Audie L. Murphy Memorial Website Message Boards

I was wondering if anyone has read or looked at James Best's book- Best in Hollywood,the Good,the Bad and the Beautiful and can tell me if he had made any mention of Audie in it?
Also Michael Dante was friendly with Audie and would like to suggest him for an AM Days guest. Any thoughts?

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Ruxy

Best In Hollywood has a 5 page chapter on Audie. Best and Audie seemed
to get along well. Some other books with Audie Murphy are the following:

Looking Away - Hollywood and Viet Nam by Julian Smith
Celebrity Secrets by Nick Redfern (10 pages)
Embattled Dreams by Kevin Starr (just a few mentions)
White Horse, Black Hat by C. Jack Lewis
(Nice behind the scenes story of Audie in his agents office
trying to get out of making Trunk to Cairo.."But Audie, you already
took the money.")

There are also mentions of Audie in biographies of Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas,
Fred De Cordova, Roger Miller, Eddie Barker, Nudie Cohen (The Rodeo Tailor),
Bruce Dern, Jimmy Hoffa, Budd Boetticher, Ron Masak and more.

Audie is also in the 1956 Guinness Book of World Records.

Tony Thomas did a good job on Murphy and several of his films in The Best of Universal, by Vestal Press, NY, 1990.

Ann

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"He endured the shame of being sent home a living trophy to the blood and death of too many friends"
A Myth in Action: The Heroic Life of Audie Murphy
http://www.annjoiner.com

wow more I didn't know about,guess I better get to the bookstore quick . Thanks Vic and Ann. Has anyone read Venitia Stevens book,if so what does she say about Audie?

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Ruxy

Hey Ruxy, I remember reading in one of the books on Audie that Venitia Stevens had written a
book and in it she discussed her friendship with Audie. Did you ever happen to catch the name
of the book she wrote and who the publisher was? Now that is one book I would love to read.
Just my thoughts... Shirley Jean.

EBAY HERE I COME!! HOPEFULLY THEY WILL HAVE THESE BOOKS.

Hi Folks, just me, I need to apologize, I got some of my information wrong when I posted last.
First off the lady's last name was Stevenson, not Stevens, and the correct spelling of her first
name is Venetia, Not Venitia. Also, she stared with Audie in Seven Ways from Sundown and
it was filmed in May of 60, and released in September 1960 . According to Film biographies on
the web, the lady is still alive as she was born in March of 1938, and was married twice, once
to Russ Tamblyn in 1957, and then divorced him in 1958, and finally married a second time
to Don Everly of the Everly Brothers fame in 1962. They had 3 children, 2 girls and the last one a boy. And then divorced in the late 70's early 80's, and never remarried. She is 72 years young and
I believe she may even have a facebook page where she posts with her fans. In trying to do some
research on the lady, I never did come across the book she was supposed to be writing.
Therefore, I am going to make a conclusion here that the book either never got written, or never
got published. If anyone has different or additional information, please post. Thanks.
Just my thoughts. Shirley Jean.

Through the power of googlebooks, I got a chance to read the Murphy-related parts of Bruce Dern's autobiography, "An Unreliable Memoir." They're pretty funny, though I'm not sure I believe any of it (seriously, was Dern even in either of the movies Murphy made with RG Springsteen?)

Christie, I just read through the Audie Murphy references in the googlebook by Dern, and I can say that any connection between Dern's writing and the real Audie Murphy is purely coincidental. Nothing he wrote about the actor or the war hero was valid, other than his statement that Murph was the most decorated soldier of WWII. Checked Sue's book (Sue Gossett, The Films and Career of Audie Murphy to be sure, but not only was Dern not in either Springsteen film (Showdown/ Bullet for a Badman, Murphy didn't play a wagon train leader in either of them. And neither Dern nor the scenario he described was in Tumbleweed, which, if memory serves, was the olny one of Murph's films where he played the leader of a wagon train.

Was your substitution of 'Unreliable" for "Unrepentant" intentional, or an "understandable" slip?

_________________
"He endured the shame of being sent home a living trophy to the blood and death of too many friends"
A Myth in Action: The Heroic Life of Audie Murphy
http://www.annjoiner.com

Strictly a Freudian slip. FWIW, I got the vibe that Dern wasn't intending very much of that book to be taken seriously, though maybe his co-authors/assistants hadn't picked up on that.

I had another interesting "google books" find that I'll try to transcribe a bit later today when I have time.

