Unholy Communion

Part One

You may find this interesting.  It’s got movies, spies, weird priests, political intrigue, and strange connections. (Or, as we call it around here, Tuesday.)

Let’s start with the movies.

Brooke Shields attained fame and notoriety as a child star in Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby.  She was only twelve years old at the time, but she appeared nude in that film as the daughter of a prostitute in a New Orleans brothel. It raised all sorts of questions concerning the exploitation of children in cinema, with some critics claiming it was “child pornography” while others defended the film’s merits.  That the Brooke Shields character was sexually involved with an older character – the photographer Bellocq, played by Keith Carradine – made the situation worse even though there was no explicit sex between the actors.  The controversy sealed the fate of Ms. Shields, however, and she became a much sought-after actress even in spite of, or perhaps due to, her notoriety.

What some film buffs may not realize, however, is that Pretty Baby was not Brooke Shields’s first film.  That honor goes to a rather mysterious production known as Communion but also as The Mask Murders, as well as Alice, Sweet Alice and Holy Terror.  That film premiered in Chicago on November 12, 1976, when Shields was only ten years old.  And thereby hangs a tale.

This time, there is a pornography tie-in, albeit not with Ms. Shields but with the director of Communion, Alfred Sole, whose first film – the low-budget porno Deep Sleep (1972), an allusion to the famous porn flick Deep Throat – was pulled from theaters for obscenity, due to pressure from the Roman Catholic Church when it was discovered that the exterior of the local bishop’s house appeared in one scene. 

The film became a cause célèbre in Sole’s hometown of Paterson, New Jersey when a local prosecutor decided to make a name for himself by prosecuting the director (and the actors) to the fullest extent of whatever law he could find.  The case made headlines for months, before finally dwindling out, but Alfred Sole found himself ostracized … and literally excommunicated from the Catholic Church, not a common occurrence. But he still had the movie bug and wanted desperately to direct another film.

Moving from pornography to a kind of detective-thriller-horror genre known to cineastes as giallo, Sole decided to produce and direct a feature film about Catholic school girls and a series of bloody murders in the local parish.  The action takes place in 1961 in Paterson: one of the most dangerous cities in America at the time. There were those who claimed the ornately Catholic plot built around the familiar ritual of First Communion was Sole’s retaliation for the Church having Deep Sleep pulled from the theatres and all its prints destroyed.  (Setting it in 1961 might also have been a reference to the first Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, who took office that year.)

Sole had studied art and architecture in Italy at the University of Florence and had developed an eye for production design which would later provide him with a decent living, working on such television shows as Castle, Veronica Mars, and MacGyver as well as a number of feature films. But in 1976 he was raising his own money, including mortgaging his house, to finance Communion.  He wrote the script with an English professor at Montclair State University, Rosemary Ritvo, who was his neighbor in Paterson and who shared some of his animus against the Church.

Most accounts leave Rosemary Ritvo right there, a virtual cypher, but that does not do justice to Sole’s co-author.  Rosemary Puglia Ritvo – to give her full name – was known for her academic studies of the Nobel Prize-winning poet (and initiate of the secret society known as the Golden Dawn) W. B. Yeats, and the relation of his work to Neo-Platonism.  She also co-authored another screenplay, much later on, for the TV movie Traitor in My House (1990) which starred Mary Kay Place and Charles Dutton: a true story about the Civil War spy Elizabeth van Lew who ran a Union spy ring out of her home in Richmond, Virginia and who, coincidentally, was once considered to be a witch. 

There was a lot more to Rosemary Ritvo than the cavalier reference to her professorship and her screenplay for Communion.  She obviously had a deeper understanding of the weird occult waters they were treading in and might have pulled off an even better screenplay than Communion if she had the chance.  She and Sole would collaborate on other projects, but financial and other difficulties in getting Communion made and distributed put the dream of a fruitful career in Hollywood script writing out of reach for both.  Sole would go on to make a few more films, each weirder than the last, but always had difficulty reaching a wider audience, so he had to settle for work as a production designer in Hollywood. 

Spies, witches, the Church, murdered children, and feature films.  Okay.  But what you’re really expecting of me is a deeper, perhaps slightly off-center, gaze into the tight little web of coincidence and conspiracy that this film represents.  Those who are familiar with my work and bio will suspect that there is some sort of personal connection to all of this as well, some weird happenstance that casts more shadow, if not more light, onto what seems at first is just an intriguing tale of how a strange little film was made and then somehow forgotten, only to be rediscovered later and praised for its creativity and directorial vision after an appropriate passage of time.

Well.  You’re not wrong.

Let’s start with one of Communion’s co-stars, a young woman in her thirties named Linda Miller.

At the time of filming, Linda Miller had just broken up with her husband, Jason Miller.  That’s the same Jason Miller who played Father Karras in The Exorcist (1973) and later in The Exorcist III (1990).  That Jason Miller.  She was so distraught over the divorce that she attempted suicide on the set of Communion by slitting her wrist.  Considering that this was, basically, a slasher film … well, I could make a joke about typecasting but that would be cruel.

