Max "Bunny" Sparber

JERON CRISWELL KING, as fans of bad films well know, was the blond-haired, spit-curled, steely-eyed psychic whose redundant dialogue (“Future events such as these will effect you — in the future!”) opened Ed Wood’s notorious ghouls and aliens epic Plan 9 from Outer Space. But how many know that Criswell was also a close friend of Mae West, the platinum-tressed comedic actress who specialized in salacious one-liners? It’s no wonder West was fond of him: he predicted that West would win the 1960 presidential election, and, more than that, he predicted she would fly to the moon five years later, with himself and Liberace as company.

Criswell’s predictions, which he offered in a syndicated column and from a regular television show (and eventually from the guest seat on The Late Show and from several books), tended toward the bizarre. As an example, he prophesied that on November 28 of 1980, a chemical leak in Pittsburgh would turn thousands of residents into marauding cannibals.

West’s prime was long past in the Fifties, when the two became friends. Her once-shocking brazen sexual attitude had retreated into caricature and camp. There was a growing sense of ridiculousness about her that would eventually become her defining characteristic, culminating in the Sixties and Seventies with Diane Arbus’s bizarre photographs of the actress kissing her pet monkey on her oversized bed, her starring role as a disquietingly amorous senior citizen in Sextette, and an ill-considered recording of “Day Tripper.” Perhaps West was attracted to a similar excessiveness in Criswell. Besides his bizarre prognostications, he was given to wearing excessive makeup and throwing regular Sunday brunches during which his stout wife would perform impromptu song and dance numbers in her bikini.

Whatever it was that West saw in the psychic, she was fond enough of him to cook for him, sell him her used limousines for a dollar, and record a song lauding his paranormal talents. West did not have a terrific voice, but she could use it to excellent effect: Listen to her purring sadness in the recording of “Mr. Deep Blue Sea” from 1936’s Klondike Annie as an example. Paired with silly material and burlesque arrangements, however, she sounded like a parody of femininity, as tough she were an intoxicated drag queen impersonating a hot-to-trot flapper. “Criswell Predicts” has this quality — it’s a hoochie coochie number, filled with salacious horn blasts and drum fills that sound meant for bumping and grinding.

We do not know how Criswell felt about this song with its carnival carnality. He may have liked it — after all, his plump wife, Halo Meadows, was a former speakeasy dancer. But, then, rumors had him haunting Hollywood’s Gold Cup restaurant, an infamous cruising ground for homosexuals, so West’s theatrical blowsiness might have been nothing more than a kitsch spectacle to him. He must have been flattered by her lyrics, though, which she reportedly scratched out on a napkin, and were filled with praise for him.

“Criswell predicts what the world’s going to do,” West drawls in the song. “Trips to the stars,” she continues, “vacations on Mars, snow in July, the strangest new cars.” Whatever odd tomorrow Criswell saw, however, couldn’t have matched the ongoing strangeness of his demonstrative movie star friend, whose own future was going to get weirder. Joan Collins describes visiting the actress in the Seventies, a tale that surpasses the soiled Hollywood Gothicism of Sunset Boulevard for sheer ghoulishness. In Collins' tale, West, then in her eighties, dressed in kabuki-styled makeup, a long blond wig to cover a developing humpback, and rubber band wrapped around her face to give her a chin line, didn’t deign to speak with the younger actress, instead sitting on a soiled white sofa, staring sideways at her in silence.

LISTEN TO "CRISWELL PREDICTS":



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