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| Someday, love will find you. Break those chains that bind you. (Illustration from Passion) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "More Oddities in the News." Originally published in Passion (Gallery Press), vol. 2, no. 2, March/April 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "Most of us leaving work think about that drink waiting at home, the cocktail hour, or another great many of us stop at our local cocktail lounge to lift a couple. Few of us ever think that there are those people who are confined, because of their age, between the walls of an old people's home, and they too would like to indulge a bit. It's pleasant to think that some people are taking the trouble to look into such a situation."
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| The Canadian tabloid Confidential Flash. |
Reflections: Some of you sharper-eyed readers may have noticed a trend the Ed Wood articles I've been reviewing lately. First, there was "Sex Oddities and the Law," then "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers," and now "More Oddities in the News." Still to come is "Odds and Ends and Oddities." Eddie obviously went through an "oddities" phase in his magazine writing career. Basically, these articles are an excuse for Ed to cram in lots of brief, unrelated news items about sex, violence, crime, death, and booze into one article. Think of them as sampler platters of sleaze.
By Ed's own count, "More Oddities in the News" was his third article of this type. He optimistically calls it a "series," though these pieces were scattered across various Calga, Gallery, and Pendulum titles between 1971 and 1973. As near as I can tell, "More Oddities" is the only one credited to "Dick Trent." The others have no byline whatsoever. Woe to the "oddities" fan who actually tried to follow this piecemeal franchise from beginning to end.
When I reviewed "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers" yesterday, I mentioned that Ed cited no sources whatsoever in it, leading me to believe he had fabricated the entire thing. Well, the pendulum swings the other way today. "More Oddities in the News" seems entirely sourced from other publications, particularly a tabloid called Confidential Flash. From what little information I can find, this seems to have been a Canadian ripoff of the famous American magazine, Confidential. Eddie also cites a tabloid called the Star Chronicle, presumably the National Star Chronicle published in New York.
But enough dull talk of continuity! Which items did Eddie dredge up for our amusement this time? Well, he starts off with an item about senior citizens in Toronto trying to get the Ontario Liquor License Board to allow the consumption of alcohol in the city's homes for the aged. Since Eddie was a prodigious alcoholic and may have imagined himself ending up in a squalid nursing home, this is a story that would have plucked his heartstrings. Ed then mentions a Confidential Flash article about an "absentminded" rapist who mistakenly assaults his own wife. This is another example of Ed Wood taking a disturbing story and trying to pass it off as light entertainment.
Ed then moves on to a pseudo-scientific article that claims women in miniskirts have fewer traffic accidents. I thought for sure he'd make a joke about how these women also cause men to have more traffic accidents, but Ed resisted that urge. (Or perhaps the idea didn't occur to him.) Up next is the sad tale of a West German man who built his own guillotine and decapitated himself because he couldn't keep up with his mortgage payments. After that is the story of a nude woman who escaped from her would-be kidnapper and flagged down a police car.
Eddie then devotes several paragraphs to a study by one Dr. Irving Miller suggesting that job-related stress may have a ruinous effect on a man's sex life. A stressed-out businessman may even have an extramarital affair, but this will only cause him added guilt and make him even less sexually potent. I cannot help but think of the character Ben in Ed Wood's The Young Marrieds (1972) and wonder if his problems aren't rooted in his job. This is another item that seems to have struck a raw nerve within Ed Wood. As Eddie writes:
Today more than ever before in history we find the guy hitting the end of his forties or the first of his fifties and dropping dead from some form of heart disease. The guy of today feels that he has to fight harder than anyone else because the competition is that much stronger. But there's a lot of competition for the graveyard also, and the road there is much easier attainable.
As a reminder, Ed would have been about 48 when he wrote "More Oddities in the News.'
There are yet more wonders to be found within "More Oddities in the News." From the Star Chronicle comes the incredible saga of Steven Zunic, a Yugoslavian man who went to rather outrageous lengths to shame and torture his unfaithful wife, only to end up with 40 days in jail and a divorce. That same publication also included an article about incest and inbreeding that Ed clearly found fascinating. In case you were curious, Ed Wood was officially against inbreeding due to the high levels of birth defects it causes.
"More Oddities in the News" ends with an outrageous story that may have some basis in truth, though Eddie provides no source for it. It concerns two young women, Lola and Shirlene (a good start already), who took a self-improvement course from a an organization called Leadership Dynamics Institute, Inc . of San Francisco. For their $4,000 enrollment fee, the women were mentally and physically abused in a variety of bizarre and kinky ways more in line with S&M roleplaying than business training. (I think the illustration for this article is supposed to depict either Lola or Shirlene.) According to Ed, these ladies were suing LDI for $250 million. What surprised me is that Leadership Dynamics was a real, short-lived organization that lasted only from 1967 to 1973 and was accused of just such practices as Ed describes. Sometimes, the real world is every bit as strange as an Ed Wood movie.
UPDATE: Reader Shawn Langrick provided me with a very enlightening passage about Flash Confidential from a book called For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (1992) by Elizabeth S. Bird. Note the references to both the National Examiner and National Exploiter, two of Ed Wood's other tabloid favorites:
"The now defunct Confidential Flash was a 'singularly humorless tabloid' published out of Toronto. Its specialty, in addition to the usual sex and violence, was extreme political views. One of its columnists offered this solution to the Vietnam conflict: "Rape the women and burn the men -- that's the way to bring these scum into line." Cliff Linedecker, former National Examiner associate editor, also remembers the National Exploiter, "which they used to print on pink paper. It was terrible. It really had some outrageous stories. I remember one: 'Cement Mason Finishes Wife' showing the body of the woman and a splash cover headline. We would never get away with that kind of thing now.'"
Bird's book lumps Flash Confidential in with the "tabloid also-rans." Barry Goubler further recommends Bill Sloan's I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact (2001) for its insights into the tabloid industry.
Next: "Odds and Ends and Oddities" (1972)