Redux: Birthday Goddess, After and Before

It's a big day at the Café, kids - the 105th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest showpeople who ever lived, the brass-lunged, foul-mouthed, great-hearted self-creation that was - deep breath - Ethel Merman. Let's give it up.

The stage was her medium and the movies didn't ever do her justice, but thank heaven we do have a record of what she was like in action. Here are two clips, separated by something just shy of half-a-century, both of which in very different ways give me goosebumps.

First up, the Great Lady herself, in full flight on the Tony Awards, reprising one of her numbers from Annie Get Your Gun:

That's the diva we all know and love.

It's easy, in watching her make it look so easy, to forget the incredible craft that she puts into a song she's sung a thousand times before. She's an old lady, never a subtle presence, pushing a voice that while still titanic is worn around the edges, and yet she brings a genuine pathos to the song; that little break between the last two words speaks volumes about a life that knew heartbreak as well as triumph.

Once upon a time, of course, even she was young, attractive if not drop-dead beautiful, and, from the moment she first stepped on stage, incomparable at putting across a song.

To prove it, here's "An Earful of Music", from the 1934 Eddie Cantor vehicle Kid Millions. Cantor shows, stage or screen, were all about Cantor, but the audience must have sat up and taken notice of this young sensation, just four years away from having been Queens stenographer Ethel Agnes Zimmerman:

Except for the dress, which definitively proves that Goldwyn's Omar Kiam was no Adrian, she's pretty believable as a girl song plugger in a sheet music store.*

Young or old, she's amazing, irreplaceable, and a very great artist. Merman had a career like no other, and while she suffered the occasional misstep and, especially toward the end, made herself a shade too easy to parody, few performers have ever had a greater hit-to-flop ratio in their favor, had such a hold on their audience for so long, or did more to spread the word about the genius of America's greatest mid-century songwriters. Like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jules Styne, we're in her debt. Happy Birthday, Merm!

* Now there's a line of work that's dead as the dodo.

First posted four years ago today, and amended only to update the year.  How time flies!

Bollywood Update: New Boy in Town

As we continue to explore the richness and diversity of the Subcontinental cinema, it's important to discover new talent, don't you think?  This gentleman, for example, has been a fixture of India's non-Hindi film industries for the past decade, making some 70 films in Malayalam, Tamil, and Telegu.

He rejoices in the euphonious name of Prithviraj Sukumaran, and he is only now making his actual Bollywood debut, in a new picture called Aiyyaa, which is apparently a sort of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? for the new century.  Popular ingenue Rani Mukherjee has the Katharine Houghton part, with Prithviraj as the slightly-too-dusky love interest.  The still above is from one of the picture's steamy musical numbers, "Aga Bai," which you can check out here if so inclined - there's an intriguing sequence featuring the leading man in white organza and gold earrings, if that's any incentive.

He's only just recently bulked up to become the remarkable creature seen here; it's a striking effect, but I can't help regretting, ever so slightly the somewhat goofy charm (and especially the classic 'stache) that he's sacrified on the way:



Before

I fear that what he's gained in Imposing, he may have lost in Endearing.  We'll have to hope that in future outings a balance is struck.  In any case, it does seem he'd bear watching...

After and Before: Ruby Tuesday

Barbara Stanwyck, looking uncharacteristically ruffled at winning an Emmy, 1983;

Ruby Stevens, looking like not much is going to startle her, circa 1926...

Stanwyck is something. Crawford was Metro's baby, just as much as Davies was Hearst's. Davis needed Warner's to give her the space to figure out who she was. Hepburn was nobody's baby, but she had as many failures as successes and was, until late in life, less universally a favorite than one might think. The exotics - Garbo, Dietrich, and their lesser sisters - traded in a very specific kind of currency, while the sex bombs - from Bow to Monroe and well after - had their own, essentially separate milieu. Ditto the musical ladies, whose ventures into other genres often perplex.

Stanwyck, though - she could be funny as hell, dangerous as any vamp, and way sexier than the average bottle blonde. Granted, she didn't sing, but she started out a hoofer and could acquit herself admirably on the floor. She ended up playing Big Tough Ladies, but she always seemed just in enough on the joke to be having fun.

What was her secret? Hard to say, but I think it helped that, start to finish, she gave every sign of knowing exactly what she wanted and of having every ability to get it herself.

After and Before: Why Hello There, Mr. Bond!

Sean Connery, proving himself - as if there were any question - a remarkable figure of a man...

If only because he not only looks good young and more mature (still does, for that matter - put him on the short list, with Omar Sharif, of eligible-at-any-age), but in both classic posing briefs and the rather more distinctive fashion choice of diaper, suspenders, swashbuckler boots, and plait.

At the beginning of his career, it was notable that a former bodybuilder and artists' model was able to make for himself a film career; by the middle, it is truly astonishing that, even as one of the biggest stars in the world, he was able to move beyond the stills from Zardoz, let alone the movie itself.

After and Before: The Gigastar

Dame Edna Everage, philanthropist, mentor, author, entrepreneur, pioneering feminist theorist, diva, and international sex bomb;

Mrs. Norman Everage, at home in Moonee Ponds, 1955. Spooky, isn't it, where time and destiny can take one, possums?

After and Before: Movin' on Up

In her Park Avenue drawing room, a kind of timeless monument to a very specific kind of New Yorkiness, Kitty Carlisle, Mrs. Moss Hart. The society lady as showbiz survivor who was there when it happened and lived to tell the tale.

