Maria Elana Among A Few All-American Boys

Maria Elana Amid A Few All American Boys. by R.E. Prindle The sweet sounds of “Maria Elana” soar about my ears into ethereal realms of harmonic bliss. The pleasant rhythmic damping of the acoustic guitar lulls my subconscious while the magnificent lead guitar stimulates my frontal lobes into dynamic activities imagining worlds that do exist but only in the imagination. If not of this world perhaps the next…or the one after that. I have my pen in hand searching for a lead into the story line I have in mind. I still compose the old fashioned way with pen and paper. Somehow it is easier to compose my thoughts from left to right rather than spewing them from my brain until they’re all gone. Force of habit I suppose. I could get lost forever in the swirling melody of Maria Elana but I would be just that, lost. In that direction lies that peculiar form of insanity- a withdrawal from reality. The damping rhythm guitar draws me back down into a balance between the dream world of harmony and the dark ulterior reality of the subconscious. Balance is what the world needs now. Love’s not the question and love’s not the answer. A place between the exterior world of appearances and the inner world of wishful thinking. How do you know you’re here? That is the substance of my researches into Edgar Rice Burroughs. Here was a man struggling to control the terrors of the world of appearances and the blissful world of soaring melodies. I will ask you this enigmatic question without providing the answer. Burroughs knew the answer. Are you from Dixie? ‘ Cause if you’re from Dixie, I’m from Dixie too.’ If you’re from Dixie you will understand. Thus I search through the pages of history, the mazes of personality, over the sea of doubt and uncertainty in search of answers that will have no more substance then that melody of Maria Elena that envelopes and sooths my mind. How does a writer work? How does he seize and sort out facts, ideas and fancies? As Louis Armstrong said: if you have to ask, you’ll never know. Louis played trumpet: trumpet players are notably arrogant. Still, there is wisdom in his comment. Like the lead guitarist of Maria Elena you have to reach for those notes; you have to combine them in the right order and touch the strings in the proper manner. Then perhaps the mood comes through. It not that easy, I tell you. I’m going to try something here to see how it works: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, Bill Bonanno. There’s a nice assortment of names isn’t it. 1938 to 1963. What links are there between them? This is how I work. You have to read a lot of stuff. The above list represents a couple hundred books. I say this not out of vanity but only so you don’t think I make this stuff up out of whole cloth. I or anyone else have to work at it. See what you think. In 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs left his wife of thirty-four years, the lovely and loving Emma Hulbert Burroughs. She was the mother of his three children. They had had a rocky relationship for thirty years. The rocks were unavoidable. As a man it was ERB’s duty to overcome them. That is the responsibility and burden of being a man. Might seem unfair but, hello Xy. That’s the way nature is; it doesn’t give a hoot about you, sink or swim. ERB then took up with an anima figure named Florence Gilbert Dearholt. She represented the ideal X of ERB’s Xy. But no real live woman can ever fulfill a man like his Anima ideal. The Anima ideal is like that melody of Maria Elena that fills your mind. It may be real but you’ll never be able to touch it. Ed and Flo were decent, self-respecting citizens of this here Republic. They moved into an apartment building just above Sunset and Doheny in LA. Resident also in the same building was a fellow immigrant from Chicago by the name of Johnny Roselli. They were friends or became friends. Perhaps Roselli’s first name of John recommended him to Burroughs. John was ERB’s favorite male name. If Roselli had used his real name of Filippo Sacco he might have found making the acquaintance rougher going. Then about thirty-three years of age, Roselli was an attractive young man with an outgoing personality. He became friends with Flo and Ed. I don’t know if ERB ever knew it but Johnny Roselli was a mafia hit man and loan shark for the Chicago Outfit. A truly dangerous man to know. But you might know him and never know he rubbed out your best friend. ERB seems to have been taken by him because he appears in ‘Tarzan And The Foreign Legion’ under the name of Johnny Rosetti. One imagines that Roselli talked and acted like Rosetti. Rosetti was one of the Foreign Legion. ERB caught up in the flow of the Melting Pot, touts Rosetti as an example of how all Americans can come together. ERB went to Hawaii as the forties began. It’s hard to believe he didn’t hear of it but Roselli went to prison shortly after so he never realy played the part of Rosetti accorded him by a benevolent Edgar Rice Burroughs. No, Johnny Roselli didn’t serve his time serving his country out in the Pacific theater. About the time ERB was writing ‘Tarzan and the Foreign Legion’ Frank Sinatra, a very dangerous man, was filming a short subject about tolerance for Italians and others. There were no minorities, in popular parlance, merely people of different national, ethnic, racial and religious origins. The concept of minorities which instituted the notion came later. About this time a young Naval officer had his PT boat torpedoed in the Pacific. That was John F. Kennedy. Bill Bonano, the son of a New York Mafia chieftain was a young man of Kennedy’s age enjoying the good life of unrationed gasoline and all the good things. While ordinary Americans suffered deprivations and their young men served overseas Mafioso wise guys had plenty of everything while enjoying the soldier wives. The melody of Maria Elana fades in an out of consciousness about here. Sam Giancana was out from behind the wheel beginning his rise through the ranks of the Outfit. In the intervening years Roselli got out of prison. Frank Sinatra went through some lean years at the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties. Giancana got bigger, Kennedy and Bonanno sought their places in the world. As luck would have it Sam Giancana became the figurehead of the Outfit which was really run by Tony Accardo with Roselli as an underboss. Jack