Destiny-land
It's..... The happiest blog on earth



Tuesday

The Outlaw (1943) made Jane Russell notorious. Howard Hughes is credited as the movie's director -- and it tells the story of a strange bi-sexual love triangle between Russell's character, Billy the Kid, and Pat Garrett.

Gore Vidal revisited the same characters in The Left-Handed Gun, in which young Paul Newman plays Billy The Kid, whose death ultimately comes from betrayal by a disillusioned biographer who'd romanticized his life.

And there's one truly unusual historical document that tells the same story. Pat Garrett was a county lawman who'd actually met Billy the Kid, and wrote a definitive biography of his life -- after he'd shot him.

I have listened, at camp-fires, on the trail, in the prairies and at many different plazas, to his disconencted relations of events of his early and more recent life...

'The Kid' had a lurking devil in him; it was a good-humored, jovial imp, or a cruel and blood-thirty fiend, as circumstances prompted. Circumstances favored the worser angel, and 'the Kid' fell.

Or, as Bob Dylan put it...
Gypsy queens will play your grand finale
Billy you're so far away from home.



11/19/2002