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Movie Madness: Titanic Mummy II



                     A LA RECHERCHE DES TOMBS PERDUS,
                                                or,
                         NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD

I must be crazy.  I'm thinking about making another documentary film, and
producing a book to go along with it.  It's hard work and a lot of stress, and I
tend to shy away from that, but in this case the material is just so good it's
hard to let it sit. Plus, I need the money.  This then, is the project I spoke
of in my codebook and Renault address query of last week.  Thanks for the help
on those questions.  There'll be more.  This is a Stone Soup Production.  As
such, though, y'all get to taste the soup as it's cooking.

NYT 12/22/25
PROROK LANDS HERE WITH LIBYAN VENUS

Count Byron Kuhn (sic) de Prorok, the explorer of North Africa, returned
yesterday on the Leviathan of the United States Lines, bringing a Venus of the
Libyan stone age, two skeletons, a quantity of jewelry and other antiquities
found in the tomb of Queen Tin-Hinan in the Sahara Desert.... "I would have
brought the skeleton of the Queen with me," [the Count said], "but my wife, who
came back with me, is very superstitious, and said it was like tempting fate to
carry the skeleton of the queen across the ocean." ...Asked why it was he had
brought the [other bones] if it was considered so unlucky to travel with the
Queen's skeleton, the count smilingly answered that the Countess had not been
aware of their inclusion in the cargo...." :)

                             xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Not surprisingly, Count de Prorok (born Francis Byron Khun, got into some
trouble with French and Algerian authorities over this incident, and it did not
set all that well with his wife or her family, either.

What I have at hand are copies of a film, diaries, letters, newspaper columns,
and photographs from this 1925 expedition into the Sahara, including accounts of
digging up the Queen.  Withal, it forms quite a compelling tale, especially in
the case of Count de Prorok.  Imagine FORREST GUMP meets THE ENGLISH PATIENT.
That's his life.

The year 1925, which was ending in problems, had started off badly for de Prorok
and his in-laws, the William F. Kenny family of New York City. It is one record
of those earlier events, which I'll get to presently, that leads me to ask this
of you all, harking back to a midsummer thread on this listserv: Never mind how
movies mess up factual details, what about non-fiction writing that gets the
facts wrong?  Realizing that anyone of us, attempting to bring lots of facts
together, could screw up here and there (and, so, should be tolerant of the
errors others make), can we complain about historians who don't check their
facts?

Take this, for example, from Richard O'Connor's biography of Al Smith, THE FIRST
HURRAH, (p.157):  "One night shocking news reached [Wm. F. Kenny's] Tiger Room
by telephone. Kenny's oldest son, William, Jr., had been shot and killed by a
taxicab driver while taking his girl home in Brooklyn."  Actually, the shooting
took place at 5:00 a.m., the boy was Dennis Kenny, not Wm., Jr., Wm. Kenny, Sr.,
was in Florida at the time, and Dennis lived for almost two weeks before
succumbing to his wounds and pneumonia.  Aside from that, this account, taken
from a Columbia Oral History Project interview with Eddie Dowling, admittedly
recollections 40 years-old, got the story right.  The New York papers covered
this shooting like, oh, say that incident where Bill Cosby's son was murdered a
few years ago, so O'Connor could have found correction to Eddie Dowling's memory
if he had looked a bit.  Y'all might be thinking that this was a trifling
incident that had no wider significance than grieving the Kenny family (and
nearly making Count de Prorok delay his trip to France to get the Sahara trip
arranged for the next fall). But, with toil, this little murder can be spun out
(and spin I must, and toil, too, for the Lilly in my life) into matters of taxi
cab licensing, NYC mayoral politics, media frenzies, capital punishment, and
campaign financing.

I'm not going to be in Denver, how about you?  Let's talk about going "after the
fact" while everyone else is whooping it up at the Chokecherry Creek Saloon.
I've got some obscure facts about the life and times of Byron Khun de Prorok
that I 'd like you to go after.

Yours for getting skeletons out of the closet,

Michael "I tell my wife everything" Tarabulski
Moscow, ID

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