Cinema Purgatorio CP17

Cinema Purgatorio #17 regular cover, art by Kevin O’Neill

Annotations for “Hell’s Angles” 8 pages in Cinema Purgatorio #17

Writer: Alan Moore, Artist: Kevin O’Neill

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Note: Some of this is obvious, but you never know who’s reading and what their exposure is. If there’s anything we missed or got wrong, let us know in comments.

General: The film-within-a-comic tells the life story of eccentric businessman and film director Howard Hughes.
In an unpublished interview, Moore mentioned that the book Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (by Peter Harry Brown, Pat H. Broeske – abbreviated HHTUS below) was one source for this issue.

Howard Hughes – via UNLV

Cover

• On the left is the young Howard Hughes seeing his older self on the right. Hughes is washing his hands, representing his obsession with cleanliness.

Howard Hughes late in life – image via Pinterest

• The women depicted represent the many, many women Hughes dated. HHTUS quotes an aide who called Hughes a “collector: of women”; the book includes a “partial list” of 45 Hughes romances. The annotations team has searched the internet for a match for these women, and concluded that (other than Russell) the women pictured appear to perhaps somewhat generic curvaceous (a Hughes preference) starlets.
  From left to right are:
  – Busty partial body (somewhat resembles this photo of Cyd Charisse)
  – Black dress (somewhat resembles Ava Gardner, Susan Hayward, or Katherine Hepburn)

  

  Jane Russell – via Pinterest

  – Head not shown: actor Jane Russell, from her iconic publicity photos for Hughes’ 1943 film The Outlaw.
  – Black V-neck (somewhat resembles Carla Balenda, Brenda Frazier, Hedy Lamarr, or Gene Tierney)
  – Blonde in profile (probably Lana Turner – possibly Phyllis Brooks, Jean Harlow, or Ginger Rogers)

• Both Hughes wear aviator watches.
• The long fingernails refer to how Hughes sometimes obsessively let his fingernails grow very long. The kleenex tissues were also a feature of Hughes’s obsessive cleanliness.
• The older Hughes appears to be bleeding film from his mouth.

Page 1

panel 1

• The text in the circle is the announcer voice-over an in-house film ad. The text in the box is the protagonist’s internal dialogue. The internal dialogue of this issue’s framing sequence includes a lot of repetition – which perhaps builds on the sort of time loop in earlier issues.
• “How the West was Fun!” is a play on the title of the 1962 film How the West Was Won.
• Its not clear why, but this page lacks the gray tones that are on page 1 and page 8 of all the earlier issues. Perhaps that rhythm is being interrupted as the story approaches its conclusion?

panel 2

• “Three-headed hot dog” is a reference to Cerebus, the mythological three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.
• The ad is, of course, sexualizing the theater food.
• “Some Like It Ho[t]” is the name of a 1959 comedy film. The title applies to the food being served, but also potentially to the heat of hell.

panel 3

• “Kemi-Ora” seems to be based on “Chemi-” (from chemistry) and “Ora” (from orange.) It is a reference to the orange-flavored British soft drink Kia-Ora Suncrush known as “Kia-Ora.” which was advertised on-screen before movies. (Thanks commenter Ian Thomson)

panel 4

• “Wrapping her in a rug” is a somewhat common trope (called the “carpet-rolled corpse“) in several movies, other fiction, and some real life incidents. The protagonist’s scene is shown later in CP18.
• The lone woman sitting directly in front of the narrator is the narrator herself; see CP 11, P8,p2-3 and CP18 P5.

panel 5

• “Hell’s Angles” refers to the 1930 film Hell’s Angels directed by Howard Hughes. The title perhaps references the many aspects (angles) of Hughes’ life – and the hell that his mental illnesses subjected him to late in life. Also more generally, the many types of Hell there are, as evidenced by this series as a whole.
  Moore has riffed on Angles/Angels in Jerusalem.

