WA2K Radio is now on the air

What? You didn't hear me? A CERTAIN SOMEONE BOTH IN FLORIDA AND PENNSYLVANIA ARE VERY SPECIAL TO ME AND THEY KNOW IT. There! Howzat?

Bellowing Bob

eh? Did I hear someone say something. ?

Well, hawkman, I see that you haven't lost your sense of the ridiculous

Ok, Boston, this is for you.

Living Out Loud

I'm tired of living in this bubble
So today I'm changing everything
Well, my dream's been buried in the rubble
It's time to set it free
No more keeping quiet this life inside of me

I'm gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound when each moment counts
Starting right now, I'm gonna start living out loud

Oh, yeah

Well, I'm not breaking any new ground
And I didn't reinvent the wheel
I'm just a man who finally figured out
What he really needs
So I'm turning up the volume of this song inside of me

Gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound when each moment counts
Right here, right now
I'm gonna start living out loud

All my demons, I have fought 'em
Inhibitions, I have lost 'em
It wasn't easy, but I taught 'em
To just get out of my way
And now, every breath I'm breathing,
The air is so much sweeter
Now that my heart has finally found a way

To start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound, when each moment counts
Right here, right now
I'm gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound, when each moment counts
Right here and now
I'm gonna start living out loud
Living out loud
Living out loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pwsugji7Vo

good evening , listeners !
here is the SAILOR'S ALPHABET
they should have taught it in grade one - seems much easier this way .
hbg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1oOnpIUnkM

John Ireland in one of his better roles.

Good evening, hbg. What a cute kid, and the alphabet sailor song was delightful.

Speaking of kids, I think one of my favorite books was Arabian Nights. Anyone remember this young man? Bet our Raggedy does.



I remember this song as well.

I want to be a sailor
Sailing to the sea,
No plough-boy, tinker, tailor's
Any fun to be.
Aunts and cousins,
By the bakers dozens,
Drives a man to sea
Or highway robbery.
I want to be a bandit
Can't you understand it?
Sailing to the sea, A pirate free,
What joy for me.

and here is the song to go with the ARABIAN NIGHTS :

THE SHEIK OF ARABY

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gbbacDkpQ4c

I enjoyed that, Letty! Thanks!

and now let's have an ARABIAN NIGHT !

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XtEASyUDk0E

Wow! What fabulous contributions, folks.

edgar, I did not see The Fast and the Furious, but I do hope it had a happy ending, Texas. I'll check back later to watch the rest of the show, and thanks.

Sharon, Alice Walker was a talented writer. I am glad that you enjoyed that contribution.

hbg, I had to smile at that version of The Sheik of Araby. (without pants on. ) That is nothing to what we see and hear today, right?

The Sarah Brightman song was truly captivating. I keep forgetting if she played Christine in the movie, Phantom of the Opera, or the stage production. Whichever, she has a great voice.

Well, listeners, we have it all here on WA2K radio.

She is AWESOME! She was introduced on CBS2NY, yesterday, as "The Real Soprano" and Real, she is! What a performer, she is! Voice as clear as a bell! Wonderful! :wink:

Well, folks. It may seem early to some of you, but it is bedtime for me, I'm afraid.

Here is my goodnight song. So lovely. I would like to have done it by a young man named Sean Harkness, but the room was so noisy that it actually angered me. He was fabulous on his acoustic guitar. Instead, you can listen to a great piano version. This is for you, Bill.

When Sunny Gets Blue

When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gray and cloudy,
Then the rain begins to fall, pitter-patter, pitter-patter,
Love is gone, what can matter,
No sweet lover man comes to call.

When Sunny gets blue, she breaths a sigh of sadness,
Like the wind that stirs the trees,
Wind that sets the leaves to swaying
Like some violin is playing strange and haunting melodies.

Bridge:

People used to love to hear her laugh, see her smile,
That's how she got her name.
Since that sad affair, she lost her smile, changed her style,
Somehow she's not the same.

But memories will fade, and pretty dreams will rise up
Where her other dreams fell through,
Hurry new love, hurry here, to kiss away each lonely tear,
And hold her near when Sunny gets blue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjtVDM-14GA&feature=related

Goodnight, all.
From Letty with love

Sure looks like Sabu to me but my eyes aren't as good as they useta be.

Good morning, WA2K radio audience.

You're correct, Bob. It is Sabu. The Jungle Books were enchanting to me as a child, and speaking of "..chanting...", how about an early morning meditation by Ravi Shankar. We'll dedicate this to my friend G.J.Patel, Prince Gautam, JLNobody and all the other Zen folks out there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih17Yb_9gmk

Zane Grey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born January 31, 1872(1872-01-31)
Zanesville, Ohio
Died Template:Death date and drjngizdrgbzsibgzhdgblol
Altadena, California
Occupation Novelist, dentist
Nationality American
Genres Western fiction

Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 - October 23, 1939) was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. As of June 2007, the Internet Movie Database credits Grey with 110 films, one TV episode, and one entire TV Series based on his novels and stories.




Biography

Early life

Pearl Zane Gray was born 31 January 1872 in Zanesville, Ohio. He was one of five children born to Lewis M. Gray, a dentist, and his wife, Alice "Allie" Josephine Zane, whose Quaker ancestor Robert Zane came to America in 1673. Zane Grey would later drop his first name; his family changed the spelling of their last name to Grey. Growing up in Zanesville, a city founded by a maternal ancestor Ebenezer Zane, a Revolutionary War patriot, he developed interests in fishing, baseball and writing, all which would later contribute to his acclaim. His first three novels memorialized the heroism of his Revolutionary relatives. [1] As a child, Grey frequently engaged in violent brawls, and his father answered those actions with severe beatings. Though irascible and antisocial like his father, Pearl Grey was counterbalanced by a loving mother and a father substitute named Muddy Miser, an old fisherman who approved of Grey's love of fishing and writing and who spouted philosophically on the advantages of an unconventional life, advice Grey later followed. His fundamentalist upbringing imprinted a lifelong distaste for alcohol and tobacco, but not for the temptations of the opposite sex. A severe financial setback caused Grey's father to move his family out of Zanesville and to start anew in Columbus, Ohio in 1889. His father struggled to re-establish his dental practice and to help out, Grey, who had learned basic dental extraction, made rural house calls as an unlicensed teenage dentist. He also worked as a part-time usher in a movie theater and played summer baseball, with aspirations of becoming a major leaguer.

Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, where he studied dentistry and joined Sigma Nu fraternity; he graduated in 1896. The Ivy League was highly competitive and an excellent training ground for future pro baseball players. He was a solid hitter and an excellent pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball; however, when the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by ten feet in 1894, the effectiveness of his pitching suffered and he was re-positioned to the outfield.[2] He was an indifferent scholar. During that time, while playing 'summer nines' in Delphos, Ohio, Grey was charged with, and quietly settled, a paternity suit involving a 'belle of Delphos', foreshadowing future womanizing behavior. His father paid the $133.40 cost and Grey resumed playing summer baseball in Delphos, and managed to conceal the episode when he returned to Penn. [3] Grey went on to play minor league baseball with a team in Newark, New Jersey and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years. Additionally, his brother, Romer Carl "R. C." Grey, played briefly in 1903 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.


Marriage

While sporadically practicing dentistry in New Jersey, he often camped in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania with his brother R. C. and fished in the upper Delaware River. While waiting at a nearby train station, Grey met seventeen year old Lina Roth, better known as "Dolly", whom he would marry five years later. Dolly came from a family of physicians and was studying to be a schoolteacher.

After re-establishing his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey, he began to write again in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice. Grey was a natural writer but his early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak. With the help of Dolly and numerous writing guides, Grey's style gradually became more fluid and descriptive. His first magazine article, A Day on the Delaware, was published in the May 1902 issue of Recreation magazine.

Grey's first novel, Betty Zane (1903), dramatized the heroism of his ancestor who had saved Fort Henry, and it was likely published with funds provided by R. C.'s wealthy girlfriend Reba Smith. During his courtship with Dolly, Grey was still in contact with previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, "But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that...But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good". He added, "I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women".[4]

When they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career and they moved to a farmhouse in Lackawaxen, with Grey's mother and sister joining them. Grey ceased his dental practice and stopped playing baseball to devote full-time to his nascent literary pursuits. While his wife managed his career and raised their three children, Grey often spent months away from her, fishing, writing, and spending time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior and was occasionally jealous, especially early on, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice, and she did not blame him for it.

The Greys moved to Altadena, California in 1920 spurred by the memory of a visit during their honeymoon. In 1920, Grey bought a prominent mansion on East Mariposa Street, known locally as "Millionaire's Row," built by Chicago business machine manufacturer Arthur Woodward. The company Woodward founded is now known as Intermatic Corporation. Designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey (no relation to the author), the 1907 Mediterranean style house is acclaimed as the first fireproof home in Altadena, built entirely of reinforced concrete as prescribed by Woodward's wife, Edith Norton Woodward. Edith Woodward is a survivor of the Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903. Grey summed up his feelings for Altadena with a quote still used to this day in that city: "In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living."


His career

Grey's honeymoon took him to the West for the first time, but though awed by the scenic splendor, he felt unsatisfied by the lack of experiences suitable for use in his novels. After attending a lecture by C. T. "Buffalo" Jones, famed western hunter and guide, Grey arranged for a mountain lion hunting trip to the North rim of the Grand Canyon. He brought along a ?'portable' camera with the intention of documenting his trips in order to prove the veracity of his adventures. This and a second trip proved arduous and dangerous to the tenderfoot, but Grey learned much from his rough compatriot adventurers, and he gained the confidence and authenticity to write convincingly about the West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to him.

Upon returning home in 1909, Grey tried to convert his experiences into a series of short stories but again met with rejection from the publishers. He wrote dejectedly, "I don't know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want...I am full of stories and zeal and fire...yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false".[5]

The birth of his first child restored his sense of urgency to produce his next novel and his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert, which he completed in four months, and which became a bestseller. It propelled a career writing popular novels about manifest destiny and the "conquest of the Wild West." Two years later he produced his best-known book, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). He formed his own motion picture company, but in a few years sold it to Jesse Lasky who was a partner of the founder of Paramount Pictures. Paramount would make a number of movies based on Grey's writings.

It is also speculated that two of his creations, Lone Star Ranger (a novel later turned into a 1930 film) and King of the Royal Mounted (popular as a series of big little books and comics, later turned into a 1936 film), were later used as an inspiration for two radio series by George Trendle (WXYZ, Detroit) which later made the transition to television: The Lone Ranger and Challenge of the Yukon (Sgt. Preston of the Yukon on TV). The Zane Grey Show ran on the Mutual Broadcasting System for five months in the late 1940s.

He became one of the first millionaire authors. Over the years his habit was to spend part of the year traveling and living an adventurous life and the rest of the year using his adventures as the basis for the stories in his writings. Some of that time was spent on the Rogue River in Oregon, where he maintained a cabin he had built on an old mining claim he bought. He also had a cabin on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona which burned down during the Dude Fire of 1991.

He was the author of over 90 books, some published posthumously and/or based on serials originally published in magazines. Many of them became bestsellers. One of them, "Tales of the Angler's El Dorado, New Zealand" helped establish the Bay of Islands in New Zealand as a premier game fishing area.

