Kathy Bates Stars As a Dispensary Owner in New Netflix Series

Actress Kathy Bates, who recently said she shared "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy, is starring as a lawyer-turned-dispensary-owner and advocate in the new Netflix series "Disjointed," set to premiere on August 25.

I caught a taping of the show's pilot last year, and found it witty, charming and quite funny. Bates's character Ruth and her son, an MBA, do battle over the future of the business, with her wanting to keep it focused on healing and her son focused on profits. It’s a somewhat accurate depiction of what’s taking place in the cannabis industry today.

You can see for yourself in the trailer below:

Bates also played a marijuana-smoking lawyer in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law," and portrayed Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." She told AARP Magazine—which dubbed her "Smokin'"—that she's enjoying playing a sexier role for a change, and that marijuana "helped tremendously" to ease nausea and chronic pain from her cancer treatments.

Amazon's "The Last Tycoon" Misses the Marijuana

Kathleen and Siva in the 1976 film The Last Tycoon

The makers of the Amazon Prime series "The Last Tycoon" say they seek to make it an authentic representation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's last, unfinished Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, set and written in the 1930's. But right out of the gate the series demotes its female love interest from a goddess to a waitress. And it erases Fitzgerald's intriguing, possible references to marijuana and the drug experience.

One of the characters in Fitzgerald’s book calls Hollywood “a mining town in lotus land,” a reference to the Land of the Lotus Eaters from Homer’s The Odyssey, where explorers get lost in a drug-induced stupor to forget the horrors of war.

In the novel, Tycoon’s main character, producer Monroe Stahr, first sees his love interest Kathleen Moore floating on a studio-made head of Siva that had become dislodged from a set in an earthquake. To this day, worshippers in India drink bhang (a drink made with cannabis) to celebrate Siva’s the marriage to the goddess Parvati.

That night, cameraman Pete Zavras attempts suicide by diving off an office building on the studio lot. “I knew he’d gone to pot,” says Stahr. When asked why he’d done it on the lot, Zavras replies, “Before the oracle. The solver of the Eleusinian mysteries.” Those were the Greek rites whose attendees worshipped the grain goddess Demeter and took the mind-altering drug kykeon, thought to be related to LSD (derived from ergot, a mold that grows on grain crops).

In the novel, when Stahr goes to Kathleen’s door, she says, “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. Shall I get my reefer and sit outside?” (A reefer is also the name of a sailor’s coat.) Kathleen is next described sitting at a long white table that “became an altar where the priestess sat alone.” Like the similarly blonde Faye Greener in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (also written in 1937), Kathleen personified the mysterious, sacramental and unattainable love object and Stahr worshipped at her altar.

Monroe first sees Kathleen in Amazon's Tycoon

Stahr—who takes Benzedrine, alcohol, and an unnamed medicine from a bottle in the book—meets Kathleen at his house, where he has had a strip of grass brought in from the prop department. Kathleen laughs and asks, “Isn’t that real grass?” Stahr replies, “Oh yes—it’s grass.” The scene is reminiscent of one in Fitzgerald’s 1925 book The Great Gatsby, the first novel about a drug dealer. After Gatsby sends a servant to mow his neighbor Nick’s lawn, Nick tells him, “The grass is fine.” “What grass?” asks Gatsby, before saying, “Oh, the grass in the yard.”

In the made-for-Amazon version there's a head of Siva, but Kathleen doesn't get near it. Instead she meets Stahr as a waitress fetching a sandwich.

In one upside to the series, a woman is revealed to be a better scriptwriter than her husband. Of a scriptwriter on the movie lot, Fitzgerald wrote:

Out the window Rose Meloney watched the trickle streaming toward the commissary. She would have her lunch in her office and knit a few rows while it came. The man was coming at one-fifteen with the French perfume smuggled over the Mexican border. That was no sin—it was like a prohibition. 

