This Day in History

 May 22, 1958:
Jerry Lee Lewis drops a bombshell in London




The arrival in the United Kingdom of one of the biggest figures in rock and roll was looked forward to with great anticipation in May of 1958. Nowhere in the world were the teenage fans of the raucous music coming out of America more enthusiastic than they were in England, and the coming tour of the great Jerry Lee Lewis promised to be a rousing success. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls Of Fire" had both been massive hits in the UK, and early demand for tickets was great enough that 27 appearances were booked in what promised to be the biggest tour yet by an American rock-and-roll star. There was just one problem: Unbeknownst to the British public and the organizers of the coming tour, Jerry Lee Lewis would be traveling to England as a newly married man, with his pretty young wife in tow. Just how young that wife really was would be revealed on this day in 1958, when Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis arrived at Heathrow Airport with his new "child bride."

It was an inquisitive reporter for the Daily Mail named Paul Tanfield who unwittingly broke the scandal when he inquired as to the identity of an especially young woman he'd spotted in the Killer's entourage. "I'm Myra, Jerry's wife," said Myra Gail Lewis. Tanfield followed up with a question for the Killer himself: "And how old is Myra?" It was at this point that Jerry Lee must have cottoned to the fact that the rest of the world might take a somewhat skeptical view of his third marriage, because the answer he gave was a lie: "Fifteen."

Myra Gail Lewis was actually only 13 years old, a fact that would soon come out along with certain other details, such as the fact that she was Jerry Lee's first cousin (once removed) and that the pair had married five months before his divorce from his second wife was made official. Jerry Lee tried to set minds at ease on this last point—the second marriage was null and void, he explained, because it had taken place before his divorce from his first wife—but even the most skilled public-relations expert would have had a hard time spinning the unfolding story in Jerry Lee's favor.

As the press hounded Jerry Lee and Myra Gail Lewis over the coming week, the Killer tried to go on with business as usual, but his first three shows drew meager audiences, and those that did buy tickets showered him with boos and catcalls. When the Rank chain of theaters cancelled the rest of his dates and his fashionable Mayfair hotel encouraged him to seek lodgings elsewhere, Jerry Lee Lewis left the UK, less than a week after his dramatic arrival on this day in 1958. Back home, he would face a blacklisting from which his career would never fully recover.

This Day in History

 May 21, 1924:
Leopold and Loeb gain national attention



Fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois, street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most fascinating murders in American history. The killers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were extremely wealthy and intelligent teenagers whose sole motive for killing Franks was the desire to commit the "perfect crime."

Leopold, who graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18, spoke nine languages and had an IQ of 200, but purportedly had perverse sexual desires. Loeb, also unusually gifted, graduated from college at 17 and was fascinated with criminal psychology. The two made a highly unusual pact: Loeb, who was a homosexual, agreed to participate in Leopold's eccentric sexual practices in return for Leopold's cooperation with his criminal endeavors.

Both were convinced that their intelligence and social privilege exempted them from the laws that bound other people. In 1924, the pair began to put this maxim to the test by planning to commit a perfect murder. They each established false identities and began rehearsing the kidnapping and murder over and over.

Loeb stabbed Bobbie Franks (who was actually his distant cousin) several times in the backseat of a rented car as Leopold drove through Chicago's heavy traffic. After Franks bled to death on the floor of the car, Leopold and Loeb threw his body in a previously scouted swamp and then disposed of the other evidence in various locations. In an attempt to throw police off their trail, they sent a ransom note demanding $10,000 to Franks' wealthy father.

But Leopold and Loeb had made a couple of key mistakes. First, the body, which was poorly hidden, was discovered the next day. This prompted an immediate search for the killers, which Loeb himself joined. The typewriter used to type the ransom note was recovered from a lake and, more important, a pair of glasses was found near Franks' body.

When the glasses were traced to Loeb's optometrist, police learned that the optometrist had only written three such prescriptions. Two were immediately accounted for and the third belonged to Nathan Leopold, who calmly told detectives that he must have dropped them while bird hunting earlier in the week. This explanation might have proved sufficient, but reporters covering the case soon discovered other letters from Leopold that matched the ransom note. When confronted with this evidence, Leopold and Loeb both confessed.