From 1918 until 1932 he was a regular contributor to Outdoor Life magazine, becoming one of the publication's first celebrity writers. In the pages of the magazine he began to popularize big-game fishing.


Fishing

Grey indulged his interest in fishing with visits to Australia and New Zealand. He first visited New Zealand in 1926 and caught several large fish of great variety, including a mako shark, a ferocious fighter which presented a new challenge. Grey established a base at Otehei Bay Lodge on Urupukapuka Island which became a magnet for the rich and famous and wrote many articles in international sporting magazines highlighting the uniqueness of New Zealand fishing which has produced heavy-tackle world records for the major billfish, striped marlin, black marlin, blue marlin and broadbill. He held numerous world records during this time and invented the teaser, a hookless bait that is still used today to attract fish.

Grey also helped establish deep-sea sport fishing in New South Wales, Australia particularly in Bermagui, New South Wales, which is famous for Marlin fishing. Patron of the Bermagui Sport Fishing Association for 1936 and 1937, Grey set a number of world records, and wrote of his experiences in his book "An American Angler in Australia".


Catalina Island

Grey had built a getaway home in Avalon, Catalina Island, which now serves as the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel. Avid fisherman as he was he served as president of the Catalina's exclusive fishing club, the Tuna Club.


Death

Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939 at his home in Altadena, California. He was interred at the Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where the National Park Service maintains the Zane Grey Museum as part of the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River. His home in Altadena is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In his hometown there is a museum called National Road Zane Grey Museum. Zane Grey Terrace, a small residential street in the hillsides of Altadena, is named in his honor.

Eddie Cantor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Israel Iskowitz
Born January 31, 1892
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died October 10, 1964 (age 72)
Beverly Hills, California, U.S.A.
Spouse(s) Ida Cantor
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award
1957 Lifetime Archievement

For distinguished service to the film industry.

Screen Actors Guild Awards
Life Achievement Award
1962 Lifetime Archievement

Eddie Cantor (January 31, 1892 - October 10, 1964) was an American comedian, singer, actor, songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio and early television audiences, this "Apostle of Pep" was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing antics about his wife Ida and five children. His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, Banjo Eyes, and in 1933, the artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round and white eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor's eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).




Early life

Cantor was born Israel Iskowitz[1] in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Meta and Mechel Iskowitz. His mother died of lung cancer two years after his birth, and he was abandoned by his father, left to be raised by his grandmother, Esther Kantrowitz. A misunderstanding when signing her grandson for school gave him her last name of Kantrowitz (later Americanized to "Cantor") instead of Iskowitz. As a child, he attended Surprise Lake Camp.

By his early teens. Cantor began winning talent contests at local theaters and started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Carey Walsh's Coney Island saloon where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano. He adopted the first name Eddie when he met his future wife, Ida Tobias, in 1903, because she liked the idea of having a boyfriend named Eddie. The two married in 1914 and remained together until Ida died in 1962.

In 1907, Cantor became a billed name in vaudeville. In 1912 he was the only performer over the age of 20 to appear in Gus Edwards' Kid Kabaret, where he created his first blackface character, Jefferson. Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway's top producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, Midnight Frolic (1916).


Broadway and recordings

A year later, Cantor made his Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. He continued in the Ziegfeld Follies until 1927, a period considered the best years of the long-running revue. For several years Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer African-American comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Cantor played Williams's fresh-talking son. Other co-stars with Cantor during his time in the Follies included Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller, and W.C. Fields. He moved on to stardom in book musicals, starting with Kid Boots (1923), Whoopee! (1928) and Banjo Eyes (1940).

Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathé and Emerson. From 1921 through 1925 he had an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, returning to Victor for the remainder of the decade.

Cantor was one of the era's most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multi-millionaire status and left him deeply in debt. However, Cantor's relentless attention to his own earnings in order to avoid the poverty he knew growing up caused him to search quickly for more work, quickly building a new bank account with his highly popular, bestselling book of humor and cartoons about his experience, Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street in "1929 A.C. (After Crash)".


Films

Cantor also bounced back in movies and on radio. Cantor had previously appeared in a number of short films (recording him performing his Follies songs and comedy routines) and two features (Special Delivery and Kid Boots) in the 1920s, and was offered the lead in The Jazz Singer when that was turned down by George Jessel (Cantor also turned it down, so it went to Al Jolson), but he became a leading Hollywood star in 1930 with the film version of Whoopee! in two-strip Technicolor. Over the next two decades, he continued making films until 1948, including Roman Scandals (1933), Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937) and If You Knew Susie (1948).


Radio

Cantor's initial radio appearance was with Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour on February 5, 1931, and it led to a four-week tryout with NBC's The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Replacing Maurice Chevalier, who was returning to Paris, Cantor joined The Chase and Sanborn Hour on September 13, 1931. This hour-long Sunday evening variety series teamed Cantor with announcer Jimmy Wallington and violinist Dave Rubinoff. The show established Cantor as a leading comedian, and his scriptwriter, David Freedman, as "the Captain of Comedy." Soon, Cantor became the world's highest-paid radio star. His shows began with a crowd chanting, "We want Can-tor, We want Can-tor," a phrase said to have originated when a vaudeville audience chanted to chase off an opening act on the bill before Cantor. Cantor's theme song was the 1903 pop tune "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," dedicated to his wife.

Indicative of his effect on the mass audience, he agreed in November 1934 to introduce a new song by the songwriters J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie that other well-known artists had rejected as being "silly" and "childish." The song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", immediately had orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music the next day. It sold 400,000 copies by Christmas of that year.

His NBC radio show, Time to Smile, was broadcast from 1940 to 1946. In addition to film and radio, Cantor recorded for Hit of the Week Records, then again for Columbia, for Banner and Decca and various small labels.

