Rock Hudson (born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr. ( November 17, 1925 – October 2, 1985) was an American actor. Although he was widely known as a leading man in the 1950s and 1960s, often starring in romantic comedies opposite Doris Day, Hudson is also recognized for dramatic roles in films such as Giant and Magnificent Obsession. In later years, he found success in television, starring in the popular mystery series McMillan & Wife and the soap opera Dynasty.

James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor celebrate during the filming of Giant.

Hudson was voted Star of the Year, Favorite Leading Man, and similar titles by numerous film magazines. The 6 ft 5in (1.96) tall actor was one of the most popular and well-known movie stars of his time. He completed nearly 70 films and starred in several television productions during a career that spanned over four decades. Hudson died in 1985, becoming the first major celebrity to die from an AIDS-related illness.

Click here for an audio intro to… 459 Framed in Red…

Here are a series of videos featuring the incomparable June Christy, one of the most overlooked vocalists of her generation. This first one was shot at the Playboy Mansion, in 1959…

Here’s a younger June, this time performing with the Stan Kenton Orchestra…

And here’s June one more time, in 1950…

Simply click the “play” arrow below for an audio intro to the Mike Montego Series...

Julie London

“Cry Me a River” is a popular American torch song, written by Arthur Hamilton, first published in 1953, and made famous in the version by Julie London in 1955.

A jazzy blues ballad, “Cry Me a River” was originally written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1920s-set film, Pete Kelly’s Blues (released in 1955), but the song was dropped. Fitzgerald first released a recording of the song on Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! in 1961. The song’s first release was by actress/singer Julie London in 1955, backed by Barney Kessel on guitar and Ray Leatherwood on bass. A performance of the song by London in the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It helped to make it a bestseller (reaching number nine  on U.S. and number 22 on U.K. charts). London’s recording was later featured in the soundtracks for the movies Passion of Mind (2000), and V for Vendetta (2005).

WHAT IS JAZZ?

by  Mel Goldgerg

While jazz is difficult to define, improvisation is one of its major elements — the creative expression and interaction between composer and performer. Improvisation developed enormously over the history of the music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised counter-melodies. During the Big Band era, the reliance turned more toward arranged music while individual soloists improvised within the arrangements. With the shift back toward small groups, the melody was stated briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance was a series of improvisations. Unlike symphonic music, which is played without ever varying a single note, skilled jazz performers interpret music in individual ways, never playing a composition exactly the same way twice. The performer’s mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, may alter melodies, harmonies, or even time signatures.

The jazz genre originated at the beginning of the 20th century within the African-American communities of the southern United States. It combined European harmony and form elements with African-based music, evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, poly-rhythms, syncopation, and swing. From its early development until the present day, jazz has also incorporated elements from popular music, especially American.

As the music developed and spread around the world, it drew on many different musical cultures, giving rise to distinctive styles, like New Orleans jazz, bebop, Afro-Cuban jazz, avant-garde jazz, Latin jazz, jazz fusion, and other ways of playing the music.

Here’s an interesting feature on two jazz greats, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane…

Groucho Marx steals the show in this episode of the popular ’50′s quiz show.

Lester Young

Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), nicknamed “Pres” or “Prez”, was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and sometime clarinetist.

Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie’s orchestra, Young was one of the most influential players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using “a free-floating style, wheeling and diving like a gull, banking with low, funky riffs that pleased dancers and listeners alike.”

Famous for his hip, introverted style, he invented or popularized much of the hipster jargon which came to be associated with the music.

Lester Young was born in Woodville, Mississippi, and grew up in a musical family. His father, Willis Handy Young, was a respected teacher, his brother Lee Young was a drummer, and several other relatives played music professionally. His family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, when Lester was an infant and later to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although at a very young age Young did not initially know his father, he learned that his father was a musician. Later Willis taught his son to play the trumpet, violin, and drums in addition to the saxophone.

Young played in his family’s band, known as the Young Family Band, in both the vaudeville and carnival circuits. He left the family band in 1927 at the age of 18 because he refused to tour in the Southern United States, where Jim Crow laws were in effect and racial segregation was required in public facilities.

In 1933 Young settled in Kansas City, where after playing briefly in several bands, he rose to prominence with Count Basie. His playing in the Basie band was characterized by a relaxed style which contrasted sharply with the more forceful approach of Coleman Hawkins, the dominant tenor sax player of the day.

He left the Basie band to replace Hawkins in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. He soon left Henderson to play in the Andy Kirk band (for six months) before returning to Basie. While with Basie, Young made small-group recordings for Milt Gabler’s Commodore Records, The Kansas City Sessions. Although they were recorded in New York (in 1938, with a reunion in 1944), they are named after the group, the Kansas City Seven, and comprised Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Basie, Young, Freddie Green, Rodney Richardson, and Jo Jones. Young played clarinet as well as tenor in these sessions. He was a master of the clarinet, and there too his style was entirely his own. As well as the Kansas City Sessions, his clarinet work from 1938–39 is documented on recordings with Basie, Billie Holiday, Basie small groups, and the organist Glenn Hardman.

After Young’s clarinet was stolen in 1939, he abandoned the instrument until about 1957. That year Norman Granz gave him one and urged him to play it (with far different results at that stage in Young’s life—see below).

Young left the Basie band in late 1940. He is rumored to have refused to play with the band on Friday, December 13 of that year for superstitious reasons, spurring his dismissal. Lester left the band around that time and subsequently led a number of small groups that often included his brother, noted drummer Lee Young, for the next couple of years; live and broadcast recordings from this period exist.

During this period Young accompanied the singer Billie Holiday in a couple of studio sessions in 1940 and 1941 and also made a small set of recordings with Nat “King” Cole (their first of several collaborations) in June 1942. His studio recordings are relatively sparse during the 1942 to 1943 period, largely due to the American Federation of Musicians’ recording ban. It was Holiday who gave Young the nickname “Pres”, short for President.

In December 1943 Lester Young returned to the Count Basie fold for a 10-month stint, cut short by his being drafted into the army during World War II.

In September 1944 Young and Jo Jones were in Los Angeles with the Basie Band when they were inducted into the U.S. Army. Unlike many white musicians, who were placed in band outfits such as the ones led by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, Young was assigned to the regular army where he was not allowed to play his saxophone. Based in Ft. McClellan, Alabama, Young was found with marijuana and alcohol among his possessions. He was soon court-martialed. Young did not fight the charges and was convicted. He served one year in a detention barracks and was dishonorably discharged in late 1945. His experience inspired his composition “D.B. Blues” (with D.B. standing for detention barracks).

Some jazz historians have argued that Young’s playing power declined in the years following his army experience, though critics such as Scott Yanow disagree with this entirely. Recordings show that his playing began to change before he was drafted. Some argue that Young’s playing had an increasingly emotional slant to it, and the post-war period featured some of his greatest renditions of ballads.

Recordings made during this and subsequent periods suggest Young was beginning to make much greater use of a plastic reed, which tended to give his playing a somewhat heavier, breathier tone (although still quite smooth compared to that of many other players). While he never abandoned the wooden reed, he used the plastic reed a significant share of the time from 1943 until the end of his life. Another cause for the thickening of his tone around this time was a change in saxophone mouthpiece from a metal Otto Link to an ebonite Brilhart. In August 1944 Young appeared alongside drummer Jo Jones, trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, and fellow tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet in Gjon Mili’s short film Jammin’ the Blues.

In September 1944 Young and Jo Jones were in Los Angeles with the Basie Band when they were inducted into the U.S. Army. Unlike many white musicians, who were placed in band outfits such as the ones led by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, Young was assigned to the regular army where he was not allowed to play his saxophone. Based in Ft. McClellan, Alabama, Young was found with marijuana and alcohol among his possessions. He was soon court-martialed. Young did not fight the charges and was convicted. He served one year in a detention barracks and was dishonorably discharged in late 1945. His experience inspired his composition “D.B. Blues” (with D.B. standing for detention barracks).

Some jazz historians have argued that Young’s playing power declined in the years following his army experience, though critics such as Scott Yanow disagree with this entirely. Recordings show that his playing began to change before he was drafted. Some argue that Young’s playing had an increasingly emotional slant to it, and the post-war period featured some of his greatest renditions of ballads.

Young’s career after World War II was far more prolific and lucrative than in the pre-war years in terms of recordings made, live performances, and annual income. Young joined Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) troupe in 1946, touring regularly with them over the next 12 years. He made a significant number of studio recordings under Granz’s supervision for his Verve Records label as well, including more trio recordings with Nat King Cole. Young also recorded extensively in the late 1940s for Aladdin Records (1946-7, where he had made the Cole recordings in 1942) and for Savoy (1944, ’49 and ’50), some sessions of which included Basie on piano.

While the quality and consistency of his playing ebbed gradually in the latter half of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, he also gave some brilliant performances during this stretch. Especially noteworthy are his performances with JATP in 1946, 1949, and 1950.[citation needed] With Young at the 1949 JATP concert at Carnegie Hall were Charlie Parker and Roy Eldridge, and Young’s solo on “Lester Leaps In” at that concert is a particular standout among his performances in the latter half of his career.

While the quality and consistency of his playing ebbed gradually in the latter half of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, he also gave some brilliant performances during this stretch. Especially noteworthy are his performances with JATP in 1946, 1949, and 1950. With Young at the 1949 JATP concert at Carnegie Hall were Charlie Parker and Roy Eldridge, and Young’s solo on “Lester Leaps In” at that concert is a particular standout among his performances in the latter half of his career.

From around 1951, Young’s level of playing declined more precipitously, as he began to drink more and more heavily. His playing showed reliance on a small number of clichéd phrases and reduced creativity and originality, despite his claims that he did not want to be a “repeater pencil” (Young coined this phrase to describe the act of repeating one’s own past ideas). A comparison of his studio recordings from 1952, such as the session with pianist Oscar Peterson, and those from 1953–1954 (all available on the Verve label) also demonstrates a declining command of his instrument and sense of timing, possibly due to both mental and physical factors. Young’s playing and health went into a crisis, culminating in a November 1955 hospital admission following a nervous breakdown.

He emerged from this treatment improved. In January 1956 he recorded two Granz-produced sessions featuring pianist Teddy Wilson (who had led the Billie Holiday recordings with Young in the 1930s), trumpet player Roy Eldridge, trombonist Vic Dickenson, bassist Gene Ramey, and drummer Jo Jones – available on the Jazz Giants ’56 and Prez and Teddy albums. 1956 was a relatively good year for Lester Young, including a tour of Europe with Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet and a successful stint at Olivia’s Patio Lounge in Washington, DC.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Lester Young had sat in on Count Basie Orchestra gigs from time to time. The best-known of these is their July 1957 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, the line-up including many of Lester’s old buddies: Jo Jones, Roy Eldridge, Illinois Jacquet and Jimmy Rushing. His playing was in better shape, and he produced some of the old, smooth-toned flow of the 1930s. Among other tunes he played a moving “Polkadots and Moonbeams,” which was a favorite of his at that time.

In September 1944 Young and Jo Jones were in Los Angeles with the Basie Band when they were inducted into the U.S. Army. Unlike many white musicians, who were placed in band outfits such as the ones led by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, Young was assigned to the regular army where he was not allowed to play his saxophone. Based in Ft. McClellan, Alabama, Young was found with marijuana and alcohol among his possessions. He was soon courtmartialed. Young did not fight the charges and was convicted. He served one year in a detention barracks and was dishonorably discharged in late 1945. His experience inspired his composition “D.B. Blues” (with D.B. standing for detention barracks).

Some jazz historians have argued that Young’s playing power declined in the years following his army experience, though critics such as Scott Yanow disagree with this entirely. Recordings show that his playing began to change before he was drafted. Some argue that Young’s playing had an increasingly emotional slant to it, and the post-war period featured some of his greatest renditions of ballads. Like Change My Plan; I Didn’t Know What Time It Was (1956 version); Gigantic Blues;This Year’s Kisses;You Can Depend on Me; and, I Guess I’ll Have.

On December 8, 1957, Young appeared with Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Gerry Mulligan in the CBS television special The Sound of Jazz, performing Holiday’s tunes “Lady Sings The Blues” and “Fine and Mellow.” It was a reunion with Holiday, with whom he had lost contact for years. She was also in decline at the end of her career, and they both gave moving performances. Young’s solo was brilliant, considered by many jazz musicians an unparalleled marvel of economy, phrasing and extraordinarily moving emotion. But Young seemed gravely ill, and was the only horn player who was seated (except during his solo) during the performance. By this time his alcoholism had cumulative effect. He was eating significantly less, drinking more and more, and suffering from liver disease and malnutrition. Young’s sharply diminished physical strength in the final two years of his life yielded some recordings with a frail tone, shortened phrases, and, on rare occasions, a difficulty in getting any sound to come out of his horn at all.

Lester Young made his final studio recordings and live performances in Paris in March 1959 with drummer Kenny Clarke at the tail end of an abbreviated European tour during which he ate next to nothing and virtually drank himself to death. He died in the early morning hours of March 15, 1959, only hours after arriving back in New York, at the age of 49. He was buried at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn. According to jazz critic Leonard Feather, who rode with Holiday in a taxi to Young’s funeral, she said after the services, “I’ll be the next one to go.” Billie Holiday died four months later at age 44.

Charles Mingus dedicated an elegy, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” for Young only a few months after his death. Wayne Shorter, then of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, composed a tribute, called “Lester Left Town.”

Young’s playing style influenced many other tenor saxophonists. Perhaps the most famous and successful of these were Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon, but he also influenced many in the cool movement such as Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Gerry Mulligan. Paul Quinichette modeled his style so closely on Young’s that he was sometimes referred to as the “Vice Prez” (sic). Sonny Stitt began to incorporate elements from Lester Young’s approach when he made the transition to tenor saxophone. Lester Young also had a direct influence on young Charlie Parker (“Bird”), and thus the entire be-bop movement. Indeed, recordings of Parker on tenor sax are similar in style to that of Young. Lesser-known saxophonists, such as Warne Marsh, were strongly influenced by Young.

Don Byron recorded the album Ivey-Divey in gratitude for what he learned from studying Lester Young’s work, modeled after a 1946 trio date with Buddy Rich and Nat King Cole. “Ivey-Divey” was one of Lester Young’s common eccentric phrases.

Young is a major character in English writer Geoff Dyer’s 1991 fictional book about jazz, But Beautiful.

The Resurrection of Lady Lester by OyamO (Charles F. Gordon) is a play and published book depicting Young’s life, subtitled “A Poetic Mood Song Based on the Legend of Lester Young.”

In the 1986 film Round Midnight, the fictional main character Dale Turner, played by Dexter Gordon, was partly based on Young – incorporating flashback references to his army experiences, and loosely depicting his time in Paris and his return to New York just before his death.

Acid Jazz/boogaloo band the Greyboy Allstars song “Tenor Man” is a tribute to Young. On their 1999 album “Live,” saxophonist Karl Denson introduces the song by saying, “…now some folks may have told you that Lester Young is out of style, but we’re here to tell you that the Prez is happenin’ right now.” Those were literally the lyrics Rahsaan Roland Kirk wrote and sang to the melody of the Charles Mingus elegy, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

Peter Straub’s short story collection Magic Terror (2000) contains a story called “Pork Pie Hat,” a fictionalized account of the life of Lester Young. Straub was inspired by Young’s appearance on the 1957 CBS-TV show The Sound of Jazz, which he watched repeatedly, wondering how such a genius could have ended up such a human wreck.

Lester Young is said to have popularized use of the term “cool” to mean something fashionable. Another slang term he coined was the term “bread” for money. He would ask, “How does the bread smell?” when asking how much a gig was going to pay.

Eugene Curran “Gene” Kelly (August 23, 1912 – February 2, 1996) was an American dancer, actor, singer, film director, producer, and choreographer. Kelly was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he played on screen.

Although he is known today for his performances in An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), he was a dominant force in Hollywood musical films from the mid-1940s until this art form fell out of fashion in the late 1950s. His many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical film, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.

Kelly was the recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for his career achievements. He later received lifetime achievement awards in the Kennedy Center Honors (1982), and from the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute; in 1999, the American Film Institute also numbered him 15th in their Greatest Male Stars of All Time list.

Early life

Kelly was born in the Highland Park neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He was the third son of Harriet Catherine (née Curran) and James Patrick Joseph Kelly, a phonograph salesman. His father was born in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, to a family of Irish descent. His maternal grandfather was an immigrant from Derry, Ireland, and his maternal grandmother was of German ancestry. At the age of eight, Kelly was enrolled by his mother in dance classes, along with his elder brother James. They both rebelled, and, according to Kelly: “We didn’t like it much and were continually involved in fistfights with the neighborhood boys who called us sissies…I didn’t dance again until I was fifteen.” At one time Kelly’s childhood dream was to play shortstop for the hometown Pittsburgh Pirates. Kelly returned to dance on his own initiative and by then was an accomplished sportsman and well able to take care of himself. He attended St. Raphael Elementary School in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He graduated from Peabody High School in 1929 at the age of sixteen. He enrolled in Pennsylvania State College to study journalism but the economic crash obliged him to seek employment to help with the family’s finances. At this time, he worked up dance routines with his younger brother Fred in order to earn prize money in local talent contests, and they also performed in local nightclubs.

In 1931, Kelly enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to study economics where he joined the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity. While at Pitt, Kelly became involved in the university’s Cap and Gown Club, which staged original, comedic musical productions. Earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics with his graduation from Pitt in 1933, he remained active with the Cap and Gown Club, serving as its director from 1934 to 1938, while at the same time enrolling in the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Also during this period, Kelly’s family started a dance studio on Munhall Road in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In 1932, the dance studio was renamed The Gene Kelly Studio of the Dance. A second location was opened in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1933. Kelly served as a teacher at the studio during both his undergraduate and law student years at Pitt. In 1931, he was approached by the Rodef Shalom synagogue in Pittsburgh to teach dance, and to stage the annual Kermess. This venture was successful enough that his services were retained for seven years until his departure for New York. Eventually, though, he decided to pursue his career as a dance teacher and full-time entertainer, so Kelly dropped out of law school after two months. He began to increasingly focus on performing and later claimed: “With time I became disenchanted with teaching because the ratio of girls to boys was more than ten to one, and once the girls reached sixteen the dropout rate was very high.” In 1937, having successfully managed and developed the family’s dance school business, he finally did move to New York City in search of work as a choreographer.