Who smuggles French perfume over the Mexican border, and calls it a prohibition? Rose is a flower like marijuana, which was called Santa Rosa or Santa Maria in Mexico. Her surname starts with an “M,” like marijuana.

Jeanne Moreau in The Last Tycoon (1976).

The reference to knitting may have come from Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 book The Hasheesh Eater, wherein he describes a hashish-induced vision of a crone knit of purple yarn. In Food of the Gods, Terrence McKenna connects the expression “spinning a yarn” to hemp’s dual purpose as a fiber and an intoxicant leading to flights of fancy.

The character called Rose in the Amazon series is no writer, but rather a cheating wife (played by Rosemarie DeWitt, who was a lot better as a pot smoker in Mad Men — until those writers turned her into a hard drug addict). Lily Collins tries as the ambitious Celia, but Theresa Russell was much more interesting in the 1976 movie version of Tycoon that cast Very Important Pothead Robert Mitchum as the studio chief and VIP Jack Nicholson as the labor leader. The best thing about the movie version wasn't De Niro as Monroe but rather Jeanne Moreau as the diva Didi opposite VIP Tony Curtis. Moreau just died at age 89, probably so she could roll in her grave over Jennifer Beals trying to play her role.

The Top 24 Greatest Albums Made by Tokin' Women

NPR has released a list of The Top 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women, and the righteous group includes many Tokin' Women.

Missy Elliott came in at #5. The rapper reportedly told reporters at a 2005 press conference in Jamaica, "What's up everyone? Sorry if I sound kind of weird, but I just had a Jamaican brownie - some of you might know what I'm talking 'bout."

Also in the top 10 are the Tokin' Trio Patti Smith (#7), Janis Joplin (#8), and Amy Winehouse (#9). (Click on their names to get their connections to cannabis.)

Madonna had two albums on the list, at #13 & #63. The World's Most Successful Female Musician Ever (if you count money as the measure), Madonna grabbed headlines away from her fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees in 2008 by using her acceptance speech to reveal she took ecstasy and smoked grass on her way to the top.

High Times cover girl Ani DiFranco comes in at #25, and Alanis Morisette, who's #29, told the magazine in 2010, "As an artist, there's a sweet jump-starting quality to [marijuana] for me." Queen Latifah, whose new movie Girl's Trip includes pot smoking, is at #33 and at #44 are the Wilson Sisters of Heart. Finishing the top 50 is Hole, featuring Courtney Love.
 
Jazz great Sarah Vaughan, at #51, was still enjoying marijuana in 1989, when a Jazz Fest organizer in Cleveland followed the scent of marijuana smoke to Vaughan's dressing room, where the star was also enjoying a glass of brandy.  She then walked onstage and gave a magnificent performance.

At #53 is Linda Ronstadt; #60 is Chrissie Hynde and at #67 is Sinead O'Connor.

These follow, Tokin' Women all:

#82 Laura Nyro
#90 Barbra Streisand
#94 Sheryl Crow
#116 Macy Gray
#117 Joan Jett
#125 Fiona Apple
#130 Teena Marie

Finally, of #140 NPR writes, "Norah Jones's distinctive voice, laced with a mellow smoke that might have originated at either the cabaret or honky-tonk, was immediately a force to contend with." When Blender magazine asked her in 2007 if she smoked pot, Jones's answer was, "Of course." Asked, "Ever get high with your buddy Willie Nelson?" she responded, "I'm not going near Willie's weed!" 

Coming in at a well deserved #1 is Joni Mitchell's Blue. Mitchell famously said, "Grass, it sits you on your ass." That may be true (at times) but it seems the women on this list didn't let that stop them.

