Holiday Specials Week: Day One, Pee Wee's Christmas Special (1988)

Good morning!

Well, folks, it's that time of year-- we're almost in the home stretch for Christmas! I have all my gifts wrapped, I have a fridge full of ingredients ready to be cooked for holiday cheer-making...I can't lie, I am super excited for the midweek festivities. What have I been doing over the weekend to get in the right frame of mind for yuletide activities? Oh, just Christmas specials. Youtube, gracious Youtube, has given us the gift this year of user-uploaded xmas specials from my childhood, and from here until Christmas Eve, why not look over a few of the better of the best of them with me?

Like, OH MY GOOD LORD, PEE WEE'S CHRISTMAS SPECIAL:

I'm just going to go over some of the highlights of this experience for you. The program is forty-eight minutes of solid, kitsch holiday joy. Read and watch along, if you want, via this link on Youtube! 

I have not seen this special since it originally aired, when I was three. THREE! Hard to believe. In a household where my parents, usually completely nonrestrictive of my constant tv viewing habits, refused to let me watch Labyrinth because David Bowie was "too weird" (um, y'all set yourselves up for my lifelong obsession with him, right there), Pee Wee's Big Adventure was rented from Kroger's enough times to warrant extralegally duping it onto a blank VHS tape. "There's no basement at the ALAMOOOO," my dad would boom along with the tour guide in that one crucial scene, literally slapping his knee at the dada-meets-screwball comedy of Mr. Herman's greatest work. Oh, we watched the FOOL out of that tape. Large Marge and all, it was a family classic at our house. Something about the grey-suited, red bow tied child man Paul Reubens presented onscreen was so adorably mad cap that my parents had no problem with leaving their pre-schooler in his capable hands for half hour romps via his weekly tv show. But this! This Christmas special is something ELSE, to be seeing through the lense of 2013! 

The special opens with a panoramic view of the snowy countryside in which Pee Wee's amazing, crazy holiday'd out, Wayne White created playhouse stands, winking its Christmas lights and sphinx-eyes at us. Inside the playhouse, a full chorus of uniformed Marine Corps officers welcomes you, in song, to Pee Wee's xmas special. The traditional choral arrangement breaks down into an Ike Turner Review like frug-dancing theme, and isn't it the better for it! I'd like to ask Santa what I needed to do this year to get a gold sequin shimmy dress and hair like these backup singers, because I sure would like to know.

The special guest star roster from year of the Lord 1988? Charro, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Grace Jones, k.d. lang, Dinah Shore, Little Richard, Cher, the Del Rubio Sisters, Magic Johnson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers. Oh my! Wouldn't you like that to be your dinner guest list at your holiday repast? I think yes.

At the beginning of the show, Pee Wee drafts a mile long xmas list for Santa with the help of Conky the robot...it occurs to me, for the first time, that Conky's eyes are made out of a pair of Brownie box cameras from the fiifties, the flash attachment serving as his peepers! All around the playhouse, I'm seeing pieces of the midcentury that wouldn't even have registered on my radar as a baby, but are making my pulse race as an almost thirty year old.

Example, check out that chair next to Chairy! Won't you, and your five brothers and sisters, please come live at my house? A thought that occurred to me while watching and thinking about all the fifties' and sixties' kitsch on display-- 1963 was only twenty five years ago in 1988. Let that concept sink in for a second....1963....was only twenty five years ago....in 1988. So as "wow, look, it's the eighties'" as this looks to us now, being as it's 2013 and 1988 was twenty five years ago...people in 1988 would feel that way about 1963. *MIND* *BLOWN*.

Pee Wee mingles with regulars from his weekly show as well as the A list celebrities of the special, the first of which is Miss Yvonne. I can just barely recall a lot of the regulars, but "the most beautiful woman in the puppet land" is definitely one of them. She reminds me of a more glamorous version of Lady Elaine from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, all fifties' chiffon prom dress and hair teased to the heavens in a perfect helmet of a hive. She shows up, back in my life after all these years, and suddenly I know exactly what I'm wearing to my parents' house on Wednesday morning. SERIOUSLY, LOOK AT THIS ENSEMBLE. You've got your Christmas tree inspired beehive, your fifties' crinolined dress decked out in red and green chiffon...I might lose the feathery white trim and the weird snowflake harness, but other than that, we are ready to go! Thanks for being a stylespiration, Miss Yvonne!

