'Hang there like fruit"

Last night we watched "The Man Who Cheated Himself"(1950), a B+ noir/murder mystery/police procedural with Lee J. Cobb as a detective who falls for a rich homicidal dame and gets himself into a lot of predictable hot water. In the film, Cobb has a younger brother, a straight-arrow, played by John Dall, an actor well-remembered for his leading role in Hitchcock's creepy "Rope"(1948).

 

 

That's John Dall on the right with a young Lee J. Cobb romancing Jane Wyatt in the foreground.

 

Afterward, we looked up John Dall in Wik and with mouths agape learned (verbatim quotation coming up here) that Dall "liked to be tied upside down to trees in Laurel Canyon in the middle of the night. He liked to hang upside down naked until morning. Once a week, he wanted this." Improbable, yes, but probably true, because it's beyond ordinary human imagination to invent such a thing. 

 

As far as I'm concerned and naif as I may be to "alternative sexual practices," it's one thing to fantasize about hanging naked tied to a tree upside down until dawn in Laurel Canyon (I'm sure we've all done so), but to move from theory to practice  -- now that is a challenge.

 

Serious questions: Did Dall like to hang from a branch of a tree, or did he like to be tied to the trunk of a tree? In either case, he'd require assistance -- at least two strong men, I'd imagine. Did they wait, motor running in the taxi, while he hung, or did they hang out at some all night coffee spot and then come back at dawn to untie him. And another question -- what kind of tree?  Much of Laurel Canyon is merely sage or chaparral, but there are trees on the lower riparian slopes. What's the best tree to hang from until dawn? Willows, unless they're black willows, are too flimsy, but live oak, California sycamore, and Fremont's cottonwood might be hefty enough to bear the load. Did John Dall have a favorite tree to whom he was loyal, or was he arboreally promiscuous?

 

And also -- is once a week too many, or too few, or just the right number of times to hang upside-down naked from a tree through the night?

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Dall's nickname was Dally, and his sexual fantasies inspired a song originally entitled "Hang Down Your Head, John Dally," later corrupted to "Dooley."

You can look it up.