Maps to the Stars: my film about the dark side of Hollywood

Bruce Wagner London Guardian

 

After dropping out of Beverly Hills High, screenwriter Bruce Wagner became a chauffeur to the stars, chasing ambulances with Olivia de Havilland and delivering corpses to hospital. Here he revisits the dark corners of the city that inspired his new film

　

Swimming pools are a recurring theme … Sunset Boulevard, 1950. William Holden (being dragged from pool). Photograph: PR

I grew up in Beverly Hills, a house away from Broderick Crawford, the gruff, leonine star of All the King’s Men and Highway Patrol. Whenever I dropped by to visit his stepdaughter, a schoolmate, he answered the door in a tattered terry-cloth robe, drunk. I remember when the girl’s mom – Crawford’s estranged wife, the starlet Joan Tabor – "accidentally" overdosed and died in her apartment off Doheny Drive. I was so embarrassed and mystified that I never spoke to my friend again.

My father was marginally in the business. Before his nervous breakdown, he’d send me to pick up Variety at a 24-hour coffee shop inside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Groucho Marx was always kibitzing outside. I was in psychoanalysis at 14 – it was the fad. Walking to appointments, I’d see Charles Bronson cross the street like a panther, and an implacable Alfred Hitchcock, poodle propped on distended belly, in a chauffeured Rolls.

The fault in our stars … Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library

The kids who worked in showbiz would come late to middleschool – just after lunch – straight from the set, still in makeup and wardrobe. Dean Paul Martin Jr revved his Ferrari past the playground on his way to Rexford, a private bastion of learning for the incorrigible offspring of the famous. My bar mitzvah was thrown at the Friar’s Club. Tina Louise ("Ginger" on Gilligan’s Island) was one of my parents’ guests. I graduated to Beverly Hills High. Beverly’s swimming pool, beneath a retractable basketball court, made its screen debut in It’s a Wonderful Life. Special lunchtime assemblies featured the Doors and Linda Ronstadt.

After dropping out of Beverly, I worked in bookstores where I stole hundreds of volumes, then drove an ambulance, and then a limousine at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The last two vocations were quite similar because one encountered people in extremis – famous or posing-as-famous or dying or mentally ill, and sometimes all of the above – like the beautiful catatonic actress we drove up the coast to the legendary psych hospital called Camarillo. She’d been wearing her clothes for so long that they had to cut her sneakers off with scissors.

Star sign … tours round the homes of Hollywood movie stars in the 50s. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Once, we transferred a model from a west Hollywood ER to County General. Apparently she’d shot herself in the head – so said her suicide note – but no gun was found at the scene, which obviously unsettled the police. On reaching the ward, a pistol clattered to the ground as we lifted her from the gurney. (The firemen had used her own bed sheet when they first moved her and everyone did the same thereafter because it was expedient – so the weapon lay dormant between sheet and body.)

As a limo driver, I regularly drove Orson Welles to Ma Maison and Larry Flynt to physical therapy after he was shot. I carried a wood board in the trunk for Flynt so he could slide directly from backseat to wheelchair. Welles rode up front because he was too obese to lift himself from the backseat.

Beverly Hills Hotel, California, circa 1950s. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I bribed the dispatcher once to give me the call to drive Welles to his home in Vegas. I loaded up the genius, then bailed somewhere on Mulholland, telling a lie that a red "check engine" light had gone on and he’d have to take another car – the prospect of sitting next to him for hours was suddenly and inexplicably stressful.

I used to give rich out-of-towners fake tours of stars’ homes in Holmby Hills. I’d point to this house or that and say, "Sinatra. Lucille Ball. Jimmy Stewart." The addresses were available from curbside vendors but most of us were too bored or lazy to bother with veracity. One day, on a fake tour of Bel-Air, I saw a dishevelled man in a bathrobe in the middle of the street. I slowed and took a closer look and couldn’t believe my eyes: Brian Wilson. He asked if we had a light for his cigarette. The Texans were so thrilled they tipped me $100. I finally understood the cryptic, dadaist bumper stickers popular at the time: I BRAKE FOR BRIAN WILSON.

I drove agents who wouldn’t tip and other rude assholes (some of them writers) that I’d later be in business with. I drove the larcenous families of African royalty, the retinue of the Shah of Iran, Mick Jagger. I drove a fight promoter who lived in a hillside enclave called Mount Olympus to a nightclub in Watts, Mr Mitch’s Another World, and after that for scotch and eggs at a speakeasy run by Lou Rawls.

An east coast mobster paid me $500 to break into a house in the Hills he kept for his mistress, a B-movie actress who refused to decamp; Olivia de Havilland, who insisted I chase after ambulances if they passed with their sirens on ("Oh come on, Bruce, it’s newsworthy!"); hookers who gave blow jobs for tips; conmen who fled without paying at the end of the day. Andy Warhol, too. I still have a copy of his book, signed "To Bruce, The Best Driver. Andy." If Andy were alive, I like to think he’d amend his maxim to: "In the future, everyone will be famous all the time." Or maybe, "In the future, everyone will have unhackable privacy for 15 minutes."

My mother died in May and is buried in a crypt next to the legendary screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath), just around the corner from Marilyn Monroe. In my early 30s, Oliver Stone introduced me to Billy Wilder. I’ll never forget my frisson on learning that the original script of Sunset Boulevard began in a morgue, with the corpses all sharing how they met their ends. (It was shot but discarded because it didn’t sit well with preview audiences.) That scene was a thematic foretelling of my own corpus to come: phantoms telling stories around a campfire. William Holden begins his "share" as a ghost heard in voiceover while we see his floating corpse. Swimming pools have always been a thread that runs through my work. As a very young boy visiting California for the first time, I looked out the plane’s window with shock and wonder at the Elysian mosaic of blue backyard portals. In Maps to the Stars, a five-year-old drowns in one. Like his great-grandfather Holden, he becomes a ghost, but sadly has had no life to share.

‘I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it’ … a view of Hollywood in 1951. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

I mention all this because its weave is the leitmotif informing David Cronenberg’s film of my script Maps to the Stars. Contrary to critics’ easy characterisation, it doesn’t have a satirical bone in its elegiac, messy, hysterical body. I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it. Maps is the saga of a doomed actress, haunted by the spectre of her legendary mother; of a child star ruined by early celebrity, fallen prey to addiction and the hallucination of phantoms; of the mutilation, both real and metaphorical, sometimes caused by fame and its attendants – riches, shame and nightmare. I see our movie as a ghost play, not a satire.