Probably there are more women on the list who toke. I mean, Beyoncé and Jay-Z's first child had a marijuana strain named after her in LA dispensaries on the day she was born. Gwen Stefani's lyrics and videos are pretty trippy. Carly Simon's been implicated in a recent biography of she, Mitchell and Carole King—who hasn't admitted but when Stephen Colbert interviewed her, he brought out his Tapestry album (#10 on the list), and demonstrated how people in the 70s used to clean pot on the double cover. And I don't know about Alicia Keys but it was at one of her concerts where the fictional character Steve Carell played on "The Office" got stoned.

Jessica Mitford: An Appreciation

As I write this I hear that Mitford's grandson James Forman Jr. will appear on NPR's Fresh Air today to talk about his book, "Locking Up Our Own," examining the role played by African-American leaders in creating the era of mass incarceration. And the beat goes on. 

I've long called Jessica Mitford, the muckraking journalist and activist, my heroine for her quote, "Objective? I always have an objective."*

Picking up Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (Knopf, 2006), a 744-page collection of Mitford's letters edited by former SF Chronicle staffer Peter Y. Sussman, I've gained even more respect for her.

Mitford was one of five well-known daughters born to Lord and Lady Redesdale in Oxfordshire, England who took wildly different paths. Two of her sisters became Nazi sympathizers; Jessica ran off at the age of 19 with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, whom she married and joined chronicling the Spanish Civil War. Romilly died in WWII while flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and Jessica married labor lawyer Robert Truehaft and lived in Oakland, CA until her death in 1996.

The couple was eavesdropped on by the same FBI agents who later targeted Mario Savio and student activists in Berkeley. Ronald Reagan got reports on her, and later when Mitford donated eyeglasses to a museum she joked about not putting them near Reagan’s for fear of explosion.

A good friends of Tokin' Woman Maya Angelou, Mitford helped her husband Bob defend “Negroes” falsely accused of murder and rape, explaining to her mother (“Muv" = Lady Redesdale) in a letter what a “frame up” was and how it was applied to Negroes especially. She also testified at a hearing in front of Sen. Edward Kennedy in DC about drug experiments taking place on California prisoners (“Cheaper than Chimpanzees” was her headline).

As well as exposing the funeral industry in her famous book The American Way of Death (1963), she wrote an exposé of the US prison system, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973), in which she reported on the 1967 President's Crime Commission that abolished public drunkenness as a crime and deemed alcoholism a disease. Mitford asked, "While they were at it, why did not  the commissioners take the further steep of proposing repeal of the laws against such victimless crimes as homosexuality, prostitution, adultery, gambling, narcotics, and a host of other forms of behavior now legally proscribed thanks to the baleful influence of latter-day Puritans?" In answer, she quotes Pater Barton Hutt, consultant to the commission, who wrote, "It is likely that almost every member of the commission consumes alcohol. It is virtually certain that they have friends and relatives who have drinking problems and may even be alcoholics...I think it is fair to assume that something less than a majority of the commission members smoke marijuana...."

Long before it was fashionable to do so, Mitford documented the racial disparity in prison time for crimes between whites and people of color, noting that in drug cases, the average sentence for whites was 61.1 months, and for nonwhites 81.1 months. She also calls out New York's Governor Rockefeller on his absurd "solution" to the drug problem: locking up for life the dealers of all drugs, including hashish but excluding marijuana. She quotes Pennsylvania inmate Samuel Jordan, who wondered, "Could this be because he does not want to see his pot-smoking young relatives behind bars?"

A member of the Communist party from 1943 until she and Treuhaft renounced it due to Stalinism, Mitford was made to sign a loyalty oath in order to teach at San Jose State University, and won a court case against submitting to fingerprinting. In 1953, she wrote a letter to President Harry Truman urging him to refuse to testify before the HUAC committee. "True patriots must challenge the authority of this committee," she wrote. "I pledge to do my part by refusing to cooperate. You have an opportunity to set an example for loyal Americans by defying this committee and doing all in your power to expose its real aim—fascism in America."