Clarence Darrow agreed to defend Leopold, and the trial soon became a national sensation. Darrow, who didn't argue the boys' innocence, directed one of his most famous orations against the death penalty itself. The judge was swayed and imposed life sentences. Apparently unsatisfied with the attorney's work, Leopold's father later reneged on his contract to pay Darrow.

In January 1936, a fellow inmate killed Loeb in a bloody razor fight in the prison's shower. Leopold was released on parole in 1958 with help from noted poet Carl Sandburg, who testified on his behalf. He lived out the rest of his life in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.

This Day in History

 May 20, 2005:
Mary Kay Letourneau marries former victim



On this day in 2005, ex-teacher and convicted pedophile Mary Kay Letourneau, 43, marries her former victim and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau, 22. Just nine months earlier, Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping Fualaau.

Letourneau first met Fualaau when she was a teacher at Shorewood Elementary School, in the Seattle suburb of Burien, Washington, and he was a second-grader. During the summer of 1996, Letourneau, then 34 and a married mother of four, began a sexual relationship with her former sixth-grade student, then 12.

The relationship was eventually discovered and in February 1997, Letourneau was arrested for rape. In May, the former teacher, who was born Mary Katherine Schmitz in California in 1962, gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Audrey. That August, Letourneau pled guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape. Judge Linda Lau of King County Superior Court showed Letourneau leniency by suspending her 89-month sentence and the former teacher was ordered to serve six months in jail, attend a treatment program and have no contact with Fualaau. Her case sparked a tabloid frenzy as well as a national debate over whether female sex offenders are treated differently than men who commit similar crimes.

On February 3, 1998, after being released from jail in six months, Letourneau was discovered in a parked car with Fualaau and arrested for violating the conditions of her suspended sentence. Investigators found a large amount of cash in the vehicle, along with a passport and some baby clothes, indicating that the couple might have been planning to flee the area with their young daughter. Three days later, on February 6, Judge Lau reinstated Letourneau’s original sentence and sent her back to prison. In October, Letourneau gave birth to her second child with Fualaau, a daughter named Alexis. The children were raised by Fualaau’s mother while Letourneau remained in prison. Fualaau and his mother, Soona, later sued the Highline School District and the city of Des Moines, Washington, for over $2 million, claiming police and school officials didn’t do enough to protect Vili. In May 2002, a jury ruled the Fualaaus were not entitled to any money.

In August 2004, Letourneau was released from prison, and a judge lifted a ban prohibiting her from contacting Fualaau, by then an adult. On this day in 2005, Letourneau and Fualaau wed, amid tight security, in a ceremony at the Columbia Winery in Woodinville, Washington, outside Seattle. The couple’s two daughters served as flower girls and Letourneau’s daughter from her first marriage, which lasted from 1984 to 1999, was the maid of honor. The television show Entertainment Tonight negotiated exclusive rights to film the ceremony.

This Day in History

 May 19, 1935:
Lawrence of Arabia dies



T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, dies as a retired Royal Air Force mechanic living under an assumed name. The legendary war hero, author, and archaeological scholar succumbed to injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident six days before.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Wales, in 1888. In 1896, his family moved to Oxford. Lawrence studied architecture and archaeology, for which he made a trip to Ottoman (Turkish)-controlled Syria and Palestine in 1909. In 1911, he won a fellowship to join an expedition excavating an ancient Hittite settlement on the Euphrates River. He worked there for three years and in his free time traveled and learned Arabic. In 1914, he explored the Sinai, near the frontier of Ottoman-controlled Arabia and British-controlled Egypt. The maps Lawrence and his associates made had immediate strategic value upon the outbreak of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire in October 1914.

Lawrence enlisted in the war and because of his expertise in Arab affairs was assigned to Cairo as an intelligence officer. He spent more than a year in Egypt, processing intelligence information and in 1916 accompanied a British diplomat to Arabia, where Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca, had proclaimed a revolt against Turkish rule. Lawrence convinced his superiors to aid Hussein's rebellion, and he was sent to join the Arabian army of Hussein's son Faisal as a liaison officer.

