The Boy With Green Hair

When I was twelve, my brother suffered the first of many psychotic breaks. A boy from his dorm at Millsaps told Dr. Collins, the president, that Jimmy had conversations with people who weren’t there. Dr. Collins discovered that he hadn’t attended any classes since before Spring break.

My father was chairman of the board at Millsaps in those days. He and Dr. Collins worked closely together and socialized often. Most of the time, if I went to the movies, it was with Dr. Collin’s youngest son. Dr. Collins allowed my brother to withdraw with incomplete marks, thinking he would soon return to complete his course of study toward graduation at Millsaps. It would not be soon.

Jimmy had had problems before this that were credited to teenage rebellion. In the early and mid-nineteen seventies, adolescent rebellion was a fairly common theme all over the world, and most of the kids his age went through it. Drugs, rock and roll, and communism were generally blamed. Not very much was known about schizophrenia or what effect the drugs might have on it.

My father insisted that Jimmy be treated at home, in the bosom of his family, rather than in a hospital. He was proscribed to talk therapy, known as psychoanalysis, with one Dr. Cox, who had an established reputation among rebellious Jackson teenagers, and another doctor proscribed a pretty severe regime of medications that made my brother, who had been brilliant and creative before something of a zombie, and only slightly less schizophrenic. They have better medications for schizophrenia now, but in those years, the choices were limited.

At twelve, my brother was the most creative person I ever knew. Through my father’s business, we could get art supplies at wholesale prices. Sometimes, the manufacturer’s rep would just give us things like paints and easels. Jimmy drew and painted nearly every day. The subjects changed when he became a teenager. He became obsessed with the character Conan the Barbarian, featured in paperback novels with the most amazing covers. I studied how he made these drawings and paintings intensely and tried to imitate what he did. There’s a theory that the human form is the basis for all art. He was really good at it.

When he came home from college, in the state he was in, although he had only been there less than a year, he was a different person. He was somebody I didn’t recognize. He began to paint over his existing canvasses, which I loved and tried to emulate. He painted over them with symbols and stories that nobody understood except the voices in his head.

I was not taking any of this very well. My brother was my most favorite person, but this was not him. This was a stranger. Not able to handle two children in crisis at the same time, my mother decided to send me to live with her sister and mother in Atlanta for three weeks. That way, I wouldn’t be there to see whatever happened at home with my brother. I wouldn’t be part of the crisis.

Today, if somebody likes to build and create things with their hands, they’re called a “maker.” There are even festivals for people who are makers. One happens this spring, which I hope to attend. My uncle Allen worked for Delta Airlines, scheduling the maintenance for their fleet stationed in Atlanta. As you might imagine, in the 1970s, that would have been a pretty high-pressure job as William B. Hartsfield Atlanta Airport was one of the busiest terminal exchanges for jet aircraft in the world.

Delta Airlines was his job, but his life was making things. He added an entire wing onto his home himself. He built at least two speedboats from plywood and instructions he bought from Popular Mechanics Magazine. He had a garden covering about a third of an acre in his backyard that I was soon recruited to help maintain since I was there anyway.

While I was there, I slept in a basement den Uncle Allen built himself. It had a full bath, with a shower and a small studio where my aunt Joreine could sew and practice her new hobby, painting in oil and acrylics. She took a class where they taught her to copy photographs from magazines using the grid transfer method. She taught me how to do that, and I painted a tiger as pictured in National Geographic Magazine. I took it home with me and entered it into the Arts Festival, where I won an award for my age group. I was given a ribbon, but they lost the painting. I was devastated. I actually don’t care much for the grid method of painting. Whenever I had to copy large designs for theater, I used an overhead projector instead.

In my Uncle Allen’s den, where I slept, there was a small color television. They had a large console TV upstairs, where my aunt would watch General Hospital and The Match Game while she canned Uncle Allen's garden largesse, but on the portable color TV, I could watch anything I wanted.

Atlanta had CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS, which had basically the same programs we had in Jackson, but they also had TBS, an independent television station. It would be another two or three years before any independent television stations were available in Jackson. Since TBS didn’t have a network feed to broadcast, they filled the day with older movies and as much syndicated programming as they could, preferably the less expensive kind.

In 1975, the monster boom that began in the late fifties was still in full flower. I was a monster-obsessed kid. My five-dollar-a-week allowance was mostly spent on comic books and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I even joined the Famous Monsters fan club, which awarded me a certificate of membership, signed by Dr. Acula (Forest Ackerman) himself, a button with a painting of the Phantom of the Opera on it, and a one-year subscription to the magazine that came to our house in much-anticipated manilla envelopes eight or nine times a year.

