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In his Lost Coast home, Alexander Cockburn recounts a personal history of Beat the Devil, the John Huston movie. When Lennard first read Beat the Devil – the book – she was amazed to discover James Helvick was the pseudonym for journalist Claud Cockburn, father of her friend Alexander. 2014, Elizabeth Lennard and CounterPunch.
Very few people have seen life from as many angles as Ray Jones. After a regular upbringing in a working-class area of Swansea, Ray veered off the rails into a life of shoplifting and small-time drug dealing fuelled by alcohol and driven by gambling. Inevitably, Ray was sent to prison and eventually left Swansea for London such was his growing notoriety with the police and magistrates in his home town. In London he settled in Ladbroke Grove and became a key figure in the burgeoning music and art scene emerging from the boho pubs around Notting Hill. He toured with Joe Strummer, hung out behind the scenes in Paris fashion houses and ran Dylan's bar in San Francisco before being ripped off in a massive drugs deal, leaving him destitute.
