Busy Gal

Hollywood, April 26, 1958: By 10:00 a.m., Paramount's top stitchmistress Edith Head is on her 16th cup of coffee and her 247th sketch!

It's So Sad / When You're Young...

Adam, sans Ants

Somehow he reminds me of that great Crawford quote: "If you want to see the girl next door, go next door." Adam always did have his little fashion quirks.

Special Bonus Myint Myint fun fact: there actually were two sets of Ants. The first abandoned Adam and reformed as the nucleus of Bow Wow Wow. What a small world, especially in post-punk London.

Our Dancing Daughters Dance No More

Oh, dear - I've just heard on the BBC sad news: the death of Anita Page, in recent years often described as "the Official Last Silent Star."

She was never among the biggest, but she was a very pretty blonde charmer who played with Joan Crawford in the silent pictures that helped propel her into sound and who held her own against the torrid appeal of Ramon Novarro.

Having not gone far herself in talkies, Page left Hollywood in 1936, but in recent years she re-emerged as something of a fixture on the movie scene.

It was never, at least to me, quite clear just what she was up to (how much was ballyhoo, that is, and how much of her nonsense she really believed), but she was a valiant ambassador for her vanished age.

Art collides with Life? Anita meets Norma Desmond

She made a string of virtually unseen low-budget stinkers (I doubt her swan song, in this year's Frankenstein Rising, will displace anyone's fond memories of Our Blushing Brides) and generally had a ball playing the Grande Dame who was there when pictures were big. You can read more about her here, and you probably ought to.

As of today, we live in a world without anyone who attended the 1929 Academy Awards in it. That can't be good.

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.

Oh, Dear

These days, successful pictures breed lines of action figures, lunchboxes, and unattractive sportswear. Once upon a time, apparently, they spawned atrocious pop songs.

I think what I adore is that she just looks so goddam pleased with herself. Well, that and the dress, which must have had about as much structural underpinning as the Eiffel Tower and yet looks so lifelike.

The Inapt Invitation

The girls agreed it was real nice of Cora to have invited her new neighbor (bottom left) to a meeting, but that she just wasn't going to make the grade. The Ashtabula Ladies' Double Chin and Perm Society had its standards, after all.

Birthday Trifecta: Funny Ladies

Today, three women born under a giggling star:

Jane Curtin was Saturday Night Live's first all-purpose woman, more nuanced than Gilda Radner and, unlike Laraine Newman, actually funny. She's always struck me as a lost outpost of classic film comedy - the straight woman who ends up upstaging the more flamboyant, slapstick comics with her deadpan slow burns, exasperated glances, and cutting last words. Happy Birthday, you ignorant slut.

Speaking of flamboyant splapsticks, many happy returns to the divinely over-the-top Jo Anne Worley, television's first female drag queen, the woman who dragged the feather boa kicking and screaming into the sixties. She's still trooping, adapting her trademark laugh and triple- and quadruple-takes to big lady roles in The Drowsy Chaperone and Wicked, the kind of warmly familiar name who sells tickets in replacement casts and on the road.

Finally, a true stage lady who has a warm place in my heart for her work in three of my favorite films: True Stories, Dangerous Liaisons, and The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. Curtin is a comic Leading Lady, a terrific foil, and Worley an all-out Zany; Kurtz is an Actress Who Can Do Funny, at home in Molière and O'Neill but game for everything from romping with Carol Burnett to high-concept New Television like her current Pushing Daisies (which has yet to show up in these parts but sounds deeply odd).

I'd like to think they are all Christmas-season babies, born of a glass too much Champagne and some mistletoe, coming into the world, as the summer fades away, with the kind of Little Something Extra that inclines us to laugh.

Tipsy Trio

Non-teetotallers Ava, Stevie, Lena pose for a candid.

Something tells me that this is not the beginning of the evening.

In the Still of the Night...

At the risk of sounding like the delightfully ornery Angry in Oman, herewith a Ramadan Rant:

So Mr. Muscati and I spend the early part of our Thursday evening at the hospital, calling on a friend who's recovering from (thankfully minor) injuries sustained in one of the many, many car accidents that are a staple of the season in these parts, given that the Holy Month here involves not only fasting, charity, self-sacrifice, and meditation, but also a more or less universal disregard for all trafffic laws (more on that here; thanks, Suburban!).