Linda Miller is the daughter of actor and TV comedian Jackie Gleason, for those keeping score at home. And Jason and Linda Miller are the parents of actor Jason Patric.  Patric starred in the vampire flick The Lost Boys (1987) and, more recently, in MK Ultra (2022).

(No, I’m not making this up.)

But it’s the other, lesser known, characters we’re interested in.  Let’s start with Alphonso DeNoble.

DeNoble was discovered by Alfred Sole when the latter went to visit his father’s grave in a New Jersey cemetery.  DeNoble was masquerading as a priest and dispensing blessings and advice to those who came to visit their dearly departed, in exchange for donations. 

This resonated with me, since I used to do the same thing with my high school classmate, William Prazsky.  We would go to St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens, dressed in black cassocks and clerical collars, heavy crosses around our necks, and wander among the graves, blessing random headstones, until visitors would approach us and ask us to bless their relatives’ resting places.  We would do so, and then the visitors would give us a few dollars.  We might make anywhere from twenty to thirty dollars (in 1968 dollars) per afternoon. It was that money that paid for our limousine to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Senator Kennedy’s funeral, but that’s another story.

Alfred Sole struck up a conversation with DeNoble at the cemetery and wound up offering him a part in his film, that of a “Mr. Alphonso,” a sleazy pedophile landlord who becomes one of the victims.

DeNoble was morbidly obese, almost impossibly round, with a bald head and devilish beard, which only contributed to his sinister appearance in the film. As it turned out, he appeared in two other movies around the same time, both of them horror films.

But the unfortunate DeNoble committed suicide almost exactly a year after Communion was released into general distribution in the United States, retitled as Alice, Sweet Alice (November 17, 1977), shooting himself in the head with a shotgun on November 18, 1978.  This seems to have been due to his getting stuck in a subway turnstile because of his size, an episode which received some unwanted attention in the New York press.  He could not survive the very public humiliation and took his own life in despair.

The other character is a truly minor one, practically a cameo.  It was the role of the undertaker and is played by professional wrestling champion Antonino Rocca.

This is where I come in.

You remember the aforementioned William Prazsky?  We were both students at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, the same institution of learning that gave us Christine Jorgensen and David Berkowitz.  It was 1968, and we were both in danger of getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam.  So we formed our own church, incorporated it in the State of New York, and proclaimed ourselves clergymen.  We had a feeling this ruse might not work as smoothly as we hoped, so we made contact with an actual church – the American Orthodox Catholic Church, also in the Bronx – and were taken under its wing.

As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad.  It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s.  Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.  And, in 1968-1969, so were William Prazsky and I, although we were not yet aware of the Church’s notoriety in political circles.

Thus it transpired that, shortly after becoming involved with the AOCC, I attended a meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue in New York City with Rabbi Alan Block, William Prazsky, Andre Pennachio, and Antonino Rocca.  Just the five of us.  The topic of the conversation was Rocca’s involvement with the CIA.

The Brotherhood Synagogue was the brainchild of a Rabbi and a Presbyterian minister. Based in Greenwich Village, it was well-known for its liberal attitude towards ecumenism.  It was also, at that time, very pro-Israel which would become a problem later.

I am not sure why we were at that meeting, except that it was probably the idea of Andre Pennachio.  Pennachio was a Liberal Catholic priest.  The Liberal Catholic Church is a branch of the Theosophical Society, and not part of the Roman Catholic Church.  Pennachio was angling for consecration as a bishop with the American Orthodox Catholic Church with which Prazsky and I – as “priests” of our very own Slavonic Orthodox Church – were in communion.  In other words, Pennachio was working with the AOCC for much the same reason we were: to get “normalized” as a clergyman and raise his profile as a bishop. 

Pennachio had contacts throughout the entertainment industry and among other Italian-American personalities, of which Antonino Rocca was one.  Born in Italy, Rocca moved to Argentina just before World War II broke out and became a soccer and rugby player before becoming a professional wrestler and moving to the United States.

Now here we were, listening to Rocca tell war stories of how he had agents killed from under him in Lebanon, and how he smuggled Phantom jets into Israel from Europe.  He tried very hard to reassure Rabbi Block that whatever it seemed the US government was doing where Israel was concerned, they were actually working behind the scenes – with Rocca, obviously – to ensure that Israel survived and received the aid she needed.

It was a bizarre episode, to be sure.  Prazsky and I were only 18 years old at the time but were somehow managing to carry off our clerical personae.  Rabbi Block had no idea who we were but knew Pennachio (who knew just about everybody in New York). I am not sure why this meeting was necessary in the first place unless it was to convince someone of something.  And as for me, I had never heard of Antonino Rocca before.

