Dothery

Thanks for the heads-up about The Seventh Dawn. When I was sightseeing at the Tower of London in 1964, I noticed Tetsuro Tamba standing in line in front of me with a group of people from the movie. They were there looping dialogue for the picture. We spent the afternoon chatting about the tower and English history. He was surprisingly fluent in English and a very polite, gentlemanly man. I think I've only seen the picture once. It will be great if they run it again. I remember we talked about a Japanese ghost story called "Hoichi the Earless," and a year or so later we saw him in the anthology "Kwaidan," playing the ghost who tears off Hoichi's ears.

An old acquaintance of mine, Joyce Reynolds, is in it, and it's running tonight. I set the DVR for it. She lived on this island when I knew her some years ago. Her name was Joyce White then. I met her when she brought me a screenplay to type, and when I saw her face I said, "The op language!" Her jaw just dropped. She was amazed that I could remember the movie from so long ago; my girlfriends and I loved it at the time. We were just about her age. A lovely lady. I used to run into her in Kona now and then. We used to chat about her costars. She loved Charles Boyer and Joan Fontaine. Janis Paige was her close friend. Bob Hutton too, but she said he changed a lot ... she never elaborated on that. I'm going to enjoy this.

(So that's why John Travolta stayed fit ) I believe he got that body being trained by Sylvester Stallone for "Saturday Night Fever." At least he credited him with it. Someone asked him how he felt about the new body he got for the picture, and he said, "I'm in awe of it."

Carol Channing was a fitness freak, at least about her food. She carried it everywhere, on planes, trains and buses. Once she was talking to a friend who asked what she had to eat on the trip. She said, "Elk. I brought it with me; you can't eat just any old elk."

They also showed Our Very Own, the one were Ann learns she is adopted. This movie had a profound effect on me when I saw it. I hated the premise, that being adopted was somehow disgraceful and caused all kinds of trauma. When my husband and I adopted our children in England, we were told by the administrator at the adoption agency that they had two unwritten laws for adoptive parents: First, that the children had to be told they were adopted right away, so that the word became part of the furniture, so to speak, no secrets, no nonsense about plane crashes or traffic accidents; and second, that we had to take at least two children and not just one. They didn't want the kids growing up alone. We agreed heartily, and our kids never had a time when they didn't know they were adopted. It was perfectly all right with them from their earliest days. A perfect situation, from our standpoint. Once I was on a plane sitting next to a little lady from the Philippines. We were chatting, and she asked if I had any children. I didn't, at that time, and told her so. She said, "What? Won't your sisters give you any?" Apparently it was customary in the Philippines at that time to share children in the family. I told her it wasn't our custom, and she was surprised. Anyway, I felt this picture was unnecessarily pessimistic and I never liked it.

I really can't imagine anyone with good taste and appreciation for "classic" film saying anything bad about Maureen. Probably the most down to Earth person in the business. And honest? Read her autobiography if you want the truth about her life and the people she worked with. Her husband Will Price was a heel and she makes no bones about it, but she supported him as long as he lived. She's very honest about her feelings when he died. There's a story there too about Jimmy Stewart which reveals him as a stern guardian of his own interests in a movie she made with him. She couldn't stand George Montgomery and called him "loathsome" for Franch-kissing her in a scene. She stormed off to the studio head and GM never tried it again. One thing I really was surprised at was that in The Hunchback she did her own stunts, including being held up over the head of a stunt man way above the crowd on the cathedral ledge. One misstep and they both would have been dead. Amazing courage.

Gracias, Se?or Dargo ...

I can't stand him. I never could. A dreadful man personally, according to those who worked with him. I don't like the characters he played so I avoid them anyway. I don't know what TCM is doing these days. The awful junk they're passing off as classic is just hideous. Now: Can anybody tell me how to get to Page 2 of any given thread? I can't find a place to click on to get there.