Under Lawrence's guidance, the Arabians launched an effective guerrilla war against the Turkish lines. He proved a gifted military strategist and was greatly admired by the Bedouin people of Arabia. In July 1917, Arabian forces captured Aqaba near the Sinai and joined the British march on Jerusalem. Lawrence was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In November, he was captured by the Turks while reconnoitering behind enemy lines in Arab dress and was tortured and sexually abused before escaping. He rejoined his army, which slowly worked its way north to Damascus, which fell in October 1918.

Arabia was liberated, but Lawrence's hope that the peninsula would be united as a single nation was dashed when Arabian factionalism came to the fore after Damascus. Lawrence, exhausted and disillusioned, left for England. Feeling that Britain had exacerbated the rivalries between the Arabian groups, he appeared before King George V and politely refused the medals offered to him.

After the war, he lobbied hard for independence for Arab countries and appeared at the Paris peace conference in Arab robes. He became something of a legendary figure in his own lifetime, and in 1922 he gave up higher-paying appointments to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) under an assumed name, John Hume Ross. He had just completed writing his monumental war memoir, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and he hoped to escape his fame and acquire material for a new book. Found out by the press, he was discharged, but in 1923 he managed to enlist as a private in the Royal Tanks Corps under another assumed name, T.E. Shaw, a reference to his friend, Irish writer George Bernard Shaw. In 1925, Lawrence rejoined the RAF and two years later legally changed his last name to Shaw.

In 1927, an abridged version of his memoir was published and generated tremendous publicity, but the press was unable to locate Lawrence (he was posted to a base in India). In 1929, he returned to England and spent the next six years writing and working as an RAF mechanic. In 1932, his English translation of Homer's Odyssey was published under the name of T.E. Shaw. The Mint, a fictionalized account of Royal Air Force recruit training, was not published until 1955 because of its explicitness.

In February 1935, Lawrence was discharged from the RAF and returned to his simple cottage at Clouds Hill, Dorset. On May 13, he was critically injured while driving his motorcycle through the Dorset countryside. He had swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. On May 19, he died at the hospital of his former RAF camp. All of Britain mourned his passing.

This Day in History

 May 18, 2004:
Randy Johnson throws perfect game at 40



On this day in 2004, 40-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks lefthander Randy Johnson becomes the oldest pitcher in major league history to throw a perfect game, leading his team to a 2-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves. A "perfect game" is when a pitcher faces a minimum 27 batters, recording 27 outs. Through the 2006 season, only 17 perfect games had been thrown, including 15 in the modern era (post-1900).

Johnson, known for his overpowering fastball, struck out 13 batters in the game. He led the National League in strikeouts for the fifth time that year; he had previously won four strikeout titles in the American League, even though managers routinely stacked their lineups with right-handed hitters to combat Johnson’s utter dominance of left-handers. The 6-foot-10-inch "Big Unit" used his height and length to full advantage, striding towards the plate and throwing the ball sidearm, so that left-handers could not see the pitch until it was on top of them or past them.

Johnson had already thrown a no-hitter in 1990 for the Seattle Mariners; he missed a perfect game that day by walking seven batters. In 1995, still with Seattle, he won his first of five Cy Young Awards, given each year to the best American League and National League pitchers. His next four Cy Youngs came consecutively from 1999 to 2002, while he pitched for the National League’s Arizona Diamondbacks. In 2001, Johnson set a major league record with an average of 13.41 strikeouts per nine innings. He was also the fifth player to throw no-hitters in both the American League and National League after Cy Young, Jim Bunning, Nolan Ryan and Hideo Nomo.

The oldest pitcher to throw a no-hitter in the major leagues was 44-year-old Texas Ranger Nolan Ryan in 1991. It was the seventh no-hitter of Ryan’s career. He never threw a perfect game.