He was a founder of the March of Dimes, and did much to publicize the battle against polio. Cantor also served as first president of the Screen Actors Guild. His heavy political involvement began early in his career, including his quick rush to strike with Actors Equity in 1919, against the advice of father figure and producer, Florenz Ziegfeld.

Cantor's career declined somewhat in the late 1930s due to his public denunciations of Adolf Hitler and Fascism. Wishing to distance themselves from any political controversy, many sponsors dropped Cantor's shows. However, it soon bounced back with the United States' entry into World War II.


Television

In the 1950s, he was one of the alternating hosts of the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which he would introduce variety acts and play comic characters like "Maxie the Taxi." However, the show landed Cantor in an unlikely controversy when a young Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared as a guest performer. Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis's brow with his handkerchief after his performance. Worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show; other sources claim that NBC threatened to cancel the show when Davis was booked for two weeks straight. Cantor's response to the controversy was to book Davis for the rest of the season.


Books and merchandising

In addition to Caught Short!, Cantor wrote or co-wrote at least seven other books, including booklets released by the then-fledgling firm of Simon & Schuster, with Cantor's name on the cover. Some were "as told to" or written with David Freedman). Customers paid a dollar and received the booklet with a penny embedded in the hardcover. They sold well, and H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) asserted that these books did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined.

Cantor's popularity led to merchandising of such products as Eddie Cantor's Tell It to the Judge game from Parker Brothers. In 1933, a set of 12 Eddie Cantor caricatures by Frederick J. Garner were published by Brown & Bigelow. These advertising cards were purchased in bulk as a direct-mail item by such businesses as auto body shops, funeral directors, dental laboratories and vegetable wholesale dealers. With the full set, companies could mail a single Cantor card each month for a year to their selected special customers as an ongoing promotion.


Tributes

Cantor was profiled on the popular program This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting person (usually a celebrity) would be surprised on live television with a half-hour tribute. Cantor was the only subject who was told of the surprise in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

In 1953 Warner Brothers, in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of The Jolson Story, filmed a big-budget Technicolor feature film, The Eddie Cantor Story. The film found an audience, but might have done better with someone else in the leading role. Actor Keefe Brasselle played Cantor as a caricature, with high-pressure dialogue and bulging eyes wide open at all times; the fact that Brasselle was considerably taller than Cantor didn't lend realism, either. Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film Eddie tells Ida, "I never looked better in my life" ... and gives the audience a knowing, incredulous look!

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced 1944 feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks that was RKO's top-grossing film that year. Probably the best summary of Cantor's career is in one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows. The Colgate hour was a virtual video autobiography, with Cantor recounting his career, singing his familiar hits, and re-creating his singing-waiter days with his old pal Jimmy Durante (Jimmy's wearing a lavish toupee!). This show has been issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person.


Family

Eddie and Ida Cantor had five children: Marilyn, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna and Janet. Cantor's daughter, Janet Gari, is a songwriter who has collaborated with Toby Garson, the daughter of composer Harry Ruby, on children's shows and off-Broadway revues. Cantor's autobiographies, My Life is in Your Hands (with David Freedman) and Take My Life (with Jane Kesner Ardmore) were republished in 2000, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Cantor's grandson, musician Brian Gari.

On October 10, 1964 in Beverly Hills, California, Eddie Cantor suffered another heart attack and died. He is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery. Cantor was awarded an honorary Academy Award the year of his death.

Tallulah Bankhead
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Tallulah Brockman Bankhead
Born January 31, 1902(1902-01-31)
Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.
Died December 12, 1968 (aged 66)
New York, New York, U.S.
[show]Awards
Other Awards
New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress
1944 Lifeboat

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968) was an American actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante.[1]





Biography

Early life and family

Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, and was named after her maternal grandmother.[2] She has been described as "an extremely homely child", overweight and with a deep, husky voice resulting from chronic bronchitis.[2]

Bankhead came from a powerful Democratic political family in the South in general and Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936-1940 (in the 74th, 75th, and 76th Congresses), immediately preceding Sam Rayburn. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Bankhead herself was a Democrat, albeit one of a more liberal stripe than the rest of her family.

Her family sent her to various schools in an attempt to keep her out of trouble, which included a year at a Catholic convent school (although her father was a Methodist and her mother, who died at her birth, was an Episcopalian).


Early career

At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and known as a hard-partying girl-about-town. During this time she experimented with cocaine and marijuana, but did not consume alcohol to any great degree. She became known for her wit, although as screenwriter Anita Loos, another minor Roundtable member, said: "She was so pretty that we thought she must be stupid." She became known for saying almost anything, whether true or not. Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead replied "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel".[3]

In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played the waitress Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She was famous not only as an actress but also for her many affairs, infectious personality and witticisms like "There is less to this than meets the eye" and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was brash, brazen, and apt to say anything. This trait made her widely popular. She was known for her promiscuous behavior, and had the reputation of being sexually available to anyone she found attractive, famous or not. Her longest known affair during this period in her life was with an Italian businessman named Anthony de Bosdari, which lasted just over one year.[4] By the end of the decade, she was one of the West End's ?- and England's ?- best-known and most notorious celebrities.[5]

While in London, Bankhead also bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She wasn't very competent with directions, however, and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. The press loved this.[4]

Promiscuity came naturally to Bankhead, and she went to bed with anyone who was interested. She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw," she said. Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She didn't bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful old-fashioned boy."[4]


Mid career

She returned to the US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich", but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 30s. Critics agree that her acting was flat, that she was unable to dominate the camera, and that she was generally outclassed by Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and others. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street, in Hollywood, and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries."[6] On September 9, 1932, she was featured on the cover of Film Weekly.[7]

Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and Cukor and Bankhead became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and didn't have the patience for it. She didn't like Hollywood either. When she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?"[8]

Bankhead herself was not very interested in making films. The opportunity to make $50,000 per film, however, was too good to pass up. She later said, "The only reason I went to Hollywood was to **** that divine Gary Cooper."[8]

One of Bankhead's most notorious events was an interview that she gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932. She was obviously letting off steam from her frustrated attempt at a movie career and she ranted wildly about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:

"I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now.... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long.... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind.... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!"[citation needed]

Alleged lesbianism, sexual exploits

Hollywood was becoming increasingly conservative, partly as a result of past scandals, and partly because Will H. Hays and others had formed the infamous Production Code. The code dictated not only what the studios could show in their films, but how actors had to conduct themselves off-screen. As predicted, the interview created quite a commotion. Will Hays was furious. Time ran a story about it, and, back home, Bankhead's father and family were really rather perturbed. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again.[8]

However, following the release of the Kinsey Reports, she was once quoted as stating;

"I found no surprises in the Kinsey Report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me..I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."[9]

Thus, comments such as that quoted above and many other actions in her life led to her reputation, of which she never made excuses. She was outspoken and uninhibited. By the standards of the interwar years, Bankhead was quite openly bisexual,[10] but she successfully avoided scandal related to her affairs, regardless of the gender of her lovers. She was known to have stripped off her clothes on several occasions while attending parties, which shocked people in attendance, but nonetheless she remained magnetic to those who knew her well. Her personality, it was said, made her almost irresistible as a friend, or a lover.

Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Hattie McDaniel, and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, and singer Billie Holiday.[11][12]

She was reportedly extremely excited when she was first able to meet the elusive Garbo, but whether they were sexually involved has never been determined beyond a doubt. The two women played tennis together often, and were said to have enjoyed one another's company, but Garbo was extremely protective of her private life and secretive about her lovers. Bankhead was married to actor John Emery from 1937 to 1941.

Actress Patsy Kelly made a claim to author Boze Hadleigh, which he included in his 1996 book about lesbianism in Hollywood's early years, that she had a long lesbian affair with Bankhead.[4][8] John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."

In 1932, she expressed some interest in spirituality, but did not outwardly pursue it, except for a time when she met with the Indian mystic, Meher Baba.[13]

In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy for an advanced case of gonorrhea, which she claimed she contracted either from George Raft or Gary Cooper. [1] Only 70 pounds when she left the hospital, she stoically said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"

In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England. After only a short stay, she was called back to New York to play in Dark Victory. She continued to play in various performances over the next few years, mostly mediocre. Nevertheless, David O. Selznick called her the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara. However, moviegoers answering a poll thought otherwise.[14]

Her screen test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the running for good. Selznick decided that she was too old (at 34) for Scarlett's antebellum scenes. Unable to capture Hollywood, Bankhead returned to her most-loved acting medium, the stage.

Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays until she played the cold and ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939). Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, while Hellman (an equally staunch Stalinist) objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak for the next quarter of a century.[15]

More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, and also husband and wife offstage). During the run of the play, some media accused Bankhead of a running feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan. Kazan confirmed the story in his autobiography, and he stated that Bankhead was one of the few people in his life that he ever actually detested.


In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter, in Lifeboat. The performance is widely acknowledged as her best on film, and won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Almost childlike in her immodesty, a beaming Tallulah accepted her trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"

After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star, and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.[15]

Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day, and was a party favorite for outlandish stunts such as underwearless cartwheels in a skirt or entering a soirée stark naked. She is also said to have been so engrossed in conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt that she dropped her drawers and used the toilet while the first lady was still talking.[15]

Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but broke with most Southerners by campaigning for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948. While viewing the Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-Governor Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, splitting the Democratic vote.


Late career

Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Although she had become a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television. Her appearance as herself on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show in 1957 is a cult favorite, as is her role as the "Black Widow" on the 1960s campy television show Batman, which turned out to be her final screen appearance.

In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but also performed monologues and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood and radio--including Fred Allen, Fanny Brice, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, Jimmy Durante, Martin & Lewis, George Jessel, Judy Garland, Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Swanson, José Ferrer and Judy Holliday, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings.

Bankhead, who proved a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality, however, was not blamed for the failure of The Big Show--television's growth was hurting all radio ratings at the time, so the next season NBC installed her as one of a half dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Although critics, pros and the sophisticated set loved her, and Tallulah's monologues became classics, she was not among the hosts renewed for the following season.

Bankhead's most popular television appearance and the one that is still seen widely today was her December 3, 1957 appearance on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Hour. Bankhead played herself in the episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but she had to bow out after cracking her vertebra.

Lucille Ball was a fan of Bankhead's and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Arnaz were at their wit's end over Bankhead's behavior during rehearsal: she refused to listen to the director and she did not like to rehearse. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and everyone thought she was drunk most of the time. Ball and Arnaz apparently didn't know about Tallulah's antipathy toward rehearsing or her incredible ability to memorize a script. The actual taping of the episode went off without a hitch, and Bankhead impressed everyone with her line readings and professionalism".[16] Lucille Ball later said that she was conned by Bankhead who purposely made her think she would screw up to throw her off kilter. Desi Arnaz said that Bankhead walked all over him and Ball, and they hadn't known this was typical behavior for Tallulah.

Bankhead also appeared as Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1956), but reviews were poor. She received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in Mary Chase's Midgie Purvis (1961). Her last theatrical appearance was in another Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963). Although she received good notices for her last performances, her career as one of the greats of the American stage was coming to an end.

Her last motion picture was a British horror film Fanatic (1965) co-starring Stefanie Powers, which was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!.

Her last appearance on screen came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series.

