Sept. 30, 1999 | If you're a media maven (and who ain't anymore?), we'd like you to play a new game. It's called "Who Got the Most Headlines?" Today, we'll vote on two candidates; both have recently admitted to being former Communist spies.

The first is Melita Norwood, 87, a jam-making granny from Bexleyheath, England, who, it was recently revealed, passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets for four decades -- under the code name "Hola." Our second candidate is Ilona Staller, 47, better known as Cicciolina (variously translated as "little fatty," "little cuddly one," etc.), former overheated blond star of porno movies, ex-wife of internationally known American artist Jeff Koons and currently a member of Italy's Parliament, as well as curator, star and spokeshuman for the official Cicciolina Web site (which, coincidentally, is lushly illustrated with revealing photos of ... Cicciolina!).

Now, given that both of our candidates for world media coverage have, in the last few weeks, admitted their espionage activities, which one, would you guess, dominated the headlines? But wait, before we hear your answer, one more clue: When Cicciolina was married to Koons, his life-size, full-color, anatomically correct porcelain sculptures of the happy couple coupling happily set fire to art museums and attracted flammable media coverage worldwide. OK, let's hear your best guess: Who Got the Most Headlines?

"Cicciolina?"

You are so wrong! But good try. No, pathetic slaves to logic, it was Melita Norwood, the grandmother spy, who monopolized the front page of the Times of London and various other media across the globe for a week or more. Poor Cicciolina's brave revelation achieved but a few shabby paragraphs here and there. "Three well-dressed men approached me one day," Cicciolina told Budapest's RTL Klub TV last week, "and asked me if I would like to make more money and when I said yes, they told me what to do." An entirely believable tale, to be sure, but it did not get the porcelain parliamentarian the attention she craves and, indeed, deserves.

But perhaps we've not heard the last from the coquettish Ms. Staller. On her Web site she implores visitors to "Come to see me often because I'm preparing very pleasing things for you ... Here you'll find the story of my life, that of course you has known, hasn't you? However each time I'll narrate some curious facts about me, little secrets that I disclose only here." Tease us crazy, you wicked vixen!

And for the bonus point, what do you make the odds that Cicciolina shows up in the next Austin Powers movie?

Misbehaving elsewhere on earth last week, Glasgow writer John Mackay was roundly excoriated for his recently published biography of John Paul Jones, "I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight." By most accounts the book is a well-written, authoritative tome. Problem is, Mackay's attackers say, it is well-written and authoritative in a way that is uncannily reminiscent of a 1976 biography on the very same person written by Samuel Eliot Morison.

Here, in an example given in Edinburgh's the Scotsman newspaper, passages from both books are compared:

In his "John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography," Morison wrote that the hero "visited some of the most beautiful parts of the world -- Cape Breton, the Windward Islands, Jamaica, Galicia, Brittany, the Hebrides, the Baltic and the Black Sea; yet not once in his voluminous correspondence does he indicate any appreciation of them; and in only one letter, about the great gale of October 1780, does he mention the majesty of the sea."

In his recently published book, Mackay wrote: "In the course of his career he visited some of the most beautiful parts of the world -- the Caribbean islands, Nova Scotia, Galicia, the Baltic and the Black Sea as well as the eastern seaboard of America and the coasts of Britain -- yet nowhere in his vast correspondence does he betray any appreciation of them. In only one letter, written in October 1780 in the aftermath of a great storm, does he allude to the majesty of the sea."

Frankly, I don't see it. What a bunch of nit-picking! But that didn't stop his publisher from shredding the book after this and many other similarities between the two were revealed. It didn't help Mackay that these were not the first such accusations of this sort leveled against him.

Mackay is holding up under the onslaught of hurtful, unjust charges. He told the New York Times: "Obviously, I read [Morison's book] like I read everything else that had ever been written on the subject, but this is my own work."

Depends on what your definition of "own" is, I guess.

Finally comes something to lift our spirits: an eloquent, grisly (and entirely original) eyewitness account of a hanging. Sure, it's a bit late -- by about 131 years -- but it's fresher than John Mackay's prose because it hasn't been seen since 1868, when Mark Twain wrote it for the Chicago Republican newspaper. An archivist named Guy Rocha recently found the article while searching the archives of the Library of Congress and the University of California.

OK, it's not exactly a lighthearted romp, but it is, uh, evocative: "I can see that stiff corpse hanging there yet," Twain wrote, "with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshly hue of life before them. Ugh!"

Twain had no sympathy for the unrepentant murderer, John Millian, who'd killed Julia Bulette, "the prostitute with the heart of gold." Millian was a "heartless assassin," Twain reported, who "knocked her senseless with a billet of wood as she slept and then strangled her with his fingers."

"I saw it all," he wrote of the public hanging in Virginia City, Nev. "He skipped gaily up the steps of the gallows like a happy girl ... I watched him at that sickening moment when the sheriff was fitting the noose about his neck, and pushing the knot this way and that to get it nicely adjusted ... I took exact note of every detail, even to his considerately helping to fix the leather strap that bound his legs together and his quiet removal of his slippers -- and I never wish to see it again."

Ditto. Hope that cheered you up.
salon.com | Sept. 30, 1999

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