Kennedy became a candidate for President of the United States. The Kennedy family began as criminals in close association with the Mafia. Now in 1958-60 as Jack was mounting his presidential campaign his father Joe Kennedy, called on his old associates for help ‘getting out the vote which they were very willing to give as to their minds they would have another criminal in the White House. God only knows what Jack might have done, but his little brother, Bobby, was truly an idealistic young man. Bobby double crossed the mob. He went after them from his post as Attorney General. At the time it seemed probable that Jack would do eight years, Bobby after him serve and Teddy succeed Bobby; a dynasty of twenty=four years. With that kind of control it seemed pretty safe to hit the mob. What were they going to do about it? Bill Bonano stood back amazed. The way he saw it he was every bit the man his contemporary criminal, Jack Kennedy was. Joe Kennedy and his dad, Joe Bonanno had been associates. So, why was he considered a reprehensible criminal while Jack Kennedy was the President of the United States? Didn’t make much sense. I agree with Bill. Strange, huh? Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana were extremely put out by the double cross. Sinatra had his own emotional problems. He thought he was going to be close buddies with the ‘most powerful man in the word.’ He even had a helicopter pad put in his backyard so the Pres could drop in whenever he liked. Frank was not the kind of guy to toy around with. He was mean and vindictive, emotionally unbalanced but not so crazy as to expose himself in self-destructive schemes. Everybody who tangled with Frank or got involved with him lost. Frank was crafty as heck. He humiliated Joe DiMaggio of whose reputation he was jealous. Kennedy, Giancana, Roselli all died terrible deaths while Frank died in bed. Think about it. Jack Kennedy managed to antagonize a lot of people. He was personally a very unlovely man. Disgusting in my humble. There were a lot of people who wanted him blotted out, not least of whom were Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana. These men were experts in blotting out people. Frank Sinatra…, Frank Sinatra. The old crooner fooled a lot of people just because he could carry a tune. He was a mama’s boy, you know. It’s a psychological fact that a mother’s love empowers a son. There are no alpha men who didn’t have an alpha mother. Alpha mothers come first, then the alpha man, and he doesn’t always look like they should. Sometimes they look like Frank Sinatra. Frank’s mom was not a fine moral example which is why Frank turned out the way he did, but she gave him strengths which couldn’t be matched by any of his contemporaries. Of course, it is not established who shot Kennedy, but I’ve come to the conclusion it was combination of the Outfit and CIA combined with a lot of indifference whether Kennedy died. Who was the go-between who coordinated the Outfit and the CIA? Who else could it have been? Francis Albert Sinatra. Who else had an entrée with the gentlemen of the CIA and the goons of the Outfit? Francis Albert Sinatra is the only one. Time sweeps so much under the rug that is perhaps never really notice or forgotten but, I remember seeing Frank Sinatra on TV on the day of the murder saying he had no responsibility for it, he was in LA at the time. And then he pulled the movie ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ in which he is depicted shooting a president from a distance with a rifle not unlike Oswald used. Hmmm. Johnny Roselli told a story to Bill Bonano. I am one who does not believe a Mafioso is any bigger a liar than anyone else. Everybody lies unblushingly when it suits their interests and tells the truth for the same reason. Apart from psychological indicators which point to Outfit involvement, Roselli told the interesting story to Bill Bonanno in prison. He could be lying but I see no reason for him to be doing so. Besides the story is so improbable that you’d have to be truly stupid to make it up. Roselli wasn’t that stupid. Bear in mind Roselli knew only knew what he had to know but he told Bonanno something like this. The Kennedy cavalcade wound its way into Dealy Plaza with the strains of Maria Elana floating high in the air where they couldn’t be heard over the cheers of the crowd. Johnny Roselli stood concealed in a sewer. Now, it is true that the manhole covers and sewer grates were not welded down as they should have been. That’s a notable error. As the car approached the checkpoint Oswald fired from the school building. What happened on the grassy knoll isn’t clear, Roselli says that he rose from the sewer and fired the shot that killed Kennedy. ‘I saw his head snap back.’ He said. Meanwhile back in Hollywood Frank Sinatra heard the news with a smile. He called off shooting for the day in honor of his old friend. I’m sure he thought to himself: ‘That ought to teach the bastard.’ Giancana fled the country shortly thereafter. Brought back from Mexico a decade later he was shot to death while frying his sausages. A couple years later Edgar Rice Burroughs’ old friend and model for Rosetti in Tarzan and the Foreign Legion washed ashore in an oil drum off Florida. After they reassembled the hacked up pieces it was Heeeeeer’s Johnny. Yup, that was him. Frank Sinatra died in his bed. Bill Bonanno is still around wondering how a criminal’s son made it to the White House while he, no more a criminal’s son than Kennedy, did a stretch in the pen while his steps are dogged by the FBI. I don’t know either. Edgar Rice Burroughs books were rediscovered in the year of the assassination rising to new heights of popularity. Millions upon millions of books. I’m snapping off my computer now as the strains of Maria Elana die away. So that’s kind of how I piece things together. I may only be able to use the parts of this, that directly concern ERB and Johnny Roseli but I might add more detail about ERB and also about Roselli’s activities in Hollywood. They were closer friends than you might think. Whatever the final product it began something like the above. I really like Maria Elana. I prefer the version by Los Indios Tabajaras. How about you? They were supposed to be indios from the jungles of Peru. Do you know who the Indios were? Two Jewish guys from Brooklyn in costume. We just can’t trust our ears and eyes can we?