Tap to the top … Bruce Wagner as a child. Photograph: Bruce Wagner

Hemingway spoke of an incident that happened at a Manhattan hotel. A socialite read in the paper that Papa was having trouble raising funds for a safari. She visited his room and said she’d pay for everything with the proviso she accompany him and his wife on the trip. He turned her down. But Hemingway began to wonder what might have become of a man who made such an agreement. From those musings came The Snows of Kilimanjaro – the death of a writer enslaved by money. Sunset Boulevard explores that theme and lies outside the realm of satire as well. Maps attempts a raucous confabulation of Wilder’s landscape along with the bitchy brutalities of Orton and Strindberg. I’m nothing if not ambitious.

David Cronenberg has said he has no interest in vivisecting Hollywood mores and manners and neither do I. The thought of an industry satire makes me vomit. At the time I wrote Maps to the Stars, I was a journeyman Pat Hobby on the road to ruin. I was in possession of a cubbyhole office in the far outfield of Paramount, bestowed on the strength of a hot comedy I had written that had been shot but never released and was deemed to be unsalvageable, due to its director’s spiralling addictions. Like a golden loser, I ordered up private screenings for "research" and killed time by watching childhood faves such as The Time Machine and Journey to the Centre of the Earth while popping Darvons and eating Commissary box lunches. To stay sane, I began writing fiction, creating the alter ego of a failed chauffeur-screenwriter, Bud Wiggins. Mr Stone eventually asked me to adapt my first book, the self-published collection Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories. I wrote a screenplay I hated, since I thought no one would make a film of a script that I loved. When Oliver surprised me by saying I should direct it, I found myself in an existential bind worthy of the character I’d conjured – as the greedy, for-hire hack I was, I had cheesily adapted the bravest, most authentic writing I was capable of. I couldn’t go through with it. So I rewrote the script, knowing that the new draft, a cri de coeur, was unmakeable. That it wouldn’t become a movie until more than 20 years later didn’t matter. I wrote Maps to the Stars and was liberated.

Ghost stories … cast and crew of Maps to the Stars at Toronto film festival. Photograph: Jeff Vespa/WireImage

"It’s all ending now," says Agatha to her brother at the end of our film. The prodigal daughter has returned to atone for her parents’ sins by sending the entire family to the ghostly realms whence she came. Sometimes the dead are more real, more enviable than the living, because they no longer have the crushing task of playing out the storyline that kills them. Cronenberg knows this, sees this, feels this. The dead are liberated from story and exist for the living as … maps to the stars.

It is our birthright – we are all ghosts around Wilder’s campfire morgue, telling stories of how we arrived, and stories of our leavetakings, too.

I can’t wait to hear the next one.

Demonizing the Minimum Wage

By William Finnegan The New Yorker

With the midterm elections approaching, the United States Congress finds itself in an exaggerated version of its customary posturing gridlock. Among the many urgent issues that it almost certainly won’t address this year are immigration reform, gun control, the Keystone XL Pipeline, the fate of the Export-Import Bank, and the federal minimum wage. A bill to raise the minimum wage from its current level, $7.25 per hour, to $10.10 an hour, over the course of two years, has been rattling around on Capitol Hill for eighteen months—with, it now seems, no hope of passing. Because the federal minimum wage has never been indexed to the cost of living, the debate over its efficacy and morality is regularly reëngaged as its value sinks and Congress is called upon to act.

The arguments against—a hundred years’ worth—were recently collected by a group of scholars calling itself the Cry Wolf Project. They sound hair-curling. "The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression," Ronald Reagan said in 1980. "Rome, two thousand years ago, fell because the government began fixing the prices of services and commodities," Guy Harrington, of the National Publishers Association, told Congress in 1937. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a national minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour, in 1938, and also abolished most child labor, "constitute[d] a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism," according to the National Association of Manufacturers. In the view of its opponents, the minimum wage—or raising an existing minimum—will always and inevitably damage the economy, kill jobs, doom American freedom, and/or harm the very people that it is meant to help. This litany of alarm has a dismal record as a description of reality, and yet has not changed much over the past century.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he first introduced the federal minimum wage, in 1933, was clear about its main purpose. "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country," he said. "By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level. I mean the wages of decent living." It had other purposes, too, including regional economic development: the initial impact of the minimum wage was strongest in low-wage industries in the South, such as textiles. But its Southern opponents succeeded in creating exceptions to the law for agricultural and domestic workers, insuring that the decent living envisioned by New Dealers would not become available to, among others, millions of African-Americans. It has been raised twenty-three times since 1938. Still, its value today is far lower than it was two generations ago. The 1968 minimum wage, to take a high-water mark, was, in real 2014 dollars, $10.95 an hour.

Raising the minimum wage is not, by any stretch, a poverty panacea. Its knock-on economic effects are in fact complex, its redistributive aim less well targeted at the working poor than, say, the earned-income tax credit. But opponents who insist that a raised minimum wage only hurts low-wage earners by eliminating entry-level jobs—a popular conservative position today—often have a weak grasp of the lives of the people involved. In March, Representative Paul Ryan, attacking the proposed hike at a town-hall meeting, said, "The majority of these workers are younger people just getting into the workforce." This is not so. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average age of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage today is thirty-five. Eighty-eight per cent are over the age of twenty. "The typical worker who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2015 looks nothing like the part-time, teen stereotype: She is in her early thirties, works full-time, and may have a family to support." In last week’s issue, I wrote about fast-food workers who also look nothing like the stereotype, and who have begun fighting for an industry-wide raise and the right to unionize. Their present wages are hopelessly inadequate. One study showed that fifty-two per cent of fast-food workers are on some form of public assistance.

　

Recent polls find that Americans strongly support (seventy-three per cent in favor, twenty-five per cent against) raising the minimum wage to $10.10. Senator Orrin Hatch, in an earlier round of this century-long debate, told the Times, "Youth unemployment and black unemployment will drastically rise. It’s amazing to me that some black leaders want an increase in the minimum wage." African-Americans and young adults are evidently consulting oracles different from Hatch’s. Both groups support raising the minimum wage to even higher rates than do Americans as a whole.

