A defiant lady looks back with no real regrets
Lake looks back with honesty, acceptance and understanding on a 30-film career between 1939 and 1970, an occupation towards which she often showed ambivalence. And equally she recounts the tumultuous issues that life dropped in her path – the death of her father in an accident, an overbearing mother who sued her, three failed marriages, guilt over inattention to her three children, a child who died, money struggles and the bottle.
She apparently dictated her story to American author and ghostwriter Donald Bain, and between the two of them they produced a compelling account that doesn't seem to hold back. It reads nicely, as though Lake is addressing you the reader personally. However, the book fell out of print, becoming rare for years, and Dean Street Press, which specialises in vintage fiction and non-fiction, seemingly had to strive to track it down for this 2020 edition.
It has an introduction by Eddie Muller, an American author and founder of the Film Noir Foundation that is dedicated to preserving and restoring films noirs , and he compares Lake to similarly torn actor Sterling Hayden, both having been reluctant stars and natural-born rebels who turned their backs on Hollywood, swapping fame for life as nomadic free spirits.
Muller points out that 'while the public has granted Sterling Hayden, a legendary boozer and hash-head, a legacy as a heroic, larger-than life iconoclast, it has branded Lake's life after Hollywood a steady downward spiral of abasement, worthy only of pity. Blame a cultural double standard that applauds reckless rebellion in men but shames it in women'. Well put.
Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, known to legions of moviegoers as Veronica Lake, was born in Brooklyn, New York State, on November 14, 1922, and her mother once intimated to her that she was a mistake, a very unwanted child. Connie was a tomboy in a normal comfortable middle-class family living in a fair neighbourhood.
She spent her pre-school years in Florida, her grade school years back in Brooklyn and her high school years in Florida and Montreal, New York State. She had a lead in a school play at age eight, and was third of 85 contestants in a Miss Miami beauty contest and won first place in a Miss Florida contest – flesh peddling, slaves markets, as she described these.
Her father died in February 1932 when she was 10 and her mother remarried a year later. Connie, her stepfather, mother and a cousin moved to Hollywood in summer 1938 when Lake was 16. She daydreamed occasionally of becoming an actress but had no compulsion, though her dominating mother had different ideas and enrolled her in acting school.
One of the girls there had a casting call at RKO for 'Sorority House' in 1939 and she asked Connie to accompany her. Both were taken on as extras. Connie had further bit parts in 'The Wrong Room' (1938) at RKO, 'Forty Little Mothers' (1940) at Metro and a couple of others.
She did a screen test for director Freddie Wilcox at Metro but the result was awful.
A producer unzipped his pants and put his half-erect penis on the desk 'lying there like a sausage on display in the local supermarket'. She threw a book, hit her target and left him howling. She says she never succumbed to that Hollywood staple, the casting couch.
Her fine, blonde hair was hard to manage and she was always trying to stop it falling in her eyes. Director Busby Berkeley decided instead that it distinguished her. She also tested for Paramount producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., and kept shaking her head to get the hair out of her eyes. The famous 'peek-a-boo' one-eyed look was born. 'Something I always considered a detriment to my appearance became my greatest asset. That's Hollywood, folks.'
She had her first featured role in 'I Wanted Wings' in 1941. Hornblow wanted to change her name and he spent a restless night thinking about it. He told her that when people looked into her navy-blue eyes they saw the calm coolness of a lake, and her classic features made him think of Veronica. (Just a whim? Who or why Veronica goes unexplained).
Working on 'I Wanted Wings' frightened her to death and she developed a self-defence, being very cocky and snippy. Her aloofness enabled her to get through the role but didn't endear her to the people working on the picture and gave her something of a poor reputation. However, it made her a star and she got a modest raise in salary.
She scored with 'Sullivan's Travels' (1941), upsetting director Preston Sturges by not disclosing she was six months pregnant. 'This Gun for Hire' and 'The Glass Key', both with Alan Ladd, and 'I Married a Witch', with Fredric March, were further successes, all in 1942.
Beauty shops nationwide began advertising the Veronica Lake hair-do, but government officials asked her to change it so that women working in war factories wouldn't get their long hair caught in the machinery. She wore it up in 1944's 'The Hour Before The Dawn'.
