Rosa Vertner's Hashish Dinner Party

Vertner depicted in A Woman of the Century

Jumping off from a CBS news report about cannabis dinner parties in Maryland, cannabis author Isaac Campos's recent Substack newsletter recalls a newspaper item describing such a party in the 1860s. At the center of the story was the poet Rosa Vertner, “in the hey day of her youth and beauty, and at her father’s magnificent home in Lexington, which was the resort of all the cultured and brilliant men who visited Kentucky.” 

According to Campos, on the occasion of Vertner’s wedding to Claude Johnston, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, “there was a grand dinner party to which thirty guests sat down,” among them various prominent citizens. 

As described in a news account: 

Mrs. Vertner Johnston conceived the idea of having [hashish] served as a cordial at the dinner party, thinking that its effect, of which she had but the vaguest idea, might entertain and amuse the guests. Everybody drank of the peculiar greenish liquid, and many who found the taste pleasant drank more than they had any idea of. Within an hour the laughter and wit was running high. Then the excitement began to grow. Handsome matrons and beautiful young girls snatched the floral pieces from the table and pelted with flowers and [fruit gravy] dignified statesmen and lawyers who stood upon the chairs grinning and gesticulating like mountebanks. The host and hostess were themselves as much under the influence of the insidious drug as any of their guests, and could do nothing to quell the excitement, which now raged fast and furious. 

Things went downhill from there, Campos writes. "Physicians were called in, various guests ended up laid out in death-like stupors, and so forth. But Vertner wound up with plenty of material for her poem “Hasheesh Visions.”

"Leslie F*cking Jones" Is F*cking Dope

Leslie Jones is doing another bang-up job hosting The Daily Show this week, prompting me to check out her new book Leslie F*ing Jones on Audible, and it's even funnier than I expected. She reads the book in her energetic and no-nonsense, straight-ahead style like she's having a conversation with the listener.

"When Leslie Jones walks into a room, she's always out of breath and mad about something," writes Chris Rock in the book's foreword. Rock suggested Lorne Michaels give Jones a tryout when he was looking to add a Black woman to the cast of SNL in 2013. "She's too funny not to be everywhere, in every movie, on every TV show, with ten Netflix specials," Rock opines, adding she should also play a Marvel villain and Harriet Tubman. 

Jones writes in the introduction, "Some of the stories about my childhood are vague because a bitch is fifty-five and I've smoked a lot of weed." Her stories about weed all start with NOT using it, since it seems that was more unusual for her. When asked if she was would mind rooming with some Rastas, Jones writes, "OK with Rastas? I would never not have weed." 

Starting with the opening story about how she insisted on being paid as a headliner at clubs when male comics made excuses to put her on last so that they didn't have to follow her, the book is full of illuminating and empowering stories from her many years on the road. 

Albert Brooks's Moment of Marijuana Acceptance

The new Max documentary "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life" is directed by Brooks's highschool chum Rob Reiner and features interviews with comics like Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman and Nikki Glaser talking about Brooks's breakthrough "alternative" comedy and his enduring influence. At one point, Tiffany Haddish appreciatively says Brooks was, "The first dude I'd ever seen at least make a marijuana joke and, like, light it up on TV—and he was sitting next to Johnny Carson."

A clip is then shown of Brooks from his 7/25/1979 Tonight Show appearance where he pulls out what looks like a joint from his pocket and says, "You know Johnny, this is my 10th year on the show, and I brought something to celebrate." Carson explodes with laughter as Brooks lights the "joint" and hands it to Ed McMahon, who takes a hit before passing it to Johnny. 

Carson takes a whiff and pronounces it not to be marijuana (how he knew the smell is a good question). Brooks admits that the joint is "ersatz," saying, "I can prove it (takes a whiff). Look, I still got memory!" He then tells a story about being on the road in the late 60s or early 70s when, performing in Seattle, he was offered a hit of a joint by the road manager for the headliner. "I still remember it with some degree of fondness," Brooks recalled, pronouncing it "industrial marijuana," the strongest he'd ever smoked. He opined that it's good when either the comic or the audience is stoned because "if you're both straight there's a good chance for physical violence." Johnny added that 10 or 12 years earlier you couldn't even make a joke about marijuana on TV, because the networks wouldn't permit it. So this was another Moment in Marijuana Acceptance, courtesy of Mr. Brooks. 