Young Kitty Conn, freshly minted as Kitty Carlisle and setting out on Life Upon the Wicked Stage, the creation of a genteely (if not gentilely) poor, ravenously MammaRoseische social-climbing mother and a vague ambition to succeed, if only to escape her.

Sometimes the unlikeliest stories have happy endings...

After (During) and Before: Touched By Her Presence, Dear

Showbiz survivor;

Sunday Girl;

Surprise! She wasn't always a Rockbird.

The Harry. Always loved her; always will. Everytime you think she'll fade away, she radiates, from "French Kissing in the USA" to "Two Times Blue". What will she get up to next?

After and Before: King of the Flickers

This mild-mannered elderly gentleman is none other than an idol of the Silent Screen, the original Ben Hur's blood enemy: Francis X. Bushman...

Vaudeville Grandma Muscato retained until the end of her days a breathless quality about him. She maintained that until you'd seen him opposite Beverly Bayne in 1928's Modern Marriage, you'd never understand screen romance, and who are we to say her nay?

After and Before: Driving Miss Blanche (Insane)

Jessica Tandy had a somewhat bisected career: it ended with a late-in-life flowering as America's favorite lovably irritable old lady, and half of the biggest acting duo since Lunt-Fontanne;

All of which rather overshadowed her earlier life as Serious Broadway Actress on her own, which of course included the original Streetcar Named Desire. That she shared the stage with Brando and lost the movie to Lady Olivier didn't help.

In between she did movies large and small, generally as a second lady or character (as in The Birds). She's one of those people I think of as The Trans-Atlantics; she was born in the UK and died an American institution. Here in this bonus extra picture, she appears to be trying on the role of The Mummy, but even so, wasn't she an extraordinarily lovely old lady?

Birthday Goddess, After and Before

It's a big day at the Café, kids - the 101st anniversay of the birth of one of the greatest showpeople who ever lived, the brass-lunged, foul-mouthed, great-hearted self-creation that was - deep breath - Ethel Merman. Let's give it up.

The stage was her medium and the movies didn't ever do her justice, but thank heaven we do have a record of what she was like in action. Here are two clips, separated by something just shy of half-a-century, both of which in very different ways give me goosebumps.

First up, the Great Lady herself, in full flight on the Tony Awards, reprising one of her numbers from Annie Get Your Gun:

That's the diva we all know and love.

It's easy, in watching her make it look so easy, to forget the incredible craft that she puts into a song she's sung a thousand times before. She's an old lady, never a subtle presence, pushing a voice that while still titanic is worn around the edges, and yet she brings a genuine pathos to the song; that little break between the last two words speaks volumes about a life that knew heartbreak as well as triumph.

Once upon a time, of course, even she was young, attractive if not drop-dead beautiful, and, from the moment she first stepped on stage, incomparable at putting across a song.

To prove it, here's "An Earful of Music", from the 1934 Eddie Cantor vehicle Kid Millions. Cantor shows, stage or screen, were all about Cantor, but the audience must have sat up and taken notice of this young sensation, just four years away from having been Queens stenographer Ethel Agnes Zimmerman:

Except for the dress, which definitively proves that Goldwyn's Omar Kiam was no Adrian, she's pretty believable as a girl song plugger in a sheet music store.*

Young or old, she's amazing, irreplaceable, and a very great artist. Merman had a career like no other, and while she suffered the occasional misstep and, especially toward the end, made herself a shade too easy to parody, few performers have ever had a greater hit-to-flop ratio in their favor, had such a hold on their audience for so long, or did more to spread the word about the genius of America's greatest mid-century songwriters. Like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jules Styne, we're in her debt. Happy Birthday, Merm!

* Now there's a line of work thats dead as the dodo.

After and Before: And Then There's Bea

'Round about now...

Long, long ago...

Older, younger, always a golden girl to me.

After and Before: Our Favorite Aunt

1968

1930

Darling Marion Lorne, who parlayed a limited career as a dithering matron into a last hurrah as the ultra-dithering Aunt Clara on Bewitched, had the kind of looks that really come into their own at 60.

I fear that's something I know about rather too well...

After and Before: Quentin Crisp

1993

1953

To lapse into LOLspeak - not so different, actually.

Après et Avant: Edition Dalida

Dalida, Paris, c. 1981

Yolanda Cristina Gigliotti, Cairo, c. 1955

After and Before and Before

Miss LaToya Jackson: 50-something, 30-something, 20-something, or Jackie Stallone, Lady Godiva, and a sweet young girl with no idea of what lies in store. You be the judge.

Self-mutilation makes me queasy, and apparent self-loathing makes me sad. The fashions, though, make me very happy in a very bitchy way, so it all evens out in the end. Unlike the trademark Jackson nose-ette...

After and Before: A Final Dame Barbara Moment

I don't know why she's been so on my mind this week, but this look at the bookends of her remarkable life should close things out.

I'm actually kind of happy to know that, at least at the very end, she finally embraced her Inner Old Lady. If it hadn't been for the lapdog, I might not have recognized her without the feathers, tiara, and glowing soft focus.

And here she is at the start of her long, long road - just another ambitious London society girl pondering what life has in store for her. I wonder, if she knew then that it included, among other things, several decades of answering 40,000 fan letters a year, she would have soldiered on?

After and Before

Carmen Miranda, c. 1943

Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, 1930