The Little World of Jim Moran

the kite-flying, fez-digging, tequila-swigging, bongo-beating, flamingo-fancying, cow-painting ersatz plenipotentiary, flack-meister extraordinary, raconteur emeritus, discover of furtles, inventor of fatolators, designer of whaletoriums, hatcher of ostrich eggs, friend of flying midgets and six-legged turkeys, onetime funeral-insurance planner, part-time prestidigitator, sometime horror-movie heavy, all-time mad prince of munchausen mummery, falstaffian flapdoodle and brobdingnagian balderdash article Jim Moran is one of those rare people who has his own part of the world ordered exactly as it pleases him. He lives alone, cooks for himself, and spends hours with his 210-pounds, six-foot-two-inch body slumped in a chair, starting moodily out of his front window. He looks like one of those poor Middle European souls Emil Jannings used to play in German films. But his appearance is deceptive. Although he is often pensive, he is also sometimes diabolical, more frequently mysterious, continually mischievous, and incurably insatiable. He has an enormous appetite for food, sports cars, jazz, classical guitar, primitive spiritous liquors, girls, practical jokes, semantics, modern and ancient art, weird machines, exotic musical instruments, girls, photographing wild animals, travel and the world in general.

Moran is perhaps the only man alive who customarily keeps a drum, usually a native one he picked up is some jungle, in every one of the five bathrooms in his ten-room apartment. They simply are there in the Johns, and they are symbolic – but not because Moran is a collector of drums; he is a collector of many other things, including funny hats and strange costumes, all the back issues of the National Geographic, books on arcane subjects, recherché statuary and painting, and Oriental rugs. The drums are symbolic because Moran, in addition to being a superb cook, a kite-flier, an inventor, the father of an ostrich, a man who not only say, but created, a purple cow and changed horses in midstream, sold an icebox to an Eskimo and found a needle in a haystack, is probably the most unorthodox drumbeater in the land.

As I write this, I am fairly certain that he represents the Red Owl stores, a chain of supermarkets in the Midwest; the Lark line of automobiles; and, occasionally, Broadway producer David Merrick. He also does some work for independent film distributors. I think. If asked point-blank what he is doing, Moran will say, "We are engaged in some very interesting projects," puff on his pipe, (continued on page 123) Jim Moran (continued from page 69) and pass a hand across his beard – into which, by the way, it is now and then his odd habit to tuck a ball point pen.

The only time Moran ever operates in a relatively uncamouflaged way is when he is on television. He describes himself as "kind of a professional interviewee," and he permits such people as Jack Paar to interview him on any number of subjects.

His appearance on a late-night-TV show with Arlene Francis last January provided a fine example of Moran's technique, which might be called sleight-of-mind. As a sleight-of-hand artist directs his audience's eyes one way with one hand while his other performs some secret manipulation, so Moran appears to be talking about one thing while he actually is slipping in plugs for something else. He started off by telling Miss Francis that he had been out looking over some land in the Rocky Mountains he was planning to buy to start a coffee plantation. This proposition was so startling that Miss Francis failed to notice a plug for Red Owl stores as it went by. "The Red Owl people are backing me in my coffee plantation," Moran said offhandedly. Moran slipped in the Lark plug ("So, before I took off on my most recent trip, I put my Lark automobile in the garage, and . . .") as he was telling her, in utter seriousness, of his plan to start a funeral-insurance plan for the natives in Belize, British Honduras. If Miss Francis had challenged this wild scheme, Moran would have produced a document headed Final Rest Burial Association. This is an organization he and an associate founded to sell funeral to Belizians on the installment plan at twenty-five cents a week for fifteen years or for life, whichever is shorter, or longer.

Moran is never more blissful than when he is making some fantastic claim and then backing it with proof. Once when he was appearing on Barry Gray's all-night radio show in New York, Gray asked him what he had been doing recently. Moran replied that he had bought a captured Japanese midget submarine from the Alien Property Custodian, and at that very moment, in secret water off the Florida Keys, a midget employee of his was in it, learning to loop the loop under water. "I'm going to exhibit this all over the country," Moran said.