The true (and truly depressing) modesty of $10.10 was made clear in the most recent "job-gap study," released annually by a group called Alliance for a Just Society. Using data from state and federal public sources, the study found that, for a single person, the bare minimum income necessary for a basic household budget varied widely according to location. In Montana, for a full-time worker, it was $13.92 an hour; in New York City, it was $22.66. For a single adult with a school-age child, the bare minimum required, in Montana, was $19.36 an hour for a full-time worker; in New York City, it was $30.02. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase the income of at least sixteen million workers. It would not lift anywhere near that many people out of poverty. The proposed hike would ease present hardship, not abolish it. It would be a move in the direction of "the wages of decent living"—a performance, one might say, of decency itself.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the Minority Leader, has voted seventeen times against raising the minimum wage; in April, he led a successful filibuster of the $10.10 bill. If the Republicans can manage to take the Senate in November, McConnell hopes to become the Majority Leader, though he will first need to retain his own seat. He is in a surprisingly tight race with Alison Lundergran Grimes, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, who has been resolutely reminding voters of his record on the minimum-wage issue—a majority of Kentuckians favor raising it. McConnell recently had what may turn out to be his Mitt Romney "forty-seven per cent" moment. He was speaking at a donor conference in California, organized by Freedom Partners Action Fund, a super PAC with ties to the conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, called American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society. McConnell’s remarks were secretly recorded by a political Web show called the Undercurrent and later published by The Nation. Looking forward to his reign as Majority Leader, McConnell told the wealthy donors, "We’re not going to be debating all these gosh-darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage."

That California conference seems to have been an extraordinary affair. The setting was the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, in Dana Point, giving Party leaders, including McConnell and Senator Marco Rubio, along with a number of Senate hopefuls, the chance to mingle for a weekend, in luxurious surroundings, with the Party’s largest donors. The Party of kill-the-minimum-wage could hardly have been more splendidly represented.

The most startling recording made at the California conference was of a speech by Richard Fink, an economist who is an executive vice-president of Koch Industries, Inc., and who has been described as the "chief political adviser" to Charles Koch. Fink hit every scare note in the timeworn aria against the minimum wage. "The big danger of minimum wage isn’t the fact that some people are being paid more than their value-added," he said. "That’s not great. It’s not that it’s hard to stay in business—that’s not great, either. But it’s the five hundred thousand people that will not have a job because of minimum wage." This theoretical mob of half a million jobless will see themselves as victims, Fink said, making them, psychologically, "the main recruiting ground for totalitarianism, for fascism." Fink drew dark analogies to the Third Reich, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, even "suicide-bomber recruitment." It was, in many ways, the same old song, and it probably spoiled no one’s appetite for the "oven-roasted Angus natural filet mignon served in a fresh green peppercorn sauce" at a conference dinner held at La Casa Pacifica, the old Western White House of Richard Nixon. Still, I like to think that Nixon himself, who originally proposed the earned-income tax credit and presided over a dramatically less unequal American economy, might have blushed.

Elderly New Yorkers, Here for the Duration

By JOANNE KAUFMAN NY TIMES

Chuck and Cindy Nemser have lived in a townhouse in Park Slope for 47 years. Until she began suffering from unexplained nerve pain a few years ago, Ms. Nemser, 77, an art historian and writer, would happily retreat to her third-floor office where she could work undisturbed. There’s plenty of wall space for the couple’s art collection, and ample storage for Mr. Nemser’s cache of fishing poles.

But the stairs have become increasingly difficult for Ms. Nemser to negotiate, and late this spring, Mr. Nemser, 80, an independent salesman, retired. The time was ripe to put the house on the market.

But let’s be clear: Leaving town isn’t an option. "I love the arts and I want to stay in New York," Ms. Nemser said.

She speaks for thousands.

It used to be that New Yorkers of a certain age reflexively said goodbye to all this — the traffic, the tumult, the long lines and the incomparable bagels — and headed south or west for their sunset years. No longer. Around town these days there are many more than 50 shades of gray. According to the city’s Department for the Aging, the 60-plus population increased 12.4 percent between 2000 and 2010. By 2030 it is projected to grow by 35.3 percent to 1.84 million.

For many lucky enough in live in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments, staying put makes financial sense, and may, in fact, be a financial necessity. But the elderly with sufficient resources see no good reason to clear out, either.

The Nemsers are searching for a two-bedroom rental in their neighborhood. An elevator, a garage and a doorman are all essentials. Amenities like a roof deck, a lounge or a garden are desirable "so Cindy and Chuck can begin socializing, Cindy especially," said the couple’s sales agent, Stefania Cardinali of Citi Habitats, acknowledging that there are few properties in or around Park Slope that tick off all the boxes on the "must have" list.

For those who don’t drive, or who have trouble walking, the buses, taxis and, in some cases, free van transportation can make New York a surprisingly viable place in which to grow old. Social services and medical care are close by, in the case of the city’s 28 official NORCs (Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities), right on site. Stores and restaurants deliver. Plays, concerts, exhibitions and recitals are abundant.

But with elderly New Yorkers growing in number, landlords, resident managers and co-op boards are confronting a host of new issues, and sorting out how best to address them. While some building managers are looking for ways to accommodate aging residents, others are — for liability reasons — ordering staff to keep their distance.

"Co-op boards today are made up of a lot of a building’s younger residents," said Harold Kobner, an associate broker at Argo Real Estate. "And the aging population in their buildings is becoming more and more of a problem because it’s a problem that has never been addressed."

Put it down to denial. "Most people who are not of a certain age yet try to shut it out of their minds," said Aaron Shmulewitz, a real estate lawyer at Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman who has fielded complaints from clients about odors, hoarding and pajama-clad elderly residents wandering the halls. "They don’t want to think what it will be like when they are that age."

Of course, residents of all ages can create headaches for the management, but these can be compounded when infirmity is part of the picture.

Steven R. Wagner, a real estate lawyer at Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, has received calls from landlords and property managers pondering what to do about a resident "who’s a shut-in or who smokes cigarettes all day long, flicks them into the fireplace, misses occasionally and starts fires," he said, or about someone who can no longer hear and is becoming a little forgetful.