Moments later, however, I was so disturbed by Floory's bold pass at my beauty icon (which was EVEN MORE BIZARRELY met with "Coming, Floory, dear!" instead of a "where do you get off, bub!"), that I have made it into a text based card for your viewing pleasure. Are you for real, Floory? Come stand over you? You are creeping me out, dude. Check yourself.

Jambi I had completely forgotten about except for his catchphrase of "Mekka Lekka Hi, Mekka Hi Ni Ho". With Margaret Hamilton level green face paint and sequined eyebrows, he's hands down the most fierce of in-playhouse talent. While this seemed like an innocuous genie back in my childhood, I'm pretty sure present day me reads this character as an Ali Baba inspired drag queen. Who grants wishes. Why do I not have something like this in my life.

Jambi, you bettah WORK.

To continue with the running list of off-the-wall celebrity guests, Grace Jones appears, grace á a postal mix-up, and sings "The Little Drummer Boy" in an honest to God breastplate (what is real?! What is fantasy?!). She was supposed to be performing at the White House, but instead was accidentally delivered to the Playhouse. I bet Pee Wee got Reagan's mail all the time with postal delivery snafus like this. Does Jones look 100% amazing? She does. It's also funny to see Pee Wee standing next to her-- while the camera is kind in this shot, in wide angle frames, Grace Jones looks about 4x the size of Pee Wee, like something distorted the proportions in post-production. LEMME HAVE THAT FUTURISTIC NUN HAT, GJ. GIVE ME THE HAT AND NO ONE GETS HURT.

Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon are next, force-labored into making 500 xmas cards for Pee Wee using a screen print and potato print technique, respectively. "Can we go out and play in the snow, Pee Wee?" "Are my cards finished? Then no!" It's weird how sincere all the guest stars are-- though I guess if you were Annette and Frankie, nothing would much make you bat an eyelash after the crazy convoluted plot lines of those beach blanket movies.

STOP. THE PRESSES. M'f'n' Cher showin' up in this PIECE, heLLO, my real mom. I forgot she was on the guest roster until she showed up and I started shrieking.

Cher's wearing a kind of mini-dress with bustle and thigh-high slits, and asks about the secret word of the day, which is ((whispers)) "year"...ah! Cher! You look like one million dollars cash! Pee Wee writes a verse poem as Cher takes off for, I don't know, a Vegas date with some underage hunk (God love her) "That was Cher! Cher was right there! In the same room as my chair! I hope I didn't stare! Oh well, I don't care!" I do care, Pee Wee. I do care. I love this woman.

Another segment has a kindly, older gentleman in sable and crown, introducing a cartoon. He's regency in Pee Wee's world, as a Captain Kangaroo like character called "The King of Cartoons". Sooooo, if you were wondering why the King of Cartoons look and sounds so familiar, it could be because HE'S BLACULA OMG WHAT DO YOU MEAN BLACULA IS THE KING OF CARTOONS. William Marshall, ladies and gentlemen, in the two roles in which he found his greatest success, King of Cartoons and the world's first famous undead black vampire (in the throes of an obsession with Pam Grier movies, I have seen Scream, Blacula, Scream! more times than I can comfortably admit):

But the surprises don't stop there. Speaking of people you didn't know were in Pee Wee's Playhouse, how about Cowboy Curtis is Laurence Fishburne? Yeah, Morpheus. Yeah, he was in Apocalypse Now, too. Boyz in tha Hood? Uh-huh, same dude, Cuba Gooding's dad. WHAT IS HE DOING IN AN ALL PASTEL COWBOY OUTFIT, COMPLETE WITH PURPLE CHAPS? S. Epatha Merkleson, from Law and Order, plays Reba the mail lady. How did they get such future-famous people on this show?! Folks, I have questions; I just don't have answers. I think it's so neat to see them at the beginning of their careers, willing to do whatever over-the-top role to get into the business.

After...or maybe a bit before...an ice skating moment with Little Richard (the stuff that dreams are made of), the Del Rubio sisters, who, honestly, I had never heard of before, come and sing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" in racy holiday mini skirts. Triplets in real life, the three girl singers had been active since the forties' in show business (you can read more about them here, careful though, there's flash video and sound right off the bat). Kitsch queen Allee Willis rediscovered them, performing as you see, in the mid eighties' and helped revive their careers. And shouldn't we be glad! These girls are CRAZY!

