Steve Parker, husband of Shirley MacLaine, & Conman extraordinaire in Japan by Robert Whiting

A one-take reading from ROBERT WHITING'S JAPAN
"Steve Parker, husband of Hollywood star, and con man extraordinaire in Japan" by ROBERT WHITING MAR 30, 2022
URL https://robertwhiting.substack.com/p/steve-parker-husband-of-hollywood

TOKYO — Steve Parker was one of the more memorable individuals I interviewed in my long career in journalism in Japan. He was one of the first Tokyo denizens I met when I first arrived in the city in the early 60’s — introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance at the popular night club Club 88 — and he was, according to Corky Alexander, the “unofficial mayor” of the American community in the city at the time, a community which numbered some 7,000 American residents — not counting the U.S. military which in any event largely confined itself to the outskirts of the city.

Steve Parker was a theater and film producer who was married to the actress Shirley MacLaine. As he liked to tell people, he was born in Germany (in 1922), and as the son of a State Department official, he had grown up all over the world. He said he had been a paratrooper during World War II who spent much of his time in New Guinea, during which time he developed an interest in the theater, helping to organize shows, before being sent to Hiroshima immediately after Japan’s surrender.

After the war he moved to New York where he struggled as an actor, but met and married rising new star MacLaine, appearing in the hit musical, “The Pajama Game” on Broadway, the couple relocating to Los Angeles as her career took off. Tired of being known as Mr. Shirley MacLaine, he moved to Japan in 1956, and the two maintained a Trans Pacific — and famously open — relationship for nearly 30 years.

FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT:
https://robertwhiting.substack.com/p/steve-parker-husband-of-hollywood

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TOKYO JUNKIE https://tokyojunkie.com/
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Robert (Bob) Whiting is a best-selling, critically-acclaimed author who has written extensively on Japan, Japanese-American relations, and sports. His book You Gotta Have Wa was a Pulitzer Prize candidate and has recently been included in the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) top fifty baseball books of the last fifty years"

https://sabr.org/50at50/books

His latest book is Tokyo Junkie, https://amzn.to/3MdUyr9 a memoir focused on his life in Japan that combines Japanese post-war history and Japanese-American relations with his own experiences. You can read the foreword here, and excerpts here:

https://www.fccj.or.jp/sites/default/files/2021-04/04-April-2021-Number1Shimbun-v14.pdf

This site - https://tokyojunkie.com/archive/ - is a work-in-progress archive of Bob’s work.

You can also subscribe to his Substack and podcast, Robert Whiting’s Japan, - https://substack.com/@robertwhiting - which provide regular analysis of Japanese sports, politics, and business.

More on Bob’s books here:

https://tokyojunkie.com/english-language-books/

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Short Guitar Clip by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: http://audionautix.com/