Birthday Girl: Miss Glory

All best returns on her 118th birthday to the lovely and talented (geniunely) Miss Marion Davies.  She's seen here looking wistful in an atmospheric snap by Mr. Hurrell.  Has anyone ever seen a color photograph of Marion, a real one, that is?  I can't find one, but I think she must have had lovely coloring.

Ou sont les neiges?

Where indeed?  Here, goddammit.  Poor, ill-fated Jon Erik Hexum is dressed for les neiges (captured by Mr. Hurrell in the full glory of his short-lived splendor), but frankly...

Dear Abby:

Lately, I've been having recurring dreams in which Ann Sothern is my next-door neighbor. Should I be concerned?

The Wonder of Roz, or Life as a Banquet

Rosalind Russell ended her career one of the Biggest of the Big - Wonderful Town's gala Ruth, Auntie Mame, Mama Rose.

I kind of love, though, that she spent so long paying her dues. It took the Hollywood bigwigs a good five years to realize that their serious dark-haired leading lady was actually a genius comedienne, a romantic lead, and a stunner to look at.

In the meantime, she played an awful lot of what she later called "Lady Mary" parts - you know, the proper dull stick who says of whichever floozie Jean Harlow is playing, "She's rahtha vulgar, isn't she?" just before being dumped by the leading man.

She was certainly pleasant, and lovely enough to look at, but somehow a shade generic. A workmanlike lead in straight parts in light comedy, she made a decent stab at drama - her Harriet Craig is less hysterical than Crawford's later incarnation, but somehow even more disturbed. But still she hadn't really clicked.

She wasn't, it has to be admitted, all that easy to photograph; in 1936, Fox thought nothing of releasing this still, in which she looks like a mildly bad-tempered Scarsdale matron.

She was well on her way to being not only just a leading lady, but a rather second-tier one, playing second fiddle to bigger names like Myrna Loy (who did her own years before the mast before MGM finally figured out how to make her score).

She must have wondered how long she'd have to do novelty stills, just one rung up from the calendar shots and leg art assigned to just-arrived starlets...

Even in sure-fire settings like the Big Telephone Scene, she seems to lack confidence, the total self assurance of the real Top Thesp.

But then - finally - after a string of now-forgotten pictures like Man-Proof, Live, Love, and Learn, and Four's a Crowd - came Sylvia Fowler, The Women. Roz clicked, and in the face of big time competition; the biggest really: in wifeliness, from Mrs. Thalberg; in glamour, from Paulette Goddard; in evil, from Crawford herself; in comedy, from Mary Boland and Marjorie Main and the whole ridiculous mise en scène. And Lady Mary walked away on top.

Don't, it turned out, force her to be proper, or even myrnaloyishly genial. Let her loose. Let her be awkward, loud, cackling, mean: hilarious.

Suddenly, when Hurell photographed her, you saw what had always been there, waiting:

Screen gold. Then came His Girl Friday, which added romance and smarts to her mix, and there was no stopping her. Oh, there was still the occasional misfire - anyone for Hired Wife (1940) or Tell it to the Judge! (1949)? Sometimes she over-reached; her Mourning Becomes Electra did favors neither to Eugene O'Neill nor her career; even at the end, her last real starring vehicle, 1967's Rosie!, is as putrid a film as any.

But from 1940 on, Rosalind Russell was a name to conjure with, the joy of audiences and critics both, the star you could equally imagine next door or at the most glamourous of Mame's Manhattan soirées. Isn't she somebody, still, you'd love to have a drink at the Plaza with, were it still, say, 1957?

Pugilistic Pulchritude

In my mind, John Payne was the archetypal second-tier leading man, the rather wan support to Alice Faye and Betty Grable in their string of higgledly-piggledly Fox musicals (Tin Pan Alley, Weekend in Havana, The Dolly Sisters, Springtime in the Rockies...).

In those pictures, he has the just-this-side-of-too-pretty allure of Tyrone Power, but not the charisma, and some of the insouciant charm of Don Ameche, but not, frankly, enough to be interesting in his own right.

But then I found this:


When I caught my breath, I decided it might be time for a reappraisal of Mr. Payne. I doubt either Power or Ameche could have carried off this pose, let alone those trunks.

It's a still by Hurrell from the very B-sounding Kid Nightingale, a 1939 programmer in which Payne tops the bill as a singing waiter turned boxer, supported by Jane Wyman, who by then had spent more than six years not going very far in bit parts and dreck.

I don't know that this one did much for either of them (it was six more years until Wyman really registered, in The Yearling, and Payne's years of looking yearningly at Grable before making way for another number were still before him), but it surely left behind one very compelling image.