After that (memo to self: stay out of hospital if at all possible), We decided to head down to Our Fair City's flashiest beach resort, the Shangri-La, to join some friends for seasonal festivities. It's a fair drive from our part of town, but very, very beautiful:

Think of the above, but night rather than evening, the palms strung with white lights, Ramadan lanterns everywhere, and lots of groups of surprisingly varied types sitting about enjoying juices, snacks, shisha, and what is, for here, a lovely almost balmy summer night. Our group was lively and varied, and we settled in for a well-deserved bit of amusement.

And then...

The music started.

Now don't me wrong - I like Arabic music. Love it even. I can't think of a more appopriate, romantic, 1,001-nights backdrop to an evening like that. But there's one key word there: backdrop.

That's not a familiar word around here. I don't know if it's simply that there's little enough live music that people just don't know how to present it, or if it's just a feeling that if you have a tower of speakers, then by God you have to use them, but why, why, why must all performers be amplified to a Spinal Tap-recalling 11 on a scale of 10?

After a while we just sat and looked at each other, waiting and hoping desperately for a break in the hissing, crackling, caterwauling din.

And, not for the first nor I'm sure for the last time this month, I prayed for the day that the bars can stay open here in Ramadan. Vodka wouldn't have solved the problem, but heavens it would have made it more bearable.

But then I'd run the risk, given the serpintine, hairpin drive home, of ending up in hospital, so I suppose all is as it should be.

Shortly after midnight, someone must have paid off the singer, for the ensemble packed up and went home. Listening to the fountains and the waves and the soft rumble of holiday conversation all around us, I thought one thing: even so, I'd still like the vodka.

****

Now, lucky readers who've made it this far, a Special Bonus Image involving Gratuitous Shirtlessness:

It's just some random visitors whose online travel diary I came across while looking for a suitable illustration, but I thought it might provide a little light entertainment.

All I ever run across on the beach in this vein are large German tourists in inappropriate Speedos. Although it's true that the lashings of local youth playing football on the sand more than makes up for that. But that's a subject for another post.

Happy Ramadan, y'all.

An Excellent Question

And I believe the answer is "strychnine."

Old Acquaintance

Miss Miriam Hopkins, seen here looking rather riper than I imagined Thackeray's heroine, from the poster for her 1935 Technicolor epic Becky Sharp .

The then-new technology was still a tricky thing and did not please all audiences. One critic wrote that it made the performers resemble "boiled salmon dipped in mayonnaise," which may be tasty, but is hardly what one wants from the heroine of a Regency potboiler.

Crime is Beauty...

...Especially when it's been retouched.

The work that's been done here on Cheryl Crane (Lana Turner's daughter, of course; seen waiting at the police station after that unfortunate incident with Mr. Stompanato and the steak knife) gives a standard jailhouse photo a kind of still, timeless, accidental beauty.

Crane survived her stormy childhood (which included yet more unpleasantness stemming from Lana's legendarily lousy taste in men) and grew up to become a happy dyke, a successful real-estate agent and author, and good to her - definitely rather trying - mother to boot.

Yesterday, When We Were Young

Sadly, Liza found out that everyone did, in fact, love her baby. Especially the boys.

I guess that's what you get for marrying someone so fond of your mother (when your mother is Judy Garland). But aren't they something?

Up the Down Staircase

As a child, I spent an inordinate amount of time, for various reasons, with my grandparents. As a result, there are times I feel that I was as much raised in the 30s as the 70s, and that I got my indoctrination far too young into the mysteries of the Early Bird and the virtues of roughage.

One feature of my grandfather's house, along with its general air of stillness broken by the striking of the clocks on the quarter hour, was the absolute devotion of its inhabitants to PBS; I'm not sure I even knew their vast console television got any other channels (it being circa 1973, it did, of course - three).

A regular part of our lives, therefore, was the weekly ritual of sitting down to a stirring blast of classical music, followed by the soothing voice of Alistair Cooke, and then...

Magic. In the form of total immersion in the lives of a fictional family of London toffs, the Bellamys, and their retinue, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Let others worry about Watergate, the war, those damn hippies (my town got a late start on the 60s) - we had our weekly fix of life on Eaton Place. I think the grandparents liked the early years best, when Edward VII came for dinner and all was right with the world, before Lady Marjorie traveled on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and the War came and changed everything.

I, however, thrilled to the Roaring 20s, when dashing James and his heedless cousin Georgina kicked up their heels to the brittle beat of the Charleston.

