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Criswell
From Outcyclopedia, the free and queer encyclopedia. A member of Ed Wood's entourage, self-proclaimed psychic Criswell was best known in the 50s and 60s for his often outlandish predictions. He is today known almost exclusively for his appearances in Ed Wood's movies, considered to be among the worst ever made. Born Charles Jerome King Criswell on 18 August, 1907 in Princeton, Indiana, Criswell was raised by his grandfather, a funeral home proprietor, who made his illegitimate grandson sleep in coffins in the showroom. The experience left Criswell unable to sleep comfortably in a bed, and he slept in coffins throughout his adult life. After high school, he studied at the University of Cincinnati's Conservatory of Music, before working for newspapers and on radio in New York. One day, to fill up airtime, he began making his first predictions. Phone calls flooded in, and before long Criswell's predictions became a regular presentation, and also began appearing in a syndicated newspaper column. As his fame spread, he met and befriended several celebrities, most notably Mae West and Liberace's brother, George. Among Criswell's wilder predictions was one made in 1955 that West would be elected President in 1960 and also become the first astronaut to land on the moon in 1965! West remained a lifelong friend of Criswell's, and each time she bought a new limousine, she sold the old one to Criswell for one dollar. Around the same time Criswell's friendship with West began, he married Halo Meadows, a former nightclub dancer who sunbathed religiously and believed her poodle to be the reincarnation of a deceased cousin. The marriage however fooled only those who did not know Criswell personally. Throughout his life, he was known among the gay community in Hollywood as one of their most unusual members. While he was a frequent and quite visible patron of Hollywood's Brown Derby, where he was often approached by people curious about their future, Criswell was also a frequent patron of The Gold Cup, a restaurant and bar where beautiful young men could be and were easily procured. By the 1950s, Criswell had made the move to television, hosting a live show carried on a local Los Angeles station where he made his predictions. He also hawked his own brand of energy tablets, which were little more than caffeine pills with just enough vitamins added to stay out of trouble with the FDA. His audience was small and consisted largely of senior citizens. Still, the station was scandalized when a woman hired to give a testimonial for Criswell's supplements absconded with the product display and the set's alabaster statues while the cameras were running. Criswell's style of prognostication seemed to operate on the law of averages. If he made enough predictions about a wide enough variety of subjects, at least some of them were bound to come true. It certainly did not hurt his track record to continually emphasize his hits, such as a Peruvian earthquake, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the election of Ronald Reagan as California governor, while taking pains to not draw attention to his misses, which included the cataclysmic shifting of the polar ice caps, the destruction of Denver, or the assassination of Fidel Castro. Not surprisingly, Criswell's most fantastic predictions, including the end of the world, were forecast decades in the future. When asked how he made his predictions, Criswell simply said that he was a student of history, which always repeated itself. Only to his closest friends, including Ed Wood and Mae West, did he confess that he simply related the first fantastical thing that popped into his head. Criswell's association with Ed Wood began in the late 1950s, after he was introduced to Wood by friend Paul Marco, who played the incompetent "Kelton the Cop" in many of Wood's films. As with the other members of the Wood entourage, Criswell was soon drawn by the allure of movie stardom, and appeared in Wood's notoriously inept Plan 9 From Outer Space, introducing the film's events in a prologue modeled after his television show. Criswell appeared in other Wood films over the years, including Night of the Ghouls, in which spirits of the dead led by Criswell take revenge on, ironically, a fake psychic. Because Wood could not pay the film developer, the movie was not released until 1983, after a fan and film collector paid the bill. Orgy of the Dead, a film written by Wood and directed by Stephen C. Apostolof, featured Criswell in his biggest and last film role as the Devil, presiding over a full moon festival attended by zombies, vampires, witches, and werewolves. Criswell's fame as a psychic continued into the 1960s, but waned rapidly. During a March appearance on the Jack Paar Show he predicted that President Kennedy would not run in 1964, "because of something that will happen to him in November 1963." Perhaps because he had not specified assassination, Criswell saw the credit for predicting the President's death go to Jean Dixon, whose fame quickly eclipsed his. In 1969 Criswell released a volume of predictions, Criswell Predicts: From Now To The Year 2000!, containing prophecies of events over the next thirty years. Among these were "homosexual cities" which would begin springing up across the US beginning in 1970, "all carefully planned and compact" in which "organized orgies" would be held. Criswell also predicted colonies living in space stations jointly built by the US and the Soviet Union in the 1990s (but not the collapse of the Soviet Union), a "bulging" of the Earth which would cause highways to buckle and vending machines to malfunction, schools replaced by educational television and memory pills, the destruction of London by a meteor, and even marriages between people and their pets. Finally, he predicted that a "black rainbow" would suck away all the oxygen in the atmosphere and destroy the human race, with only the orbiting space colonies surviving. This last event would occur in 1999, on 18 August, Criswell's birthday. Criswell never lived to see this final prediction come true, - it didn't, of course, - dying in 1982 on 4 October. Interestingly, Criswell never predicted that he would find new posthumous fame as a cult following developed around Ed Wood and his endearingly bad attempts at film making. Twelve years after Criswell's death, Tim Burton's Ed Wood was released, with Jeffrey Jones playing Criswell. While many who knew the psychic have said that Jones' portrayal was quite accurate, the film makes no mention of Criswell's homosexuality, while concentrating on the comical queendom of fellow Wood groupie John "Bunny" Breckenridge. External links: Mr. C's introduction to the less than reliable prophet, Criswell! The Onion AV Club | Criswell Predicts Criswell Predicts: Homosexuality Internet Movie Database: Criswell Brian's Drive-In Theater: Ed Wood & Co Entry added/revised 13 October, 2004. All text is available for use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (see Copyrights for details). |
