Where Does Love Go (1965) : Charles Boyer Sings!

Good morning!!

Long time no see! How've ya been? I'm peeping back in from the BLAZING, SCORCHED EARTH of Nashville, Tennessee to update you with a celebrity oddity I ran across the other day. Yep, the kind of thing only you and I would enjoy.

Confession: I cancelled my Spotify premium subscription the other day in a bid to cut down on some of the superfluous digital services we seem to mindlessly become entwined with (it's so easy to do!). As much as I love commercial-free listening, I figured with all the things out there, there had to be somewhere else I could get my music (legally, semi-legally, whatever) for free. And, in my spendthrift haze, I had completely forgotten that Freegal, a service provided by my local library, totally allows unlimited music streaming from something like 10,000 music labels, including Universal Music Group (which has subsumed SO. MANY. OLD SCHOOL. LABELS). While the user interface is barest of bare bones, hey, it's free! And no commercials. And so....many....weird things.

Such as? A contender for the prize of "Weirdest Midcentury Spoken Wordish Singing Record by a Celebrity" (the mantle formerly held by Dirk Bogarde alone)... this compilation of Gallic import Charles Boyer speak-singing, in French has flipped my wig to where it is completely on backwards.

Let's talk!

It's funny, but as with a lot of classic Hollywood stars, you don't get the full picture of Charles Boyer's movie impact in a still photograph. His receding hair and average stature, coupled with even but unprepossessing features, are nothing to write home about at first glance-- and yet put him in a movie and you're sure to be swept away by his suave, continental bearing, his smoldering glances, and above all, his dreamily pronounced French accent. Also, ascots. Boy, all the ascots. A heady combination for old school romantic movie-lovers such as ourselves.

Born in the Pyrénées in 1899, Charles Boyer became famous in America for a line from the trailer of the Pépé le Moko remake, Algiers, that never even made it into the finished film. "Come with me to the Casbah", pronounced trippingly on Boyer's tongue, became the "Come wizz meee to de Cazzbaaah" of a million celebrity impressionists, as famous in its day as "I vant to be a-lone". The sonorous, deep quality of his voice, combined with the rakish French accent, is pretty much irresistible. The year before his catchphrase was born, he played in a romantic weepy that won my heart, opposite Irene Dunne in Love Affair. That film would later be remade as the four-handkerchief classic An Affair to Remember... and if you'd have told me, pre-screening, that the person in the photograph on the left would give Cary Grant of all people a run for his money in a romantic who-played-it-best, I would have been skeptical to say the least. However! Boyer carries with him an urgency verging on pathos in most of his good scenes-- while he may start a movie haughty and remote, arch and distant, it seems as if there's always some turning point along the course of the filmplay where the music swells and you realize he's been torturing himself trying to suppress his love for you  his onscreen lady love for the better part of the movie. AND THAT, my friends, is what makes a truly indelible heartthrob in the Mr. Darcy mold. I've seen plenty of movies that were just "eh" (see: The Garden of Allah, in spite of its jawdropping Technicolor gorgeousness) in hopes of capturing one of those true heart-string tugging moments that the best of his movies include (see: All This and Heaven, Too). 

Which brings us to why I would be psyched to see his name next to a record in the Freegal holdings!

Initially, I was like "Whoa, TWO records of...wait, these are the exact same songs." Waaah. 

Is this record perfect? No, it is not. Is it totally fun? Yes it is. Is it weirdly more listenable than the Dirk Bogarde record (which, itself, has kind of grown on me)? Indeed! INDEED IT IS. My favorite part, bless my little beating francophone coeur, is that Boyer slips into French in half the songs-- "Autumn Leaves" and "La Vie Rose" both feature passages of the original French lyrics, a real treat for French speakers. I love the series of ideas that sprung to mind as I listened and sighed a swoony sigh:

1. Do old-time French actors have a specific accent that is dated by its age/time period, in the way that 1940's actors (Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, etc) have a very specific way of talking even outside of their individual idiosyncracies? People in 1940's movies, stylized or not, have a very identifiable way of speaking specific to that era, which made me wonder: if a native French speaker listened to Boyer speaking in French, would they get a sense of old-fashionedness from his in-French accent that misses us for not being born francophones?
2. Imagine going back to some dude's apartment in 1965, and he puts THIS on the hi-fi as a "mood setter"/possible makeout music? I think that's technically the intended audience for this and the Bogarde record, as a swoony-romance-y dim-the-lights music, but I would have fallen into a fit of giggles at the preposterous nature of the whole endeavor I'm pretty sure from Minute One. "Bolero" is obvious enough, but a record of a French actor speaking his way through love songs would just advertise subtlety as NOT being one of your strong suits, sixties' Mad Men era would be lothario.
3. Also, think of Charles Boyer himself giving a "I'm game" go-ahead for this album, though professing to possessing no great vocal ability. Record company: "Charles, we're going to bring you in here to do a record." Charles Boyer: "And whhhy nawt?" with an insouciant toss of his diminutive shoulders. Go on, get your life, Charles Boyer.

Give it a listen yourself, and see what you think-- you can catch a lot of these songs on Youtube or Spotify or even Freegal, if your library subscribes.

source

And if you won't take my word it being good, did you know that no less a shining star than Our Elvis Presley who art in Heaven expressed a deep love of this record around the time of his Las Vegas performances? Read for yourself:

Whaaaat. You heard it here first! Or possibly second, if you've read those two Elvis books I just grabbed pull quotes from (the latter of which, Peter Guralnick's epic two-volume bio, is essential reading). My favorite part of that passage is that no one else liked the record because of its melancholy nature-- I guess there is a kind of sad undertone to the music, but that's about the only way I like it-- dramatic, romantic, BIG!



Anyway, it's good to get a chance to check in! I've definitely missed writing and interacting over here, and as always, hope to make good my promise to return to a more regular blogging schedule as time permits. In the in-between-time, I hope you're finding lots of great stuff out at the sales and enjoying the summer months as best you can for all this oppressive heat! Stay cool, and see you again soon! Til then. :)

Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton and Tom Neal (Hollywood Scandal, 1951)

Good morning!

How's every little thing? I was telling my friend Eartha the other day that I had two or three blog entries I'd started and not even attempted to finish due to a debilitating bout of inertia, but didn't just saying it outloud shame me into taking action on these poor, neglected posts? So, I thought I'd take a minute or two off from catching up on my Turner Classic Movies watchlist and handwringing over various housework projects that need attention (both of which can wait), and share with you a scintillatingly scandalous bit of salaciousness I was researching the other day. Or at least I found it so! I hope you do, too.

People, Barbara Payton and Franchot Tone-- Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton, my people.

Points gained for the hat, points lost for the inebriated 500 yard stare each are giving the photographer.

I was working on a little side project I've been toying with lately about vintage Hollywood scandals when a brief cotton wisp of a thought about Franchot Tone blew by while I was brainstorming incidents in the lives of ye olde classic Hollywood celebrities. Wasn't there something in his biography about a brawl over a young starlet when he was well into his middle age that put him in the hospital? Sketchy with my recollection on that (so many Hollywood Babylon type stories under the bridge), I turned to Wikipedia as an aide-memoire, which obligingly offered up the following:

In 1951, Tone's relationship with actress Barbara Payton made headlines when he suffered numerous facial injuries and fell into a coma for 18 hours following a fistfight with actor Tom Neal, a rival for Payton's attention.

Yeeeeah, that was about the long and short of it! As I tried to find Google results, I leaned on my new favorite source for contemporary accounts of historical events, which is Google Newspapers. Yea bo, can you dig up some old school dirt with the help of that search engine. But let's start at the beginning. How should you know who Franchot Tone is? Here's a little background on the fellow at the center of this 1951 media storm:

• Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone (you can't make this up) was born in 1905 in New York state. His father, Frank Tone, was a wealthy industrialist/inventor who headed up the Carborundum Company in Niagara Falls.
• Tone enjoyed some success on Broadway and in New York theater circles before heading west to work in the movies, first with Paramount and then MGM.
• After signing with MGM, he was slated to appear in the WWI movie Today We Live with Gary Cooper. William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner) was working on a screenplay adaptation of his short story, "Turnabout", for the film when Louis B. Mayer requested that they put Joan Crawford on the picture in order to use her in an already-in-progress project. Only problem? There were no female parts in the original short story. "Well, put her in as a nurse or something," LB not-so-subtly suggested, and so the men-at-war movie became a men-at-war-trying-to-get-the-same-girl movie.
• Donald Spoto (celebrity biographer and one of the very best), opens the section of the book discussing this movie in his excellent Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford, like so:
• "Today We Live must be ranked not only as the low point in the career of Joan Crawford but also as one of those most dreadful movies ever made."
• Um, and that's, we're to assume, not only Trog and Berserk, in Joan's own filmography, but all other movies in the history of movies. Harsh but not exactly inaccurate?
• So,the movie was terrible, Joan Crawford should not be required to do an English accent for any amount of time... but in good news, Tone and Crawford hit it off at once, begin dating, and marry in 1935.