Later...ok, check this out-- imagine it's 1988. Pee Wee Herman....is more famous...than Oprah Winfrey. FOLKS, PEE WEE HERMAN IS MORE FAMOUS THAN OPRAH WINFREY! I understand she had her show in 1988, but it wasn't anywhere near the cultural touchstone it would become a few years later. Here's the big O herself, all teased coiffure and magenta lipstick, talking in the phone booth with Pee Wee with Dinah Shore on the other line (see inset). I love it!

There's a claymation segment by the future creator of Hey Arnold!, a k.d. lang version of "Jingle Bell Rock", the cuchi cuchi girl herself, Charro, performing "Feliz Navidad" as earnestly as anyone ever has, and some other sketches towards the end...all and all, I would say this show is packed with almost a whole hour of meta nostalgia. But don't take my word for it! Grab a candy cane and some hot cocoa, and watch the whole thing yourself on Youtube. You deserve a break from stocking stuffing, right?

So! Do you remember watching this back in the eighties'? Are you a Pee-Wee fan? Re-watched any childhood favorites lately with the critical, discerning eye of a grown person and been surprised at what you didn't remember? Let's swap stories!

That's all for today, but more xmas special merriment tomorrow and Wednesday. Take care! Get those presents wrapped! Talk soon.

Photo Friday: Dance Kids Edition

Good morning!

Well, peeps, we made it. It's Friday! I'm here for a half a day and then it's out into the wild and wooly weekend! It's flea market, too, this Friday-Saturday-Sunday (yeeeeeeeaaaaAAAAhhhh!)! And could we be having better weather for it? We could not. Today I was doing my usual trawl through Flickriver for pictures of other people's family members, when I came across a concentration of photos from a simpler time of kids' extracurricular activity. 

Folks, how about some little girls' dance recital costumes for a Friday? I think yes.

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This was really the first photo that struck me as post-worthy, and you can see why! Lots of maribou trim, pert little matching cap, immaculately white dance shoes-- I mean, this is a knock out of a dance ensemble. The user dates this photo of their mother to the mid 1930's. I thought about, while I was finding other photos, how many old Hollywood movie stars got their start in juvenile and later adult dancing roles. Louise Brooks studied with the Denishawn Dancers under Ruth St. Denis before transitioning to silents. Myrna Loy started her professional career as a dancer at Graumann's Egyptian Theater. Joan, of course, came to Hollywood on the strength of her Charleston abilities. Think of how many actresses probably got their first taste of show business success as a hoofer rather than a thespian-- after all, it seems to me it would be much easier to learn how to dance gracefully and look good in an attractive dance costume than to act in Shaw or Ibsen...that could come later! As show business seems to have been a much smaller, much more organic trade at the time, imagine how many mothers in the first half of the twentieth century saw a silver screen future for their artistically minded daughters through the medium of dance. 

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The 1930's were probably a particularly hard time for little girls not to get signed up for dance classes. With ringlet-haired Shirley Temple lighting up 20th Century Fox with her big screen bankability, I'm sure the stick-straight hair of tots across the country were being tortured into rag-curls and dance studios with children's classes were overbrimming with both talented and woefully untalented grade school age movie hopefuls. This little baby, I can't lie, looks perfectly precious in her tulle tutu, dance shows, and indeed, perfectly curled hair topped with a little matching bow. Isn't it weird sometimes looking at children's skirts of the 30's and 40's? I know in this case it's a dance costume, and needs be short, but some casual playwear of the vernacular photos I've seen from this time period are like "PUT. SOME CLOTHES. ON YOUR KID!" A tween would be hard pressed to show up in public in a skirts this short without their parent's lack of supervision of the child's wardrobe being called into question.

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Aaah, much more modest fashion prevailing in the case of this little dancer...she's wearing full-on pantalets! The outfit is coconuts but if you're not going on stage to be noticed, don't bother! The daughter's caption on this ensemble: "Some zany dance recital getup. Mom remembers that the buttons on her jacket were actually poker chips covered with fabric." I wonder, in the cases of each of these kids, if they were excited or put out to be wearing such precious duds. Me, I would be excited (also, given the super power of baby-giraffe thighs, I would be wearing 80% of these outfits on a daily basis). But you never know when a kid was less pleased with the clothes than the parents at how adorable said child looked in them. Seeing my mom in her Easter best, circa 1964, I commented on how amazingly cute her frilly organza dress, gloves, and sausage curls looked on tiny, child sized she. My mom, looking at the picture, could only remember how horribly itchy the crinoline was, how tight the poofy sleeves' elastics were on her child arms, how much she worried with her gloves, and how she hadn't slept the night before because her scalp was pulled too tightly into the requisite rag curls for her to sleep comfortably. I love that I'm like "No pain, no gain! Beauty don't come cheap!" to her retroactive protests...this is why I will be a bad mother. With extremely presentable children.