According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized." This headline was a testament to Bankhead's large, charismatic personality (which inspired much of the "personality" of the character Cruella De Vil in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians).[17]

Bankhead had no children, but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend and actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls's husband, Donald Seawell. She was known for her kindness to animals and children.

An avid baseball fan, Bankhead was a fan of the New York Giants. She once said that, throughout history, there have only been two geniuses, "Willie Shakespeare and Willie Mays."

Bankhead was also a fan of the soap opera, The Edge of Night. It has been said that after watching a female character agonize over a man, Bankhead contacted the producers of the show and said, "Why doesn't she just shoot the bastard?"

On May 14, 1968, Bankhead was a guest on The Tonight Show with Joe Garagiola as the guest host, along with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were in New York to announce the formation of their new company Apple Records. Bankhead, reportedly a bit inebriated, told Lennon and McCartney that she would love to learn how to meditate, as they had in India with the Maharishi in February 1968. Around that time, fans were shocked to see Bankhead on the cover of The National Enquirer. The tabloid informed its readers that the actress was aware that she had only months to live. "There's nothing you, or I, or anybody can do about it," she was quoted.


Death

Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of double pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated by emphysema, at the age of 66 on December 12, 1968, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland.[1]

Her last words: Codeine... bourbon.[18]


MI5 investigation of Eton school scandal

Recently declassified papers thrust Bankhead in the limelight of public scandal posthumously[19]. She had been investigated by MI5 amid rumors she was corrupting pupils at Eton. The documents alleged that she seduced up to half a dozen public schoolboys into taking part in "indecent and unnatural" acts. This rumor had sent shockwaves through the 1920s British establishment.

The documents compiled by the British Aliens and Immigration Department allege that the investigation was scuttled by a determined cover-up by Eton's headmaster, Dr C.A. Alington. The allegations were based purely on gossip and word of mouth, and lacked credible evidence. It appears that they were assembled by MI5 at the urgings of a Home Office minister.

The dossier, assembled when she was 32, contains allegations that while in Britain the actress:

performed indecent acts with under-age boys from Eton College
was a lesbian who was also promiscuous with men
was thrown out of her home by her father because of immoral conduct
moved in a social circle which was a center of vice.
The report that a group of Eton boys took part in a sex session with her at an hotel in Berkshire was discreetly investigated by police and the headmaster was interviewed. However, nothing was discovered except that a couple of boys had been dismissed for breaking school rules on riding in a car.

However, the investigator known only as FHM wrote: "The headmaster is obviously not prepared to assist HO (Home Office) by revealing what he knows of her exploits with some of the boys, i.e., he wants to do everything possible to keep Eton out of the scandal."

John Agar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born January 31, 1921
Chicago, Illinois USA
Died April 7, 2002 (aged 81)
Burbank, California USA
Spouse(s) Shirley Temple (1945-1950)
Loretta Combs (1951-2000)

John G. Agar (January 31, 1921 - April 7, 2002) was an American actor. He starred alongside John Wayne in the films Sands of Iwo Jima and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, but was later relegated to B Movies, such as Tarantula, The Mole People, The Brain from Planet Arous and Hand of Death. He is also mentioned in the Frank Zappa Song, The Radio is Broken from the album The Man From Utopia (1983) and the Young Fresh Fellows have written songs about him, including "The New John Agar" and "Agar's Revenge," found on the album Topsy Turvy.

Agar was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Lillian (née Rogers) and John Agar, Sr., a meat packer.[1] He was educated at Harvard School for Boys and Lake Forest Academy in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Pawling Preparatory School in Pawling, New York, but did not attend college. He and his family moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1942 following his father's death. During World War II he served in the Army Air Corps, and he was a sergeant at the time he left the army in 1946.

He was Shirley Temple's first husband (1945-1950), and they worked together in Fort Apache. His marriage to Temple lasted five years and they had one daughter together, Linda Susan Agar who was later known as Susan Black, taking the surname of her stepfather Charles Alden Black. Following his divorce from Temple, Agar was married in 1951 to model Loretta Barnett Combs (1922-2000). They remained married until her death in 2000. They had two sons: Martin Agar and John G. Agar III.

Agar died on April 7, 2002 at Burbank, California of complications from Emphysema. He was buried beside his wife at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.

Carol Channing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Carol Elaine Channing
Born January 31, 1921 (1921-01-31) (age 87)
Seattle, Washington US
Spouse(s) Harry Kullijian 2000 - present
Charles Lowe 1956-1999 (his death)
Theodore Naidish
Alexander Carson
Official site http://www.carolchanning.org
[show]Awards
Tony Awards
1964 Best Actress (Musical) for Hello, Dolly!
1968 Special Award
1995 Lifetime Achievement Award

Carol Elaine Channing (born on January 31, 1921 in Seattle, Washington) is an American singer and actress. The winner of three Tony Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nominee, Channing is best remembered for two roles: Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!.

She is easily recognized by her distinctive voice and wide eyes, and her unusual mannerisms and personality are frequently parodied.





Childhood and education

An only child, Channing was born on January 31, 1921 in Seattle, Washington. Her father was George Channing, a journalist, whose newspaper career took the family to San Francisco when Channing was only two weeks old; her mother was the former Carol Glaser. She went to school at Aptos Junior High School, where she met an Armenian-American boy named Harry Kullijian with whom she fell in love. They lost touch when she went to Lowell High School in San Francisco. At Lowell, Channing was a member of its famed Lowell Forensic Society, the nation's oldest high school debate team.

