LIQUID REFRESHMENT

Here's your bourbon. You can add your own water.

You can consider this cover for The High Cost of Loving, which is unattributed, an addendum to our April showers collection from last year. Written by Bonnie Golightly, it’s a novelization of the 1958 MGM film starring José Ferrer and Gena Rowlands, in the latter’s cinematic debut. The story deals with a devoted corporate drone whose company is sold. Clues indicate he’s going to be fired, and his name is even scraped off his office door, but the twist is he’s really going to be promoted but hasn’t been informed because of an oversight. He decides to confront the company president over his unfair treatment. Will his anger cost him the opportunity he’s been looking for? What do you think—it’s a Sidney Lumet movie or something? Everything ends up just fine.

Interesting side note on author Bonnie Golightly: that’s her real name and she even sued Truman Capote for $800,000 over Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which you’ll remember starred a Holly Golightly. She claimed the similarities between Holly and she were obvious—both lived in Upper East Side brownstones with bars around the corner, both were amateur singers, and both were crazy about cats. The suit eventually died, and Capote always claimed his character was actually based on a German immigrant he knew in NYC at the beginning of World War II who later conveniently disappeared in East Africa—a place from which lawsuits rarely spring. You can see that April showers collection here.

New York City, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Bonnie Golightly, Truman Capote, José Ferrer, Gena Rowlands, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 16

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanideâ€”not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juiceâ€”resulting in his death in late 1937.

February 15

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.