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I love this girl's pose, tiara, and winning grin. Do you wonder what dance teachers must have been like in this time period? I'm picturing an older woman with a ruler beating time on a barre or on the polished wood floor of her dance studio, something along the lines of Jane Darwell (she played Southern society matron Mrs. Merriweather in Gone with the Wind, along with a number of character roles for the next few decades in the studio system). About a year ago, when we were in Project Runway withdrawal after watching a season's worth in a self-imposed online marathon, Matthew and I were trying to find something dumb to watch on "watch full episodes" internet content (we don't have cable, don't judge). After trying to get through a few episodes of The Rachel Zoe Project (so boring, except for Brad, and then he left, but his new show wasn't on streaming yet), we gave Dance Moms a shot. I was honestly giddily impressed with Abby Lee Miller (kind of like if Shannon Doherty and Jane Darwell had a baby, and that baby was Satan) when she called the cops, to her own studio, on a mother she was having  beef with...you have to impressed with people who are willing to take an altercation all the way to jail! Simultaneously, impressed and afeared of crossing. But I finally had to quit watching because I was just too bummed at watching a bunch of preteens being buffeted with verbal abuse, first from their instructor and then from their mothers. I know it's probably 90% fake, like I like all my reality tv, but the thrill of seeing the moms and Abby lock horns (or moms and kids, or moms and moms) just couldn't compensate for how sad I was that these kids were going to remember "dance" as "that horrible class my mom used to make me go to". I hope old dance studios were more civilized than the pageant stuff we see today, but again, I don't know!

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I like this little girl's 1940's ballet costume mainly because it's something I would like in adult size for me, myself, and I. See how perfect her hair is! How shiny her ballet shoes!

Last but not least:

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This group shots includes the user's mother, who is the little blonde heartbreaker at front, left. Who wouldn't put that kid in the front row, she's a doll! My favorite person in this spread, however, is probably the little girl in the cats' eye glasses and Mary Pickford curls, third from the right. How cute is she?! That would be my kid, where I'm like "Yes, you have to wear glasses, but by Godfrey, you are going to look like a million bucks while doing so!" Also note the other blonde member of the troupe has broken the uniformity of the girls' shoe choice by wearing ballet slippers that lace up the ankles. As her mother intended, I'm sure, they DO make her stand out!

What do you think? Were you ever a "dance kid"? I vaguely remember taking ballet when I was like, four or five, but only for a brief time, and none of it stuck. T he singular memory I have of this experience was how super excited I felt about getting the shoes for class and how sad when I outgrew them. Which of these costumes do you feel like "ooh" and "aaah" ing over? Do slash will you put your children into training as the next Isadora Duncan? Let's talk!

That's all for this week, but have a great weekend! Maybe I'll see you at the flea market, fellow Nashvillians! Be good, find great stuff, and we'll talk Monday. Til then!

Art Deco/Art Nouveau Dangle Earrings (1910's-1930's)

Good morning!

How are you guys doing on your Christmas shopping? Enjoying the "it's-almost-HERE!" holiday seasonality yet? I've been riding a shuttle from a free parking lot across the river (free! Rapid! Beats paying $6 to park by a country mile!), and my favorite thing about it other than the speed with which it delivers me to and from the library's doorstep is the fact that the radio is set to some 24/7 holiday channel. No, I'm totally serious. Yesterday, I heard Frank Sinatra swinging some yuletide standard on my ride back from work, and this morning, a frenetic version of "We Need a Little Christmas" gave me about the pep I needed to face the world today. I hope I can get all my presents squared before less than a week from now!!

While we're on the subject of Christmas, I was shopping for myself (I am so large hearted) on etsy and ebay the other day, hot on the trail of vintage opal bracelets and earrings. As often happens when shopping for something in particular, I was completely derailed when I saw the phrase "VINTAGE ANTIQUE ART DECO DANGLE EARRINGS". Do, DO tell me more! As I clicked through the listings, I was swept up in a wave of passion for the earrings I saw.

