Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 278: "A Child's Garden of Extroversion" (1939)

Two greats square off: Criswell and S.J. Perelman.

"I am not only witty in myself but the cause that wit is in other men."

-Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 (1600)

It's strange to think that the Amazing Criswell (1907-1982) did not arrive fully formed into this world. After all, the man seemed so innately himself, both in print and on camera, that it's difficult to imagine him doing anything else. But he was not always the pompadoured, tuxedoed showman we see in Ed Wood movies, confidently spouting (inaccurate) predictions and waxing philosophical about time and space. Long before the books, the movies, the newspaper columns, and the TV talk shows, he was merely Jeron Criswell King from Princeton, Indiana.

An ad for Criswell's books.

Much like his Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) castmate Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, Cris cycled through various identities and professions before landing on the gimmick that would make him cultishly famous. In 1935, after a failed teaching career, he relocated to New York and spent a few years trying to establish himself as a radio personality, playwright, and stage actor. During this period in his life, he met and married the equally outlandish Myrtle Louise Stonesifer (1905-1985) aka Louise Howard aka Halo Meadows.

Cris and Halo wrote a series of utterly bizarre how-to guides, most of them about making it in show business. (On some of their books, a third author named Arthur Jones is listed.) Though they had not found much success in the entertainment field yet, they were cheerfully selling books about how to make it as an actor, a songwriter, or a playwright. Definitely a case of "fake it 'til you make it."

These books are not commonly found today on the secondary market, but I have a xeroxed copy of one: How to Crash Tin Pan Alley from 1939. It's ostensibly a how-to book for songwriters. It explains how newcomers can get their compositions published, recorded, and performed. Since Criswell and his cohorts knew absolutely nothing about songcraft, the book assumes you can handle that part of the process yourself without their help. Instead, they focus on the music industry and the many pitfalls that a young, inexperienced songwriter may encounter while navigating it, from skeptical publishers to egotistical singers. The tone of the book is very similar to Ed Wood's own posthumously-published showbiz guide, Hollywood Rat Race (1998). Somehow, Cris and Halo managed to wrangle an introduction from celebrated jazz bandleader Sammy Kaye (1910-1987).

Since neither Criswell nor Halo Meadows ever became a hit songwriter, I wasn't sure what kind of cultural impact How to Crash Tin Pan Alley ever had. My xeroxed edition of the book was made from a copy at the University of Illinois, where it had been checked out numerous times over the years, starting in 1943. The most recent stamp on the inside cover said February 18, 1999. Imagine that! As late as Bill Clinton's second term, someone was still taking highly dubious career advice from Criswell! 

One wonders what these aspiring Hoagy Carmichaels thought of How to Crash Tin Pan Alley. The book is quite unlike any how-to guide of my experience. The bulk of it is given over to what I'd call a satirical novella written in the second person, somewhat like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except that there is only one path to follow here. You, the reader, are cast in the role of a young songwriter. You've written a catchy little ditty and you want it to be played on the radio and performed onstage so that it will be known to everyone in America. More than that, you want to have a steady career as a professional songwriter. Eventually, after many headaches and heartbreaks, you achieve your goal.

"Now," says the book, "all you have to worry about is television." A remarkable warning, since that medium wouldn't start becoming a major threat to the traditional entertainment industry for at least another decade. Maybe Cris was a better prognosticator than we give him credit for.

Tin Pan Alley as it once was.

The book also includes "A Creed for Songwriting Success," which includes various rules, both professional and moral, for aspiring tunesmiths to follow. The volume concludes with a section called "Marketing and Exploitation Campaign," which lays out a laughably impractical but nevertheless ambitious 30-step plan for becoming a profitable songsmith. A lot of it depends on local newspapers, businesses, and politicians supporting you enthusiastically in your showbiz endeavors. Why they should care about you in the first place, I have no idea, but the authors insist they will comply if you pester them enough.

In many ways, Criswell's book is commenting on a music industry that is long, long gone, if it ever existed at all. The very term "Tin Pan Alley," referring to a section of Manhattan where various music publishers had their offices, is now decidedly archaic. Not only did the entertainment business change drastically over the years, but so did the way we consume music. While many Americans had radios and phonographs in their homes by 1939, for example, they also bought a lot of sheet music in those days so that they could perform the latest hit tunes at home with their family and friends. Because of this, much of How to Crash Tin Pan Alley is devoted to the then-thriving sheet music business. The long-playing record (or LP) had not even been invented when this book was written.