This is probably something everybody knows, but if you don't, here it is. I just joined a site called Lovingtheclassics.com. I was looking for an Alan Ladd/Loretta Young movie called "And Now Tomorrow." Hadn't been able to locate it on Netflix or elsewhere. They have it on this site so I'm ordering it there. They've got tons of old classics. You're welcome.

Alice Ghostley! How I loved her. I saw her first as a singer on Broadway, her singing voice really glorious. She had great wit as a singer as well, making everything she sang funny. For years I played and sang The Boston Beguine, and it always brought down the house. "I met him in Boston, in the native quarter ... He was from Haaavad, just across the border ..." I thought she was marvelous in anything she did, the sitcoms she graced and the revues she made popular.

I remember Marion Lorne best from the Wally Cox show, "Mr. Peepers." She was hilarious.

I remember when Mr. Roberts first came out. I watched it and liked it. I didn't bother to watch it this time around, except for one scene which I always try to watch when it's on: the one where Jack Lemmon tells the captain how long he's been on board. That one killed Cagney so much that he could hardly keep a straight face. He tells about it in his autobio; that Lemmon's line made him hysterical and he couldn't say his own line afterward. He says he asked Lemmon to go over it with him again and again so it would lose its meaning, and eventually he managed to get through the scene, but he says when you see it on screen he's just barely holding it in. My favorite part of the picture is watching Bill Powell make Red Label. He was always attractive to me, for some reason, but there he looked downright handsome, with that dark tan and the silver hair. I recently learned he worked with my mother's boss, Billy Connery, a congressman, before he went into politics. Billy's nephew, Larry Quirk, wrote a book about the Kennedys in Hollywood, and in it mentions Joe Kennedy talking with Bill Powell at a party, about Billy Connery. Powell says, "I played in stock with Billy," and Kennedy says, "I wish to hell he'd stayed in acting; then we wouldn't have all this labor BS." Only he didn't say "BS." Joe Kennedy was strictly Managment. Billy was chairman of the House Labor Committee and wrote the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that established the minimum wage, 40 hour week and child labor laws. His brother Larry Connery (a pal of mine when I was growing up) is quoted in the book as saying that Billy and Joe couldn't be at the same party without going at it about the rights of labor. Larry Quirk, by the way, wrote for Photoplay for a long time. He wrote books about Joan Crawford, Bob Hope and other movie stars.

I don't walk out of movies, as a rule, but I thought *Witches of Eastwick* was disgusting. Out I went, when one of the girls was throwing up cherries or something. Yuck.

Amnesia in the movies ... usually not really representative of the genuine article. Amnesia in real life is complex. Some years ago I read a book about a lady in her fifties who had been hit by a taxi and lost her memory back to zero. Nada. Nothing left. I later saw the woman on Donahue, with her family, and she was back to what seemed normal, but was a completely different person than the wife and mother they'd known before the accident. When she came out of a six-week coma, she didn't know how to eat, or talk, and didn't know any of her family members. She swore like a sailor and loved bright colors, showed off like a little kid and wandered around the hospital getting into mischief. They had to put a sign on her saying "Return to Neurology." She never got her original memory back. One thing that was even more remarkable was that she knew the future of the family before it happened. Nobody believed it until she began to be able to predict things that they did. She said it was because she was told these things by the "gray-haired lady in the tunnel" that she met during her time in the coma. They eventually deduced that it must be her husband's mother, who had died a few months before the accident. Her husband was quite offended that his mother had come to his wife rather than to him, but eventually had to concede that it must have been she, because of the things she knew and talked about. I remember the gray-haired lady told the comatose woman that she wouldn't die, because if she did, PawPaw (her father-in-law's nickname) would die, and it wasn't time for him to go yet. Some time later she said that the gray-haired lady said that PawPaw was going to get married again; that it was a woman who lived in his apartment building, and it was good that he would be married because he shouldn't be alone, and that he'd tell them in a couple of weeks. All of it happened. At any rate, spiritual things aside, this lady had to relearn her whole life, including sex with her husband, which she thought was hilarious when he explained it to her. She eventually became a normally intelligent woman, got a job in the insurance business giving medical exams, and as far as I know didn't ever get her original personality back, which had been rather mouselike. If it comes right down to it, I always preferred TV amnesia to movie amnesia. Bob and Ray did dozens of amnesia episodes, with Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife always the patient. They'd be the surgeons diving into Mary's head in the endless operations, dropping cigarette ashes into her brain and doing the surgery with strange instruments, which they brought with them. There was much chatting into a box to make it sound like Mary thinking as it all went on.

