In Popular Culture
A romanticized version of Walker's tenure as mayor was presented in the 1957 film Beau James, starring Bob Hope. The film was based on a biography of Walker, also titled Beau James, written by Gene Fowler. This same book was also the basis for Jimmy a stage musical about Walker that had a brief Broadway run from October 1969 to January 1970, starring Frank Gorshin as Walker and Anita Gillette as Betty Compton. There is also a song about Walker in the stage musical Fiorello!, "Gentleman Jimmy".
Footage of Jimmy Walker is used in the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig, with Walker being one the guests during Zelig's visit to William Randolph Hearst's mansion, San Simeon.
The novel It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, lists the exiles in Paris as "Jimmy Walker, and a few ex-presidents from South America and Cuba."
Mayor Walker was referenced in the December 6, 2010 episode of the ABC (USA) television series, Castle.
The political and criminal activity surrounding Walker's 1929 campaign features heavily in Tom Bradby's 2009 novel Blood Money.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Walker
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)