Literary Connection to Old Celebrity

 

I discovered another connection I have with a celebrity from days of old. Much like that time I stumbled over Lee Harvey Oswald’s library take-out online. I find myself endlessly fascinated with what other people read. Whenever someone’s interviewed on teevee with a bookshelf behind him, or when I see a row of books in the background in a movie scene, I’m always dying to see the names scrawled on the spines of those out-of-focus books.

 

Anyway, I’m reading a goofy little book on UFO phenomena. It hearkens back to the spooky days of my youth. A dose of nostalgia to wipe away the stresses of the day. In this book it’s stated that comedian Jackie Gleason was a huge UFO buff. He had a house built in upstate New York shaped like a flying saucer. Golfing buddy Richard Nixon allegedly showed the girthy comic alien bodies at an air force base late one drunken night. Along with an interest with the paranormal and the occult, he had over 1,400 books in his collection at the time of his death in 1987. The collection was then donated to a local college, and I found a link to it online.

 

Jackie Gleason was most famously known as Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners as well as the sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds. Smokey was a staple of my youth, and the Honeymooners was a staple at college, where my roommates and I, usually drunk but not always so, would watch the show late at night before bed. Occasionally a little wacky weed would be involved and we’d turn off the sound and ad-lib the dialogue. Gleason was one of my grandfather’s favorite comics, too.  He was the Jim Carrey or Will Ferrell of the 1950s, in a somewhat weak but fair analogy.

 

So what did Jackie Gleason read that I, Hopper, also put away? Out of 1,437 books, we have 15 specifically in common:

 

The UFO Experience, by Dr. J. Allen Hynek

Flying Saucers, by Carl Jung

Invisible Residents and Uninvited Visitors, by Ivan Sanderson

Communion, by Whitley Strieber

The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James

Flying Saucers Here and Now, by Frank Edwards

The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz

The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley

Meetings with Remarkable Men, by Gurdjieff

Autobiography of a Yoga, by Paramahansa Yogananda

Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigal

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche (!)

and

No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, the first biography of Door’s lead singer Jim Morrison (!!!)

 

Additionally, Gleason had a book of Nostradamus prophecies (similar to a giant tome my father-in-law gave me one Christmas), a book on the philosophical treatises of Leibniz (I still have Monadology on the shelves), and a book titled The Evolution of Physics, by Albert Einstein (!).

 

What lessons can be drawn, other than Jackie Gleason and Hopper have literary tastes often quite far from the mainstream road?

 

Well, as one should never judge a book by its cover, one should never judge a reader by his collection. Or maybe better, one never knows another truly until he sees what books are on the other’s shelf.