I still got messages about James Atlee Phillips AKA Philip
Atlee. I don't know the URL for the web site that is
mentioned below, but I'm sure it could be easily found.
Juri
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001
15:45:52 +0700 From: "From the Cluttered Desktop of:" <
cjade@ksc.th.com> To: Juri Nummelin <
jurnum@utu.fi> Subject: Re: James Atlee Phillips
The following is from a page on the Net about James's son,
folk-rock artist Shawn Phillips. As you will see it contains
a lot of family background. It must date from pre-1991 since
Jim's death is not included.
"CHAPTER 1: AN AMERICAN FAMILY Shawn Phillips was first
arrested at the age of ten, and had to face the United States
District Attorney as a result. When he was a teenager, he was
arrested several times by the Fort Worth Police, and almost
thrown in jail. While in the Navy, he had to spend two weeks
in the discipline barracks for going A.W.O.L. A few years
later, he spent three days in jail in Dublin, Ireland. Before
going into detail about how a rock musician evolved from such
a turbulent youth, his family background will be
considered.
Phillips' paternal grandfather, Edwin Thomas Phillips, was a
graduate of The University of Texas Law School, and founded a
large corporate law firm in Fort Worth: Phillips, Tramel,
Chizum, Estes, Edwards, and Price. On September 5, 1928,
despite his robust health (6'3", 205 pounds), he suddenly
caught lobar pneumonia and died; the business went downhill
very rapidly without his leadership. Shawn Phillips'
grandmother, Mary Louise Phillips, was socially prominent in
Fort Worth, serving on the School Board, and having an
elementary school named for her in 1948.
Shawn's maternal grandfather, Dr. Charles Fielding Clayton,
was an orthopedic surgeon, with head office in Fort Worth,
and practice in neighboring states as well. Clayton founded
an orthopedic clinic, in which Shawn presently holds a 25
percent financial interest. All four grandparents are
deceased.
Shawn's mother, Joyce Clayton Phillips, attended The
University of Texas and Fairmount College, before marrying
Shawn's father October 12, 1938. She worked as a fashion
model in New York briefly, and, as an amateur pianist,
provided Shawn's only musical background. She suffered from
Raynaud's Disease, a scleroderma in which the blood supply to
the extremities is restricted. She had to have seventeen
surgical operations, including the amputation of several of
her fingertips, and died October 14, 1956.
Shawn's father, James (Jim) Atlee Phillips, "the black sheep"
of his family, has been a writer most of his life. At
nineteen, he had published two books of poetry, The Metal
Forest and Wind, Sand, and Stars. After discovering that
poetry would not support his family, Phillips stopped trying
to market it. He has continued writing poetry, stating, "If
it's good, it'll keep. If it is not, it doesn't matter."
After marrying Joyce, he moved to New York City for three
years, where he did publicity for Billy Rose. While there he
published his next book, The Inheritors (Dial Press, 1940), a
survey of
"country club Christianity." He thought that he would lead
the student rebellion of his day with that book and was so
convinced of it that "I became a leader of the people. Then
one day I looked around and there was nobody behind me. So I
gave up the crusade."
In 1941, Phillips became operations manager at Hicks Field
near Fort Worth, training Army Air Force pilots, until he had
a fight with the Director of Flying and knocked him over his
desk. Phillips moved briefly to Consolidated Vultee, where he
was recruited by Pan American Airlines to join the China
National Aviation Corporation (of which they owned 49
percent, with the rest owned by Chiang Kai Chek's Kuomintang
government) as head of Flight Operations for the Hump route
from India to China over the Himalayas.
After two years in that capacity, he returned to the United
States and joined the Marines. He intended to become a combat
correspondent but was not allowed to. Instead Sergeant
Phillips (he had been a colonel in the Chinese Air Force)
served as an editor of The Leatherneck, the Marine Corps
magazine. One of the men on the staff of The Leatherneck was
Fred Lasswell, the creator of the comic strip, "Snuffy
Smith." Phillips gave Lasswell a picture of his son, with a
mournful expression on his face, taken when Shawn was about
two years old.
I took this picture to Lasswell who imposed it on his board
and drew a picture around it of Shawn sitting in a crude
wooden tub. And Snuffy Smith is standing there with a big
scrubbing brush, bubbles all over the place, and he's saying,
'Well, Goddamn, Shawn, you got to take a bath once in your
life.' Shawn is so outraged that it was a great thing.
