Word: sadakichi
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Minutes of the Last Meeting, by Gene Fowler. More stories about those three Hollywood musketeers, John Barrymore, W. C. Fields and Author Fowler, disguised as a biography of their colleague and poetic oracle, Sadakichi Hartmann (TIME, April...
Minutes of the Last Meeting, by Gene Fowler. More stories about those Hollywood musketeers, John Barrymore, W. C. Fields and Author Fowler, disguised as a biography of their colleague and poetic oracle, Sadakichi Hartmann (TIME, April...
...Hope of Walt Whitman. The idea of chronicling Sadakichi's wayward life and times began as a club gag. But Fowler took it seriously, and raked together the few known facts about this eccentric's eccentric. When he was not with his mock-worshipful pals, Sadakichi lived on an Indian reservation, posing as an Indian. Actually, he was the son of a German coffee merchant who had married a Japanese girl. His first name means "steady luck" in Japanese. Fields contended that it meant "Gimme some dough!" And Barrymore stoutly maintained that "Sadakichi is the mating call...
Proof exists that Sadakichi heard a fairly powerful mating call from somewhere, for he married twice and fathered 13 children, one illegitimate. But his first love was poetry, and he always carried a testimonial to his early genius in the form of a tattered newspaper clipping of 1888. In it Walt Whitman said: "I have more hopes of Hartmann, more faith in him than in any of the boys." Few connoisseurs today would show such faith in Sadakichi's poems, e.g., the couplets that Biographer Fowler uses as chapter headings. Samples: "I made a bed of sun and sand...
Something for the Pigeons. All the while. Sadakichi sharpened the talent for gratuitous insult that later so endeared him to his Hollywood buddies. When he met dapper Industrialist Henry Clay Frick, he told him to write his autobiography and call it The Tom Thumb of the Coke Ovens. Of some blueprints of Architect Stanford White he said: "To be improved upon only by pigeons, after the drawings become buildings." One figure escaped his misanthropic venom: Mary Baker Eddy. He called the founder of Christian Science "the greatest spiritual expression of the century," and was writing a verse drama about...