Love that face, love those accessories.

For you vintage cinephiles and fellow Hollywood gossip mongerers out there, Franchot Tone is actually at the center of Joan/Bette feud theory. If you remember your camp canon correctly, you'll know that there may have or may not have been a long going for real/not for real/possibly for publicity/but possibly not for publicity tension between two of the greatest 1930's/1940's film stars, immortalized in the first and best entry in either's mid career foray into horror, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Tensions during that filming ran high, but were even worse when the film was successful and a semi-sequel, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte went into production. Joan dropped out a few weeks in due to "fatigue" and was replaced by Davis bosom buddy Olivia de Havilland, starting a media frenzy as to whether or not the two towering personalities had clashed as much on the set as they did on camera. However, according to The Divine Feud and a host of other separate biographies, the Crawford/Davis rancor actually dates back to 1935, when Bette Davis won an Academy Award, but not her co-star's off screen affections, in Dangerous. 

Better luck next time, Bette.

Joan and Franchot divorced in 1939 but remained lifelong friends...Bette never did get her chance with her co star crush. Tone continued appearing in movies through the thirties' and forties', but as the vogue for Manhattanite roués waned, so did his star power. He's best known for, other than the Crawford and Davis movies, Mutiny On The Bounty, as third billed under the theatrical powerhouse, Charles Laughton, and MGM megastar (and former Joan paramour) Clark Gable. He married a striking blonde actress named Jean Wallace in 1941, but they divorced in 1950, leaving the still-extremely-wealth Tone single and looking-- which is when he fell for the much younger Barbara Payton.

In the movies, Franchot Tone seems to inhabit the same sort of urbane, debonair, wry and slightly patrician man-about-town character from film to film-- someone who would take you to a Park Avenue party and a rally for theater workers unions on the same night in the same tuxedo, before some inelegant mix up involving a runaway heiress or an errant Broadway producer. From the Crawford biographies, you get the sense that he was much the same person in real life...which is why hearing about him being involved in some lurid love triangle that landed him in the hospital is kind of surprising! But don't take my word for it-- I've clipped some news articles from the time and present them here in semi-chronological order so you can see just how wild both the situation and the news reporting that followed got over the course of a few months in 1951.

Exhibit A: 

I love....and I mean I LOVE...how much like a present day news article on DailyMail or People magazine this sounds. Before TMZ or even Entertainment Tonight, you could flip to the celebrity section of your local newspaper (this one, for example, is a syndicated column appearing in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune) and read as much D-I-R-T dirt as you would in our modern age. Hollywood reporters kept on this story for weeks! As you can see in the article, what appears to have happened: Tone takes a swing at Tom Neal, Neal swings back but HARD, and Tone ends up in the hospital.

Barbara Payton was a new name to me-- she was model turned actress discovered in 1950 by William Cagney and chosen to appear in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye alongside his lookalike brother, movie legend James Cagney. That role lead to other good-to-middling parts at Warner Brothers in the next year, including the love interest in the okay-ish western Only The Valiant (1951), with my boyfriend Gregory Peck:

Hi ya, Handsome!

Payton got involved with Tom Neal, an ex-boxer and B movie tough most famous for Detour (1945), around the same time as she met Franchot Tone. So what do you do, drop Mr. Great Body for Mr. Sophisticated Financial Security? Why would you, when you could just juggle either back and forth? Newspaper clipping-wise, Payton first shows up in Franchot's public life grâce à his divorce proceedings from his second wife. Please read the second column closely. Outloud, if you've got friends or coworkers around, and TELL ME the fifties' weren't about as gossip-hungry a public as we are today:

"Corky". As Gordon Ramsay would say, "Wow, wowowowowow." For Payton's part, the blonde authored an almost incomprehensible memoir in 1963, piquantly titled I Am Not Ashamed, which described the dichotomy between her two lovers like so:

It's... pretty much as badly written as that throughout, so I'll skip ahead a little and explain that it was, according to Payton, Tone's idea to get everyone together to "talk this over in a civilized fashion", which quickly devolved into boozy quarrel, with Neal questioning the age gap between Tone and Payton, and Tone referring to Neal as an "out of work body builder". Fightin' words, son. And yet, it was Tone who threw the first punch...and probably lived to regret it I would say. 