Marni J. Berk, a managing director at FirstService Residential and the general manager of Lincoln Towers, the eight-building complex on the Upper West Side, tells of the elderly resident who was washing his trousers in the sink and forgot to turn off the faucet, causing water to cascade all the way down to the lobby. Gas stoves have been left on; tenants out for a constitutional around the 20-acre property have become confused and disoriented.

One recent Saturday night at 11:30, Elaine Paris, 68, who lives in a co-op in Queens, heard the doorbell ring. There stood an elderly neighbor saying she was all alone, recalled Ms. Paris, a travel consultant who moved to the three-building complex a year ago. "I know her. She’s physically healthy and she has an aide, but she wasn’t around."

"First I called security and he said, ‘What do you expect me to do?’ " continued Ms. Paris, who took the woman back to her apartment, only to get another visit a half an hour later. "I walked her back home, took her to her room, turned off some lights and l literally tucked her in."

If the neighbor had come back again, Ms. Paris said she would have called 911. "She could have fallen down a stairwell," Ms. Paris said. "One of the guys in management said to me: ‘This is not an assisted living facility.’ It’s troublesome. It needs to be brought up to the board so there are some protocols to follow."

Many buildings have just such protocols. "We make sure we have good contact information for the next of kin or for close friends of the elderly people who live in our buildings," said Marina Higgins, a vice president and director of leasing for Argo Real Estate. "We also make a point of having a set of keys to the apartment of our seniors. That can be difficult," she added. "But we try to explain to our older population that it’s in their best interest."

The Kips Bay Towers Condominium maintains a list of elderly residents who use canes, walkers or wheelchairs or who have special needs, according to the building’s property manager, Marsha Bangaru. "And if the neighbors of a senior tell us they haven’t seen the person in a while, we’ll go up and check on the resident to make sure everything is O.K.," she said.

Lincoln Towers, meanwhile, asks new residents, regardless of age, to fill out a form that asks questions about special needs like a walker or oxygen. "If there’s an emergency and the building needs to be evacuated, the F.D.N.Y. gets this list," Ms. Berk said.

Often, doormen are the first line of defense. "Me and the other guys know who looks good and who doesn’t look good," said Michael Lydon, who has been on the service staff of an Upper East Side co-op for 27 years. "We’ll say, ‘Have you seen Mrs. So-and-So recently?’ People who are elderly have a routine, like going to Gristede’s on senior citizens’ days. If they break from that routine, that makes us think we should go check on them."

Watching a resident’s health decline can be difficult, Mr. Lydon added. "One gentleman fell a few times and I said, ‘I don’t want to be the one who comes up to find you on the floor or worse. If you’re not going to get an aide, you should at least get MedicAlert,’ " he continued, referring to one of the many wearable alert systems.

Mr. Lydon said he doesn’t mince words because "I’ve been in the building a long time so I can talk to them a little more honestly."

Certain buildings make special allowances and create special programs for their older residents. Technically, the community rooms at Lincoln Towers are off limits to the 10 percent of residents, all now elderly, who didn’t buy when the complex went co-op in 1987. But to accommodate events sponsored by Project Open, an on-site outreach organization for seniors, "we make an exception and donate the space," Ms. Berk said.

Mr. Wagner represents a Brooklyn co-op with a basement laundry room. "But the elevator doesn’t go to the basement, and one elderly tenant couldn’t negotiate the stairs," he said. So even though it was against building rules, management made an accommodation and let the resident have a washer and dryer in her apartment.

Similarly, while the Kips Bay Tower Condominium generally doesn’t permit delivery people beyond the lobby, "we let them go up to the apartments of our elderly residents," said Ms. Bangaru, who estimates that almost half the unit owners are in their late 60s or beyond.

A committee of resident volunteers also arranges a game or bingo night in the building’s community room. "It’s been a good way to get the elderly out and socializing and meeting their neighbors," Ms. Bangaru said. That same committee "has also put together seminars that might be beneficial to the elderly, like a technology class to teach them how to use social media to interact with their loved ones." One class was a presentation on navigating Facebook.

Lincoln Guild Housing Corporation, an Upper West Side NORC, has an on-site outreach office that offers lectures on nutrition and estate planning, and classes in ballroom dancing, tai chi and exercise. Such programs are planned for the building’s older population (some 40 percent of the residents are over 60) but are open to all residents.

A nurse visits once a week pro bono to check the blood pressure and the medications of interested residents, according to Lucille Bruto, a social worker and director of the outreach program. Wearing medical alert devices is encouraged, "and the building gets a discount from one of the companies," she said. The outreach office also has a fax machine, copy services and a shredder "to attract people in the building of all ages so we can make them aware of our programs," Ms. Bruto added.

One habitué is Delos Smith. "I use the fax machine, and I have my blood pressure taken weekly. That’s very significant, because my blood pressure is right on the borderline," said Mr. Smith, 79, a retired economist who was unaware of Lincoln Guild’s special offerings before he and his wife moved in 21 years ago. "We’d lived at 69th and Broadway and wanted a bigger apartment but wanted to stay in the area," Mr. Smith added. "The outreach office is an insurance policy. I’m still mobile, but it’s nice to know I don’t have to move if I need more services."

In 1997, two residents of Schwab House, a co-op on the Upper West Side, put together a 17-page "Senior Resource Directory" with the phone numbers of government agencies like the city’s Department for the Aging, as well as local pharmacies, social service agencies and senior centers in the neighborhood. "The building was very supportive and paid all the expenses of the guide," said one of its authors, Frances Klein, 86, who’s now toying with the possibility of producing an update and who also serves on the building’s gym committee. "We have lots of equipment that’s good for seniors," she said.

Mrs. Klein was one of many in the audience when the Schwab House Council, a volunteer group, arranged a talk by a resident, a geriatric case manager who brought along a lawyer specializing in issues relevant to the elderly. "It was mind-boggling," Mrs. Klein recalled of the lecture, which dealt with asset management, health care proxies and living wills, among other matters. "I wouldn’t have missed it for anything."

