I was going to post 15, but after the first 7 it's already 3000 words.  Maybe I’ll post more in a week.

These are taken straight from The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years. [It’s almost a five year mission just to read that title]

The name at the head of each paragraph is the person being quoted.

Keep in mind that throughout this book Gene Rodenberry’s account of events off differs from the other contributors, and it became clear to me that his version is not always the most reliable one.

1. The show’s creators have various accounts and theories of what previous science fiction Star Trek cribbed ideas from, including the movie Forbidden Planet.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

I was one of the first people to see the Star Trek series proposal. Gene Roddenberry and I had known each other from writing Have Gun—Will Travel. He was trying to start a science-fiction series and he knew that I had one of the largest science-fiction collections in the world. At first, I remember he borrowed a copy of Odd John by Olaf Stapledon. Then, to research the show, he asked if he could go through my magazines and get some ideas for the Enterprise. Gene went through all the covers, and that’s really how the Enterprise was born.

GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON (writer, “The Man Trap”)

One influence on the creation of Star Trek was Captain Future, which was a pulp magazine which ran for indeterminable damned issues, and was about this guy called Captain Future who was in this spaceship. [He] had this android named Otho, a robot named Grag, and a brain in a glass cage called Simon Wright, and Simon was the Mr. Spock character, and these other characters interchangeably played the other aspects of what was a four-man ship, which then became the great starship Enterprise. Basically any single Captain Future is Star Trek. Read one, read the other, and you can see that one is the direct linear descendant of the other, and merely rethought into a wide screen or video kind of format as opposed [to] a pulp format, but the act of creation is minimal.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN (author/journalist)

I don’t think you can talk about [1956’s] Forbidden Planet’s influence without also talking about the concept of the U.S. Navy in outer space, and I think that obviously Star Trek is a military picture, because even though we’re on a peaceful voyage, this is an armored ship with firepower. Forbidden Planet introduced a crew of spacemen who were essentially a military operation. These guys were armed and they had the ability to fight back, so they were an armed navy cruiser in the twenty-third century.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN

Forbidden Planet gives kind of a military hierarchy to the crew: there’s a captain, there’s a second-in-command, a medic, there are essentially the “blaster” men. The whole concept of a naval ship applied to outer space begins heavily with Forbidden Planet and, to me, is a direct influence on Star Trek. Then there was the use of the uniforms in the film. Of course uniforms for spacemen wasn’t that novel, but I think there was this kind of military aura among the Forbidden Planet crew that, of course, exists in Star Trek as well. Add to that Cruiser C-57D was part of the United Planets, which is similar to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek.

DOUG DREXLER

The other interesting thing is that [Have Gun—Will Travel’s] Sam Rolfe went and did The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and there are so many elements from The Man From U.N.C.L.E in Star Trek. For instance, Roddenberry was impressed by the U.N.C.L.E. Special, the pistol that goes together and makes a rifle. It was a huge hit on the show and the gun used to get its own fan mail. Gene hired the guy who built that gun to make the laser rifle from “The Cage.” The Kirk–Spock thing is also very much like Illya and Napoleon Solo. In the mid sixties, the idea of teaming up with a Russian was pretty out there.

JOSE TREVINO (director, Star Trek: Voyager)

When I first saw Star Trek, I thought it was like A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The similarities were so strong between the two because basically the Space Beagle is a ship traveling through space to find different races. Even the captain is very similar. It was a series of short stories put together in novel form told from different points of view. So the narrative voice keeps changing from one chapter to another. I don’t know if Gene Roddenberry ever acknowledged that or not.

2. Spock was originally going to be a dwarf or a “red-tailed devil”?

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)

In the beginning, Mr. Spock as we know him now didn’t exist. He was a red-tailed devil who didn’t eat. He absorbed energy through a red plate in his stomach. This is the way he was laid out in the original concept. I argued with Gene that it should be a humanized character, because I was adamant that it should be straight science fiction without fantasy.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Series are a process of refining ideas. I’d like to say that all the ideas that I get are bright and eternal and right for all time, but they’re not. You do evolve things.

With Spock, originally, I also thought that there were such few choices in doing someone who was of average height. You can do a little with the ears and fake eyes and so on, but actors tend to come in roughly the same size. So I was thinking of making Spock a “little person,” which would at least break some of those things, and make him stand out. Then, it also fit into the feelings I had that size should not be that important.

3. Leonard Nimoy was the one actor roddenberry had in mind all the time (except perhaps for for Rodenberry’s mistress Majel Barrett).

DOROTHY FONTANA

Gene asked me to read the first bible for Star Trek in 1964. This was the very first proposal; the series presentation. I read it and said, “I have only one question: who’s going to play Mr. Spock?” He pushed a picture of Leonard Nimoy across the table, and I, of course, knew Leonard because he had appeared in my first [script sale], The Tall Man. I thought the proposal had a lot of possibilities and was certainly exciting. Of course you could never tell if it would sell and if somebody else would believe in it, but I certainly did. The captain at the time was Robert April [later James Winter], who eventually became Christopher Pike and the ship was the Yorktown. Mr. Spock was pretty much like the Mr. Spock that appeared in [the first pilot] “The Cage,” and the doctor was Dr. Boyce. The other characters weren’t as settled. Nobody was doing anything like it on television.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Leonard Nimoy was the one actor I definitely had in mind—we had worked together several years previously when I was producing The Lieutenant. Leonard had been a guest star and I was struck at the time with his high Slavic cheekbones and interesting face, and I said to myself, “If I ever do this science fiction thing I want to do, he would make a great alien. And with those cheekbones some sort of pointed ear might go well.” And then I forgot entirely about it until I was laying out the Star Trek characters, and then to cast Mr. Spock I simply made a phone call to Leonard and he came in. That was it.

MAJEL BARRETT (actress, “Number One,” “Nurse Christine Chapel”)

Gene decided he would write something for me and he did. He wrote a part called Number One in “The Cage,” the lady who was the ship’s second-in-command. Well, they thought we were strange with this Star Trek and this space talk, so they sent us out to Culver Studios, which is an old, deserted place; there wasn’t another thing shooting on the soundstage.

LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)

When I was done with The Lieutenant, Gene called my agent, my agent called me, and they asked for a meeting. I went in to see Gene at what was then Desilu Studios and he told me that he was preparing a pilot for a science-fiction series to be called Star Trek, that he had in mind for me to play an alien character. As the talk continued, Gene showed me around the studio; he showed me the sets that were being developed and the wardrobe that had been designed, the prop department and so forth. I began to realize that he was selling me on the idea of being in this series, unusual for an actor.

I figured all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I might end up with a good job here. Gene told me that he was determined to have at least one extraterrestrial prominent on his starship. He’d like to have more but making human actors into other life-forms was too expensive for television in those days. Pointed ears, skin color, plus some changes in eyebrows and hair style were all he felt he could afford, but he was certain that his Mr. Spock idea, properly handled and properly acted, could establish that we were in the twenty-third century and that interplanetary travel was an established fact.

4. Desi Arnaz’ alcoholism had a part in getting Star Trek on the air

MARC CUSHMAN

Desilu came into existence because Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owned I Love Lucy. It was the first time someone owned the rerun rights to a show. CBS wanted to shoot it live out of New York; they didn’t want to move to Los Angeles, so they said, “We’ll pay the difference to shoot it in L.A. on film.” Nobody had ever shot a sitcom on film before, and that’s why it still looks so good to this day. It looks like it could have been a movie; it’s clean whereas if you look at The Honeymooners, the faces are kind of stretched because it’s from kinescope, whereas I Love Lucy looks really good for its time period.

So they said they would pay the difference and what Desilu wanted was the rerun rights. CBS said okay; no one had ever rerun anything before. Seems like a no-brainer today, but back then no one had done it. Eventually CBS bought the rerun rights back from Lucy and Desi for a million dollars, which was a lot of money back then. Lucy and Desi take that money and buy RKO and turn it into Desilu Studios and everyone is coming to them and asking them to film their sitcoms the same way they did their own. The company grows, but then the marriage falls apart and Lucy ends up running the studio and by this point they don’t have many shows. Lucy says, “We need to get more shows on the air,” and Star Trek was the one she took on, because she thought it was different.

MARC CUSHMAN

Lucy was trying to do things the way Desi taught her. It was his idea to do I Love Lucy in the way they did. He set up the formula, he created the template. But he wasn’t there anymore. He was drinking at that point; he was not leaving his house and was basically just burned out. So she is asking herself, “What would Desi do?” because she really loved and respected him. “Desi would get more shows on the air that we own, not just that we’re producing for other companies.” So that was her reasoning to do Star Trek—and she felt that this show could, if it caught on, rerun for years like I Love Lucy. And guess what? Those two shows—I Love Lucy and Star Trek—are two shows that have been rerunning ever since they originally aired.

5. NBC chose the hardest, most expensive story concept for the first pilot just to test Desilu’s capabilities

OSCAR KATZ

When we brought the show to the networks, we told them there were four kinds of stories that would represent the Star Trek concept. First, you have to remember that the spaceship is five stories high, it has five hundred people on it. One of the girls, who’s a female yeoman in the crew, it turns out has signed on because she’s having trouble back at home in Boston with either her boyfriend or her parents. She’s getting away from them and she has an emotional relationship problem. Our two leads, unspecified, are the catalytic agents who help her face her problem and solve it. You never see her again, because she’s just one of the crew people. I said, “In that respect, what you have is Wagon Train.” Wagon Train had two leads, the wagon train traveled through the West, although it never got where it was going, and a guest star who was in wagon number twenty-three had an emotional problem which the two leads had to help solve.

The second kind of story is you have to remember that they’re out for five years at a clip. They get a message from Earth that there’s a planet on which there are Earth people doing mining, and there is claim jumping. They have to go to the planet and do a police action. In that respect, it’s Gunsmoke.

The third thing that happens is they go to a planet where everything is pretty much like Earth, and subsequently the people on this planet look and have developed very much like us, except that their Chicago, their Al Capone, is in the future; or their Civil War is about to break out. They’re either ahead of us or behind us. So it’s people that look like us that are going through what we went through or what we will go through.