Lake's successful teaming with Ladd continued in 'The Blue Dahlia' (1946) and 'Saigon' (1948). 'Blue Dahlia' writer Raymond Chandler called her 'Miss Moronica Lake'. Others joked. Groucho Marx: 'I opened up my mop closet the other day and I thought Veronica Lake fell out.' Bob Hope: 'Veronica Lake wears her hair over one eye because it's a glass eye.'
She writes: 'I decided it was time to make Hollywood a thing of the past. At this point, cynics will say that quite the reverse was true; Hollywood decided to make Veronica Lake a thing of the past… I set foot in Hollywood again in June 1952, to obtain my final divorce from [Hungarian film director] André [DeToth]. I've never been back since.' Like others, DeToth had problems being 'Mr Lake', husband of a movie star, pin-up girl, sex symbol.
Lake moved to New York and made a precarious living doing television and theatre. She broke her ankle and was laid low for a time, paycheck to paycheck. A newspaper revelation that she was a cocktail waitress at a New York hotel caused world headlines, but she insists it was something she liked and not forced by debts. A long section of the book describes her years drinking in bars with her sailor boyfriend Andy, until he died from alcohol ailments.
Lake is quite matter of fact about her so-called decline. This reader is reminded of Edith Piaf's signature song 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' – 'No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. All the things that went wrong, For at last I have learned to be strong. No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. For the grief doesn't last, it is gone, I've forgotten the past.' The Hollywood rebel had simply left glamour behind and wanted stardom without the usual trimmings.
The book, recall, was published in 1969. Before reading it I saw her on YouTube interviewed on 'The Dick Cavett Show' in 1971, two years from death, almost unrecognisable with shorter hair and aged face but perfectly content and throwing her head back in wild laughter a couple of times. And there is a rather sad photo on the internet of her standing outside the gates of Paramount Pictures that same year, the former beauty looking like a dowdy housewife in a cheap tracksuit. But she is giving a little smile and appears composed.
It seems the sadness is ours, not hers. Peace at last. 'And the memories I had I no longer desire. Both the good and the bad I have flung in a fire. And I feel in my heart that the seed has been sown. It is something quite new, it's like nothing I've known.' No regrets.
Rest in peace Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, sometimes 'legend' Veronica Lake.
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Budapest Times
20-07-2025
- Budapest Times
Dumb hoods screw up in kidnap gone wrong
Latter-day editions of books by late American crime writer Charles Willeford (1919-1988) have featured the front-cover accolade by late American crime writer Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) that 'No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford'. That's exceedingly generous praise from a man for whom many would offer exactly the same sentiment, that 'No one writes a better crime novel than Elmore Leonard'. While not wanting to enter a debate about who might have been the better of the two, it has to be said that Leonard's output of some 45 novels outstrips Willeford's of 18 or so, with both maintaining a remarkably high standard of idiosyncratic plotting, characterisation and dialogue in a felonious field that includes many other notable penmen and penwomen. (Leonard and Willeford have been great favourites at The Budapest Times for years, where we've consumed some 35 of Leonard's novels and just about all of Willeford's, but forced by threat of torture into a decision of some sort, rather than choosing one author we would at least opt for the latter's superlative 'Sideswipe' (1987) as nigh on unbeatable.) Well, just about matchless, that is, for 'The Switch', first published in 1978. is top-notch story-telling too, with its requisite badasses who are basically too stupid to be successful badasses. The badasses here are Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, Ordell a light-skinned Negro and Gara a dark-skinned Caucasian, so they are about even in shade (a typical Leonard touch, that). Not only are Leonard's hoods often dumb and screwing up, they can end up trying to rip off each other too, with guess-what results. Louis is going to be the dumb-ass here. Leonard liked to write things in a bit of an oblique way, so when he tells us that 'Louis had been down in Huntsville, Texas, keeping fit, clearing scrub all day, having his supper at five P.M. and turning the light out at ten', that's Elmore code for Louis having been in jail. Likewise, reading that 'Louis wore a cap – this summer a faded tan cap – straight and low over his eyes. Louis didn't go in for jewelry; a watch was enough, a $1,200 Benrus