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Chapter 23

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Key links in the Fuhrman collection often come together in unexpected ways that are obvious in retrospect. I did not expect, for example, that Kassandra in Warlock would link up with the West Cost television hostess for bad late-night horror movies Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I’d never seen the full-length ’88 video in which Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira and a co-writer of the video screenplay calls her TV persona, "The gal that put the boob back in boob tube." I had seen her on hilarious TV commercials and I knew that the raven-haired beauty with the ample cleavage and macabre/erotic sense of humor was a natural redhead. I recently learned that the name Elvira was drawn out of a coffee can moments before she went on the air in 1981. Remember Mimi de Jour, the blond in Police Squad! with the "some kind of bust" line who took off a red wig in her dressing room and danced in a place called The Flamingo Club? Her alias was Mimi Coffee.

Cassandra Peterson wears a black wig and so much make-up as Elvira that you will find it hard to recognize her the way she looks as Cassandra unless you have help. You get that help in the ’88 Elvira video. In a scene evocative of The Legacy with Katherine Ross, and Laura with her good friend Vincent Price, Elvira inherits a house, a dog and a cookbook from her Great-aunt Morgana. In the house hangs a framed painting of Morgana, a 300-year-old witch with an uncanny resemblance to Elvira.

Cassandra Peterson is Morgana as well as Elvira. However, the name Morgana and the appearance of Elvira in the black comedy are too close to Morticia, the black-garbed, raven-haired character in the black comedy TV series The Addams Family not to be related.

To be sure, Elvira has a personality all her own. She is brash and trashy. When a woman criticizes her appearance, Elvira grabs her by her collar and says, "If I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you." When she picks up a wild-eyed hitchhiker who looks like a homicidal maniac and turns out to be one, she stops her car and boots him out sending him fleeing in terror without his shirt. Before Elvira resumes her trip she throws a hatchet at him saying, "Here, you forgot your ax." By the sound it makes and the sound he makes you know where it landed. Sweet, dainty, Morticia Addams would have found a sweeter, daintier way to rid herself of the man, the hatchet or both. She would never do any of the unladylike things Elvira does as a matter of course. If there is a ruder, cruder way of doing anything, Elvira will find a funny way to do it.

The closer you look at the differences between Elvira and Morticia Addams, the more they resemble exact opposites. Where Morticia whispers Elvira shouts. Where Morticia is sensual Elvira is sexual. Morticia is subtle. Elvira is blunt. Morticia is passionate but only with her husband. She speaks French to turn him on. Elvira performs French for men she hardly knows. In short, by simply adding the opposites to the similarities you get a pretty good picture of Elvira and some major plot devices to move the screenplay along.

Morticia is so rich by way of her husband’s vast financial holdings that money means nothing to her. Elvira has to work for a living and getting enough money to open an act in Los Vegas is way out of her financial league. Morticia is a devoted family woman with a husband, two children and a passel of aunts, uncles and cousins, Elvira is a single woman raised in a Catholic orphanage. When she gets fired from her TV show just before getting word in her dressing room that her Great-aunt Morgana has died and provided for her in her will, Elvira says, "I didn’t know I had a good aunt much less a great one." She has visions of getting all the money she needs to star in her own singing and dancing act at the Flamingo Hotel in Los Vegas.

From the mid-’80s to the time of the Goldman-Simpson murders, there were few paths an aspiring writer could follow to be assured of getting published and having his book rise to the top of the New York Times best seller list. You can’t go wrong in today’s publishing market with a combination of sex, violence and a big-name star if you can position yourself to write about it from the perspective of an insider. Mark Fuhrman’s role in the Goldman-Simpson murders made him an insider and a prominent player in the story. In Fuhrman’s words, "I’m the key witness in the biggest case of the century. And if I go down, they lose the case. The glove is everything. Without the glove – ‘bye, ‘bye."