More contemporary newspaper clippings:

The end of the first column should say after a champagne reception something about them going to Duluth.
You get the idea.

I love how Tom Neal throughout is like, "Ok. So?" when asked for comment from the media. Also, as opposed to the bland "off the wire" type sound of a lot of present day celebrity gossip reports, I think it's great how first-person a lot of these accounts sound. Like there's some newspaper man in a slouch hat running down the hallway at the hospital to use the phone. "Here, just take this down as I say it,...'Dateline, Hollywood...' " You can see in the fifties' how the iron-fist control of the studios with regard to publicity begins to break down...Warners had already spent an exorbitant amount of money on building up a celebrity profile for Barbara Payton, so it really is surprising that something like this was splashed across newspapers countrywide. If this happened in the thirties', when Tone's star was on the ascendant at MGM, guaran-TEE he would have gone "out of the country" to "rest" after this while some Swiss plastic surgeon worked his miracles on the man's mangled mug. Also, can you imagine getting in a fight with your girlfriend's boyfriend that is bad enough you end up in the hospital? Maybe I naturally spurn trouble whenever possible, but I think after my nose was broken in four places by my significant other's OTHER significant other, I would be moving on to greener, calmer pastures in the romance department. But I digress.

I think a lot of alcohol was probably also factoring into this equation, because how else can you account for headlines like this?

I'm pretty sure they teach you in Northeastern blue blood charm schools that spitting in a lady's face is ne-e-e-e-ver acceptable. Did you catch that she was a witness in a murder trial as well in that second column? Again, wouldn't this make a crazy movie??

By November, things between the movie actor and the starlet had soured, and the barrage of bad press continues on into the spring of 1952, when the brief marriage began to fizzle but seriously. Read it for yourself! Sooooo much drama.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Franchot nursed his broken heart and face, working onstage and in television as he could, but never recapturing any of his clout in Hollywood. Payton and Neal continued to insist they were getting married, touring in a stage production of The Postman Always Rings Twice to capitalize on their notorious press presence, but broke up for good in 1954. Did either of them go softly into that dark night, though? An emphatic no. Once a troubled star, always a troubled star. Here's an article about Tom Neal from 1965...he was eventually convicted of manslaughter in the case of his wife's death, and served six years in prison before being released and dying of a heart attack in 1971. 

For Barbara's part, she descended into heavy alcoholism, arrested in California for passing bad checks and prostitution. She died in 1968, as, Wikipedia puts it, still holding to:

a childlike belief in her Hollywood stardom, which in her mind had never faded. She was unable to acknowledge that her once-promising career had crashed and burned, never to be resurrected.

I mean, how is this not at least an episode of Mysteries and Scandals? Right click this image for a larger version of this final clipping on Payton:

Well, I have to get going, but tell me what you think if you get a chance. Can you even BELIEVE the drama in these newspaper articles? Are you surprised at seeing early 1950's gossip described so frankly in a newspaper anyone could pick up and read? While I knew people were doing things like this in the fifties', it's pretty wild to be reading about it in contemporary accounts! Have you seen any Franchot Tone movies? Are you not shocked that he would be involved in all this? Let's discuss!!

More vintage stuff around the corner, cross my heart! I hope we get to talk again soon. Take care, til then!

Straight Jacket on Youtube (1964)

Good afternoon!

Sorry to only pop in for a moment again! This blog has been getting later and later, and isn't it a shame! So much drama in the LBC again...but not nearly as much as JC has to put up with in her late career schlock masterwork, Straight Jacket (1964). Did you know it was on Youtube? Did you know it was just what the doctor ordered this afternoon? Take me away, crazy early sixties' horror movie...take me away!