This is from a book called "Supermob" by Gus Russo. One of the amazon reviews describes it as a pile of research notes rather than a coherent book, and expresses skepticism about some of the content, but adds that at least it cites and sources its factoids, so that the reader can make up his/her own mind about the validity of any given detail. That's consistent with my impression of the bits I've read. Anyway, the book is about Sidney Korshak, a lawyer with ties to the Chicago mob, the Teamsters, and the entertainment industry, and the chapter in question is a collection of circumstantial evidence tying Korshak to various attempts to get Hoffa pardoned. The paragraph of interest reads:


The Jack Clarke in question seems to be this guy, now deceased: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008 ... estigators

I found this interesting for two reasons: one, a possible glimpse of one of his police/law enforcement contacts in the shape of Clarke, and two, it kind of supported a hunch I'd developed from reading Graham's account of the Hoffa business. I'd come away from Graham's account thinking "it just doesn't sound, in spite of the effort he was putting into it, like Audie Murphy was all that emotionally invested in the outcome. This doesn't sound like something he was doing to satisfy his own sense of justice or because he was that screamingly desperate for money. This sounds more like a favor he's grudgingly doing for a friend." So, you have this account, in which he was persuaded into it in part by George Murphy, who was a friend and due to a then-recent operation couldn't talk above a whisper, and some pieces kind of fell into place for me.

(edited to remove jokey line that came out more sarcastic than I'd intended, sorry.)

Was able to get "Celebrity Secrets" by Nick Redfern on ebay.

Interesting reading.

cheryl

yeah, that one sounded interesting, I think I'd just as soon have the raw FBI files myself

followup on the Supermob book: I got a chance to look at a physical copy and therefore the endnotes. Author cites the Murphy story I transcribed earlier to a 1/31/04 interview with Jack Clarke.

I flipped through "Born to Ride" recently-a biography of Murphy's rodeo friend Casey Tibbs. Despite the blurb mentioning Murphy as one of Tibbs's celebrity friends, there's only a couple of pages about him. There's the same story about how they first hit it off that you can find in "No Name on the Bullet," there's a somewhat different account of Murphy telling Tibbs that he "didn't hunt animals no more" from the ones I've seen elsewhere (in this case, Tibbs says that he-Tibbs had been invited to the "Governor's One Shot Antelope Hunt" and that he wanted to take Murph with him, but Murph got "halfway hot", ie annoyed, when asked).

He describes Murphy as being badly "tore up" when he accidentally ran over a kitten in his driveway. Also, people apparently thought that Murph and Tibbs looked similar to each other-I can't say that it's apparent to me from the photos I've seen. Anyway, they apparently used to play pranks based on this resemblance, like claiming to be each other when they were flirting with women (Tibbs would claim to be Murphy, and Murphy would claim to be Tibbs). Tibbs notes that one woman they teased in this manner never did figure it out. Tibbs also claims that the two of them "bought some race horses together."

Murphy is also described as moody and complex, but it's a much less negative and less detailed portrayal than you would expect from the Tibbs quotations in "No Name on the Bullet," with Tibbs being quick to chalk up his friend's issues to his wartime experiences. The author concludes the section on Murphy by mentioning his untimely death and adding that he is much missed by his family, friends and fans.

That's all there is on Murphy directly; there seems to be some discussion of his and Tibbs' mutual friend Budd Boetticher, and Tibbs' fairly detailed discussion of his gambling addiction and his involvement in horsey matters might be interesting to people who want to get a sense of Murphy's milieu. And of course Casey Tibbs is a colorful figure in his own right.

There's some mentions of Murphy in a new Huston biography called: "John Huston: Biography and Art" by Jeffrey Meyers. The only Murphy-specific work referenced in the bibliography was the earlier edition of the Charles Whiting book.

Meyers's description of Murphy ranges from mildly patronizing to highly negative: "Murphy, emotionally burnt out by all the slaughter and unable to slake his thirst for killing" is perhaps the most negative bit, but Meyers is quick to slap down Lillian Ross for her cartoony and negative portrayals of the people involved in Red Badge of Courage (he doesn't single out Murphy as one of her victims, but it's a commendable dissent from the way most movie fanatics take Ross as gospel). He also recounts the near-drowning incident from the Unforgiven shoot with a measure of sympathy for Murphy. He quotes Christopher Isherwood's impressions of Murphy and Huston from his memoirs, which I had already skimmed, and found Isherwood to be a dreadful snob. Isherwood had a pronounced distaste for Murphy's brand of rough-housing and humor, and characterized Huston as charming, but "more of a monster than Murphy ever thought of being."

The only Murph-related story I had not heard before was that John Huston's mistress had a miscarriage during the Unforgiven shoot, and Murphy offered to fly her to Mexico City in his plane. Huston refused, and instead had his driver take the woman and him-Huston to Mexico City by car, a much slower route. Meyers attempts to excuse this bit of control-freak behavior by saying that perhaps Huston thought Murphy was unreliable in a plane, and citing Murphy's eventual death in a plane crash as justification. I'm going to chalk this up as a mistake people often make: they hear that Murphy was a pilot himself and owned a plane at one time, and died in a plane crash, and jump to the conclusion that he was piloting himself at the time.

He was of course a passenger on the Aero-Commander in 1971, and although it was presumably not all that wise of him to decide to ride in a plane flown by a guy who wasn't licensed for instrument flight, it doesn't reflect on his piloting skills per se.