After a fruitless search, Kelly returned to Pittsburgh, to his first position as a choreographer with the Charles Gaynor musical revue Hold Your Hats at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in April, 1938. Kelly appeared in six of the sketches, one of which, “La Cumparsita”, became the basis of an extended Spanish number in Anchors Aweigh eight years later.

His first Broadway assignment, in November 1938, was as a dancer in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me! as the American ambassador’s secretary who supports Mary Martin while she sings “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. He had been hired by Robert Alton who had staged a show at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and been impressed by Kelly’s teaching skills. When Alton moved on to choreograph One for the Money he hired Kelly to act, sing and dance in a total of eight routines. In 1939, he was selected to be part of a musical revue “One for the Money” produced by the actress Katharine Cornell, who was known for finding and hiring talented young actors.

Kelly’s first career breakthrough was in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life, which opened on October 25, 1939, where for the first time on Broadway he danced to his own choreography. In the same year he received his first assignment as a Broadway choreographer, for Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe. Betsy Blair was a member of the cast. He began dating Blair, and they married on October 16, 1941.

In 1940, he was given the leading role in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey, again choreographed by Robert Alton, and this role propelled him to stardom. During its run he told reporters: “I don’t believe in conformity to any school of dancing. I create what the drama and the music demand. While I am a hundred percent for ballet technique, I use only what I can adapt to my own use. I never let technique get in the way of mood or continuity.” It was at this time also, that his colleagues noticed his phenomenal commitment to rehearsal and hard work. Van Johnson who also appeared in Pal Joey recalled: “I watched him rehearsing, and it seemed to me that there was no possible room for improvement. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. It was midnight and we had been rehearsing since eight in the morning. I was making my way sleepily down the long flight of stairs when I heard staccato steps coming from the stage…I could see just a single lamp burning. Under it, a figure was dancing…Gene.”

Offers from Hollywood began to arrive but Kelly was in no particular hurry to leave New York. Eventually, he signed with David O. Selznick, agreeing to go to Hollywood at the end of his commitment to Pal Joey, in October 1941. Prior to his contract, he also managed to fit in choreographing the stage production of Best Foot Forward.

1941–1945: Becoming established in Hollywood

Selznick sold half of Kelly’s contract to MGM for his first motion picture: For Me and My Gal (1942) starring box-office champion Judy Garland. Kelly claimed to be “appalled at the sight of myself blown up twenty times. I had an awful feeling that I was a tremendous flop”, (Betsy Blair told a different story!). For Me and My Gal performed very well and, in the face of much internal resistance, Arthur Freed of MGM picked up the other half of Kelly’s contract. After appearing in a cheap B-movie drama Pilot #5 he took the male lead in Cole Porter’s Du Barry Was a Lady opposite Lucille Ball (in a part originally intended for Ann Sothern). His first opportunity to dance to his own choreography came in his next picture Thousands Cheer, where he performed a mock-love dance with a mop.

He achieved his breakthrough as a dancer on film when MGM loaned him out to Columbia to work with Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944), where he created a memorable routine dancing to his own reflection. Despite this, noted critic Manny Farber was moved to praise Kelly’s “attitude,” “clarity,” and “feeling” as an actor while inauspiciously concluding, “The two things he does least well – singing and dancing – are what he is given most consistently to do.” In 1944 he also starred in Christmas Holiday.

In Kelly’s next film Anchors Aweigh (1945), MGM virtually gave him a free hand to devise a range of dance routines, including the celebrated animated dance with Jerry Mouse, and his duets with co-star Frank Sinatra. The iconic performance was enough for Manny Farber to completely reverse his previous assessment of Kelly’s skills; reviewing the film, Farber enthused, “Kelly is the most exciting dancer to appear in Hollywood movies.” Anchors Aweigh became one of the most successful films of 1945 and it garnered Kelly his first and only Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

In Ziegfeld Follies (1946) – which was produced in 1944 but not released until 1946 – Kelly collaborated with Fred Astaire – for whom he had the greatest admiration – in the famous “The Babbitt and the Bromide” challenge dance routine.

At the end of 1944, Kelly enlisted in the U.S. Naval Air Service and was commissioned as lieutenant junior grade. He was stationed in the Photographic Section, Washington D.C., where he was involved in writing and directing a range of documentaries, and this stimulated his interest in the production side of film-making.

1946–1952: MGM

On his return to Hollywood in the spring of 1946, MGM had nothing planned and used him in a routine, black-and-white movie: Living in a Big Way. The film was considered so weak that Kelly was asked to design and insert a series of dance routines, and his ability to carry off such assignments was noticed. This led to his next picture with Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, a musical film version of S.N. Behrman’s play The Pirate, with songs by Cole Porter, in which Kelly plays the eponymous swashbuckler. The Pirate gave full rein to Kelly’s athleticism and is probably best remembered for Kelly’s work with The Nicholas Brothers – the leading African-American dancers of their day – in a virtuoso dance routine. Now regarded as a classic, the film was ahead of its time, but was a box-office flop.

Although MGM wanted Kelly to return to safer and more commercial vehicles, he ceaselessly fought for an opportunity to direct his own musical film. In the interim, he capitalized on his swashbuckling image as d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. and also appeared with Vera-Ellen in the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet in Words and Music (1948). He was due to play the male lead opposite Garland in Easter Parade (1948), but broke his ankle playing volleyball. He withdrew from the film and convinced Fred Astaire to come out of retirement to replace him. There followed Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), his second film with Sinatra, where Kelly paid tribute to his Irish heritage in The Hat My Father Wore on St. Patrick’s Day routine. It was this musical film which persuaded Arthur Freed to allow Kelly to make On the Town, where he partnered with Frank Sinatra for the third and final time, creating a breakthrough in the musical film genre which has been described as “the most inventive and effervescent musical thus far produced in Hollywood.”

Stanley Donen, brought to Hollywood by Kelly to be his assistant choreographer, received co-director credit for On the Town. According to Kelly: “…when you are involved in doing choreography for film you must have expert assistants. I needed one to watch my performance, and one to work with the cameraman on timing; without such people as Stanley, Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne I could never have done these things. When we came to do On the Town, I knew it was time for Stanley to get screen credit because we weren’t boss-assistant anymore but co-creators.” Together, they opened up the musical form, taking the film musical out of the studio and into real locations, with Donen taking responsibility for the staging and Kelly handling the choreography. Kelly went much further than before in introducing modern ballet into his dance sequences, going so far in the “Day in New York” routine as to substitute four leading ballet specialists for Sinatra, Munshin, Garrett and Miller.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

It was now Kelly’s turn to ask the studio for a straight acting role and he took the lead role in the early Mafia melodrama: Black Hand (1950). This exposé of organized crime is set in New York’s “Little Italy” during late 19th century, and focuses on the Black Hand, a group which extorts money upon threat of death. In real-life incidents upon which this film is based, it was the Mafia, not the Black Hand, who functioned as the villain. Even in 1950, however, Hollywood had to tread gingerly whenever dealing with big-time crime, it being safer to go after a “dead” criminal organization than a “live” one.

There followed Summer Stock (1950) – Judy Garland’s last musical film for MGM – in which Kelly performed the celebrated “You, You Wonderful You” solo routine with a newspaper and a squeaky floorboard. In his book “Easy the Hard Way”, Joe Pasternak, head of one of the other musical units within MGM, singled out Kelly for his patience and willingness to spend as much time as necessary to enable the ailing Garland to complete her part.

There followed in quick succession two musicals which have secured Kelly’s reputation as a major figure in the American musical film, An American in Paris (1951) and – probably the most popular and admired of all film musicals – Singin’ in the Rain (1952). As co-director, lead star and choreographer, Kelly was the central driving force. Johnny Green, head of music at MGM at the time, described him as follows:

“Gene is easygoing as long as you know exactly what you are doing when you’re working with him. He’s a hard taskmaster and he loves hard work. If you want to play on his team you’d better like hard work, too. He isn’t cruel but he is tough, and if Gene believed in something he didn’t care who he was talking to, whether it was Louis B. Mayer or the gatekeeper. He wasn’t awed by anybody, and he had a good record of getting what he wanted.”

An American in Paris won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and, in the same year, Kelly was presented with an honorary Academy Award for his contribution to film musicals and the art of choreography. The film also marked the debut of Leslie Caron, who Kelly had spotted in Paris and brought to Hollywood. Its dream ballet sequence, lasting an unprecedented seventeen minutes, was the most expensive production number ever filmed up to that point. It was described by Bosley Crowther as, “whoop-de-doo … one of the finest ever put on the screen.” Singin’ in the Rain featured Kelly’s celebrated and much imitated solo dance routine to the title song, along with the “Moses Supposes” routine with Donald O’Connor and the “Broadway Melody” finale with Cyd Charisse. Though the scene did not initially generate the same enthusiasm as An American in Paris, it subsequently overtook the earlier film to occupy its current pre-eminent place among critics and filmgoers alike.

1953–57: The Decline of the Hollywood Musical

Kelly, at the very peak of his creative powers, now made what in retrospect is seen as a serious mistake. In December 1951 he signed a contract with MGM that sent him to Europe for nineteen months so that Kelly could use MGM funds frozen in Europe to make three pictures while personally benefiting from tax exemptions. Only one of these pictures was a musical, Invitation to the Dance, a pet project of Kelly’s to bring modern ballet to mainstream film audiences. It was beset with delays and technical problems, and flopped when finally released in 1956. When Kelly returned to Hollywood in 1953, the film musical was already beginning to feel the pressures from television, and MGM cut the budget for his next picture Brigadoon (1954), with Cyd Charisse, forcing the film to be made on studio back lots instead of on location in Scotland. This year also saw him appear as guest star with his brother Fred in the celebrated “I Love to Go Swimmin’ with Wimmen” routine in Deep in My Heart. MGM’s refusal to loan him out for Guys and Dolls and Pal Joey put further strains on his relationship with the studio. He negotiated an exit to his contract that involved making three further pictures for MGM.

The first of these, It’s Always Fair Weather (1956) co-directed with Donen, was a musical satire on television and advertising, and includes his famous roller skate dance routine to “I Like Myself,” and a dance trio with Michael Kidd and Dan Dailey which allowed Kelly to experiment with the widescreen possibilities of Cinemascope. MGM had lost faith in Kelly’s box-office appeal and as a result It’s Always Fair Weather “premiered” at seventeen drive-in theatres around the Los Angeles metroplex. Next followed Kelly’s last musical film for MGM, Les Girls (1957), in which he partnered a trio of leading ladies, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall and Taina Elg. It too sold few movie tickets. The third picture he completed was a co-production between MGM and himself, a cheapie B-film The Happy Road, set in his beloved France, his first foray in a new role as producer-director-actor.

1958–1996: Years of perseverance

Leaving MGM in 1957, Kelly returned to stage work. In 1958 he directed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical play Flower Drum Song. Early in 1960, Kelly, an ardent Francophile and fluent French speaker, was invited by A. M. Julien, the general administrator of the Paris Opéra and Opéra-Comique,[6] to select his own material and create a modern ballet for the company, the first time an American had received such an assignment. The result was Pas de Dieux, based on Greek mythology, combined with the music of George Gershwin’s Concerto in F. It was a major success, and led to his being honored with the Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur by the French Government.

Kelly continued to make some film appearances, such as Hornbeck in the 1960 Hollywood production of Inherit the Wind. However, most of his efforts were now concentrated on film production and directing. In 1962, he directed Jackie Gleason in Gigot in Paris, but the film was drastically re-cut by Seven Arts Productions and flopped. Another French effort, Jacques Demy’s homage to the MGM musical: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) in which Kelly appeared, was popular in France and nominated for Academy Awards for Best Music and Score of a Musical Picture (Original or Adaptation) but performed poorly, elsewhere. He appeared as himself in George Cukor’s Let’s Make Love (1960).

His first foray into television was a documentary for NBC’s Omnibus, Dancing is a Man’s Game (1958) where he assembled a group of America’s greatest sportsmen – including Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson and Bob Cousy – and re-interpreted their moves choreographically, as part of his lifelong quest to remove the effeminate stereotype of the art of dance, while articulating the philosophy behind his dance style. It gained an Emmy nomination for choreography and now stands as the key document explaining Kelly’s approach to modern dance.

Kelly also frequently appeared on television shows during the 1960s, but his one effort at television series, as Father Chuck O’Malley in Going My Way (1962–63), based on the Best Picture of 1944 starring Bing Crosby, was dropped after thirty episodes, although it enjoyed great popularity in Roman Catholic countries outside of the United States. He also appeared in three major TV specials: New York, New York (1966), The Julie Andrews’ Show (1965), and Jack and the Beanstalk (1967) a show he produced and directed which returned to a combination of cartoon animation with live dance, winning him an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program.

In 1963 Kelly joined Universal Pictures for a two-year stint. He joined 20th Century Fox in 1965, but had little to do – partly due to his decision to decline assignments away from Los Angeles for family reasons. His perseverance finally paid off, with the major box-office hit A Guide for the Married Man (1967) where he directed Walter Matthau. Then, a major opportunity arose when Fox – buoyed by the returns from The Sound of Music (1965) – commissioned Kelly to direct Hello, Dolly! (1969), again directing Matthau along with Barbra Streisand. Those splashy “in your face” production numbers caused the film to flop.

In 1970, he made another TV special: Gene Kelly and 50 Girls and was invited to bring the show to Las Vegas, Nevada, which he duly did for an eight-week stint – on condition he be paid more than any artist had hitherto been paid there. He directed veteran actors James Stewart and Henry Fonda in the comedy western The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) which performed poorly at the box-office. In 1973, he would work again with Frank Sinatra as part of Sinatra’s Emmy nominated TV special Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. Then, in 1974, he appeared as one of many special narrators in the surprise hit of the year That’s Entertainment! and subsequently directed and co-starred with his friend Fred Astaire in the sequel That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976). It was a measure of his powers of persuasion that he managed to coax the 77-year-old Astaire – who had insisted that his contract rule out any dancing, having long since retired – into performing a series of song and dance duets, evoking a powerful nostalgia for the glory days of the American musical film. Kelly continued to make frequent TV appearances and, in 1980, appeared in an acting and dancing role with Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu (1980), an expensive theatrical flop which has since attained a cult following. In Kelly’s opinion, “The concept was marvelous but it just didn’t come off.” In the same year, he was invited by Francis Ford Coppola to recruit a production staff for American Zoetrope’s One from the Heart (1982). Although Coppola’s ambition was for him to establish a production unit to rival the Freed Unit at MGM, the film’s failure put an end to this idea. In 1985, Kelly served as executive producer and co-host of That’s Dancing! – a celebration of the history of dance in the American musical. Kelly’s final on-screen appearance was to introduce That’s Entertainment! III. His final film project was in 1994 for the animated movie Cats Don’t Dance, released in 1997 and dedicated to him, on which Kelly acted as an un-credited choreographic consultant.

Working methods and influence on filmed dance

When he began his collaborative film work, Robert Alton and John Murray Anderson influenced him; he strived to create moods and character insight with his dances. He choreographed his own movement, along with that of the ensemble, with the assistance of Jeanne Coyne, Stanley Donen, Carol Haney, and Alex Romero. He experimented with lighting, camera techniques and special effects in order to achieve true integration of dance with film, and was one of the first to use split screens, double images, live action with animation and is credited as the person who made the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.

There was a clear progression in his development, from an early concentration on tap and musical comedy style to greater complexity using ballet and modern dance forms. Kelly himself refused to categorize his style: “I don’t have a name for my style of dancing…It’s certainly hybrid…I’ve borrowed from the modern dance, from the classical, and certainly from the American folk dance – tap-dancing, jitterbugging…But I have tried to develop a style which is indigenous to the environment in which I was reared.” He especially acknowledged the influence of George M. Cohan: “I have a lot of Cohan in me. It’s an Irish quality, a jaw-jutting, up-on-the-toes cockiness – which is a good quality for a male dancer to have.” He was also heavily influenced by an African-American dancer Dancing Dotson, whom he saw at Loew’s Penn Theatre around 1929, and was briefly taught by Frank Harrington, an African-American tap specialist from New York. However, his main interest was in ballet, which he studied under Kotchetovsky in the early Thirties. As biographer Clive Hirschhorn explains: “As a child he used to run for miles through parks and streets and woods – anywhere, just as long as he could feel the wind against his body and through his hair. Ballet gave him the same feeling of exhilaration, and in 1933 he was convinced it was the most satisfying form of self-expression.” He also studied Spanish dancing under Angel Cansino, Rita Hayworth’s uncle. Generally speaking, he tended to use tap and other popular dance idioms to express joy and exuberance – as in the title song from Singin’ in the Rain or “I Got Rhythm” from An American in Paris, whereas pensive or romantic feelings were more often expressed via ballet or modern dance, as in “Heather on the Hill” from Brigadoon or “Our Love Is Here to Stay” from An American in Paris.

Kelly in rehearsal with Sugar Ray Robinson and assistant Jeanne Coyne in the NBC Omnibus television special Dancing is a Man’s Game (1958)

According to Delamater, Kelly’s work “seems to represent the fulfillment of dance-film integration in the 1940s and 1950s”. While Fred Astaire had revolutionized the filming of dance in the 1930s by insisting on full-figure photography of dancers while allowing only a modest degree of camera movement, Kelly freed up the camera, making greater use of space, camera movement, camera angles and editing, creating a partnership between dance movement and camera movement without sacrificing full-figure framing. Kelly’s reasoning behind this was that he felt the kinetic force of live dance often evaporated when brought to film, and he sought to partially overcome this by involving the camera in movement and giving the dancer a greater number of directions in which to move. Examples of this abound in Kelly’s work and are well illustrated in the “Prehistoric Man” sequence from On the Town and “The Hat My Father Wore on St. Patrick’s Day” from Take Me Out to the Ball Game. In 1951, he summed up his vision as follows: “If the camera is to make a contribution at all to dance, this must be the focal point of its contribution; the fluid background, giving each spectator an undistorted and altogether similar view of dancer and background. To accomplish this, the camera is made fluid, moving with the dancer, so that the lens becomes the eye of the spectator, your eye”.