Art Deco Egyptian Revival Czech Glass Dangle Earrings - Turquoise Blue Color

One Etsy store in particular, called OldRiverAntiques, features a number of these completely off-the-charts pieces of antique jewelry. The pair above boasts not only four and a half inches of eyecatching, ear-bob magnificence, but are also topped off with an Egyptian revival sphynx? AAAH! You want attention, you would surely get it with these chandelier trinkets swinging off either lobe. I love that the sky blue of the Czech glass baubles at the end of the earrings contrasts beautifully with the aged patina of the main piece.While the prices are far north of my normal expenditures, I might have to just pull the trigger and buy a pair of these somewhere on the internet. Life's too short for me not to have these.

King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered in 1922, which may date these pretties back to the Egypt-o-mania that swept the globe following Howard Carter's archaeological boon. It warms my cold heart to think of 1920's people being interested in the mystical powers of ancient Egypt and wanting a bit of that exotica with which to adorn their persons.

According to the listing:

These earrings were made in the 1920s / 1930s in what was known as Northern Bohemia, in the Jablonec Nad Nisou region which was part of Czechoslovakia. This area is now part of the modern day Czech Republic. The region has always been known for its beautiful glass and jewelry. The drops were made from glass rods that were hand-pressed into molds almost 100 years ago. 

While there are many dangle-earrings, and even earrings in this style on Etsy and Ebay, there's something whimsical while still being stately to these pieces that other reproductions seem to miss entirely. A hundred years ago! I like to think of the tiny, Gloria Swanson like girl who might have worn these in the teens' or twenties', maybe wearing a robin's egg blue fashion turban to accent the glass.

I am not a person who is any way, shape, or form into fairies, but check out this next pair:

Art Deco Czech Glass Dangle Earrings w/ Fairy / Fairies & Amethyst Purple-Colored Drops

Looking at this, I thought about something I'd read in one of those Tales of the Unexplained type publications I used to gobble up as an imaginative, ghoulish little girl--do you remember the Cottingly Fairies hoax ? I think they made a Disney movie based on the true story of a set of photographs that were published in 1919 of English school girls interacting with tiny, winged creatures purported to be "real live fairies". No less a celebrity than Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes, and an occult/supernatural hobbyist) investigated the girls' claims to have captured photographic proof the existence of these "little people". While the pictures are pretty obviously faked, and the girls themselves admitted in their old ages that they'd staged the images by using cutouts of fairy illustrations propped up by hatpins, I love the idea of the English press and public going into a furor over these possible mystical creatures existing in the world. Maybe these earrings were inspired by the craze!

Speaking of inspired by, this pair, and the next, reminds me of Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha's work. Don't the mermaid-haired, undulating tresses of the girls look like Mucha's late 19th century/early 20th century illustrations?

In each of these pair, it's interesting that you have a decorative piece at the top, two side-jewels, and a longer pendant piece as composition. The purple and red pair in particular is so colorful! I've been loathe to wear these kind of dangly-earrings in adult life because they're so "loud"-- wearing chandelier earrings means committing to having people comment upon your chandelier earrings all day, all day, ALL DAY. I feel more comfortable with a less jangly accessory--though I do wear charm bracelets a lot of the time, something about the personal decoration swinging so close to your face makes me uncomfortable. However! I think a change is going to have to come if I can spot a pair of these in the wild. I can't get over how VIVID they are!

ART NOUVEAU URANIUM glass Dangle earrings Large Authentic Antique jewelry pierced earrings Repousse Czech

Afraid, like me, of looking like someone's fifty year old, jodhpurs-and-oversized-embroidered tunic-wearing, wackadoodle liberal arts professor in these earrings? Not to worry. Here's a quartet of 1920's actresses wearing almost shoulder grazing jewelry while looking soigée as sin. Clockwise, Mary Astor, Louise Brooks, Norma Shearer, and Myrna Loy:

I tried like heck to find a picture of La Swanson in similar earrings; as I mentioned before, she was the first thing that came to mind when thinking of this style, but I grew too impatient with Google search. You get the idea. The implied decadence and glamour of these accessories!

I have to get back to work (MUST. STOP. LOOKING. AT. EARRINGS.), but what do you think about these little numbers? Are you into long, long earrings, do you have items like this in your collection, or do you draw the line as far as accessory length/volume? What kind of finishing touches do you put on an outfit that make you feel particularly "put together"? Which pair of earrings would you want to take home and just hug? Let's talk!

That's all for today, but I'll see you back here tomorrow for Photo Friday (it's almost the weekennnnnnd!). Take care, talk then!

Nairn Linoleum Floors (1941 Interiors)

Good morning!

