Five days ago (8.19) Farran Smith Nehme (aka Self-Styled Siren) posted an investigation into the “John Wayne slash Sasheen Littlefeather backstage-at-the-1973-Oscars” urban legend (i.e., specifically that Wayne had to be restrained by six security guards to prevent him from going medieval on Littlefeather after she declined Marlon Brando‘s Best Actor Oscar over the film industry’s treatment of Native Americans).
Nehme concluded that (a) the six security guards thing “never happened,” but (b) two people were responsible for creating and propulgating the myth — Oscar telecast producer-director Marty Pasetta, and British writer Joan Sadler.
The following day (8.20) HE “covered” Nehme’s article, adding emphasis here and here. HE’s piece was titled “Unreliable Narrators.” The key thing to remember, I wrote, was that the “bad guys” in this affair were Pasetta and Sadler, but primarily Sadler because she was first out of the gate with the security guys fable, having written about them in a 1981 article.
Yesterday (8.23) L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik posted his own coverage of Nehme’s article (“Did John Wayne try to assault Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 Oscars? Debunking a Hollywood myth“). Hiltzik’s workmanlike piece, written in standard L.A. Times-ese (professionally honed, neutralish, suppressed personality) covered the basics and added nothing new.
Hiltzik did, however, get one thing wrong, and in so doing subtracted something significant — poor Joan Sadler. Apparently because Nehme’s sourcing on Sadler’s 1981 article (i.e., the one that introduced the six security guys to the civilized world) is somewhere between thin and non-existent.
The thorough and exacting Nehme, however, did quote from Sadler’s article, so we can probably presume that it was in fact written and published.
Here’s how Hiltzik puts it: “[Nehme] says the story began as an exaggerated yarn that Oscar telecast director Marty Pasetta started telling interviewers a year or so after the fact ‘that got more exciting each time it was told’ until it became ‘a persistent urban legend.'”
All I know is that Joan Sadler’s place in history — a woman who, according to Nehme, did so much to shape the historical legend of John Wayne’s final decade and who was the first to provide a seminal enhancement of the Littlefeather legend by characterizing her as a female buckskinned Beowulf vs. Wayne’s Grendel — has been dismissed by Michael Hiltzik and the L.A. Times.
And yet according to Nehme, Joan did it first! Joan created the security guys, and then Pasetta ran with them seven years later.
Sadler, in short, almost certainly invented the Backstage Security Six as surely as Akira Kurosawa invented the Seven Samurai, as George Lucas invented Luke Skywalker and as Margaret Mitchell invented Scarlett O’Hara.
But Hiltzik is saying “Naaah, let’s give all the credit to Pasetta. An Academy guy, credibly sourced, killed in Palm Desert by drunk driver…safer that way.”