"All right, Jim," Gray laughed, "what have you really been doing?"

With a flourish, Moran pulled a large folded document from his pocket. "Read this," he said, icily. It was a policy issued by Lloyd's of London, insuring the life of a midget named Morris Mac-Afie against any accident that might occur while he was looping the loop in a midget Japanese submarine.

Moran sometimes mentions casually that he once ran for the Senate. So he did, in 1946, in California, in an attempt to fill the unexpired term of the late Hiram Johnson. He got twenty thousand votes, campaigning on the slogan "What this country needs is a good five cents." He also refers every now and then to his career as a movie actor: he appeared with Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher, and he played a headwaiter in The Specter of the Rose. He was a radio talk jockey on a small New York station, and, for one week, served as host for WNBC-TV's late movie.

Because Moran so often blandly produces evidence to back his more extravagant claims about himself, none of his friends ever quite know if he is serious or joking. One day while he and I were sitting around talking in his library, the telephone rang. He answered and immediately began to haggle with the caller. "No, no," he kept saying, "a hundred and fifty dollars is too much for man trap." When he finished the call, he said, "Some guy wants to sell me a man trap. Imagine that." Positive that this was another of Moran's stunts, I asked no questions. A couple of weeks later, he and I were looking for something in the storeroom of his apartment – an incredibly cluttered place, containing, among other things, a television set ("I keep it here because I hate television"); two dozen assorted hats, including a sombrero, a pith helmet and a Roman Catholic Cardinal's hat; a lie detector; and several boxes full of Chinese. Arabian and Indian robes, as well as yards and yards of lace and bolts of exotic and expensive cloth ("I dig fabric"). In the midst of all this impedimenta, cocked and ready for action, was a huge black steel trap, about ten times bigger than the spring-jaw device commonly used to capture bears. "I bought that man trap after all," Moran said casually. "You don't know of anyone who needs one, do you?" Later he explained that the machine once had been used in England to catch poachers. "I got it at a good price, a hundred bucks," he said. "Not bad for a man trap, eh?"

Moran is fascinated by curious machines, and sometimes invents them himself. One of his most successful was the Fatolator, which he demonstrated on Garroway's TV show one morning, meanwhile merrily sliding in plugs for his various accounts. The Fatolator was about the size of a one-nighter suitcase, and fitted with gears, wheels and lights. "One of the primary laws of nature," Moran explained, "is that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Now, many people are on diets these days. This fat they're all losing must be going somewhere. I have discovered it is in the atmosphere, and I've developed the Fatolator to render fat out of the air."

While Garroway looked on, Moran carefully started his machine. "It whirred and growled," says Mike Zeamer, who was then director of the show, "and a wisp of blue smoke came up. After a moment, a chime sounded and the machine stopped."

Moran faced Garroway dramatically. "When I open this drawer here," he said, "we will find a tiny ball the size of a nut, resembling pure lard. This will be fat from people who have lost weight, rendered from the air around us." Moran opened the drawer. His face took on a horrified expression. Gingerly reaching in, he took out a small piece of steak. "My God!" he cried. "Someone around here is losing meat!"

The Fatolator was preceded by another machine, the Fadeometer. Moran devised this one while working for Fred Waring. Waring and the announcer on his radio show, the late Paul Douglas, were continually arguing about whether Florida sunshine. Moran offered to find out. He went to Florida and spent a week in the sun with one side of his body exposed. Then he went to California, he produced his Fadeometer, which he had made himself, and "measured" his suntans. The machine, he said, with the air of a scientist making an earth-shaking pronouncement, was unable to discover any noticeable difference in the two shades of brown.

When Moran is not using machines, he likes to work with animals and birds. To publicize The Matchmaker." during its run on Broadway, he rigged a taxi so that a big monkey could drive it around New York (Moran was concealed in the rear operating remote controls). The cab bore a sign saying, "I am driving my master to see The Matchmaker."

Guests at a Moran party one night found, in one bathroom, not only the usual drum, but an unusually large live pink flamingo. For a long time he kept an owl, too, sometimes in a bathroom and sometimes in a cage. "Jim, why do you keep that owl?" a friend once asked.