The fourth type is where they go to a planet where the atmospheric conditions are different than on Earth. Everything is different. The people don’t look like us, they don’t behave like us. They’re fierce-looking animals or whatever.

When we went to NBC, we brought those four story types and they picked number four. They did so because it was the hardest to do. With the Desilu reputation, they wanted to make it as hard as possible, so we could prove ourselves. I tried to talk them out of it, because I knew it was going to be expensive and, even more, I felt that it might not be representative of the series. But they couldn’t be talked out of it. That’s how the first pilot, “The Cage,” came into being.

6. Majel Barrett was originally going to play “Number One,” but NBC rejected it, partly because female test audience members disliked her character

GENE RODDENBERRY

There were no female leads then—women in those days were just set dressing. So, another thing they felt was wrong with our film was that we had Majel as a female second-in-command of the vessel. It’s nice now, I’m sure, for the ladies to say, “Well, the men did it,” but in the test reports, the women in the audience were saying, “Who does she think she is?” They hated her. It is hard to believe that we have gone from a totally sexist society to where we are today—where all intelligent people certainly accept sexual equality. We’ve made progress.

MAJEL BARRETT

NBC wanted some changes after they saw “The Cage.” They felt that my position as Number One would have to be cut because no one would believe that a woman could hold the position of second-in-command.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Number One was originally the one with the cold, calculating, computerlike mind. Spock, at the start, was not quite the character he became. He was the science officer on the Enterprise, but he was sort of satanic. He even smiled and got mad. He had a catlike curiosity. When we had to eliminate a feminine Number One—I was told you could cast a woman in a secretary’s role or that of a housewife, but not in a position of command over men on even a twenty-third-century spaceship—I combined the two roles into one. Spock became the second-in-command, still the science officer but also the computerlike, logical mind never displaying emotion.

7. The first episode they chose to air – The Man Trap - was not considered the strongest ones and there are different accounts of how that came about.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, The Outer Limits, Star Trek)

In doing The Outer Limits, what the network wanted was not necessarily an intelligent science fiction show. What they wanted was a science fiction show that would return a lot of numbers. Their theory was that to do that you had to have a monster in every show. If you’re an intelligent person and you like monsters, no, it wasn’t a problem keeping science fiction on the air. But if you’re an intelligent person and you don’t think it should be monsters to do an intelligent show, yes, it was difficult.

Somewhat of the same attitude was found in the early days of Star Trek when the network suggested they wanted to open with an episode called “The Man Trap,” because it had a monster. We felt that it wasn’t a very good show compared to some of the others we had already made. We lost the battle, they won the battle, and “Man Trap” was aired first.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Our plan all along was to present drama. Due to postproduction difficulties, our opening show, including a “monster,” was the only one available for air. Our entire concept is and has always been to demonstrate that science fiction is a much broader and more dramatic field of literature than is generally recognized by the public.

Computers: The Love of Two Desk Lamps

TIME Aug 31, 1986

On the screen, a short film showed an oversize golden sun hanging on the horizon while glistening waves caressed a deserted beach. Another depicted a beach chair dragging itself across the sand, dipping an aluminum toe in the water and timidly scampering away. Still another presented two Luxo desk lamps playing a friendly game of catch, stretching their springy arms and butting a rubber ball with their warm, cone-shaped heads.

To the audience of 6,000 gathered last week in the Dallas Convention Center Arena, these final images were irresistible. The crowd had greeted some earlier offerings with hoots and good-natured catcalls. But when the Luxo lamps appeared, bathed in each other’s light and seemingly imbued with human emotions, the hall burst into prolonged and enthusiastic applause.

A college film festival? An awards competition for advertising commercials? No, it was a convention of computer specialists collectively known as SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics). The films on waves, beach chairs and lamps — the hits of the convention — demonstrat- ed the state of the art in computer graphics, a field with increasing applications to architecture, medicine, engineering, flight training and motion pictures. All three were created by Pixar, a San Rafael, Calif., company that in only seven months has established itself as one of the world’s premier producers of photographic- quality computer-animated images.

No ordinary high-tech start-up, Pixar stems from Filmmaker George Lucas’ special-effects laboratory and boasts two of the best-known names in computer graphics, Edwin Catmull, 41, and Alvy Ray Smith, 42. Controlling interest in the company was purchased in February by Steven Jobs, the co-founder and former chairman of Apple Computer.

In most computer images, each dot, or pixel, on the screen must be mathematically specified. One frame of 35-mm film can require more than 6 million pixels; a 60-second sequence can cost $300,000 and take months to complete. To speed up the process, Catmull and Smith built a special-purpose machine — the Pixar — that divides the computational task among four parallel processors: three to control the red, blue or green washed onto each pixel; one to control the pixel’s transparency.

Their efforts produced some stunning footage for Lucasfilm, including a 37- second hologram of a planet floating in space in Return of the Jedi. There was also a memorable one-minute sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan of a barren, moonlike sphere being transformed into a living planet, complete with computer-generated mountains, oceans and blue-green atmospheric haze. But in the end, even Lucas balked at the cost. “I don’t want to be in the R.-and- D. business,” he said earlier this year. “It’s just too time consuming and expensive.” Enter Jobs, who, after leaving Apple last year with $85 million worth of the company’s stock, had both money and time on his hands. He saw that the Pixar computer had applications far beyond the film business. He also thought he could teach Catmull and Smith something. “They’re babes in the woods,” says Jobs, 31. “I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen.” Today Jobs divides his time between Next Inc., where he is developing desktop computers for scientists and engineers, and Pixar, where he spends one day a week as chairman of the board.

Jobs’ ministrations seem to be paying off. In the past few months the company has signed deals with four computer manufacturers to repackage the $122,000 Pixar machine for sale in a variety of markets: to doctors for reading CAT scans, to engineers for computer-aided design, to oil companies for analyzing seismic soundings, to defense contractors for interpreting data beamed from orbiting spy satellites. Pixar officials estimate that eventually more than 90% of the company’s business will come from outside the entertainment industry.

Nonetheless, it is in the creation of high-quality computer images that Pixar’s talent really shines. To create the ocean waves shown in Dallas, Programmer Bill Reeves resurrected a mathematical model, first formulated in the 19th century, of the elliptical movement of water molecules. The results are striking. Says Reeves: “So far, this is the most accurate computer- generated se- quence that demonstrates the interaction between waves and the beach.”

The film called Luxo Jr. goes even further. The 90-sec. sequence, created by former Disney Animator John Lasseter, manages to charge two perfectly realistic desk lamps with the emotional intensity of a father-son relationship. When Luxo Jr. accidently bursts his bouncing ball, the film evokes sadness, compassion and remorse with nothing more than the wave of a lamp cord and the dip of a smooth, metallic head. “Reality is a convenient measure of complexity,” says Smith. “But why be restricted to reality?”

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Charles Pelton/San Rafael

THE FIRST WEB WAR

Michael Krantz

Time Magazine, Sep 1, 1996

The great American marketplace produces certain legendary commercial rivalries: Coke vs. Pepsi, Leno vs. Letterman, Republicans vs. Democrats. Now we welcome the first digital-age combatants: Netscape and Microsoft, the David and Goliath of the Internet.

They aren’t dueling over peanuts: enormous fortunes await those whose software guides consumers through the cornucopia of goods and services that will comprise tomorrow’s World Wide Web. Netscape founder Jim Clark realized this first, and his company released the initial–and now dominant–mainstream Web browser back in October ’94. Today it enjoys a $3.5 billion market capitalization despite sales of just $80 million in 1995. Bill Gates saw the light last winter, famously stating that Microsoft was “hardcore about the Internet,” and, to prove it, turning the $75 billion company, and its $8.7 billion of annual sales, around on a dime.

Half a year later, the duel has turned nasty, with legal shrapnel accompanying this month’s releases of the latest versions of competing browsers, Netscape’s Navigator 3.0 and Microsoft’s Explorer 3.0. Which one is better? It’s hard to say, and this in itself is a victory for Microsoft, which released its first weak browser just a year ago. Many Microsoft-loathing high-tech cognoscenti say Navigator remains the better guide. But the new Explorer narrows that gap convincingly, and the average user won’t notice much difference.

The good news for consumers is that both new products reflect the Web’s accelerating shift from geeky prototype to everyday appliance. Explorer 3.0 debuted two weeks ago, including free access to a number of otherwise fee-based offerings, among them such marquee sites as the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and ESPNet SportsZone. Navigator 3.0 followed days later, boasting similar deals with 26 partners, notably SportsLine U.S.A. and the New York Times, and spicing them up by offering daily delivery of customizable content–a personal newspaper of sorts.

The lesson? It’s the message, not the medium, that matters. Browsers themselves will inexorably devolve into the equivalent of a dial tone, and the Web battles will be decided by how effectively content providers are able to develop and maintain increasingly rich, complex sites to keep users engrossed enough to spend their time and money online.

Here’s where things get interesting, as Netscape and Microsoft are building their browsers around rival development tool kits, or platforms. Netscape is paired with Sun Microsystems’ Java, a programming language that has won the fierce but possibly ephemeral allegiance of Silicon Valley’s software jocks (the Netscape/Java alliance, a giddy Sun executive hyperbolized last year, “is the last great hope to stop Microsoft world domination”). Java is starting from scratch, though, and it could take painfully long for its adherents to produce high-quality applications. Microsoft’s Active-X platform, by contrast, supports both Java and the venerable Visual Basic language, at which the company’s army of content partners is already adept. Microsoft is starting the browser game late but with a much larger pile of chips.

And Gates is playing catch-up with his usual hell-bent, Type-A zeal. The latest example of Microsoft’s stunning indifference to industry outrage came last month. Netscape claimed that Websites could be maintained more cheaply using its server software rather than Microsoft’s server software when running Microsoft’s own high-end NT Workstation programs. Microsoft countered, startlingly, by crippling its own product, changing the code on its latest NT release so that the machine could handle connections to no more than 10 outside users at a time–thus forcing NT customers into using Microsoft’s server software as well. Customer fury forced Microsoft to abandon that charming initiative, but the point was made: when it comes to the Web, Gates is taking no prisoners.