Poor unhinged Joanie is honestly still pretty wonderful as convicted ax murderess Lucy Harbin, trying to put together the pieces of her life after twenty years in an institution for a crime she...possibly didn't commit? I need to change my ringtone to Crawford just screaming "Noooooo" for thirty seconds in the opening scene. It ain't no Mildred Pierce, but you have to admire the picture for a) its full commitment to camp and b) Joan's consummate professionalism even as she's hacking up her adulterous husband in the opening scene, charm bracelet jangling as she delivers the "forty whacks" of the later children's rhyme made up about her (just....directly...lifted from Lizzie Borden's similar tune?). Also, while the wig is bad (though NOT Beyond the Forest Bette Davis bad, to her credit!), the sixties' dresses are on point!

The stills don't really do Joan justice-- in the movie, in spite of the wacky hair and eyebrows, her "movie star" quality still shines blindingly through every scene she appears in. When she's in the frame, you can't look at anybody else!

Some stills from the picture:

After her makeover, wig application, and about ten rounds with the eyebrow pencil...#luhyoujoanie

Did you know this bust was originally presented to JC on the set of A Woman's Face (1941), sculpted by Yugoslavian artist Yucca Salamunich? You can see her in 1941 with the bust here.

Two severed heads in the bed-- about two more than you want to wake up to.

Who makes Joan Crawford ride in the backseat?! Uncomfortable!

But as ye olde Levar Burton used to say, don't take my word for it! The whole film (and a bonus documentary about making the film) is available on Youtube. Watch the first, then watch the second, and see if the afternoon doesn't just fly by.

How I'm cutting my cake this year. Also, dang JC, nice arm muscle!

So! How about you? What kind of mindless entertainment gets you through a wild work week? Do you have a favorite camp horror movie or good-star-in-a-bad-movie that you would recommend? Have you seen Straight Jacket? Let's discuss!

That's all for today, but hopefully I'll be back a little earlier tomorrow for Photo Friday. Have a great Thursday! We'll talk then!

"Some Very Winning Europeans" (European Movie Stars in Life Magazine, 1963)

Good afternoon!

Hope you're not melting, melting in this late summer heatwave--I'm trying to stay cool here at the downtown library, but it's not easy! Lots of work to do today, but I wouldn't leave you hanging...check out this article from 1963 Life magazine on exciting European film stars of the time. Ugh, I just wanted to be Jeanne Moreau when I was sixteen, and I love her happy, smiling jolie-laide face across the page from my boyfriends Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Read up on some more familiar names (Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale. the painfully gorgeous Romy Schneider) and some less (Jules Dassin's wife Melina Mercouri, Maximillian Schell, Bergman star Bibi Anderssen, and how did a pre-Dr. Zhivago Omar Sharif sneak in?), and I've even thrown in some interview clips from the time period for good measure. Spoiler alert: European film stars sometimes give interviews in European languages, but even if you don't speak the language spoken, I hope you enjoy seeing real live interviews from the early 1960's (think about what a thing that was before E! and Entertainment Tonight!)

I gotta skedaddle, but have a great Tuesday! Lord willing I'll be back tomorrow with some more vintage coverage for your viewing pleasure.

                              

          

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The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965)

Good afternoon!

Here I am agazin, slinking over to Blogger in the middle of the late afternoon to send you a missive from the library trenches...once again, we are relocating service desks, avoiding adhesive patches where the new carpet's going, and generally trying to keep business rolling in a workplace in flux! I've been listening to what I think is a circular saw for the last forty minutes, and people...I'm ready to go home already. However! I wouldn't dream of not checking in with you of a Thursday. With the scant time I have left in the day, let me spread the good word about The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

So you've seen Alfred Hitchcock's masterworks like Notorious, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Psycho (I love ALL his movies, but those are my top five). You've probably seen a couple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which bonded his name inextricably with the "Funeral March of a Marionette" by Charles Gounod (one of the most genius uses of public domain classical pieces as theme music, um, ever). BUT! Have you seen the three seasons of his last television series, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour? If not, goody for you, as I've found a slew of them on the world wide internet, free for all to see, that I thought I might tell you about. I've been watching the hello out of these lately since we cancelled our Hulu, and they stand up admirably well compared to a lot of other programming from the same time period!

Tell you what though...can you spot the celebrity (or celebrities!) in each one of the stills from the episodes below? Click on each of the titles to see the episode on Youtube, and scroll down to the bottom to see if your answers were correct! Ready...steady...go:

1) The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "Captive Audience" (1962)

IMDB description: 

A mystery novelist sends a series of weird audiotapes to his publisher. On the first tape, the author boasts that the publisher won't be able to discern if the story he narrates is the history of an imminent murder - or a mere fantasy.