According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist whom she had believed was born in Rhode Island, was in fact born in Augusta, Georgia to a German American father and an African American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother didn't want her to be surprised "if she had a black baby".[1][2] Channing kept her heritage secret so she would not be typecast on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess, published in 2002 when she was 81 years old. Channing's autobiography, although containing a photograph of her mother, displays none of her father or her son.[3]


Career

Channing was introduced to the stage while doing church work for her mother. In a 2005 interview with the Austin Chronicle, Channing recounted this experience:

"My mother said, 'Carol, would you like to help me distribute Christian Science Monitors backstage at the live theatres in San Francisco?' And I said, 'All right, I'll help you.' I don't know how old I was. I must have been little. We went through the stage door alley [for the Curran Theatre], and I couldn't get the stage door open. My mother came and opened it very easily. Anyway, my mother went to put the Monitors where they were supposed to go for the actors and the crew and the musicians, and she left me alone. And I stood there and realized ?- I'll never forget it because it came over me so strongly - that this is a temple. This is a cathedral. It's a mosque. It's a mother church. This is for people who have gotten a glimpse of creation and all they do is recreate it. I stood there and wanted to kiss the floorboards."[1]
Channing's first job on stage in New York was in Marc Blitzstein's No For an Answer, which was given two special Sunday performances starting January 5, 1941 at the Mecca Temple (later New York's City Center). Channing then moved to Broadway for Let's Face It, in which she was an understudy for Eve Arden. Decades later, Arden would be a road company "Dolly" after Channing finally relinquished the role.

Channing had a featured role in a revue, Lend an Ear, where she was spotted by Anita Loos and cast in the role of Lorelei Lee, which was to bring her to prominence. (Her signature song from the production was "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.") Channing's persona and that of the character were strikingly alike: simultaneously smart yet scattered, naïve but worldly.

Channing came to national prominence as the star of Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly! She never missed a performance during her run, attributing her good health to her Christian Science faith. Her performance won her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, in a year when her chief competition was Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl. She was deeply disappointed when Streisand, who many believed to be far too young for the role, signed on to play the role of Dolly Levi in the film, which also starred Walter Matthau and Michael Crawford.

She reprised the role of Lorelei Lee in the musical Lorelei, and appeared in two New York revivals of Hello, Dolly!, in addition to touring with it extensively throughout the United States. She also appeared in a number of movies, including the cult film Skidoo and Thoroughly Modern Millie, opposite Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore. For Millie she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 1966 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.

William Goldman, in his book The Season, refers to Channing as a classic example of a "critic's darling" ?- an actress who is always praised by critics no matter the caliber of her work, chiefly because she is simply so unusual and bizarre (other actresses he places in this category include Sandy Dennis and Beatrice Lillie.)

Channing was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1995[2], and an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts by California State University, Stanislaus in 2004.[3] She and husband Harry are active in promoting arts education in California schools.


Family life

She has been married four times. Her first husband, Theodore Naidish, was a writer; her second, Alexander Carson, was center for the Ottawa Rough Riders Canadian football team (they had one son, Channing Lowe, who is a Pulitzer-prize-nominated cartoonist and who took his stepfather's surname; he uses the name Chan Lowe professionally).[4][5] In 1956 she married her manager and publicist, Charles Lowe. They remained married for 42 years, but she abruptly filed for divorce in 1998. He died before the divorce was finalized. After Lowe's death and until shortly before her fourth marriage, the actress's companion was Roger Denny, an interior decorator.[6]

On May 10, 2003, she married Harry Kullijian, her fourth husband and junior high school sweetheart, who reunited with her after she mentioned him fondly in her memoir. The two performed at their old junior high school, which had become Aptos Middle School, in a benefit for the school. At Lowell High School, they renamed the school's auditorium "The Carol Channing Theatre" in her honor. The City of San Francisco, California proclaimed February 25, 2002 to be Carol Channing Day, for her advocacy of gay rights and her appearance as the celebrity host of the Gay Pride Day festivities in Hollywood. She shared the stage with Richard Skipper, well known Carol Channing Tribute Artist. Richard recently did a benefit for The Dr. Carol Channing-Harry Kullijian Endowment For The Arts. Carol and Harry were in attendance.

Mario Lanza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Mario Lanza (31 January 1921 - 7 October 1959) was an American tenor and Hollywood movie star who enjoyed success in the late 1940s and 1950s. His voice was considered by some to rival that of Enrico Caruso, whom Lanza portrayed in the 1951 film The Great Caruso. Lanza was able to sing all types of music. While his highly emotional style was not always universally praised by critics, he was immensely popular and his many recordings are still prized today.




Operatic career

Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was exposed to opera and singing at a young age, and by the age of 16 his vocal talent became apparent. Starting out in local operatic productions in Philadelphia, he later came to the attention of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who provided young Cocozza with a full student scholarship to the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. Koussevitzky would later tell Lanza that, "Yours is a voice such as is heard once in a hundred years."

His operatic debut, as Fenton in Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, was at Tanglewood on August 7, 1942, after studying with conductors Boris Goldovsky and Leonard Bernstein. It was here that Cocozza adopted the stage name Mario Lanza, which is the masculine version of his mother's name. His performances at Tanglewood won him critical acclaim, with Noel Straus of The New York Times hailing the 21-year-old tenor as having "few equals among tenors of the day in terms of quality, warmth, and power."

His operatic career was interrupted by World War II, when he was assigned to Special Services in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He appeared on the wartime shows On the Beam and Winged Victory while in the Air Corps. He also appeared in the film version of the latter (albeit as an unrecognizable member of the chorus).

He resumed his singing career in October 1945 on the CBS radio program Great Moments in Music, where he made six appearances singing various operatic selections. He later studied under Enrico Rosati for fifteen months, then embarked on an 86-concert tour of the United States, Canada and Mexico between July 1947 and May 1948 with George London and Frances Yeend. In April 1948, he sang Pinkerton in the New Orleans Opera's Madama Butterfly (conducted by Walter Herbert) to great acclaim. A concert at the Hollywood Bowl brought Lanza to the attention of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who signed Lanza to a seven-year film contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. This would prove to be a turning point in the young singer's career.


