The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    I probably should have tried Marijuana

    By Ramona on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 9:28am | Politics, Personal
     
    In a daring raid in 1948, Robert Mitchum got caught smoking marijuana in Hollywood:
    Sept. 1, 1948: Actor Robert Mitchum and starlet Lila Leeds were reportedly caught smoking marijuana during a police raid at the actress' Hollywood Hills home. Two others were also arrested.

    Mitchum told police that he and another friend were in the neighborhood looking to buy a house when they stopped to visit Leeds and her roommate, dancer Vickie Evans.

    The actor said he had trouble finding the home on     Ridpath Drive, which one narcotics agent described as "ideally situated to be a 'reefer resort.' It is perched on a hillside, with no near neighbors, and well-screened by shrubbery," The [Los Angeles] Times reported.
    It was reported in the Times but I lived in Michigan, we didn’t yet have the tabloids (or the internet), and I was not quite 11 years old, so it got right past me. (Hedda Hopper might have hinted about it in the movie mags but her hints weren’t always clear.  In her juiciest scoops, the principals remained nameless.  (“What handsome, dark-haired bad boy was caught smoking dope with a blond starlet who wasn’t his wife?” )
     
    Fortunately, a few years later a magazine called Confidential surfaced; a juicy, slimy precursor to the tabloids, and eventually they got around to the story about the not-so-current arrest of that bad boy, Bob Mitchum.  I remember reading it as a teenager, thinking that man is treading on some dangerous ground there.  (Maybe not in those words, exactly.  I probably didn’t talk like that. The point is, I was a teenager, I had seen Reefer Madness!, and I was shocked!)
     
    The article about Mitchum is long gone, but I’m remembering his picture this way:  He’s leaning toward the camera as if he’s trying to get up but can’t.  His eyes are half-closed, the famous Mitchum sneer is all over his face.  His hair is damp and matted and probably dirty.  It might have been the picture of a drunk, but it wasn’t.  It was much worse.  Robert Mitchum was stoned. On Reefer.  And it wasn’t the first time.
     
    The shock of it must have marked me for life.  Marijuana was a terrible drug.  It was bad.  The baddest of the bad.  Normal people didn’t go in for it, they went in for alcohol.
     
    In Michigan in the 50s the drinking age was 21.   In Wisconsin, it was 18, so I had my first legitimate drink while we were on our honeymoon at the Wisconsin Dells.  It was a Tom Collins and it was delicious.  No doubt I would have liked it just as well without the alcohol, but in Wisconsin, anyway, I was a grown up!.  We ran around with a drinking crowd most of our young lives but I was never much of a drinker.  The few times I got drunk my body let me know in the most violent ways that there were some things it would not tolerate and an overabundance of alcohol was one of them.  So be it.
     
    Until around the early 70s I didn’t know anyone who had ever smoked pot.  We had new neighbors move in right next door and the guy immediately started a pot garden in the back yard.  When his plants were mature, he started selling his crop.  Their house was close enough so that at all hours of the night we could hear knocking on their door and the low rumble of short conversation.  I gave up thinking poorly of them when I grew to like them for the crazy, dear people they were.  I felt incredibly sophisticated.  I knew pot people!
     
    Then our neighbor two doors over found out that we had never smoked pot.  It was our anniversary and we were going away for the weekend to celebrate, so she decided this would be the perfect time to experiment.  She brought over a gaily wrapped package of pot brownies and insisted I pack them in our suitcase.
     
    They went with us but neither of us wanted to indulge.  Truth is, I was scared to death of them.  (Reefer Madness!) I shoved them way in the back of my underwear drawer and forgot about them.
     
    So last week my daughter and I were talking about how silly it was that marijuana hasn’t yet been legalized.  I said, “I can’t really understand the effects of pot since I never tried it.  I probably should have, at least once in my life.”  Then I dropped the bombshell on her:  I told about the time I had a whole package of pot brownies in our house. 
     
    I waited for her reaction.  She looked at me, startled, and then she began to laugh.  “I know you did, mom.  I ate them!”
     
    Turns out I had told my teenaged daughter about the brownies, never once thinking that it would be anything that would interest her so much she would be stealing them out of my drawer, little by little so I wouldn’t notice, and sharing them with her friends.
     
    I know nothing about life.  Nothing.  Pay no attention to me.  I know nothing.
     
    (Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices)
    Topics: 
    Politics
    Personal

    Comments

    Oh, you know things. You know lots of things: reading you makes that very clear.


    by Doctor Cleveland on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:01am

    Ha!  A lot you know, professor.


    by Ramona on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:30am

    OMG Ramona, what a great story! I laughed so hard. Thanks for that.


    by tmccarthy0 on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:16am

    It's been my deep, dark secret for lo, these many years.  Now it's out.  I can breathe again.  laugh


    by Ramona on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:37am

    You made me chuckle also.  My dad used to tell me when I was little about his childhood in the 1920's.  He was very poor and lived in the far western mountains of Maryland.  He and his little sister would take off everyday in the summer with their wagon to see a man that would put into the false bottom of the wagon whisky and hemp.  Then they would take it into town with his sister riding in the wagon to a garage in exchange for a silver dollar and a bag lunch.  The part he enjoyed the most was the soda pop.  They would eat their lunch and walk home to give the dollar to their mother.   My grandfather would leave months at a time for work so this was really the only way they could eat and pay rent.  So he had lots to tell us about all the pot that was used in those mountains and the end of the roaring 20's speak easies.  So I was well versed on all the vises by the time I was a preteen and had little interest in it later in high school.  He said no one ever paid attention to them because they were shunned by his mother's family, community and church because his parents were not married.  Here they were running moonshine and hemp when they just looked like a white trash going into town for a free lunch from a nice business man.   Pot became banned in the 1930's.  They were baking chocolate pot cakes back then for the ladies that didn't smoke. 


    by trkingmomoe on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 7:50pm

    LOL, Momoe, great stories.  I didn't know it was so popular in the 20s.  And I sure didn't know about the chocolate pot cakes.  I thought that was a new invention! 

    Seriously, you need to write out these stories and keep them in a safe place for your family (after sharing them with us, of course).  They're priceless.


    by Ramona on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:12pm

    Jazz musicians loved the stuff!  Sidney Bechet's song Viper Mad is all about it.  "Good tea is my weakness, I know it's bad..."

    Great story for a Saturday morning, with the kid still asleep.  Wake and bake?  Ah, but the President said something about putting away childish things once and besides, Meet the Press isn't on until tomorrow.


    by Michael Maiello on Sat, 06/29/2013 - 8:24am

    I know nothing!

    Stick to the Greek philosophers. hahahahah

    Maryjane just never did anything for me! I recall getting 'high' once on a fluke.

    I never liked it.

    Now I sound like Clinton except I am in love with tobacco, so I absolutely know I inhaled. haahah

    I am working on some blog, I think, about strange news and one of the articles deals with feeding pigs maryjane. hahahahahah

    And it increases the value of the pork by 400%? hahahahahah

    IF PIGS COULD FLY

     


    by Richard Day on Fri, 06/28/2013 - 10:48pm