On May 4, 1967 Decca wrote to her sister Nancy Mitford from Oakland—in a letter describing having Arnold Toynbee over to dinner and Bob’s “re-torturing” of the CIA over their involvement in the Berkeley Co-op movement—about what her "Muv" called "Marriage Uana":

Hillary Clinton interned with Mitford's husband in the 60s while she was a Yale law student, but here's what Mitford had to say about Bill Clinton in 1992: 

I'm not the only one who admires Mitford: J.K. Rowling named her daughter after Jessica. 

*I can't however find the source of that quote, although she did say, "If to be objective means having no point of view, or giving equal weight to all information that comes one's way, I plead guilty—although accuracy is essential."

A Real Wonder Woman: Meryl Streep in "Ricki and the Flash" (and everything)

UPDATE 2023: Streep won a Tokey award this year for the moment when asks Martin Short, "Do you doobie baby?" in Only Murders in the Building. 

So bored was I trying to watch Wonder Woman in the theatre that I came home and instead rented Ricki and the Flash (2015) starring a true Wonder Woman: Meryl Streep. Who else could, at the age of 65, play the sh@# out of a raunchy rock-and-roll mama so well, learning to play guitar for the role, and doing all the singing.

The film teams Streep with Kevin Kline as her ex-husband Pete, in their first screen pairing since Sophie's Choice for which he, too, should have won the Oscar. Her other love interest is the impossibly cute and talented Rick Springfield, who everyone my age (including me) had had a crush on since Dr. Noah Drake sang "Jesse's Girl." He was the Ricky Nelson of our generation. What inspired casting.

Unlike Wonder Woman, this movie is written by a woman, Diablo Cody (Juno) and it shows. It's got heart, and soul, and yes, a revelatory marijuana scene.

Streep's daughter Julie, played by her spittin' image Mamie Gummer whose first role was as a toddler in "Heartburn' (1986), is undergoing a crisis that calls Ricki back to the family she left in the dust of her dreams. Julie bites her absentee mom's head off when she arrives, and tellingly tells her the next morning, "My therapist has had me on Effexor, and I think we need to titrate down a little bit. It's made me volatile." She later says she has "Ambien shits from my suicide attempt. I had them on hand because I'm an insomniac."

Similar to Jane Fonda's character Grace in Peace, 
Love and Misunderstanding, Ricki asks about the marijuana she found in the fridge just at the moment when the family is about to turn in at 9 PM rather than face each other. Next thing you know, everyone's chill and listening to music, after which Streep and Kline laugh their faces off, munch out, and actually have a conversation about their troubled child. Meanwhile, insomniac Julie snoozes to an old movie on TV with Judy Holliday saying, "you know, it just smells nice." 

The bummer boom comes down the next morning in the form of the stepmom, who wants Ricki and her marijuana out of the house so that they can go back to prescription-medicating her daughter. "It's a plant," Streep scoffs. In the end, she's there when her daughter needs her, like a true shero.

Springfield, who as Greg the Guitarist is sweetly supportive in the film, wrote about getting stoned and listening to Hendrix, or spending all his money on weed and girls, in his memoir Late, Late at Night (which in 2012 was named No. 23 of "The 25 Great Rock Memoirs of All Time" by Rolling Stone). 

But back to Meryl. With the possible exception of Susan Sarandon, Streep has now played more female stoners on screen than any other actress. She portrayed Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa, passed a joint to Cher in Silkwood, sniffed some exotic plant material in Adaptation (pictured) and "poked smot" with Steve Martin in It's Complicated. Reportedly she smoked medicinal pot as a cancer patient in One True Thing.

Streep has the stones (i.e. ovaries) to stand up to the current administration, causing Tweety D. to single her out as an "overrated actress." Which may be the biggest lie he ever told.

Anita Pallenberg: "She was the catalyst"

Actress, artist and muse Anita Pallenberg has died. Pallenberg had a 12-year relationship and two children with Keith Richards, but first she dated Rolling Stone Brian Jones, after famously bringing him hashish backstage after a concert in Munich.

