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.