Kelly’s athleticism gave his moves a distinctive broad, muscular quality, and this was a very deliberate choice on his part, as he explained: “There’s a strong link between sports and dancing, and my own dancing springs from my early days as an athlete…I think dancing is a man’s game and if he does it well he does it better than a woman.” He railed against what he saw as the widespread effeminacy in male dancing which, in his opinion, “tragically” stigmatized the genre, alienating boys from entering the field: “Dancing does attract effeminate young men. I don’t object to that as long as they don’t dance effeminately. I just say that if a man dances effeminately he dances badly — just as if a woman comes out on stage and starts to sing bass. Unfortunately people confuse gracefulness with softness. John Wayne is a graceful man and so are some of the great ball players…but, of course, they don’t run the risk of being called sissies.” In his view, “one of our problems is that so much dancing is taught by women. You can spot many male dancers who have this tuition by their arm movements — they are soft, limp and feminine.” He acknowledged that, in spite of his efforts — in TV programs such as Dancing: A Man’s Game (1958) for example — the situation changed little over the years.

He also sought to break from the class-conscious conventions of the 1930s and early 40s, when top hat and tails or tuxedos were the norm, by dancing in casual or everyday work clothes, so as to make his dancing more relevant to the cinema-going public. As his first wife, actress and dancer Betsy Blair explained: “A sailor suit or his white socks and loafers, or the T-shirts on his muscular torso, gave everyone the feeling that he was a regular guy, and perhaps they too could express love and joy by dancing in the street or stomping through puddles…he democratized the dance in movies.” In particular, he wanted to create a completely different image from that associated with Fred Astaire, not least because he believed his physique didn’t suit such refined elegance: “I used to envy his cool aristocratic style, so intimate and contained. Fred wears top hat and tails to the manner born — I put them on and look like a truck driver.”

Marriages

Kelly married actress Betsy Blair in 1941. They had one child, Kerry, and divorced in April 1957.

In 1960, Kelly married his choreographic assistant Jeanne Coyne, who had divorced Stanley Donen in 1949 after a brief marriage. He remained married to Coyne until her death in 1973. They had two children, Bridget and Tim. He was married to Patricia Ward from 1990 until his death in 1996.

Political and religious views

Kelly was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party that occasionally created difficulty for him as his period of greatest prominence coincided with the McCarthy era in the U.S. In 1947, he was part of the Committee for the First Amendment, the Hollywood delegation that flew to Washington to protest at the first official hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His first wife, Betsy Blair, was suspected of being a Communist sympathizer and when United Artists, who had offered Blair a part in Marty (1955), were considering withdrawing her under pressure from the American Legion, Kelly successfully threatened MGM’s influence on United Artists with a pullout from It’s Always Fair Weather unless his wife was restored to the part. He used his position on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, West on a number of occasions to mediate disputes between unions and the Hollywood studios, and although some on the right of championing the unions frequently accused him; the studios valued him as an effective mediator.

Kelly was a major financial supporter of the Official Irish Republican Army (IRA), and he left thousands of pounds to NORAID in his will. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, and he was a member of the Good Shepherd Parish and the Catholic Motion Picture Guild in Beverly Hills, California. However, after becoming disenchanted by the Roman Catholic Church’s support for Francisco Franco against the Spanish Republic, he officially severed his ties with the church in September 1939. This separation was prompted, in part, by a trip Kelly made to Mexico in which he became convinced of the Church’s failure in helping the poor. After his departure from the Catholic Church, Kelly became an agnostic and remained so for the rest of his life. He retained a lifelong passion for sports and relished competition. He was known as a big fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Yankees. From the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, he and Blair organized weekly parties at their Beverly Hills home, and they often played an intensely competitive and physical version of charades, known as “The Game.”

Final years and death

Kelly’s health declined steadily in the late 1980s. A stroke in July 1994 resulted in a seven-week hospital stay, and another stroke in early 1995 left Kelly mostly bedridden in his Beverly Hills home. He died in his sleep at 8:15 a.m. on February 2, 1996, and his body was subsequently cremated, without any funeral or memorial services. Kelly’s papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University

The great Nat King Cole whistles his way into the hearts of American television viewers on this episode of What’s My Line?

Danny Kaye (born David Daniel Kaminsky; January 18, 1913 – March 3, 1987) was an American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.

Kaye starred in 17 movies, notably The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), White Christmas (1954), and The Court Jester (1956). His films were popular, especially his bravura performances of patter songs and favorites such as “Inchworm” and “The Ugly Duckling.” He was the first ambassador-at-large of UNICEF in 1954 and received the French Legion of Honor in 1986 for his years of work with the organization.

Early years

David Daniel Kaminsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. Jacob and Clara Nemerovsky Kaminsky and their two sons, Larry and Mac, left Yekaterinoslav two years before his birth; he was the only son born in the United States. He spent his early youth attending Public School 149 in East New York, Brooklyn—which eventually was renamed to honor him—where he began entertaining his classmates with songs and jokes, before moving to Thomas Jefferson High School, though he never graduated. His mother died when he was in his early teens. Clara enjoyed the impressions and humor of her son and always had words of encouragement; her death was a loss for the young Kaye.

Not long after his mother’s death, Kaye and his friend Louis ran away to Florida. Kaye sang while Louis played the guitar; the pair eked out a living for a while. When Kaye returned to New York, his father did not pressure him to return to school or work, giving his son the chance to mature and discover his own abilities. Kaye said he had wanted to be a surgeon as a young boy, but there was no chance of the family affording a medical-school education. He held a succession of jobs after leaving school, as a soda jerk, insurance investigator, and office clerk. Most ended with his being fired. He lost the insurance job when he made an error that cost the insurance company $40,000. The dentist who hired him to look after his office at lunch hour did the same when he found Kaye using his drill on the office woodwork. He learned his trade in his teenage years in the Catskills as a tummler in the Borscht Belt, and for four seasons at the White Roe resort.

Kaye’s first break came in 1933 when he joined the “Three Terpsichoreans,” a vaudeville dance act. They opened in Utica, New York, with him using the name Danny Kaye for the first time. The act toured the United States, then performed in Asia with the show La Vie Paree. The troupe left for a six-month tour of the Far East on February 8, 1934. While they were in Osaka, Japan, a typhoon hit the city. The hotel where Kaye and his colleagues stayed suffered heavy damage; a piece of the hotel’s cornice was hurled into Kaye’s room by the strong wind, nearly killing him. By performance time that evening, the city was in the grip of the storm. There was no power, and the audience was restless and nervous. To calm them, Kaye went on stage, holding a flashlight to illuminate his face, and sang every song he could recall as loudly as he was able. The experience of trying to entertain audiences who did not speak English inspired him to the pantomime, gestures, songs, and facial expressions that eventually made his reputation. Sometimes it was necessary just to get a meal. Kaye’s daughter, Dena, tells a story her father related about being in a restaurant in China and trying to order chicken. Kaye flapped his arms and clucked, giving the waiter an imitation of a chicken. The waiter nodded in understanding, bringing Kaye two eggs. His interest in cooking began on the tour.

When Kaye returned to the United States, jobs were in short supply and he struggled for bookings. One job was working in a burlesque revue with fan dancer Sally Rand. After the dancer dropped a fan while trying to chase away a fly, Kaye was hired to watch the fans so they were always held in front of her.

Career

Danny Kaye made his film debut in a 1935 comedy short Moon Over Manhattan. In 1937 he signed with New York–based Educational Pictures for a series of two-reel comedies. Kaye usually played a manic, dark-haired, fast-talking Russian in these low-budget shorts, opposite young hopefuls June Allyson or Imogene Coca. The Kaye series ended abruptly when the studio shut down in 1938. He was working in the Catskills in 1937, using the name Danny Kolbin. Kaye’s next venture was a short-lived Broadway show, with Sylvia Fine as the pianist, lyricist and composer. The Straw Hat Revue opened on September 29, 1939, and closed after ten weeks, but critics took notice of Kaye’s work. The reviews brought an offer for both Kaye and his bride, Sylvia, to work at La Martinique, a New York City nightclub. Kaye performed with Sylvia as his accompanist. At La Martinique, playwright Moss Hart saw Danny perform, which led to Hart casting him in his hit Broadway comedy Lady in the Dark.

Kaye scored a triumph in 1941 in Lady in the Dark. His show-stopping number was “Tchaikovsky,” by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin, in which he sang the names of a string of Russian composers at breakneck speed, seemingly without taking a breath. In the next Broadway season, he was the star of a show about a young man who is drafted, called Let’s Face It!.

His feature film debut was in producer Samuel Goldwyn’s Technicolor 1944 comedy Up in Arms, a remake of Goldwyn’s Eddie Cantor comedy Whoopee! (1930). Kaye’s rubber face and patter were a hit, and rival producer Robert M. Savini cashed in by compiling three of Kaye’s Educational Pictures shorts into a patchwork feature, The Birth of a Star (1945). Studio mogul Goldwyn wanted Kaye’s prominent nose fixed to look less Jewish, Kaye refused. He did allow his red hair to be dyed blonde, apparently because it looked better in Technicolor.

Kaye starred in a radio program, The Danny Kaye Show, on CBS in 1945–1946. The cast included Eve Arden, Lionel Stander and Big Band leader Harry James, and it was scripted by radio notable Goodman Ace and playwright-director Abe Burrows.

The program’s popularity rose quickly. Before a year, he tied with Jimmy Durante for fifth place in the Radio Daily popularity poll. Kaye was asked to participate in a USO tour following the end of World War II. It meant he would be absent from his radio show for nearly two months at the beginning of the season. Kaye’s friends filled in, with a different guest host each week. Kaye was the first American actor to visit postwar Tokyo; He’d toured there some ten years before with the vaudeville troupe. When Kaye asked to be released from his radio contract in mid-1946, he agreed not to accept a regular radio show for one year and limited guest appearances on radio programs of others. Many of the show’s episodes survive today, notable for Kaye’s opening “signature” patter.

“Git gat gittle, giddle-di-ap, giddle-de-tommy, riddle de biddle de roop, da-reep, fa-san, skeedle de woo-da, fiddle de wada, reep!”

Kaye was sufficiently popular to inspire imitations:

• The 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Book Revue had a sequence with Daffy Duck impersonating Kaye singing “Carolina in the Morning” with the Russian accent that Kaye affected from time to time.

• Satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer’s 1953 song “Lobachevsky” was based on a number that Kaye had done, about the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski, with the affected Russian accent. Lehrer mentioned Kaye in an opening monologue, citing him as an “idol since childbirth”.

• Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster fashioned a short-lived superhero title, Funnyman, taking inspiration from Kaye’s persona.

Kaye starred in several movies with actress Virginia Mayo in the 1940s, and is known for films such as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), On the Riviera (1951) co-starring Gene Tierney, Knock on Wood (1954), White Christmas (1954, in a role intended for Fred Astaire, then Donald O’Connor), The Court Jester (1956), and Merry Andrew (1958). Kaye starred in two pictures based on biographies, Hans Christian Andersen (1952) the Danish storyteller, and The Five Pennies (1959) about jazz pioneer Red Nichols. His wife, writer/lyricist Sylvia Fine, wrote many tongue-twisting songs Danny Kaye was famous for. She was an associate producer. Some of Kaye’s films included the theme of doubles, two people who look identical (both Danny Kaye) being mistaken for each other, to comic effect.

Kaye teamed with the popular Andrews Sisters (Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne) on Decca Records in 1947, producing the number-three Billboard smash hit “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)”. The success of the pairing prompted both acts to record through 1950, producing rhythmically comical fare as “The Woody Woodpecker Song” (based on the bird from the Walter Lantz cartoons, and a Billboard hit for the quartet), “Put ‘em in a Box, Tie ‘em with a Ribbon (And Throw ‘em in the Deep Blue Sea),” “The Big Brass Band from Brazil,” “It’s a Quiet Town (In Crossbone County),” “Amelia Cordelia McHugh (Mc Who?),” “Ching-a-ra-sa-sa”, and a duet by Danny and Patty of “Orange Colored Sky”. The acts teamed for two yuletide favorites: a frantic, harmonic rendition of “A Merry Christmas at Grandmother’s House (Over the River and Through the Woods)”, and a duet by Danny & Patty, “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”

While his wife wrote Kaye’s material, there was much that was unwritten, springing from the mind of Danny Kaye, often while performing. Kaye had one character he never shared with the public; Kaplan, the owner of an Akron, Ohio rubber company, came to life only for family and friends. His wife Sylvia described the Kaplan character:

He doesn’t have any first name. Even his wife calls him just Kaplan. He’s an illiterate pompous character who advertises his philanthropies. Jack Benny or Dore Schary might say, “Kaplan, why do you hate unions so?” If Danny feels like doing Kaplan that night, he might be off on Kaplan for two hours.

When he appeared at the London Palladium in 1948, he “roused the Royal family to laughter and was the first of many performers who have turned British variety into an American preserve.” Life magazine described his reception as “worshipful hysteria” and noted that the royal family, for the first time, left the royal box to watch from the front row of the orchestra. He related that he had no idea of the familial connections when the Marquess of Milford Haven introduced himself after a show and said he would like his cousins to see Kaye perform. Kaye stated that he never returned to the venue because there was no way to re-create the magic of that time. Kaye had an invitation to return to London for a Royal Variety Performance in November of the same year. When the invitation arrived, Kaye was busy with The Inspector General (which had a working title of Happy Times). Warner’s stopped the film to allow their star to attend. When his Decca co-workers The Andrews Sisters began their engagement at the London Palladium on the heels of Kaye’s successful 1948 appearance there, the trio was well received and David Lewin of the Daily Express declared, “The audience gave the Andrews Sisters the Danny Kaye roar!”

He hosted the 24th Academy Awards in 1952. The program was broadcast on radio. Telecasts of the Oscar ceremony came later. During the 1950s, Kaye visited Australia, where he played “Buttons” in a production of Cinderella in Sydney. In 1953, Kaye started a production company, Dena Pictures, named for his daughter. Knock on Wood was the first film produced by his firm. The firm expanded into television in 1960 under the name Belmont Television.

Kaye entered television in 1956 on the CBS show See It Now with Edward R. Murrow. The Secret Life of Danny Kaye combined his 50,000-mile, ten-country tour as UNICEF ambassador with music and humor. His first solo effort was in 1960 with an hour special produced by Sylvia and sponsored by General Motors; with similar specials in 1961 and 1962. He hosted a variety hour on CBS television, The Danny Kaye Show, from 1963 to 1967, which won four Emmy awards and a Peabody award. Beginning in 1964, he acted as television host to the CBS telecasts of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. Kaye did a stint as a What’s My Line? Mystery Guest on the Sunday night CBS-TV quiz program.

Kaye was later a guest panelist on that show. He also appeared on the NBC interview program Here’s Hollywood.

In the 1970s, Kaye tore a ligament in his leg in the run of the Richard Rodgers musical Two by Two, but went on with the show, appearing with his leg in a cast and cavorting on stage in a wheelchair. He had done much the same on his television show in 1964 when his right leg and foot were burned from a cooking accident. Camera shots were planned so television viewers did not see Kaye in his wheelchair.

In 1976, he played Mister Geppetto in a television musical adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio with Sandy Duncan in the title role. Kaye portrayed Captain Hook opposite Mia Farrow in a musical version of Peter Pan featuring songs by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse. It was shown on NBC-TV in December 1976, the Hallmark Hall of Fame series. He later guest-starred in episodes of The Muppet Show, The Cosby Show and in the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.

In many films, as well as on stage, Kaye proved to be an able actor, singer, dancer and comedian. He showed his serious side as Ambassador for UNICEF and in his dramatic role in the memorable TV film Skokie, when he played a Holocaust survivor. Before his death in 1987, Kaye conducted an orchestra during a comical series of concerts organized for UNICEF fundraising. Kaye received two Academy Awards: an Academy Honorary Award in 1955 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982. Also that year he received the Screen Actors Guild Annual Award.

Kaye was enamored of music. While he claimed an inability to read music, he was said to have perfect pitch. Kaye’s ability with an orchestra was mentioned by Dmitri Mitropoulos, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. After Kaye’s appearance, Mitropoulos remarked, “Here is a man who is not musically trained, who cannot even read music, and he gets more out of my orchestra than I have.” Kaye was invited to conduct symphonies as charity fundraisers and was the conductor of the all-city marching band at the season opener of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1984. Over his career he raised over US $5,000,000 in support of musician pension funds.

In 1980, Kaye hosted and sang in the 25th Anniversary of Disneyland celebration, and hosted the opening celebration for Epcot in 1982 (EPCOT Center at the time), both were aired on prime-time American television.

Cooking

In his later years he entertained at home as chef—he had a special stove on his patio – and specialized in Chinese and Italian cooking. The stove Kaye used for his Chinese dishes was fitted with metal rings for the burners to allow the heat to be highly concentrated. Kaye installed a trough with circulating ice water to use the burners. Kaye taught Chinese cooking classes at a San Francisco Chinese restaurant in the 1970s. The theater and demonstration kitchen under the library at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York is named for him.

Kaye referred to his kitchen as “Ying’s Thing.” While filming The Madwoman of Chaillot in France, he phoned home to ask his family if they would like to eat at “Ying’s Thing” that evening; Kaye flew home for dinner. Not all of his efforts in the kitchen went well. After flying to San Francisco for a recipe for sourdough bread, he came home and spent hours preparing loaves. When his daughter asked about the bread, Kaye hit the bread on the kitchen table. His bread was hard enough to chip it. Kaye approached his kitchen work with enthusiasm, making sausages and other foods needed for his cuisine. His work as a chef earned him the “Les Meilleurs Ouvriers de France” culinary award; Kaye was the only non-professional to achieve this honor.

