How Paulette Goddard Turned on Fred Astaire?

I just learned that Petula Clark "outed" herself and co-star Fred Astaire as smoking marijuana during the filming of 1968's Finian's Rainbow. "There was a lot of Flower Power going on," she told the BBC.

The movie, directed by pot-puffing Francis Ford Coppola, is set on an agricultural cooperative where a character played by Al Freeman Jr. attempts to develop a pre-mentholated tobacco. The plot has co-star Don Francks trying hard to get a hand-rolled cigarette to produce smoke, and ends with the whole cast blissfully doused in smoke.

The Canadian-born Franks—a jazz singer, poet and Native American—used to perform a song called Smokin’ Reefers. "A smoker of weed in his younger years, he was a fan of the plant. He gave up drinking when he was 21, using the First Nations term 'firewater' when referring to alcohol." Source.

Hermes Pan with Ann Miller in "Kiss Me Kate"

I can't find any other reference to Astaire and marijuana, but the choreographer most closely associated with him, Hermes Pan, is described in a biography as offering both tobacco and marijuana cigarettes to guests at a 1949 dinner party at his home in Coldwater Canyon.

Astaire called Pan his "ideas man" and the two began their collaboration on "The Carioca" number for "Flying Down to Rio" (1933) (probably the most humorous dance duet ever). Pan also suggested Astaire dance with a hat rack in "Royal Wedding," and advised him how to do it. He continued to collaborate with Astaire right up until his last musical picture, Finian's Rainbow.

Pan's career began with an appearance as a chorus boy in the Marx Brothers' 1928 Broadway production of "Animal Crackers." At that time, marijuana was still legal, and Chico Marx told an interviewer in 1959 that Groucho took his name from the "Grouch bag" they'd wear around their necks in their Vaudeville days, adding, "In this bag we would keep our pennies, some marbles, a couple of pieces of candy, a little marijuana, whatever we could get...because, you know, we were studying to be musicians."

Pan was also close to VIP Diego Rivera, who may have turned him on to pot in Mexico, if Errol Flynn's account of his own experience with Rivera serves. Pan and Rivera met at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1940, introduced by actress Paulette Goddard, who appeared in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and "Modern Times" as well as "The Women."

In 1943, Pan visited Rivera at his home in San Angel near Mexico City where Rivera asked Pan to pose for him dancing, so that he could work out techniques for depicting motion in his paintings. He also painted a portrait of Pan. 

Flynn wrote in his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways that he visited Rivera in 1935, introduced by another actress, Dolores Del Rio (who also appeared in "Flying Down to Rio"). Rivera offered Flynn marijuana, which he smoked, and afterwards he could hear the paintings singing.

"Pan found life in Hollywood even more superficial and insignificant after his return from San Angel," wrote his biographer John Franceschina. Maybe the two-week posing process included puffing something mind expanding and if so, he shared some with his friend Fred.

Detail from Rivera's "Pan American Unity" mural
seems to depict a love triangle with Frida Kahlo,
himself and Goddard before the Tree of Life.

Goddard traveled to Mexico in 1940 for Look magazine ("Paulette Goddard Discovers Mexico"), where she reportedly met Rivera while living in the San Angel Inn across from his studio. She was "pursued" by Rivera and was a model for a mural he painted on San Francisco's Treasure Island. She accompanied him to California when he fled Mexico following death threats and attacks on him for his political activities. (Source: Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera, 1999.) A follow-up story in Look (July 20, 1940) is titled "Adventure and Mexico – Paulette Goddard helps Diego Rivera." The FBI soon put the actress under surveillance to investigate her political opinions and activities.

UPDATE 9/20 - Rivera's mural "Pan American Unity" was scheduled to be exhibited at SFMoMA in late 2020, but it seems that has been delayed although the museum will soon be reopening. UPDATE 11/22 - The mural is now viewable for free at SFMOMA through 1/23. 

As for Kahlo, a retrospective of her work was recently held at San Francisco's DeYoung museum. This drawing of hers from a letter that may indicate a medical use. More on Frida. 

2012 TOKEY AWARDS

Tokin Woman is proud to bestow 

the following “Tokey” Awards for 2012, 

in recognition of the achievement, 

courage and compassion of the awardees. 

