Looks like a chip off the ol' block!

...um...Shaun...billions of sperm...NO EGG.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hasta:
That isn't you, Peter... At least I hope to God...

---

It's no good hoping to him, you know. And all those members who you never see? That's all my work, is that?

Oh is that so.
Born & raised in Hagerstown, Maryland, I'd like to know when he became the property of Tampa.

A disfiguring disease turned Tampa's Rondo Hatton into a bit- playing movie monster in the '30s and '40s. Now his most devoted fan wants to pluck him from obscurity and turn him into a hero.

"About 30 years ago, for obscure and strange reasons," Burns says, in a voice full of mystery, "I became obsessed with Rondo Hatton."

Burns is sitting in the library of the Tampa Bay History Center in downtown Tampa. He has come here in late May to explore the archives of a city that yielded one of the least heralded movie monsters of all time.

Seated next to Burns, in rapt amazement, is Anne Ciurro, the registrar at the history center, who has come to her interest in Hatton much more recently. But Ciurro, 30, already has demonstrated a precocious level of affection; three years ago she restarted someone's abandoned tradition of observing Hatton's birthday by placing red carnations on his grave at the American Legion cemetery on Kennedy Boulevard.

Over the next hour, the two will feed each other's appetites for Hattoniana with obscure information about one of the more obscure movie actors of all time.

Hatton, who died in 1946, was modestly well known during his lifetime as a fixture of B-grade horror movies who always seemed to be cast as the lurking, monosyllabic homicidal maniac. His qualification for such roles had nothing to do with acting talent (he always said he was no actor, and that was a fair appraisal), but the fact that he suffered from acromegaly, a disease that seriously deformed his face and earned him the name "the monster without the makeup."

Burns has spent most of his professional life as an art director for horror movies, among them The Howling, Re-Animator and The Hills Have Eyes. Now he hopes to make his own movie about Hatton, but one that avoids the misguided plot of "handsome young man becomes a monster and becomes a movie star," Burns says.

"He really wasn't a movie star," Burns tells Ciurro. "He was really just a nice, boring guy."

The real movie, Burns insists, is "an honest-to-God love story" between Hatton and his second wife, Mabel. Tampa, then, is to Burns what Verona was to Shakespeare.

"The story is them," Burns says. "All the other stuff is subplot to that."

Burns can make pronouncements like that because he reckons he is "the world's leading authority on the life of Rondo Hatton." He might, in fact, be the only authority. The competition is not that fierce.

This does not embarrass Burns. The scarcity of information on Hatton is one of the things that so appealed to Burns in 1966 when he first discovered Hatton on late-night reruns of films such as House of Horrors, Jungle Captive and The Spider Woman Strikes Back. He had bit parts in dozens of other movies, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which he was out-uglied at the Festival of Fools by Quasimodo.

"How many times is a person the world's authority on anything?" Burns says. "One thing led to another, then it got way out of hand."

In 1970, after he had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, Burns named his graphic art studio the RH Factor. Two years later, Burns sponsored a softball team in Austin that he named the Golden Creepers, in honor of Hatton's most celebrated role as the Creeper, a recurring character that first appeared in the Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death.

"The team won its division," Burns says of the Golden Creepers. Later, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead took a fancy to the team jerseys and Burns gave him one.

Among people such as the late musician Frank Zappa, who put out an album under the name the Rondo Hatton Band, Hatton - whose face was usually ominously underlit to accentuate his hooded brow and prognathous jaw - became an icon of pop culture, an ironic footnote to an era of low production values and equivalent public taste.

But Burns' fixation has been far longer lasting, a marriagelike devotion for a man who has never been married.

Hatton had been a handsome young man when he attended Hillsborough High School, starring on the football team and socializing with the social elite, J. Rex Farrior among them. His disease did not strike until after he returned from the trenches of World War I, where he had been gassed.

Doctors originally thought the mustard gas had caused the grotesque swelling of his face, but later it was diagnosed as acromegaly. The disease is triggered by a tumor on the pituitary gland, which causes the bones of the face, hands and feet, as well as some soft tissue, to continue to grow. Hatton's case was progressive, and he would have to undergo operations to remove his cheekbones and shave the bone of his lower jaw.