Film career

MGM's contract with Lanza required him to commit to the studio for six months, and at first Lanza was able to combine his film career with his operatic one, singing two acclaimed performances as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly for the New Orleans Opera Association in April 1948. He also continued to perform in concert, both in solo appearances and as part of the Bel Canto Trio with George London and Frances Yeend. In May 1949, he made his first commercial recordings with RCA Victor. However, his first two starring films, That Midnight Kiss and The Toast of New Orleans, were very successful, as was his recording career, and Lanza's fame increased dramatically.

In 1951, Lanza portrayed Enrico Caruso in The Great Caruso, which proved to be an astonishing success. At the same time, his popularity exposed Lanza to intense criticism by some music critics, including those who had praised his work years earlier.


Mario Lanza as Lt. Pinkerton and Kathryn Grayson as Cio-Cio San of Madama Butterfly in their 1950 picture The Toast of New Orleans.In 1952, Lanza was dismissed by MGM after he had pre-recorded the songs for The Student Prince. The reason most frequently cited for his dismissal in the tabloid press at the time was that Lanza's recurring weight problem had made it impossible for him to fit into the costumes of the Prince. However, as his biographers Cesari and Mannering have established, Lanza was not overweight at the beginning of the production, and it was, in fact, a disagreement with director Curtis Bernhardt over Lanza's singing of one of the songs in the film that led to Lanza walking off the set. MGM refused to replace Bernhardt, and the film was subsequently made with actor Edmund Purdom miming to Lanza's vocals. Ironically, the eventual director of the film was Richard Thorpe, the same man whom Lanza had pleaded with MGM to replace Bernhardt, and with whom the tenor had enjoyed an excellent working relationship on "The Great Caruso".

Depressed by his dismissal, and with his self-confidence severely undermined, Lanza became a virtual recluse for more than a year, frequently seeking refuge in alcoholic binges. During this period Lanza also came very close to bankruptcy as a result of poor investment decisions made by his former manager, and his lavish spending habits left him owing about $250,000 in back taxes to the IRS.

He returned to an active film career in 1955 in Serenade. However, despite its strong musical content, it was not as successful as his previous films. Lanza then moved to Rome, Italy in May 1957, where he worked on the film Seven Hills of Rome and returned to live performing in a series of acclaimed concerts throughout Britain, Ireland and the European Continent. Despite failing health, which resulted in a number of cancellations during this period, Lanza continued to receive offers for operatic appearances, concerts, and films. In late August 1958, he made a number of operatic recordings at the Rome Opera House for the soundtrack of what would turn out to be his final film, "For the First Time". Here, he came into contact with the Artistic Director of the Rome Opera, Riccardo Vitale, who reportedly offered him the role of Canio in Pagliacci in the theater's 1960/61 season. At the same time, however, his health continued to decline, with the tenor suffering from a variety of ailments, including phlebitis and acute high blood pressure. The old habits of overeating and crash dieting, coupled with his binge drinking, compounded his problems. The following year, in April 1959, Lanza suffered a minor heart attack, followed by double pneumonia in August. He died in Rome in October of that year at the age of 38 from a pulmonary embolism. His widow, Betty, moved back to Hollywood with their four children but used barbiturates to commit suicide five months later; Marc, the younger of their two sons died in 1993 of a heart attack at the age of 37.

Lanza's short career covered opera, radio, concerts, recordings, and motion pictures. He was the first artist for RCA Victor Red Seal to receive a gold disc. He was also the first artist to sell two and half million albums. A highly influential artist, Lanza has been credited with inspiring the careers of successive generations of opera singers, including Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Leo Nucci and Jose Carreras, as well as those of singers with seemingly different backgrounds, and influences, his RCA Victor label-mate Elvis Presley being the most notable example. In 1994, tenor José Carreras paid tribute to Lanza in a worldwide concert tour, saying of him, "If I'm an opera singer, it's thanks to Mario Lanza."

Joanne Dru
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joanne Dru (January 31, 1922 - September 10, 1996) was an American film and television actress. She also was the elder sister of Peter Marshall, best known for being the host of Hollywood Squares.


Life and career

Born Joanne Letitia LaCock in Logan, West Virginia, Dru came to New York City in 1940, at age 18. After finding employment as a model, she was chosen by Al Jolson to appear in the cast of his Broadway show Hold Onto Your Hats. Dru met and married popular singer Dick Haymes. When they moved to Hollywood, she found work in the theater. Dru was spotted by a talent scout and made her first film appearance in Abie's Irish Rose (1946).

Over the next decade, Dru appeared frequently in films and on television. She was cast often in western films such as Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), and John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Wagon Master (1950). She later lamented that she had been typecast in western films, commenting that once an actress suffered that fate, that was the end, adding that she never liked horses.

She gave a well-received performance in the dramatic film All the King's Men (1949), and co-starred with Dan Dailey in The Pride of St. Louis (1952) about major-league baseball pitcher Jerome "Dizzy" Dean. She was divorced from Haymes in 1949, and married John Ireland, who was also in Red River, less than a month later. Dru and Ireland got divorced in 1957.

She also appeared in the Martin and Lewis film 3 Ring Circus (1954). Her film career began to fade by the end of the 1950s, but she continued working frequently in television, and played the female lead in the 1960 ABC sitcom Guestward, Ho!. After Guestward, Ho!, she appeared sporadically for the rest of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, with one feature film appearance, in Sylvia (1965), and eight television appearances. Although regarded as a capable and popular film actress, it was for her contributions to television that Dru was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Dru had five children, three with Haymes, and two with Ireland. She died in Los Angeles, California at the age of 74 from lymphedema.