Stoned Cold Soldier

VINGSBO PRESS

LOS ANGELES

Copyright © 2024 by Foo Dog Films

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States by Vingsbo Press (a division of Foo Dog Films).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, digital, or any information strategy and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a writer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or feature written for inclusion in a periodical, broadcast, podcast, or internet blog.

I’ve set myself against being concerned with any more worldly success than I need to function with. . . . Up to a point, I have to be successful in order to operate. But I think it’s corrupting to care about success; and nothing could be more vulgar than to worry about posterity.

—Orson Welles

For Colin Fox, the last member of the Stratford platoon

Table of Contents

THE PLATOON

THE CORRESPONDENT

THE MEDIA

THE MURDER MAN

THE THREE RING CIRCUS

THE PRISONER

THE HOOKER AND THE GOD-MAN

THE ELUSIVE SURVIVORS

THE WHITE HOUSE WATCHDOG

THE BANDIT

THE TRIAL

THE VISION

FOREWORD

Stoned Cold Soldier was my first novel. It also brought Laurence Harvey and Orson Welles into my life. I was 22 and living in London when I first started writing the book. It was the late 1960s and drugs were a way of life. Marijuana was unknown in England and the most common turn-on was hashish, which made its way east overland on the old trade routes from India. In addition to hash, there were African plants – twigs and branches with hallucinatory powers. A secretary at the William Morris Agency, who worked for WMA’s Brooklyn-born rock and roll agent, liked to get stoned with me and had access to an incredible trove of mind-altering delights courtesy of her boss.

One Saturday afternoon in April she arrived at my top floor flat in Sussex Gardens bearing a joint stuffed with something she called Congo bush. We had a few hits before she departed for a previous engagement. I was alone by the time the Congo bush kicked in. My flat was on the fifth floor, and I was soon addressing the leaves pushing up against the window. Addressing? More like proselytizing. Railing against the Viet Nam war.  I’d never been so stoned in my life. The philgrims flew by on broomsticks. That was when Stoned Cold Soldier came into being.

I tried taking notes, but Congo bush was a cruel taskmaster. Very little made sense when I attempted to decipher my scribblings the next day. This wouldn’t deter me from writing a serious protest about the conflict in Vietnam. It was intended to be in the tradition of Johnny Got His Gun or All Quiet on theWestern Front. However, when army chaplain Isadore Feldman was blown up playing the seventh hole of the Inter-Faith Golf Tournament - on the very first page – the comic tone of the novel was set.

Never having served in the armed forces, where was I to find inspiration for the military types? I had worked at Canada’s Stratford Festival and forged strong bonds with several actors there. Determined to eventually dramatize the story, I cast the roles with some of my favorite thespians: William Hutt was the inspiration for Fitzroy Claypoole; Colin Fox’s comic genius manifested itself in Burnett Remington; and Ken Welsh, the company’s jeune premier would be the accused, Tommy Bennett. (Twelve years later, the four of us would appear in the movie Covergirl, whose screenplay I had written.) Jimmy Blendick’s inner grizzly bear brought Cleet Fowler to life. For The Murder Man, Frank Graham, I shamelessly stole the persona of Stratford alumnus, John Vernon.

The story possessed and obsessed me. I wrote day and night. By June it was completed. My agents submitted the manuscript to every publisher in London without any success.

At the same time, my friend and mentor, Bill Hutt, had taken a sabbatical from the Stratford Festival where he’d been a leading player since the company’s inception in 1953. In the summer of 1969, he was a guest star at the Chichester Festival. I took the train south from London to visit Bill and went to a cocktail party where I met another of the festival’s guest stars, Laurence Harvey.

