We saw “Argo” recently, the great Ben Affleck movie about the hostage event and repercussions from 1979 and 1980 over in Iran. If you have not seen the movie, go; if you have seen it then – go again.
We also saw “Flight,” which I think I liked a little better. It is about a commercial jetliner pilot who likes to stay up late drinking and snorting cocaine. Problems arise from this, as they so often will.
When I was watching the take-off in “Flight,” I remembered when I was flying to the 1999 Masters with my friend, Fred. It was not long after we had gotten airborne, during the somewhat stressful part of the journey, when the 100,000 pound 727 was still straining for altitude. Fred thought it the right time to tell me that he has a friend who is a pilot who says that during the minute or so just after takeoff you are just a sneeze away from flipping over and plummeting to the ground below. “Just thought you might like to know that,” Fred said.
“So best not to sneeze for awhile?” I asked him.
“Probably not a good idea.”
But back to 1979, which was a banner year for misunderstood misfits.
Like Patty Hearst (a.k.a. Tania), the newspaper heiress who was kidnapped at age 19, but later helped her abductors in a bank robbery, earning her a 35-year sentence after she was captured. President Carter commuted that and she served 22-months. Carter, in the same year, would later be attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing near his home of Plains, Ga. There is no indiction the rabbit had anything to do with the Hearst kidnapping.
Then there was John Simon Ritchie, of London, who was the son of a Buckingham Palace guard. John Simon was born exactly a week before me, in May of 1957. He would die from a heroin overdose as Sid Vicious, former front man of the punk band, The Sex Pistols, on February 2, 1979.
Ritchie was given his nickname by John Lydon, after Lydon’s pet hamster, Sid. When the hamster bit Ritchie one day, he said, “Sid is really vicious!”
Or Dan White, who after killing Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in San Francisco, reportedly claimed his diet of Twinkies caused him to be depressed, triggering diminished capacity, the excuse criminals sometimes use in trials. In truth, White’s attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White’s actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, served five years and two years later committed suicide by carbon monoxide.
Last was Jaques Mesrine, the most infamous criminal in modern French history. He was responsible for numerous bank robberies, burglaries and kidnappings, one of those being a judge who had sentenced him. An aptitude for disguise earned him the moniker “The Man of a Hundred Faces.” He was rarely without a glamorous female companion and was seen as an anti-establishment ‘Robin Hood’ figure.
On November 2, 1979, Mesrine left his apartment for a weekend in the country with Sylvia Jeanjacquot and her poodle. On the outskirts of Paris, the gold BMW they were driving was boxed in by police at the entrance to an intersection. Twenty rounds were fired at point blank range; Mesrine was hit 15 times. A coup de grâce was then administered with a pistol. Sylvia Jeanjacquot lost one eye and suffered lasting damage to her arm. Her pet dog was also killed.