When 4E Met Sirki - Sharing The Wealth (part 2 of 2)
"With A Heavy Heart I Regret To Inform you" Dept.:
We've seen how Forrest Ackerman was instrumental in the creation of, amongst other things, one of the first,if not the original, Lesbian magazines in America, but this next bit involves a friend of mine.
Kim Hunter is prettified and The Master shows his toolkit
My friend Daragh Hayes, when *he* was about 10 years old and quite possibly the biggest Planet Of The Apes fan in the small Northern Ontario town of his origin, went on a cross Canada roadtrip to L.A. with his family and had a copy of FMOF in his possession. Darragh saw the open invitation that Forry always had in the letter column inviting people to the Ackermuseum, and thinking it was some kind of wax museum like he had seen in Niagara Falls earlier in his travels with his folks, Darragh called the number, spoke to a kindly sounding old man on the phone, and before he knew it was being shown around Forry's living room with his Dad while his Mom and sister did some shopping nearby. Daragh later told me, when we were both collating a batch of crap at Kinkos where we worked together that it was EXACTLY as you would think it would be. Forry saw the reverance that Daragh had for the left over Cornelius mask that Roddy McDowall had given Forry personally, and the autographs, and Forry had worn the Boris Karloff MUMMY ring and the Lugosi DRACULA ring the way he always did when he was doing a guided tour. Daragh admitted to him that he would love to do monster make up like the stuff he saw in the magazine that fans sent in and that Forry would always publish - and Forry reminded him that people like Rick Baker and Steven Spielberg and Stephen King had started out just as he did and he could do whatever he wanted to do if he devoted his energy to it and it was something that meant a lot to him. When Forry asked Daragh about the stuff he loved, Ackerman was genuinely pleased to see that, not only did Daragh know his stuff when it came to monster movies, but that he knew the older figures in monster movies as well as he knew the newer ones. It was because of this that he asked Daragh if he knew what one item inparticular was. It was a toolbox made of enameled leather about a foot tall and wide and about two feet long, with a clasp lock and a handle on th etop of it. He opened it up and there was dried greasepaint and tubes of mortician's wax and wire and cotton inside and a few flattened rolls of old latex at the bottom of the case. It was Lon Chaney Sr's make up kit, given to Forry by Lon Jr and Daragh and Forry were both poking through it, gingerly, with their fingers. Finally, Forry said "Here", and tore off a small two by two inch strip of latex and gave it to Daragh "This is for you. There's a lot of it in there and I know Lon would have wanted it to go to a fan." Daragh his mind, already blown, just teared up and thanked him. As they were leaving, Daragh's Dad was thanking Forry profusely for having them in, and Ackerman leaned over to him and said "He might never do make-up or be involved in the movies or arts at all - he might be a doctor or a lawyer or something someday, but I think it's safe to say that he'll never forget this."
Daragh admitted, at the end of the story, that he lost the piece of latex in a house move a few years later. After a brief burst of celebrity playing music across North America and Europe in a punk band in his 20s, Daragh travels the world teaching a variety of languages, and he's very happy doing it. I know that if he reads that Forry passed last Thursday he'll miss him like an Uncle too.
The important thing, to Forry anyway, was that if you had a passion for something and you had a means of expressing that passion, you shared the wealth - no matter how stupid it made people feel when they didn't "get it". You *could* help people out by being creative and nurture their creativity as you did it. Whether it was opening his house to show his treasures to total strangers from all over the world, or acting as a literary agent getting friends of his (including Ed Wood and Robert Bloch and L Ron frigging Hubbard) published through the many contacts he had amassed through the 30s and 40s, or publishing the world's first and arguably most popular monster magazine because you had stacks and stacks of 8x10" B&W photos that would cost you nothing to use, you shared the wealth at your disposal. Amazing things would come about as a result of that whenever you did. We're talking about the guy who even created COSPLAY fer Chrissakes - his girlfriend Myrtle R. Douglas designed and created the first "futuristicostume" which Forry proudly wore at the 1st World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 - nobody had ever come to a conference in costume before. Forry believed in sharing the wealth, and for something like 80 of his 92 years that's exactly what he did - still conducting tours of the much smaller Mini-Mansion up until last year, doing interviews, attending the 50th anniversary Warren publishing panel at San Diego Comicon last summer - still reading, still writing, still making Gawdawful puns. He has no survivors, he and his wife Wendy never had any children - but in many ways those of us who were treated to his deep and all abiding love of the fantastic are his children, and it's up to us to keep sharing the wealth that investing in imagination and creativity inevitably reproduces in the people to whom it really takes root.
So long, Forry.