Born Larushka Mischa Skikne in Joniskis, Lithuania on October 1, 1928, Harvey was the youngest of three boys. The Skikne family emigrated to South Africa six years later. Lying about his age, Larushka joined the South African army at 15 where he was assigned to the entertainment unit, serving in Egypt and Italy. At war’s end, he emigrated to England where he abandoned his Jewish identity and reinvented himself as the quintessential WASP, Laurence Harvey. He led the life of a Regency rake living beyond his means. Put under contract by James and John Woolf, he starred as Romeo in their 1954 Romulus production of Romeo and Juliet. This led him to Hollywood where he played the juvenile lead opposite Rex Harrison, George Sanders and Virginia Mayo in King Richard and the Crusaders. The movie was a flop and Harvey returned to England and the British film industry.

1959’s Room at the Top was a role tailor-made for the relentlessly ambitious actor. As social-climber Joe Lampton, he forsook his married lover (Simone Signoret) for a rich man’s daughter. The movie was an international hit and Harvey was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The man known as ‘Laurence of Lithuania’ returned to Hollywood and big budget movies including Butterfield 8, The Alamo, Summer and Smoke and The Wonderful World of the BrothersGrimm.

But it was John Frankenheimer’s 1962 suspense classic, The Manchurian Candidate, that would be his enduring cinematic legacy. His aloof, cold-as-ice performance as brain-washed assassin Raymond Shaw was quintessential Laurence Harvey. The film would mark the zenith of his career as a movie star. Except for Darling and Life at theTop (continuing the saga of Joe Lampton), he spent the rest of the decade making movies for money.

When I was introduced to Harvey at the cocktail party, he was dressed in a powder blue safari suit with a cigarette holder dangling from his lips. I audaciously asked him if he’d like to read the best political thriller since Manchurian Candidate.

Can I read it tonight? responded Harvey.

Larry (as I came to know him) loved the book and suggested Orson Welles direct it. I was speechless. This was too good to be true. Welles had directed Larry and Jeanne Moreau over a three-year period in a movie called The Deep that was never completed. Larry shared the manuscript of Stoned Cold Soldier with his pal, author Wolf Mankowitz, who was equally effusive in his praise. When would the cameras start rolling?

That evening was spent in Larry’s hotel suite where he held court regaling us all with hilarious anecdotes. A superb raconteur, his warm and friendly personality was the antithesis of his screen image. When room service of the Chichester hotel failed to respond to his requests, he branded the management anti-Semitic. Having rediscovered his Jewish roots and a supporter of Israel after the Six Day War, Egypt promptly banned his movies. In a brilliant impersonation of that other Laurence – Olivier – he let loose an ear-piecing howl: Ohhhh! That I had remained a Christian!

Larry recounted his first adventure in Hollywood when he was unable to lift George Sanders from the floor during the making of King Richard and the Crusaders. The hilarious explanation of Sanders immobility became the centerpiece of my play, High Class Heel, years later.

Returning to London, my agent informed me he’d finally found a publisher for Stoned Cold Soldier. Two ex-Guards Officers – whom I dubbed the Two Michaels - had formed a publishing company called Sesquipedalian Press. They were interested in my first book as their first book. Interested but not committed.

Larry Harvey to the rescue! To seal the deal, he took me and Michael One, the slippery partner, to lunch. (Michael Two was the money source and spent most of his time drunk.) Over our meal, Slippery Michael confided how he’d only met one other film star.

Who was that? purred Larry, fitting a cigarette into his ubiquitous holder.

George Lazenby.

I prayed Larry wouldn’t get up and walk away. Instead, he took a deep drag on his cigarette and said: Really!

The Two Michaels signed the contract, and I was about to become a published author.

Several months passed with no publication date in sight. Slippery Michael told me not to worry too many times for comfort. I went to confront him in his girlfriend’s spacious Knightsbridge flat. A third and final notice demanding payment from the printers in Frome, Somerset was in plain view on the dining table.

What are you going to do about this? I asked, fearing yet again that my book would never see the light of day.

I sent him a case of rather inferior port to placate him, drawled Slippery Michael. It was a line one of Evelyn Waugh’s characters might have said. Coincidentally, Waugh was Slippery Michael’s godfather.