"Why, for owl observation," Moran replied, and went into a long explanation of how his scientific determinations had proved that the phrase "wise as an owl" was not true. "Owls really are stupid," Moran said. "Watch." He jumped up and down in front of the owl's cage, waving his arms and calling it names. The owl only blinked in a bored manner and emitted an occasional hoot of pure ennui.

This owl belonged to Moran long before he began representing the Red Owl stores. When he got that account, he went owl-crazy. He rounded up a dozen owls and shipped them to Milwaukee when the chain was invading that city, then arrived in person and invited the press to his hotel suite to watch him color the owls red. He accomplished this with a spray gun filled with dye. "The whole suite had to be repainted."

Owls, flamingos, monkeys and the like are far too mundane to occupy Moran for long. A man who likes to think big, he prefers whales – and these large mammals have figured prominently in his promotions for years. In 1939, when Grover Whalen was assembling the New York World's Fair, Moran tried to get him to put in what he called a "Whale-torium." Live whales would be seen in a huge tank: "And we'll sell advertising-space on them, paint messages on their backs!" Moran cried to Whalen. The latter was not interested. Nor were the city fathers willing to listen to Moran's scheme to dispose of all the whales, sharks and other fish that were left homeless when the old aquarium was torn down. He proposed, through the newspapers, that the people of the city be invited to a huge fish fry. While Moran was publicizing some now-for-gotten sea epic for a Hollywood studio, he learned that a huge whale had blundered into and was locked in the San Diego harbor. The Great Moran Whale Rescue Expedition was formed hastily. Moran announced to all who would listen that he planned to rescue the whale and then put it atop Pike's Peak in a specially constructed tank. Disap-pointingly for the nation's mountain climbers, nothing came of it.

Sometimes Moran makes up animals and birds of his own. One Thanksgiving he gave Dave Garroway a six-legged turkey. He and a butcher had spent hours carefully sewing the four additional legs onto the turkey's carcass, but Moran stoutly maintained that he had produced the bird by breeding two three-legged turkeys. On another occasion he asked some friends up to see his fur-bearing turtle. When they arrived, sure enough, they found a large turtle covered with fur crawling around the room. "A rare beast I picked up in my travels," he said. "It is called a Furtle." He later confessed that he had glued a hunk of an old opossum coat onto the turtle's back.

Moran's greatest achievement as an animal creator occurred when he was publicizing the film The Egg and I. He announced that he personally was going to hatch an ostrich, and proceeded to do it. Wearing a costume bedecked with feathers, he sat on an ostrich egg for nineteen days, four hours and thirty-two minutes, until it hatched. He later gave his son to a zoo.

A slightly less spectacular caper took place after Moran awoke one morning with the words to the late Gelett Burgess' famous rhyme about the purple cow echoing through his head. He went out and rented a thoroughbred Jersey cow, mixed up some harmless purple dye and talcum powder, and dusted the cow from head to tail. He painted three of her teats gold and one silver. Then he went over to the hotel where Gelett Burgess lived and asked him to come down to the lobby. According to H. Allen Smith, Burgess swore that he would never forget the sight of the purple cow as long as he lived.

Moran rarely goes to all that trouble just to put one person on. He much prefers putting people on en masse. Every year the magicians of America get together and hold a convention, and in the course of it they show off the new tricks they have invented. Moran got invited to the convention one year by telling the executive committee that he had invented "the goddamnedest card trick of all time." Wearing robes and a turban, blindfolded and behind a screen, Moran called for a carton of decks of playing cards to be brought on stage. It had been sealed at the factory. A person selected at random from the audience broke the seal. Another person took a deck from the box. A third opened the deck. It was cut into four parts, which were given to four other people. An eighth person designated one of the four, and a ninth went up to the tapped man and chose a card. From behind the screen, Moran commanded, "Concentrate on that card!" While the assembled magicians watched, the ninth man concentrated. "That card," Moran called out, "is the six of diamonds!"

It was not the six of diamonds. Moran, unruffled, gathered his robes about him and walked grandly off the stage. "If it had been the six of diamonds," he said recently, "those bastards would still be talking about it!"