Fast forward to 1977.  That was the year, remember, that Communion officially opened in theaters as Alice, Sweet Alice.  Antonino Rocca died on March 15 at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan of a urinary tract infection.  He was only 55 years old.  His funeral was attended by thousands.  But there was never any mention anywhere of his supposed involvement with CIA in the Middle East, and no confirmation that he smuggled Phantom jets into Israel from Europe.  He was, however, quite particular as to how it was done.

In order to avoid Congressional limits on aid to Israel, he said, the jets were sold to a third party in Luxembourg.  They were crated up, according to Rocca, and assembled in Luxembourg after which they were flown to Israel. This seemed like a lot of detail to me. He also insisted he had two men who worked for him as agents killed in Lebanon by Palestinian spies.  It was all very cloak-and-dagger, of course, and could have been put down to bragging, but that still does not explain what we were all doing there that morning.

Rocca maintained his involvement in the wrestling world for years after our meeting in 1969.  He worked as a referee in Japan, among other things, and eventually retired officially in 1976.  He was a world traveler, and fluent in several languages including Italian and Spanish as well as English, so he would have made a useful intelligence agent.  It is unsure how he got the part in Communion, except that he evidently had the same agent as actress Lilian Roth who also appeared in the film.

Little did I know, however, that at that meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue I was seated with not one but two movie actors.

Andre Pennachio, as mentioned, knew a lot of people in the industry.  What is not so well known is that he had his own bit part in a film.  He had a non-speaking role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).  If you remember the famous baptism scene, where the infant Sofia Coppola (playing Michael Corleone’s godson) is being baptized as Al Pacino (Michael Corleone) is holding her over the baptismal font, there is a high-ranking clergyman standing off to the side, resplendent in what appear to be a monsignor’s black cassock with red buttons.  He also appears again, briefly, on the steps of the church after the ceremony.  That is Andre Pennachio.

But in 1969, Pennachio had formed an official committee to finance and celebrate his consecration as a bishop in the AOCC.  He had a lot of well-known names on his letterhead, including Joseph Konowe of the Teamsters Union and Harry Hirschfield, the famous cartoonist, both of whom I met at the time. The Committee was run out of an office building on lower Fifth Avenue, near the Flatiron Building.  It was the headquarters of something called Delta Metal Industries.

Delta Metal Industries had a warehouse in Brooklyn, and to this day you will find some of their furnishings for sale on eBay and similar sites, mostly stools and small chairs made of brass in a “boudoir style”, replete with red or purple velvet pompoms.  Their showroom on Fifth Avenue was large and located on the third floor above street level and in all the time I spent there I never saw any customers.  We had the use of our own office on site, but there was never any work for me to do.  We mostly just hung out.

Gradually, it became obvious that there was no actual business being done out of that office.  But there were parties.  Most of the guests were theater people known to Pennachio, and government people known to Harry Kay. (I remember the actress Thelma Carpenter at one such affair.) Why would Harry Kay loan an office in his showroom to Andre Pennachio?  How did Kay even know Pennachio?

And how was it possible for Pennachio to escort me to the office of the head of the Selective Service System in New York City when it became time for me to register for the Draft? 

All of these things are connected, and the links are subterranean and strange.  Colonel Kirschenbaum was a tweedy type with a big desk and a private office in the Federal Building. I sat down with him and Pennachio, and he deftly provided me with the 4-D Clergy deferment on the spot … with the proviso that I keep him abreast of any suspicious Eastern European types coming in from abroad and passing themselves off as priests.  This was not only the Vietnam Era, it was also the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was moving spies into the United States masquerading as Russian Orthodox priests.  The AOCC was an anti-Soviet front organization run by a Ukrainian. It was all starting to come together.

Thus a few months later I was sitting at a desk in Delta Metal Industries and wondering what I had gotten myself into.  I began hearing rumors that I was going to be sidelined from the Committee and from the churches generally.  Prazsky had developed a closer relationship to Pennachio than was … seemly, and he began to indulge delusions of grandeur.  Prazsky was not satisfied being a mere priest or archimandrite.  He wanted to be a bishop, too. 

Remember, we both were still only eighteen and had only just graduated high school the year before. Prazsky would turn nineteen that June, yet by October he managed to befriend another cleric, this time it was Archbishop Hryhorij Osijchuk of the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, and he would eventually manage to take over that denomination years later, a bizarre fact that would contribute to his mysterious death after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that’s another story for another time.

As for me, I left the whole operation abruptly once I learned of the plot against me.  My sudden disappearance caused a lot of consternation among the others who were afraid of what I might say to the authorities about what I had seen or heard at Delta Metal Industries.  They began phoning my mother’s apartment at all hours, looking for me and trying to find out what my plans were.  Once they were satisfied I was not going to make any trouble for them, they stopped calling … but I immediately received notice from the Draft board that I had been reclassified as 1A. 

I was going into the Army.

(To be continued.)