Flying

Kaye was an aviation enthusiast. He became interested in learning to fly in 1959. An enthusiastic and accomplished golfer, he gave up golf in favor of flying. When Kaye went for his written pilot’s exam, he brought a liverwurst sandwich in case he was there for hours. The first plane Kaye owned was a Piper Aztec. Kaye received his first license as a private pilot of multi-engine aircraft, not being certified for operating a single engine plane until six years later. He was an accomplished pilot, rated for airplanes ranging from single-engine light aircraft to multi-engine jets. Kaye held a commercial pilot’s license and had flown every type of aircraft except military planes. A vice-president of Learjet, Kaye owned and operated a Learjet 24. He supported many flying projects. In 1968, he was Honorary Chairman of the Las Vegas International Exposition of Flight, a show that utilized many facets of the city’s entertainment industry while presenting an air show. The operational show chairman was well-known aviation figure Lynn Garrison. Kaye flew his plane to 65 cities in five days on a mission to help UNICEF.

Danny Kaye was fond of the legendary arranger Vic Schoen. Schoen had arranged for him on White Christmas, The Court Jester, and albums and concerts with the Andrews Sisters. In the 1960s, Vic Schoen was working on a show in Las Vegas with Shirley Temple. He was injured in a car accident. When Danny Kaye heard about the accident, he flew to McCarran Airport to pick up Schoen and bring him to Los Angeles for medical attention.

Baseball

Kaye was part owner of baseball’s Seattle Mariners with Lester Smith from 1977 to 1981. Prior to that, the lifelong fan of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers recorded a song called “The D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song (Oh really? No, O’Malley!)”, describing a fictitious encounter with the San Francisco Giants, a hit during the real-life pennant chase of 1962. That song is included on Baseball’s Greatest Hits compact discs. A good friend of Leo Durocher, he often traveled with the team. In addition to being an owner, Kaye had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game.

Charity

Throughout his life, Kaye donated to charities. Working alongside UNICEF’s Halloween fundraiser founder, Ward Simon Kimball Jr., the actor educated the public on impoverished children in deplorable living conditions overseas and assisted in the distribution of donated goods and funds. His involvement with UNICEF came about in an unusual way. Kaye was flying home from London in 1949 when one of the plane’s four engines lost its propeller and caught fire. The problem was initially thought serious enough that it might make an ocean landing; life jackets and life rafts were made ready. The plane was able to head back over 500 miles to land at Shannon Airport, Ireland. On the way back to Shannon, the head of the Children’s Fund, Maurice Pate, had the seat next to Danny Kaye and spoke at length about the need for recognition for the Fund. Their discussion continued on the flight from Shannon to New York; it was the beginning of the actor’s long association with UNICEF.

Death

Kaye died of heart failure on March 3, 1987, brought on by internal bleeding and complications of hepatitis. Kaye had quadruple bypass heart surgery in February 1983; he contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion. He left a widow, Sylvia Fine, and a daughter, Dena. His ashes are interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. His grave is adorned with a bench that contains friezes of a baseball and bat, an aircraft, a piano, a flowerpot, musical notes, and a chef’s toque. Kaye’s name, birth and death dates are inscribed on the toque. The United Nations held a memorial tribute to him at their New York headquarters on the evening of October 21, 1987.

Personal life

Kaye and Sylvia Fine grew up in Brooklyn, living a few blocks apart, but they did not meet until they were working on an off-Broadway show in 1939. Sylvia was an audition pianist. Sylvia discovered that Danny had worked for her father, dentist Samuel Fine. Kaye, working in Florida, proposed on the telephone; the couple were married in Fort Lauderdale on January 3, 1940. Their daughter, Dena, was born on December 17, 1946.

Kaye and his wife raised their daughter without parental hopes or aspirations for her future. Kaye said in a 1954 interview, “Whatever she wants to be she will be without interference from her mother nor from me.” When she was very young, Dena did not like seeing her father perform because she did not understand that people were supposed to laugh at what he did. On January 18, 2013, during a 24-hour salute to Kaye on Turner Classic Movies in celebration of his 100th birthday, Kaye’s daughter Dena revealed to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz that Kaye was born in 1911.

After Kaye and his wife became estranged, circa 1947, he was allegedly involved with a succession of women, though he and Fine never divorced. The best known of these women was actress Eve Arden.

There are persistent claims that Kaye was homosexual or bisexual, and some sources assert that Kaye and Laurence Olivier had a ten-year relationship in the 1950s while Olivier was married to Vivien Leigh. A biography of Leigh states that their love affair caused her to have a breakdown. Olivier’s official biographer, Terry Coleman, has denied the affair. Joan Plowright, Olivier’s third wife and widow, has dealt with the matter in different ways on occasion: she deflected the question (but alluded to Olivier’s “demons”) in a BBC interview. She is reputed to have referred to Danny Kaye on one occasion, in response to a claim that it was she who broke up Olivier’s marriage to Leigh. However, in her memoirs, Plowright denies an affair between the two men. Producer Perry Lafferty reported: “People would ask me, ‘Is he gay? Is he gay?’ I never saw anything to substantiate that in the time I was with him.” Kaye’s final girlfriend, Marlene Sorosky, reported that he told her, “I’ve never had a homosexual experience in my life. I’ve never had any kind of gay relationship. I’ve had opportunities, but I never did anything about them.”

Duke Ellington influenced millions of people, around the world and at home. He gave American music its own sound for the first time. In his fifty year career, he played over 20,000 performances in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Ellington’s legacy transcends boundaries and fills the world with a treasure trove of music that renews itself through every generation of fans and music-lovers. His work continues to live on, and will endure for generations to come. Winton Marsalis put it best when he said, “His music sounds like America.” Because of the unmatched artistic heights to which he soared, no one deserved the phrase “beyond category” more than Ellington, for it aptly describes his life as well. He was most certainly one of a kind, a man who led a life with universal appeal and a style that transcended countless boundaries.

Duke Ellington is best remembered for the over 3,000 songs  he composed during his lifetime. His best known titles include, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” “In a Mellotone,” and “Satin Doll.” As a musician, he was most creative while on the road. It was during this time when he wrote his most famous piece, “Mood Indigo”which brought him world wide fame.

When asked what inspired him to write, Ellington replied, “My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people.”

Duke Ellington’s popular compositions set the bar for generations of brilliant jazz, pop, theatre, and soundtrack composers to come. While these compositions guarantee his greatness, what made Duke an iconoclastic genius, and an unparalleled visionary, what has granted him immortality, are his extended suites. From 1943′s “Black, Brown and Beige,” to 1972′s “The Uwis Suite,” Duke used the suite format to give his jazz songs a far more empowering meaning, with enhanced resonance and purpose. They exalt, mythologize, and re-contextualize the African-American experience on a grand scale.

Duke Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York, and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington’s heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home. ”The memory of things gone,” Ellington once said, ”is important to a jazz musician,” and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those bygone days. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, anytime Ellington’s music is played — the music still carries us forward today.

Duke Ellington was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966. He was later awarded several other prizes, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and the French Legion of Honor in 1973, the highest civilian honors in each country. He died of lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, a month after his 75th birthday, and is buried in the Bronx, in New York City. At his funeral, attended by over 12,000 people at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Ella Fitzgerald summed up the occasion, “It’s a very sad day…A genius has passed.”

Mickey Rooney Mickey Rooney (born Joseph Yule, Jr.; September 23, 1920 – April 6, 2014) was an American film actor and entertainer whose film, television, and stage appearances spanned almost his entire lifetime. Rooney had one of the longest careers in cinematic history; he first appeared on film in 1927 and made his last appearance in 2014. He received multiple awards, including a Juvenile Academy Award, an Honorary Academy Award, two Golden Globes and an Emmy Award. Working as a performer since he was a child, he was a superstar as a teenager for the films in which he played Andy Hardy, and he had one of the longest careers of any actor, spanning 87 years actively making films in ten decades, from the 1920s to the 2010s. For a younger generation of fans, he gained international fame for his leading role as Henry Dailey in The Family Channel’s The Adventures of the Black Stallion. Until his death in April 2014, Rooney was one of the last surviving stars who worked in the silent film era.

Rooney was born Joseph Yule, Jr. in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. His father, Joe Yule (born Ninnian Joseph Ewell), was from Glasgow, Scotland, and his mother, Nellie W. (née Carter), was from Kansas City, Missouri. Both of his parents were in vaudeville, appearing in a Brooklyn production of A Gaiety Girl when Joseph, Jr. was born. He began performing at the age of 17 months as part of his parents’ routine, wearing a specially tailored tuxedo. When he was fourteen months old, unknown to everyone, he crawled onstage wearing overalls and a little harmonica around his neck. He sneezed and his father, Joe Sr., grabbed him up, introducing him to the audience as Sonny Yule. He felt the spotlight on him and described it as his mother’s womb. From that moment on, the stage was his home. While Joe Sr. was traveling, Joe Jr. and his mother moved from Brooklyn to Kansas City to live with his aunt. While his mother was reading the entertainment newspaper, Nellie was interested in getting Hal Roach to approach her son to participate in the Our Gang series in Hollywood. Roach offered $5 a day to Joe, Jr., while the other young stars were paid five times more.

As he was getting bit parts in films, he was working with established film stars such as Joel McCrea, Colleen Moore, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Jean Harlow. While selling newspapers around the corner, he also entered into Hollywood Professional School, where he went to school with dozens of unfamiliar students such as Judy Garland and Lana Turner, among many others, and later Hollywood High School, where he graduated in 1938. The Yules separated in 1924 during a slump in vaudeville, and in 1925, Nell Yule moved with her son to Hollywood, where she managed a tourist home. Fontaine Fox had placed a newspaper ad for a dark-haired child to play the role of “Mickey McGuire” in a series of short films. Lacking the money to have her son’s hair dyed, Mrs. Yule took her son to the audition after applying burnt cork to his scalp. Joe got the role and became “Mickey” for 78 of the comedies, running from 1927 to 1936, starting with Mickey’s Circus, released September 4, 1927. These had been adapted from the Toonerville Trolley comic strip, which contained a character named Mickey McGuire. Joe Yule briefly became Mickey McGuire legally in order to trump an attempted copyright lawsuit (if it was his legal name, the film producer Larry Darmour did not owe the comic strip writers royalties). His mother also changed her surname to McGuire in an attempt to bolster the argument, but the film producers lost. The litigation settlement awarded damages to the owners of the cartoon character, compelling the twelve-year-old actor to refrain from calling himself Mickey McGuire on- and off screen. Rooney later claimed that, during his Mickey McGuire days, he met cartoonist Walt Disney at the Warner Brothers studio, and that Disney was inspired to name Mickey Mouse after him, although Disney always said that he had changed the name from “Mortimer Mouse” to “Mickey Mouse” on the suggestion of his wife.

During an interruption in the series in 1932, Mrs. Yule made plans to take her son on a ten-week vaudeville tour as McGuire, and Fox sued successfully to stop him from using the name. Mrs. Yule suggested the stage name of Mickey Looney for her comedian son, which he altered slightly to Rooney, a less frivolous version. Rooney made other films in his adolescence, including several more of the McGuire films, and signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934. MGM cast Rooney as the teenage son of a judge in 1937′s A Family Affair, setting Rooney on the way to another successful film series. Rooney with Judy Garland in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) In 1937, Rooney was selected to portray Andy Hardy in A Family Affair, which MGM had planned as a B-movie. Rooney provided comic relief as the son of Judge James K. Hardy, portrayed by Lionel Barrymore (although Lewis Stone would play the role of Judge Hardy in subsequent films). The film was an unexpected success, and led to 13 more Andy Hardy films between 1937 and 1946, and a final film in 1958. According to author Barry Monush, MGM wanted the Andy Hardy films to appeal to all family members. Rooney’s character would portray a typical “anxious, hyperactive, girl-crazy teenager,” and he soon became the unintended main star of the films. Although some critics describe the series of films as “sweet, overly idealized, and pretty much interchangeable,” their ultimate success was because they gave viewers a “comforting portrait of small-town America that seemed suited for the times,” with Rooney instilling “a lasting image of what every parent wished their teen could be like.”

Behind the scenes, however, Rooney was in fact very much the “hyperactive girl-crazy teenager” he portrayed. MGM head, Louis B. Mayer, who became like a father to Rooney during this period, found it necessary to manage his public image, explains historian Jane Ellen Wayne: Mayer naturally tried to keep all his child actors in line, like any father figure. After one such episode, Mickey Rooney replied, “I won’t do it. You’re asking the impossible.” Mayer then grabbed young Rooney by his lapels and said, “Listen to me! I don’t care what you do in private. Just don’t do it in public. In public, behave. Your fans expect it. You’re Andy Hardy! You’re the United States! You’re the Stars and Stripes. Behave yourself! You’re a symbol!” Mickey nodded. “I’ll be good, Mr. Mayer. I promise you that.” Mayer let go of his lapels, “All right,” he said. In 1937, Rooney received top billing as Shockey Carter in Hoosier Schoolboy. Also in 1937, Rooney made his first film alongside Judy Garland with Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. Garland and Rooney became close friends and a successful song-and-dance team. Besides three of the Andy Hardy films, where she portrayed Betsy Booth, a younger girl with a crush on Andy, they appeared together in a string of successful musicals, including the Oscar-nominated Babes in Arms (1939). During an interview in the 1992 documentary film MGM: When the Lion Roars, Rooney describes their friendship: “Judy and I were so close we could’ve come from the same womb. We weren’t like brothers or sisters but there was no love affair there; there was more than a love affair. It’s very, very difficult to explain the depths of our love for each other. It was so special. It was a forever love. Judy, as we speak, has not passed away. She’s always with me in every heartbeat of my body.”

With Carmen Miranda backstage at Babes on Broadway (1941) Rooney’s breakthrough-role as a dramatic actor came in 1938′s Boys Town opposite Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, who runs a home for underprivileged and delinquent boys in Omaha, Nebraska. Rooney was awarded a special Juvenile Academy Award in 1939 and Tracy won the Oscar for Best Actor. The popularity of his films made Rooney the biggest box-office draw in 1939, 1940 and 1941. For their roles in Boys Town, Rooney and Tracy won first and second place in the Motion Picture Herald 1940 National Poll of Exhibitors, based on the box office appeal of 200 players. Boys’ Life magazine wrote, “Congratulations to Messrs. Rooney and Tracy! Also to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer we extend a hearty thanks for their very considerable part in this outstanding achievement.”

A star in early 1940s, his picture appeared on the cover of the March 18, 1940 issue of Time magazine, timed to coincide with the release of Young Tom Edison; the cover story began: Hollywood’s No. 1 box office bait in 1939 was not Clark Gable, Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but a rope-haired, kazoo-voiced kid with a comic-strip face, who until this week had never appeared in a picture without mugging or overacting it. His name (assumed) was Mickey Rooney, and to a large part of the more articulate U.S. cinema audience, his name was becoming a frequently used synonym for brat. Rooney, with Garland, was one of many celebrities caricatured in Tex Avery’s 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon, Hollywood Steps Out.

In 1991, Rooney was honored by the Young Artist Foundation with its Former Child Star “Lifetime Achievement” Award recognizing his achievements within the film industry as a child actor. After presenting the award to Rooney, the foundation subsequently renamed the accolade “The Mickey Rooney Award” in his honor. Rooney entertaining troops in 1945 In 1944, Rooney enlisted in the United States Army. He served more than 21 months, until shortly after the end of World War II. During and after the war he helped entertain the troops in America and Europe, and spent part of the time as a radio personality on the American Forces Network and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for entertaining troops in combat zones. In addition to the Bronze Star Medal, Rooney also received the Army Good Conduct Medal, American Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal for his military service.

After his return to civilian life, his career slumped. He appeared in a number of films, including Words and Music in 1948, which paired him for the last time with Garland on film (he appeared with her on one episode as a guest on her CBS variety series in 1963). He briefly starred in a CBS radio series, Shorty Bell, in the summer of 1948, and reprised his role as “Andy Hardy”, with most of the original cast, in a syndicated radio version of The Hardy Family in 1949 and 1950 (repeated on Mutual during 1952). His first television series, The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan (created by Blake Edwards with Rooney as his own producer), appeared on NBC television for 32 episodes between August 28, 1954 and June 4, 1955. In 1951, he directed a feature film for Columbia Pictures, My True Story starring Helen Walker. Rooney also starred as a ragingly egomaniacal television comedian, loosely based on Red Buttons, in the live 90-minute television drama The Comedian, in the Playhouse 90 series on the evening of Valentine’s Day in 1957, and as himself in a revue called The Musical Revue of 1959 based on the 1929 film The Hollywood Revue of 1929, which was edited into a film in 1960, by British International Pictures. In 1958, Rooney joined Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra in hosting an episode of NBC’s short-lived Club Oasis comedy and variety show. In 1960, Rooney directed and starred in The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, an ambitious comedy known for its multiple flashbacks and many cameos.

In the 1960′s, Rooney returned to theatrical entertainment. He still accepted film roles in undistinguished films, but occasionally would appear in better works, such as Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and The Black Stallion (1979). Mickey Rooney – “What’s My Line?” On December 31, 1961, he appeared on television’s What’s My Line and mentioned that he had already started enrolling students in the MRSE (Mickey Rooney School of Entertainment). His school venture never came to fruition. This was a period of professional distress for Rooney; as a childhood friend, director Richard Quine put it: “Let’s face it. It wasn’t all that easy to find roles for a 5-foot-3 man who’d passed the age of Andy Hardy.”

In 1962, his debts had forced him into filing for bankruptcy. In 1966, while Rooney was working on the film Ambush Bay in the Philippines, his wife Barbara Ann Thomason (AKAs: Tara Thomas, Carolyn Mitchell), a former pinup model and aspiring actress who had won 17 straight beauty contests in Southern California, was found dead in their bed. Beside her was her lover, Milos Milos, an actor friend of Rooney’s. Detectives ruled it murder-suicide, which was committed with Rooney’s own gun. Rooney was awarded an Academy Juvenile Award in 1938, and in 1983 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted him their Academy Honorary Award for his lifetime of achievement. He was mentioned in the 1972 song “Celluloid Heroes” by The Kinks: “If you stomped on Mickey Rooney/ He’d still turn ’round and smile…”

In addition to his movie roles, Rooney made numerous guest-starring roles as a character actor for nearly six decades, beginning with an episode of Celanese Theatre. The part led to other roles on such television series as Schlitz Playhouse, Playhouse 90, Producers’ Showcase, Alcoa Theatre, Wagon Train, General Electric Theater, Hennesey, The Dick Powell Theatre, Arrest and Trial, Burke’s Law, Combat!, The Fugitive, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, The Jean Arthur Show, The Name of the Game, Dan August, Night Gallery, The Love Boat, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, among many others. Rooney made a successful transition to television and stage work. In 1961, he guest-starred in the 13-week James Franciscus adventure–drama CBS television series The Investigators. In 1962, he was cast as himself in the episode “The Top Banana” of the CBS sitcom, Pete and Gladys, starring Harry Morgan and Cara Williams. In 1963, he entered CBS’s The Twilight Zone, giving a one-man performance in the episode “The Last Night of a Jockey.” Also in 1963, in “The Hunt” episode 9, season 1 for Suspense Theater, he played the sadistic sheriff hunting the young surfer played by James Caan. In 1964, he launched another half-hour sitcom, Mickey, on ABC. The story line had “Mickey” operating a resort hotel in southern California. Son Tim Rooney appeared as Rooney’s teenaged son on this program, and Emmaline Henry starred as Rooney’s wife. It lasted 17 episodes, ending primarily due to the suicide of co-star Sammee Tong in October 1964.

