Oh, Thank Heaven For Simple Blessings
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| Scott Brown's naked "leg up" in Cosmos |
by Winsip Custer CPW News Service
Scott Brown appeared on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight on February 2, 2011 to discuss his new book Against All Odds: My Life of Hardships, Fast Breaks and Second Chances. The son of C. Bruce and Judith Brown, Scott grew up in Massachusetts and after a troubled childhood which included child abuse, he graduated from Tufts University and Boston College owing his turn-around to the intervention of a Massachusetts judge. One of Scott's fast breaks came in June 1982 when Brown was 22 years old and won Cosmopolitan's "America's Sexiest Man" contest. The prize money of $1000 reportedly helped pay for his law school tuition and the notoriety opened the door to a modeling career.
Scott was not the only famous Brown associated with Cosmopolitan. In the same year he won "America's Most Sexiest Man" contest, 1982, Cosmopolitan Magazine editor and publisher, Helen Gurley Brown, published her biography, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex and Money. Helen Gurley Brown's earlier book Sex and the Single Girl chronicled her view of post-adolescent female priorities. You sleep your way to the top and Helen unabashedly did, marrying notable film producer David Brown whose first film kicked off the career of a young Stephen Spielberg. No, not Jaws......The Sugarland Express.
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| David and Helen Gurley Brown |
Sugarland Express (1972) was the springboard for Goldie Hawn's career in film. Goldie had started her stage-life in the chorus line of Can-Can in the Texas Pavilion at the 1963 New York World's Fair. Texas had also been home to Helen Gurley Brown. She graduated from Texas Women's University in Denton, Texas.
David Brown's interest in The Sugarland Express and his young Texas vixen were not altogether unrelated. The Brown name in Texas goes back to the Texas Revolution where the first captains of ships in the Texas Navy were from the Brown family and where, had it not been for John Henry Brown of Galveston, Indianola, Belton and Dallas, the Texas Revolution may have been lost. It was his foresight that led to an appeal to a conclave of Roman Catholic bishops meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, home of one of America's most powerful and wealthy industrialists and shipping and transportation moguls, Alexander Brown. At their request, the Bishops were delivered a message from a Texas Irish-Catholic newspaper man, John Linn, who worked for John Henry Brown in Texas. Linn was an influential member of the Texas Irish Colony of James Power. The Bishop's English speaking priests hurried to Texas so that the Irish immigrants would not defect to the Roman Catholic Mexicans. Separation of church and state has always been a matter of political expediency.
Sugarland Express was the true story written by Robert Wiatt, famed FBI agent, who not only experienced this event, but was also credited with killing Fred Gomez Carrasco in July, 1974, the undisputed head of the Texas-Mexican Mafia. In his later years Wiatt became the head of security at Texas A&M University where Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, similarly became president following his career at the Central Intelligence Agency.
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| Bob Wiatt, famed FBI agent and key figure in The Sugarland Express |
David Brown, the power behind Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmo, produced other such award winning films as Jaws, Driving Miss Daisey and The Sting. Together they had an uncanny eye and ear for the promotion of the good life as they understood it, but which was never far from the power resources upon which men like Alexander Brown had amassed his American fortunes from home ports in Baltimore, Boston, New York and Liverpool. They would fund rebellions not only in Texas and the great American West, but would ride the rails laid by Brown Brothers Harriman carrying the engineering skills of Brown & Root, then Kellogg, Brown & Root to places like the Philippines, Mexico, Central and South America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, supporting and challenging stability and chaos as it seemed to further U.S. interests....and by U.S., as General Smedley Butler pointed out so eloquently in his book War Is A Racket, we mean their interests. It is nothing to have given a wayward family member a leg up through male modeling, school tuition, a judges' mentoring and various other resources.
When Scott Brown endorsed the invasion of Iraq while discounting the path taken to get there we were given a clue. When President Obama embraced Scott Brown's approach to solving the health care stalemate and logjam, was the President channeling his sympathies down long established ties to the Brown empire through relationships established with Michele Obama's employment at the Springfield, Illinois law firm that represented Republican Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and which merged in 2001 with the New York law firm of Brown & Wood? What are these connections to David Brown? Helen Gurley Brown? Scott Brown?
The media rarely digs that deeply into family connections within America's power systems and structures which has the lesser power brokers within the Italian, Irish, Latin American, Greek, Jewish, African American and other ethnic systems both admiring and resenting their prominence.
Who could blame a 22 year-old Scott Brown for accepting a leg up.....albeit a naked leg up? No one. Anymore than they can blame Stevie Speilberg for accepting David Brown's help with The Sugarland Express, or Paul Newman or Robert Redford for their parts in The Sting. Again, no one blames them for that. Opportunity knocks and you have to open the door, but of course it's a single file line to the door and not everyone will have the same opportunities. Opportunity knocks and its hand, in this case, is connected to David Brown. He opens it and you have to go through. But not to identify the real source of the power behind the seemingly serendipitous events and to present these events as random, disconnected and unexplainable blessings? Stung again, Henry Gondorff!
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