Of Madonna and Melissa, and Marijuana

UPDATE: Barbra Streisand's new memoir also mentions marijuana. Read more.

A new, weighty (in pounds, if not words) biography of Madonna is out, written by Mary Gabriel and titled, "Madonna: A Rebel Life." 

Marijuana is mentioned early on. In describing the young singer spending time during the summer between 8th and 9th grades at her grandmother's house in Bay City, Michigan, Gabriel writes, "Her grandmother's idea of child-rearing was liberal in the extreme. Madonna said she could go out with boys, drink beer, 'have twelve desserts...and stay out past ten.' Nanoo, as they called her, let her sons, Madonna's uncles, smoke pot in the basement and practice their rock band in her garage. 'I thought they were the coolest people in the world,' Madonna said." 

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

I expected the new documentary about Joan Baez, "I Am a Noise," co-produced by Tokin' Woman Patti Smith, to be a celebration of Baez's stellar career. 

That it is, but with an unexpected twist: Baez opens up in the film about how she has suffered from severe anxiety attacks all of her life, including when she burst on the international stage at the age of 18 as a voice from heaven, practically the new Virgin Mary.

Replete with footage of Baez's performances and actions as a folksinger and activist, the film also features excerpts from hours of audiotapes, home movies of her childhood, her drawings, and her diaries. 

Her connection with Bob Dylan, who supplied the protest songs that her voice demanded, is covered, including how deflated she felt when she was basically rebuffed by him while touring Europe, as documented in the 1967 film "Don't Look Back." 

As Baez tells it, she "couldn't" participate in the drug taking that the Boys in the Band were doing on the tour, and she was soon excluded in other ways. Since Dylan turned the Beatles onto marijuana, one wonders why he didn't do the same for Baez. Perhaps because she was a woman, she wasn't invited to the boys' pot parties.  

Frances Marion and Marijuana

After writing an obituary for Judy Balaban, who tried LSD back in the day when Cary Grant was doing it, and co-wrote an article interviewing Grant’s wife Betsy Drake and others for Vanity Fair in 2010, I looked up her co-author  Cari Beauchamp, a film historian currently at the Mary Pickford Foundation. 

Beauchamp’s book: “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” details Marion’s illustrious career during the years of the Fatty Arbunkle trial etc. and the coming of the Hays code.

After Marion (who was also a painter and sculptor) painted a portrait of actress Kitty Gordon showing off her much-admired back to promote Peg O’ My Heart, posters for the play were vandalized and leaflets signed by “Conscientious Citizens" went out shouting, “We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such pictures of half-nude women. And we keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and the lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.” Marion and a friend attended a meeting of the group, dubbing them “The Constipated Citizens.” (p. 27). 

Marijuana is mentioned twice in the book: 

RIP Judy Balaban: Early LSD Experimenter and Chronicler, and Human Rights Champion

"Her father was head of Paramount, she was one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids, and she shared an LSD experience with Cary Grant," ran the obituary in the Hollywood Reporter for Judy Balaban, who died on October 19 at the age of 91.  

Balaban was Hollywood Royalty in more ways than one: a member of the prominent Balaban family, she dated Montgomery Clift for six months in the 1950s when she was 18, and was married to Kelly's agent Jay Kanter—who made his client Marlon Brando best man at their wedding—when she was the youngest of six bridesmaids at Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Balaban later married actors Tony Franciosa and Don Quine.

A 2010 article Balaban co-wrote with author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp for Vanity Fair documents the experiences of a group of Hollywood heavyweights who took LSD therapeutically in the late 1950s, among them Cary Grant and Balaban herself. 

Setting the stage for the article, she and Beauchamp wrote that at the time, "Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a 'joint' was a body part or a lower-class dive. If people were 'doing lines,' you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned 'acid,' you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem. Nobody in Hollywood—or almost anywhere else in the United States—had ever heard of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy." 

Balaban relates in the article that she didn’t know much about LSD when she started taking it, but, she laughingly says, “I figured if it was good enough for Cary Grant, it was good enough for me!”