After the war, the Phillips family moved to San Miguel
Allende, Mexico, for about two and a half years. "We just
decided to find a Mexican place, and we didn't really mean to
go to San Miguel. We just started driving, and when we got
there, we said, 'This is the place,' and stopped. Shawn, then
about four years old, quickly picked up Spanish from the
street children. When the Phillips were entertaining, Shawn
would come in, "glance around like a tow-headed fireplug, and
say 'Chingada la cabrn, seor,' or 'bsame cula, seor.'" His
father would quietly take him by the hand and walk him out of
the room. Shawn also would go to the poorest hovels of town
and say, "no hay huevos en mi casa." (There are no eggs in my
house.) Even the poorest family would give him an egg, which
he always brought home.
They subsequently returned to Fort Worth, and Phillips went
to Europe on an
"abortive mission" to do a syndicated column called "Scene
Abroad." After two years of that, he returned to Burma to run
a charter airline, supplying troops and ammunition for the
Burmese government. In 1953 he returned to the United States,
and, due to his constant travel and their general
incompatibility, divorced Joyce. Phillips announced to the
Judge that he would pay Joyce $600 a month for the rest of
her life, regardless of whether she remarried.
Because he did not wish to subject his son to the emotional
stress of custody conflicts, Phillips moved to the Canary
Islands. There he married the former Baroness Hermelin; that
marriage lasted seven years. During that period, while living
in the Canaries, Sweden, and Spain, Phillips wrote sports and
adventure stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's
and did television and movie work.
In 1956, he returned to Fort Worth and Joyce's funeral, a
very traumatic event for Shawn. After completing a contract
for Radio Keith Orpheum, Phillips took his son to Tahiti for
several months. There he rented a house in the Punavia
district on the beach outside Papeete. Shawn, an expert
swimmer, had fun learning to fill outrigger canoes with water
and then empty them again. Jim was having a delayed reaction
to Joyce's death, and "was drinking far too much. Shawn
helped me more than I helped him."
In his movie work, he signed contracts by the movie rather
than by the year. He did numerous bad movies; the only decent
one he worked on was Thunder Road, which starred Robert
Mitchum. Phillips' independent spirit got him into a fight
with Mitchum, which was described:
I said in a fit of pique, 'Oh, fuck you!' And [Mitchum] said,
'How can you, when you can't even kiss me?' And I said,
'Well, then, I just better take a shot at you.' And I hit the
son of a bitch, and was there with it for quite a while. All
hands drunk, of course.
The following morning, Phillips woke up with pillows attached
to his head by matted blood. Mitchum visited him and helped
detach the pillows. The next year, 1959, Phillips committed
himself to the federal hospital in Fort Worth for Nembutal
addiction, worried about the danger caused by mixing that
barbiturate with whiskey. He was released after ninety days,
and moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and in September,
1963, married his present wife, Martha Tuttle Phillips.
During his first years in Arkansas, he continued to do
occasional movie work but did so reluctantly, as he preferred
writing for Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Until
those magazines discontinued publication, he had a "gravy
train," because he was paid $3,500 for a short story he could
write in two weeks. However, when those magazines ceased to
exist, he was "driven to the basement of publication" to
begin an adventure series about a character named Joe Gall.
While his wife was pregnant with Shawn's brother, Phillips
wanted a middle name for this "cuckoo," so he appropriated
the name of the unborn baby for it. Gall became Joseph Liam
Gall, and Shawn's brother, Liam Pritchard Phillips, when he
arrived on November 14, 1964.
Phillips has recently finished the nineteenth book in the
Gall series, which is published by Fawcett, and describes the
books, which have sold about 18 million copies, as "nothing
but cops and robbers, international background. Do it fast
enough so you get them out of the theater before they
realized they've been defrauded." Phillips has spent much of
the past ten years overseas, researching backgrounds for the
books. He noted, "I use only about 25 percent of what I find
in these books, and the reason I'm going is to educate
myself, and this is just a pretty good swindle to pay for the
trip. He plans to continue the Gall series as long as it is
interesting and exciting, and has plans to write his memoirs,
tentatively entitled, Going to Find the Wizard. He also plans
to devote more time to his family. From the foregoing, it is
evident that Shawn Philllips' family background is unusual;
it had a significant effect upon his life and
attitudes."
Note (by DW): the stint in Ft Worth federal hospital
obviously provided background for THE DEATH BIRD
CONTRACT.
Also here is a photo of Jim, probably taken sometime in the
80s; also from one of his son's websites. [This I took off,
since it was an attachment.]
Feel free to use these on the mailing list.
Cheers
Don Walsh
PS elsewhere on the Net Jim is quoted as saying he was
wounded in the ankle on 'Iwo Shima' (Iwo Jima) and spent some
time in Klamouth Falls US Navy hospital...that whole speech
is straight out of several of the Gall books word for word,
and accoding to the above material, he never saw combat in
USMC. So, the Iwo Shima thing appears to be a 'war story' or
was lifted from the novels and assumed to be
autobiographical. I know for sure that he was editor of
LEATHERNECK as friends of mine in the Corps remember him
well.
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