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE AWARD:

Andrew Sullivan

The Daily Beast

Mr President, Don't Even Think About It

INTERNATIONAL AWARENESS AWARD:

TOM HAYDEN

http://theava.com/archives/18091

CULTURAL AWARENESS AWARD:

"Breaking the Taboo" http://www.breakingthetaboo.info/

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom"

http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2012/08/25/Newsroom-Anchor-Smeared-Pot-Use

"Toke" and "Mary Jane the Musical"

http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2012/07/12/Summer-Theatre-Reviews-Toke-ing-Mary-Jane

VIDEO OF THE YEAR: What if Obama Called a Real Marijuana User?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hO5meenaso&feature=youtu.be

COVER GIRL OF THE YEAR: LILY TOMLIN, CULTURE

http://tokinwoman.blogspot.com/2012/09/high-lily-high-lily.html

FICKLE FEDERAL FINGER OF FATE AWARD:

Federal Policy Goes to the Dogs Over the Vapor Room SF

http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2012/06/08/federal-policy-goes-to-the-dogs-over-the-vapor-room/

BIzARRE BEDfELLOWS AWARD:

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2012/09/02/Ayn-Rand-Drugs

BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD:

Too High to Fail

http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2012/08/28/Too-High-Fail-Fine-Book-Cannabis-Conundrum

SCIENCE WRITING AWARD: CLINT WERNER FOR SMELL THE TRUTH

http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2012/06/14/could-marijuana-save-professional-football/

A FOND FAREWELL TO:

Phyllis Diller

http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2012/08/23/RIP-Phyllis-Diller-Inspiration-Comics-and-Cannabis

Larry Hagman

http://www.veryimportantpotheads.com/hagman.htm

Special recognition to: Cannabis Culture and the Smell the Truth blog for supporting original journalism in 2012.

First Pot Peace Candidate Had Reason in His Family

Teresa and George McGovern after he won
the Massachusetts Democratic Primary

I haven't had a chance in this busy election season to stop and reflect about the death this year of George McGovern. Among those who worked on Mr. McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign were Warren Beatty, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Gary Hart. And, I'm proud to say, me.

My first political act, at the age of 13, was to campaign for McGovern. When Nixon won by a landslide, I was so disheartened about the cynicism of the neighbors I'd canvassed and the country I lived in that I didn't get involved in politics again until I found out about hemp in 1991.


Now I see that the laws against marijuana had a damaging effect on a member of McGovern's family.

According to Wikipedia:

In July 1968, George McGovern's daughter Teresa was arrested in Rapid City, SD on marijuana possession charges. Based on a recently enacted strict state drugs law, Terry now faced a minimum five-year prison sentence if found guilty. At the time McGovern was in the running for the Democratic nomination for president.

McGovern denounced as "police brutality" the Chicago police tactics against demonstrators at the convention in August and ended up supporting Hubert Humphrey's nomination that year. Again, Wikipedia:

McGovern returned to his Senate reelection race. While South Dakota voters sympathized with McGovern over his daughter's arrest, he initially suffered a substantial drop in popularity over the events in Chicago. 

McGovern won the Democratic nomination four years later in 1972, when he famously became tagged with the label "amnesty, abortion and acid," supposedly reflecting his positions. McGovern favored the decriminalization of marijuana (but didn't say the same for LSD). Ever since, McGovernism has come to mean the embracing of progressive social policies that make liberals easy targets for conservatives. See SF Gate's Obituary.

Teresa was 19 when her pot bust happened. The effect it may have had on her life is unknown. For one thing, it might have sent her to more damaging substances, like alcohol.

McGovern writes, "Embarrassed by her Rapid City marijuana arrest, Terry decided not to return to Dakota Wesleyan that fall." Instead she enrolled at the University of Dakota, which was "then a place where heavy drinking and pot smoking were common, and Terry steadily increased her intake of alcohol with some limited use of marijuana and amphetamines." In February 1988, she began occasional use of marijuana, calling it a "pot addiction."

In December 1994, at the age of 45, Teresa fell into a snowbank while heavily intoxicated with alcohol, and died of hypothermia.

Christmas Classics and Cannabis

VIP Bob Hope was perhaps the most beloved American entertainer with the most longevity, best known for entertaining US troops abroad and for his Christmas TV shows.