Who's the mystery movie star and mystery blonde in the screen cap?

2)The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "A Tangled Web" (1963)

IMDB description:

A very sweet French maid runs away with, and marries a professional burglar with hopes of making him honest.

Recognize the hunk of handsome in the suit, center?

3) The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "Ride the Nightmare" (1962)

IMDB synopsis:

A perfect couple's content suburban world is interrupted by a telephone threat ("I'm going to kill you") against the cocksure husband. His past misdeeds unravel his new life, terrifying his unknowing wife.

Who is this well dressed, unknowing wife? Also, will she let me borrow that dress?

4) Alfred Hitchcock Hour - The Gentleman Caller (1964)

IMDB synopsis:

Gerald Musgrove shoots and kills a night watchman while stealing $100,000 from a bank. On the street nearby, while eluding police, he meets elderly Emmy Rice, and befriends her. Since he is on parole, he must launder the loot, so he stows it in some of Emmy's old magazines...

I'm sure that works out well for him. Who's the murderin' bank robber in the tender scene above?

5) The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "Bonfire" (1962)

IMDB synopsis:

A lonely young woman moves into her newly-deceased aunt's home in a small town. A way-too-helpful next-door neighbor becomes her guardian angel. He's a lay preacher, who's determined not to go back to being a coal miner.

And the preacher/coalminer iiiis.....?

Did you guess 'em all? 

Bet you already knew this one

Answers:

1. Angie Dickinson (left) and James Mason (swoon, right).
2. An impossibly young Robert Redford, center.
3. Gorgeous Gena Rowland (star of several of husband John Cassevetes's ground breaking independent films; also, a little movie called The Notebook).
4. Roddy McDowall, English child star, lifelong friend of Elizabeth Taylor, veteran film actor, and Cornelius of Planet of the Apes fame.
5. Peter Falk, who you might know as titular star of Columbo (hard to recognize him without the trench coat).

How'd you do? Now, go watch the episodes and tell me what you think of them! Did you ever watch Alfred Hitchcock's television properties either when they aired or in reruns? What is it about the devilish sense of irony or turnaround that makes these great even fifty years later?

I've gotta run, but have yourself a wonderful little Thursday night, and I'll see you tomorrow for Photo Friday! Take care; til then! :)

What Does Billie Holiday Wear? (Newspaper Article,1937)

Good morning!

How was your weekend? We had a pretty lazy one hanging around the house, drinking mimosas, and saving a snapping turtle from imminent danger (also, I may or may not be too into Instagram right now). And here I am back at work today to deliver the good word in vintage goings on. Heads up this Monday for a new vintage timewaster on the internet-- Google has a newspaper archive some hundreds of titles strong, and yours truly just last week figured out how to search the database proper, rather than occasionally stumbling across the odd article here and there. I was looking up something or other and came up with this amazing article from a 1937 issue of The Afro-American, a black interest newspaper published out of Baltimore since 1892. Reporter Lillian Johnson sat down with Lady Day herself in her dressing room of the Royal Theater, and dished something delightful over the personal wardrobe and habits of the iconic vocalist.

Take a look:

(source)

What a lead, already, by the way-- "I like ugly men...I've always had the idea that good looking men are conceited, that they think they're cute." The Coasters would agree with you! Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, would have been twenty-two at the time of this article's publication, and spent 1937 on a difficult tour with Count Basie. I lo-o-o-ove the dishy tone of Johnson's column, and want to rifle through the other issues of The Afro-American from the time to see if I can dig up anything else on the swing/big band era stars of the time. I'm still honing my Google newspaper search skills, and haven't quite figured out how to search one newspaper's run, but somewhere in these 465 issues of the paper from the 1930's, I'm sure I'll find something else good!

Here's a photo of Holiday on stage around the time the article would have run.

Billie Holiday at the Apollo with Count Basie's band, 1937 (source)

If you're more of a visual than a text-based learner, I went through the article and tried to recreate some of the outfits from each of the lavish descriptions for you, in case you wanted to swagger out of the ball room in style like Billie did back in her heyday. I didn't always hit the nail on the head etsy-wise, but I hope I came kinda close? Here's the singer's dressing room ensemble, comprised of:

• "A peach colored dressing gown, trimmed in turquoise blue"
• "with satin turquoise mules," and
• "a ring set with nineteen diamonds".

