The Stage Mothers' Club

By Ron Capshaw

Johnny Jenkins was the child star of a controversial exorcism film, The Damned. After enduring the pain caused by a hovering stage mother, he escaped and enlisted in the Army. After being honorably discharged, Little Johnny Jenkins began to suffer from debilitating PTSD, and the only way he can keep his demons at bay is by writing. As the cloistered, highly successful writer of feel-good novels about loving mother-son relationships, he has created a comfort zone for himself. But he is soon brought back to the epicenter of his nightmares, his role in the movie; and along the way discovers the horrifying backstory of The Damned.

 

Pulpy and darkly smart, Ron Capshaw is a compulsively readable genre unto himself. I devoured The Stage Mother's Club in a single sitting. Take two-measures of William Peter Blatty and add a dash of vintage James Ellroy. Season with the breakneck pace of 1980s-style adventure paperbacks and savor the wild banquet! 

–Craig McDonald, Edgar Award Finalist

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Introverted Soul Collective Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215332245

Ron Capshaw

Ron Capshaw's work has appeared in National Review, the Daily Beast, Horror Tree, and Black Petals.  He lives in Florida with his cat.

Book preview

Somewhere in the publicity for the film there was an item about William Friedkin’s having looked at five hundred little girls before he chose his Regan, and, indeed, Linda Blair is a sparkling, snub-nosed, happy-looking little girl, who matches up perfectly with Ellen Burstyn. I wonder about those four hundred and ninety-nine mothers of the rejected little girls—or about the hundred and ninety-nine, if that’s a more reasonable figure. They must have read the novel; they must have known what they were having their beautiful little daughters tested for. When they see The Exorcist and watch Linda Blair urinating on the fancy carpet and screaming and jabbing at herself with the crucifix, are they envious? Do they feel, That might have been my little Susie—famous forever?

–Pauline Kael

PART ONE

ROLLER BOOGIE

Chapter One

Mom thought the role would net me other ones; ones radically different from The Damned. Roles where my pre-teen, angelic, dimpled face would play to my advantage, and not just used to contrast the snarling, possessed child The Damned script required.

She thought I could be a Jodie Foster or a Diane Lane; child actors who didn’t have to get their foot in the door via Disney, like Kurt Russel or Goldie Hawn, much less starring in a filthy horror movie.

She should have noticed how the rest of the child actors back then were train wrecks. Take Dana Plato, the teenage star of the hit ‘80s sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes. Everyone was shocked at what she had become after she left the series (although I suspect, not the cast, as during the show’s run she nearly died at the age of 14 from a diazepam overdose). Cut loose from Diff’rent Strokes, she then turned to petty crime, robbing a video store for the princely sum of $164, and then inexplicably returning to the scene of the crime.

Once I knew she made the cut for a role in The Exorcist sequel, mercifully uncredited, I understood why she eventually committed suicide. Unlike me, she didn’t play a possessed child; but I could have predicted that the mere taint of being in that film would result in a slow, painful, inevitable walk toward her suicide at the age of 34.

Looking at her eyes on-screen, whether on Diff’rent Strokes or the B-movies she slummed in afterwards; I knew she’d seen things that most of mankind are mercifully blind to. I should have gone to her funeral. We had never met, but I owed her that—one broken person to another.

Thankfully, my experiences during the filming of The Damned was a blur to me. But sometimes during that twilight period of a drug-induced sleep I would recall images from the set.

The blur of two figures. A booming voice. A very cold room.

But when Mom had got her talons into me, relentlessly capitalizing on the controversy The Damned had excited, three years after the much tamer version of the 1976 film Bonnie and Clyde had destroyed the Hays Code and kickstarted the much more permissive ratings system, dormant memories would resurface.

While she was narcotizing me with sleep medications and uppers to assure an innocent well-adjusted child performance on the publicity junket for The Damned, she went into religious mode.

She was good; a much better actor than I would ever be. She told reporters, talk show hosts, and any other person who pointed a fucking camera or microphone at her, with head held up high, that Johnny is 10 years old. He is a Christian, and I will not let him see the film.

But during my last argument with her, I mustered up enough bravery to say, You didn’t mind other people’s children seeing it.

And I hadn’t seen it. The shrinks said not to.

Today, the psychiatrists would have told me to confront my fears and watch the film; a twisted form of exposure therapy. By confronting what scares me, it would no longer be so fearful.

But then, such a theory was considered a bad idea. Avoidance was in vogue.

The only thing I clearly remembered about the film was what happened around it. When filming wrapped, the studio engaged in a ferocious, behind-the-scenes battle to get the movie ratings board to not give the film an X-rating (then, as now, only porno movies got X-ratings); and somehow, someway, The Damned was granted what today would be called a hard R.

I remember the lead actress, Ellen Cranston, who got the part by screaming in terror during the audition when the director, Riley Mason, a gun nut before the NRA was famous (or depending upon your point of view, infamous) fired a pistol into the air behind her for motivation, telling Rona Barret that I was kept mostly away from the other actors and directed in private. Mason said it was a form of method acting; he didn’t want me to become friendly with the people I would scream at and spit on.

