A downtown desk clerk's memorable film credit
by Jack Neely
The lobby of the 75-year-old YWCA building on Clinch Avenue hasn't changed a lot over the decades. Unlike its masculine counterpart down the street, the YWCA still takes in residents. Most of the 60 pigeonholes behind the desk have mail or messages in them. Hanging over the desk clerk, there's a portrait of an unidentified young woman, stylish for 1935.
The downtown YWCA looks like an old-fashioned hotel, and it's not surprising that it portrayed one in the movie, October Sky.
The desk clerk tonight is an older lady with blonde-white hair and a broad, reckless smile that sometimes closes her eyes. It's the smile of a lady who's had a lot of fun in her life. She's fond of the Y. She once lived here herself.
Jane Parker has done notable things in her life. She was, for example, the last organist at the lamented S&W Cafeteria. If Jane Parker has any enduring fame beyond Tennessee, however, it will be for one perfect scream.
She grew up in old Park City on the east side, idolizing her dad, Clyde Parker, who was a city detective back in the '30s, an expert in narcotics busts. "When they saw him coming—250 pounds, six-foot, eyes of steel— they ran!" she says. Her mom was a nurse who saw World War I hero Alvin York through his final years. Among her friends, growing up, was future Vice-Mayor Jack Sharp; she was talking with him just this morning.
She grew up with strong musical inclinations, sang, played piano and organ. She says she never worked at singing. "Voice comes natural to me," she says. "I just happen to be musical." She joined the Knoxville Choral Society in 1959.
In 37 seasons she never even had to try hard except when KSO conductor Zoltan Rozsnyai asked them to sing Brahm's Requiem in the original German. "I'm no good at the foreign languages," she admits.
She'd been at it for a few years when she landed a role in a summer-stock production of a musical, Annie Get Your Gun, over at UT. "I played Mrs. Ernest Henderson. I went up to Annie and said, "chahmed." At the time, she was working for the credit bureau in the flatiron building at Broadway and Central. The stage experience whetted her appetite for show business. She sang a radio jingle for an oil heat company in North Carolina. She can still sing it for you, across the counter: "There's an O in North Carolina/ There's an O in Oil Heat, too!"
Around 1963, when a representative for a Hollywood movie came to the Choral Society looking for folks with show-business experience, Jane got in line. "They gave me a little tag," she recalls. "I was number 199."
The movie was to be called The Fool Killer, a suspense picture about murder in the Reconstruction-era South. The lead would be played by Tony Perkins, then at the height of his post-Psycho fame. Shooting was to be at the farm run by Eastern State mental hospital, near Forks of the River.
"We were not allowed to wash our hair for two weeks," she recalls. "It was set just after the Civil War, and we had to look like we'd been through difficulties." They paid $12 a day.
She liked the co-star, Edward Albert, Jr., who was just 12 years old. He was the son of actor Eddie Albert, and The Fool Killer was his first movie. "Later, you know, he was in Falcon Crest," she says.
She remembers Frank Kotsianas, the Greek restaurateur who ran the Brass Rail on Gay Street, who got a small part in the movie. He was always asking her to play "Sunshine Of Your Smile" on the set piano, just for him. "I called him 'Sunshine,'" she says, laughing.
She was playing "Sunshine Of Your Smile," when Tony Perkins jumped up on top of the piano as someone took his picture. He seemed worried that the pianist would climb up and join him.
"You just stay down there," ordered Tony Perkins.
"Don't worry," Jane said. "I don't bite."
She wishes she could find a copy of that picture. However, she admits she didn't much care for Perkins. "He was overbearing," she says. "When he was staying at the Andrew Johnson Hotel, he wanted split-pea soup. They didn't have any, and he raised a ruckus."
Helma's catered the location shoots, some of which were in the Jacob Building at Chilhowee Park. She doesn't recall Perkins complaining then. She thinks Helma knew split-pea soup.
Director Servando Gonzalez wasn't much better. The extras had been told not to speak to Gonzalez because he didn't speak English. "The sprinkler system went off during a scene and, of course, they didn't have sprinkler systems during the Civil War. And he said 'Jesus Christ'!" Imitating him, Parker rolls the R in Christ. "I said, 'That sounds like English to me.'"
One day, the director's assistant said, "We need somebody to scream." Parker's experienced voice got the job. "I was the preacher's wife," she recalls, "and Tony had took an ax and had killed my husband." She screams when she finds the body.
"I got $15 that day instead of 12," she says. The three bucks extra were for having a speaking part.
"I evidently did well, or they would have cut it out," she says. "My cousin went to the movie. He usually goes to sleep when he goes to the movies, but that scream woke him up!"
If you've never seen The Fool Killer, it's a strange movie, black and white, but with experimental shots that might remind you of Bu�uel. Some scenes are fascinating. Still, Jane Parker's sudden, shrill scream is the best two seconds of the movie. It comes unexpectedly, about an hour into the movie, during a quiet daytime scene at a tent revival. Little Edward Albert is just poking around in the slowly milling crowd near the tent, when suddenly there's Jane Parker in an old-fashioned bonnet, screaming as if the world's collapsing beneath her. Janet Leigh could not have improved it.
Parker hoped her scream might open doors. A few years later, she volunteered for the next local shoot, A Walk In the Spring Rain, starring Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn. They discussed the possibility of her playing a local "club woman," but it didn't make the cut.
"I didn't get my mug in there," she says, grinning over her regret. Much of the movie was shot in Cades Cove. "I took a friend up there with me in his Vista Cruiser, and that got in." The car, that is. "I got a baked potato and steak dinner out of that."
Parker didn't like Bergman and Quinn much more than Perkins. "Ingrid Bergman was not fond of the ladies, but she was fond of the men," she says. "Anthony Quinn was a pain—real arrogant, he was," she says.
She would have liked to do more work as a "good Hollywood extra, or in the costume department." Instead, she learned how to handle a computer; she works days in a West Knoxville investment office.
"I do right well," she says. She left the choral society after 37 seasons, but still plays organ for the Shannondale Presbyterian Church. Hollywood keeps following her around.
As fate would have it, however, Jane Parker, who once screamed in a Tony Perkins movie, wasn't working the night they shot October Sky at the downtown YWCA.
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