While working as a reporter for the Tampa Tribune in the 1920s and '30s, Hatton was sent to cover the filming of a movie caled Hell Harbor. The director, Henry King, saw Hatton and offered him the minor role of the dance hall owner, which he took. Later, King pressed Hatton to move to California to make more movies. Hatton, who was painfully self-conscious, demured.

In 1934, Hatton, still working for the Tribune, met a beautiful young seamstress named Mabel "Mae" Housh when he was sent to cover a costume ball. Housh, who had sewn the gown for the hostess, was asleep on the back steps.

"He ran into her and they talked long into the night," Burns says. "She knew ugliness was only skin deep."

They both had been married before, but they gave it one more try on Sept. 29, 1934.

Housh persuaded Hatton to move to Hollywood. Sure, they're exploiting your looks, she told him. They're doing it to Veronica Lake, too.

Burns met and interviewed Mrs. Hatton in California in the early '70s. "She was just excessively cool," he says. But it took him a while to home in on their love as the central theme of the movie he had always wanted to make.

"She had personality enough for both of them," Burns says.

Once, at a Beverly Hills post office, a little girl began to cry when she saw Hatton's face. He was mortified, along with everyone else in line. Trying to dispel the tension, Mrs. Hatton nudged her husband, whispering, "Say, 'Boo.' "

He did and everyone laughed, Burns says.

In a 1946 story called "Hollywood's Strangest Love Story," Pageant magazine writer Erma Taylor said Mabel "was one of the most beautiful women even the city of films has ever seen. . . . Her blondeness is so pure and natural that her beauty is always a kind of shock in Hollywood, the capital of bleached albinism."

Ciurro could not match Burns' vast stockpile of Hatton lore, but she was able to show him city directories that indicated where Hatton lived with his parents on the 1000 block of Grand Central Avenue and where Housh lived before they were married. She showed Burns a photograph of Hatton taken before World War I when he was assigned to Company H of the Second Florida Infantry.

"You can see that his lips and his nose were beginning to thicken up," Burns says. "It's a good transition picture."

This was exciting stuff for Burns, who quickly began to hone the plot.

"The opening scene I want to be the costume party," he says. "I realize it had to be the Gasparilla of 1934. I didn't know anything about Gasparilla. (Before) I thought it had to be Halloween. It was probably the first Gasparilla after the repeal of Prohibition."

The history of Tampa at the time will make for a rich backdrop, he says.

"What a wild and woolly place. I had no idea it was one of the most notorious cities in the country," Burns says. "It had Chicago gangland stuff, Tombstone wild West stuff, New Orleans drinking stuff."

He is casting the movie in his head, too.

"It would have to be a really good physical actor," Burns says. "You'd have to play it with tons of makeup. Like Vincent Donofrio in Men in Black, that scene where the alien invades his body."

Burns says he wants to finish the screenplay quickly. But he is mindful, too, that the gestation period so far has been somewhat slow.

"It could be 20 years before it's done," he says. "Who knows?"

You can't hurry love.

The movie House of Horrors (1946) was one of Rondo Hatton's best known. Hatton's character is rescued during a suicide attempt by a sculptor who proceeds to use Hatton as the model for his masterwork. In gratitude, Hatton's character, again a homicidal maniac, kills all the art critics who had disparaged the sculptor.

Rondo Hatton's movie roles were short on dialogue and long on scowling and lurking. In the Brute Man, which was released after his death, Hatton played "The Creeper," the psychologically scarred result of a laboratory explosion that disfigures an ambitious chemistry student.

Rondo Hatton met his second wife when he was covering a masquerade ball as a newspaper reporter for the Tampa Tribune. Mabel Housh, a seamstress, had designed the costume for the hostess.

Robert Burns, an authority on the obscure movie career of Rondo Hatton, displays a promotional photograph from the movie House of Horrors.

Robert Burns' fascination with Rondo Hatton, a modestly well-known movie monster from the 1930s and 1940s, dates back 30 years. In late May, Burns made the trip to Tampa, where Hatton grew up and is buried, to begin research on a movie about Hatton.

Hatton starred on the Hillsborough High School football team and was in the same social club as J. Rex Farrior, who would go on to become a prominent Tampa lawyer. Acromegaly, the disease that would distort Hatton's features, did not begin to affect him until after he returned from World War I.

***********************************************************************