Over the years, I have become curiously fond of How to Crash Tin Pan Alley, mainly because I'm impressed by the sheer chutzpah of the thing, the audacity of it. Criswell and Halo were not, by any stretch of the imagination, successful songwriters. But that did not deter them one bit from giving (worthless) advice to you, the novice! And they shamelessly used this book to plug so many of their other projects, i.e. their other books, plus various stage plays and films they claimed to be working on. But here's what makes the book endearing: even though Criswell has ripped you off and tricked you into buying a book of bad advice for a dollar (which is over $23 in today's money), he's still going to put on an entertaining show. In a way, this Tin Pan Alley book is a preview of his later, more lucrative career as a predicter. Could Criswell foresee the future? No, not really. But he sure could pretend like he could. This isn't flying, this is falling with style.

One key to Criswell's enduring popularity is that he was (and, let's face it, still is) an easy, inviting target for jokes. Talk shows booked him because he was preposterous. Cult movie audiences have been snickering through his scenes in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Night of the Ghouls (1959), and Orgy of the Dead (1965) for decades. When his books and newspaper columns are reviewed, it's to point out how wildly, flagrantly wrong they almost always were.

The ridicule came  early in Criswell's career, as Edwin Lee Canfield's biography Facts, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell (2023) demonstrates. Three years before How to Crash Tin Pan Alley, Cris adapted and starred in an off-Broadway adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). To say the least, this production was not well-received. Canfield includes some quotes from reviews that appeared at the time in The New York Times and The New York Daily News, and they are brutal. According to these scribes, the actors were "luckless," the audience was "heartless," Wilde's novel was "tarnished," and the comedy was "unintentional." But that was nothing compared to what was coming Criswell's way. Little did he know, he was about to be skewered by one of America's sharpest wits! 

Take that, Criswell!

Recently, in a Facebook forum devoted to Ed Wood, the ever-reliable Shawn Langrick posted a few pages from How to Crash Tin Pan Alley. He also posted a withering review of the book that originally appeared in the September 2, 1939 edition of The New Yorker. Headlined "A Child's Garden of Extroversion," it is penned by renowned humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (1907-1979). Today, Perelman may be best remembered for his work on the Marx Brothers' features, Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). But in his prime, Perelman was one of America's top comedic minds. For whatever reason, he chose Criswell as one of his targets. I suppose you could say that was an honor.

S.J. Perelman delights in pointing out that the authors indulge in so much self-promotion and include numerous publicity photographs of themselves in the book. "If you think Noel Coward is versatile," he writes, "you have yet to hear about Arthur Jones, Louise Howard, and Jeron Criswell." He also expresses puzzlement that Sammy Kaye willingly endorsed this fly-by-night enterprise. ("Our affair is at an end if he persists in being devoted to the first two-thirds of the book," Perelman warns the bandleader.) To be honest, I still don't know how Cris managed to snag that intro. Did Kaye owe him a favor?

The article then gives an extremely accurate, if unkind, description of what How to Crash Tin Pan Alley contains:

"It is presupposed that you have written a popular song, and forthwith you are carried through eighty-four pages of adventures with a set of Broadway characters named Mauvis Midnight, Horace Hamm, and Malcolm Doap IV which set the facial muscles aching with boredom. On page 103, the authors mercifully stop for wind and present a creed for songwriting success somewhat similar to the tenderfoot pledge of the Boy Scouts of America. One of its principal tenets is 'I keep my body free from dissipation and my mind clear and alert.' I was not aware one had to take a physical examination to place a ballad with Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., but we live in a changing world."

Perelman then dissects the book's absurd 30-point career plan and concludes that "the successful songwriter evidently must be a combination of Uriah Heep and Attila the Hun." The critic explains that this plan requires you, the songwriting hopeful, to harangue a bunch of strangers, all of whom are expected to help you without financial compensation. "Where you are going to pick up this collection of feebs and addlepates is of no concern to the authors," Perelman writes.

And here, the critic (perhaps inadvertently) gets at the heart of Criswell's peculiar appeal: "no concern." Would the plan outlined in How to Crash Tin Pan Alley work? Barring several miracles, probably not. Were the authors even remotely qualified to write such a book? No. But the Amazing Criswell simply did not let little inconveniences like reality get in his way. Ultimately, that's what made him an ideal candidate for Ed Wood's inner circle.