Page 2

panel 1

• The narrator is now Howard Hughes. Towards the end of Hughes’ life he suffered from a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder – especially becoming fixated with cleanliness. From Wikipedia:
  “He stayed in the studio’s darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk, and was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides giving them explicit instructions neither to look at him nor speak to him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continually watching movies.”
  HHTUS – chapter 28 – describes a very specific point in Hughes life depicted here. In December 1957, soon after marrying Jean Peters, Hughes had had a mental breakdown (“Hughes obsessive-comulsive disorder had become psychotic”), where he essentially “arranged his own asylum.” He secretively left his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow to retreat to his private screening room, where he spent five months mostly watching films.
• The portrayal includes many details noted in HHTUS: the “white leather recliner,” Hershey chocolate bars, milk cartons, Kleenex tissues, pecans, and service from aides who were given detailed instructions – including to never speak with Hughes, but instead communicate via written notes. Via one of these notes, aides were instructed to urinate in milk cartons (after Hughes OCD made him fear the bathroom he sensed was unsanitary.)
• Regarding Hughes nudity, HHTUS states that by March “Howard’s clothes were filthy and tearing at the seams [and] reeked of urine… By the third month, Hughes had discarded his clothes. He remained naked for months.”
• (Bleeding Cool points out that the scene depicted is reported to have taken place in 1958, not 1957 as stated. Per the article “the wrong date below is intentional, showing Howard Hughes’ lack of awareness of the passing of time.” HHTUS – chapter 28 – puts the start of Hughes retreat as December 1957 – though the panel states “I’ve been here for around four months” so, yes, at the time the scene takes place, ’57 has bled into ’58.)
• “Nosseck’s Studio” originally the the offices of early movie producer Martin Nosseck. At that time it was owned by Hughes. It featured a private film screening room that Hughes used.
• Hughes’ “confinement as ‘checking my instrument panel'” references the aviation analogy (as noted in the next panel.) HHTUS describes it similarly “During the five months at Nosseck’s, it seems to [Hughes’] aides that he was taking inventory of his mind to see how it functioned, to gauge its condition as if he were testing an airplane. And he soon realized that hit mind had shut down.”
• Commenter pandrio points out that the film-within-a-comic portrays Hughes’ detachment and non-linear perception of time in ways that resemble that of Moore’s Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen.

panels 2-3

• “Crashed that plane in 1946” refers to Hughes’ July 1946 nearly-fatal crash in the XF-11 aircraft. Details in panel 3 fill in the story.
  • Per Wikipedia:
    

    Many attribute his long-term dependence on opiates to his use of codeine as a painkiller during his convalescence. Yet, Noah Dietrich asserts that Hughes recovered the “hard way – no sleeping pills, no opiates of any kind.”

panel 4

• Hughes seems to be unaware of (or in denial of) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

panel 5

• “Clothes” and “instrument panel” – see panel 1 above.

Still from the 2004 film The Aviator

 

• Some of visuals here are similar to those in the 2004 Martin Scorsese Hughes biopic The Aviator. It’s not clear whether Moore and O’Neill were inspired by the film, or whether the comic and the film converge in depicting the same events.

Page 3

panel 1

• According to New World Encyclopedia, “Hughes had also contracted syphilis as a young man, and much of the strange behavior at the end of his life has been attributed by modern biographers to the tertiary stage of that disease.”

panel 2

• Blood and Sand is a 1941 technicolor film that stars two women that Hughes romanced: Rita Hayworth and Linda Darnell. HHTUS notes it was the first film Hughes watched during his 57-58 breakdown.
• Kate Hepburn is actor Katharine Hepburn., who Hughes was romantically involved with from 1936-38.
• The actor Cary Grant and Hepburn appeared together in four films. Grant was Hughes friend and confidant; Grant introduced Hughes to Hepburn.
• The film shown is Moore and O’Neill’s fictional The Time of Our Lives from CP#5. This is P2,p5.

panel 3

• Hughes “wanted to marry Kate [Hepburn]” is confirmed in her Wikipedia entry.
• This shows CP#5 P5,p7. Their looking “too old” is due to the way time advanced quickly throughout #5’s story. It perhaps also alludes to Hepburn’s struggle to retain commercial viability as she aged (a common problem for Hollywood women) and to Hughes’ penchant for teenage girls.
• The confusion between a (desired) wife and his mother would seem to allude to the oft-observed situation where men tend to marry women similar to their mothers.

panel 4

• Hughes mother Allene Stone Gano is said to have been excessively cleanly, potentially contributing to Hughes’ later cleanliness obsessions. She did indeed wash him with lye soap every day.