Fuhrman said he found the bloody leather glove that put him in the spotlight on the ground in front of a spider web. He also talked about being "on stage" and traveling to Los Vegas in connection with another murder case. Keep in mind, also, that Fuhrman was a body builder.

Perhaps you noticed the leather glove in Elvira’s hand as she throws the hatchet at the hitchhiker. She’s also wearing the gloves when she spills gas at a self-serve station that ends of killing another man. Before all is said and done, you will see Elvira living her dream on stage at the Flamingo Hotel. The spotlight falls on her posing before a giant spider web. As she dances away from the web she is joined by male dancers wearing hats with devil’s horns protruding from them. They are all wearing blood red gloves. As part of the act, they reach for her throat and fall hands first to the ground in front of her – and the web. In another part of the act, two men strike a bodybuilder pose on either side of her as she stands in front of the web. They are not wearing gloves.

Let’s take it from the top with Elvira’s leather gloves – the ones she is wearing when she kills two people. To get the full impact of this sequence, you need to recall "The Hitch-hiker" episode of The Twilight Zone with Inger Stevens as Nan Adams, the buyer for a New York department store (Nicole bought the killer’s leather gloves in a New York department store). Nan gets killed en route to California. There were two hitchhikers in that teleplay. One was death, whom she first saw at a gas station in the rearview mirror of her car. The other was a sailor. She picked up the sailor. In the end, death was in the car with her.

Elvira begins her cross-country trip from California to Massachusetts in a black, ’65 Ford Thunderbird convertible with leopard skin seats. Her steering wheel has a chain rim and a pentagram in the center. Her mirror has a barbed wire border. She checks the mirror and sees herself. Straight down from the mirror a Death figurine is mounted on top of the instrument panel above two death’s heads. The man she picks up is not a sailor but you wouldn’t know it by listening to her. She says, "Hop in sailor." This is the first time we see her wearing the leather gloves. The next time is when she throws the hatchet at him.

We see the gloves again when she pulls into a self-serve gas station on a deserted stretch of highway. If this had anything to do with Fuhrman’s credit card alibi, you would expect to see a credit card or a soft drink because Fuhrman said he bought gas and a soft drink at a gas station in the desert with his credit card. We see no money exchanged in any form but we do see Elvira gassing up with a Coca-Cola vending machine in the background and leather gloves on her hands. Before she leaves with the nozzle on the ground spilling gas, she tells the attendant, who is smoking a cigarette, "those things will kill you." She pulls away. The attendant drops his cigarette and the gas station explodes in a huge ball of fire. In the very next scene you see Elvira sipping a soft drink in a paper cup through a straw.

A movie in the Fuhrman collection that you expect to follow a given pattern sometimes fits too well not to count but not well enough to count as a perfect match. A movie like this can almost invariably be merged with another Fuhrman collection screenplay that fills all of the gaps. For the redheaded Kassandra in Warlock to fit the pattern of other redheads in the collection, she would have had to associate herself in some way with performing oral sex, being a prostitute or both. Lori Singer as Kassandra does neither. Cassandra Peterson as Elvira does both.

The clue that took me to Elvira was in the Webtv summary of the movie on the Sci-fi Channel. It went something like this: Elvira battles an evil warlock for possession of a magic book. That’s what Kassandra does in Warlock. In both cases it’s a fight to the death. Without the so-called fight to the death on Bundy that Fuhrman wrote about in his first best-selling book these links would not exist. To predict the oral sex/whore connection in Elvira, all I did was lay out the whole pattern and follow the patterns of speech in Fuhrman’s first recorded interview with Laura Hart and in his book. If it wasn’t in Warlock I was confident that it would be in Elvira.

In a scene where Elvira agrees to sell her newly inherited cookbook to her Great-uncle Vincent, the warlock, two passing women see her leaning against his chauffeur-driven limousine to talk to him in the back seat. Under any circumstances, Elvira, mistresses of the dark looks like a "lady of the evening." That’s the stage persona that she uses as a launching pad for blue humor, so you know how it looks. The passing women don’t hear the part of the conversation where the man asks if she’d be willing to sell the book for fifty dollars. All they hear is her reply, "Sure, I’ll do it for fifty bucks."

