As the legal inferno involving Mayor Eric Adams continues to burn, some NYC scribes are rememebering other mayors from times gone by that also got into trouble.
The two mayors mostly commonly remembered for getting into big trouble are Jimmy Walker and William O'Dwyer, both of whom resigned in 1932 and 1950, respectively, and then fled the country. Also there was Fernando Wood, the 19th mayor who was vastly more corrupt than either Adams, Walker or O'Dywer -- and never got into trouble at all.
I recently came upon a few articles (here, here and here) about these men, comparing their stories to the predicament that Eric Adams finds himself in (sadly two of these articles are behind a paywall).
But Mr NYC, yours truly, was blogging about these naughty mayors long ago, before any of this meshugas (read about them here and here) -- and remember, Mr NYC is always ahead of his time.
In 2018 I did a short review of the classic late 1970s adult film Debbie Does Dallas which, despite its title, was actually filmed in Brooklyn. It starred a woman named Bambi Woods who was catapulted to adult stardom by the film.
And in 2021 I interviewed the former adult star Lisa Cintrice who starred in Debbie Does Dallas 2 and had a scene in a bathtub with Ms Woods. After this, Bambi Woods vanished from the public eye, and in the forty-plus years since no one has been able to find her -- there have been rumors that she died in 1986, others that she moved and continues to live as a housewife in Iowa.
Either way, back in 1979, Bambi Woods was very much a star and she gave this short interview about the movie that had made her infamous. It's a moment in time when the adult films business in NYC was at the vanguard of popular culture -- a moment that, in retrospect, passed quickly.
The hottest thing in American popular culture today isn't superhero movies -- it's hours-long true crime podcasts, documentaries, and TV series.
In the last few years, tabloid scandals from the past about Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrew Cunan, Robert Chambers, OJ, and many others (more recently, the Menendez Brothers) have become massive hits in various multi-episode formats. And all of them seem to be about tabloid stories from the late 20th century.
But before the era of streaming and podcasts, where hours and hours could be devoted to telling these trashy tales, such stories would become network TV movies -- and instead of waiting years, these "ripped from the headlines" events became hastily-made, two-hour flicks.
One such story that, as far as I know, has yet to become a 21st-century multi-hour podcast/documentary/streaming series is about the June 1986 attack of Marla Hanson.
A Missouri-transplant and aspiring model, Marla Hanson was living in a Manhattan apartment, attending glamorous parties, pursuing romance, living the NYC dream, until one day her landlord, who was obsessed with her, slashed her face, ending her modeling dreams. It was a big, scary story about obsession, beauty, and the "face value" of human worth. Her attackers were eventually sentenced to prison, but not until she was, in her words, badly treated by the criminal justice system.
And this is why the 1991 TV-movie about the incident was called Face Value: The Marla Hanson Story.
This movie falls squarely into the now gone-and-forgotten sensationalist TV-movie with bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, and bad music. It's amazing to think anything this low-rent would get made today but, thirty-odd years ago, this was the stuff that millions of people watched when the big network TV hits went on hiatus.
There are, however, a few interesting things about this movie that make it worth watching (you can see the trailer and full movie below).
First, it's a real-NYC movie that, in its ways, captures the allure and danger of the late 20th century, pre-911 city.
Second, the cast.
Marla Hanson is played by an actress named Cheryl Pollack, who "had a moment" in the early 1990s. She was in the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume, a memorable episode of Quantum Leap, and later on was on another show called The Heights. She continued to pop up in TV shows throughout the 1990s until, it appears, she left acting.
Marla's landlord/slasher was played by an odd-looking, odd-sounding actor named Kirk Baltz. And ironically, the very next year, he'd make movie history as the victim of a fictional slashing -- he's the guy who played the cop who memorably got his ear cut-off in Quentin Tarantino's directorial-debut Reservoir Dogs (while "Stuck in the Middle With You" played in the background). It must have been ironic for him to go, within a year or so, from playing a slasher in a totally forgettable TV movie to playing the most famous slashing victim in movie history -- and in a cinematic classic.
Then there's Marla's love interest. He's played by a very handsome actor named Dale Midkiff. His career caught fire in the 1980s when he played Elvis in a TV-mini-series, and then was in the 1989 hit movie Pet Semetary. But big screen stardom elluded him and it was back to TV. Not long after making this Marla Hanson TV movie, Dale starred in a very silly but massively entertaining show called Time Trax. It was about a cop from the year 2193 who is sent back in time to 1993 to find criminals who escaped from his time, hiding out the past, and sending them back to the future -- and justice. After Quantum Leap, it was my favorite time-travel show ever (although nowhere as good as QL), and he was really good in it. It only ran for two-years but it was fun to watch (interestingly, Time Trax premiered on January 20th, 1993, the same day that Bill Clinton became president).
As for Marla Hanson, after this horrible incident, she appears to have gone on and lived a nice quiet life. She married, had a child, worked briefly as a screenwirter, and seems to have had no interest in having a public profile in the almost 40-years after she was thrust into the headlines. And good for her!
These days the network TV movie seems to be a thing of the past. But this movie capture an era of TV, and NYC, that seems both far in the past and very familiar.
I'm not going to blog about Eric Adams anymore until something definitive happens -- namely, that he ceases to be mayor.
So this will be my last post on the subject until then.
That said, you shoud read this article by the political journalist & three-time Mr NYC-interviewee Ross Barkan about "The Fall of Eric Adams" -- and how we got here. As always, he summarizes the whole thing well.
Over the years I've blogged about my love of Venice, the great Italian city of isles that, in some ways, is the true spiritual sister of NYC.
And like NYC, Venice is a city of beauty and inspiration.
That's why it was fun to read this article about the legendary designer and business Diane von Furstenberg who has recently taken up residence in a Palazzo on the Grand Canal. Like many brilliant people before her, who came to NYC to realize their dreams, she's done the same with Venice. It's a fascinating story.
And, in some ways, she follows in the footsteps of those other great Venetians Marco Polo, Veronica Franco, and Casanova -- as well as countless New Yorkers -- who take their destiny into their own hands.