In his earlier, or pre-TV days, Moran made a specialty of exploding accepted concepts and demonstrating that popular sayings were inaccurate. During the 1944 Presidential campaign, when the Democrats were declaring that it was inadvisable to change horses in midstream, he hired himself out to the Republicans and went to Reno, where he changed horses in the middle of the Truckee River. While working for Fred Waring, Moran led a bull into Plummer's on Fifth Avenue to demonstrate that a bull in a china shop was not necessarily destructive. It wasn't, but in getting out of the animal's way, Waring bumped into a table and knocked off forty dollars' worth of crockery. This got a satisfactory amount of newspaper space, as had Moran's previous feat of finding a needle in a haystack (which took him eighty-two hours); his successful expedition to Juneau to sell an icebox to an Eskimo; and his restaging of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

This last was one of his more elaborate stunts. Moran arrived in Boston and placed a want ad in the newspapers calling for twelve men: two nearsighted, two farsighted, two with normal vision, two bleary-eyed, two bright-eyed, one afflicted with pinkeye, and one cross-eyed. Nearly 250 men applied the next day, and Moran selected twelve. He dressed the nearsighted, farsighted and normal men in Colonial uniforms, and the rest in British uniforms. Moran himself wore the uniform of a Colonial colonel. He gave his troops muskets and for two days drilled them on Boston Common. Presently he announced his plans: "I am going to prove that 'Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!' was the stupidest command in the history of warfare."

Loading the muskets with blanks, he lined up his forces and gave the command. The Redcoats began to advance. Indescribable confusion ensued. The farsighted Colonials began firing when the British were seventy-five feet away, and the men with normal vision began when they were fifty feet away. The nearsighted men did not begin firing until the British were on top of them. The cross-eyed, pinkeyed, bleary-eyed and bright-eyed men fired every which way. "All this never would have happened," Moran proclaimed, "if they had had modern eyeglasses in those days." At the time, he was working for a manufacturer of optical glass.

Subsequently, Moran – still optically occupied – got a dozen homing pigeons for the purpose of staging a race from Washington to New York. Six were fitted with the patron firm's sunglasses and six were not. Moran confidently predicted the winner would be wearing glasses; whether his prediction would have panned out has never been learned, since the release of the birds was in the neighborhood of a powerful broadcast antenna, which so disrupted the homing mechanisms in the birds' brains that they never did leave Washington. "Too bad," says Moran. "Of course, by that time, the news had been made, but it was a setback to science."

Moran is much admired by other press agents for his ability to devise news events that cannot be reported without mentioning the name of the client Moran is promoting at the moment. In 1949 he was hired to publicize Pimm's Cup. He started off one morning by having Alvino Rey and three mummer friends, Herbert Evers, Ann Staunton and Nancy Andrews, all go to Billy Reed's Little Club at two A.M. Evers and Miss Staunton went in first and ordered Pimm's. Rey and Miss Andrews arrived a bit later, and they ordered it, too. Miss Andrews said loudly, "I want mine with a sprig of mint." "Not mint!" cried Miss Staunton. "You don't use mint in Pimm's! You use cucumber rind!" An uproar ensued; the police came; Rey allegedly punched Evers; they were taken to night court; Moran showed up with bail. The fake battle made all the afternoon papers the next day, with Pimm's mentioned in every account. Moran represented himself to the reporters as "an interested friend."

Many of Moran's recent coups have been accomplished in collusion with David Merrick, Broadway's most prolific play producer. Merrick claims to detest publicity stunts, but he permitted Moran to help keep Fanny, a musical which the critics tried to kill, running on and on. One of Moran's moves to help the show was to locate an ostrich which, he claimed, was the daughter of his son and therefore his granddaughter. "What's its name, Jim?" asked Dave Garroway, in full view of millions. "Fanny," said Moran, in full hearing of millions.