That’s the whore connection, the Whore connection and the whore/Nicole/O.J./Fuhrman connection. It’s the whore connection to the movie To Protect and Serve where the special significance of the fifty-dollar bill and Fuhrman’s spotted dress neckties come together. In case you forgot, in To Protect and Serve a prostitute performs oral sex on a corrupt cop in the front seat of his squad car while her pimp in the back seat hands him an envelope containing fifty dollar bills. When she finishes, she wipes her mouth with his black dress necktie.

This is also a Monica Lewinsky connection. What you may not know is what the black dress tie has to do with the stain on the blue dress that Fuhrman was instrumental in having preserved for DNA testing. Monica Lewinsky liked to compare herself with Elvira. When Cassandra Peterson heard about it she was quoted as saying, "at least I wash my little black dress now and then."

Cassandra Peterson as Elvira uses a conk on the head with a fallen letter from a movie theater marquee to introduce us to Elvira the-ten-letter-c-word that Fuhrman used with Laura Hart. The act it describes involves a portion of the male anatomy that is also commonly referred to by the letter "D" … as in Jody Foster’s Dairy High D in The Hotel New Hampshire. This is the word O.J. uses on the ’93 911 tape to say what he saw Nicole doing to Ron Goldman’s boss. The letter that crowns Elvira is the letter "D" When Bob, the man who dropped the D asks her, "How’s your head?" she replies, "I haven’t had any complaints yet."

Only by way of Mark Fuhrman does Elvira’s "head" have any relevance to the Bundy murders. It has to do with his emphases on birthdays and Jennifer Jason Leigh (who shares Fuhrman’s birthday) as a homicidal redhead "giving head" to her roommate’s boyfriend in Single White Female. It has to do with Alley Sheedy (whose birthday is June 12) in Maid to Order (’87) wearing the same earrings as Elvira and telling her publicist in the made-for-television movie Fear (’89) "I give good fear." It his to do with Fuhrman’s theory about O.J.’s motive for murder, which hearkens back to the language he used on the 911 tape ("You weren’t thinking about the kids when you were sucking his dick on the couch!").

You are likely to come away from Elvira thinking that she never met a double-entendre or any other play on words, for that matter, that she didn’t like. Elvira’s crack about her "head" is a key example.

The Billie (Fuhrman’s mother) links in the Fuhrman collection are overwhelmingly associated with fellatio. In a scene in Elvira where the name Billy is used for the only time: Elvira sits at a table in a bowling alley where two men seat themselves on either side of her. One of the men makes a crude sexual remark. She puts him down hard. His friend laughs and says, "Billy, that’s no way to talk to a lady." He then says to Elvira, "How about a blowjob?" With that in mind you want to note the position of Elvira’s "head" the only time you see the word "Fuck." This is another one of those things that you can see only if you look at it through Mark Fuhrman’s eyes.

The "D" that Bob drops on Elvira’s head (Nicole was hit in the head) comes from the word DUCK, the second film in a G-rated double feature. All movies in Falwell, Massachusetts have to be G-rated. The first feature is called WILDLIFE ADVENTURE. The second is HOW TO HUNT DUCK. Bob had taken down the LIFE (taking a life?) part of WILDLIFE from the first feature and the HUNT from the second feature when he dropped the D on Elvira’s head.

Remember that Mark Fuhrman used the word "cocksucker" with Laura Hart as a substitute for "motherfucker" for his "down and dirty" example of "cop talk" and he implied doing violence to anyone who called him a motherfucker. With this said you can see what’s coming the instant Elvira spots the second E in MATINEE and insists on "correcting" the spelling by climbing up Bob’s ladder and taking down the final E. Holding her hand over the part of the E (as in Elvira) that turns it into an F, she slips and regains her balance by falling against the marquee. The position of her head in this context means nothing to anyone but Mark Fuhrman. Here, it becomes a substitute for the word "mother." You know what the F stands for in MF. But did you know that Cassandra Peterson’s husband, the producer of Elvira, is named Mark?