He won a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award for his role in 1981′s Bill. Playing opposite Dennis Quaid, Rooney’s character was a mentally handicapped man attempting to live on his own after leaving an institution. He reprised his role in 1983′s Bill: On His Own, earning an Emmy nomination for the role. Rooney provided the voices for four Christmas TV animated/stop action specials: Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July (1979), and A Miser Brothers’ Christmas (2008)—always playing Santa Claus. He continued to work on stage and television through the 1980s and 1990s, appearing in the acclaimed stage play Sugar Babies with Ann Miller beginning in 1979. Following this, he toured as Pseudelous in Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

In the 1990′s, he returned to Broadway for the final months of Will Rogers Follies, playing the ghost of Will’s father. On television, he starred in the short-lived sitcom, One of the Boys, along with two unfamiliar young stars, Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane, in 1982. He toured Canada in a dinner theatre production of The Mind with the Naughty Man in the mid-1990′s. He played The Wizard in a stage production of The Wizard of Oz with Eartha Kitt at Madison Square Garden. Jo Anne Worley later replaced Kitt. In 1995 he starred with Charlton Heston, Peter Graves and Deborah Winters in the Warren Chaney docudrama America: A Call to Greatness. He also appeared in the documentaries That’s Entertainment! and That’s Entertainment! III, in both films introducing segments paying tribute to Judy Garland.

Rooney voiced Mr. Cherrywood in The Care Bears Movie (1985), and starred as the Movie Mason in a Disney Channel Original Movie family film 2000′s Phantom of the Megaplex. He had a guest-spot on an episode of The Golden Girls as Sophia’s boyfriend “Rocko”, who claimed to be a bank robber. He voiced himself in the Simpsons episode “Radioactive Man” of 1995. In 1996–97, Rooney played Talbut on the TV series, Kleo The Misfit Unicorn. He costarred in Night at the Museum in 2006 with Dick Van Dyke and Ben Stiller; Rooney filmed a cameo with Van Dyke for the 2009 sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which was cut from the film but included as an extra on the DVD release.

After starring in one unsuccessful TV series and turning down an offer for a huge TV series, Rooney finally hit the jackpot, at 70, when he was offered a starring role on The Family Channel’s The Adventures of the Black Stallion, where he reprised his role as Henry Dailey in the film of the same name, eleven years earlier. The show was based on a novel by Walter Farley. For this role, he had to travel to Vancouver. The show became an immediate hit with teenagers, young adults and people all over the world, being seen in 70 countries.

Rooney appeared in television commercials for Garden State Life Insurance Company in 1999, alongside his wife Jan Rooney. In commercials shown in 2007, he can be seen in the background washing imaginary dishes. In 2003, Rooney and his wife began their association with Rainbow Puppet Productions, providing their voices to the 100th Anniversary production of Toyland!, an adaptation of Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland. He created the voice for the Master Toymaker while Jan provided the voice for Mother Goose. Since that time, they have created voices for additional Rainbow Puppet Productions including Pirate Party, which also features vocal performances by Carol Channing. On May 26, 2007, he was grand marshal at the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival. Rooney made his British pantomime debut, playing Baron Hardup in Cinderella, at the Sunderland Empire Theatre over the 2007 Christmas period, a role he reprised at Bristol Hippodrome in 2008 and at the Milton Keynes theatre in 2009. In 2008, Rooney starred as Chief, a wise old ranch owner, in the independent family feature film Lost Stallions: The Journey Home, marking a return to starring in equestrian-themed productions for the first time since the 1990s TV show Adventures of the Black Stallion. Even though they acted together before, Lost Stallions: The Journey Home was the sole film in which Rooney and Jan portrayed a married couple on screen.

In December 2009, he appeared as a guest at a dinner-party hosted by David Gest on Come Dine With Me. In 2011, Rooney made a brief cameo appearance in The Muppets and appeared in an episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, recounting how, during a down period in his career, his deceased father appeared to him one night, telling him not to give up on his career. He claimed that the experience bolstered his resolve and soon afterwards his career experienced a resurgence. In 2014, Rooney returned to film scenes to reprise his role as “Gus” in Night at the Museum 3. It is currently unknown whether he completed his scenes and whether his death will affect the film’s production.

Rooney was married eight times. In the 1950′s and 1960′s, he was often the subject of comedians’ jokes for his alleged inability to stay married. At the time of his death, he was married to Jan Chamberlin, although they were then separated. He had a total of nine children, as well as 19 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. In 1942, he married Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner, but the two were divorced well before she became a star in her own right. While stationed in the military in Alabama in 1944, Rooney met and married local beauty queen Betty Jane Phillips. This marriage ended in divorce after he returned from Europe at the end of World War II. His subsequent marriages to Martha Vickers (1949) and Elaine Mahnken (1952) were also short-lived and ended in divorce. In 1958, Rooney married Barbara Ann Thomason (stage name Carolyn Mitchell), but tragedy struck when she was murdered in 1966. Falling into deep depression, he married Barbara’s friend, Marge Lane, who helped him take care of his young children. The marriage lasted only 100 days. He was married to Carolyn Hockett from 1969 to 1974, but financial instability ended the relationship. Finally, in 1978, Rooney married Jan Chamberlin, his eighth wife; the union would endure for 37 years, longer than all of Mickey’s previous marriages combined. They both were outspoken advocates for veterans and animal rights.

After the deaths of his wife Barbara Ann Thomason and his mother, problems with alcohol and drugs, and various financial problems that included a bankruptcy, Rooney had a religious experience with a busboy in a casino coffee shop. In 1975, Rooney was an active member of the Church of Religious Science, a New Thought group founded by Ernest Holmes. Rooney’s oldest child, Mickey Rooney, Jr., is a born-again Christian, and has an evangelical ministry in Hemet, California. He and several of Rooney’s other eight children have worked at various times in show business. One of them, actor Tim Rooney, died in 2006, aged 59.

On September 23, 2010, Rooney celebrated his 90th birthday at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency in the Upper East Side of New York City. Among those who attended the fete were Donald Trump, Regis Philbin, Nathan Lane, and Tony Bennett. In December 2010 he was honored as Turner Classic Movies Star of the Month. On February 16, 2011, Rooney was granted a temporary restraining order against Christopher Aber, one of Jan Rooney’s two sons from a previous marriage. On March 2, 2011 Rooney appeared before a special U.S. Senate committee that was considering legislation to curb elder abuse. Rooney stated that unnamed family members financially abused him. On March 27, 2011, all of Rooney’s finances were permanently handed over to lawyers over the claim of missing money. In April 2011, the temporary restraining order that Rooney was previously granted was replaced by a confidential settlement between Rooney and his stepson. Christopher Aber and Jan Rooney have denied all the allegations. In May 2013, Rooney sold his house of many years, separated from his wife Jan Rooney and split the proceeds.

Rooney died surrounded by his family at his home in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, on April 6, 2014, at the age of 93. Rooney was survived by his wife of 37 years, Jan Chamberlain, as well as eight surviving children, two stepchildren, nineteen grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren.

During his peak years from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, Rooney was among the top box-office stars in the United States. His success was due not only to the versatility of his acting, but to being co-starred with other great actors of the time, including Judy Garland, Wallace Beery, and Spencer Tracy. Between the age of 15 and 25 he made forty-three pictures. Among those, his role as Andy Hardy became one of “Hollywood’s best-loved characters,” with Marlon Brando calling him “the best actor in films.” For his acting the part in thirteen Andy Hardy films, he received an honorary Oscar in 1938 for “bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth” and for “setting a high standard of ability and achievement.” Rooney became an MGM standard, a success vehicle noted for his ability to act, sing, dance, clown, and play various musical instruments, most of which he did with apparent ease and raw talent. “There was nothing he couldn’t do,” said actress Margaret O’Brien. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer treated him like a son and saw in Rooney “the embodiment of the amiable American boy who stands for family, humbug, and sentiment,” writes critic and author, David Thomson. By the time Rooney was 20, his consistent portrayals of characters with youth and energy suggested that his future success was unlimited. Thomson also explains that Rooney’s characters were able to cover a wide range of emotional types, and gives three examples where “Rooney is not just an actor of genius, but an artist able to maintain a stylized commentary on the demon impulse of the small, belligerent man:” Rooney’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) is truly inhuman, one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic. . . . His toughie in Boys Town (1938) struts and bullies like something out of a nightmare and then comes clean in a grotesque but utterly frank outburst of sentimentality in which he aspires to the boy community. . . . His role as Baby Face Nelson (1957), the manic, destructive response of the runt against a pig society.

By the end of the 1940s, his movie characters were no longer in demand and his career went downhill. “In 1938,” he said, “I starred in eight pictures. In 1948 and 1949 together, I starred in only three.” However, film historian Jeanine Basinger notes that although his career “reached the heights and plunged to the depths, Rooney kept on working and growing, the mark of a professional.” Some of the films which reinvigorated his popularity, were Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and The Black Stallion (1979). In the early 1980s, he returned to Broadway in Sugar Babies, and “found himself once more back on top.” Jeanine Basinger tries to encapsulate Rooney’s career: Rooney’s abundant talent, like his film image, might seem like a metaphor for America: a seemingly endless supply of natural resources that could never dry up, but which, it turned out, could be ruined by excessive use and abuse, by arrogance or power, and which had to be carefully tended to be returned to full capacity. From child star to character actor, from movie shorts to television specials, and from films to Broadway, Rooney ultimately did prove he could do it all, do it well, and keep on doing it. His is a unique career, both for its versatility and its longevity.

What happened fifty two years ago in May, 1962…

May 1st… The Dayton Hudson Corporation opened the first of its TARGET discount stores in the St. Paul suburb of Roseville, Minnesota.

… The National Bowling League rolled its last game, with the Detroit Thunderbirds defeating the Twin Cities Skippers in three straight matches.

May 4th… Dr. Masaki Watanabe of Japan performed the very first arthroscopic surgery to repair a meniscus tear, a common injury for athletes. The patient, a 17-year-old basketball player who returned to playing six weeks later.

May 5th… Twelve East Germans escaped through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall.

May 6th… The USS Ethan Allen fired an armed Polaris A-2 ballistic missile, causing the first nuclear explosion from a ship. It occurred on Christmas Island, 1,200 miles from the launch site.

May 7th… Three officials of the Central Intelligence Agency met with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and implored him to stop investigation of Mafia crime boss Sam Giancana. For the first time, the CIA revealed that it had offered $150,000 to several organized criminals to carry out a “hit” against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The secret meeting would become public in 1975, with the release of the Rockefeller Commission’s report on an investigation of the CIA.

… Detroit became the first city in the United States to use traffic cameras and electronic signs to regulate the flow of traffic. The pilot program began with 14 television cameras along a 3.2-mile stretch of the John C. Lodge Freeway, between the Davison Expressway and Interstate 94.

May 9th… The Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter, capable of lifting 20,000 pounds (over 9,000 kg), made its first flight.

… The Beatles signed their first recording contract, with Parlophone, after Brian Epstein persuaded George Martin to sign them, sight unseen.

… At the request of the U.S. Department of State, the Immigration and Naturalization Service agreed to issue a United States visa to Marina Oswald so that her husband Lee Harvey Oswald could return to the U.S.

May 11th… In accepting the Sylvanus Thayer Award, retired General Douglas MacArthur delivered his memorable “Duty, Honor, Country” speech to West Point cadets. The 82-year-old MacArthur delivered the 30-minute address from memory and without notes, and a recording of the remarks would be released as a record album later.

May 12th…  Archie Moore gave up his world light heavyweight boxing title to move up to the heavyweight class. His successor was Harold Johnson.

… Born: Emilio Estévez, American actor, to Martin and Janet Sheen, in Staten Island, New York.

May 14th…  Prince Juan Carlos of Spain married Princess Sophie of Greece in Athens. The two would become King and Queen when the monarchy was restored in Spain in 1975.

May 15th…  American reconnaissance satellite FTV-1126 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

May 16th… Thalidomide was withdrawn from sale in Japan, bringing an end to the worldwide distribution of the morning sickness drug that had caused birth defects. Dainippon Pharmaceutical halted further shipments; about 1,200 “thalidomide babies” were born in Japan.

… Plácido Domingo played the role of Maurizio in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur for the first time, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City.

May 18th…  Al Oerter became the first person to throw the discus more than 200 feet, setting a mark of 61.10 m (200’5″) at Los Angeles.

May 19th…  Marilyn Monroe made her last significant public appearance, singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at a birthday party for President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. The event was part of a fundraiser to pay off the Democratic Party’s four million-dollar debt remaining from Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Monroe was stitched into a $12,000 dress “made of nothing but beads,” and wore nothing underneath as she appeared at the request of Peter Lawford; President Kennedy thanked her afterward, joking, “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

May 21st… Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev accepted the recommendation from his Defense Council to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.

May 22nd… Continental Airlines Flight 11 crashed on a farm near Unionville, Missouri, after the in-flight detonation of a bomb near the rear lavatory. All 45 passengers and crew on the Boeing 707 jet flight from Chicago to Kansas City, were killed. Contact was lost at 9:15 pm and the plane had disappeared from radar at 9:40 after leaving behind a 60-mile line of debris, including a briefcase with the initials “T.G.D.”; Thomas G. Doty, one of the passengers, who had been on his way to Kansas City to face criminal charges for armed robbery, had taken out $300,000 in insurance payable to his wife, and had bought sticks of dynamite at a hardware store, before carrying out the murder-suicide.

May 23rd…  The first successful reattachment (replantation) of a severed limb was accomplished by Dr. Ronald A. Malt at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Everett Knowles, a 12-year-old boy, had had his right arm severed at the shoulder by a freight train. A year after the limb was saved, Everett could move all five fingers and bend his wrist, and by 1965, he was again playing baseball and tennis.

May 24th… Project Mercury: Scott Carpenter orbited the Earth three times in the Aurora 7 space capsule, then splashed down 250 miles off course. He was located and rescued by the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. Carpenter’s rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 7:45 am local time, went around the Earth three times, then began its return at 1:30. Instead of being tilted 34° toward the horizon, the capsule was inclined at 25° and overshot its mark, landing at 1:41 pm. Carpenter deployed a rubber raft and stayed afloat for another three hours before being spotted.

… The U.S. Embassy in Moscow renewed the passport of Lee Harvey Oswald and approved the entry of his wife and daughter into the United States.

May 31st… Died: Adolf Eichmann, 56, German Nazi and SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, was hanged for his role in the extermination of 6,000,000 European Jews. The first execution in the history of modern Israel took place at 11:58 pm local time “on an improvised scaffold in a third story storeroom” at the Ramleh prison near Tel Aviv. The body was cremated soon afterward and Eichmann’s ashes scattered over the Mediterranean Sea.

And that’s the way it was, May, 52 years ago. And now for a video treat, here’s a young comedian by the name of Woody Allen, appearing on the popular American TV show, What’s My Line?

John Garfield John Garfield (March 4, 1913 – May 21, 1952) was an American actor adept at playing brooding, rebellious, working-class characters. He grew up in poverty in Depression-era New York City and in the early 1930′s became an important member of the Group Theater.

In 1937, he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner Bros.’ major stars. Called to testify before the U.S. Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he denied Communist affiliation and refused to “name names,” effectively ending his film career. Some have claimed that the stress of this incident led to his premature death at 39 from a heart attack.

Garfield is acknowledged as a predecessor of such Method actors as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in a small apartment on Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to David and Hannah Garfinkle, Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in the heart of the Yiddish Theater District. In early infancy a middle name—Julius—was added, and for the rest of his life those who knew him well called him Julie. His father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, struggled to make a living and to provide even marginal comfort for his small family. When Garfield was five, his brother Max was born, and their mother never fully recovered from what was described as a “difficult” pregnancy. She died two years later, and the young boys were sent to live with various relatives, all poor, scattered across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

Several of these relatives lived in tenements in a section of East Brooklyn called Brownsville, and Garfield lived there in one house and slept in another. At school he was judged a poor reader and speller, deficits that were aggravated by irregular attendance. He would later say of his time on the streets there, that he learned “all the meanness, all the toughness it’s possible for kids to acquire. If I hadn’t become an actor, I might have become Public Enemy Number One.” His father remarried and moved to the West Bronx, where Garfield joined a series of gangs. Much later he would recall: “Every street had its own gang. That’s the way it was in poor sections… the old safety in numbers.” He soon became gang leader.

At this time people started to notice his ability to mimic well-known performers, both bodily and facially. He also began to hang out and eventually spar at a boxing gym on Jerome Avenue. At some point he contracted scarlet fever, (it was diagnosed later in adulthood), causing permanent damage to his heart and causing him to miss a lot of school. After being expelled three times and expressing a wish to quit school altogether, his parents sent him to P.S. 45, a school for difficult children. It was under the guidance of the school’s principal—the noted educator Angelo Patri—that he was introduced to acting. Noticing Garfield’s tendency to stammer, Patri assigned him to a speech therapy class taught by a charismatic teacher named Margaret O’Ryan. She gave him acting exercises and made him memorize and deliver speeches in front of the class and, as he progressed, in front of school assemblies. O’Ryan thought he had natural talent and cast him in school plays. She encouraged him to sign up for a city-wide debating competition sponsored by the New York Times. To his own surprise, he took second prize.