Meanwhile, at Morningside Heights Housing Corporation, a NORC in Upper Manhattan, "the older people want to sit out on our grounds and read a book and the younger families want their children to be able to ride a scooter," said Russell W. Jermyn, Morningside’s general manager. "The board is restricting the size of bikes and scooters on the property and is mandating that kids can only play with balls like Nerfs or Spaldeens."

But some buildings are leery about extending a helping hand. According to Mr. Shmulewitz, many co-op boards are issuing written orders to service staff members instructing them not to run to the aid of an elderly resident who calls to say he’s fallen and can’t get up. They are to explain that no, they can’t come upstairs to help, but yes, they will call 911.

"If the doorman goes up and lifts Mr. Smith off the floor and Mr. Smith is hurt further or expires, the co-op could incur liability," Mr. Shmulewitz said. "If the doorman wrenches his back picking up Mr. Smith and he’s not covered by workman’s comp, once again the co-op is liable. It sounds cold and it sounds impersonal, but there’s a growing trend of these instructions."

Liability is one concern; the impact on co-op and condo sales is another.

"People do due diligence when they’re looking to buy, and part of that is reviewing the minutes of a co-op board meeting," said Steven D. Sladkus, a real estate lawyer at Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz. "If there are a lot of issues concerning elderly shareholders, like a report that there was a flood or that adult protective services was called, that might raise antennas."

Similarly off-putting, according to Mr. Shmulewitz: an elderly pajama-clad resident camped out in the lobby. "If a real estate agent comes in with a client," he said, "and the first thing they see is a senior in a nightgown, guess what? The apartment isn’t selling that day, at least not for the price the shareholder wants."

In fact, many buildings have rules forbidding residents, senior or junior, regardless of their wardrobe choices, to use the lobby as anything more than a space to walk through.

Seniors? Bring them on, said Dean Feldman, an associate broker at Halstead Property and a resident of Schwab House. "I know that co-ops aren’t social service agencies," he said. "But we can all do a lot to support all the elderly people in our buildings." This could include designating "floor captains" who would take note of newspapers piling up in front of a door and of mail uncollected.

For his part, Mr. Feldman, 52, routinely takes an elderly neighbor to dinner, checks in with another several times a week, and does grocery shopping for yet another. "As a single person who lives alone," he said, "I like to think I’m paying it forward."

Bob Crewe, Songwriter for Frankie Valli and Four Seasons, Dies at 83

By WILLIAM YARDLEY NY TIMES

　

Bob Crewe, who helped create a parade of indelible hits, most notably for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, including "Sherry," "Walk Like a Man," "Rag Doll" and Mr. Valli’s soaring anthem of adoration "Can’t Take My Eyes Off You," died on Thursday in Scarborough, Me. He was 83.

His brother, Dan Crewe, confirmed his death. He said his brother had been in declining health after a fall several years ago while visiting him in Maine.

Mr. Crewe was a singer himself in the 1940s and ’50s, but he found his niche writing, co-writing and producing for a wide range of other artists, sometimes on record labels he started, including Dynovoice. His first hit, written with Frank Slay, was the 1957 single "Silhouettes"; a Top 10 hit for the Rays, it became a Top 10 hit again for Herman’s Hermits in 1965.

That same year he produced "Devil With a Blue Dress On & Good Golly Miss Molly," a hit for Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

Nearly a decade later he wrote, with Kenny Nolan, "Lady Marmalade," recorded by Labelle. Propelled by its provocative and irresistible chorus in French, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir," it rose to No. 1 in 1974. Nearly three decades later, a new version of the song featuring Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Pink and Mya, featured in the movie "Moulin Rouge," was also a No. 1 hit.

But it was in his work with the Four Seasons and the striking falsetto of Mr. Valli that Mr. Crewe established himself as a master purveyor of pop sentimentality. In less than 10 years he helped make the group one of the best known in the history of popular music.

The group had been struggling to find a hit and a record label in the early 1960s when Mr. Crewe, who had worked with Mr. Valli in the past, decided to take a chance on them. In 1962 he produced their first No. 1 hit, "Sherry," written by the group’s keyboardist, Bob Gaudio, and he soon began helping write songs for them.

With Mr. Gaudio composing most of the music, Mr. Crew wrote most of the words — some syrupy, some shamelessly ogling — that Mr. Valli sang with urgency. Mr. Crewe is portrayed in the hit Broadway musical "Jersey Boys" and credited as the show’s lyricist; in the movie version, directed by Clint Eastwood, he is played by Mike Doyle.

Few of Mr. Crewe’s songs are more enduring than "Can’t Take My Eyes Off You," which Mr. Valli recorded as a solo artist and which rose to No. 2 in 1967. Mr. Crewe, the producer, wrote the lyrics; Mr. Gaudio, the music. The song begins with a whisper:

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take my eyes off of you.

You’d be like heaven to touch

I want to hold you so much

At long last love has arrived

And I thank God I’m alive.

You’re just too good to be true

Can’t take eyes my off of you.

Then it bursts into the chorus:

I love you, baby

And if it’s quite all right

I need you, baby,

To warm the lonely night

I love you, baby

Trust in me when I say

Oh pretty baby ...

With bright bells, ample strings and big, precise percussion, Mr. Crewe’s productions were crisp confections that gave little ground to the rougher rock that was on the rise in the 1960s. He wrote about innocent crushes, direct sexuality and heartache, his metaphors always accessible. Against the big melody of "The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)," which was first recorded by the Four Seasons but became a bigger hit for the Walker Brothers, he wrote in sad counterpoint:

Loneliness is the coat you wear,

A deep shade of blue is always there.

The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore.

The moon ain’t gonna rise in the sky

The tears are always clouding your eyes

When you’re without love.

Robert Stanley Crewe was born on Nov. 12, 1930, in Newark and grew up in Belleville, N.J. He took tap dance lessons as a boy and performed on street corners in Newark. After graduating from Belleville High School, he studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan before dropping out to pursue music. He met Mr. Slay in New York and by the early 1950s they were writing songs together.

Mr. Crewe recorded some songs as the Bob Crewe Generation in the 1960s and had a modest hit with the instrumental "Music to Watch Girls By." He also produced "Good Morning Starshine," a single by the singer Oliver from the score of the musical "Hair."

"He had what they used to call ears," said Ralph M. Newman, who worked in music publishing in the 1960s and ’70s and knew Mr. Crewe. "He could recognize what the popular taste was."