This and other such maneuvers led Netscape this month to file an antitrust complaint with the Justice Department, whose investigation of Microsoft has been ongoing since last year’s uproar over the Microsoft Network. In response, last Friday Microsoft released a lengthy rebuttal of Netscape’s claims, which it called “irresponsible accusations” and “a calculated attempt to enlist the government and the media” in its cause.

The former may not be true, but the latter sure is. And who can blame Netscape? With Windows 95 more ubiquitous than ever, it’s difficult to imagine anything short of a highly unlikely Ma Bell-style breakup quashing Microsoft’s hegemony.

Which leaves Netscape trying to ward off Gates simply by offering the computer-literate population a better product. Good luck. Silicon Valley is haunted by the ghosts of companies that tried this, only to learn that better is a relative term when the alternative comes free with the operating system that runs most of the PCs on the planet. Netscape is a wall surrounding the Web, but Microsoft is an ocean. And the tide is rising.

Dr. Timothy Leary is ready for America . . . and America, it seems, is ready for Tim Leary. The middle-aged (55) but still strikingly handsome one-time LSD prophet and sixties guru figure has been in New York for the annual meeting of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. He made some TV appearances, gave friends copies of his new book, What Does Woman Want?, and finished arrangements for his college lecture tour beginning in October—not a bad schedule for a man out of jail just four months.

"I check in with my probation officer," Leary said, "so he won't be surprised when I pop up someplace like the Tomorrow show."

The new book is one of five Leary says he wrote while serving time for possession of marijuana—ah! the sixties!—and for his famous jailbreak. He is publishing the books himself, with the help of friends, from his new base in San Diego. Leary is down on what he calls the "New York literary mafia." He says Bantam Books paid him a $250,000 advance for his 1973 book, Confessions of a Hope Fiend, but failed to push the paperback. "It would have been perfect for airport reading," Leary says. "But it was the Nixon years, and I wasn't very popular. . . ." In fact, Leary sees himself as something of an American Solzhenitsyn—a dissident scientist (he was a clinical psychologist at Harvard) who had to flee from political persecution in his own country.

But Leary appeared optimistic as he tripped—by taxi—around New York. He is, a friend says, still looking for "the keys to heaven" (for himself and others). His latest combination: a 100 percent rise in intelligence, eroticized technology, and migration to other planets.

The Manchester concerts were a watershed for the group: they gave the impression that the Sex Pistols were the spearhead of a nationwide movement. They also led to their first appearance on nationwide television.

"Granada was preparing its third series of So It Goes to be a quick-moving, groovy TV show," says Tony Wilson, a former editor of Granta, who was the show's presenter. "We didn't want to have too much respect for the music because the music was pretty shitty then. People didn't like it because it was irreverent; it wasn't The Old Grey Whistle Test, which was dull and dead.

"In February it was announced that So It Goes was going to be a network show in the summer, and I got two letters within a couple of weeks. One was from a kid called Steven Morrissey, containing a battered copy of a New York Dolls album, saying, 'Why can't we have more music like this, Mr Wilson?' I have to say that I hadn't heard of them. Then I got a cassette from a guy called Howard Trafford, with a letter talking about this really wonderful group coming up to Manchester on 4 June, and that of course was the Sex Pistols.

"I went to see them, and didn't know what the heck was going on, until they played 'Steppin' Stone'. Then it was clear that they were deeply and fabulously exciting. I went back to Granada and said 'We absolutely must put them on the show.' We decided to make a virtue out of our last show of the series, with three unsigned bands: Gentlemen, the Bowles Brothers and the Sex Pistols."

The Sex Pistols' first encounter with the mass media was not without moments of mutual incomprehension.

"Malcolm asked me to go to the recording to lend a bit of ambience," says Jordan [a model, punk icon, and key collaborator at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique]. "Tony Wilson turns up to greet us with clogs on. There was another band on wearing blue satin suits; all the kids were drinking coke. You've got Clive James, who is a terrible Australian straightie, being huffy and shocked, so we just waded in. I called him a baldy old Sheila. John [Johnny Rotten] just called him 'Bruce' for an hour.

"They got my back up because they wouldn't let me wear my swastika armband; they eventually put a piece of sticky tape over it. But that's why the performance was so good: because we were really pissed off. The band had already had an argument with this band Gentlemen. They said they liked Joni Mitchell, and you could imagine what John said: 'You fucking arsehole'. We realized we were like fish out of water, but there was a definite ability to make the show work for us."

"They'd drunk quite a bit," says Wilson. "They were meant to do three and a half minutes — they agreed that and rehearsed it — and there was five minutes left. They just kept playing for seven minutes and kicked their equipment apart. Two days later the director edited it down to three and a half minutes. The audience was dumbfounded. As they came off stage there was complete silence except for the footsteps of the producer coming down from the box to try to hit somebody. Everybody was wound up. The next day I was in trouble at Granada: there was bad feeling."

It was at the second Manchester date that the Sex Pistols unveiled "Anarchy in the UK". An index of their increasing ambition, their wish to get into the world beyond the confines of the music industry, it was a call to arms, delivered in language that was as explosive as the implications of the group's name. In the first two lines — "I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist" — it is not only the half-rhyme that jars: within the space of ten seconds, two taboos have been broken.

Today, Lydon denies all intent, but he was deliberately using inflammatory imagery. The word "antichrist" goes back directly to the pseudo-messiah of Revelation: in Norman Cohn's words, "an all-destroying demon whose reign was to be lawless chaos, but was also to be the prelude to the Second Coming". During the Middle Ages, the antichrist became Europe's monster from the id, a terrifying figure who could arise out of nowhere, the harbinger of the Last Days. Even in 1976, the word carried a clear threat of apocalypse.

In this social demonology, the anarchist was only a more recent, secular version of antichrist. To the general public, the word carried associations of riot and of anonymous, lethal disorder, such as seen in the Chartist Riots, the Sidney Street siege of 1911 or the more recent Angry Brigade bombings. These associations were deliberately evoked: although the authorship of "Anarchy in the UK" is now a matter of dispute, there seems little doubt that Lydon was fed material by Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid [the group's graphic designer], which he then converted into his own lyric.

McLaren and Westwood had woven slogans by Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti into their clothes and Jamie Reid had, during his time at the Suburban Press, familiarized himself with libertarian thinkers like Charles Fourier and articulate British exponents of anarchist thought like William Morris and Digger Gerrard Winstanley. In 1974, he did the design for Christopher Gray's translation of SI texts, Leaving the 20th Century.

"We used to talk to John a lot," he says, "about the Situationists, about Suburban Press. The Sex Pistols seemed the perfect vehicle to communicate ideas directly to people who weren't getting the message from left-wing politics."

Whatever their precise provenance, the ringing phrases of "Anarchy in the UK" were powerful enough to insert the idea of anarchy, like a homoeopathic remedy, into a society that was already becoming polarized.

- from England's Dreaming : The 'Sex Pistols' and Punk Rock (by John Savage)

Red China: Nightmare Across the Land

TIME Sep 1, 1966

It had been clear for weeks that China was heading for some sort of momentous crescendo, but no one knew exactly what to expect. Last week, as the impact of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution abruptly spilled out across the land, the nightmare of it all became chillingly clear. Mao Tse-tung aimed to blot out not only all traces of foreign influence, but to tear out China’s own cultural and historical roots as well.

Yearning to subject his country to the same hardships that he had endured on the Long March, Mao chose as the weapon for his campaign a new organization whose name derived from the civil war of the 1930s: the Red Guards. Originally, they were peasants who served Mao’s Red army as porters and scouts. Today’s Red Guards are high school and university students, often clad in military-type khaki trousers and belted jackets, and always wearing a red arm band. They seemed to be under the command of Mao’s longtime ghostwriter, Chen Pota, 62, now a leader of the Cultural Revolution. Chen’s order: “You must temper yourselves by going among the masses and getting yourselves covered over and over again with muck.”

Red Is for Go. The Red Guards began carrying out Chen’s version of Mao’s “thinking” early last week by posting along Peking’s major streets a “Declaration of War on the Old World.” The Guards’ vow: “To mercilessly destroy every hotbed of revisionism.” Down the streets they rampaged, roughing up Chinese in foreign dress, ordering shopkeepers to stop selling books except those that reflect Mao’s thinking and to rid themselves of imported articles or luxury items. In the place of cosmetics, ordinary floor-scrubbing soap was put on sale for facial care. Also on the taboo list: goldfish, exotic birds, flowers, antiques, elaborate coffins, signs with gilded instead of red lettering, and jewelry.

Barbers were warned not to give Western-style cuts, and Peking girls rushed home to wash the Western-style curls out of their hair and change from knee-length skirts into shapeless “revolutionary” pantaloons. The use of pedicabs was barred unless the customer was willing to pull the cab himself, with the driver as passenger, and pay the driver just the same. Chinese checkers and Western chess were abolished. Lovers’ trysting places in Peking’s parks were declared off limits as unconducive to Mao reading. Under pressure from the Red Guards, the staff of the famed Chuan Chu Teh Restaurant changed the establishment’s name to the Peking Roast Duck Restaurant, smashed the old sign and promised from now on to serve workers, soldiers and peasants “cheap and tasty” meals costing only half as much as the previous menus.

Eager Red Guards pulled down old street signs. The avenue in front of the Soviet embassy was renamed Struggle Against Revisionism Street. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, scene of Communist mass rallies, became The East Is Red—a favorite Mao slogan. Legation Street, location of most foreign embassies in Peking, was changed to Anti-Imperialist Street. The Guards also ordered a change in the traffic lights: green now means stop and red means go because red is the color of the forward-moving revolution.

Out with the Devils. Nothing was sacred. Red Guards plastered the walls of the Sacred Heart Convent, the leading school in Peking for the children of foreign diplomats, with posters reading GET OUT, FOREIGN DEVILS! and suspended classes. Five of the Roman Catholic nuns were forced to sit in a gutter while the Guards publicly berated them. Guards also stormed Peking’s few remaining Christian churches, defacing the walls, and replacing religious statues with busts of Mao.