With Patri and O’Ryan’s encouragement he began to take acting lessons at a drama school that was part of The Heckscher Foundation, and began to appear in their productions. At one of the latter he received back-stage congratulations and an offer of support from the Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami who recommended him to the American Laboratory Theater. Funded by the Theatre Guild, “the Lab” had contracted with Richard Boleslavski to stage its experimental productions, and with Russian actress and expatriate Maria Ouspenskaya, to supervise classes in acting. Former members of the Moscow Art Theater, they were the first proponents of Stanislavsky’s “system” in the United States.

Garfield took morning classes and began volunteering time at the Lab after hours, auditing rehearsals, building and painting scenery, and doing crew work. He would later view this time as beginning his apprenticeship in the theater. Among the people becoming disenchanted with the Guild and turning to the Lab for a more radical, challenging environment were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. In varying degrees, all would become influential in Garfield’s later career. After a stint with Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater and a short period of vagrancy involving hitchhiking, freight hopping, picking fruit, and logging in the Pacific Northwest (Preston Sturges conceived the film Sullivan’s Travels after hearing Garfield tell of his hobo adventures), Garfield made his Broadway debut in 1932, in a play called Lost Boy. It ran for only two weeks but gave Garfield something critically important for an actor struggling to break into the theater: a credit.

Garfield received feature billing in his next role, that of Henry the office boy, in Elmer Rice’s play Counsellor-at-Law starring Paul Muni. The play ran for three months, made an eastern tour and returned for an unprecedented second return engagement, only closing when Muni was contractually compelled to return to Hollywood to make a film for Warner’s. At this point the Warner company expressed an interest in Garfield and sought to arrange a screen test. He turned them down. Garfield’s former colleagues Crawford, Clurman, and Strasburg had begun a new theater collective, calling it simply “the Group,” and Garfield lobbied his friends hard to get in. After months of rejection he began frequenting the inside steps of the Broadhurst Theater where the Group had its offices. Cheryl Crawford noticed him one day and greeted him warmly. Feeling encouraged, he made his request for apprenticeship. Something intangible impressed her and she recommended him to the other directors. They made no dissent.

Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets had been a close friend of Garfield from the early days in the Bronx. After Odets’ one-act play Waiting for Lefty became a surprise hit, the Group announced it would mount a production of his full length drama Awake and Sing. At the playwright’s insistence, Garfield was cast as Ralph, the sensitive young son who pled for “a chance to get to first base.” The play opened in February 1935 and Garfield was singled out by critic Brooks Atkinson for having a “splendid sense of character development.” Garfield’s apprenticeship was officially over; he was voted full membership by the company.

Odets was the man of the moment and he claimed to the press that Garfield was his “find”; that he would soon write a play just for him. That play would turn out to be Golden Boy, and when Luther Adler was cast in the lead role instead, a disillusioned Garfield began to take a second look at the overtures being made by Hollywood.

Garfield had been approached by Hollywood studios before—both Paramount and Warners offering screen tests—but talks had always stalled over a clause he wanted inserted in his contract, one that would allow him time off for stage work. Now Warner Bros. acceded to his demand and Garfield signed a standard feature-player agreement—seven years with options—in Warner’s New York office. Many in the Group were livid over what they considered his betrayal. Elia Kazan’s reaction was different, suggesting that the Group did not so much fear that Garfield would fail, but that he would succeed.

Garfield in Four Daughters

Jack Warner’s first order of business was a change of name, to John Garfield. After many false starts he was finally cast in a supporting, yet crucial role as a tragic young composer in a Michael Curtiz film titled Four Daughters. After the picture’s release in 1938, he received wide critical acclaim and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The studio quickly revised Garfield’s contract—designating him a star player rather than a featured one—for seven years without options. They also created a name-above-the-title vehicle for him, titled: They Made Me a Criminal. Before the breakout success of Daughters, Garfield had made a B movie feature called Blackwell’s Island. Not wanting their new star to appear in a low-budget film, Warner’s ordered an A movie upgrade by adding an additional $100,000 to its budget and recalling its director Michael Curtiz to shoot newly scripted scenes.

Garfield’s debut had a cinematic impact difficult to conceive in retrospect. As biographer Lawrence Swindell put it: “Garfield’s work was spontaneous, non-actory; it had abandon. He didn’t recite dialogue, he attacked it until it lost the quality of talk and took on the nature of speech. The screen actor had been dialogue’s servant, but now Julie had switched those roles. Like Cagney, he was an exceptionally mobile performer from the start of his screen career. These traits were orchestrated with his physical appearance to create a screen persona innately powerful in the sexual sense. What Warner’s saw immediately was that Garfield’s impact was felt by both sexes. This was almost unique.”

His “honeymoon” with Warner’s over, Garfield entered a protracted period of conflict with the studio, they attempting to cast him in crowd-pleasing melodramas like Dust Be My Destiny, and he insisting on quality scripts that would offer a challenge and highlight his versatility. The result was often a series of suspensions, Garfield refusing an assigned role and Warner’s refusing to pay him. Garfield’s problem was the same one shared by any actor working in the studio system of the 1930′s: by contract the studio had the right to cast him in any project they wanted to. But, as Robert Nott explains, “To be fair, most of the studios had a team of producers, directors, and writers who could pinpoint a particular star’s strengths and worked to capitalize on those strengths in terms of finding vehicles that would appeal to the public – and hence make the studio money. The forces that prevented him from getting high quality roles were really the result of the combined willpower of Warner Bros., the studio system in general, and the general public, which also had its own perception of how Garfield (or Cagney or Bogart for that matter) should appear on screen.”

A notable exception to this trend was Daughters Courageous, a not-quite-sequel (same cast, different story and characters) to his debut film. The film did well critically but failed to find an audience, the public dissatisfied that it was not a true sequel (hard to pull off, since the original character, Mickey Borden, died in the first picture). The director Curtiz called the film “my obscure masterpiece.”

At the onset of World War II, Garfield immediately attempted to enlist in the armed forces, but was turned down because of his heart condition. Frustrated, he turned his energies to supporting the war effort. He and actress Bette Davis were the driving forces behind the opening of the Hollywood Canteen, a club offering food and entertainment for American servicemen. He traveled overseas to help entertain the troops, made several bond selling tours, and starred in a string of popular, patriotic films like Air Force, Destination Tokyo, and Pride of the Marines (all box office successes). He was particularly proud of that last film based on the life of Al Schmid, a war hero blinded in combat. In preparing for the role Garfield lived for several weeks with Schmid and his wife in Philadelphia and would blindfold himself for hours at a time.

Pride of the Marines

After the war Garfield starred in a series of successful films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) with Lana Turner, Humoresque (1946) with Joan Crawford, and the Oscar-winning Best Picture, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947). In Gentleman’s Agreement, Garfield took a featured, but supporting, part because he believed deeply in the film’s exposé of anti-semitism in America. In 1948, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring role in Body and Soul (1947).

That same year, Garfield returned to Broadway in the play Skipper Next to God. A strong-willed and often verbally combative individual, Garfield did not hesitate to venture out on his own when the opportunity arose. In 1946, when his contract with Warner Bros. expired, Garfield decided not to renew it, and opted to start his own independent production company, one of the first Hollywood stars to take this step.

“I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. My life is an open book. I am no Red. I am no ‘pink.’ I am no fellow traveler. I am a Democrat by politics, a liberal by inclination, and a loyal citizen of this country by every act of my life.” —From Garfield’s statement read before the HUAC.

Long involved in liberal politics, Garfield was caught up in the Communist scare of the late 1940′s and early 1950′s. He supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of political beliefs. When called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was empowered to investigate purported communist infiltration in America, Garfield refused to name Communist Party members or followers, testifying that, indeed, he knew none in the film industry.

Garfield rejected Communism, and just prior to his death in hopes of redeeming himself in the eyes of the “blacklisters,” wrote that he had been duped by Communist ideology, in an unpublished article called “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” a reference to Garfield’s movies about boxing. However, his forced testimony before the committee had severely damaged his reputation. He was blacklisted in Red Channels, and barred from future employment as an actor by Hollywood movie studio bosses for the remainder of his career.

With film work scarce because of the blacklist, Garfield returned to Broadway and starred in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, finally being cast in the lead role denied him years before. He was in 35 feature films, five short subjects, and one documentary: The John Garfield Story (2003) (available on Warner Home Video’s 2004 DVD of The Postman Always Rings Twice).

Garfield moved out of his New York apartment for the last time, indicating to friends it was not a temporary separation. He confided to columnist Earl Wilson that he would soon be divorced. Close friends speculated that it was his wife’s opposition to his plotted confession in Look magazine that triggered the separation. He heard that a HUAC investigator was reviewing his testimony for possible perjury charges. His agent reported that 20th Century-Fox wanted him for a film called Taxi but would not even begin talks unless the investigation concluded in his favor. Three actor friends, Canada Lee, Mady Christians, and J. Edward Bromberg, had all recently died after being listed by the committee.

The morning of May 20, 1952, Garfield, against his doctor’s strict orders, played several strenuous sets of tennis with a friend, mentioning the fact that he had not been to bed the night before. He met actress Iris Whitney for dinner and afterward became suddenly ill, complaining that he felt chilled. She took him to her apartment where he refused to let her call a doctor and instead went to bed. The next morning she found him dead. Long-term heart problems, allegedly aggravated by the stress of his blacklisting, had led to his death at the age of 39.

The funeral was the largest in New York since Rudolph Valentino, with over ten thousand persons crowding the streets outside. His estate, valued at “more than $100,000,” was left entirely to his wife. Shortly afterward, ironically, the HUAC closed its investigation of John Garfield, leaving him in the clear. Garfield is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York. In 1954, the widowed Roberta Garfield married attorney Sidney Cohn, who died in 1991. She died in January 2004.

He and Roberta Seidman married in February 1935. Though his wife had been a member of the Communist Party, there was no evidence that Garfield himself was ever a Communist. They had three children: Katherine (1938–1945), who died of an allergic reaction on March 18, 1945; David (1943–1994); and Julie (born 1946), the latter two later becoming actors themselves. Garfield was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Four Daughters in 1939 , and Best Actor for Body and Soul in 1948. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7065 Hollywood Boulevard.

Peggy Lee Peggy Lee (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002) was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer and actress, in a career spanning six decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman’s big band, she forged a sophisticated persona, evolving into a multi-faceted artist and performer. She wrote music for films, acted, and created conceptual record albums—encompassing poetry, jazz, chamber pop, and art songs.

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, the seventh of eight children of Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad, and his wife Selma Amelia (Anderson) Egstrom. She and her family were Lutherans. Her father was Swedish American and her mother was Norwegian American. Her mother died when Lee was just four years old. Afterward, her father married Min Schaumber, who treated her with great cruelty while her alcoholic father did little to stop it. As a result, she developed her musical talent and took several part-time jobs so that she could be away from home.

Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her a salary in food. Both during and after her high school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), changed her name to Peggy Lee. Miss Lee moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17.

She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy, and was noticed by hotel owner Frank Beringin while working at the Doll House in Palm Springs, California. It was here that she developed her trademark sultry purr – having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. Beringin offered her a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East in Chicago. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. According to Lee, “Benny’s then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into The Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn’t know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn’t like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing.” She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years.

In 1942 Lee had her first No. 1 hit, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place”, followed by 1943′s “Why Don’t You Do Right?” (Originally sung by Lil Green). It sold over a million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman’s orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.

In March 1943 Lee married Dave Barbour, a guitarist in Goodman’s band. Peggy said, “David joined Benny’s band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up, although David didn’t play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule. I think that’s not too bad a rule, but you can’t help falling in love with somebody.”

When Lee and Barbour left the band, the idea was that he would work in the studios and she would keep house and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for the fledgling Capitol Records in 1947, for whom she produced a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including “I Don’t Know Enough About You” (1946) and “It’s a Good Day” (1947). With the release of the US No. 1-selling record of 1948, “Mañana,” her “retirement” was over. In 1948 Lee joined Perry Como and Jo Stafford as a rotating host of the NBC Radio musical program The Chesterfield Supper Club. She was also a regular on NBC’s Jimmy Durante Show and appeared frequently on Bing Crosby’s radio shows throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.

She left Capitol for Decca Records in 1952, but returned to Capitol in 1957. She is most famous for her cover version of the Little Willie John hit “Fever” written by Eddie Cooley and John Davenport, to which she added her own, un-copyrighted lyrics (“Romeo loved Juliet,” “Captain Smith and Pocahontas”) and her rendition of Leiber and Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?”. Her relationship with the Capitol label spanned almost three decades, aside from her brief but artistically rich detour (1952–1956) at Decca Records, where in 1953 she recorded one of her most acclaimed albums, Black Coffee. While recording for Decca, Lee had hit singles with the songs Lover and Mister Wonderful.

In her 60-year-long career, Peggy was the recipient of three Grammy Awards (including the Lifetime Achievement Award), an Academy Award nomination, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Award, the President’s Award, the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Living Legacy Award from the Women’s International Center. In 1999 Lee was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Lee was a successful songwriter, with songs from the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, for which she also supplied the singing and speaking voices of four characters. Her collaborators included Laurindo Almeida, Harold Arlen, Sonny Burke, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Dave Grusin, Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, Jack Marshall, Johnny Mandel, Marian McPartland, Willard Robison, Lalo Schifrin and Victor Young. She wrote the lyrics for popular songs that include, “It’s A Good Day,” “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me),” and “The Shining Sea.” Her first published song was in 1941, “Little Fool.” “What More Can a Woman Do?” was recorded by Sarah Vaughan with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)” was No.1 for 9 weeks on the Billboard singles chart in 1948, from the week of March 13 to May 8.

Lee was a mainstay of Capitol Records when rock and roll came onto the American music scene. She was among the first of the “old guard” to recognize this new genre, as seen by her recording music from The Beatles, Randy Newman, Carole King, James Taylor, and other up-and-coming songwriters. From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, she produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year that usually included standards (often arranged quite differently from the original), her own compositions, and material from young artists.

In 1952 Lee starred opposite Danny Thomas in The Jazz Singer (1952), a Technicolor remake of the early Al Jolson part-talkie film The Jazz Singer (1927 film). In 1955, she played an alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955 film), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1955 Lee did the speaking and singing voices for several characters in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. In 1957, Lee guest starred on the short-lived ABC variety program, The Guy Mitchell Show.

Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes in a wheelchair. After years of poor health, she died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack at age 81. She was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles’ Westwood, Los Angeles, California neighborhood. On her marker in a garden setting is inscribed, “Music is my life’s breath.”

Carl Lee Perkins (April 9, 1932 – January 19, 1998) was an Americanrockabilly musician who recorded most notably at Sun Records Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, beginning in 1954. His best-known song is “Blue Suede Shoes“. According to Charlie Daniels, “Carl Perkins’ songs personified the rockabilly era, and Carl Perkins’ sound personifies the rockabilly sound more so than anybody involved in it, because he never changed.” Perkins’ songs were recorded by artists (and friends) as influential as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Cash, which further cemented his place in the history of popular music. Paul McCartney even claimed that “if there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.” Called “the King of Rockabilly”, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll, the Rockabilly, and the Nashville Songwriters Halls of Fame; and was a Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipient.

Perkins was the son of poor sharecroppers, Buck and Louise Perkins (misspelled on his birth certificate as “Perkings”) near Tiptonville, Tennessee. He grew up hearing Southern gospel music sung by whites in church, and by African American field workers when he started working in the cotton fields at age six. During spring and autumn, the school day would be followed by several hours of work in the fields. During the summer, workdays were 12–14 hours, “from can to can’t.” Carl and his brother Jay together would earn 50 cents a day. With all family members working and not having any credit, there was enough money for beans and potatoes, some tobacco for Carl’s father Buck, and occasionally the luxury of a five-cent bag of hard candy.

During Saturday nights Carl would listen to the radio with his father and hear the Grand Ole Opry, and Roy Acuff‘s broadcasts on the Opry inspired him to ask his parents for a guitar. Because they could not afford a real guitar, Carl’s father fashioned one from a cigar box and a broomstick. When a neighbor in tough straits offered to sell his dented and scratched Gene Autry model guitar with worn-out strings, Buck purchased it for a couple of dollars.

For the next year Carl taught himself parts of Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird” and “The Wabash Cannonball“, which he had heard on the Opry. He also cited the fast playing and vocals of Bill Monroe as an early influence. Carl began learning more about playing his guitar from a fellow field worker named John Westbrook who befriended him. “Uncle John,” as Carl called him, was an African American in his sixties who played blues and gospel on his battered acoustic guitar. Most famously, “Uncle John” advised Carl when playing the guitar to “Get down close to it. You can feel it travel down the strangs, come through your head and down to your soul where you live. You can feel it. Let it vib-a-rate.” Because Carl could not afford new strings when they broke, he retied them. The knots would cut into his fingers when he tried to slide to another note, so he began bending the notes, stumbling onto a type of “blue note.”

Carl was recruited to be a member of the Lake County Fourth Grade Marching Band, and because of the Perkins’s limited finances, was given a new white shirt, cotton pants, white band cap and red cape by Miss Lee McCutcheon, who was in charge of the band. In January 1947, Buck Perkins moved his family from Lake County, Tennessee to Madison County, Tennessee. A new radio that ran on house current rather than a battery and the proximity of Memphis made it possible for Carl to hear a greater variety of music. At age fourteen years, using the I IV V chord progression common to country songs of the day, he wrote what came to be known around Jackson as “Let Me Take You To the Movie, Magg” (the song would convince Sam Phillips to sign Perkins to his Sun Records label).

Perkins and his brother Jay had their first paying job (in tips) as entertainers at the Cotton Boll tavern on Highway 45 some twelve miles south of Jackson, starting on Wednesday nights during late 1946. Carl was only 14 years old. One of the songs they played was an uptempo, country blues shuffle version of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky“. Free drinks were one of the perks of playing in a tavern, and Carl drank four beers that first night. Within a month Carl and Jay began playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Sand Ditch tavern near the western boundary of Jackson. Both places were the scene of occasional fights, and both of the Perkins Brothers gained a reputation as fighters.