Mr. Crewe was gay, and his brother, his only survivor, said he was discreet about his sexuality in many of his social circles. He noted that in "Jersey Boys" Mr. Crewe was portrayed as overtly gay, but in real life that was not the case, Mr. Newman said, particularly during the period when he was working with the Four Seasons. Promotional material for Dynovoice Records quoted a female singer fawning over Mr. Crewe’s handsomeness.

"Whenever he met someone, he would go into what I always called his John Wayne mode, this extreme machoism," Dan Crewe said.

That fact that Mr. Crewe wrote so many songs about women reflected the complicated culture of his era as well as his shrewd professionalism, his brother said. Asked if some of his songs had been inspired by male romantic interests, Dan Crewe said: "It wasn’t motivated by anything, except he had an intense love affair with words. He told stories."

War Mongers and ISIL

　

Trevor Timm theguardian.com,

　

According to previews of Obama’s Wednesday speech, the very airstrikes the public has been scared into supporting will reportedly expand fast – not only in Iraq but into Syria. Photograph: Bixentro / Flickr via Creative Commons

Did you know that the US government’s counterterrorism chief Matthew Olson said last week that "there’s no credible information" that the Islamic State (Isis) is planning an attack on America and that there’s "no indication at this point of a cell of foreign fighters operating in the United States"? Or that, as the Associated Press reported, "The FBI and Homeland Security Department say there are no specific or credible terror threats to the US homeland from the Islamic State militant group"?

Probably not, because as the nation barrels towards yet another war in the Middle East and President Obama prepares to address that nation on the "offensive phase" of his military plan Wednesday night, mainstream media pundits and the usual uber-hawk politicians are busy trying to out-hyperbole each other over the threat Isis poses to Americans. In the process, they’re all but ignoring any evidence to the contrary and the potential hole of blood and treasure into which they’re ready to drive this country all over again.

Facts or consequences have never gotten in the way of Congress’ lust for war before – this political body was, after all, George W Bush’s chief enabler in Iraq the last time around – and this time it’s no different. Sen James Inhofe (R-OK) recently said Isis militants are "rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major US city and people just can’t believe that’s happening." (Maybe because there’s no proof that they are?) Sen Bill Nelson (D-FL) said, "It ought to be pretty clear when they … say they’re going to fly the black flag of ISIS over the White House that Isis is a clear and present danger." (Again, who cares if they’re not?)

The White House declared on Tuesday night that it needn’t bother to ask Congress for war powers, and Congress is more than happy to relieve itself of the responsibility of asking for them – or, you know, voting. Members of both parties have actually been telling the president to ignore the legislative branch entirely – as well as his constitutional and legal requirements. It seems so long ago now that presidential candidate Obama said, "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

"What if it comes over and you can’t pass it?" asked Sen Lindsay Graham, as though he wouldn’t want democracy getting in the way of a nice war. The aforementioned Sen Nelson said he thinks the president should go ahead and strike Isis all he wants, but added that "there are some legal scholars who think otherwise, so let’s just put it to rest". Those pesky legal scholars with their "laws" and that "Constitution" of theirs, always slowing things down.

Meanwhile, the media has been busy arguing whether Obama is talking "tough" enough, how closely Isis resembles the Nazis, and how much military strength the US is going to unleash to "destroy" Isis – never pausing to question whether that’s prudent or even possible (or maybe that it’s exactly what Isis wants).

How many people wake up and ask themselves, "I wonder what Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger think about Isis?" Outside of a few TV bookers, absolutely no one does – but with war on the horizon, the nation’s most awful surviving warmongers get to go back on the television circuit and address members of Congress, explaining that, if we just drop a few more bombs, it’ll actually work this time! (Unlike all the other times.)

Thanks to this wall-to-wall fear mongering, a once war-weary public is now terrified. More than 60% of the public in a recent CNN poll now supports airstrikes against Isis. Two more polls came out on Tuesday, one from the Washington Post and the other from NBC New and the Wall Street Journal, essentially concluding the same thing. Most shocking, 71% think that Isis has terrorist sleeper cells in the United States, against all evidence to the contrary.

So where to from here? Well, those airstrikes the public have been scared into supporting, which already numbering the hundreds, will reportedly expand fast – not only in Iraq but into Syri. The White House even has shiny new euphemism for such military attacks, as the Wall Street Journal reported: "Mr. Obama could green-light the new ‘sovereignty strikes’ in his address on Wednesday." George Orwell would be proud.

And the president is said to favor a multi-pronged approach that also relies on our "partners" – like the repressive Saudi Arabia – to train and arm the "moderate" Syrian resistance army that is fighting both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Isis in Syria. (Yes, that’s the same Saudi Arabia which, as the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reported, have been accused of funding and supporting Isis, and the same Saudi Arabia that beheaded 19 people in just the first half of August, including eight for non-violent offenses.)

It’s also strange that we are unquestionably calling the Free Syrian Army (FSA) the "moderate" opposition and putting our faith in their abilities, despite many actual experts claiming they’re far from moderate and far from a cohesive army. As George Washington University’s Marc Lynch wrote in the Washington Post recently, "The FSA was always more fiction than reality, with a structure on paper masking the reality of highly localized and fragmented fighting groups on the ground." The New York Times reported two weeks ago that FSA has a penchant for beheading its enemy captives as well, and now the family of Steven Sotloff, the courageous journalist who was barbarically beheaded by Isis, says that someone from the "moderate" opposition sold their son to Isis before he was killed.

The only red line when it comes to Isis, or at least the red line claimed by Secretary of State John Kerry, seems to be no ground troops. Of course, there are already ground troops in Iraq, fighting alongside the Kurds – we just call them "advisors", which is another innocuous euphemism for special forces. And as Glenn Greenwald writes, it’s inevitabley only a matter of time until there will be a clamoring from the chattering class for that, too.

So how, exactly, will the administration accomplish "destroying" Isis, when no amount of bombs and soldiers have been able to destroy al-Qaida or the Taliban in nearly 13 years of fighting? The administration openly admits it has no idea how long it will take, only that it won’t be quick. "It may take a year, it may take two years, it may take three years," John Kerry said.

He didn’t add, "it might take another 13", but he might as well have.