In her memoir Faithfull, Marianne Faithfull wrote,  "How Anita came to be with Brian is really the story of how the Stones became the Stones. She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée (the fashionable youth)."

Jones reportedly mistreated her, and she and Richards were drawn to each other. They hooked up while traveling and checked into a hotel as the Count and Countess of Zigenpuss. "By the time we got to Valencia, it was summer," Richards wrote in his autobiography Life. "I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid by Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things." The next stop was Marrakesh, where band members were hanging out with Very Important Pothead Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, who contributed the hashish fudge recipe to the Alice B. Toklas cookbook.

Faithfull with Pallenberg in London

Anita ended up in prison overnight a drugs charge in Rome while filming Barbarella. While filming Candy based on the Terry Southern novel, co-star Marlon Brando "kidnapped her one night and read her poetry and, when that failed, tried to seduce Anita and me together," Richards wrote, adding "Later, pal."

As so often happens with power couples, forces conspired to pull them apart. When Anita was cast opposite Mick Jagger in Performance,  tongues wagged about a possible affair with a third Rolling Stone. It was during this time that she says she started using heroin. 

In 1972, Anita was arrested for marijuana in Jamaica, and the Rastas took care of her children while she was in jail. In 1977, she and Richards were arrested and charged with hashish and heroin possession in Toronto. After undergoing a painful withdrawal and facing a long sentence, Richards repented and went into rehab, including electroshock therapy, according to The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen.

In his memoir Life, Richards wrote: "Anita came out of an artistic world, and she had quite a bit of talent herself—she was certainly a lover of art and pally with its contemporary practitioners and wrapped up in the pop art world." Her ancestors were painters, and she hung out with "Fellini and all those people" at the age of 16 while on scholarship to a graphic school in Rome. "Anita had a lot of style. She also had an amazing ability to put things together, to connect with people...in New York she'd connected with Warhol, the pop art world and the beat poets....She was the catalyst of so many goings-on in those days."

At one point Anita introduced the band to filmmaker Kennith Anger, who took them down the road to Aleister Crowley and satanic stuff, culminating in "Sympathy for the Devil," and forever attaching the word "witch" to Anita (who did backup vocals on the track). She also inspired the song Angie, among others, and was a fan of Timothy Leary, who visited them in France. 

Apparently Anita left behind no writings of her own. She made a memorable appearance in 2001 on the British series “Absolutely Fabulous,” playing the Devil in a fantasy sequence, alongside Faithfull, who played God. In her later years, she retired to "an allotment in Chiswick where she grew strawberries, artichokes, leeks, broad beans and enrolled in botanical drawing classes" according to The Telegraph. 

ADDENDUM 7/2024: A new documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is based on her autobiography Black Magic, discovered by her children after her death. Read in excerpt by Scarlett Johannson in the film, Anita's voice recounts how she gave up modeling when she started doing acid, deciding that she couldn't do both, "And I really loved acid." She also recounts how, when Brian Jones began having bad trips and getting aggressive and abusive with her, he was also taking doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals like STP, Mandrax, Dexadrine, and barbiturates for his asthma. 

The film recounts how, after having Richards's child, he encouraged her to give up her acting career and left her home alone with the baby to go on tour. Her heroin use continued and she hit rock bottom after their third child died at 10 weeks of crib death. After nearly dying herself from an alcohol overdose, she got clean, went back to school for a college degree, and returned to acting. 

Kate Moss is interviewed in the film, saying, "I didn't know her when she took drugs, but she was so interesting without them." Moss credits her idol Anita with setting an iconic style, "the original bohemian rock chick that people still aspire to today." Eschewing plastic surgery as "naff" (very unchic), Anita's look was extraordinary in her later roles, including playing Queen Elizabeth in Mister Lonely (2007). 