The five hundred copies of my book were subsequently seized by the Sheriff of Somerset and languished in a jail cell. Slippery Michael disappeared.

Two years later the books were rescued by Bachman & Turner publishers, who purchased them from the printers. Larry Harvey wrote a glowing blurb that preceded the book’s remarkable reception by the British press. Attached to his blurb was a note:

I’m really delighted and thrilled for you and feel almost personally rewarded for having had so much faith in your novel from its inception. Handled right, it could be a big success, and I hope that those idiotic critics will concur with my own feelings.  I do hope that I have remained within the bounds of sanity in discussing your book, but I mean it.

Larry’s note was dated May 31, 1973. Five months later, he was dead of cancer at the untimely age of 45. I’ve never forgotten his loyalty and affection in writing to me while amid his cancer treatment.

The following year, I was living in Los Angeles. Orson Welles was staying at the Westwood Marquis, where I dropped off a copy of the book with a note telling him of Larry’s interest in his directing the movie version.

Two weeks elapsed before I received a phone call from a rumbling voice identifying himself as Orson Welles. When I realized it was really Orson Welles and not someone impersonating him, he was bubbling over with praise about the book. It’s wonderful. I love it. What else have you written? My second novel, The Next to Last Train Ride, had just been published and Welles insisted I send him a copy immediately. I jumped in my car and drove to Westwood.

When several weeks elapsed and I’d received no call from Welles, I called his hotel and was put through to his room.

What do you want? thundered Welles as if I were some annoying bill collector. Why are you bothering me? He slammed down the phone and I never heard from Orson Welles again.

The book was a great success in Britain and the subsequent paperback version went into a second printing. But there was never an American publication. My agent said Viet Nam was too sensitive a subject for U.S. audiences. Catch-22 and MASH were old wars. This one was still raging.

Fifty years later the book is finally available thanks to Ulrika Vingsbo, Vingsbo Press and Amazon Books Publishers. Rereading the novel now has been a journey back in time where I’ve been allowed to view a precocious and passionate version of myself with so much to say. I’m glad that boy survived the experience and went on to write so many more books.

​ ​Charles Dennis

​ ​El Rancho Del Navitas

​ ​Shadow Hills, California

​ ​March 26, 2024

THE PLATOON

You just don’t lose a platoon; not a whole platoon; not lost.

But that appears to have been the fate of the Wichita Platoon, who’d gone on a simple search-and-destroy mission seventy-five miles North-East of Saigon.

Three days later, they still hadn’t returned.

Normally, no one would bother making a federal case out of this. Knowing the Wichita Platoon, they probably got lucky in one of the villages. But the Wichita Platoon was also the Wichita Ball Club and the stupid bastards had screwed up the B Company World Series by not getting back in time.

The Saturday game was canceled and most of the noncoms sat around the PX that night waiting for the boys’ return to give them shit. It was generally assumed the platoon didn’t come back Saturday night to escape going to services Sunday morning.

The Sunday Morning Service was an interdenominational outdoor affair organized by one Francis ‘Tightass’ Kelly, who was the biggest prick on the base.

Fitzroy Claypoole, the company commander had been cool regarding the subject of services. ‘Every man is answerable to his own conscience’ became a convenient phrase, which allowed most of the base to enjoy a delightful sleep-in Sunday morning. The chaplains made a few obligatory grumbles for the first two weekends then grew used to the idea, eventually liked it, and ultimately took advantage of it by organizing an Inter-Faith Golf Tournament (which disintegrated out of respect for the memory of thirty-two-year-old Rabbi Isadore Goldman, who was inadvertently blown to pieces on the seventh hole when he stepped on a Viet Cong land-mine).

Rabbi Goldman’s premature demise saw the emergence of Corporal Francis Kelly from King of Prussia, Pa., whose prior claim to prickdom had been known only to the Wichita Ball Club.