On Fridays and Saturdays, TBS always had a full schedule of monster movies, including Godzilla, Gorgo, Dinosaurus!, Green Slime, and more. During the week, they kept my attention by showing Ultraman, Lost in Space (just the color episodes), Batman, and The Land of the Giants in the afternoon, programs that were canceled from network television in the sixties. By 1975, they were available at a discount for stations like TBS.

Much has been written about why Vietnam-era boys were so obsessed with monsters. Traditional suspects have been the atomic bomb, the social revolution, and the national obsession with television. I think boys have always been obsessed with monsters. If you look at the pulp fiction available for boys in the teens and twenties, it features even more outrageous and fantastic creatures than anything in the fifties and sixties.

As a species, we survive not by fang and claw but by cooperation. Socialization makes the difference between a strong, healthy boy and a dead one. Because they’re just learning to socialize among their family and their peers, I think all children have moments when they fear they’re not doing well when they fear they don’t fit in, and when they fear being monsters.

I was born with ADHD, Dyslexia, and a pronounced stutter. You can’t really tell it that much now, but for a long time, particularly as a child, any sort of communication was a struggle for me. Without confidence in my ability to communicate, I developed a fear of any sort of socialization. Because children don’t typically admit to each other what their struggles might be, I imagined all the other children as “normal” and better than me, and since I couldn’t socialize like them, I must be the monster. Frankenstein, struggling to be understood, made a lot of sense to me. The men who made the monster movies and comic books, the men who published Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, I imagined, understood me far more than anyone in Mississippi, including my parents. Had I thought about it, I probably would have noticed that other boys were going through the same thing I was, but as it was uncommon to discuss these things among boys, I never did.

With my aunt and uncle in bed early every night, evenings were my own in the converted basement den, with a color TV and an imagination filled with rocket ships and dinosaurs. Science fiction, monster, and fantasy movies were reserved for the weekends on TBS, and they had some of the best, but during the week, their schedule was filled with less shocking titles. The best I could hope for during the week was a Tarzan, Hercules, or War movie.

In the mornings, Uncle Allen passed me the sections of the paper he finished. Aunt Jo would read them after breakfast dishes were put away with a cigarette and what was left of the coffee. Without much interest in Atlanta politics, I mainly stuck with the funny papers and the entertainment section. That night, a Wednesday night, TBS was showing a Thin Man movie. I’d probably read comics or draw while it was on. After that, was going to be “The Boy With Green Hair.” Green Hair? That sounded like a monster movie to me, and on a weeknight!

I’d never heard of a movie about a boy with green hair. It was never mentioned in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, but come on! It’s Green Hair! This had to be a monster. After supper, I put on my pajamas and struggled through Nick and Nora and their stupid dog, solving some sort of murder, preparing myself for meeting this new green-haired monster.

An associate of Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Losey, directed “The Boy With Green Hair” in 1947 for RKO. In 1948, thinking he knew more about movies than anybody in America, Howard Hughes took control of RKO. He despised the movie and its pacifist message. Too much had already been spent on the movie for him to just halt the production, but he made sure almost nothing was spent promoting it.

In 1948, Dean Stockwell was just twelve years old. “The Boy With Green Hair” was his thirteenth professional acting job in a career that spanned over a hundred movies and television programs. Pat O’Brien played his grandfather, and Russ Tamblin, also twelve, was cast as one of Stockwell’s classmates. This production was the beginning of a life-long friendship between Tamblin and Stockwell..

In 1948, America was at peace with Germany, Italy, and Japan but very concerned about war with China and The Soviet Union. Working with writers Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt, Losey crafted a story about a young boy whose mother and father were killed in war. It doesn’t mention which war, but they died in London, trying to save the world for other boys like Peter, played by Dean Stockwell.

Peter is shifted from relative to relative until he finally finds himself on the doorstep of a grandfather he never met, living in a second-story rented room. Played by Pat O’Brien, Gramps had once been a circus magician but now makes his living as a singing waiter. Cold to his new living arrangements at first, Peter soon finds his magic grandfather fascinating and allows himself to love and be loved.