By adding a colon after the word "ADVENTURE" you can read the "new" marquee as a single adventure in sex. This is the same thing Mark Fuhrman does with his 214 badge number on his Bundy notes to turn it into Joe Friday’s badge 714. It’s what Arthur Frayn does with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to create Zardoz. To see it, Zed ignores "The Wonderful Wi" and puts his finger over the "of." But we can do that with the altered letters in the marquee only if there is a Wizard of Oz connection in Elvira…. There is.

More about that later….

The word "letter" has a double meaning, which is consistent with what we know about Fuhrman and the Bundy murders (Fuhrman’s double alibis, the double shoeprints, the double blood trail, etc). The scene in Sergeant Rutledge where Lucy Dabney and her father are found murdered and the initial indications are that Sgt. Rutledge did it, is a good example. No sooner does Cantrell learn that Rutledge was at the murder scene and that he is missing does he learn that Apaches are on a killing and burning spree. Sgt. Skidmore ruefully remarks, "trouble comes double." You will recall that a letter is involved here, too, the letter that Billie Burke as Mrs. Fosgate (MF) was writing when she heard the shots that brought her to the window to see Rutledge stumbling out of the house and dashing for the East gate on his horse.

The letter about O.J. and Nicole that Fuhrman "dropped" on the city attorney in 1989 would mean little in this context without some indication that Elvira was involved in Fuhrman’s thinking in 1989 and on June 12, 1994. The ’88 release date of the video screenplay together with his reference to visiting video stores to get ideas for the screenplay he wanted to write with Laura Hart put that idea in the realm of possibility. The fact that the town allows only G-rated movies makes the name Falwell, Massachusetts significant. The fact that Falwell, Massachusetts has the same initials as Mark Fuhrman in reverse order is more significant here than if they’d been in the "proper" order.

Fuhrman’s ability to invert evidence of O.J.’s innocents to look like evidence of guilt by his initial interpretations of what it signified made the case against O.J. and deflected attention away from himself as the prime murder suspect. That’s the alternate meaning of the word "initial" to the uppercase letter that a proper name begins with – the initial letter. The letters on the marquee are uppercase.

Look at all the uppercase letters associated with Elvira and with Mark Fuhrman, not the least of which are O.J. If the letters MF or FM are the initials of your name, you are going to see them transposed wherever your name has to appear in alphabetical order. So, either way, you’re going to get a MF out of the two initials at one time or another. However, the reverse meaning of the message on Bob’s theater marquee, thanks to Elvira’s stumble and her grip on the letter E that turns it into an F is, as we’ve seen, only part of what makes the scene special to Mark Fuhrman. The G-rated versions of the movies on the marquee speak directly to Fuhrman’s self-description as an outdoorsman and a hunter just as the marquee in Whore featuring CHINA BLUE spoke directly to him as a M.P. in Vietnam. His ambition to write an R-rated screenplay and the enhanced "marquee value" of his name as a result of his involvement with O.J. and Nicole also come through loud and clear.

The Bundy murder scene has so many anomalies that it’s hard to know where to know where to begin listing them. To the extent that Mark Fuhrman equated Elvira with Nicole and saw both of them as whores, the tasks is made simpler by allowing us to focus on the place in Nicole’s backyard where Fuhrman said he found the bubble gum. This is the same area where the coins were found on the ground next to Nicole’s Jeep. The whore link is clear in Crimes of Passion with Kathleen Turner as China Blue puttin her bubble gum in a ten dollar bill and throwing it way and in Whore with the redheaded prostitute standing under the marquee and spitting her gum at Blake’s passing car. Between the two movies we have a direct association with gum, money and whores. What’s missing is a direct association with death.