It might be presumed that newsmen by this time would be rather suspicious of Moran's straight-faced announcements of impending "news" events, and equally on guard against what might appear to be genuine news with Moran somehow lurking in the background. The presumption is correct; yet in promoting an Orientally oriented play, Moran outfoxed newsmen by capitalizing on their suspicions of him. He sent telegrams to the editors of all New York papers announcing that Chinatown's famed dragon dancers would perform in front of the theater where the play was appearing, at noon that day, and urging them to send reporters and photographers. None of them did, of course – which was what Moran expected. Meanwhile, he'd found an empty theater of the same name in Philadelphia, and arranged to have the dragon dancers go there, unheralded, to perform. He then tipped a Philadelphia newsman to the "mistake" the dancers had made. That was news.

One night, when Look Back in Anger, Merrick's production of John Osborne's play, appeared to be faltering, the audience was treated to an unscheduled performance. A young woman stood up screaming, rushed onto the stage and gave actor Kenneth Haigh a good roundhouse slap in the face. As she was being hustled off, she shrieked that she had been so aroused by the drama she had lost control of herself. Reporters, who just happened to be handy, duly wrote up the incident. Moran later confessed that the girl had been paid $250.

Hard though it may be for the rest of us to credit, James Sterling Moran was not, as has been suggested, the issue of a mad, champagne-drenched night shared by an old-time circus barker and a lady faro dealer. He was born in Woodstock, Virginia, in 1907, the second of four sons of a respectable attorney for the U.S. Agriculture Department. His elder brother, Alvin, is with the State Department; and the two younger brothers, Elbert and Paul, are in the typewriter and television-repair businesses, respectively. His boyhood was not exactly unhappy, but his restrained home life made him restless. He says: "I could have come home after just having murdered the President of the United States, and it could have been on the radio and all over the newspapers, and nobody would ever have mentioned it to me."

Moran did everything in his power to attract attention from roughly the time he was able to walk, which may have something to do with his lifetime fondness for dressing up. He is likely to receive guests wearing a heavily ornamented brocade robe with a mandarin's hat riding above it. Sometimes he affects a fez or a Roman helmet. He was wearing a beard long before the present rash broke out across the country; it goes well with his costumes. Once, in Hollywood, he pretended that he was a visiting Prince of Arabia, and with a large retinue of slaves, swept into a nightclub and sat majestically at a table, casually dropping fake emeralds and rubies. While representing The Mouse That Roared, Moran went to Washington and sent his card to all the embassies, presenting himself as James Sterling Moran, the Ambassador of Grand Fenwick, the mythical duchy in the film. He also issued Grand Fenwickian postage stamps, had a magnificent uniform custom made for himself, drove around Washington in a Mercedes with a sterling silver mouse as a radiator ornament and license plates he designed himself (thereby quite wittingly – but fruitlessly – inviting arrest), and presided over a full-dress ball to which flocked most of the diplomatic set, either for kicks or because they'd been duped.

At parties, he often insists that guests don costumes from his storeroom. He also asks that they sit on the floor while dining, and insists on feeding them unfamiliar foods. One night he served a 136-course dinner in this manner. Each course consisted of a single, half-bite-sized tidbit, which each guest was required to place in the mouth of the person on his left. The guests left not only hungry but perplexed.

Moran's formative years were spent chafing in school. He read a good deal, and still does, which accounts for his imposing store of peculiar information. His library consists of around two thousand volumes. Moran declares that his passion for reading originally fired him to become a newspaper reporter, and after he left high school and had a one-semester set-to with George Washington University, he went to work for the Washington Daily News, first as an advertising solicitor and later as a cub reporter. He lasted sixteen months. "The job was too confining for me," he says.

Confinement of any kind has always been loathsome to Moran. As soon as he got his job with the News, he moved out of his parents' house and into the first of a series of apartments that have grown ever more cavernous.

Moran's present monstrous apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan contains two items of more than usual interest. The first is a huge carving showing a group of ladies in medieval costume, standing on a balcony. They are watching something, tittering and exclaiming to each other in an ecstasy of voyeurism. Moran has the ladies hanging in his private chamber, overlooking his bed. The second prize item is an elaborately carved antique piano, which is the star piece of a collection of ancient stringed instruments, including several zithers. He picked up the piano, which would be a monstrosity anywhere but in his rococo apartment, for only slightly more than the drayman's fee, but he gives the impression that it was fearfully expensive. "It came from the home of a fabulously rich man," he says.