Opening of the 2004 film The Aviator

• This scene resembles the opening of the 2004 Hughes biopic The Aviator.

panel 5

• Howard Hughes Sr. was indeed a highly successful businessman. This panel recounts Hughes biography.
• A “Stutz Bearcat” was an early American sportscar – as pictured. HHTUS relates that in 1919, Hughes Sr. spent $7,000 to purchase a Stutz Bearcat “one of the country’s most glamorous cars” for his son who “took apart the roadster and reassembled it in less than a month.”

Page 4

panel 1

• The Hughes Sr. will is described on Wikipedia, but not to the detail that appears here. HHTUS notes that the younger Hughes “found two wills in his father’s safe.” He hid the latter less-favorable unsigned version in his own papers, “where it was found three decades later.”
• As stated in the next panel, the screen image is from from Hughes’ 1930 film Hell’s Angels.

panel 2

• Hell’s Angels “almost bankrupted” Hughes – costing $3.5 million at the time. The high cost is attributed to many factors, including Hughes “overbearing” producing – as well as a mid-stream decision to shift from silent to talkie.
• “The plane I crashed” refers to a filming incident where, when stunt pilots refused one scene as too dangerous, Hughes flew it himself and crashed.

panel 3

• “Women [whom Hughes] bought… engagement rings” refer to the many famous Hollywood stars Hughes romanced. The side of the plane lists five famous actresses Hughes had affairs with:
  – Ginger [Rogers]
  – Lana [Turner]
  – Ava [Gardner]
  – Rita [Hayworth]
  – Terry [Moore]
  (This is not a comprehensive list of Hughes’ many many women.)
• Hughes “becoming America’s richest man” is an oft-repeated assertion that is difficult to state with certainty. He was among the U.S.’s first billionaires, and certainly among the richest Americans ever.
• “Round-the-world flight in ’38” describes Hughes record-setting aviation feat.
• Google doesn’t turn up any “Hughes for President” buttons (searches find mostly buttons for the unsuccessful 1916 run of Charles Hughes.)
  HHTUS notes that, on the heels of Hughes’ aviation feats, and after Hughes’ 1947 senate testimony, “In less than a week, one hundred Hughes for President clubs had formed in the major cities.”
• “Occasionally [Hughes would] disappear… working anonymously as a pilot” is mentioned in some form at several websites, including AcePilots which states: “[In 1933] he took a job with American Airways as a co-pilot, applying under the pseudonym Charles W. Howard. The ruse was soon discovered and Hughes quit.” HHTUS describes the incident in detail, and notes that Hughes went missing for 20-40+ days each year from 1931-35

panel 4

• Hughes, via aerospace companies started by his father, was a “main supplier to the USAF [U.S. Air Force].”
• Panels 4 and 5 form a fixed camera sequence

panel 5

• In the background, a guard urinates into the just-emptied milk carton, as described on P2,p1.

Page 5

panel 1

• Kate is, again, actor Katherine Hepburn.
• “Muirfield mansion” refers to Hughes’ home on Muirfield Road in L.A.’s Hancock Park neighborhood.
• “Mr. [Lucky] Luciano and Mr. [Bugsy] Siegel” are gangsters. They’ve appeared previously in several Purgatorio issues.
• Left to right, apparently, are Hughes, Hepburn, and the corpse of Siegel.
• The ubiquitous couch is the one where Siegel was shot dead. The real life couch was located in a home in Beverly Hills – not Hughes’ Muirfield Road home – though Hughes is an unreliable narrator and the couch ties into its earlier Purgatorio appearances. The right half of the panel re-prints O’Neill’s Siegel death image from CP6 P7,p2 which was also printed in CP11 P6,p5, CP16 P4,p6 and P7,p3. The couch also appeared in the pages 1 and 8 framing sequence starting in issue 13.

panel 2

• Hughes had various “connections with politics and the C.I.A.” through his aerospace company. These include Nixon scandals (see next panel) and Project Azorian (see panel 5 below.)
• “The future” is not very clear, as the date that Purgatorio takes place is not clear. It seems to be a version of Moore’s youth. Moore was born in 1953 – so it could take place in the late ’50s or early 60s. The Nixon incident took place in 1960, so that would place Purgatorio in the late ’50s.
  Finding an exact coherent time frame for Purgatorio may be fruitless. Hughes is a delusional unreliable narrator. Moore has compelling theories about time – primarily eternalism (time as the fourth physical dimension of an unchanging solid universe), which is explored extensively in Jerusalem.
• In the background, the formerly urinating guard is placing the refilled container outside.