In Elvira you can’t tell what kind of gum Elvira chewing but you can see her take it out of her mouth and put it on the drip rail of Vincent’s limousine when she agree to "do it for fifty bucks." In an earlier scene when she first learns of her Great-aunt’s death and her inheritance, Elvira sees the event as a game show where she wins valuable prizes including a Jeep. Like contestants on other game shows she claps her hands (clad in leather gloves) and jumps up and down with glee when she is showered with money. You will note that some of the money falls to the ground next to the Jeep.

You’d never guess that this had anything to do with The Wizard of Oz. But it does. I thought I was reaching for a Wizard of Oz connection when Elvira begins with a monster movie within the movie. I didn’t go to The Wizard of Oz deliberately. It was just that Judy Garland popped into my mind when I saw Beverly Garland confronting a goofy-looking monster who strangles her to death. It probably had something to do with the fact that Beverly Garland is Kate Jackson’s mother in the ’80s television series The Scarecrow and Mrs. King and the Wizard of Oz wouldn’t be what it is without the scarecrow.

Apparently, the writers of Elvira made the same name association I did because there are Elvira has two more allusions to The Wizard of Oz – three if you count the letter that drops on the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wiz. On her way to the East Coast, Elvira passes a sign that you would never see in the real world. It says, "’Leaving Kansas "Land of Ah’s’" (Oz). When she arrives for the reading of the will, she puts her arms around her great-aunt’s housekeeper and chauffeur and says, "Auntie EM, Uncle Remise. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home."

You see a looser connection to The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy’s ruby slippers in Elvira's fight to the death with her warlock uncle. It combines Elvira’s black pumps with her ruby ring (her standard attire along with her gold dagger and black dress). In her first attempt to use the power of her ruby ring it flies off her finger and onto the finger of the warlock (Nicole’s ring was taken off her finger on Bundy). In a cemetery showdown (remember the cemetery showdown in Warlock) when all appears to be lost, she throws her shoe at him. The heel impales him in the forehead (Jennifer Jason Leigh kills a man with the heel of her shoe in Single White Female). In the end, she retrieves her ring and uses it to kill him.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the West by dousing her with water while trying to put out the fire on Scarecrow’s arm that was set by the witch. Elvira, on he other hand, is saved by water from they sky (rain) when the people of Falwell try to burn her at the stake for practicing witchcraft. The sheriff initiates the execution by setting fire to the straw at her feet.

Does any of this remind you of what Fuhrman told Kathleen Bell in 1986? She said that he wished he could kill all of the "niggers" in the world. She couldn’t be sure if he said he wanted to bomb them or burn them. Given his other references to genocide and his fascination with Nazi Germany my guess is he said, "burn."

This is one of the places in Elvira where Jack Nance comes in. He is the Good Samaritan in Whore who rescues Liz when she is beaten and left for dead by the railroad tracks in Whore. In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (’90), he is Pete Martell who runs into a burning building to save his wife, whom he thinks is trapped inside. You get another Jack Nance link in the Elvira references to The Wizard of Oz. In Wild at Heart he’s a strange character called 00 Spool that Nicolas Cage as Sailor and Laura Dern as Lula meet in a trailer park. He tells the couple, "My dog barks some. You have pictured my dog mentally. You might even picture Toto in The Wizard of Oz…"

I don’t have to say any more about Fuhrman, Nicole, Laura and Hart with respect to Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart. But we can get to Wild at Heart from Elvira directly by way of two actors who appear in both movies and both of whom might share the name Billy. Frank Collision is Billy in Elvira. He’s Tommy in Wild at Heart. Elvira’s Uncle Vincent is William Sheppard Morgan. He is Mr. Reindeer in Wild at Heart. Mr. Reindeer is a gangster of some unspecified variety who arranges for a hit with a phone call and two silver dollars as his calling cards. If you had any doubt that the dollars raining down on Elvira next to the Jeep could stand for coins, Mr. Reindeer’s "calling cards" should put them behind you for good.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison

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