Whether the piano now sits in the home of a rich man is moot. One acquaintance says Moran clears around $50,000 a year – and this sum is really clear, for when Moran travels he either is transported by friends in private planes or has the cost of his trip picked up by one of his accounts. There are a number of restaurants on both coasts and in foreign countries that are delighted to feed him on the cuff. Even when he ruins a hotel suite in the course of working out one of his mad schemes, the management usually repaints without a whimper of protest. About the only things he pays full price for are his groceries and his office. The latter, tenanted by Sam Kaplan, his genial partner, and a couple of secretaries, is located at 501 Madison Avenue. Moran rarely sees the inside of it. He does all his work in his apartment, generally by his front window, the telephone within easy reach. His monthly telephone bill rivals that of the late Mike Todd.

Moran reached his present happy state, in which he drives a silver 300SL and squires a huge collection of girls (at one of his parties I encountered seven girls, each of whom was under the illusion that she was his date – and they all may have been), only after years of job-hopping. After his sixteen months of newspapering, he sought his fortune in a variety of ways. He sold radiator covers for a while. He represented a pilot who took tourists on hop-flights over the capital. He gave guitar lessons. Moran learned to play classical guitar when he was in his teens and became intensely serious about it. He still studies with Sophocles Pappas, one of the world's foremost classical guitarists. Moran so admires Pappas that when he wrote his first book, he named the principal character after him. The book is called Sophocles the Hyena. Tom Scott set it to music for symphony orchestra, and it has been performed in Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic, with Burl Ives, and in Vienna by the Viennese State Symphony with Moran himself. Sophocles and the second Moran book, Miserable, about a Brontosaurus, will soon be followed by a third book, Miff the Mole, also ostensibly for children.

Moran has been through three marriages. The first lasted two years, 1929 to 1931. The second survived between 1934 and 1942. The third, Moran will not discuss. He now declares that he will never get married again, principally because he is having too much fun in his single status.

Moran's first big break came in 1935, when he was representing a recording company in Washington. He read that the director of the Washington Zoo was off to Borneo to look for a male orangutan. Moran announced to the press that he had a recording of a female orangutan which he was planning to give to the explorer. It was actually a recording of Moran howling like Moran's idea of a female orangutan in heat, but the newspaper reporters gave the story, and the recording company, a big play.

One of the people attracted by the publicity owned a canary he claimed could whistle Yankee Doodle. Moran promptly made a deal with the owner to put his phenomenon on the radio and send it on a concert tour. He arranged a performance for the bird, whose name was Pete, with the U.S. Navy Band over a coast-to-coast radio hookup, and booked him into a New York nightclub. Unfortunately, Pete chose this critical time to shed his feathers. He became so dejected he could not sing a note of Yankee Doodle or anything else. By the time his feathers grew back he had forgotten how to sing – according to Moran.

Some time after this fiasco, Moran went to Hollywood and worked for several studios, but most of the old hands out there thought his ideas far too impractical. For a long time he was a kind of professional guest. He would take over a friend's kitchen for the evening and cook Oriental dishes. After dinner he would deliver a lecture. One night he delivered a long oration on "The Importance of the Toilet Flush in American Life," illustrating it with the recorded sounds of various flushes from, among other places, a moving train and a men's room at the Library of Congress.

In those days Moran drank. His hangovers were agonizing. One morning a friend was trying to get him on the telephone; when Moran answered, his voice sounded like something out of the Pyramid of Gizeh. "Have you a hangover, Jim?" the friend asked solicitously.

"It isn't that, exactly," said Moran. "But my central nervous system slipped a bill under the door this morning, marked Long Overdue."

About five years ago, Moran went on the wagon. He now drinks only when he is not in the United States, but when he does go on a toot it often lasts for days, during which time he consumes Jackiegleasonian quantities of native ferments. He especially loves powerful, dark rums and home-brewed tequila. Last Christmas Eve he got plastered with a mob of two hundred Indians in Chonux, British Honduras. When in wine, Moran, who has a baroque vocabulary, likes to stand up and make a speech. The Indians' friendship so touched him that he arose in Chonux and made his "annual Christmas speech," whereupon they initiated him into the tribe. This moved him to make the same speech a second time. Eventually he fell asleep in the arms of two of his new blood brothers, and when he awoke he discovered that he had given his shirt to one and his shoes to the other.