James, needless to say, was an early crush, leaving me helpless ever since for a little moustache and a sweep of black hair. Grandmother, on the other hand, thought Georgina a fast little baggage, and didn't hesitate to say so. She was, she intimated, very like my other, maternal grandmother, whose decades of absolute respectability had not yet wholly overcome a girlhood spent taking part in dance contests and on the fringes of vaudeville.

Eventually, alas, it all came to an end. James ended badly, Georgina married dull rich stick, and finally, plucky housemaid Rose took a last look at the empty morning room, scene of so much drama. Eaton Place fades to black.

Other series came and went - we returned to Edwardian World with Lillie Langtry (with Oscar Wilde making grandfather grunt disapprovingly), went even further afield with poor Anna Karenina, and were startled at the goings-on in Ancient Rome with Claudius, Livia, and Caligula. Nothing, though, really took the place of the Bellamys.

Thirty years on, and my grandparents' house, with its polished silver and long heavy meals, is as vanished as 165 Eaton Place. I realize, now and then, that the world we watched was the world of their childhood, youth, and early years together, and I wonder if a child in 20 years will look back at 1972 and find it as foreign and enchanting as I did 1922. I rather hope so.

Picture This: Seurat, Revisited

One fine day in 2006, a group of volunteers, mostly friends and neighbors, in Beloit, Wisconsin, gathered by the blue purple yellow red water on the green purple yellow red grass, to (re)create a perfect moment in a perfect park.

Sometimes I really do love America.

If you haven't heard the song in an eon or two, you really owe it to yourself. On an ordinary Wednesday, why not have six minutes and 11 seconds of perfect beauty?

LOLJoan

Cats, dogs, pundits, presidents - why not celebrities?

Bollywood Beef

Upen Patel

Hrithik Roshan

Dino Morea

John Abraham

Apparently, I have to start paying more attention to the cinema of India.

My memory, gleaned from Saturday morning clip shows on New York public-access television, was of keening young cuties in saris running through the rain chased by dumpy men with combovers and flash leisure suits.

Now, however, a younger generation of male stars is stirring things up. And, from all evidence, that's a very good thing.

But really - Dino Morea? That's just about the porniest name since Miles Long.

Enregistrements Horribles

One day, Ann Blyth awoke in horror to realize that, during a prolonged binge, she had somehow managed to make a Loretta Young record while wearing Rhonda Fleming's wig, Joan Crawford's makeup, and a necklace of mothballs and breathmints. She had vague, uneasy memories of the after-party with the orchestra and chorus.

Her life was never the same.

Beautiful Boy

Truman Capote, or Portrait of the Artist as a Faun. It's like Dennis the Menace meets Les fleurs du mal.

Lovely Reta...

Seen here in two familiar incarnations, the redoubtable character lady Reta Shaw.

She must be one of relatively few performers to have appeared in no less than three of that unique genre of the 60s, the Supernatural Sitcom, playing a total of five characters (two each in "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie", with a continuing role as - what else? - the housekeeper in "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir").

One can even add to her occultish associations by noting her role in 1966's The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, in which she rejoiced in the character name of "Mrs. Halcyon Maxwell" (it's a picture that features two other "Bewitched" regulars; were there only something like 50 actors in all of Hollywood in those days?).

First, "Bewitched" - here, I believe, as the relatively obscure Aunt Bertha, as opposed to the more familiar (and formidable) Aunt Hagatha.

Based on the IMDb, it's a surprisingly rich résumé, with everything from a recreation of her Broadway role in the film of The Pajama Game to "The Tab Hunter Show" to stints with Lucy, Danny Thomas, and Dick Van Dyke.

In her guest-shot on "The Monkees", she played a character named "Mrs. Badderly" (one assumes, from the usual subtlety of that program, a villainess).

What an easy segue that makes into this still from perhaps her most prominent movie role, in which she was joined by the equally divine Hermione Baddeley; together, they formed the disapproving ranks of Servants Against Mary Poppins:

I would employ them in a minute; that Banks house was immaculate.

They are, of course, inevitably won over the in the end by the irresistible cheer of Miss Andrews and drawn into singing and dancing. I prefer them earlier on, myself. Capering, somehow, didn't suit either terribly well.

Miss Shaw remained, it seems, a maiden lady throughout her 70 years. Make of that what you will.

(stills pulled with glee, respectively, from gv416's photostream and from the treasure trove that is Hilly Blue's Flickrland)