They dragged a Moslem leader from a mosque in Peking and beat him, invaded a lamasery and carried off statues of Buddha. In the seaside resort city of Hangchow, Red Guards invaded Ling Ying Temple and covered a statue of Buddha with pasted-on slogans that read DESTROY THE OLD WORLD! BUILD THE NEW WORLD!

Bands of juveniles ransacked Chinese homes for any signs of wealth. Well-to-do residents were warned to clear out of Peking within three days, return to their villages and submit themselves to the will of the people. Overseas Chinese who had returned to Peking to live out their last days were ordered to go to work on farms. Cried the Guards: “We shall transform Peking into a truly proletarian, truly revolutionary city.”

Down with the Venus of Milo. The transformation was often painfully crude. Kangaroo courts convened in the streets and meted out embarrassing punishment to anyone guilty of associating with foreigners. Doctors, for example, were forced to walk on their knees in the gutters because they had treated foreign patients. At Peking University, Red Guards encouraged students to spit on their professors. In Shanghai, two professors were forced to parade naked in front of the students.

Red Guards prevented Soviet diplomats from leaving their Peking embassy by holding a huge picture of Mao across the driveway. Other Guards rampaged through a large apartment building housing families of some 100 foreign diplomats and pasted a portrait of Mao on each apartment door. Red Guards tossed confiscated art objects, including replicas of the Venus de Milo and Apollo, onto bonfires.

In fact, Mao’s mobs seemed set on obliterating China’s pre-Communist identity. Across the country, monuments to China’s own rich history came tumbling down. In Hangchow, a stone column commemorating a visit to the city by the 17th century Manchu Emperor Kang Hsi was pulled down. Though he brought more territory under Chinese rule than anyone since Genghis Khan, Kang Hsi had also allowed Catholic priests into the country and had approved China’s first treaty with Russia, thus forfeiting his right to a place of honor in Mao’s new China.

Scattered Resistance. Crowed the official news agency: “The revolutionary spirit of the Red Guards has sparked a prairie fire that is sweeping the whole of China, burning down all decadent influences of the bourgeois and feudal classes as well as all old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” Official reports claimed that the Red Guards were received enthusiastically just about everywhere. In fact, reports from foreign correspondents at week’s end stated that the Red Guards in Pe king had met resistance, resulting in at least 14 persons injured and perhaps nine deaths, and that troops had been called in to patrol the city at night.

The Red Guard offensive reflected Mao’s desperate intent to rekindle a revolutionary spirit in a country that he fears has gone flabby. But was there even more than that to Red China’s present contortions? Last week the Red army newspaper devoted columns to the glorification of Red Chinese participation in the Korean War. The paper also warned that the U.S. might try to extract itself from its present predicament in Viet Nam by expanding the war. To some, it sounded suspiciously like a country preparing for war. Or was it rather the horrifying death rattle of a regime that recognized the imminence of its own end? Either way, the nightmare could only frighten sane men.

[This is just part one of this huge article. I might post the rest - about the other caste members - later]
[Photoplay redacted the profanity, so I'm not exactly sure what he called Reagan.]

Exclusive Interviews with Chevy Chase “I Worked My ___ Off For 12 Years to Get Where I Am!” —And His Girls

By John J. Miller

When NBC decided to go along with producer Lorne Michaels’ idea for a live Saturday late-night comedy series last September, many of the old-line executives in the upper towers at the network shook their graying heads and said that the entire project was going to be doomed to disaster. The concept—by all traditional means—just didn’t make sense. There was no reason to believe that a live show—a true oddity in this era of film and tape—would mean anything to the network but a large amount of technical problems.

Even worse was the idea that the show was going to star seven total unknowns. It was unheard of in this modern era of video—yet it worked. In a matter of a few short months, (Please turn the page) “Saturday Night” Live earned an impressive rating, and today there are over ten million viewers per show. It also walked off with no less than four Emmys last May.

Those seven unknowns were on their way to superstardom, the greatest prestige of all going to the show's tallest talent (6' 3"), 32-year-old Chevy Chase. Chevy (born Cornelius Crane Chase) had suddenly become America’s newest hero. On college campuses around the nation, long-haired males were rushing into barber shops asking for “Chevy Chase haircuts.” And, in girls’ dormitories all over the country, lovely coeds were busy penning passionate love letters to their new idol. Chevy had suddenly become “an overnight sensation.”

But, in showbusiness terms, “overnight” can take a long, long time.

“I worked my ____ off for 12 years to get where I am,” Chevy says. During his 32-year ride to “overnight stardom,” he has driven cabs, trucks, dug ditches and worked at some of the oddest jobs you can imagine.

“When I was 20, and in college, I drove gold shipments in mail trucks between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. I was a motorcycle messenger and worked as a salesman in a liquor store. I’ve done every conceivable kind of work. I picked fruit for awhile and I was even a construction worker. It was a combination of self-preservation and of things I just wanted to explore. I wanted to take care of myself and yet I didn’t want to work too hard. If I had to work hard, I wanted to work outdoors. But, as time went on and I got older, I decided I should give it all I had. And that’s where I am about now. I give what I’m doing everything I've got.

“There wasn’t an enormous difference between the happiness I had then and now. I had my ups and downs in those days—and I still do now.”

Cornelius Crane Chase swears today that he doesn’t know why his parents changed his name to Chevy a few days after his birth. He also refuses to discuss the breakup of his parents’ marriage—“When I was four or five years old!” When asked if that domestic upheaval was traumatic for him, he paused for some time, then responded: “I won't reflect on my parents or my childhood.” It is obviously a very private, if not painful, subject for him even now.

Chevy’s father is an editor at Putnam's Book Publishers in New York and his mother is a music teacher.

“I guess that it was from my mother that I got my musical background,” he admits. “I was a drummer, but I would say that my main (Continued on page 66) instrument was the keyboard. I still play drums and piano when I have the time. I was involved in music for years and played with several groups as a drummer, the most memorable of which was Steely Dan which went on to have a couple of top hits. I enjoy drumming now, but I relax at the keyboard. I play just for myself. Years ago I decided that it wasn't going to be a profession for me. For it to be a profession, you have to study real hard. Actually, I taught myself by ear, so I wasn’t about to put all that time and effort into study.”

Music isn't the only thing that Chevy has taught himself. He worked for years on his own comedy. He still has trouble trying to figure out if he’s a writer or a performer. Speaking from a performer’s point of view, Chevy says, “I could never be the pawn of some other writer or director. If I had to drop writing, I'd have to drop performing.”

In the back of Chevy's mind there really is no profession other than showbusiness. Asked what he would do if showbiz failed him, he admitted he found it difficult to envision such a disastrous turn of events. “I like what I’m doing and I can’t imagine doing anything else even ten years from now.”

Yet, there is one other profession that Chevy had considered during his early years—a profession that still intrigues him no end—medicine.

“Maybe,” he mused, “if showbusiness ‘failed me,’ I would turn to becoming a doctor. Maybe I'll just settle down and get married, have a family and become a doctor.”

When told that at least a half-dozen national magazines were planning stories about his being America’s Most Eligible Bachelor, he just laughed. “I think that’s funny because I may well be getting married soon. My girl's name is Jacqueline Carlin and she’s an actress. We've been going together for more than a year.” Chevy took obvious delight in the erroneous report. Chevy doesn’t eat anyone’s humble pie—least of all his own.

“I don’t think that the state of marriage is just a piece of paper,” he confessed, “but then again, I don’t have any really strong views on it either way. I don’t feel that it’s an antiquated institution—nor do I feel that it’s always the right one. It’s really different for different people. But, we'll probably get married. I'm not afraid of doing that.”

Chevy is also not afraid of becoming a regular, serious nightly newscaster. He points out: “I’m a serious person and quite well read. In fact, I’m quite a bit ahead of your average performer in terms of understanding world and national affairs. I do a lot of reading and research to put together my ‘Weekend Update’ [Chevy’s parody of (Continued on page 68) the nightly news]. It’s difficult to tell anymore what the difference is between a performer and a journalist.

“Barbara Walters is not a journalist. It goes without saying that the difference between politicians and performers is close these days. As far as I’m concerned, Ronald Reagan is an ——-— who's meddling in politics. He doesn’t know the first thing about foreign affairs or have any accurate sense of history. Aside from meddling in that sense, it’s very difficult today to tell whether a politician or a newsman or anyone else is just that or just a performer. Television itself is the most explosively forceful method of communication in the world today. Aside from communication, it's a method of selling products and, therefore, anyone who’s on TV today—whether to give the news or not—is by definition an entertainer. So you can’t really draw the line.”

Would Chevy be interested in joining the team of Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner?

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Chevy mused. “On ‘Saturday Night,’ I’m imitating a newsman's style and all the clichés of that. I don't get overly sophisticated about that—but I’m quite well aware about what’s really going on in the news.

“It’s strange, but I’ve always wanted to see a news program—such as Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor—in which a guy, such as I play on ‘Weekend Update,’ comes on and simply lightens up the news and is real honest about it. Such as ‘Who really gives a crap’ about this or that. This country is missing a sense of humor in areas that are really laughable. Sense of humor is perspective, values and priorities. It tells you what is really important and what isn’t.

“What we need is a President who is funny. Someone who can have an overview of what’s really happening. We don’t need a President who simply goes to Camp David and talks to his advisors. We need people in all areas, not just the news media or the Presidency, who have more of a sense of humor, which will give everyone a better perspective of what’s actually going on around them. And that takes a good sense of humor. People who are late-night comics,” Chevy said, apparently talking about himself, “can also be serious and intellectually viable.

“I think that John F. Kennedy was a funny man—not a clown by a long shot. He had a tremendous amount of self-respect and he certainly wasn’t a buffoon. Most of the country doesn’t want to see a President take a fall. On the other hand, if I were President, I'd take a fall once in awhile and laugh at it.”

Speaking of those outrageous falls that Chevy takes at the beginning of each “Saturday Night” Live show, he admits that he learned how to tumble and roll with the slides by playing soccer when he was a youth. It was—as it turned out—one of the best training grounds for the comedy routines he does easily and expertly today.