I just saw Lana in I WAKE UP SCREAMING and boy was she lusciously pretty. TikiSoo, that was Betty Grable. I looked it up to be sure, and it's her.

I haven't kept a journal, exactly; I just remember these things in such detail I could repeat them at any time, so maybe I'll put them all together some time. I have a friend who had a limo service in L.A. and his are much more interesting ... his encounters with Mike Wallace, Marlon Brando, Gene Autry, Rod Steiger, Paul Allen (seventh richest man in the world, last I heard), were fascinating. We put them in draft form a while ago and perhaps he'll self-publish them. I did write a whole book once, but it was fiction. Suzanne Brent, George's daughter, and I were (and are) great friends, and since she has a theatrical flair, I wrote three chapters of a book for her and some friends for a birthday we shared, and gave them to them at the party, which was held on a two-masted brigantine, sailing around San Diego Bay. The subject was one of the birthday guys, and portrayed him as his great interest, a knight in King Arthur's court. In the book, he was terribly inept and couldn't manage the chivalry thing very well. Maidens wouldn't let him rescue them, etc. Later they insisted on more chapters, so every time we had a party I came up with another. Eventually it ended with ten. What fun that was. Suzi was in it as Lady Suzanne the Penniless. I was Lady D, who was the most beautiful woman who had ever been seen at court. The knights all lost their minds when she came around. She couldn't sit in the booths in the cafe Sir Lancelot built, since all the knights tried to crowd in with her ... anyway. Fun stuff to write and it still makes me laugh when I read it.

A little anecdote about Loretta Lynn ... she used to have a house in Puako here on the Big Island. I played the organ at Ascension Church there. One Sunday morning I noticed this very pretty woman come in, who was obviously Somebody Special. There's something about people like her who carry their specialness quietly, but are instantly recognized as Somebody, and she did. I had no idea who she was until we shook hands at the Sign of Peace. When I looked into those extremely blue eyes, I knew who she was. Her eyes are startling. I was a little surprised to see her there, since I believe she's not Catholic, but she hugged Father Schmidt when she saw him. Later I found they had become close when he helped her through the death of her son. She was very sweet and ordinary in her demeanor.

Sepia, it's not surprising they had all those countries represented by their clothing; they didn't have to come there for the crucifixion ... they were already there. Jerusalem was full of foreigners at all times, as Boston is now, for example. St. Paul talks about them in his letters, particularly when he's talking about the languages they spoke and the fact that after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles, everyone could understand them, though they spoke only one language. The errors in the movie were understandable. As far as I know, they weren't great researchers (except for DeMille, who made a fetish out of accuracy in costuming and set design). Mistakes don't bother me. I was most impressed by the fact that Iras of Egypt, the rakish blonde who was Messala's girlfriend, resembled no one so much as Lady Gaga. I liked the picture the first time I saw it, years ago. I had forgotten some of it and was delighted they ran it again. I stayed up late to watch it on my DVR. Couldn't manage it all, but I finished it this morning.

Whenever I see his movies, I think how sweet a person he must have been to convey that so well. He's a remarkably good actor, I think. His death haunts me, as I'm sure it does others, and I say prayers for him. I was very unhappy about it until I read some of the trial testimony and found out he was praying very hard toward the end, having been beaten badly by his murderers, saying Hail Marys one after the other. I'm hoping God heard his prayers and took him home. At any rate we now have a legacy of his lovely performances and a glimpse of his personality. Not every actor can give you an insight into himself as well as the roles he plays. Sometimes I think of Jimmy Cagney and his tough guy image, which wasn't himself at all, according to his friends.