During the next couple of years the Perkins Brothers began playing other taverns, including El Rancho, the Roadside Inn, and the Hilltop around Bemis and Jackson as they became well known. Carl persuaded his brother Clayton to play the bass fiddle to complete the sound of the band. Perkins began performing regularly on WTJS-AM in Jackson during the late 1940s as a sometime member of the Tennessee Ramblers. He also appeared on Hayloft Frolic where he performed two songs, sometimes including “Talking Blues” as done by Robert Lunn on the Grand Ole Opry. Perkins and then his brothers began appearing on The Early Morning Farm and Home Hour. Overwhelmingly positive listener response resulted in a 15-minute segment sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour. By the end of the 1940s, the Perkins Brothers were the best-known band in the Jackson area.

Perkins had day jobs during most of these early years, working first at picking cotton, then at Day’s Dairy in Malesus, then at a mattress factory and in a battery plant. He then worked as a pan greaser for the Colonial Baking Company from 1951 through 1952. During January 1953, Perkins married a woman he had known for a number of years, Valda Crider. When his job at the bakery was reduced to part-time, Valda, who had her own job, encouraged Carl to begin working the taverns full-time. He began playing six nights a week. Late the same year he added W.S. “Fluke” Holland to the band as a drummer, who had not any previous experience as a musician but had a good sense of rhythm.

Malcolm Yelvington remembered the Perkins brothers from 1953 when they played in Covington, Tennessee. He noted that Carl had a very unusual blues-like style all his own. By 1955 Carl had made tapes of his material with a borrowed tape recorder, and had sent them to companies such as Columbia and RCA with addresses such as “Columbia Records, New York City.” “I had sent tapes to RCA and Columbia and had never heard a thing from ‘em.”

Early Elvis

During July 1954, Perkins and his wife heard a new release of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black on the radio, and Valda told Carl that someone in Memphis understood what he was doing and he should go see him. Later, Presley told Perkins that he had traveled to Jackson and seen Perkins and his group playing at El Rancho. As “Blue Moon of Kentucky faded out, Carl said, “There’s a man in Memphis who understands what we’re doing. I need to go see him.”

Years later fellow musician Gene Vincent told an interviewer that, rather than “Blue Moon of Kentucky” being a “new sound”, “a lot of people were doing it before that, especially Carl Perkins.”

Perkins successfully auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records during early October 1954. “Movie Magg” and “Turn Around” were released on the Phillips-owned Flip label (151) March 19, 1955, with “Turn Around” becoming a regional success. With the song getting airplay across the South and Southwest, Perkins was booked to appear along with Elvis Presley at theaters in Marianna and West Memphis, Arkansas. Commenting on the audience reaction to both Presley and himself Perkins said, “When I’d jump around they’d scream some, but they were gettin’ ready for him. It was like TNT, man, it just exploded. All of a sudden the world was wrapped up in rock.”

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two were the next musicians to be added to the performances by Sun musicians. During the summer of 1955 there were junkets to Little Rock, Forrest City, Arkansas, Corinth and Tupelo, Mississippi. Again performing at El Rancho, the Perkins brothers were involved in an automobile accident. A friend, who had been driving, was pinned by the steering wheel. Perkins managed to drag him from the car, which had begun burning. Clayton had been thrown from the car, but was not injured seriously.

Another Perkins tune, “Gone Gone Gone”, released in October 1955 by Sun, was also a regional success. It was a “bounce blues in flavorsome combined country and r.&b. idioms”. It was backed by the more traditional “Let the Jukebox Keep On Playing,” complete with fiddle, “Western Boogie” bass line, steel guitar and weepy vocal. Commenting on Perkins’s playing, Sam Phillips has been quoted as saying that, “I knew that Carl could rock and in fact he told me right from the start that he had been playing that music before Elvis came out on record … I wanted to see whether this was someone who could revolutionize the country end of the business.

That same autumn, Perkins wrote “Blue Suede Shoes” after seeing a dancer get angry with his date for scuffing up his shoes. Several weeks later, on December 19, 1955, Perkins and his band recorded the song during a session at Sun Studio in Memphis. Phillips suggested changes to the lyrics (“Go, cat, go”) and the band changed the end of the song to a “boogie vamp.” Presley left Sun for a larger opportunity with RCA in November, and on December 19, 1955, Phillips, who had begun recording Perkins in late 1954, told Perkins, “Carl Perkins, you’re my rockabilly cat now.” Released on January 1, 1956, “Blue Suede Shoes” was a massive chart success. In the United States, it scored No. 1 on Billboard magazine’scountry music charts (the only No. 1 success he would have) and No. 2 on Billboard’s Best Sellers popular music chart. On March 17, Perkins became the first country artist to score No. 3 on the rhythm & blues charts. That night, Perkins performed the song during his television debut on ABC-TV’s Ozark Jubilee (Presley performed it for the second time that same night on CBS-TV’s Stage Show; he’d first sung it on the program on February 11).

In the United Kingdom, the song became a Top Ten success, scoring No. 10 on the British charts. It was the first record by a Sun label artist to sell a million copies. The B side, “Honey Don’t,” was covered by the Beatles, Wanda Jackson and (in the 1970s) T. Rex. John Lennon sang lead on the song when the Beatles performed it before it was given to Ringo Starr to sing. Lennon also performed the song on the Lost Lennon Tapes.

After playing a show in Norfolk, Virginia on March 21, 1956, the Perkins Brothers Band headed to New York City for a March 24 appearance on NBC-TV’sPerry Como Show. Shortly before sunrise on March 22 on Route 13 between Dover and Woodside in Dover, Delaware, Stuart Pinkham (a.k.a. Richard Stuart and Poor Richard) assumed duties as driver. After hitting the back of a pickup truck, their car went into a ditch of water about a foot deep, and Perkins was lying face down in the water. Drummer Holland rolled Perkins over, saving him from drowning. He had suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck, a severe concussion, a broken collar bone, and lacerations all over his body in the crash. Perkins remained unconscious for an entire day. The driver of the pickup truck, Thomas Phillips, a 40-year old farmer, died when he was thrown into the steering wheel. Carl’s brother Jay had a fractured neck along with severe internal injuries, later dying from these complications.

On March 23, Bill Black, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana visited Perkins on their way to New York to appear with Presley the next day. D.J. Fontana recalled Perkins saying, “Of all the people, I looked up and there you guys are. You looked like a bunch of angels coming to see me.” Black told him, “Hey man, Elvis sends his love,” and lit a cigarette for him, even though the patient in the next bed was in an oxygen tent. A week later, Perkins was given a telegram from Presley (which had arrived on March 23), wishing him a speedy recovery.

Sam Philips had planned to surprise Perkins with a gold record on The Perry Como Show. “Blue Suede Shoes” had already sold more than 500,000 copies by March 22. Now, while Carl recuperated from the accident, “Blue Suede Shoes” scored No. 1 on most popular, R&B, and country regional music charts. It also scored No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and country charts. Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” scored number one on the pop and country charts, while “Blue Suede Shoes” did better than “Heartbreak” on the R&B charts. By mid-April, more than one million copies of “Blue Suede Shoes” had been sold.

On April 3, while still recuperating in Jackson, Perkins would see Presley perform “Blue Suede Shoes” on his first appearance on The Milton Berle Show appearance, which was his third performance of the song on national television. He also made references to it twice during an appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Although his version became more famous than Perkins’s, it only scored No. 20 on Billboard’s popular music chart.

Perkins returned to live performances on April 21, 1956, beginning with an appearance in Beaumont, Texas, with the “Big D Jamboree” tour. Before resuming touring, Sam Phillips arranged a recording session at Sun with Ed Cisco filling in for the still- recuperating Jay. By mid-April, “Dixie Fried,” “Put Your Cat Clothes On,” “Right String, Wrong Yo-Yo,” “You Can’t Make Love to Somebody,” “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” and “That Don’t Move Me” had been recorded.

Beginning during early summer, Perkins was paid $1,000 to play just two songs a night on the extended tour of “Top Stars of ’56.” Other performers on the tour were Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. When Perkins and the group entered the stage in Columbia, South Carolina, he was appalled to see a teenager with a bleeding chin pressed against the stage by the crowd. During the first guitar intermission of “Honey Don’t” they were waved offstage and into a vacant dressing room behind a double line of police officers. Perkins was quoted as saying, “It was dangerous. Lot of kids got hurt. There was a lot of rioting going on, just crazy, man! The music drove ‘em insane.” Appalled by what he had seen and experienced, Perkins left the tour. Appearing with Gene Vincent and Lillian Briggs in a “rock ‘n’ roll show”, he helped pull 39,872 people to the Reading Fair in Pennsylvania on a Tuesday night in late September. A full grandstand and one thousand people stood in a heavy rain to hear Perkins and Briggs at the Brockton Fair in Mass.

Sun issued more Perkins songs in 1956: “Boppin’ the Blues“/”All Mama’s Children” (Sun 243), the B side co-written with Johnny Cash, “Dixie Fried“/”I’m Sorry, I’m Not Sorry” (Sun 249). “Matchbox“/”Your True Love” (Sun 261) came out in February 1957. “Boppin’ the Blues” reached No. 47 on the Cashbox pop singles chart, No. 9 on the Billboard country and western chart, and No. 70 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.

“Matchbox” is considered a rockabilly classic. The day it was recorded, Elvis Presley visited the studio. Along with Johnny Cash (who left early), Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Presley spent more than an hour singing gospel, country and rhythm-and-blues songs while a tape rolled.[5] The casual session was called The Million Dollar Quartet by a local newspaper the next day, and it was eventually released on CD in 1990. On February 2, 1957, Perkins again appeared on Ozark Jubilee, singing “Matchbox” and “Blue Suede Shoes”. He also made at least two appearances on Town Hall Party in Compton, California in 1957 singing both songs. Those performances were included in the Western Ranch Dance Party series filmed and distributed by Screen Gems.

He released “That’s Right,” co-written with Johnny Cash, backed with the ballad “Forever Yours,” as Sun single 274 in August, 1957. Both sides failed to chart. The 1957 film Jamboree included a Perkins performance of “Glad All Over” (not to be confused with the Dave Clark Five song of the same name), that ran 1:55. “Glad All Over,” written by Aaron Schroeder, Sid Tepper, and Roy Bennett, was released by Sun in January 1958.

During 1958, Perkins moved to Columbia Records where he recorded songs such as “Jive After Five”, “Rockin’ Record Hop,” “Levi Jacket (And a Long Tail Shirt),” “Pop, Let Me Have the Car,” “Pink Pedal Pushers,” “Any Way the Wind Blows,” “Hambone,” “Pointed Toe Shoes,” “Sister Twister,” and “L-O-V-E-V-I-L-L-E.” In 1959, he wrote the country and western song “The Ballad of Boot Hill” for Johnny Cash who released the song as part of an EP on Columbia Records.

He performed often in the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas during 1962 and 1963, and also in nine Midwestern states and a tour of Germany.

During May 1964, Perkins toured Britain along with Chuck Berry. Perkins had been reluctant at first to undertake the tour, convinced that as forgotten as he was in America, he would be even more obscure in the U.K., and he was afraid of being humiliated by drawing meager audiences to the performances. It was Berry who convinced him that they had remained much more popular in Britain since the 1950s than they had in the United States, and that there would be large crowds of fans at every show. The Animals backed the two performers. On the last night of the tour, Perkins attended a party that turned out to be for him, and ended up sitting on the floor sharing stories, playing guitar, and singing songs while surrounded by the Beatles. Ringo Starr asked if he could record “Honey Don’t”. Perkins answered, “Man, go ahead, have at it.” The Beatles would cover “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” recorded by Perkins but adapted from a song originally recorded by Rex Griffin during 1936 with new music composed by Carl Perkins, a song with the same title also recorded by Roy Newman in 1938. The Beatles recorded two versions of “Glad All Over” in 1963. Another tour to Germany followed in the autumn. He released “Big Bad Blues” backed with “Lonely Heart” as a single on Brunswick Records with the Nashville Teens in June 1964.

Although he had been trying to rehabilitate himself during 1968 by drinking only beer (but large amounts of it), while on tour with the Johnny Cash troupe, Perkins began a four-day bender in Tulsa, Oklahoma, starting with a bottle of Early Times. Nevertheless, with the urging of Cash, he opened a show in San Diego, California, by playing four songs after seeing “four or five of me in the mirror,” and while being able to see “nothin’ but a blur.” After drinking yet another pint of Early Times, he passed out on the tour bus. By morning he started hallucinating “big spiders, and dinosaurs, huge, and they were gonna step on me.” The bus was parked on a beach at the ocean. He was tempted by yet another pint of whiskey that he had hidden. He took the bottle with him onto the beach and fell on his knees and said, “Lord … I’m gonna throw this bottle. I’m gonna show You that I believe in You. I sailed it into the Pacific … I got up, I knew I had done the right thing.” Perkins and Cash, who had his own problems with drugs, then gave each other support to refrain from their drug of choice.

During 1968, Cash recorded the Perkins-written “Daddy Sang Bass” (which incorporates parts of the American standard “Will the Circle Be Unbroken“) and scored No. 1 on the country music charts for six weeks. Glen Campbell also covered the song, as did the Statler Brothers and Carl Story. “Daddy Sang Bass” was also a Country Music Association nominee for Song of the Year. Perkins also played lead guitar on the Cash smash single “A Boy Named Sue” which was No. 1 for five weeks on the country chart and No. 2 on the popular music chart. Perkins spent a decade in Cash’s touring revue and appeared on The Johnny Cash Show. He played “Matchbox” with Cash and Derek and the Dominoes. Cash also featured Perkins in rehearsal jamming with José Feliciano and Merle Travis.

A Kraft Music Hall episode hosted by Cash on April 16, 1969 had Perkins singing his song “Restless.” Country music fans may recognize The Statler Brothers’ song, “Flowers on the Wall,” which was also featured on the show. During February 1969, Perkins joined with Bob Dylan to write “Champaign, Illinois.” Dylan was recording in Nashville from February 12 to February 21 for an album that would be titled Nashville Skyline, and met Perkins when he appeared on The Johnny Cash Show on June 7. Dylan had written one verse of a song, but was stuck. After Perkins worked out a loping rhythm and improvised a verse ending lyric, Dylan said, “Your song. Take it. Finish it.” The co-authored song was included in Perkins’s 1969 album On Top.

Perkins was also united in 1969 by Columbia’s Murray Krugman with a rockabilly group based in New York’s Hudson Valley, the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet. Carl and NRBQ recorded “Boppin’ the Blues” which featured the group backing him on songs like his staples “Turn Around” and “Boppin’ the Blues” and included songs recorded separately by Perkins and NRBQ. One of his TV appearances with Cash was on the popular country series Hee Haw on February 16, 1974.

Johnny Cash’s brother Tommy Cash had a Top Ten country gospel hit in 1970 with a recording of the song “Rise and Shine” which was written by Carl Perkins. Tommy Cash reached no. 9 on the Billboard country chart and no. 8 on the Canadian country chart with his version of the song. Arlene Harden had a Top 40 country hit in 1971 with the Carl Perkins composition “True Love is Greater Than Friendship” from the film Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1971) which reached no. 22 on the Billboard country chart and no. 33 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart for Al Martino that same year.

After a long legal struggle with Sam Phillips over royalties, Perkins gained ownership of his songs during the 1970s. During 1981 Perkins recorded the song “Get It” with Paul McCartney, providing vocals and playing guitar with the former Beatle. This recording was included on the chart-topping album Tug Of War released in 1982. This track also comprised the B-side of the title track single in a slightly edited form. One source states that Perkins “wrote the song with Paul McCartney.” The song ends with a fade-out of Perkins’s impromptu laughter.

The rockabilly revival of the 1980s helped bring Perkins back into the limelight. During 1985, he re-recorded “Blue Suede Shoes” with Lee Rocker and Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, as part of the soundtrack for the film, Porky’s Revenge.

In October 1985, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Lee Rocker, Rosanne Cash and Ringo Starr appeared with him on stage for a television special that was taped live at the Limehouse Studios in London called Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session. The show was later shown on Channel 4 on 1 January 1986. Perkins performed 16 songs with 2 encores in an extraordinary performance. Perkins and his friends ended the session by singing his most famous song, 30 years after its writing, which brought Perkins to tears. The concert special was a memorable highlight of Perkins’s later career and has been highly praised by fans for the spirited performances delivered by Perkins and his famous guests. The concert was released for DVD by Snapper Music in 2006.

Also during 1985, Perkins was inducted to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in 1987, wider recognition of his contribution to music came with his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition, “Blue Suede Shoes” was chosen as one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, and as a Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipient. His pioneering contribution to the genre was also recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

Perkins’s only notable film performance as an actor was in John Landis‘ 1985 film Into the Night, a cameo-laden film that includes a scene where characters played by Perkins and David Bowie die at each other’s hand.

As a guitarist Perkins used finger picking, imitations of the pedal steel guitar, right-handed damping (muffling strings near the bridge with the palm), arpeggios, advantageous use of open strings, single and double string bending (pushing strings across the neck to raise their pitch), chromaticism (using notes outside of the scale), country and blue licks, and tritone and other tonality clashing licks (short phrases that include notes from other keys and move in logical, often symmetric patterns). A rich vocabulary of chords including sixth and thirteenth chords, ninth and add nine chords, and suspensions, show up in rhythm parts and solos. Free use of syncopations, chord anticipations (arriving at a chord change before the other players, often by a 1/8 note) and crosspicking (repeating a three 1/8 note pattern so that an accent falls variously on the upbeat or downbeat) are also in his bag of tricks.

During 1986, he returned to the Sun Studio in Memphis, joining Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison on the album Class of ’55. The record was a tribute to their early years at Sun and, specifically, the Million Dollar Quartet jam session involving Perkins, Presley, Cash, and Lewis in 1956. During 1989, Perkins co-wrote and played guitar on the Judds‘ No. 1 country success, “Let Me Tell You About Love.” During 1989, Perkins also signed a record deal with Platinum Records LTD for an album with the title Friends, Family, and Legends, featuring performances by Chet Atkins, Travis Tritt, Steve Wariner, Joan Jett and Charlie Daniels, along with Paul Shaffer and Will Lee. During 1992, during the production of this CD, Perkins developed throat cancer.