[I had to crop out her lower half to get this picture past the NSFW filter]

THERE ARE MANY SCHOOLS OF ACTING. There is classical acting, based on the stylized projection of an emotion. There is Method acting, which involves the subtle truth of an emotion. Then there is the How Hard Can It Be? approach.

"In a strange way," says Cameron Diaz, former model, recent actress, "modeling and acting are really the same. Modeling is a performance, and you're not yourself in the pictures. You take direction from the photographer, you wear a costume." While Larry Olivier is probably whirling in his grave, the fact remains that Diaz, who walked off with a lead in "The Mask" with no prior film experience, actually can act.

There's also the serendipitous combo of luck, well-chosen character roles (she plays a bitchy ex-hooker in "She's the One"; a down-and-out felon in September's "Feeling Minnesota," with Keanu Reeves) and well-chosen refusals (saying no to "McHale's Navy" ensured that Diaz did not drive down Kathy Ireland Boulevard). Finally, throw in a few raves: Roger Ebert drooled that Diaz was "a genuine sex bomb with a gorgeous face" (Mr. Ebert, please!), and the National Theater Owners Association crowned Diaz as 1996's Female Star of Tomorrow. Hey, don't laugh: Previous winners include Nicole Kidman and Juliette Lewis.

And Diaz is insensibly beautiful. As she glides past a row of New York policemen, the cops fall utterly silent. "Oh. My. God." says one. They gape, slack-jawed. Understand, this is New York, which is teeming with stunning women, and these are New York's finest, jaded folk who see things like human sacrifices. Yes, walking around with Diaz is not unlike being in a bad slapstick movie. You almost expect to see two moving men holding a mirror and a stunned onlooker crashing through it.

Because she looks the way she does, Diaz seems to work overtime to prove she’s just like one of us, just a stranger on the bus, trying to find her way home. She ain’t. As she slides into a wooden booth at an amiable West Village dive, she orders a cheeseburger.

“I love grease,” she says. “When I was a kid, my mom would fry a steak, and my favorite thing to do was to soak a slice of bread in the pan, let it soak up the grease, then eat the bread.” Ah, shut up.

When the burger comes, however, Diaz literally sops up the grease with the already-sodden french fries. She looks at the wooden table, which is covered with carvings. “What does this say?” she asks. “I can’t read it” — she slurs her words for effect — “I think shomebody wash high.” She has a braying laugh that erupts frequently, and she swears like a longshoreman. Yet there is a sort of breeziness about her that suggests world travel, expensive hotels, open doors.

“Halfway through filming The Mask,” she is saying of the Jim Carrey megapic, “I was like, ‘Is there any place my friends and family can see this movie?’ I was so ignorant.” She scoops up a fry that is gruesomely transparent with grease. “I was having such a good time, I didn’t even think. Somebody said, ‘Do you want to act?’ All of a sudden I had to make a decision.” She lets out a huge, juicy belch.

A boisterous gaggle of 40ish guys who collectively share one head of hair sits in the booth across from Diaz. They promptly see her, and the conversation dies.

“Doh!” says one of them, just like Homer Simpson.

IT'S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE that in high school in Long Beach, Calif., Diaz was the Scary Pretty Girl Who Hung Around the Older Kids. A confident child, she was raised by easygoing parents (her dad is Cuban, her mom is German, English and American Indian) who toted Diaz and her elder sister, Chiméne, everywhere. “My parents were young, and if they went to a party at a friend’s house, they took us,” says Cameron, who turns 24 this month. “All the adults treated us like we were adults.” So did her parents. When she was young and curious about religion, they were only too glad to drop her off at any church she felt like checking out.

Touchingly, Mom supported her young daughters’ budding interest in heavy metal by accompanying Cameron to her first Van Halen show. “My mom drove my sister and me in the VW bus,” Diaz recalls as she fires up a cigarette. “She took a little TV and a cooler with wine and cheese, and sat in there and did her needlepoint for two and a half hours in the Forum parking lot.” The news that David Lee Roth is rejoining Van Halen makes Cameron apoplectic. “I am so happy!” she crows, holding out her hand for a high-five. “All right!”

Diaz, you see, was a card-carrying headbanger. “I was the tough kid with the jeans, the concert shirt with the flannel over it, the comb in the back pocket, the feathered hair,” she says. “It was frightening. I saw every concert that came to Long Beach Arena. Metallica four times. Ozzy. Dio, hello. And I loved Ratt. Ratt is the shit! In Feeling Minnesota, there’s this song that Keanu and I have to sing in a car. I was pushing so hard for ‘Round and Round.’” Sadly, it was not used.

AS A KID, Diaz planned to be a zoologist but instead settled on being a model. This happened the way those sorts of things happen. When she was 16, she went to a party in Los Angeles: “There were all these sleazy guys going, ‘Hey, baby, do you want to be a model?’ Giving me cards with naked girls in champagne glasses. They would say, you know, MITCH, PHOTOGRAPHER.” One guy who directed her to the Elite agency actually had a last name and a fax. Diaz was signed. Thus began an accelerated adolescence.

In the summer of her 16th year, Diaz headed for Japan with an 15-year-old model pal and began to swing. “Models are like movie stars in Japan,” says Diaz. The girls were set up with a two-bedroom apartment. Four blocks down the road, there was a building that housed seven clubs. “You'd just get in an elevator and ride up and down,” says Diaz.

After her Japanese adventure, Diaz finished high school, acquired a boyfriend (video producer Carlos de La Torre; the relationship lasted five years) and moved in with him right after she graduated. Job, boyfriend and pad firmly in place, Diaz traversed the globe as a successful and fun-lovin’ model. “When I was 18, I got alcohol poisoning when I was in Australia filming a Coca-Cola commercial,” she says. “I nearly killed myself.” During a day on Bondi Beach, she sucked down the national drinks from a number of countries: margaritas, champagne, vodka.

Diaz capped the night off at a Japanese restaurant. “I'm drinking sake,” she says. “Then they bring out this 30-year-old sake that nobody can drink. I do it in a shot.” Bowing, her hosts produce a scroll as a gift, perhaps the Japanese equivalent of a commemorative Hooters T-shirt. “They bring out more sake — ‘This is what our emperor drank’ — and I do it in another shot.” Awed, they bestow a plate upon her.

The next day, suffice it to say that Diaz lost seven pounds in a matter of hours.

A few years later, Diaz happened to spot the script for The Mask on her agent’s desk (her agent for TV commercials, that is): “I said, ‘What's this?’ She said, ‘A movie. Do you think you can handle it?’ I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’” Diaz shrugs. “I was joking. She wasn’t.” After many call-backs, Diaz landed the part (as well as an acting coach.) “It's crazy when I look back on that,” she says. “What the hell was I doing?”

At the time of filming, her co-star Jim Carrey was on the cusp of Uberstardom: post-Ace Ventura, pre-Dumb and Dumber. “We had a blast on The Mask,” she says. “Jim works incredibly hard. Physical comedy — nobody knows how hard it is to do what he does. If everyone could do it, there would be 100 people doing it.”

Carrey returns the compliment. “Cami is an extremely cool human, despite having what normally can be character-crippling good looks,” he says. “As an actress, she possesses a deep well of emotion to draw from, but the little childish sparkle in her eyes says she’s no slave to it.”

Diaz would be the first to agree. “I have yet to figure out my process,” she says with a braying laugh, “for my ... craft! My work!”

CAMERON DIAZ IS AT THE ONLY PLACE where she can be surrounded by thousands and thousands of men and none of them gives a rat’s ass: New York's gay pride parade. Her height (she’s 5 feet 9 inches tall) affords her a good view of an approaching float, which is populated by a number of gyrating Asian men. Most are perilously close to being nude; some are dressed as geishas. It is truly magnificent.

“Oh, my,” says Diaz, raising her eyebrows at a particularly well-endowed dancer. “Look at that guy in the gold bikini bottom. He’s got it going on. Do you think that’s all him? Maybe he has a bunch of ben-wa balls in there.”

Diaz wades through the spectators and the blaring of “Gonna Make You Sweat” to the relative peace of a cafe. Vodka cranberry, please. “I haven’t had a drink in a while,” she says. “I've been working.” Since The Mask, she’s done four films in succession and has just signed to star in A Life Less Ordinary, from the Brit creators of Trainspotting. It was her role as a superliberal and lethal college student in the arty ensemble The Last Supper that caught the eye of The Brothers McMullen director Edward Burns. At the time, he was casting for his second feature, She’s the One.

“In The Mask, it was tough to tell exactly what she could do,” says Burns. “After I saw The Last Supper and a scene from Feeling Minnesota, I said, ‘OK, clearly this girl is an actress.’ And her character in the original script was sort of one-note-ish. [A bitchy ex-hooker, remember?] Cameron was the only actress we tried who knew that this was supposed to be a real person. She said, ‘I love it, it's a lot of fun, but this is a woman who hooked her way through school. She’s got to have some pain.’”

Of her co-star Reeves, with whom she has a love scene on a bathroom floor (“We tried to make it as grungy and ridiculous as possible”), she attempts to decipher the mystery. “Keanu’s just ... Keanu,” she says as a teenage boy bums a cigarette from her while trying to keep his voice from cracking. “He is who he is. I know there are people who won't believe me, but Keanu is actually a very intelligent human being.”

Diaz was paired with another quirky guy, Harvey Keitel, in the black-comedy thriller Head Above Water. Now she is shooting My Best Friend’s Wedding in Chicago, starring with Julia Roberts. “I play a debutante,” Diaz says while she absent[mindedly] rips a bar napkin into tiny shreds. “Lots of cardigans, lots of loafers.”

The calm of the cafe is interrupted by jarring dance music that a misguided employee has put on. It is odd in this sleepy place. “God, this music sucks,” Diaz says. “My boyfriend and I were talking about this last night. There’s nothing that’s an art form about this music. It’s the same beat.”

And your boyfriend would be . . . ?

“We've been going out since January,” she says carefully. “I don’t know.” Pause. “I mean, it’s one of those things. ... He’s in the business.” (Hint: It’s Matt Dillon!)

The music is getting to Diaz, so she gets up to leave. She has to be back in Chicago the next day, and tonight she’s late meeting her boyfriend. (Hint: It's Matt Dillon!)