The Damned was only an R-rated movie up to that point that the Vatican endorsed—and they had good reason to. Because of The Damned, their membership skyrocketed. Moviegoers out for a cheap thrill went in as smarmy Atheists and left as vomit-covered believers.

It also pleased the religious intentions of William Evans Kidfast, the very devout Catholic writer who adapted his novel for the screen. On the press junket, he said he wrote the book to convince agnostics in that God is Dead period that Satan existed; and, therefore, so did God.

But it was ironic that Kidfast, loudly religious, had never dealt with religion in his screenplays before. His métier, and this still astounds people to this day, was scripting screwball comedies.

It was equally ironic that the gun-nut director Riley Mason, who also Bible-thumped in interviews (he said that after reading the galleys of The Damned in one night, he was both converted to Christianity and determined to make a film about the novel) had previously been an actor, starring in hippie-cop movies.

Finally, I got to the point where I couldn’t take any more of the flashbacks and nightmares that the publicity tour caused—vague swaying shapes, a ram’s-head. I asked Mom to go get me a drink of water; and while she was gone, I tried to hang myself in the green room of the Marv Griffith Show with a rope I had hid in my clothes.

But it broke.

I sat on my sore butt, looking at the rope beside me, coiled like a snake.

Why was I being spared? Or to be more precise, why was I being forced to endure this pain?

More shrinks. More drugs, some prescribed and some purchased in alleyways from a friend.

And I think they would have made me feel better if not for Mom being a stage one.

Against the advice of psychiatrists, she relentlessly lobbied for roles for me. Even in studio quickies trying to capitalize on The Damned; bargain basement possession movies that required pre-teen boys and girls to scream hateful and obscene blasphemies.

Mom eventually gave up on my horror career when, during an audition for a teenage warlock, I had a seizure. A trip to the ER and the attending physician looking at my mother like she was Jack the Ripper closed off that genre for me.

More drugs, more alcohol.

Mom then tried to capitalize on my arrests for drug possession by getting me roles in disco films—it worked. Not of the Saturday Night Fever caliber, but teeny bopper films like Roller Boogie, where I played a teenager flirting with cute girls as they rolled and discoed by.

That experience I remembered. During the filming I had developed a reputation in the industry as the Nine Take Kid because it took as many takes for me not to panic when the director said, Action. Then, I would try and fail while tears ran down my face. Only when Mom gave me one of those happy pills would I give them something they could use.

I will never forget what the director, Hugh Jacobs, told me on my last day of filming. He detached me from my hovering mom, asking her to let him rehearse a new film role with me.

He was a blacklisted screenwriter, who made tons of money during the Depression. But even though he named names, he never hit it big again.

Hence, Roller Boogie.

He sat me very far away from the crew and Mom, who kept darting glances my way.

He leaned in very close and said, She is going to be the death of you. He then gestured to the movie, set as well as Mom. Save yourself. Get away from all of this.

He then took me outside and gave me $400.

Mom later asked me what we’d talked about, and I looked into that eager, greedy, plastic surgery-enhanced face and said, He wants me for his next picture. He wants you to meet with him tomorrow.

The next day, while Mom was pounding the pavement to the director’s door, I escaped. From there, I legally changed my name and enlisted. Goodbye little Johnny Jenkins, as the press called me, and enter Chandler Davis.

I don’t know if the army figured out my real identity, and I expected to be given a Section Eight out the door when the army shrink evaluated me; but he didn’t. He must have looked into my eyes and saw a trained killer.

In my file, which I later got a copy of, he wrote, Perfect motivation. Very angry. Barely repressed violence. I predict he will have a talent for it.

Hence, the Special Forces.

I thought the brutal training would break my fragile shell. But the psychiatrist was right. I took to it. Excelled at it even.

Four years followed, in which I took part in some of the deadliest missions on earth; missions that no one else but the Berets could pull off. And I remained calm, even in the worst firefights. I was, as my Green Beret sergeant had put it, holding my shit together.

Until my 12th mission.

My team was in the process of a hit-and-run liberation of an African village held by Cubans when I looked inside a tent.

Why did I have to see that young girl, eyes wide with fear, tied to a pole while a screaming priest hit her with a Bible?

Apparently, the supposedly Atheistic Cubans had had other matters to deal with in the village that had taken precedence over stopping it. While they smoked, raped, and shot those they couldn’t re-educate into Marxism, they let the priest go at her.

While Bakersfield, Simmons, and McCarthy were liberating the village, I went further into the tent and saw a child ruined for life—Swaying figures. I’m held up in the air.

I came to, as Simmons, looking at me with horror on his camouflaged face, took my empty machine gun away from me and hustled me into a helicopter that evacuated us while the village burned.

Since the invasion was top secret, no one would ever know what I’d done, in that post-Woodward-and-Bernstein period.

No one told me. It must have been very bad.

I was sent to a secret hospital and re-evaluated. Even though the Army shrink said my memories of the invasion were buried deep and would never resurface, to the Berets, I was damaged goods.

My commanding officer, Colonel O’Neal, trim at 48 years old, told me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. Every Green Beret had a breaking point.

The human psyche can only stand so much. Everyone breaks down in combat. Trust me, my boy.

He then saluted me, wouldn’t shake my hand, gave me