Do you ever have mornings where you wake up feeling markedly less than stellar? I hardly got any sleep last night from tossing and turning-- Matthew and I stayed up until about 10:30 watching Barbara Stanwyck in the 1930's weep-a-thon Stella Dallas (I hadn't seen it in years and he hadn't seen it period), and after that, I could NOT sleep. Not because I was wrapped up in the melodrama of the title character's maternal self-sacrifice, I don't know...just because I couldn't sleep! I finally managed to nod off after what seemed like a hundred years, but woke up this morning at 6:45 feeling like I had stayed up the entire night without repose. Ugh! Hate it! Accordingly, my world view is particularly mopey, even for a Wednesday. I've spent most of the morning self-indulgently wallowing in John Lennon's Mind Games (no better morose jam-out in the world; not on Spotify, but on Youtube in its entirety) and looking at 1941 linoleum ads to try and buoy up my spirits!

The second of these, I hope you readers can benefit from!! Take a look:

In 1941, Nairn Linoleum took out a series of full-page ads in Life magazine, hawking their high quality, low cost floor coverings to the wartime domestic population. What Johnny GI wouldn't want to come home to the cheery colors and clean, modern lines of these interior scenes? The pictures in these spreads focus on the two main areas you would probably want linoleum-- kitchens and dens. I was surprised they didn't include bathrooms in their product showcase, but maybe most houses of that time came with tiled bathrooms as a basic. As tiny as my kitchen is, this makes me want to rethink the whole thing, especially in terms of the flooring. As usual, seeing 1940's interiors in C-O-L-O-R sets my imagination spinning. Look at the yellow and the periwinkle blue of the kitchen above! The burgundy-with-green-accents of the kitchen below! I would never in a million years have guessed these vivid combinations if you showed me the kitchen in black and white.

Nairn boasts in these ads to be "the oldest makers of linoleum", though they were not the first in America. Linoleum was invented in 1864 by Frederick Walton, who went through several possible uses for linseed oil before hitting on the idea of inexpensive, decorative flooring. Walton initially produced the formula as an agent for waterproofing textiles, but according to Wikipedia, "little interest was shown in his varnish, his first factory burned down, and he had persistent and painful rashes." Dang, Walton! His second endeavor, as flooring king, was much more successful. He named his new product "linoleum", a portmanteau of the Latin words linum ("flax") and oleum ("oil"), and, after a period of exporting his product from Scotland, set up shop in New Jersey. In 1887, eighteen years after Walton had begun commercially manufacturing linoleum, the Nairn company's linoleum factory, also in New Jersey, caused Walton to bring a trademark infringement lawsuit against Nairn, which he lost on the grounds that the term "linoleum" was at that point so common place that anyone should be able to use it. Check out this George Orwell-level-disturbing illustration of Walton from the 1800's. I wouldn't have ruled in his favor either, that picture is positively unnerving!

But back to the interiors:

Would you believe chevron, as tired and played out as it may be in design motifs of the present day, is being used to great effect in this 1941 rumpus room? I'm also scratching my head but also vaguely attracted to the pair of swords hanging crossed under a regimental kepi on the wall over the fireplace. Green and red, off set by the white and blonde-wood colors of the rest of the room, don't look too Kris Kringle to me in this combination! 

Now, HERE'S a living room:

This looks so 1940's Hollywood to me...  the smooth walls and floors standing in for marble. Now, is it all linoleum? HA, you should be the one to ask, look at the caption, which helpfully explains the room's inexpensive though luxe-looking appointments:

I would say one of the things I am most jealous of, in terms of mint-condition, time-capsule-y houses you see on Retro Renovation, are these restaurant-sized 1940's kitchens with built-ins, upon built-ins, upon built-ins. Look at the little dining nook there with its red Formica and blue bar stool seating! Look where I could catch up on my correspondence and household bills while supervising the oven at the little desk adjacent to the food prep area! This is suh-HERE-iously a jewel of a kitchen.. I would never want to leave it!

I wasn't much into this one until I saw the glass doors on the kitchen cabinets and that accented-black-backsplash. Ok, fine, you win, Nairn, let me have this kitchen.

OH. MY. GOODNESS. The red and the black and white stripe and all that white wicker... doesn't this design look fresh as paint even seventy-two years after it was in the pages of Life? One, I want a sun room; two, in the event that I have a sunroom, I want a sun room that has this patio set, including a weird wheel-barrow like contraption that seems to serve a wholly decorative purpose; three, given the sunroom, and the patio set, I want a black and white rectangle tile flooring pattern THAT MATCHES THE AWNING OVER THE OUTSIDE PORTION OF MY PATIO. I can't even look at it. It's too cool. Please let my dream come true.