Joan Rivers, a Comedic Stiletto, Dies at 81

By ROBERT D. McFadden NY TIMES

 

Joan Rivers, the raspy loudmouth who pounced on America’s obsessions with flab, face-lifts, body hair and other blemishes of neurotic life, including her own, in five decades of caustic comedy that propelled her from nightclubs to television to international stardom, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 81.

Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, confirmed her death.

Ms. Rivers died at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she was taken last Thursday after reportedly losing consciousness while undergoing a procedure on her vocal cords at a doctor’s office on the Upper East Side. Doctors at the hospital placed her in a medically induced coma. On Tuesday, her daughter said she was on life support; on Wednesday, she said she had been moved out of intensive care.

The State Health Department is investigating the circumstances that led to her death, a state official said Thursday.

She was one of America’s first successful female stand-up comics in an aggressive vein that had been almost exclusively the province of men, from Don Rickles to Lenny Bruce. And she was a role model and an inspiration for tough-talking comedians like Roseanne Barr, Sarah Silverman and countless others.

Vivacious even as a nipped-and-tucked octogenarian, flitting from coast to coast and stage to studio in a whirl of live and taped shows, publicity stunts and cosmetic surgery appointments, Ms. Rivers evolved from a sassy, self-deprecating performer early in her career into a coarser assassin, slashing at celebrities and others with a rapier wit that some critics called comic genius in the bloodletting vein of Mr. Bruce. Others called it downright vicious. But if she turned the scowlers off, she left millions in stitches.

"Can we talk?" she demanded in her signature call to gossip and skewer — the brassy Jewish-American princess from Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Larchmont, in Westchester County, leveling with the world.

She would take the stage in a demure black sheath and ladylike pearls, a tiny bouffant blonde with a genteel air of sorority decorum. Then she’d stick her finger down her throat and regurgitate the dirt on the rich and famous, the stream-of-conscious take on national heroes and sacrosanct cultural idols.

On Nancy Reagan’s hairdo: "Bulletproof. If they ever combed it, they’d find Jimmy Hoffa."

On Charlton Heston: "He told us, ‘I got Alzheimer’s.’ Surprise! He’s been wearing his wig sideways for 19 years."

On Donatella Versace: "That skin! She looks like something you’d hang off your door in Africa."

On Sandra Bullock’s Bottega Veneta gown at the Golden Globes: "It looked like Prince’s old prom dress." (And Tina Fey’s Zac Posen: "A decorative toilet seat cover.")

On Queen Elizabeth II: "Gowns by Helen Keller." "Nice looking. Not at all like her stamp. Wears her watch over the glove, though — tacky."

On herself, desperate for a man: "My parents had a sign, ‘Last girl before thruway.’ I’d get an obscene phone call. I’d say, ‘Hold on a minute, let me get a cigarette.’ "

Nothing was sacred.

On her husband’s suicide: "After Edgar killed himself, I went out to dinner with Melissa. I looked at the menu and said, ‘If Daddy were here to see these prices, he’d kill himself all over again.’ "

Even the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were not off limits. "A few days after 9/11," Jonathan Van Meter recalled in a 2010 New York magazine article, "she called and asked me if I wanted to meet her for lunch at Windows on the Ground."

Mr. Van Meter wrote: "She pushes as far as she can as soon as she can. It’s compulsive."

Shocked? Offended?

"Oh, grow up!" she advised.

Successes and Setbacks

A contemporary of Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, she began doing stand-up routines in nightclubs in the late 1950s, and broke through as a guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson in 1965. Over the next two decades she became a regular guest host on the Carson show, a Las Vegas headliner and a television star. In 1986, she hit the big time with a $10 million contract as host of the new Fox network’s weeknight entry, "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers," competing directly with her old benefactor.

Then came a series of devastating professional and personal setbacks. She was shunned by Carson, who said that she had never informed him of the Fox offer and who apparently considered her disloyal for accepting it. She insisted that it had had nothing to do with loyalty, and that Fox had wanted her because her ratings were higher and her demographics younger than his.

After less than a year on the air, she was fired by Fox when her ratings slumped. Her husband and manager, Edgar Rosenberg, fell into depression after a heart attack and committed suicide in 1987. Ms. Rivers became estranged from her only child, Melissa. Bookings dried up, and her career seemed to be on the rocks.

But, struggling with grief, Ms. Rivers traveled for a time, then fell back on the resilience of laughter and revived her comedy career. As she told widows and other sorrowing women at a lecture billed as a "grief seminar" some years later: Think positive. Make a list. "One, I don’t live in Bosnia. Two, I never dated O. J."

"There are two kinds of friends, and both mean very well," she added. "One group doesn’t want you to grieve at all — ‘Come on, come on. It has been a week and a half since you lost Joe. Get out. Enough!’ The other kind never want to see you be anything but grieving. ‘Your husband is dead only eight years, and you’re wearing a red dress?’ "

Dreaming of the Stage

Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1933, to Meyer and Beatrice Grushman Molinsky, immigrants from Russia. Her father, a doctor, did comic impersonations of patients. Her mother insisted on piano lessons and private schools for Joan and her sister, Barbara, who grew up in Brooklyn and Larchmont. Joan attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, Connecticut College for Women and Barnard College in Manhattan, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1954 with a degree in English.

Dreaming of an acting career, she worked in the publicity department at Lord & Taylor and was a fashion coordinator for the Bond clothing stores. Her marriage to James Sanger, the son of the Bond stores’ merchandiser, was annulled after six months in the 1950s. She married Mr. Rosenberg in 1965. Melissa was her only child. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a grandson, Cooper.

Her parents refused to support her acting ambitions, and she struggled for years in office temp jobs while taking small parts off Off Broadway. She became a stand-up comic to support her acting, working in grimy cafes and small clubs, and was fired often. But she liked comedy and was good at it. She developed fresh routines based on her experiences and observations, changed her name to Rivers and got a few breaks.

 

 

In "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s" (2003), Gerald Nachman wrote, "Rivers is actually the well-groomed comic granddaughter of Yiddishe mamas like Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female titans who roamed the Catskills and Miami Beach and who reveled in subversive humor at the expense of both men and themselves." He added, "When that wore out and she became a star, she turned her death ray on others, verbally abusing women who were thinner, richer and more famous while serving audiences as their new bitchy role model, styled by Oscar de la Yenta."

