Sweet Seasons
Lizard asked Uncle Baxter about Marilyn
Kilroy.
She was born in Savannah, Georgia
in 1927 and died in New York City in 1969.
Who was she?
A torch singer, but one song of hers,
Laffin at Me, sounds like typical pop schlock
you’d hear from the late fifties.
How did she make her mark?
In ‘51 she appeared in The Big Night,
the one unflawed character in this film
about the corruption of life in America
as it was as opposed to how it is.
She was the one George, the protagonist
looked at and said to, you’re so beautiful
even though..his inference
was even though you are black. You saw
the change in her face, at first
pleased, suddenly revolted.
What did she look like?
She had brown eyes. The features in her
face perfectly proportioned,
she was lovely, but not uncommonly so.
What else about her do you know?
She sang in New York clubs. In November
1969 she and her twenty year old
stepdaughter were murdered in their
apartment because her husband Pat
Jackson, a car salesperson, had failed
to pay a debt he owed to drug dealers.
Did she herself do drugs?
I have no idea. She may have. I only know
she sang, and acted in a few films.
She sang in The Big Night moments before
George sidled up to her.
She was the impetus for racism as an
integral part of the corruption depicted
in this film, which, unlike Laffin at Me,
was not dollar-driven but had something
to say, and to show, the face of Terry
Angelus, played by Marilyn, aka Mauri
Leighton, who in real life was murdered,
either shot, stabbed, or beaten,
I don’t know how, there’s much I don’t know.
I saw her face change as she stood
outside the club in that movie, about
to go someplace else, shortly after midnight,
I don’t know where. You see
George leave in a cab with his pal
the professor, you don’t see Terry again.
You know she’s in The Big Night
not only for her singing.
Were drugs rampant in New York in ‘69?
I suspect so. Marilyn’s stage name
was Mauri Leighton. She was beautiful.