Kelly was one of the President’s forgotten Americans, a member of the silent majority. The brushed-cut, six-foot, red-haired, pimple-ridden, Jesuit, interpreted the demolition of the likeable rabbi on the seventh hole as a divine symbol. A warning from the Lord that a definite blanket of immorality was smothering the base in general, B Company in particular, and unequivocally the Wichita Ball Club. Father Doolan, the Catholic padre, publicly expressed disbelief that  the Lord would have any particular reason for striking down a Jew on Sunday and privately informed Kelly he was ‘full of shit’. Needless to say, Father Doolan was the best liked god-man on the base.

The Wichita Ball Club was an obvious target for Kelly’s wrath. Natural born shit disturbers of an almost devout irreverence, their favorite target was the devout Pennsylvanian.

Those two erudite young sons of Manhattan, Thomas Jefferson Bennett and Kip Mendlsohn, won Kelly’s undying hatred by tipping off PFC Harvey Edelman that Tightass was a transvestite. Edelman broke the story in his ‘Gloria Gleam Gossip Column’ (one of the six columns the St. Louis native wrote under various pseudonyms in the base newspaper—which he also edited). Kelly soon found himself beset by numerous suitors in the B Company shower house.

Kelly loathed Buzz Kaplan for his immoral, lewd, lascivious, filthy, disgusting, suggestive acid rock record collection—the best discs in South-East Asia. He hated Fingers Mackenzie for his general blasphemous nature, his scheming ungodly ways, his worship of Mammon, and the snakes he was always placing in Tightass’s bed.

He hated Dalton C. Keller, the financial wizard of the platoon, who had introduced the Wichita Light shows that had given the platoon its name. The night before Keller’s departure overseas, he spent an out-of-sight night with a turned-on chick from Wichita, Kansas, who staged her own light show with a blue plastic garbage bag.

The groovy lady from Kansas twisted the bag like a licorice stick, knotted the ends, and tied it on to a hanger. She then suspended the hanger from the ceiling and set fire to the bottom of the bag.

The bag slowly burned, emitting a science-fiction-like laser-beam and an unearthly noise to match. This Wichita Light Show was best appreciated when the spectators were stoned, which was more often than not.

This was how the vengeful Jesuit knew when the Wichita Platoon was turning on. Kelly wouldn’t have known what a joint was if it had stood up and said ‘Allan Ginsberg’ to him. He did know when the laser-beam shot through the night, marijuana was happening.

When the boys discovered Kelly knew their m.o., they simply lit double-length plastic bags in the barracks and went off into the jungle to get high. Kelly would arrive with the MPs only to discover a hanger suspended mysteriously from the rafters and a strange pool of plastic on the floor.

Tightass’s spiritual vendetta also extended to Big Ralph Rolingo, a karate-chopping rounder from Baltimore, who would casually deal the Jesuit a paralyzing blow on the back of the neck in the mess hall. Determined to turn the other cheek to Rolingo’s assaults, Tightass was unable to move his neck.

Kelly’s dislike of Jaime Ramirez, Punjab, and the Asp was much more basic. Like many patriotic Americans, Kelly was a hopeless bigot. His bigotry didn’t bother Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant who didn’t understand English very well. Punjab and the Asp were another story.

Punjab and the Asp were the affectionate nicknames for Arthur Lee Haynes and Millard Fillmore Dixon, two African Americans from Detroit, who played shortstop and right field respectively on the ball team. Tightass once made the unfortunate mistake in the heat of anger by calling them ‘niggers’.

The remark lost him his two front teeth, his sense of smell for six months, and gained him a limp that Dr. Markson said might or might not be permanent.

The Ball Club decided to let bygones be bygones and sent Kelly a fruit basket, gingerly wedging a baby tarantula between the mango and the papaya.

Dr. Markson managed to treat the bite in time but not before Kelly discovered a significant film review in ‘Randall Crane’s Cinema’ (another of Edelman’s incarnations). The nouvelle vague Crane suggested that a scene in an obscure Scandinavian film which had taken place on the seventh hole of a golf course had strong religious connotations. Kelly’s imagination took wing. The idea for the outdoor chapel was born. On