The main thing that disturbs Moran these days is the realization that many of his best schemes have never come off – for example, the Moran Midget Employment Stabilization Board. "Midgets," Moran used to say to his friends, "have a very unstable employment situation. How often does somebody need a midget for something? During a war they can work in aircraft factories, riveting in tight, crammed quarters, but in peacetime all they can do is be freaks." In order to put some of his little friends to work, Moran designed huge kites. He test-flew them, each with a midget suspended from it in a harness, over the New Jersey meadows across the river from Manhattan. They performed nicely, except for a tendency to spin. "If there is one thing I can't stand, it's a spinning midget," Moran said. He thereupon devised rudders for the midgets to wear, which kept them on an even, nonspinning keel. It was Moran's notion that he would launch his kites and midgets in Central Park, the little people naturally holding display cards with advertising messages on them.

The law intervened. As Moran was preparing to send up the first of his three kited midgets, whose lives he had insured heavily, a policeman showed up to arrest him. "What law am I breaking?" asked Moran, putting on his injured face.

"You can't fly no midget on no kite in no Central Park," the cop said. "Suppose one fell off? He might hit a ball-player, facrissake."

Moran was disappointed, but what he felt was as nothing compared to his emotions after the blowup of the wildest scheme he ever conceived. When Grace Kelly was preparing to marry Prince Rainier, Moran was invited to the wedding. He is still not quite sure how his name got on the guest list, but once he had checked and found that the invitation was genuine, he began to plot. Miss Kelly and Rainier were to be married in two ceremonies, civil and religious. Moran decided that he could be more effective at the latter. He spent days with a balloon manufacturer, devising an inflatable baby that could be concealed, uninflated, inside his cummerbund, and which would inflate itself into a realistic-looking infant at the pulling of a valve. The idea was Moran at his most diabolic. He was going to wait until the priest asked if anyone present had any objection to the union of the Philadelphia heiress and the august ruler. Then, Moran would step forward with his baby in his arms and demand, "What about Fanny?"

There was considerable danger involved. The late Jack Kelly, Grace's father, had a classic Irish temper and was still fast with his fists. He and his son once had wrecked the office of the editor of a keyhole-peeking magazine because the man had printed some nasty things about Grace. In addition, there were to be armed guards everywhere, watching for would-be assassins. Moran nevertheless insists he was determined to go through with it. He says he studied a map of Monaco and a plan of the church; he put out feelers for petty officials who could be bribed; he had arrangements made for a getaway car and a route marked out.

But disaster struck, in the form of pneumonia. Anyhow, Moran says he had pneumonia. There may have been some other hitch; or he may have lost his nerve; or the entire plot may have existed only in his imagination. One cannot tell, and one does not necessarily want to. It is enough, for those of us who lead pedestrian lives, that such a man exists. His contempt for rules, restrictions and hard truths is a splendid thing that ought to be treasured. As Jim Moran himself has sighed, "In all of this world, there is nothing more dismal than a fact."

As this issue of Playboy goes to press, Moran is again demonstrating his unique capacity for combining business with pleasure and a penchant for traveling on odd missions. As you read this, he will be Africa-bound on a trip round the world to acquire what he modestly terms "the world's finest collection of masks." It's all part of a publicity campaign for a forthcoming flick titled The Mask, all about a curséd facepiece which makes those who wear it homicidal. It was Moran's idea to film some of the gorier sequences in 3-D (the kind that requires red and green specs) and to provide audiences with masks bearing red and green eyeholes, to be donned at the crucial moments. "One other detail," Moran said, loftily, as he was about to embark on this trip. "My contract also calls for me to appear in the film."

I noticed, in the trade-press write-up he handed me as he said farewell, that the producing company bears a name peculiarly suited to its bearded publicist – Beaver-Champion Attractions.