Last but not least, I DO NOT approve of the piano in the corner being painted green by its fickle, color-scheme conscious owner-- so many gorgeous old pianos, wood gleaming, perfect condition, were painted to "go better" with decor in the forties', fifties', and sixties', and I STILL see these things at Goodwill, seemingly pleading to either be shot and put out of their misery or returned to their original finish (I can't save you all! I'm sorry!). However, I will allow the travesty going on with the piano for the eye-popping charm of the floor scheme. I love how you can make something so appealing out of just clever, geometric arrangement of contrast color tiles. Also, the green, yellow, orange, brown, and white colors should clash horrifically, but I think they go together well in this space. I'm often surprised at what will surprise me in terms of what I like!!

So! See, don't you already feel better about Wednesday? I do! I still need an extra forty winks, but this was a welcome distraction from my teeth-grindingly annoying lack of sleep. Which interior is your favorite? Have you ever seen amazing linoleum out in the wilds of estate sales or your relatives homes? Have any of you tried incoporating vintage-style linoleum into your own retro themed homes? Let's talk! This makes plain old black and white kitchen tile (which I desperately want) seem like such a cop out, when there's a rainbow of possiblities, probably still out there in 2013!

That's all for today, but I'll catch you tomorrow. Keep a good thought that sleep overcomes me at the appropriate time today, and I'll talk to you later! Til then.

Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland's Feud (Photoplay, 1940-1943)

Good afternoon! Sorry for the delay, things were crazy around the library this morning!

If you're not up on your golden age of the studio system feuds, boy, have I got a doozy of a story to tell you today about two of the most estranged celebrities the Hollywood hills ever saw. Actress Joan Fontaine famously quipped of her sister, Olivia de Havilland, in a 1978 interview, “I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!” And what's more...damned if she didn't do it! Both women were among the few living classic Hollywood screen beauties until Sunday, when Fontaine passed away at her California home at the age of 96. De Havilland, a year older and half a world away in France, released a statement yesterday expressing that she was "shocked and saddened" by her sister's death, buuuut...those might be a little stronger adjectives than behooves the end of a sixty plus year antipathy between the two Academy Award winners. They are the only siblings to win that industry honor in the same category. Joan won Best Actress in 1942 for  Suspicion, and Olivia the same in 1947 for To Each His Own and in 1950 for The Heiress (Olivia was nominated for her career-defining role as Melanie in Gone With the Wind, but lost to co-star Hattie McDaniel, the first African American performer to win an Academy Award).

I dug through some old Photoplays, courtesy of the Media History Digital Library, for the contemporaneous scoop on their hate-hate relationship. Let's take a look at the raw material:

She always looks particularly stylish in an updo! I love this hair.

Both girls were born in Tokyo, Japan a year apart, Olivia in 1916 and Joan in 1917. Their British national parents split up in 1919, leaving Olivia, Joan, and their mother Lillian, a RADA trained former actress, to fend for themselves. Lillian relocated to Los Angeles and remarried in the 1920's. Joan  spent a good deal of her formative years locked in a chilly, barely tenable détente with her sister, with occasional truces. Apparently the animosity between the two started day one. "Olivia so hated the idea of having a sibling that she wouldn't go near my crib," Joan told People magazine in 1978. Things didn't get much better from there. In her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, a then-sixty-one year old Fontaine tells how a precociously literate Olivia tortured her, at age five, with vivid readings from the Bible of Jesus's crucifixion, to the point that Joan would flee the house. "To this day, " she wrote, half a century having passed in the meantime, "I cannot look at a statue of Christ on the crucifix...without that same anguish recurring." Joan was forbidden by Olivia to speak to her on the school grounds during recess, when the more popular sister would be gaggled up her friends. At sixteen, in a fit of pique, older Olivia trounced Joan so badly that she broke her sister's collarbone. And on, and on. The book's preface asserts that Fontaine has "no wish to...air the family linen", but don't a few details like that make you wish you had even more of an inside line on these girls' childhoods! 

Watching you, watching me...