Wonder who she was engaged to at the time? BH doesn't spill on who the lucky guy was, other to say he's "tall, sharp, and tailor made, though he isn't handsome"...while Billie married her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, in 1941, who's to say who this former beau was. Whoever he was, don't mistake him for cute, Billie seems to be insisting!

dressing gown, shoes, ring

The rest of the article continues to describe her clothes and demeanor here (click for a closeup):

Billie is described as "neat and dainty" and as doing her own hair. I second her sentiment of "I didn't take a course in hair dressing, but I kept trying until I got it just right." Preach! Her favorite colors for her wardrobe include "black, white, and green", but none of those are represented in the streetclothes described as hanging from behind the door of her dressing room. Those items include

• "A soft fleece sport coat in dark gray with a blue fox collar"
• "a gray skirt" and
• "a short woolen jacket of brick". She also wears
• "a long, slender wristwatch, lavishly set in [diamonds].

Doesn't this ensemble sound chic, chic, chic? Here's what it might look like in person, with apologies for the early fifties' suit...you wouldn't believe the time I had trying to find the right fox fur and grey suit, to boot! In the late thirties', the sleeves would have been fuller, the jacket longer and maybe belted, and the skirt a little looser/more flowy. See this image for an example.

suit, wristwatch, bolero

On to what we would have been more familiar with her wearing-- Billie's on stage clothes! I noticed the copy mentioned three gardenias in her hair, and while that sounded like about two too many, here she is rocking the triad of floral hair pieces like it was no big deal, looking gorgeous in the meantime. Again, her stage attire is described as:

• "a black chiffon, fitted evening gown with a black satin underslip, trimmed in rhinestones at the neck" and 
• "with it she wore three gardenias".

Two of my favorite songs of hers were recorded in 1937: "A Sailboat in the Moonlight" and "Me, Myself, and I". Though they're all my favorite, this period of her recording history, at least, boasts some of her best numbers. If you're a beginner Billie fan, I would heartily recommend the Lady Day box set, which covers her Columbia recordings from 1933-1944. While later albums are poignant in their own way for her raspier, deeper voice in the late forties' and early fifties', the lilting prettiness and insouciant song stylings of this period are classic Holiday at her best.

dress, gardenias, sheet music (one and two)

How about the reporter outs Billie as having plenty of tearose silk underwear around her dressing room? The article asserts she doesn't keep a maid and tidies up well after herself...yet, how is the reporter privy to the contents of her unmentionables drawer if she didn't have pairs strewn about the place? Inquiring minds want to know. Favorite perfumes and makeup?

• "Max Factor makeup blender" and
• "Emeraud and Evening in Paris perfumes".

Max Factor face powder, Emeraud, Evening in Paris, tap pants

Last but not least, the reporter describes Billie as intending to buy a Persian lamb coat and hat...these two in the photo below are from a 1937 catalog advertising the self same! Can you beat that? Billie also goes on to describe her house and being all done up in white furniture and blonde wood-- while I had several Hollywood mansions of the time period pegged to show you what this would look like (I'm almost positive Jean Harlow's bedroom was made up in all white, but maybe I'm thinking of a movie?) I wasn't able to lay hands on any from the time in color. Here's a pretty reasonable facsimile, along with what a 1930's white telephone might look like in its factory version, along with the original model black phone Holiday ruined when she tried to paint it to match the decor (see the article for details)!

coat and hat, bedroom, rare 1930's white phone

You can see the original article as it appeared in the Afro American here (right click then "open link in a new tab" for the full size version):

So! Are you a Holiday fan? What was the most exciting detail of this Baltimore write-up for you? If someone wrote a similar write-up about you, what do you think your fans would be surprised to know about your personal habits or wardrobe? Let's talk!

                                

That's all today, but go have fun looking at all these old newspapers, and I'll be back tomorrow to tell you a little bit about my weekend finds! Be good; til then.

Bonus: Have you seen Carl Van Vechten's 1949 photographs of Billie Holiday in color? They're breathtaking! Here's my favorite, but check out all Van Vechten's work over at his Yale Libraries page: