Warning: spoiler alert.
When Lathrop Weld died in 1947, his wealthy family forced Yosene Ker, his widow, into a difficult decision. She could choose to give her in-laws full custody of their three children, provided she never see them again. Or, she could keep the kids and live in poverty.
Yosene kept the kids. But damned if she would live in poverty. She made the youngest, Susan, go to work as a child model. She then found an agent, who got the child acting gigs under the name Tuesday, a stylized variation of Susan’s childhood moniker.
To say that Weld grew up fast would be a bit of an understatement. By the age of five, she had become her family’s breadwinner. At nine, she starred in her first film. That same year, she suffered a nervous breakdown. By age twelve, she’d made her first suicide attempt amidst the throes of alcoholism. According to memoir writer and former actor John Gilmore she became a habitue of wild Hollywood parties--rife with the sex, drugs and bebop of the James Dean generation--by age fourteen.
By the time nymphet-mania came around in the 1960s, Weld starred in some memorable pictures as the dangerous girl who enchants men to wrack and ruin. The 1968 flick Pretty Poison starred Weld as a high school drill team geek who becomes the obsession of a recently released psychiatric patient played by Anthony Perkins (talk about type casting). The Perkins character can only find menial work, hardly anything that would give him a chance with a perky little teenager. So he tries to impress her by introducing himself as a CIA case officer. Under the guise of recruiting her into espionage, he involves her in a series of intrigues that winds up with her bludgeoning a guy to death. He voluntarily takes the rap for her.
Two years earlier, Weld played a wannabe high school cheerleader who becomes the fancy of Roddy McDowall in the film Lord Love a Duck. The McDowall character, like the Perkins character in Pretty Poison, winds up in prison for murder. Unlike the Perkins character, he actually committed the crime (mass murder this time) so that Weld’s character could realize her dream of becoming a movie star.
The movie is rather forgettable, despite the title. But it’s noted for this really bizarre scene in which the Weld character goes on a sweater shopping spree with her father (played by veteran actor Max Showalter). If nothing else, this scene proves, beyond all doubt reasonable or unreasonable, that the Hays Code was at death’s door by 1966. Ephebophilia and incest hadn’t quite come out of the silver nitrate closet, but they certainly lingered at the threshold.
Weld’s prominence in so many films of this era arguably established her as queen of the nymphets.* And one can see such movies as a response to the youth movement she symbolized for an older generation.
Celebrities generally become agents of identification. As such, they can exert more influence on popular culture than most of us. But one conspiracy researcher, Jeffrey Turner, asserted that Weld had more than a general influence on the counterculture. According to him, Weld created and micro-managed it.
Turner claimed that Weld is a “High Queen and Princess” of the Illuminati, a descendent of a long line of underground Druidic royalty. Moreover, he insisted that her mission during the 1960s consisted of distracting young activists away from political struggle. Acting under the orders of Bob Hope, her assignment consisted of enticing the youth of America into such hedonistic pursuits as sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, in hopes that they would someday conform to the dictates of creature comfort capitalism. He points out that a number of cultural references cryptically refer to this, most famously in the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.**
Although Turner felt that Weld’s goal was to dissuade 1960s youth from both pacifism and the fascistic bent of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by her former protege and later nemesis Kristi M., he nevertheless considered her evil, linking her to all sorts of murders–from Marilyn Monroe to Natalie Wood (whom he claimed to be his mother).
Adam Gorightly publicized Turner’s claim on his website and podcast (both titled Untamed Dimensions), and in an article for Paranoia magazine. Gorightly didn’t buy into Turner’s story. He nevertheless followed through on the hypothesis and turned up some items of interest, most notably Weld’s links not just to wealth and power, but to old-money wealth and power. The Weld family had a good deal of influence in politics (e.g. former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, Tuesday’s cousin), oil, finance capital and other business interest since fourteenth-century England. During the Nineteenth Century, the Welds supported the abolitionist movement. During the Twentieth Century, they forged ties to the Bush family.
Of course, if Gilmore is correct, Weld, at a very young age, had access to a milieu that would have included such actors as Dennis Hopper, whose friends Kenneth Anger and Marjorie Cameron had a strong interest in the occult.*** It’s not difficult to speculate that Weld at least developed some curiosity about a philosophy that embraced the hedonistic lifestyle they all enjoyed at that time.
Okay. So the notion of an underground celebrity sorceress who uses magick to influence major political events on behalf of economic and political elites seems, well, impossible for most of us (probably all of us) to swallow. Still, I find it curious that a woman who served as a cultural icon of 1960s male fears has again become a frightening symbol–at least to those believing in the grand Illuminati conspiracy hypothesis.
When Lathrop Weld died in 1947, his wealthy family forced Yosene Ker, his widow, into a difficult decision. She could choose to give her in-laws full custody of their three children, provided she never see them again. Or, she could keep the kids and live in poverty.
Yosene kept the kids. But damned if she would live in poverty. She made the youngest, Susan, go to work as a child model. She then found an agent, who got the child acting gigs under the name Tuesday, a stylized variation of Susan’s childhood moniker.
To say that Weld grew up fast would be a bit of an understatement. By the age of five, she had become her family’s breadwinner. At nine, she starred in her first film. That same year, she suffered a nervous breakdown. By age twelve, she’d made her first suicide attempt amidst the throes of alcoholism. According to memoir writer and former actor John Gilmore she became a habitue of wild Hollywood parties--rife with the sex, drugs and bebop of the James Dean generation--by age fourteen.
By the time nymphet-mania came around in the 1960s, Weld starred in some memorable pictures as the dangerous girl who enchants men to wrack and ruin. The 1968 flick Pretty Poison starred Weld as a high school drill team geek who becomes the obsession of a recently released psychiatric patient played by Anthony Perkins (talk about type casting). The Perkins character can only find menial work, hardly anything that would give him a chance with a perky little teenager. So he tries to impress her by introducing himself as a CIA case officer. Under the guise of recruiting her into espionage, he involves her in a series of intrigues that winds up with her bludgeoning a guy to death. He voluntarily takes the rap for her.
Two years earlier, Weld played a wannabe high school cheerleader who becomes the fancy of Roddy McDowall in the film Lord Love a Duck. The McDowall character, like the Perkins character in Pretty Poison, winds up in prison for murder. Unlike the Perkins character, he actually committed the crime (mass murder this time) so that Weld’s character could realize her dream of becoming a movie star.
The movie is rather forgettable, despite the title. But it’s noted for this really bizarre scene in which the Weld character goes on a sweater shopping spree with her father (played by veteran actor Max Showalter). If nothing else, this scene proves, beyond all doubt reasonable or unreasonable, that the Hays Code was at death’s door by 1966. Ephebophilia and incest hadn’t quite come out of the silver nitrate closet, but they certainly lingered at the threshold.
Weld’s prominence in so many films of this era arguably established her as queen of the nymphets.* And one can see such movies as a response to the youth movement she symbolized for an older generation.
Celebrities generally become agents of identification. As such, they can exert more influence on popular culture than most of us. But one conspiracy researcher, Jeffrey Turner, asserted that Weld had more than a general influence on the counterculture. According to him, Weld created and micro-managed it.
Turner claimed that Weld is a “High Queen and Princess” of the Illuminati, a descendent of a long line of underground Druidic royalty. Moreover, he insisted that her mission during the 1960s consisted of distracting young activists away from political struggle. Acting under the orders of Bob Hope, her assignment consisted of enticing the youth of America into such hedonistic pursuits as sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, in hopes that they would someday conform to the dictates of creature comfort capitalism. He points out that a number of cultural references cryptically refer to this, most famously in the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.**
Although Turner felt that Weld’s goal was to dissuade 1960s youth from both pacifism and the fascistic bent of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by her former protege and later nemesis Kristi M., he nevertheless considered her evil, linking her to all sorts of murders–from Marilyn Monroe to Natalie Wood (whom he claimed to be his mother).
Adam Gorightly publicized Turner’s claim on his website and podcast (both titled Untamed Dimensions), and in an article for Paranoia magazine. Gorightly didn’t buy into Turner’s story. He nevertheless followed through on the hypothesis and turned up some items of interest, most notably Weld’s links not just to wealth and power, but to old-money wealth and power. The Weld family had a good deal of influence in politics (e.g. former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, Tuesday’s cousin), oil, finance capital and other business interest since fourteenth-century England. During the Nineteenth Century, the Welds supported the abolitionist movement. During the Twentieth Century, they forged ties to the Bush family.
Of course, if Gilmore is correct, Weld, at a very young age, had access to a milieu that would have included such actors as Dennis Hopper, whose friends Kenneth Anger and Marjorie Cameron had a strong interest in the occult.*** It’s not difficult to speculate that Weld at least developed some curiosity about a philosophy that embraced the hedonistic lifestyle they all enjoyed at that time.
Okay. So the notion of an underground celebrity sorceress who uses magick to influence major political events on behalf of economic and political elites seems, well, impossible for most of us (probably all of us) to swallow. Still, I find it curious that a woman who served as a cultural icon of 1960s male fears has again become a frightening symbol–at least to those believing in the grand Illuminati conspiracy hypothesis.
Footnotes
1. In a 1967 TV adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Weld
played the part of Abigail, a teenaged servant who gets booted by the
mistress of the household when the latter finds her seducing her
husband. In the 1970 flick I Walk the Line, she played a small-town girl who seduces the local sheriff away from his wife.
But even in other movies, Weld was romantically paired with much older men: twice with Steve McQueen (thirteen years her senior) in the movies The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and Soldier in the Rain (1963); and with Richard Beymer (five years her senior) in Bachelor Flat (1962).
Also, Weld co-starred as Selena, a teenaged girl with “a past,” in the 1961 movie A Return to Peyton Place. A year earlier she co-starred in Sex Kittens Go to College as one of the kitties in question. So it would seem clear that her appeal to producers rest in the projection of her as an underage or barely legal sexpot.
2. For example, Weld is the putative subject of the song “Ruby Tuesday” (although, according to Keith Richards, the song is about his ex-girlfriend, Linda Keith, who left him for Jimi Hendrix). She supposedly appears in the Beatles' “She Came In through the Bathroom Window” (the lyrics “Tuesday’s on the phone to me”), “I Am the Walrus” (“stupid bloody Tuesday”), and “Lady Madonna” (“Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”).
While we're at it, we might as well throw in this song from 1967.
3. Cameron was the widow of rocket scientist/occultist Jack Parsons, a follower of Aleister Crowley, and a friend of Parson's partner, L. Ron Hubbard, who went on to found the Church of Scientology.
But even in other movies, Weld was romantically paired with much older men: twice with Steve McQueen (thirteen years her senior) in the movies The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and Soldier in the Rain (1963); and with Richard Beymer (five years her senior) in Bachelor Flat (1962).
Also, Weld co-starred as Selena, a teenaged girl with “a past,” in the 1961 movie A Return to Peyton Place. A year earlier she co-starred in Sex Kittens Go to College as one of the kitties in question. So it would seem clear that her appeal to producers rest in the projection of her as an underage or barely legal sexpot.
2. For example, Weld is the putative subject of the song “Ruby Tuesday” (although, according to Keith Richards, the song is about his ex-girlfriend, Linda Keith, who left him for Jimi Hendrix). She supposedly appears in the Beatles' “She Came In through the Bathroom Window” (the lyrics “Tuesday’s on the phone to me”), “I Am the Walrus” (“stupid bloody Tuesday”), and “Lady Madonna” (“Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”).
While we're at it, we might as well throw in this song from 1967.
3. Cameron was the widow of rocket scientist/occultist Jack Parsons, a follower of Aleister Crowley, and a friend of Parson's partner, L. Ron Hubbard, who went on to found the Church of Scientology.
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