There were risks and reversals in her more aggressive style. Her appearance on Jack Paar’s "Tonight Show" gave her national exposure, but audiences and Mr. Paar himself were appalled at her off-color ethnic jokes. Far from a springboard to success, it was a career setback.

In the early ’60s, she joined the Chicago-based Second City troupe, whose improvisational approach, she said, reinforced her confidence, although she preferred stand-up solos to its ensemble work. She had many gigs in Greenwich Village and performed with a musical-comedy trio, Jim, Jake and Joan. She also wrote for CBS’s "Candid Camera," and in 1966 began a series of appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

A Big Breakthrough

She broke through on Carson’s show in 1965. They had an immediate rapport. She told gags about her mother’s struggle to marry her off, and about a motorist who ran over her wig and apologized for killing her dog. She soon had bookings at choice nightclubs in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

As a frequent guest host on "The Tonight Show" in the ’70s, she toned down her acidity for the national audience and often exploited self-deprecation, a theme of her early nightclub work: "A peeping Tom looked in my window and pulled down the shade." She was so fat as a child that "I was my own buddy at camp; I began to retreat into myselves."

Her ratings as host sometimes surpassed Carson’s, and NBC signed her as the sole regular replacement during his eight or nine annual vacation weeks from 1983 to 1986. The national exposure made her a superstar. She was on magazine covers, commanded $200,000 for five nights in Las Vegas and was in demand for awards shows, conventions and TV specials.

Besides appearing in Hollywood films, she directed one: "Rabbit Test," a 1978 comedy about the world’s first pregnant man, starring Billy Crystal, with Ms. Rivers in a cameo as a nurse. Critics hated it. But her volume of madcap fiction, "The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz" (1984), was a best seller for months and sold a half-million hardcover copies.

After being dismissed by Fox, she reinvented herself as a writer, producer and entrepreneur. She and her daughter reconciled and made a film, "Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story" (1994). Beginning in 2011 they had their own reality show, "Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?" on the WE cable channel.

For years Ms. Rivers marketed her own lines of jewelry and clothing on television shopping channels. Beginning in the mid-1990s, she turned up at the Grammys, the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, first for the E! Entertainment network and then for the TV Guide Channel, poking a microphone into freshly Botoxed faces on red carpets and asking, "Who are you wearing?" In 2010 she began starring on the E! show "Fashion Police," where she and a panel gleefully critiqued celebrities’ wardrobes.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, she had her own daytime television talk program, "The Joan Rivers Show"; she won the Daytime Emmy for best talk show host in 1990. She was also nominated for Drama Desk and Tony awards for her performance in the title role of "Sally Marr ... and Her Escorts," a 1994 Broadway play based on the life of Lenny Bruce’s mother.

A documentary, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, was released in 2010. By then she had weathered 50 years in show business, appeared in thousands of television programs, more than a dozen films and countless nightclubs; written 11 books; raised millions for AIDS, cystic fibrosis and other charities; and amassed a fortune estimated at $290 million.

She lived in a triplex penthouse just off Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park that featured a ballroom with gilded columns and 23-foot-high ceilings. It was on the market for $29.5 million in 2011, when she told The New York Times: "Qaddafi wanted to rent it for that whole U.N. thing. People said it’s blood money. I said, ‘Oh, I can easily wash blood off dollar bills.’ But they didn’t like it. It was too close to a synagogue."

Imagine having this guy as a cellmate? There'd never be a dull moment!

South Beach conman who pitched anti-aging yogurt cream gets 10 years in prison

Joseph Fox Batista duped investors with the claim that he had developed a yogurt-based cream that would regrow hair and reverse effects of aging.

By David Ovalle Miami Herald

Joseph Fox Batista, an eccentric South Beach wannabe inventor who dazzled investors with the promise of a yogurt-based cream to regrow hair and slow aging, is now a convicted conman.

A Miami-Dade jury last week convicted Fox, a self-described microbiologist, of second-degree grand theft. Fox, 59, was immediately sentenced to 10 years in prison plus five years of probation.

His conviction came three years after Fox was profiled in the Miami Herald. In a jailhouse interview, Fox insisted he never stole money, and that shadowy forces — including the hair-transplant industry — were conspiring to hold back his invention and company, Telogenesis Inc.

But investigators said Fox suckered investors into buying at least $380,000 worth of bogus stock.

"Obviously, I have to be paid. I’m the CEO of a corporation. The CEO gets at least $100,000 a year," Fox said in 2011. "I’m actually paying myself very little — at times, nothing. I have running costs. I have to pay my rent. I have to feed myself. I’m doing the work of 1,000 people."

At trial last week, Fox’s defense claimed the case was nothing more than a civil business dispute.

"The company is still alive and viable and holds patents on materials," defense attorney Ira Still said.

After the guilty verdict Friday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jose L. Fernandez also ordered Fox to pay $40,000 in restitution to six investors. Fox was prosecuted by assistant state attorneys Christine Rhee and Terry Livanos.

It was not Fox’s first scheme. In California, he was convicted in 2002 of ripping off investors after peddling a machine that purported to weigh the amount of gold in any object.

More than a decade later, he moved to Florida. On the streets of South Beach, he was known for his bowl haircut and penchant for white Panama hats, guayabera shirts and sparkly dress shoes.

He began peddling his so-called anti-aging research to pedestrians on Lincoln Road, claiming he was the nephew of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, a story denied by former leader’s family.

"He had so much faith in himself. I don’t even think he knows he’s crazy," one former roommate told the Herald in 2011. "He truly thinks he’s the smartest person in the world."

His yogurt cream purported to grow hair on balding men, turn gray hair dark and generally reverse the aging process. At the heart of his pitch was an enzyme known as telomerase, discovered in the early 1980s, which scientists believe can slow the decline of the body’s cells.

But experts say research is still basic and has not shown that successfully introducing the enzyme into the body can reverse aging in older humans.

Fox insisted the investment money went to lab testing, clinical trials, production and marketing. But after combing through bank records and interviewing victims, state agents found that most of the money invested from July 2007 to November 2009 went toward Fox’s daily living expenses, including alcohol, drugs and lavish meals for friends.