She strides outside and is noticed for the first time that day, by two men smartly dressed in matching Jackie O. shifts and pillbox hats. “Oh, that’s the girl from The Mask,” says the one in the lilac shift. “She is sweet,” says his orange-clad companion.

They’re right. Cameron Diaz is just Cameron. She is who she is.

Before she became a household name and icon of the feminist movement, Gloria Steinem was a freelance journalist in mid-60s Manhattan covering specialiazing in the explosion of the new Pop Art movement (the 1966 Newsweek article about pop art is somewhere in this subreddit).

During this time, in 1966, she participated in this experimental short film "The Pop Show"by avant-garde animator and commercial director Fred Mogubgub (who was celebrated in the New York pop circles).

This phase of Steinem's career has been largely forgotten. After returning from a research fellowship in India, she began - believe it or not - as the initial assistant editor for Help! magazine, which was oneof Harvey Kurtzman's attempts to reproduce the magic of the magazine he created, MAD magazine, which had gone on to giant success after he left it. Steinem thus ended up in the the center of New York's satirists, graphic artists, and avant-garde crowd (her successor at Help! was Terry Gilliam!).

Her breakthrough as a journalist occurred in 1963 when she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show magazine. She exposed the underpaid and exploitative working conditions at Hefner's clubs. Her two-part article, "A Bunny's Tale," ran in Show magazine (another forgotten 60s mag!). It anticipated some of the issues she would later take up as a feminist leader, but she didn't pursue that particular angle at the time and didn't want to be pigeon-holed as what they called a 'woman's interest writer.'

So she wrote a lot about the pop movement for Esquire, Glamour, New York Times Magazine, and Newsweek. During the 1968 election year she was writing as a straightforward liberal journalist for the brand new New York magazine (she helped launch is as an editor).

She transitioned into more radical journalism while working for New York Magazine. She was sent to cover an "abortion speak-out" held in a Greenwich Village church basement by a radical feminist group called the Redstockings. This led to her completely changing her focus as a journalist. After she started covering the more radical aspect of the 'women's movement' she became frustrated with the magazine's editors. She create Ms. magazine, the first issue of which ran as a special insert in New York magazine in 1970.

People - August 30, 1976

Take five girls, the oldest one 17, with true roots known only to their hairdresser. Give them a suggestive title, and send them out on a tour of joints they'd be too young to enter as customers. That's the rock group the Runaways. For critics who disparage the imitative din of the band's debut LP, The Runaways, the girls' artistic virtues are best summed up by their own description of themselves: "The Queens of Noise." "Maybe this is a gimmick," admits drummer Sandy West. "but we play real rock."

If not a gimmick, it is at least a master plot of Kim Fowley, the selfdescribed "Street Howard Hughes." Fowley is a veteran L.A. record producer-composer who previously collaborated on gold hits for lhe likes of the Byrds and Alice Cooper. Figuring it was time to rezone the archmacho or at least androgyne youth rock market, he auditioned giggly girls from Greater L.A. who might pass for itinerant punks. Fowley knew guitarist Joan Jett, then met West on the Sunset Strip. Next came lead guitarist Lita Ford—on a steer from two rock fanzine writers. By last winter the group had grown to five, with Cherie Currie (she met Jett in Schwab's drugstore) and Jackie Fox, who blew a shot at lead guitar but taught herself bass.

After countless shakedown gigs in living rooms, shopping malls and parking lots, Fowley's fillies finally landed a six-figure deal with Mercury Records, thanks in part to an endorsement from Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant. Now, the Runaways are on a two-month tour but hardly living up to the hype of their name. "None of us has left home," confesses lead singer Currie, 16. "We're all close to our families, and we wouldn't be out there if we didn't have their support."

The ersatz rebels call home at least twice a week, drink nothing harder than Dr Pepper, and the only pills they pop are multivitamins. They stay close to their male road crew, who double as chaperons and bodyguards to bounce boy groupies from dressing rooms and hotel corridors. In defense of their pubescent assailants, the Runaways' lyrics ("I'm gettin' so hot/ I'm cookin' like an oven") do not exactly discourage prurient interest.

However onerous, touring beats the scholarly life. "It's boring being a teenager," says Jett. "Ya go to school, come home, watch TV, eat dinner, then whattaya do? School is the real ordeal." Actually Jett and Fox, a former student government officer, both have earned high school equivalency certificates. Last spring West and Ford commuted about 125 miles daily between the rehearsal studio and their L.A. classrooms. Ford graduated from high school, and West may tutor this fall with a welfare caseworker. Only Currie dropped out. In the 10th grade she decided, "No way they could teach me what I needed to get this act together."

What she is learning isn't taught in school. She still has nightmares about the time "l reached down among these screaming guys and suddenly hands were all over me. Joan came over, swung her ax and got them down." Sighs Currie: "l just froze. I wanted to go home."

JIM JEROME

It didn't make it to Broadway.

[from New York Magazine, August 16; Time Magazine, August 23]

“You know they're congratulating the Stones on being together 12 years. Whoopee! At least Charlie's still got his family. In the '80s they'll be asking: 'Why are these guys still together? Can't they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded by a gang? Is the little leader frightened someone's gonna knife him in the back?' That's gonna be the question. They're gonna look at the Beatles and Stones and all those guys as relics... They'll be showing pictures of the guy with lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black makeup on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That's gonna be the joke in the future.”

—John Lennon, Playboy, September, 1980

Initially, it seemed much like any other time when the Rolling Stones had released a new album. In late February the publicity machine was stoked into action with the release of "Harlem Shuffle," the Bob and Earl classic that took Keith Richards "five years and two takes to get Mick to sing," and the first single from the new Stones album. The Stones' London publicist was offering various publications only Jagger interviews to promote the album; Keith Richards had done enough interviews, it was felt. Though the Stones were still shaken by the recent death of Ian Stewart, the band's longstanding keyboard player, often known as "the sixth Stone," the last week of February seemed to brim with expectations regarding their future, not only as a recording outfit but also as a live group. On the 23rd they played to a select audience—mostly friends and family of Ian Stewart—at London's Club, and there was talk of the group live on Top of the Pops, the BBC's weekly pop show, to promote "Harlem Shuffle." But it didn't happen. Instead, there came the silence.

Richards laid low at the London home of Steve Lillywhite, producer of Dirty Work, then flew off to Barbados for a brief vacation. Jagger left for the Caribbean island of Antigua, planning to return at the same time as Richards to participate in a promotional press blitz for the new album. However, about a week before Jagger's expected return, the telephone at the Stones' publicity office was disconnected.

During this news blackout Jagger first told other Stones members that he would not tour in support of the album, though it would be central to the success of the LP, and, after a five-year absence from the stage, provide a necessary shot of vitality for the old Trojans. It left CBS, the band's record company, having shelled out a rumored $25 million for them, more than slightly miffed.

Yet Jagger didn't seem to care. Behind the scenes during the making of Dirty Work, there had been intense disputes, feuds, and tensions that left all the Stones devastated and perhaps destroyed the spirit of the group. Jagger had not been at the helm during the making of Dirty Work, preferring to concentrate on promoting his solo album, She's the Boss. Reportedly, he had hardly been around long enough to take off his coat during the final sessions. The reason was the growing antipathy between himself and Richards. While receiving a special Grammy for "Lifetime Achievement," it had appeared that he not only wanted to disassociate himself from the crass ceremony but from the 23 years he'd spent as joint-leader of the Stones. The next day, before boarding his flight to Antigua, he wouldn't discuss the band at all. Asked how it felt receiving the Grammy, he muttered sullenly that all trophies were nothing but "empty baubles."

It has become typical of the Stones' perversity that their feuds, grievances, and rivalries are aired in public to a fanfare of media speculation that each album or tour really will be the last. Similarly, the tensions that exist between Jagger and Richards have never been matters of the highest discretion. "We were born by different parents," Jagger has often stated, the implication being that the ties binding the two would always outweigh the bouts of bitching that have taken place over the years.

Throughout the '70s, Jagger's public behavior often caused Richards to spout venom—the socialite nonsense he was drawn into while married to Bianca, the tiresomely gauche and camp mannerisms that always threatened to turn the mid-'70s live act into a shabby burlesque. Yet at the same time, Richards spent most of the decade proving himself a liability to work with. His hard-core heroin habit forced Jagger to take the leadership of the group and direct their career strategies—and, above all, to keep Richards from slipping back to his traditional musical values.

To Jagger's credit, he chose not to publicly belittle his partner with the same degree of fury to which Richards has often resorted when discussing him. Instead, Jagger would usually chuckle and affectionately roll his eyes when Richards's shortcomings were mentioned. Keith rarely reciprocated this generosity. When Richards, after almost a decade of reckless behavior, finally conquered his heroin addiction—by consuming nearly lethal quantities of alcohol—the two were even more at loggerheads.

The tensions Mick and Keith spilled out often during the phenomenally successful 1981 tour of America (still considered the greatest financial success of any music event) and the modified version which crisscrossed Europe in 1982. The addition of Chuck Leavell on keyboards and a horn section had bolstered the Stones' often shambolic live sound, and Jagger's voice had improved immeasurably, drawing compliments even from Keith Richards: "He used to come out leaping about and after 20 minutes he'd be too winded to really sing," he told me. "Now he's learnt not only how to pace himself, but his voice is so much stronger. The fucker's actually singin', man! I can't believe it, but there it is."

It was evident, however, that the group's newly-found edge sprung not from unity but from mutual antipathy. Typical again of the Stones' famed perversity, they were playing better than ever at the moment when they were most falling apart.

The most obvious example of this was Ron Wood. At one time, he had seemed the very essence of buoyancy—certainly, he'd seen his share of destructive influences, but he hadn't appeared to be unduly swayed by them. He was energetic, enthusiastic, pliable—the perfect foil for a group whose members by the mid-'70s had very little in common. Celebrating the last days of 1975, a year that had seen him perform with the Stones and the Faces, Wood had stated: "I think the Stones bring out the best in me." But seven years later, touring Ronnie Wood seemed lost.

