Né Joyner: the Cleanest Man in Entertainment

texture · UNDATED (two-plus pre-political decades, B.S.)

• When: UNDATED — "two long-past decades" of show business plus a later promoter/union career, all before the millennial turn to politics
• What: Before politics, Johnny Gentle, né Joyner, is a lounge singer turned teenybopper throb turned B-movie mainstay, known unkindly as the "Cleanest Man in Entertainment" — a world-class hygiene obsessive of "the late-Howard-Hughes kind, the really severe kind," complete with Fukoama microfiltration masks, boiled hankies, and a Dermalatix Hypospectral flash-booth that burns off the outer layer of skin. In later public life he becomes a sterile-toupee-wearing Vegas schmaltz-broker and entertainment-union bigwig, head of the Velvety Vocalists Guild, whose seven months of scab-free "Live Silence" struck floor-shows and soundstages until Management came to terms — the labor victory that made his name as a force. The germ-phobia planted here is not color: it becomes the aesthetic of his entire politics (events 2, 4). A later scene corroborates the pre-toupee crooner era from a wall photo: on stage, wearing velour, twirling a mike, "when he used a strigil instead of a UV flash-booth and was just a Vegas crooner" (event 11).