panel 3

• Hughes connections to Richard Nixon are detailed in HHTUS chapter 32. Hughes supported Nixon, and reportedly gave Nixon a never-reported “briefcase full of cash” as a political slush fund.
• Later president Richard Nixon narrowly lost the 1960 election, in part due to a late-breaking scandal (orchestrated by Democratic strategist Lawrence O’Brien): “the Kennedy campaign spread word that Vice President Nixon had secretly pocketed money from billionaire Howard Hughes.” The money had come from Hughes to Nixon’s brother, and coincided with a huge tax break for Hughes.
• Avoiding a similar scandal is thought to be part of Nixon’s motivation for Watergate. The Watergate scandal was triggered by a Nixon-connected team breaking in to the Watergate building to place a listening device in Democratic National Committee chair Lawrence O’Brien’s office. According to Vox:  “Perhaps the most popular theory is that Nixon was worried that O’Brien knew about his financial dealings with billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes, for whom O’Brien served as a lobbyist in addition to his DNC duties.”
  HHTUS states that Hughes had hired O’Brien as a lobbyist for Hughes business interests, but apparently Nixon’s was paranoid that Hughes and O’Brien would sabotage his presidential candidacy.
• Visible in the foreground is one of Nixon’s tape-recorders.

panel 4

• Recounted in HHTUS, There are several aspects of Hughes life that would contribute to this sort of replacement scenario:
  – Starting circa 1960, Hughes security aides found a decoy double to stand in for him – an actor named Brucks Randell.
  – In 1966 Hughes moved to Las Vegas, he was so reclusive that some questioned if he was really alive and living there. His aides had to detox him and prove he was alive (generally over the phone) to purchase property.
  – There were also conspiracy theories that “Hughes never left Nevada alive” despite later chapters of his life in the Bahamas and Mexico. Author Marjel De Lauer (and some others) believe “Hughes was somehow killed in 1970 and replaced by a carefully coached double.”

panel 5

• This panel details Hughes role in the 1974 top secret Project Azorian. Hughes designed the Glomar Explorer ship that attempted to retrieve the Russian submarine. The specific soviet sub was indeed numbered 722.
• Note that each of the large panels on pages 3-4-5 include a big metal vehicle increasing in size: car, airplane, submarine.
• “Split screen” – see next page.

Page 6

panel 1

• “Abel Gance” was a silent-era French filmmaker who pioneered “tracking shots, extreme close-ups, low-angle shots, and split-screen images.”
• Split screen film-making does not appear to be specifically associated with Howard Hughes; it appears to be a convention that Moore and O’Neill are using to juxtapose contradictory aspects of Hughes life.
  Moore and O’Neill use an expanding split screen on the first three panels of this page.

panel 2

• “[Charlie] Chaplin and [Errol] Flynn” were movie stars known as womanizers, even alleged rapists. Flynn is famous for playing a swordsman in several movies. Moore has conflated sword with penis here; a Google search didn’t find other places where film star womanizers were called “swordsmen.” Hughes did seduce many Hollywood teenagers, most famously a then-17 Gloria Vanderbilt.

panel 3

• “Drunk driver who kills a pedestrian…” describes a 1936 Hughes car crash that took place in Santa Monica. The crash is portrayed in the 4th screen in this panel. The victim had been waiting for a streetcar (as depicted), and right after the crash, Hughes sent his passenger/companion Nancy Bell Bayly away on the streetcar, in order to hide her from his lover Katherine Hepburn.
• “Hepburn” – see P3,p2 above.
• “Presidents” – see P5,p3 above.
• “Pink elephant” is a euphemism for a drunk hallucination.
• Though Hughes supplied the C.I.A., a Google search doesn’t find a Hughes helicopter connection with U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy and his 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal pictured. HHTUS tells of a (c.1970) Las Vegas party that Hughes threw for Kennedy, that was scandalous for the married senator being photographed with a “well-stacked blonde.”
  The helicopter depicted somewhat resembles 1970s Indian Airforce helicopters decorated to appear as elephants.
• Hughes “American Airlines pilot” incident is described in P4,p3 above. (‘Airlines’ has been corrected to ‘Airways’ in the collected edition.)
• “Hermit eating Baskin-Robbins” references how Hughes “once became fond of Baskin-Robbins’ banana nut ice cream, so his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him, only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. They put in a … special order [for] 350 gallons… A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream.”