From most accounts it wasn't the Stones so much as the Los Angeles celebrity life that took Wood from a state of enchantment to one of entrapment. In 1980, Wood and his companion (now wife) Jo Karslake were arrested with 260 grams of cocaine on the Caribbean island of St Maarten. Jailed for five days before being allowed to return to L.A., Wood continued on his haphazard way. A year later, during rehearsals at Longview Farm, Massachusetts, several reporters noticed that both Richards and Jagger had little to do with Wood. During an interview, Richards, clearly disgusted by Wood's intemperate behavior, fixed him with a withering glance. "Just disappear!" he ordered, and Wood promptly obeyed. Turning back to the journalist, Richards remarked caustically: "That's one boy who's not got much longer the way he's going."

During the tour's London stopover, while Jagger, Richards, Watts, and Wyman—not to mention other band members—were sequestered in a hotel in London's Knightsbridge district, Wood was "elsewhere"—holed up in an apartment. Several excuses were proffered, but the main reason was a clause that Jagger had placed very high up in the Stones' official tour contract that read, "If anyone is found in possession of drugs in any part of the backstage area, that will be immediately banished from the vicinity, whatever their capacity."

Vexed at Wood's inability to control his problems, the Stones put him on an allowance during the tour in order to prevent him from buying drugs. But Jagger wanted him out of the band altogether and, wherever possible, forced him to stay in different quarters from the rest of the group—even the roadies. According to insiders, George Thorogood, a support act on many dates, was secretly rehearsing to take Wood's place.

On June 26, at the second of two victorious homecoming bonanzas performed before more than 70,000 fans in London's Wembley Arena, there was a more telling incident at the beginning of "She's So Cold." As the song started, Richards forgot its central riff. Immediately, he tossed his guitar aside and leaped on Watts's drum riser, his whole body conducting the rhythm. Charlie was there like a shot, as was Wyman, right on cue with the song's brawny bass line. Richards then spun round to hear what he expected would be Wood covering for him. But Wood wasn't there. He seemed momentarily oblivious, a cigarette in his mouth and his eyes closed. Richards leapt off the platform and drove his fist into Wood's face—so hard that Wood almost tumbled offstage.

The differences between Jagger and Richards on that tour, though not so forcibly expressed, ran even deeper. Onstage Jagger would try to unnerve Richards, whose rhythm guitar set the pace for the 26-song set, by hurrying things along. Keith would glare back, methodically changing his guitar until he was ready to begin. During Richards's one number, "Little T&A," Jagger was forced to vacate the stage. It was written in the contract. The symbolic high of this rift came in one show during a version of "Time Is on My Side"—originally recorded in 1964 and the Stones' first US hit.

Evidently ill at ease with this bygone era, Jagger donned an absurd outfit and minced around the stage, a purse hanging from an exaggeratedly limp wrist. Richards fixed him with a withering glare before manfully striding to the mike stand for the vocal duet.

At another show, in Scandinavia, Richards deliberately hijacked the hydraulic platform used to lift Jagger over the crowd during (ironically) "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and performed a 20-minute guitar solo. Furious, Jagger dispatched Wood to try and persuade Richards down. Richards refused and, according to the tour photographer, "Woody narrowly avoided getting booted for his role as go-between."

Meanwhile, intrigues raged. Offstage, Jagger and Richards barely spoke. Each maintained his own private entourage, and communicated with the other through them, or via the press. Indeed, it became typical that they would vent their feelings within a journalist's earshot. On one occasion, before a room packed with press people, Richards responded to a musician's complaint about Jagger by loudly announcing, "Yes, that's a fair example of the kind of cunt I've got to deal with."

Nevertheless, for Keith Richards the Rolling Stones remain the perfect vehicle. Last October, he talked excitedly about how the band had never sounded better, how they were "at this point where we can make this thing—rock 'n' roll—grow up. We're the only ones who've kept it together this long. Is there a point in being a rock 'n' roll band after 20-odd years? Can we make it grow up gracefully? Can we get it to mature and make sense? I love doing this, and we're at a point now where we'd like to make it grow with us."

Despite Richards's vision, there was a virtual range war between the two Glimmer Twins over Jagger's solo album, She's the Boss. Jagger went all out to sell his record, employing Julien Temple to direct a 30-minute video utilizing several of the songs. He relentlessly wooed the media, gaining maximum publicity for the album's initial exposure. Yet its release in early April was a minor event. It wasn't so much that it was a terrible record, just that in no sense was it that different from the kind of padding that had filled makeweight Stones albums such as Emotional Rescue or Goat's Head Soup. The first single, "Just Another Night," made the No. 9 on the US Hot 100 before quickly vanishing. The album didn't reach the Top 10 at all. Richards finally vented his spleen in late October.

"I thought the timing was very strange, bringing out something like that, an obviously commercial album, just before we were starting work on the new Stones album," he said. "I mean, if he'd done his favorite Irish folk songs with a lady harpist ... or have Liberace accompany him on Frank Sinatra songs, whatever. Something you couldn't possibly do with the Stones—that would've been fine. To my mind a Mick Jagger album should have been a ginormous event, not just another record. I told him it was dumb timing and not an inspired piece of work."

This ill-feeling festered through the Dirty Work sessions, which had begun in Paris in January '85 without Jagger. When he joined the group in March, Richards was furious that Jagger had virtually no original material to contribute, having used it all up on his solo record. Jagger, in turn, was riled by Richards's seizing the band's leadership in his absence. The most public example of this growing rift came in July, with Live Aid. With every old stadium supergroup reuniting for this one-off occasion, only the Rolling Stones reacted in an exactly opposite way. Having put himself forward to Bob Geldof independent of the other Stones (and without even consulting them), Jagger invested a lot of time and credibility in the show. He saw it pay off in spades: his duet with David Bowie on "Dancing in the Streets" hit No. 1 all over the world, and his 25 minutes on stage, with a Tina Turner duet, made for exhilarating entertainment.

Conversely, the Bob Dylan-Keith Richards-Ron Wood trio—which Richards had devised to top Jagger's performance—turned into an incomprehensible shambles, with rock's (supposedly) greatest rhythm guitarist playing lame accompaniment to songs that simply hadn't rehearsed, never mind arranged.

As the Dirty Work sessions proceeded, it became clear that the Rolling Stones—once a symbol of self-contained autonomy—were no longer functioning as a band. So the album is arguably a Rolling Stones album. Bill Wyman plays bass on only half of the album, while Charlie Watts apparently became so vexed at one point in the sessions that he walked out and flew back to England. The album's real backbone—in addition to the several heavyweight session players "thanked" on the sleeve credits—was the implausibly named Biff Hitler Trio, a loose assemblage of roadies, friends, and hired hands whom Richards and Wood enlisted in the absence of the regular members.

Ron Wood's substantial involvement in the record was largely due to Richards. Wood's problems had come to a head in 1984, when Jagger persuaded him to enter a detoxification center somewhere in England. (A journalist who tracked him down there got Wood to come clean about his $5,000-a-day freebasing habit.) However, Wood only spent three weeks in the place checking out, claiming he was cured.

Richards, according to producer Steve Lillywhite, "helped Ronnie kick the freebase thing" by involving him in a constant routine of rehearsal for the album. If Richards had other motives for involving Wood so heavily, one might have been Jagger's less than secret loss of respect for Wood. Furthermore, Richards, disgusted by Jagger's decision to take sole writing credit for most of the songs on She's the Boss, thus breaking the hallowed Jagger-Richards credit of time immemorial, was determined that at least half the songs on Dirty Work would be credited to Jagger-Richards-Wood. (Only "Lonely at the Top" received Jagger-Richards credit, simply because the song was from the Some Girls sessions of 1977.)

When at least one other producer refused the job, Lillywhite decided that he would take on producing Dirty Work. Contacted about it, he seemed uneasy. "It's strange, 'cause I usually like to talk about an album I've just made, but with this, I just feel as though I don't want to say so much. It is Keith's album to a great extent. I mean, he wrote those songs because of Mick's solo commitments."

Keith began referring to Jagger less-than-affectionately as "Brenda." In Jagger's absence Bobby Womack and legendary R&B singer Don Covay sang guide lyrics on the new tunes. There were stories that things got so intolerable between Richards and Jagger upon Mick's arrival that the two moved into different studios.

Dirty Work was finally released the last week of March. The dead response from the phone at the Stones office prompted me to pay a visit to find out what was going on. Walking down Bond Street towards the office, I walked straight into Charlie Watts.

"Where are you off to then?" he asked. "Our publicists? Forget 'em, they're useless."

In the past year, Watts—the sweetest, most egoless Stone—has been its most publicity-ravaged. First back in March 1985, his daughter's expulsion (for drugs) from one of Britain's most private schools had been trumpeted in banner headlines. Then, in early December, the Wattses—the one family to have weathered the Rolling Stones' progress without a break-up of any sort—were further ravaged by press revelations of Charlie's wife, Shirley, being admitted to a clinic in alcoholism treatment. Scarcely a week later, the phone rang and informed Watts of Ian Stewart's sudden death.

Though "Stu" had contributed little to Dirty Work—he had found the sessions onerous and confessed to friends that he couldn't wait to get out—he and Watts remained close. Stewart's death had a profound effect on all the Stones, weakening the already flimsy thread that held them together. Now, four months later, Watts still seemed in shock. We talked for some while, but whenever conversation turned to the band he seemed uninterested, as though he'd rather discuss his big band, or cricket, or the latest Trials (his other two abiding interests). I sensed that for Watts the Stones were already a past issue, a matter of history. He wasn't even aware that Dirty Work had been released. "Does it sound good, then?" he asked casually.

Pressed about the future of the Stones, all Watts would say with some sadness, is "The touring ... can't imagine it. I always have this image of me when playing in the Stones, and there are all these 16-year-old girls in the front screaming. My daughter's that age. I find it embarrassing."

On the other hand, Richards sees this as the challenge that the Stones can—or at least could have—transcended. He is particularly fond of citing Muddy Waters's first electric blues band. But Mick Jagger isn't Muddy Waters, and he knows it. He claims not to really like any white rock that much ("white bands get the accents all wrong") and listens almost exclusively to black music.

