By Joseph Taverney
(Dec. 06/Jan. 07) "Women liked the name Mickey" was Spillane's stock explanation to reporters inquiring why he changed his birth name. That quote, like his writing, is vintage Spillane: terse, unconventional and unpretentious. Although he made his living writing about tough guys, fast woman and sordid lives, none of his fictional characters were ever as interesting as their creator, Frank Morrison Spillane, born March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York. The son of Anne and John Spillane, a working-class Irish family, young Frank became the perfect amalgam of his parents. The life lessons he received from his tough, no-nonsense bartender father were tempered by his mother, who stressed the value of education and reading the classics. In 1935, the adolescent Spillane began submitting stories to "slicks," or illustrated magazines, and later to comic books. After cutting his literary teeth on such titles as Captain Marvel, Superman and Batman, the aspiring writer eventually outgrew the genre, saying he found the concepts of superpowers, masks and tights unmanly. He tried to create his own comic hero - sans cape or costume (i.e., "a regular guy"). Although Mike Danger, a precursor to Mike Hammer, was unsuccessful, bigger things lay ahead. The day after Pearl Harbor, an eager Mickey Spillane put his nascent writing career on hold and enlisted in the Army. Wounded twice as a fighter pilot, he eventually became a flight instructor to cadets. After the war, the decorated veteran joined Barnum & Bailey's Circus as a trampoline artist and a knife thrower. Characteristically, he even volunteered to be shot out of a cannon. The restless Spillane's next adventure was a foray into law enforcement. Working with the FBI, Mickey helped crack narcotics rings, claiming to have been stabbed on one occasion. After his short-lived FBI career, the mercurial Spillane decided to "settle down" and become a family man. Lacking the capital to build his dream house on land he had purchased, he returned to writing as a source of income. Living in a tent as he built his home and alternating between a trowel during the day and a typewriter at night, Spillane, not yet 30, would churn out his first novel, I, the Jury (1947) in an astounding nine days, creating his most enduring character - Mike Hammer. Spillane combined elements from the pre-war pulp detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade with his comic creation Mike Danger and peppered the story with as much sex and violence as censorship and post-war sensibilities would allow. Although the book was lambasted by critics as vulgar and quasi-literate, the public made it a national bestseller as Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer became household names. The two personalities began to merge in popular culture as Hammer began to evolve into an alter-ego for the colorful Spillane, who regularly and deliberately appeared in public with Hammer-esque fedora and trademark trench-coat in tow. Reveling in the public's hazy distinction between writer and character, consciously distorting the lines of fiction, he continued to turn out Mike Hammer novels at a break-neck pace, while maintaining he only wrote for the money. He once corrected a reporter who mistakenly called Spillane an author. The burly Spillane declared himself a "writer" not an author. When asked to elaborate on the difference, Spillane quipped, "...an author makes books; a writer makes money." He frequently labeled his readers "customers" and referred to his books as "the chewing gum of literature." He often refused to revise or edit and would routinely finish a book in under a month. Nevertheless, Spillane became the best-selling writer of the 20th Century. His titles wrought with sexual innuendos and sadistic violence, like My Gun Is Quick (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1952) and The Body Lovers (1960), Mickey was a lightning rod for the attention of censors and critics, who reviled his work as pornographic and contributory to juvenile delinquency. Bizarrely, two of his staunchest supporters were idiosyncratic literary giant Ayn Rand (whose Atlas Shrugged is currently in development, with Angelina Jolie to star) and conservative screen-legend John Wayne. By the 1960s, seven of the ten best-selling American novels had been written by Spillane, selling a staggering 200 million copies. To increase sales, he had his second wife, Sherri Malinou, a model 24 years his junior, appear nude for the cover of his 1974 novel The Erection Set. In all, eight films and ten TV series were based on characters or plots he had written (including the 1955 cult classic Kiss Me Deadly). Strangest of all, however, was the 1963 film adaptation of the Mike Hammer novel The Girl Hunters. The studio, working with a shoestring budget and no bankable star to play the lead, took a gamble and cast Mickey Spillane as Mike Hammer. The boundary between fiction and identity, the tightrope Spillane precariously walked, was about to be crossed. The character and creator would merge. Although Spillane had played himself previously in small cameos (like 1954's Ring of Fear), he was definitely not an actor. Surprisingly, while not Oscar-worthy, his laconic performance was adequate, and the film was a marginal success. It is distinguished as marking the first time an author - excuse me, "writer" - portrayed his own literary creation in a major motion picture. The surreal combination of creating then portraying a fictional character, the blurring of identities, may be the strangest experiment attempted in film history. Frank Morrison "Mickey" Spillane, the undisputed king of pulp, died July 17, 2006, at the age of 88. Like Ernest Hemingway (another Spillane critic), he is likely to be remembered ultimately for the life he lived as much as his literary output. He was an American original. |