One day, Peter notices a green plant in their tiny apartment. Gramps explains that the boy's grandmother loved the color green and always kept a bit of it about the house. Green was the color of growth and life and hope, he said. The next day, he and some other boys drive around town with Gramps, collecting clothes for war orphans. At school, Peter sees posters of war orphans in Europe and Asia and says how glad he was that he wasn’t one of them. One of the other children says, “But Peter, you are a war orphan, too!” Peter refuses to believe it and fights the other boy. The teacher breaks up the tussle, and Gramps is called. Gramps apologizes to Peter for not telling him sooner, but it’s true: Peter’s parents were killed in war. Peter was a war orphan.

Peter goes to bed that night confused and angry but grateful for Gramps and his teacher.

The next morning, Peter takes his bath, and when he goes to the mirror to brush his teeth, he sees that his hair turned bright green! Up to this point, the director kept the color palette to drab, muted colors. In Technicolor, Peter’s hair was shockingly green.

At first, the other children think Peter’s green hair is fascinating and wonderful, but slowly, the town begins to turn against him. Some people believe the milkman delivers tainted milk, and some people think the water department has contaminated the town’s water supply. Some boys chase Peter on their bicycles to try and forcefully cut off his hair. He escapes but finds himself lost in a wooded glen. In the glen, he meets the children he saw in the posters of War Orphans. They say they’ve been waiting for him. They wanted to tell him that his green hair was a message to the world that they should love one another and not make war on each other. Peter rides his bicycle home, excited that he knows his green hair's purpose.

At home, Gramps waits for Peter with the doctor and the milkman. They explain that the whole town has become afraid of Peter. The milkman explained nobody wanted to buy milk for fear their hair would turn green. The doctor explained that if Peter allowed the barber to cut off his hair, it might grow back brown like it was before. Peter doesn’t want to, but he agrees. He allows the barber to shave his head, but he runs away to the next town once it's finished.

In the next town, nobody knows who the strange bald boy is. The police captain calls in a child psychologist, who gets Peter to talk by offering him a milkshake and a hamburger. The psychologist doesn’t know if Peter’s story is real or fantasy. At this point, the audience doesn’t either. After telling his story, the psychologist reveals that he found Gramps and brought him to the police station. Gramps reads a letter Peter’s father wrote to be read when he was sixteen. Gramps decides Peter is mature enough to hear the content of the letter now. In it, Peter’s father explains that he died for a reason, and he hopes that Peter will continue working for peace in the world.

For a long time, what I remembered the most about the movie was Peter and Gramps singing and whistling as they climbed the stairs to their apartment at the end of the movie. The movie had a pretty profound effect on me for a long time. Peter was remarkably different from the other children. At times, it made him feel like a monster. At times, it made the town feel like he was a monster. At times, they would treat him like a monster. Peter knew that what made him different also made him wonderful, but he couldn’t get others to see that, so he began to doubt it himself.

Really, what is a monster movie but the story of somebody who is very different and how the world responds to them? Peter wasn’t a killer like the Wolfman or a destroyer of cities like Godzilla, but he was very much a monster. He was even green, a color almost always associated with monsters. There was even a monster called “The Green Slime.”

The next week, I flew back to Jackson. I never saw my brother again—not like he was before. There was a new person in his body now. He’d taken my brother’s things and even began defacing his artwork. I never had green hair, but I was physically bigger than any kid in my grade; I could barely read and sometimes could barely speak. I felt like a monster. I had a brother who had been a hero but was a monster now.

Like Peter, the grownups encouraged me to be normal, even though I didn’t know how. In the movie, they made it clear that there was a boy with red hair and a boy with thick glasses, who also felt like a monster, just like Peter but kept it hidden. I had long been a grown man before I understood that part–before I understood that everybody spends some time feeling like a monster.

Joseph Losey and his wife joined the American Communist Party during the depth of the depression. Deeply concerned about the abject poverty that swept many parts of America and Europe, he believed the arts, particularly the dramatic arts, could be used to try and help them. Once he took control of RKO, Howard Hughes refused to assign Losley any work, even though he was under a long-term contract. By 1951, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He always believed Hughes had turned him in. He probably did. Losey left the United States shortly after and wouldn’t return until the sixties. The Boy With Green Hair remained his most famous production. In America, Losey was a monster.

The 2004 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica featured a sixty-eight-year-old Dean Stockwell as the main villain. In 2009, Edward James Almos and Stockwell cooperated to produce a movie about what led up to the main conflict in the series. Almos had been a fan of “The Boy With The Green Hair,” working with Dean Stockwell; they found several places to insert references to the 1948 movie into their 2009 movie. Stockwell died in 2021. He never had green hair.