Jackie Coogan, The Kid, Uncle Fester, Bad Boy, Much-Married, Catholic

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACKIE COOGAN, BORN OCTOBER 26, 1914 

Have you ever heard about or seen The Kid, Charlie Chaplin's silent comedy-drama?

If so, you might be surprised as I was to learn that Jackie Coogan, who played the adorable kid in 1921, also played the grotesque Uncle Fester in the Addams Family TV series from 1964-1966—and that in between, he became a romantic lead who acted in movies with and in 1937 married Betty Grable, who later became the most popular World War II pin-up girl.

And it also was a bit surprising to me that he was a Catholic. Jackie Coogan was born into an Irish-American Catholic family. At least he started out Catholic, and by the grace of God he seems to have finished that way too.

Starting at the age of seven, Jackie Coogan was the first celebrity child star "the most famous boy in the world." His image was used to sell products as diverse as peanut butter, stationery, whistles, dolls, records, and figurines.

He also was the first celebrity humanitarian. In 1924, after the Armenian genocide in World War I, when he was ten, Coogan promoted the Children's Crusade of Mercy, and he travelled in his own rail car across the U.S. collecting food and donations for orphaned refugee children. He traveled to Europe by ship, had a private audience with Pope Pius XI, and then he accompanied the donations to their final destinations in Athens, Syria, and Palestine.

Looking at the poster, I see Karo syrup had a commercial tie-in to the charitable mission, since the poster tells children to buy and donate Karo syrup with claims that dextrose is an important nutrient for children.

Coogan married Betty Grable in 1937 when he was 23 and she was 20 at St. Brendan Catholic Church in Los Angeles.

The history page of the website of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills also mentions him as one of the celebrities who attended Mass there and who became a member of the Catholic Motion Picture Guild that was started by the pastor.

Perhaps because it is hard to keep your moral compass when you're immersed in the temptations of wealth, fame, and the Hollywood lifestyle, Jackie Coogan and his family were involved in so many scandals that there's not room to write about them all here. For one thing, he had to sue his mother and his step-father to try to get money he had earned as a child star. For another thing, when two kidnappers killed a friend he met at Santa Clara College before he had to leave for bad grades, he was in a lynch mob that hung the murderers, in the city where I live now, in San José.

Coogan and Grable divorced after two years, and he later married three more women in civil ceremonies. He married his fourth wife, Dorothea Lamphere, in 1952, and he was still married to her when, in 1961, he was arrested for marijuana possession in company with a former exotic dancer and two other men at his Malibu ocean front home.

Nothing was reported about where Dorothea was at the time of Coogan's arrest. But he was still married to her at the time of his death.

After Betty Grable died in 1973, Coogan might have had his fourth marriage blessed in the Church. In any case, he was in good enough standing as a Catholic to have a Requiem Mass at the chapel of Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, where he is buried.

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"Jackie’s daughter, Leslie, related to author Stephen Cox one particular Addams Family-related memory concerning her father: 'He had been doing the part for a while, I guess, and he came home crying-sober. He said, ‘I used to be the most beautiful child in the world and now I’m a hideous monster.’ That was heavy. Something just dawned on him one day. It hit him. He’d let go of it later, but it really had to do with his lost childhood. Later he came to cope with the Fester character and loved doing the character and loved doing the show. Then he cherished it.'"—‘Addams Family’ Star Jackie Coogan Was Haunted By His ‘Lost Childhood’ When He Played Uncle Fester

When Jackie turned 50 in 1964, he received this doll as a gift. His smile seems a bit forced, methinks.

 

A Liqueur, a Color, and a Hermit Order’s Major Source of Income

Chartreuse is a luxury liqueur produced by the Carthusians, a strict contemplative order of hermits founded by Saint Bruno, whose feast is today, October 6. Chartreuse Verte, a shimmering green liqueur created by the Carthusians with 130 herbs, plants and flowers, gives its name to a distinctive Spring-green color that is an equal mixture of green and yellow. The liqueur is paradoxically associated both with luxury and with holiness.

First, some examples of the luxury. On the night the Titanic sunk in 1912, a Chartreuse-based dessert was on the First Class menu. 

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder, the narrator, drinks Chartreuse with decadent Anthony Blanche, who savors the liqueur with these words, “Real g-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is like swallowing a sp-spectrum.”

Russian Tsar Nicolas II insisted that a bottle of Chartreuse always be on his table.

Now for the holiness. The liqueur is named after the Carthusian monks' Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Chartreuse Mountains in France. Anthony Blanche's remarks in Brideshead refers to a perceived difference between the make-up of the liqueur from before  the expulsion of the monks by the French government in 1903 and after their return from Spain in 1940, when they resumed production.

In 1903, the Carthusian monks of Grande Chartreuse were forcibly removed from their monastery by the military and expelled from France.

Saint Bruno’s hermit life attracted followers into what eventually became the Carthusian order. He established the first charterhouse in 1082. (Charterhouse is an English corruption of Chartreuse.) Carthusians consecrate their lives entirely to pray and seek God. They intercede for the Church and for the salvation of the world.

St. Bruno, Founder Statue at St. Peter's Rome by Michelangelo Slodtz (1744). Text on statue Pedestal - S. BRUNO FUNDATOR / ORDINIS CARTUSIENSIS

The 2005 documentary Into Great Silence gave the world unprecedented views of their life.

Today, a few of the monks who were trained by their predecessors select, crush, and mix the secret herbs, plants and other botanicals used in producing the liqueur. Each monk only knows a portion of the recipe.

The large proceeds from the liqueur's sales provide the Carthusians the means to pursue their lives of intercessory prayer. After assisting to pay for the maintenance of the various charterhouses and the building of new ones, the rest of the income from the liqueur is devoted to works of charity.

Dom Benedict, on of the few people in the world who know the recipe for Chartreuse Verte