This Day in History

May 17, 1974:
LAPD raid leaves six SLA members dead

In Los Angeles, California, police surround a home in Compton where the leaders of the terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are hiding out. The SLA had kidnapped Patricia Hearst, of the fabulously wealthy Hearst family publishing empire, months earlier, earning headlines across the country. Police found the house in Compton when a local mother reported that her kids had seen a bunch of people playing with an arsenal of automatic weapons in the living room of the home.

The LAPD's 500-man siege on the Compton home was only the latest event in a short, but exceedingly bizarre, episode. The SLA was a small group of violent radicals who quickly made their way to national prominence, far out of proportion to their actual influence. They began by killing Oakland's superintendent of schools in late 1973 but really burst into society's consciousness when they kidnapped Hearst the following February.

Months later, the SLA released a tape on which Hearst said that she was changing her name to Tania and joining the SLA. Shortly thereafter, a surveillance camera in a bank caught Hearst carrying a machine gun during an SLA robbery. In another incident, SLA member General Teko was caught trying to shoplift from a sporting goods store, but escaped when Hearst sprayed the front of the building with machine gun fire.

Although law enforcement officials began talking about the SLA as if they were a well-established paramilitary terrorist organization, the SLA had only a handful of members, most of who were disaffected middle class youths.

On May 17, Los Angeles police shot an estimated 1,200 rounds of ammunition into the tiny Compton home as six SLA members shot back. Teargas containers thrown into the hideout started a fire, but the SLA refused to surrender. Autopsy results showed that they continued to fire back even as smoke and flames were searing their lungs; they clearly chose suicide and martyrdom over jail. Randolph Hearst, Patty's father, remarked that the massive attack had turned "dingbats into martyrs." The raid left six SLA members dead, including leader Donald DeFreeze, also known as Cinque. Patty Hearst was not inside the home at the time. She was not found until September 1975.

Patty Hearst was put on trial for armed robbery and convicted, despite her claim that she had been coerced, through repeated rape, isolation, and brainwashing, into joining the SLA. Prosecutors believed that she actually orchestrated her own kidnapping because of her prior involvement with one of the SLA members. Despite any real proof of this theory, she was convicted and sent to prison. President Carter commuted Hearst's sentence after she had served almost two years. Hearst was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.

This Day in History

 May 16, 1929:
First Academy Awards ceremony



On this day in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its first awards, at a dinner party for around 250 people held in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California.

The brainchild of Louis B. Mayer, head of the powerful MGM film studio, the Academy was organized in May 1927 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of the film industry. Its first president and the host of the May 1929 ceremony was the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Unlike today, the winners of the first Oscars--as the coveted gold-plated statuettes later became known--were announced before the awards ceremony itself.

At the time of the first Oscar ceremony, sound had just been introduced into film. The Warner Bros. movie The Jazz Singer--one of the first "talkies"--was not allowed to compete for Best Picture because the Academy decided it was unfair to let movies with sound compete with silent films. The first official Best Picture winner (and the only silent film to win Best Picture) was Wings, directed by William Wellman. The most expensive movie of its time, with a budget of $2 million, the movie told the story of two World War I pilots who fall for the same woman. Another film, F.W. Murnau's epic Sunrise, was considered a dual winner for the best film of the year. German actor Emil Jannings won the Best Actor honor for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, while 22-year-old Janet Gaynor was the only female winner. After receiving three out of the five Best Actress nods, she won for all three roles, in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise.

A special honorary award was presented to Charlie Chaplin. Originally a nominee for Best Actor, Best Writer and Best Comedy Director for The Circus, Chaplin was removed from these categories so he could receive the special award, a change that some attributed to his unpopularity in Hollywood. It was the last Oscar the Hollywood maverick would receive until another honorary award in 1971.

The Academy officially began using the nickname Oscar for its awards in 1939; a popular but unconfirmed story about the source of the name holds that Academy executive director Margaret Herrick remarked that the statuette looked like her Uncle Oscar. Since 1942, the results of the secret ballot voting have been announced during the live-broadcast Academy Awards ceremony using the sealed-envelope system. The suspense--not to mention the red-carpet arrival of nominees and other stars wearing their most beautiful or outrageous evening wear--continues to draw international attention to the film industry's biggest night of the year.