“Dillinger’s dead
I guess the cops won again”– Elton John, ‘The Ballad of Danny Bailey’
“He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker…”
– Young Frankenstein
Hollywood has long been infatuated with Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger. The most recent high profile Dillinger flick was Public Enemies (2009), which was directed by Michael (“L.A. Takedown“) Mann and starred Johnny (“Nightmare on Elm Street“) Depp and Christian (“Mary, Mother of Jesus“) Bale. It was a visually sophisticated filum that tried to strip away some of the accumulated layers of myth and bullshit that urban folklore A-Listers like Dillinger invariably attract. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that Michael Mann likes to do: he’s a serious filmmaker who makes serious films about serious men with serious problems. He’s not the sort of cheap hack who’d fob people off with a lewd anecdote about Dillinger just because he thought it was funny.
Here’s a lewd anecdote about Dillinger that I think is funny.
Like some kind of big phallic space rocket, the legend of John Dillinger’s Pickled Penis consists of three distinct yet interrelated modules:
- Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger had an unfeasibly large shlong.
- After Dillinger’s was shot to death outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover had his arch enemy’s colossal manhood surgically removed.
- This ithyphallic monstrosity was subsequently displayed at the Smithsonian Museum.
Like most urban myths, there’s little in the way of hard evidence (ahem) to support any of this. To tackle (if you will) the first part of the legend – upon which, its fair to say, the rest of it hangs (so to speak) – there’s not so much as a post-coital testimonial from a grateful size moll to support the theory that John Dillinger was equipped with a prodigious trouser-based Tommy gun. The closest we get to ‘proof’ is a grainy black and white photograph of Dillinger’s recently-expired corpse that was taken in Cook County Morgue in 1934. For some strange reason it was only after the photo was published in newspapers that the rumour began to spread.
This is the photo:
As a disgraced former UK light entertainer might have said: “Can you tell what it is, yet?”
Of course, even if this photo was the catalyst for over half-a-century’s worth of pecker-speculation, it’s hard to imagine how it subsequently gave rise (groan) to the rest of the legend. How do you get from ‘America’s Public Enemy Number One with a ding-dong so huge it could tent a morgue sheet’ to ‘Surreptitiously castrated by the (allegedly) cross-dressing head of the FBI’? And how did it get from there to the Smithsonian Museum?
In a jar filled with formaldehyde, I suppose.
It could have something to do with Jungian archetypes, I suppose. Dillinger was often portrayed as a 20th Century Robin Hood; maybe this lurid myth is just a modern variation of the illustrious East Midlander’s final blind arrow shot? Then again, it’s not what you might call a like-for-like comparison: sightlessly firing an arrow to determine the your burial site isn’t quite the same as already being dead and having your purple-headed palooka chopped off by the Feds and put on display. Maybe I should leave the Jungian archetypes to the Jungian archetypists.
At least the excellent myth-busting website snopes.com offers a more robust psychological take on the bizarre affair:
Although the FBI finally caught up with and killed the infamous gangster in Chicago […] he had given Hoover and the FBI a black eye, leading them on an extended merry chase across the Midwest and humiliating them by escaping yet again when they had him cornered. What better revenge for Hoover than a symbolic emasculation, especially considering that it was a woman whom the FBI finally used to lure Dillinger to his death? Spread the word that Public Enemy Number One had been interred sans penis, and that his manhood had been put on display for all to see right across town from FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC.
If you ask me, that’s a pretty good explanation for something that probably isn’t true.
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