He returned to Sun Studios to record with Scotty Moore, Presley’s first guitar player. The CD was called 706 ReUNION, released on Belle Meade Records, and featured D.J. Fontana, Marcus Van Storey and the Jordanaires. During 1993, Perkins performed with the Kentucky Headhunters in a music video remake, filmed in Glasgow, Kentucky, of his song “Dixie Fried.” In 1994, Perkins teamed up with Duane Eddy and the Mavericks to contribute “Matchbox” to the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Country produced by the Red Hot Organization.

Perkins’ last album, Go Cat Go!, was released during 1996, and featured new collaborations with many of the above artists, as well as George Harrison, Paul Simon, John Fogerty, Tom Petty, and Bono. It was released by the independent label Dinosaur Records and distributed by BMG.His last major concert performance was the Music for Montserrat all-star charity concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall on September 15, 1997.

Perkins died four months later, on January 19, 1998 at the age of 65 at Jackson-Madison County Hospital in Jackson, Tennessee from throat cancer after suffering several strokes. Among mourners at the funeral at Lambuth University were George Harrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wynonna Judd, Garth Brooks, Nashville Agent Jim Dallas Crouch, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Perkins was interred at Ridgecrest Cemetery in Jackson.

A strong advocate for the prevention of child abuse, Carl Perkins worked with the Jackson Exchange Club to establish the first center for the prevention of child abuse in Tennessee and the fourth in the nation. Proceeds from a concert planned by Perkins were combined with a grant from the National Exchange Club to establish the Prevention of Child Abuse in October 1981. For years its annual Circle of Hope Telethon generated one quarter of the center’s annual operating budget.

Carl Perkins had one daughter, Debbie, and three sons, Stan, Greg, and Steve. His first-born son, Stan Perkins, is a recording artist as well. In 2010, Stan joined forces with Jerry Naylor to record a duet tribute to Carl, “To Carl; Let it Vibrate.” Stan Perkins has been inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Perkins’ widow, Valda deVere Perkins, died November 15, 2005 in Jackson.

Perkins collaborated on a 1996 biography, Go, Cat, Go, with New York–based music writer David McGee. Plans for a biographical film were announced by Santa Monica-based production company Fastlane Entertainment was slated for release in 2009. During 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Perkins number 99 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. His version of “Blue Suede Shoes” was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of CongressNational Recording Registry in 2006.

The Perkins family still owns his songs, which are administered by former Beatle Paul McCartney‘s company MPL Communications.

Natalie Wood was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California, as Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. Her parents were Russian-born émigrés, of Ukrainian and Russian descent, who spoke barely comprehensible English; they changed the family name to Gurdin after becoming US citizens. When she was just four years old, Natalie appeared in her first film, Happy Land (1943). A production company had come to Santa Rosa, California, where the Gurdins were living and Natalie won a bit part of a crying little girl who had just dropped her ice cream cone. With stars in her eyes for her daughter, Mrs. Gurdin packed the family and moved south to Los Angeles in the hopes that more films would come her daughter’s way. Unfortunately they did not, at least not at first, and the family continued to scrape by much as they had done in Santa Rosa. In 1946 Natalie tested for a role in Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). She was only seven at the time, and flunked the screen test. Natalie’s mother convinced the studio heads to give her another test, and this time she was convincing enough that they gave Natalie the role.

In 1947′s Miracle on 34th Street (1947), she won the hearts of movie patrons around the country as Susan Walker in a film that is considered a Christmas classic to this day.

Natalie stayed very busy as a child actress, appearing in no less than 18 films in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When she was 16 Natalie appeared in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean, Sal Mineo and Dennis Hopper. She played Judy, a rebellious high school student who was more concerned with hanging out with the wrong crowd than being a sweet teenager like her contemporaries. The result was her first Academy Award nomination and a defining moment in her development as an adult actress. She appeared in Splendor in the Grass (1961), West Side Story (1961), Gypsy(1962), and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).

While Natalie was reported to be unhappy making “West Side Story,” the film won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. In short, it was a smash hit.

Although she wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award in that one, she did receive nominations for her roles in “Splendor in the Grass” and “Love with the Proper Stranger.” After This Property Is Condemned (1966) in 1966, Natalie stayed away from Hollywood for three years to have time for herself and to consider where she was going. When she did return, her star quality had not diminished, as evidenced by her playing Carol Sanders in the hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice(1969). From that point on Natalie didn’t work as much. She made a few television appearances, but nothing of substance with the exception of the TV mini-series From Here to Eternity (1979).

After making The Last Married Couple in America (1980), Natalie began work on Brainstorm (1983) in the fall of 1981 with Christopher Walken. She did not live to see it released. On November 29, 1981, she was sailing on the yacht she shared with her husband, Robert Wagner, and their friend Walken, when she fell in the ocean while trying to board the dinghy tied up alongside the yacht and drowned. She was 43 years old. Natalie had made 56 films for TV and the silver screen. “Brainstorm” was finally released in 1983.

Anthony Quinn was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico, to an Irish-Mexican father and a Mexican mother. After starting life in extremely modest circumstances in Mexico, his family moved to Los Angeles, California, where he grew up in the Boyle Heights and the Echo Park neighborhoods. In Los Angeles he attended Polytechnic High School, and later Belmont High, but he eventually dropped out. The young Quinn boxed (which stood him in good stead as a stage actor, when he played Stanley Kowalski to rave reviews in Chicago), then later studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright at the great architect’s studio, Taliesin, in Arizona. Quinn was close to Wright, who encouraged him when Quinn decided to give acting a try. After a brief apprenticeship in theatre, Quinn hit Hollywood in 1936 and picked up a variety of small roles in several films at Paramount, including as an Indian warrior in The Plainsman (1936), which was directed by the man who later became his father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille.

As a contract player at Paramount, Quinn mainly played villains and ethnic types, such as an Arab chieftain in the Bing Crosby-‘Bob Hope’ vehicle Road to Morocco (1942). As a Mexican national (he did not become an American citizen until 1947), he was exempt from the draft. With many actors in the service fighting World War II, Quinn was able to move up into better supporting roles. He had married DeMille’s daughter Katherine DeMille, which enabled him to move in the top circles of Hollywood society.

He became disenchanted with his career and did not renew his Paramount contract despite the advice of others, including his father-in-law (whom Quinn felt never accepted him due to his Mexican roots). Instead, he returned to the stage to hone his craft. His portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Chicago and on Broadway (where he replaced the legendary Marlon Brando, who is forever associated with the role) made his reputation and boosted his film career when he returned to the movies.

Brando and Elia Kazan, who directed “Streetcar” on Broadway and on film, were crucial to Quinn’s future success. Kazan, knowing the two were potential rivals due to their acclaimed portrayals of Kowalski, cast Quinn as Brando’s brother in his biographical film of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Viva Zapata! (1952). Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for 1952, making him the first Mexican-American to win an Oscar. It was not to be his lone appearance in the winner’s circle: he won his second Supporting Actor Oscar in 1957 for his portrayal of Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli‘s biographical film of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life (1956), opposite Kirk Douglas. Over the next decade Quinn lived in Italy and became a major figure in world cinema, as many studios shot films in Italy to take advantage of the lower costs (“runaway production” had buffeted the industry since its beginnings in the New York / New Jersey area since the 1910s). He appeared in several Italian films, giving one of his greatest performances as the circus strongman who brutalizes the sweet soul played by Giulietta Masina in her husband Federico Fellini‘s masterpiece The Road(1954). Alternating between Europe and Hollywood, Quinn built his reputation and entered the front-rank of character actors and character leads. He received his third Oscar nomination (and first for Best Actor) for George Cukor‘s Wild Is the Wind (1957). He played a Greek resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation in the monster hit The Guns of Navarone (1961) and received kudos for his portrayal of a once-great boxer on his way down in Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962).

He went back to playing ethnic parts, such as an Arab warlord in David Lean‘s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and he played the eponymous lead in the “sword-and-sandal” blockbuster Barabbas (1961). Two years later he reached the zenith of his career, playing Zorba the Greek in the 1964 film of the same name (a.k.a. Zorba the Greek(1964)), which brought him his fourth, and last, Oscar nomination as Best Actor. The 1960s were kind to him: he played character leads in such major films as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). However, his appearance in the title role in the film adaptation of John Fowles‘ novel, The Magus (1968), did nothing to save the film, which was one of that decade’s notorious turkeys.

In the 1960s Quinn told Life magazine that he would fight against typecasting. Unfortunately, the following decade saw him slip back into playing ethnic types again, in such critical bombs as The Greek Tycoon (1978). He starred as the Hispanic mayor of a southwestern city in the short-lived 1971 TV series The Man and the City (1971), but his career lost its momentum during the 1970s. Aside from playing a thinly disguised Aristotle Onassis in the cinematic roman-a-clef “The Greek Tycoon”, his other major roles of the decade was as Hamza in the controversial 1977 movie The Message(1977) (a.k.a. “Mohammad, Messenger of God”, as the Italian patriarch in The Inheritance (1976), yet another Arab in Caravans (1978) and a Mexican patriarch in The Children of Sanchez (1978). In 1983 he reprised his most famous role, Zorba the Greek, t on Broadway in the revival of the musical “Zorba”, for 362 performances. Though his film career slowed during the 1990s, he continued to work steadily in films and television.

Quinn lived out the latter years of his life in Bristol, Rhode Island, where he operated a restaurant. He died in hospital in Boston from pneumonia and respiratory failure linked to his battle with throat cancer. He was 86 years old.

Jane Wyman (born Sarah Jane Mayfield; January 5, 1917 – September 10, 2007) was an American singer, dancer, and film/television actress. She began her film career in the 1932 and her work in television lasted into 1993. She was considered a prolific performer for two decades. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Johnny Belinda (1948), and later in life achieved a new level of success in the 1980s as the aging wine country matriarch Angela Channing on Falcon Crest.

She was the first wife of Ronald Reagan; they married in 1940 and divorced in 1949.

Wyman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Although her birth date has been widely reported for many years as January 4, 1914, research by biographers and genealogists indicates she was born on January 5, 1917. The most likely reason for the 1914 year of birth is that she added to her age so as to be able to work and act while still a minor. She may have moved her birthday back by one day to January 4 so as to share the same birthday as her daughter, Maureen (born January 4, 1941). The 1920 census, on the other hand, has her at 3 and living in Philadelphia, Pa. After Wyman’s death, a release posted on her official website confirmed these details.

Her parents were Manning Jefferies Mayfield (c.1885–1922), a meal-company laborer, and Gladys Hope Christian (c.1891–1960), a doctor’s stenographer and office assistant. In October 1921, her mother filed for divorce, and her father died unexpectedly the following year at age 37. After her father’s death, her mother moved to Cleveland, Ohio, leaving her to be reared by foster parents, Emma (1866–1951) and Richard D. Fulks (1862–1928), the chief of detectives in Saint Joseph. She took their surname unofficially, including in her school records and, apparently, her first marriage certificate.

Her unsettled family life resulted in few pleasurable memories. Wyman later said, “I was raised with such strict discipline that it was years before I could reason myself out of the bitterness I brought from my childhood. In 1928, aged 11, she moved to southern California with her foster mother, but it is not known for certain if she attempted a career in motion pictures at this time, or if the relocation was due to the fact that some of Fulks’ children also lived in the area. In 1930, the two moved back to Missouri, where Sarah Jane attended Lafayette High School in Saint Joseph. That same year she began a radio singing career, calling herself “Jane Durrell” and adding years to her birth date to work legally since she would have been under age.

After dropping out of Lafayette in 1932, at age 15, she returned to Hollywood, taking on odd jobs as a manicurist and a switchboard operator, before obtaining small parts in such films as The Kid from Spain (as a “Goldwyn Girl”; 1932), My Man Godfrey (1936) and Cain and Mabel (1936). After changing her name from Jane Durrell to Jane Wyman, she began her career as a contract player with Warner Bros. in 1936 at age 19. Her big break came the following year, when she received her first starring role in Public Wedding.

In 1939, Wyman starred in Torchy Plays With Dynamite. In 1941, she appeared in You’re in the Army Now, in which she and Regis Toomey had the longest screen kiss in cinema history: 3 minutes and 5 seconds.

Wyman finally gained critical notice in the film noir The Lost Weekend (1945). She was nominated for the 1946 Academy Award for Best Actress for The Yearling (1946), and won two years later for her role as a deaf-mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda (1948). She was the first person in the sound era to win an acting Oscar without speaking a line of dialogue. In an amusing acceptance speech, perhaps poking fun at some of her long-winded counterparts, Wyman took her statue and said only, “I accept this, very gratefully, for keeping my mouth shut once. I think I’ll do it again.” The Oscar win gave her the ability to choose higher profile roles, although she still showed a liking for musical comedy. She worked with such directors as Alfred Hitchcock on Stage Fright (1950), Frank Capra on Here Comes the Groom (1951) and Michael Curtiz on The Story of Will Rogers (1952). She starred in The Glass Menagerie (1950), Just for You (1952), Let’s Do It Again (1953), The Blue Veil (1951) (another Oscar nomination), the remake of Edna Ferber‘s So Big (1953), Magnificent Obsession (1954) (Oscar nomination), Lucy Gallant (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Miracle in the Rain (1956). She replaced the ailing Gene Tierney in Holiday for Lovers (1959), and next appeared in Pollyanna (1960), Bon Voyage! (1962), and her final big screen movie, How to Commit Marriage (1969).

Television

Her first guest-starring television role was on a 1955 episode of General Electric Theater, a show hosted by her former husband Ronald Reagan. This appearance led to roles on Summer Playhouse, Lux Playhouse, Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, Checkmate, The Investigators, and Wagon Train. She guest starred in 1959 on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford on NBC. She was hostess of The Bell Telephone Hour and Bob Hope Presents The Chrysler Theatre. She had telling roles in both The Sixth Sense and Insight, among other programs.

She hosted an anthology television series, Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1957. During her tenure as host, however, ratings steadily declined, and the show ended after three seasons. She was later cast in two unsold pilots during the 1960s and 1970s. After those pilots were not picked up, Wyman went into semi-retirement and remained there for most of the 1970s, although she did make guest appearances on Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat.

Falcon Crest

In the spring of 1981, Wyman’s career enjoyed a resurgence when she was cast as the scheming Californian vintner and matriarch Angela Channing in The Vintage Years, which was retooled as the primetime soap opera Falcon Crest. The series, which ran from December 1981 to May 1990, was created by Earl Hamner, who had created The Waltons a decade earlier. Also starring on the show was an already established character actress, Susan Sullivan, as Angela’s niece-in-law, Maggie Gioberti, and the relatively unknown actor Lorenzo Lamas as Angela’s irresponsible grandson, Lance Cumson. The on- and off-screen chemistry between Wyman and Lamas helped fuel the series’ success. In its first season, Falcon Crest was a ratings hit, behind other 1980s prime-time soap operas, such as Dallas and Knots Landing, but initially ahead of rival soap opera Dynasty. Cesar Romero appeared from 1985 to 1987 on Falcon Crest as the romantic interest of Angela Channing.

For her role as Angela Channing, Wyman was nominated for a Soap Opera Digest Award five times (for Outstanding Actress in a Leading Role and for Outstanding Villainess: Prime Time Serial), and was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1983 and 1984. Her 1984 Golden Globe nomination resulted in a win for Wyman, who took home the award for Best Performance By an Actress in a TV Series. Later in the show’s run, Wyman suffered several health problems. In 1986, she had abdominal surgery which caused her to miss two episodes (her character simply “disappeared” under mysterious circumstances). In 1988, she missed another episode due to ill health and was told by her doctors to avoid work. However, she wanted to continue working, and she completed the rest of the 1988-1989 season while her health continued to deteriorate. Months later in 1989, Wyman collapsed on the set and was hospitalized due to problems with diabetes and a liver ailment. Her doctors told her that she should end her acting career. Wyman was absent for most of the ninth and final season of Falcon Crest in 1989-1990 (her character was written out of the series by making her comatose in a hospital bed following an attempted murder).

Against her doctor’s advice, she returned for the final three episodes in 1990, even writing a soliloquy for the series finale. Wyman ultimately appeared in almost every episode up until the beginning of the ninth and final season, for a total of 208 of the show’s 227 episodes. After Falcon Crest, Wyman acted only once more, playing Jane Seymour‘s screen mother in a 1993 episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Following this, she retired from acting permanently. Wyman had starred in 83 movies, two successful TV series, and was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning once.

Later life

Wyman spent her retirement painting and entertaining friends. A recluse, she made only a few public appearances in her last years in part due to suffering from diabetes and arthritis, although she did attend her daughter Maureen’s funeral in 2001 after the latter’s death from cancer. (Ronald Reagan was unable to attend due to his Alzheimer’s disease). She also attended the funeral of her long-time friend Loretta Young in 2000. Wyman broke her silence about her ex-husband upon his death in 2004, attending his funeral and issuing an official statement that read “America has lost a great president and a great, kind, and gentle man.”

Death

Wyman died at the age of 90 at her Rancho Mirage home on September 10, 2007. Wyman’s son, Michael Reagan, released a statement saying: I have lost a loving mother, my children Cameron and Ashley have lost a loving grandmother, my wife Colleen has lost a loving friend she called Mom and Hollywood has lost the classiest lady to ever grace the silver screen.

It was reported that Wyman died in her sleep of natural causes. A member of the Dominican Order (as a lay tertiary) of the Roman Catholic Church, she was buried in a nun’s habit. She was interred at Forest Lawn Mortuary and Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards

• Nominated: Best Actress, The Yearling (1946)
• Won: Best Actress, Johnny Belinda (1948)
• Nominated: Best Actress, The Blue Veil (1951)
• Nominated: Best Actress, Magnificent Obsession (1954)

Emmy Awards

• Nominated: Best Lead Actress – Drama Series, Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre (1957)
• Nominated: Best Lead Actress – Drama Series, Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre (1959)

Golden Globe Awards

• Won: Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama, Johnny Belinda (1949)
• Won: Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama, The Blue Veil (1952)
• Nominated: Best Actress – Drama Series, Falcon Crest (1983)
• Won: Best Actress – Drama Series, Falcon Crest (1984)

Wyman has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; one for motion pictures at 6607 Hollywood Boulevard and one for television at 1620 Vine Street.