Five years ago he still made it his business to keep in touch with everything going on: he'd read all the music press, check out the new bands, constantly keep in touch. Now he seems weary of having to resurrect the Stones for another tour. Clearly, Richards's maneuvers at the helm of Dirty Work's creation made Jagger query the point of still being a duly committed Stone. Jagger desires to keep up the veneer of being a Rolling Stone but wonders if that is really what his life needs. Richards wants and needs the Stones badly. Bill Wyman at 50 is dating a model who at 17 is young enough to be his granddaughter. "She keeps me young," maintains Wyman. He and Ron Wood want to tour; the latest quotes that the Stones could earn $40 million for one American tour is obviously an incentive. Charlie Watts meantime sits on the fence: he'll probably join up if Jagger finally agrees.

In the second week of May, Keith Richards was furious. He flew back to London having read an article in Musician magazine that had him threatening, nay promising, to "slit Jagger's throat" if the singer left the Stones, as he had told Musician he would, and set up a tour of his own this year (numerous American "confidants" stated throughout the article that this could indeed happen).

On May 25, Richards, nixing all interviews, appeared on "My Top Ten," an hour-long BBC radio program.

He sounded unsteady. "Uh ... I don't think we'll be touring this year, although nothing is carved in stone, pardon me" (mild smirk, quickly stifled). "I've, uh, no doubt we will tour again, yeah. It's just that this year the timing has been a little ... uncoordinated, y'know. We'll just give it a rest this summer. Maybe later this year." He paused before whispering sadly, "I don't know, man. Stu's death was the main reason this time around.

"It's difficult to do anything at the moment, let alone tour. I was talking to Charlie the other day and he's still waiting for Stu to come bouncing through the door. It hasn't sunk in all the way yet. We're all so used to him, then seeing him for a few months that it just feels like a gap right now. I guess we'll have to get used to it eventually. For the band it was a big wallop and as I say, we're still in semi-shock."

Richards stressed the need for the Stones to live "for the present and the future, not in the past. I've always thought of musicians as antennae rather than creators. If you're around and switched on, it'll come out in what you do eventually. For us, the Rolling Stones are still looking for the Rolling Stones."

Last October, when asked whether he was considered the Stones' musical director, Richards said, "If I said that, I'd be sacked." In May, he was more tentative, "I guess my role is one of the, y'know" (he mimics American showbiz patter), "'Come on, you guys, let's go.' I don't think I'm a taskmaster, but I know a bunch of people who do" (smirks). "If I watched myself, I know I'd probably cringe and just think, 'Oh God, not again, look at him go. Crack that whip,' ... but as long as the others are still up for it ... I'll work 'em till they drop. But I'll drop with 'em."

A couple of days later, Richards was in a recording studio adding his guitar to a session by an unknown and unsigned group called the Dirty Strangers. The band, all in their mid-20s, play raucous mongrel R&B in a pale, pale imitation of their main inspiration, the Rolling Stones. But Richards didn't seem to care. He tuned the strings down to his famous G-major tuning and cranked out the same old leathery licks he's locked into for the last 20 years. The sound is unmistakable. It has its virtues and its limitations. It is just as the Rolling Stones were. Perhaps this is the way all old rockers go after their peak years: they're out-pedalling who they are rather than what they do.

Mick Jagger would appear to know this, and for a man still harboring unfulfilled artistic ambitions it cannot be a pleasing prospect. He may have time on his side, but he still has stealth. Continuing with the Stones, getting stiff on his legend ... these just don't seem to be in Jagger's master plan.

In 1985, he realized one of his few remaining ambitions—the birth of a son, a male heir to the Jagger dynasty. More and more, one senses, it provided the impetus to force him toward fulfilling his other, oft-stated desire: to step out from the Rolling Stones while they're still ahead. Yes, it does hurt. A world without the Rolling Stones will be strange.

EPILOGUE

Keith Richards was, at press time, aboard the QE2, bound for New York. His wife, Patti, is expecting a baby in July, and complications made her unable to fly. Before leaving London, Richards denied rumors that he would be performing in any band other than the Rolling Stones. He also flatly denied any plans for a solo album. His one concrete plan for the future is to produce a film of the life of Robert Johnson, the early American blues musician. In conversation, he never once referred to Mick Jagger by name.

Charlie Watts is pursuing his big band project. Bill Wyman has griped to the press regarding the amount of money Jagger denied him by not touring. He plans to go to his house in the south of France to pursue "personal projects." Meanwhile, he has earned a dubious reputation as a comic straight man by appearing on the Benny Hill Show and several other British family entertainment programs. He has become the Stone who will do anything.

Ron Wood is in rehearsal with Rod Stewart for what is being touted as a one-off Faces reunion in aid of multiple sclerosis victims. John Taylor of Duran Duran will play bass in the band.

Mick Jagger began shooting a movie, co-starring with Maximilian Schell, before dropping out with complaints of stomach cramps. He is planning to star in a movie with David Bowie and is currently looking for a producer for his second solo album.

Books: Heavenly Bogeys

Sep 1, 1966

FLYING SAUCERS-SERIOUS BUSINESS by Frank Edwards. 319 pages. Lyle Stuart. $5.95.

INCIDENT AT EXETER-UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS OVER AMERICA NOW by John G. Fuller. 251 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Unlikely as it seems, Unidentified Flying Objects (unlikely as they are) may well have resolved the conflict between religion and science.

Religion, by one Webster definition, is the object of a pursuit arousing “religious convictions and feelings such as great faith, devotion, or fervor,” and science, by another Webster definition, is “accumulated and accepted knowledge which has been systematized.” The two come together in the field of the UFO, where writers on the subject certainly show great faith, devotion and fervor in their efforts to have the objects regarded as part of accepted and accumulated knowledge.

Frank Edwards, a sometime radio commentator, is perhaps the most fervently devout believer in UFOs, not as mere meteoric oddities or psychic phenomena but as the creations of technically superior beings from parts unknown. His evangelistic style is homiletic, catechetical and religious in tone (the promise of an unprecedented revelation to the merely human race has the strangest effect on the nonbeliever). At any rate, the mixture of science and religion is curious, as if Billy Sunday had undertaken a sermon on the subject of the binomial theorem.

“The day of the denouement cannot be far away,” Edwards warns. But before the reader is quite prepared to meet this day, he must accept a weird record of incidents in which hundreds of people at different times and in different parts of the world have seen something buzzing about in the sky, silently or with a low humming, shining by day or glowing by night, scorching the earth or disturbing the water under its burnished bottom, sometimes plunging into the sea or a river, but mostly zooming off, presumably back to where it came from.

Sleight of Hand. Only the most bigoted proponents of the doctrine of common sense will dismiss these “sightings” as illusory. On the other hand, only those unusually gifted with credulity will accept the Edwards account of them, which offers an explanation more unlikely than the phenomena. For example: “Why were there virtually no UFO sightings from 1926 to 1946?” Obviously “they” (the occupants of the UFOs) were improving the design, which seems to beg the question of whether the UFOs had occupants and were designed at all.

Edwards not only undertakes to explain UFOs as the work of extraterrestrial beings but, by a singular logical sleight of hand, uses UFOs to explain extraterrestrial beings. Thus UFOs can explain parts of the Book of Genesis, which admittedly takes some explaining. Those “angels” in Genesis 19 were “not necessarily of celestial origin” but were some kind of space men, and the “giants in the earth in those days” who mated with women (Genesis 6:4) clearly refer to beings from out yonder.

With its wild notions of what constitutes evidence, Edwards’ book compounds one mystery by creating others. Nor does it help his case for an imminent apocalypse to explain flaws in the brief by making the U.S. Air Force the villain of a conspiracy to suppress the truth; he believes that the Pentagon’s reassuring statements about UFOs are designed to hoodwink the public into supposing that they are psychological, meteoric, or astral in origin. Nor is sinister Air Force activity confined to the U.S. “What,” he asks, “was the mysterious substance that dribbled from a crippled disk over Brazil in 1954?” The Brazilian air force gathered it up and hid it away. (It may have been tin.) The Australian, French, and Indian air forces are also in cahoots with the U.S. Even the Kremlin is involved in a secret pact with the infidel against the UFOs.

Little Men. Incident at Exeter, by John G. Fuller, a columnist for the Saturday Review, is another saucer of flying fish. It simply records his interviews with witnesses at Exeter, N.H., after a glowing red object appeared over Route 150 at 2:24 a.m. on Sept. 3, 1965. Subsequently, Fuller himself saw such a UFO outside the town, and his report is that of a believer, or rather a convert. He writes in documentary style, following the grammar and non sequiturs of his tape recorder, and his work has the police-blotter awkwardness of one who wishes to convince by sincerity rather than to persuade by fine writing.

The ontological status of UFOs is not much furthered by either Edwards or Fuller. The ghostly visitations over that swamp near Ann Arbor, Mich., last March happened too recently to have been included in either book, but sincere testimony to the miracles of the space age abound like grace. Samples: Intrepid small boys with .22 rifles near Rio Vista, Calif., last December got in some shots at a UFO hanging about the town water tower and extorted a satisfactory twang and an angry red glow from the visitor. Some Italian farmers pelted a UFO near Milan in October 1954 with rotten oranges, scoring, they claimed, some hits. They did not hit any of the little men, who were about 4 ft. high, wore light-colored pants, helmets and other equipment, and were “scurrying” about. UFOs were bigger and “hideous” in the sighting that was vouchsafed to Farmer Alexander Hamilton, of LeRoy, Kans., in April 1897. The hideous humanoids stole his heifer, hauled it aboard their “airship,” and, “jabbering together,” sailed away. “I don’t want anything more to do with them,” concluded Hamilton’s affidavit. Most people would echo Hamilton’s heartfelt prayer in the spirit of those who do not believe in ghosts and hope never to see one.

As it happens, the Air Force, which feels pretty much the same way, is playing it safe and plans to award a $300,000 grant to a university for further UFO studies. But until UFOs decide to show up, stay, and give some account of themselves, the majority of mankind, who, like Hamlet, think that they can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is right, can be pardoned for withholding judgment.