More on "From Eternity Back to Here!": I just stumbled onto the amazing fact that Kurtzman had a more direct reference in
Mad to the New Senator Hotel, the real-life Honolulu house of prostitution, than James Jones did in
From Here to Eternity. Managed by Ruth Davis at 121 North Hotel Street (see color photo), the New Senator had a lounge area, a bar and rooms in which the female employees could entertain guests. The WWII photo at bottom shows soldiers and sailors waiting in line to enter the New Senator Hotel or other brothels on Hotel Street.
Jones cleverly managed a bit of sexy word play when he fictionalized the New Senator Hotel as the New Congress Hotel in his novel. For the 1954 movie, the name was changed to the New Congress Club (but the sexual meaning of the word "congress" apparently slipped past the censors). During WWII, Kurtzman was stationed in North Carolina, not the Pacific, but he somehow knew enough to devise the name New Senate Club for "From Eternity Back to Here!" Perhaps he learned about the place while doing research for
Two-Fisted Tales and
Frontline Combat.
Here's the staff of the New Senator Hotel in 1940...
Also see:
"Dousing Honolulu's Red Lights" by Richard Greer.
I love Krigstein's art, but he wasn't a favorite to a lot of EC fans, and his work in Mad seems jarring and out of place. It isn't bad art, but would probably have been more at home in a Mad imitation than Mad itself.
ReplyDeleteReading From Here to Eternity in these censored ms. pages makes me want to go back and reread the book, which I haven't read in 40+ years. I see a direct line with Jones' characters speaking to Elmore Leonard's use of dialogue.
I read it in the summer of 1954. I had the same reaction of wanting to read it again. I remember the part where Maggio explained how to survive in solitary by picturing a black spot and pushing away any thought that enters. I used that image for years to go to sleep!
ReplyDeleteY'know, Bhob, it's quite possible that Kurtzman was just trying to come up with a parody name of "The New Congress Club" and substituted Senate for Congress without realizing he was reversing Jones' substitution. In parody terms, it's a fairly obvious substitution, so HK needn't have known anything about the New Senator Hotel at all.
ReplyDeleteHK may have encountered Jean O'Hara's My LIfe as a Honolulu Prostitute (1944) while researching VD for Lucky Fights It Through (1949). O'Hara's book was the source for William Bradford Huie's The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951). I think if the estimated 1,000,000 servicemen were serviced by 250 Honolulu prostitutes during WWII, word of the long lines on Hotel Street must have spread to military bases everywhere.
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