Carry Me BACK
My Ghost Writer Had Just The Right Stuff By Jimmy Hatcher
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Actress Jane Russell, in a photo fit for an eight-year-old.
elcome to Richmond, Virginia, circa 1945. One hot summer morning my neighbor, Helen Wolfe, and I (a darling, eightyear-old duo) were summarily dismissed by an older 11-year-old group of my sister’s friends (and they were not so darling). The 11-year-olds were writing fan letters to their favorite movie stars and they insisted we were too young to join in. It was not the first time we were told we were “too young” to do anything with them, but actually, they probably were right. Over to Helen’s house we proceeded, only to arrive just as her 14-year-old brother, T.K., got back from his baseball practice. Helen was strongly motivated to write to her new crush, Roddy McDowell, the recent star of “Lassie Come Home.” Elizabeth Taylor hadn’t yet made “National Velvet,” or I certainly would have written to her. Anyway, due to my lack of inspiration, Helen’s brother suggested that I write to a gorgeous new movie star named Jane Russell. Well, I had no idea who Jane Russell was,
but of course, Helen’s brother was, as we now know, very much “in the know” about everything. He knew that Jane Russell had just made the Howard Hughes shocker, “The Outlaw,” and that it had been banned by the censors because of Jane Russell’s way too revealing décolleté. I had no clue, so with T.K. dictating, I wrote my eight-year-old fan letter to Jane Russell and mailed it with a three-cent stamp. A few weeks passed before the 11-year-old group began to receive their fan photos in the mail. Each one was very glamorous but, alas, all the signatures were just stamped into the photos, and definitely were not the personalized real thing. Not so with my photo of Jane Russell. It was signed in real ink and said, “To Jimmy, Best Wishes, Jane Russell.” There was no décolleté, not that I minded much at age eight. And oh, have you guessed by now that my ghost writer, T.K., Helen’s big brother, was, indeed, none other than Tom Wolfe, who later in life became the acclaimed author of “The Right Stuff ” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” among many other best-sellers.
Country ZEST & Style | Holiday 2023
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