Tonight, TCM aired Hope's 1951 movie "The Lemon Drop Kid" in which he and Marilyn Maxwell sing "Silver Bells," a song written for the film. Based on a Damon Runyan story, the movie has Hope rounding up New York's petty crooks to dress as Santas and collect money for a phony charity.

While singing the song about 56 minutes into the movie, Hope is clowning around just after it's established a policeman can't shut him down because he's licensed. He stops to sniff a big meerschaum pipe smoked by a street corner Santa, after which he acts goofy, whistling and flapping his wings. (The tune is actually introduced by William Frawley as "Gloomy," who sings, "chunk it in/chunk it in/or Santy will give you a Mickey.")


Hope joked about pot on radio broadcasts in the 1940s and while entertaining troops in Vietnam in the 1970s. "I hear you guys are interested in gardening here," he quipped. "Our security officer said a lot of you guys are growing your own grass." Poignantly, he added that "instead of taking it away from the soldiers, we ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris." The jokes were censored from Hope's 1970 Christmas special (so much for Peace on Earth).

Hope, who admitted to trying pot in a Rolling Stone interview in 1980, gave a nod to his "Road" movie co-star Bing Crosby at the end of The Lemon Drop Kid. Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" is the best-selling single ever, was also a VIP.

Another beloved Christmas film, "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1942), edits out a scene from the 1939 play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman where absinthe is mentioned. In the film, Sheldon Whiteside, played by Monty Woolley, is the unwanted guest of staid Ohio industrialist Ernest Stanley over the Christmas holidays.

The original play has this scene:

JOHN (manservant): And Sarah has something for you, Mr. Whiteside. Made it special. 

WHITESIDE: She has? Where is she? My Souffle Queen! 

SARAH (cook): (Proudly entering with a tray on which reposes her latest delicacy) Here I am, Mr. Whiteside. 

WHITESIDE: She walks in beauty like the night, and in those deft hands there is the art of Michelangelo. Let me taste the new creation. (...swallows at a gulp one of Sarah's not so little cakes. An ecstatic expression comes over his face) Poetry! Sheer poetry! 

SARAH: (beaming) I put a touch of absinthe in the dough. Do you like it? 

WHITESIDE: (rapturously) Ambrosia!

Interestingly, the word "counterfeiting" in the play's line, "If that's for the Stanleys, tell them they've been arrested for counterfeiting," was changed to "dealing dope" in the film. Mr. Stanley brags of building ball bearings for the war effort, which is what the real Ohio industrialist Henry Timken did. Timken's son Harold H. ("Henry") also grew hemp in Imperial Valley, California in 1917.

Woolley also appeared in the Christmas movie "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), in which he plays a professor  who describes to the Bishop (David Niven) the never-emptying bottle of sherry that the angel (Cary Grant) bestows upon him thusly: "It warms. It stimulates, It inspires. But no matter how much you drink, it never inebritates....it's something you can't explain with all your Ecclesiastical knowledge." 

In his latest brilliant column on marijuana, VIP Andrew Sullivan skewers David Frum and NIDA for their backwards words and policies. He writes,

"The whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection. People need these things and have always sought refuge in them, especially at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere."

True, even at the movies.

High Lily, High Lily

My favorite line from Lily Tomlin's masterful album "Modern Scream" comes from this mock question:

Interviewer: "Lily, is it true you have a drug problem?"
Lily: "Yes, it's so hard to get good grass these days."

As one of the two "tokin' women" honoring George Carlin when he posthumously won the Mark Twain Prize,  she opened with, "I flatter myself to think that George and I somehow drank from the same comedy fountain. Or should I say 'inhaled'? Or perhaps I shouldn't."

Lily inhaled on screen with Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda in the  1980 movie "9 to 5," at a pot party that bonded the characters in a deliciously wicked plot to improve their workplace conditions. (It's true: pot leads to communism.) Tomlin's "Tasteful Lady" is a great send-up of the kind of "Mothers Against Everything" that would put the clampdown on cannabis.

Yet I had never heard Tomlin fully "out" herself as a pot smoker until the October issue of Culture Magazine, whose cover is graced with Lily rocking a black bowler hat.

Asked if she's an advocate for marijuana legalization, Tomlin replied, "Yes, yes. Of course."

She said she doesn't have a doctor's recommendation, and asked, "Can you get me one?...I have to rely on the kindness of strangers. I don't use everyday. I'm not that fresh and hip." To the question, does she have any favorite of cannabis strains, Tomlin replied, "I wish I was that sophisticated."

