unquenchable appetite for knowledge turn? For Frank Sutton, aside from Love, American Style and a couple of television movies, it was the stage.

Valley Times, April 1969 

 

City Record, July 1971

In this case, the stages were inside dinner theatres. The concept of live entertainment served up with a restaurant-quality meal and hopefully, a full bar, was developed in the 1950s, but really hit its stride and became part of pop culture in the 1970s, as many current television personalities, along with aging former movie and theatre stars, made good money bringing popular plays and musicals to cities and towns far from Broadway.

Sutton played dinner theatres all over the country. He portrayed the wronged husband George in No Hard Feelings and major slob Oscar Madison (to Patrick Baldauff’s Felix Unger) in The Odd Couple.  In May 1974, he arrived in Shreveport, Louisiana to begin rehearsals for Luv, Murray Schisgal’s 1964 absurdist comedy about a guy who tries to foist off his wife on a down-and-out college buddy so he can run away with his mistress.  Mike Nichols directed the original Broadway version.  Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson were in the original cast. Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk and Elaine May starred in the 1967 movie.

In this production of Luv at the Beverly Barn Dinner Playhouse, Sutton was starring with regional theatre actress Elizabeth Ives.  Sutton’s wife Toby Igler, now a soap opera writer, and their ten-year-old daughter Amanda were with him in Shreveport.  His twenty-year-old son, Joseph, was a student at Dartmouth.

Shreveport Times June 1974

On Friday night, June 28, 1974, Luv was heading into its third weekend at the Beverly Barn, busboys were clearing plates from the tables, and the audience was ready for a show.  Frank Sutton was in his dressing room.  Moments before taking the stage, he suffered a heart attack and died. He was 50 years old.

Elizabeth Ives made the announcement to the audience. “It was to have been my privilege to appear with Frank Sutton tonight, but I am sorry to have to tell you that last evening was his last performance. He has taken ill and died,” she said most eloquently.  “He was an actor and a professional, and he said — and I know it sounds corny, but he said ‘if any actor has to die, that a theatre is the place for him to die’.

“He was a lovely man and would all of you take just a moment of silence for Frank.  There will be no show tonight.”

The audience, already stunned, went silent, before filing out of the theater.

Elizabeth Ives said later that Sutton had made the remark about dying in the theatre twice during rehearsals.

“I’m really shocked,” Jim Nabors said from Honolulu, where he was able to live as a gay man, far from the prying press.  “He was a very great man as far as I’m concerned. A great talent and a great human being.  He was a fine person and a very dedicated actor and a terrific family man. We worked together every day, fourteen hours a day, for eight years.”

Luv, which had been scheduled to run through July 13, was canceled. It was replaced by a one-week run of the play Beginner’s Luck, starring another television comedy military man, Bob Crane. (Coincidentally, Crane was appearing in Beginner’s Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Scottsdale, Arizona in June 1978, when he was found bludgeoned to death in his apartment.)

After memorial services in Los Angeles, in accordance with his wishes his body was transported on at least a metaphorical version of the last train to Clarksville, and buried in its Greenwood Cemetery. 

In 2009, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff founded The Frank Sutton Appreciation Society.  Nesteroff wrote on the WFMU blog: “Sutton produced a richly hilarious body of work that deserves to be remembered…. Without Sutton’s blustery and explosive reactions to Pyle’s relentless stupidity, (Gomer Pyle – USMC) would have been lifeless and dull.  But Sutton was nothing if not versatile within the limited confines of the Sgt. Carter role.”

Frank Sutton statue in Clarksville, Tennesee.

A bronze statue of Sutton as Sgt. Carter, was unveiled in downtown Clarksville in May 2017.  

Had Frank Sutton managed make it from his dressing room to the dinner theatre stage before expiring, he would have earned a place in Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns’ new book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, published on September 3, 2019 from Chicago Review Press’ A Cappella Books, and available for preorder at DiedOnstage.com.

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Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.