When Olivia started acting under their shared last name, Joan was forbidden by her sister to use "de Havilland" professionally.  "She was always a stout believer in primogeniture," said Joan, who was to go by "Joan Burfield" and "Joan St. John" before settling on "Fontaine", adopting her stepfather's surname under the advice of a fortune teller. Soon, the girls were both getting decent screen reviews, Olivia in a series of swashbuckling adventures on the Warner Brothers lot with my boyfriend, Errol Flynn, and Joan in smaller parts at RKO. 1939 saw Olivia snag a major role in the movie of the century, Gone with the Wind, but her stellar performance as glamorless, self sacrificing Melanie Wilkes was so memorable, I feel like many film fans forgot how utterly beautiful she was in the thirties'. Until I saw a lot of her Flynn movies, I just assumed she was jealous of her sister's good looks, but de Havilland was as gorgeous if not a touch more so than her sister in her heyday. 

They look VERY alike, actually, when both are made up!

In 1940, Fontaine won an important role of her own-- that of the nameless second Mrs. de Winter in the screen adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's smash bestseller, Rebecca. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring a drop. dead. gorgeous. Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter, the production and resultant picture were stellar. Joan had also gotten married in the meantime to a fellow actor, each of the principals in the wedding party having almost stood the other up at the altar before eventually tying the knot. Asked on set by Olivier, "Who's the chap you married?", Joan proudly replied, "Brian Aherne".... to which the future Sir Larry replied, "Couldn't you do better than that?" OUCH. Catty thing. I like Aherne, but who I am to judge (he was much better as a character actor in the fifties' than as a leading man in the thirties', I'll grant you, and by Joan's account, a rotten first husband). Click on the images below for a joint interview BA and JF did, comparing each other to contemporary stars, from Photoplay:

 

Careerwise, by 1942, both sisters were nominated for the same award, Best Actress, which Joan won and Olivia did her best to act sanguine about (Fontaine recalls in her book that she was terrified of having incurred the elder sister's wrath, but Olivia was gracious). I haven't seen the movie de Havilland was nominated for (Hold Back the Dawn, with Charles Boyer), but Fontaine was great in her pairing with a possibly homicidal Cary Grant in Suspicion...I had a chance to see it again at the Belcourt during a Hitchcock retrospective, and Fontaine's limpid brown eyes and puppyish devotion to Grant, even as he's planning to murder her, was as effective seventy years later as it was when it was shot.

With her sister at the ceremony, and with Gary Cooper, who also won that year for Sergeant York.

What was interesting to me, in trying to dissect the autobiography and some interviews and copy from the forties', was that there seemed to be no single incident that set the sisters into a confirmed state of antagonism. While Joan insists that their mother's funeral, and her sister's handling of it (Joan was on tour and didn't find out about the services or her mother's death until the last minute, wasn't invited to the memorial, went anyway), became the proverbial nail in the coffin of their relationship, long before that, Olivia and Joan spent most of their lives in just barely concealed open hostility. Asked for a quote on Olivia's first  husband, when news of de Havilland's wedding to the screenwriter broke, Joan fired off, "All I know about him is he has had four wives and written one book. Too bad it's not the other way around". Joan's congratulations, when Olivia finally won her Oscar, were spurned and the winning sister cut the other cold at the ceremony itself, just as a Photoplay photographer captured the moment for posterity. At the birth of her first child, Joan says, "I couldn't call Aunt Olivia, because at the time we were having a frisson." They argued in the forties' over Howard Hughes (Olivia was smitten with him, he was smitten with Joan, Joan was not at all interested in him...so it goes), and later seemed to have little to no contact, long before their mother died. It seems like some people were just born not to get along.

Here's a little on the first press coverage of the feud from a September 1941 issue of Photoplay. The pages are too large to format full size on the blog, but click the image and then click again to enlarge the text and read the article, with gems like "Olivia and Joan, dearly beloved enemies". Ah! The purple prose of the old fan magazines! But maybe not too exaggerated, given the situation.

A 1942 article about her marriage to Aherne, also lining out the problems she had with her sister, and here again,  you'll need to click through to get the print up to normal size:

I have to get back to work, but read these articles and tell me what YOU think about the de Havilland/Fontaine lifelong feud! Are you fans of their films? What have you seen either in that you particularly admired? The idea of this row going on for that long, for so little reason other than "basic dislike", makes you wonder what strong personalities these women must have been to be so set in their ways as to make any reconciliation out of the question! I wish de Havilland had written her own memoir (she did write one book, which I reviewed in this blog post, but it's mainly about her experiences as an expat married to a Frenchman in l'Hexagone)...who knows! Maybe at 97 she still will!

That's all for today! Have a great Tuesday, I'll see you back here tomorrow. Til then!