he'd picked up at the Flamingo Motor Hotel, McAllen, Texas', well, that's another roundabout for the reader to understand – he's a thief. He has indeed been away for nearly three years, and so now that he's out of stir and back in Detroit, his pal Ordell is taking him for a ride in Ordell's tan Ford van so that he can see the latest sights of the Motor Capital. As they cruise past the monumental Renaissance Centre on the riverfront, all glass and steel rising 700 feet in a five-tower complex, all Louis can say is that, 'Wow. It's big'. Ordell is nonplussed, asking, 'That's all you can say? It's big?' to which Louis adds: 'It's really big. If it fell over you could walk across it to Canada.' Another sight described by Ordell: '… a fine example of neo-ghetto… You can see it's not your classic ghetto yet, not quite ratty or rotten enough, but it's coming. Over there on the left, first whore of the day. Out for her vitamin C. And there's some more – hot pants with a little ass hanging out, showing the goods.' Louis was jailed after gunning his car at someone he didn't like to make him jump but cut it too close and broke the man's legs. 'I was arrested, charged with attempted murder, plea-bargained it down to felonious assault and got two to five in Huntsville. Served thirty months, same amount of time I was in the Navy, and I'll tell you something. Even being at [naval station] Norfolk, Virginia, I liked the Navy a little better.' Leonard is a master of casual humour. Ordell recounts how he went down to the Bahamas about seven, eight years ago. 'I had some money to spend, I said hey, go down to a paradise island and have some of those big rum drinks and watch the natives do all that quaint shit beating on the oil drums, you know?' And then there's Richard, full name Richard Edgar Monk, a cultist, racist, anti-communist, anti-semite, ex-private security guard with an arsenal of rifles, revolvers, a musket, shotguns – one sawed-off – grenades, bayonets, knives, a gas mask, a German helmet, an Afrika Korps soft hat, Nazi armbands, belt buckles, an SS death's head insignia, and boxes of cartridges and shotgun shells. His car has a shotgun mount, roll-bar and police siren. Richard is recruited because Ordell and Louis plan to kidnap the wife of a rich man and they need Richard's house to hold her until her husband pays a million-dollar ransom. Alongside Richard's World War Two memorabilia, the red, white and black swastika on the wall and photos of Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in his black SS uniform, Leonard notes in another nice touch that the couch and easychairs have crocheted antimacassars on the arms and headrests. There's something weird about Richard. The kidnap victim will be Mickey Dawson, the 'tennis mum' of a spoiled brat teenage son, Bo. She's sick to the teeth of her husband Frank. 'He's a pure asshole,' she says. For the irritable Frank, nothing his wife does is right and he's on her back all the time. Unknown to her, he has apartments in Detroit renovated with stolen materials and appliances, renting to pimps and prostitutes, grossing at least $100,000 a month but reporting only half as income, his money going into a numbered bank account. Frank also regularly goes to the Bahamas for a day or two, lately for several days, supposedly working on land development with foreign investors. He has a mistress there, Melanie. Ordell and Louis have a selection of rubber faces including four Richard Nixons, Frankenstein, a vampire, a witch, monsters, Micky Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy for disguise. They grab Mickey and take her to Richard's. It has all the makings of a terrible mess, Elmore Leonard-style – the two hoods and their psycho pal, and the Frank-Mickey-Melanie triangle. Unfortunately, unknown to the kidnappers, Frank has divorce papers in the pipeline and he wants to marry Melanie, so why should he want to pay out a million dollars to secure Mickey's release? In fact it would save him a lot of trouble if the kidnappers kill her. There's an interesting question that Leonard might be subtly leaving us to consider – are Ordell, Louis and Richard any more screwed up in their criminal ways than the 'respectable' Frank? The outcome is unseen and nicely absurd, a satisfying ending to an enjoyable book . The other two newly resissued Leonard paperbacks alongside 'The Switch' are 'Swag' (1976) and 'Rum Punch' (1992). Another 10 will follow at the end of this year and in March 2026. It's all about keeping the catalogue alive. These latest paperbacks don't mean that Elmore Leonard is back, because he never went away, and probably won't either. A couple of his tenets for good writing to keep the reader engaged were to never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue, and to never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said' to keep the focus on the dialogue itself. For these and his other rules we remark that we are exceedingly grateful.
Budapest Times
12-07-2025
- Budapest Times
A defiant lady looks back with no real regrets
Doubtless, many people younger than Veronica Lake wrote autobiographies, with hers having been published in 1969 when she was only 47 years old. But by 1973 she was dead; as legend has it, a washed-up, bankrupt Hollywood beauty who drank to oblivion. It would seem reasonable to assume that she had accepted her glory days would never return and it was time to set the record straight. Even, perhaps, that she felt her remaining days were few. Lake looks back with honesty, acceptance and understanding on a 30-film career between 1939 and 1970, an occupation towards which she often showed ambivalence. And equally she recounts the tumultuous issues that life dropped in her path – the death of her father in an accident, an overbearing mother who sued her, three failed marriages, guilt over inattention to her three children, a child who died, money struggles and the bottle. She apparently dictated her story to American author and ghostwriter Donald Bain, and between the two of them they produced a compelling account that doesn't seem to hold back. It reads nicely, as though Lake is addressing you the reader personally. However, the book fell out of print, becoming rare for years, and Dean Street Press, which specialises in vintage fiction and non-fiction, seemingly had to strive to track it down for this 2020 edition. It has an introduction by Eddie Muller, an American author and founder of the Film Noir Foundation that is dedicated to preserving and restoring films noirs , and he compares Lake to similarly torn actor Sterling Hayden, both having been reluctant stars and natural-born rebels who turned their backs on Hollywood, swapping fame for life as nomadic free spirits. Muller points out that 'while the public has granted Sterling Hayden, a legendary boozer and hash-head, a legacy as a heroic, larger-than life iconoclast, it has branded Lake's life after Hollywood a steady downward spiral of abasement, worthy only of pity. Blame a cultural double standard that applauds reckless rebellion in men but shames it in women'. Well put. Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, known to legions of moviegoers as Veronica Lake, was born in Brooklyn, New York State, on November 14, 1922, and her mother once intimated to her that she was a mistake, a very unwanted child. Connie was a tomboy in a normal comfortable middle-class family living in a fair neighbourhood. She spent her pre-school years in Florida, her grade school years back in Brooklyn and her high school years in Florida and Montreal, New York State. She had a lead in a school play at age eight, and was third of 85 contestants in a Miss Miami beauty contest and won first place in a Miss Florida contest – flesh peddling, slaves markets, as she described these. Her father died in February 1932 when she was 10 and her mother remarried a year later. Connie, her stepfather, mother and a cousin moved to Hollywood in summer 1938 when Lake was 16. She daydreamed occasionally of becoming an actress but had no compulsion, though her dominating mother had different ideas and enrolled her in acting school. One of the girls there had a casting call at RKO for 'Sorority House' in 1939 and she asked Connie to accompany her. Both were taken on as extras. Connie had further bit parts in 'The Wrong Room' (1938) at RKO, 'Forty Little Mothers' (1940) at Metro and a couple of others. She did a screen test for director Freddie Wilcox at Metro but the result was awful. A producer unzipped his pants and put his half-erect penis on the desk 'lying there like a sausage on display in the local supermarket'. She threw a book, hit her target and left him howling. She says she never succumbed to that Hollywood staple, the casting couch. Her fine, blonde hair was hard to manage and she was always trying to stop it falling in her eyes. Director Busby Berkeley decided instead that it distinguished her. She also tested for Paramount producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., and kept shaking her head to get the hair out of her eyes. The famous 'peek-a-boo' one-eyed look was born. 'Something I always considered a detriment to my appearance became my greatest asset. That's Hollywood, folks.' She had her first featured role in 'I Wanted Wings' in 1941. Hornblow wanted to change her name and he spent a restless night thinking about it. He told her that when people looked into her navy-blue eyes they saw the calm coolness of a lake, and her classic features made him think of Veronica. (Just a whim? Who or why Veronica goes unexplained). Working on 'I Wanted Wings' frightened her to death and she developed a self-defence, being very cocky and snippy. Her aloofness enabled her to get through the role but didn't endear her to the people working on the picture and gave her something of a poor reputation. However, it made her a star and she got a modest raise in salary. She scored with 'Sullivan's Travels' (1941), upsetting director Preston Sturges by not disclosing she was six months pregnant. 'This Gun for Hire' and 'The Glass Key', both with Alan Ladd, and 'I Married a Witch', with Fredric March, were further successes, all in 1942. Beauty shops nationwide began advertising the Veronica Lake hair-do, but government officials asked her to change it so that women working in war factories wouldn't get their long hair caught in the machinery. She wore it up in 1944's 'The Hour Before The Dawn'. Lake's successful teaming with Ladd continued in 'The Blue Dahlia' (1946) and 'Saigon' (1948). 'Blue Dahlia' writer Raymond Chandler called her 'Miss Moronica Lake'. Others joked. Groucho Marx: 'I opened up my mop closet the other day and I thought Veronica Lake fell out.' Bob Hope: 'Veronica Lake wears her hair over one eye because it's a glass eye.' She writes: 'I decided it was time to make Hollywood a thing of the past. At this point, cynics will say that quite the reverse was true; Hollywood decided to make Veronica Lake a thing of the past… I set foot in Hollywood again in June 1952, to obtain my final divorce from [Hungarian film director] André [DeToth]. I've never been back since.' Like others, DeToth had problems being 'Mr Lake', husband of a movie star, pin-up girl, sex symbol. Lake moved to New York and made a precarious living doing television and theatre. She broke her ankle and was laid low for a time, paycheck to paycheck. A newspaper revelation that she was a cocktail waitress at a New York hotel caused world headlines, but she insists it was something she liked and not forced by debts. A long section of the book describes her years drinking in bars with her sailor boyfriend Andy, until he died from alcohol ailments. Lake is quite matter of fact about her so-called decline. This reader is reminded of Edith Piaf's signature song 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' – 'No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. All the things that went wrong, For at last I have learned to be strong. No! No regrets. No! I will have no regrets. For the grief doesn't last, it is gone, I've forgotten the past.' The Hollywood rebel had simply left glamour behind and wanted stardom without the usual trimmings. The book, recall, was published in 1969. Before reading it I saw her on YouTube interviewed on 'The Dick Cavett Show' in 1971, two years from death, almost unrecognisable with shorter hair and aged face but perfectly content and throwing her head back in wild laughter a couple of times. And there is a rather sad photo on the internet of her standing outside the gates of Paramount Pictures that same year, the former beauty looking like a dowdy housewife in a cheap tracksuit. But she is giving a little smile and appears composed. It seems the sadness is ours, not hers. Peace at last. 'And the memories I had I no longer desire. Both the good and the bad I have flung in a fire. And I feel in my heart that the seed has been sown. It is something quite new, it's like nothing I've known.' No regrets. Rest in peace Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, sometimes 'legend' Veronica Lake.
Budapest Times
24-05-2025
- Budapest Times
Black author committed to damning the black experience
Readers of this Books section should be well acquainted with Chester Bomar Himes, the black American writer (1909-1984) best known for his hard-boiled but wry Harlem Detectives series, all eight of which, and a couple of his others, we have featured as they were republished in the past four years. Now here are eight of his short stories, perhaps some of them written from prison, in a slim volume that is one of a whopping 90 new books selected from the Penguin Random House archive. The 90 are to celebrate the 90th anniversary of what is now the largest book publisher in the United Kingdom. It was in 1935 that Allen Lane (1902-1970) together with his brothers Richard and John founded Penguin Books to bring high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. The simple idea was that quality literature shouldn't cost more than a packet of cigarettes. Publishers and booksellers were sceptical at first but within a year Penguin had caused a revolution in the industry, with three million sold. The Himes book is typical of the 90, it being a short 142-page selection and thus selling at a reduced UK price of £5.99 compared with a normal paperback for £9.99-16.99. The eight stories come from 'The Collected Stories of Chester Himes' that was originally published in 1990 and contained a fulsome 60 tales spanning some four decades of his writing. Like the other 89 archive titles, 'All God's Chillun Got Pride' has a simple but striking cover, which draws on Penguin's design heritage. The new series uses only one colour, and that colour is red foil, otherwise known as the colour of passion, the idea being that this is intended as a love letter from the publisher for the birthday. The red foil lettering is stamped onto naked white covers, showing the story, author and the year when the author was first published as a Penguin. In Himes' case, he has been 'A Penguin since 1974'. Otherwise, no further details are given about the contents, which is a pity. It would have been nice to know when Himes wrote his eight stories and where