At 72, Tomlin is back on TV as the mother of Reba McEntire in the upcoming ABC sitcom Malibu. She'll appear onstage on January 19, 2013 at the Sunset Cultural Center in Carmel, CA.

In May, Tomlin and longtime writing/life partner Jane Wagner were honored by Sen. Barbara Boxer. Maybe the two should have a toke, and a talk. UPDATE: Maybe they did. 

UPDATE 9/14: Tomlin will receive a 2014 Kennedy Center Honor. The gala will be broadcast on December 30. (Many other Very Important Potheads have received the Honor.) She and Jane Fonda will co-star in the new Netflix series Grace and Frankie.

Tales of Two Tokin' Women: Fiona Apple and Lady Gaga

UPDATE 10/15: The Texas sheriff that arrested Apple 

is now refusing to arrest marijuana offenders. 

Fiona Apple was caught on Wednesday with small amounts of marijuana and hashish in Sierra Blanca, Texas, making her the first woman to be nabbed in the same border town where Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg and Armie Hammer were also arrested by the US Border Patrol. (Hammer was reportedly carrying baked goods from his wife's bakedery.)

 Apple was arrested and jailed, and spoke about her experience at her Houston concert. It's about time someone spoke up about what a violating experience being jailed is. Apple's arrest is potentially much more serious than the others who got their wrists slapped, since hash possession reportedly can bring a 3-10 year sentence in Texas, even though it's just concentrated cannabis.

There is possibly no other artist who digs as deep as Apple does, with undeniable talent and honesty. She is back on the musical scene after a 7-year hiatis, with her presciently titled new album The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw, And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. We wish all the best to the extraordinary machine that she is. She'll be in New Orleans on Monday night, and touring the East Coast thereafter.

Apple's arrest blunted my enthusiasm about the news that Lady Gaga lit up a joint onstage at her concert in Amsterdam, declaring weed "wondrous." She was quoted as telling The Sun newspaper: "I want you to know it has totally changed my life and I’ve really cut down on drinking."

One commenter wrote: "Good now she won't end up like Amy." (Gaga has famously gained 25 pounds, possibly due to the munchees and healthier habits.) Another wrote: "Good on you Lady Gaga. Makes me want to reach for one. Unfortunately it is totally acceptable for celeb's to indulge in whatever their desire, but not for regular folks like us. LoL." They're right, and I'm not laughing about it.

Tickets for Gaga's Born this Way Ball on Feb. 22 at Madison Square Garden go on sale on Sept. 28. Since she has 29 million Twitter followers, we think they're likely to sell out.

Where Are the Top Female Marijuana Users?

Maya Angelou

The Marijuana Policy Project has released a list of Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users, chosen by vote from 200 candidates (and augmented by MPP's 13 "automatic qualifiers").

Only five women make the list. Sarah Palin comes in at number 14, and poet Maya Angelou is number 21. Angelina Jolie is 24th on the list, even though she said she doesn't like pot's effects. Jennifer Aniston shows up at number 38 and Whoopi Goldberg at 44. Lady Gaga missed the cut, coming in at #52.

The maleness of the list could be a reflection of MPP's membership, or of their own selection of the 200 nominees. High Times's readership is almost exclusively young males, and groups like NORML have traditionally been male-heavy (although the NORML Women's Alliance is working to change that).

NORML board member Greta Gaines made some waves recently when she published an Alternet.org article titled "Why Are No Women Celebrity Stoners Willing to Come Out of the Greenhouse." Gaines got a few things wrong, dissing Melissa Etheridge as a mere medical marijuana advocate, and failing to recognize that women like Aniston, Sarah Silverman, Cameron Diaz, Kirsten Dunst and others have spoken publicly about their marijuana use. But if the MPP list is a reflection of public perception, her point is one that needs to be made.

Most are aware that women had a role in bringing about alcohol prohibition, but many don't know that they also helped bring it down. Pauline Morton Sabin was one important player who was highlighted in Ken Burns's PBS series "Prohibition." A panel at the national NORML conference on Saturday, October 6 will explore women's role in ending America's prohibitions. An NWA Luncheon will follow. Read more and register.

See a round-up of prominent female cannabis connoisseurs, now and then.