• 

  Baskin Robbins older logo – via tyhatiramisu

  In the bottom right screen, the logo “[Bask]in 31 Robb[ins]” (Baskin Robbins was sometimes known as “31 Flavors”) to perhaps appear to read “in 31 rolls.” This may allude to Hughes’ many roles as shown throughout this panel.

• As Bleeding Cool points out, this 9-screen grid resembles the 9-panel comics grid, used extensively by Moore, most associated with Watchmen. The grid-of-screens also appears in Watchmen,  watched by Ozymandias.

panel 5

• “Nuts” has a secondary meaning here of “crazy”.

Page 7

panel 1

• Nosseck – see P2,p1 above.
• “The Fatal Officers” including the images shown is from CP#1.

panel 2

• Hughes dead is complicated – and apparently took place in Acapulco (or a plane en route to Texas) in 1976. His death was announced when the airplane carrying his corpse reached the U.S.
• In his later years, Hughes was attended by a “committee” of assistants, many of whom were Mormon.

panel 3

• This describes and depicts the complicated international incidents behind Hughes’ death.
• The panel depicts Hughes and his Mormon aides departing Acapulco. The man with the medical case is “local doctor” Victor Montemayor. He was called in to diagnose Hughes, who had been unconscious for three days. As stated, Montemayor’s diagnosis was “neglect” and suspected foul play from Hughes’ aides.
  According to HHTUS, the cause of death was an overdose of codeine, administered by Hughes’ aides.

panel 4

• This appears to be the first time that the film-within-a-comic has explicitly connected with the purgatory framing sequence (though there have been connections between the various films.) Purgatorio‘s protagonist mentions this in panel 5 asking “was that last bit about this place?”

panel 5

Hell’s Angels “THE END”

• “The same sofa” (where Siegel was shot dead – appearing in P5,p1 and P7,p5above) appeared earlier in CP6 P7,p2 and CP11 P6,p5 and framing sequence starting in issue 13 – including P8,p5 below.
• The end title is that from Hell’s Angels, only with the addition of a gradual fade to utter blackness.

Page 8

panel 1

• This Marie Prevost Screen Regrets issue appeared in CP6. Prevost was an actress who died of acute alcoholism at the age of 38 in January 1937. The cover and text of the magazine are a darkly ironic reference to the fact that Prevost’s body was not discovered until two days after her death, when neighbors complained about her dog’s incessant barking.
• Both the woman whose point of view the panel takes (whose hand the reader sees) and the woman reading the magazine are the protagonist stuck in some sort of time loop, repeatedly paying penance for her sins. See more explanation of the protagonist’s looped double appearance at CP11 P8 panels 2-3 and CP18 page 5.

panel 2

• Scar/mark on usherette’s cheek? – suggest??

panel 4

• “Burt Lancaster” was a Hollywood actor. “Crockery Joe” was a nickname based on his wide white grin.
• This is the fifth time the ticket seller has alluded to children without the narrator paying full attention. Quoting our previous note from CP#11, P1p2:
  “Different conditions […] for children” is similar to CP#2 P1,p3, the ticket seller says “something about adults and children, muffled”; in CP#3 P1,p2, “for adults and children there are different… She mumbles the last word, it could be tariffs, or duties. Something like that.”, and in CP#9 P1,p3, “different charges for minors”. Is the narrator in purgatory because she abused a child she had a “duty” towards, one who was in her “charge”?

panel 5

• This is, again, the “stained prop sofa” where Siegel was murdered – see P5,p1 and P7,p5 above.
• “Albert Lewin” was a Hollywood filmmaker.
• The Man Ray photo – suggest?? (Man Ray was mentioned in CP#11.)
• “The danger in the commonplace is dullness” sounds like a Moore homage of an Oscar Wilde truism. Moore previously homaged Wilde and Dorian Gray in Lost Girls chapter 13.
• “Hurd Hatfield” was an actor. He played Dorian Gray in Lewin’s 1945 film.
• “The Sweet Smell of Excess” references the 1957 Burt Lancaster film Sweet Smell of Success.
• Commenter Cent notes that the fingers of the protagonist’s right hand “become” the suggestive legs in the copy of Screen Regrets she is reading. (Spread fingers representing spread legs is an old schoolboys’ dirty joke, explicitly referenced by Moore and O’Neill in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)

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