Wonder Woman's True Origin Story

UPDATE 4/19 - Stanford Professor Adrienne Mayor found this ancient Scythian carving of an Amazon woman with a golden lasso, like Wonder Woman. 

7/18: A National Geographic article debunks some myths about Amazon women and talks about how, as Scythians, they inhaled hemp smoke.

I really wanted to like the new Wonder Woman movie, but I couldn't even sit through half of the 2 1/2 hour epic, driven away by drippy dialogue and lame characterizations.

The film is directed by a woman (Patty Jenkins), but the screenplay is by Allan Heinberg, with a story by Heinberg, Zack Snyder, and Jason Fuchs (three nonwomen). It shows. Men seldom look earlier than the Greek times, and this is in fact when "history" began. But "herstory" started long before that.

Wonder Woman first appeared in comic form in January 1942. She was said to be sculpted from clay by her mother the Amazon Queen Hippolyta, and given life by the Aphrodite, goddess of love. Later comics, and the movie, instead have the male god Zeus giving life to Diana/Wonder Woman and indeed, all of humankind.

This has significance because in the first written story of mankind, The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE), it is the goddess Belet-ili (also called Aruru) who sculpts men from clay. The men then team up to chop down the cedar forest and denigrate the goddess Ishtar (who opens my book, Tokin' Women). Flash forward to the Greek play The Eumenides, wherein a man is found not guilty of matricide on the grounds that people are not related to their mothers, who merely carry men’s seed. The goddess Athena, who testifies in the play that she sprung whole from the head of Zeus and was not borne by a mother, seals the move from the old god/goddess pantheon to the new, patriarchal one.

Myth matters. As Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers, "If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor." He also said, "There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history, the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population to break, control, and employ to its own ends."

As revealed in Jill Lepore's book The Secret History of Wonder Woman, the Wonder Woman character was created by the American psychologist and writer William Marston, who was inspired by early feminists, especially his psychologist wife Sadie Holloway and the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Sadie, who attended Mount Hollyoke at a time when women were called Amazons for going to college, once wrote DC comics suggesting instead of "Vulcan's hammer," Wonder Woman should exclaim, "Suffering Sappho!"

In the movie, Wonder Woman sets out to destroy Ares, the god of war, and thereby end WWI. Ending war was a goal of Sanger's as well. She argued in Woman and the New Race that overpopulation is the cause of all human misery, including poverty and war. Birth control, she said, is "the real cure for war" and "love is the greatest force of the universe." Lepore writes, "Women should rule the world, Sanger and Marston and Holloway thought, because love is stronger than force."

Wonder Woman was objected to last year when she was named an ambassador to the United Nations. The announcement, which was attended by TV's Wonder Woman Lynda Carter and Gal Gadot of the big screen, came weeks after seven real-life women were rejected as UN Secretary General. Some men objected to a women-only screening of the film, to which New Yorker fact checker Talia Lavin tweeted about the all-male panel that's working to remove birth control options for women in the US healthcare plan.

In the movie, there's a witchy female character who concocts deadly poisons for the modern Ares, who's seen inhaling poppers in much the same way as Hitler took methamphetamine. I'm guessing, after many special effects and pyrotechnics, Wonder Woman kicks his butt (but leaves something open for a sequel).

I will say I had a little more spring in my step as I left the theatre, walking tall like a woman. It was nice that Connie Nielsen got to be a gladiator (Hippolyta) this time, and to see Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) playing a strong character (Diana's warrior woman aunt Antiope) who isn't underhanded like Claire Underwood. I liked some of the lines like, "How do women fight in these clothes?" and "This is what passes for armor in your country?" when Diana is considering corsets and frills. But on the warrior costumes, why the codpieces?

I see on her Twitter feed that Nielsen is founder of Human Needs Project, and Road To Freedom Scholarships. Those are the kinds of battles where we need our warrior women today.

Robin Wright as Antiope, Gal Gadot as Diana, and Connie Nielsen as Hippolyta.