they were first published, because he, of course, started writing at the Ohio State Penitentiary after committing armed robbery and being arrested while attempting to pawn the stolen jewellery in Chicago. It was 1929 and he was 19 years old. The court gave him the maximum 25 years in prison but he was released on parole in 1936. Biographers say that while incarcerated he bought a Remington typewriter and began tapping out stories. These were sent to magazines and the like, and his work was published in the Pittsburgh Courier, Bronzeman, Atlanta Daily World, Abbott's Monthly and Esquire. A victim of racism himself, Himes used his writing career to concern himself with black protagonists doomed by white racism and self-hate. This set of eight tales opens with 'Headwaiter', which we think was first published in Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life in 1937. The story explores the necessarily repressed feelings of a black headwaiter, Dick Small, who has held the postion at the Park Manor Hotel for 20 years and must defer to an exclusively white clientele while overseeing an equally exclusively black waiting staff. These waiters have a Negroid langour that bespeaks liberal tips. Small is reminded of the negro of Mark Twain legend who said he didn't want to make a dime 'cause he had a dime. One diner observes that 'all a nigger needs is something to eat and someplace to sleep'. The diner knows because he's got a plantation of them. A busboy, shouted at by a lady diner, 'jumped a full yard backward, his nostrils flaring like a winded horse's and his eyes white-rimmed in his black face'. 'Lunching at the Rtizmore' is a satirical story about a student bet that will supposedly disprove the existence of racism in Los Angeles. Consternation ensues as the city's down-and-outs tag along to see whether a negro will be allowed to eat in restaurants, ultimately at the Ritzmore, the swankiest of West Coast hotels. How is the bet resolved? It doesn't matter really. It's all rather tongue-in-cheek from Himes. What racism? The titular short story, 'All God's Chillun Got Pride', is a brilliantly powerful and relentless summation of the daily fear and humiliation that a 'black beast', a nigger, goes through in white America. The man, Keith Richards, known as 'Dick', keeps up a bold front but he's afraid that one day he will crack, and that will be his doom. 'So each day, of a necessity, in order to live and breathe, he did as many of these things of which he was scared to do as he could do short of self-destruction. He did them to prove he wasn't scared so the next day he would be able to get up and live and breathe and go down to the library and work as a research assistant with a group of white people.' 'Pork Chop Paradise' has writing almost as strong, in which an illiterate black man, a convicted rapist, comes to be called God by black and white men and women, duped into fake faith by his messianic messaging and because, for a while, he is able to assuage their hunger. Pavements turned into pork chops? Here is a denunciation of phoney religious cults. Finally, 'God' is brought to grief by falling to his own suppressed human desires, especially sex, losing his head with a blinding lust for Cleo, 'a high-yellah gal… from down Harlem way, and she sent him to the dogs. Sent him to the dogs'. The opening pages of 'Friends' are a bit difficult to follow – the alligators – until we reach a murder that is difficult to read, because the bloody and horrific account is so chillingly recounted. It is harrowing. The rapist accidentally cuts off his penis to free it from the corpse with a butcher knife. Phew. In 'His Last Day', cop killer 'Spats' Wilson is on Death Row and hours away from the big chair. He's determined not to give way to fear, to go to his destiny with a smile on his face, though mainly for the benefit of his fellow inmates and the newspaper coverage. Deep down he is desperate for a reprieve, which never comes, and he is scared. He rejects the preacher who wants him to make peace with God. He just about manages to carry off his final minutes with bravado, but take at look at his eyes and see his true feelings. (Written in prison and Himes' first published short story, in Abbott's Monthly in 1933.) In 'The Snake', the search for a rattlesnake that has invaded a woman's home leads to the discovery of her missing husband in a grave under the floorboards. (Esquire published this on October 1, 1959.) Black America needed, and probably still does – Black Lives Matter – the perspective of a person such as Himes. As he mentions here, didn't (Founding Father, United States President and slave owner) Thomas Jefferson write that 'All men are created equal'? Not in Himes' telling of the black experience. 'They don't hang Negoes in the north; they have other and more subtle ways of killing them,' he writes. But when you shear away the falseness of tradition and ideology, who can tell the black from the white? Let's hope that 'All God's Chillun Got Pride', which is in effect a sampler, generates enough interest to allow 'The Collected Stories of Chester Himes' to see the light again.