Okay, I have to admit I thought A Man For All Seasons was excellent. It was hardly a thrown-together-for-TV picture. The sets and cast were marvelous, the direction by Fraser Heston was wonderful. Even Chuck's accent was good. It wasn't quite British, which was fine, because Tudor English didn't sound like the Oxford accents we hear now from British actors, and that made it more authentic to me. It was really long, but the play is long, and written so beautifully you don't mind. So it's Will Penny and this one, and Chuck's got one more on his side of the board.

{color:maroon}"I saw my mother in bed dead. I made the funeral arrangements as a teen-ager in high school. She did not commit suicide," emphatically stated Perry Damone, the son of Vic Damone and the crooner's first wife, the late actress Pier Angeli, who had a long history of medical problems and was on prescription medication.* *A biopic about Perry's mother is in the works called No Tomorrow centering on the three s words - salacious sex sells. It's the triangle of the delicate actress Pier Angeli, Damone and James Dean. Quotes from the following article: http://www.broadwaytovegas.com/October20,2002.html

I'm not a big James Dean fan, but I do appreciate the fact that he seems to have been a nice kid. One strange story about him: Alec Guinness talks in his autobiography about how concerned and accommodating he was when he and his wife were turned away from a restaurant because they didn't have a reservation, and met him coming in; he offered them his table and they had a pleasant meal together. After they left, Guinness writes, for the first and only time in his life he had a premonition. As Dean showed them his brand-new car, Guinness said, "They'll pull you out of it dead in a week." He had no idea why he said it. Dean just laughed and said, "Aw, don't be mean," and they said goodbye. And of course he was dead in a week. I thought he was good in the movies he made, but quite raw. Much too young for the part in Giant, which took him into middle age. He was ridiculous-looking in those scenes. But that wasn't his fault. Some longtime actors, notably Hume Cronyn, didn't like him because he used to pull tricks on them during their work together, experimenting as he went along. But I believe he was well-meaning and would have gotten past that stage and settled into a reasonable style of performing. He was a method actor, and method actors, as Helen Hayes complained, didn't really learn how to act; they could draw up memories and feel a part, but couldn't project it to the audience. She mentioned, at another time, that theatrical training was invaluable, and cited Clark Gable as an example of someone who had had ten years of theater before he went into the movies, and was a pleasure to work with, whereas Gary Cooper, who had had no stage training, had to be eased along by the cast, and they had to be very patient with him. I expect it could have been pretty confusing for any young actor who'd been led to believe that the system he learned was the best. Anyway, God rest his soul.

That's Gladys Swarthout, but I don't know what the tie-in would be or with whom.

Soylent Green. I believe I'm going to be able to skip Purgatory because I saw that thing. I loved EGR in it, especially since the last scene he did was HIS last scene, and he knew it, but I must say I did not find it edifying. No. The only Chuck Heston movie I ever liked was "Will Penny." THAT was a good picture. Maybe because his son directed it. I don't know. But he seemed a lot less frozen in it.

Regarding Mae West, and a dozen other performers, may I recommend a wildly funny book called "No Pickle, No Performance" by Harold J. Kennedy. He owned a dinner theater where the great, not-great-any-more and going-to-be-great performed. His stories are absolutely hilarious. I won't spoil it for you by telling you what they are. But please don't pass this up. I just checked and you can get it used at Amazon.com for not much. Mae's time at his theater was a riot. "You got to showcase me, Honey," she said when she pulled up. She showed him how and they were a sellout from then on. I came across a reference to it a while ago in Farley Granger's autobiography where he said he sent that book to every friend he had. I gave my copy to Doc Stone and when I saw him next he said he hadn't stopped laughing since he began it. Aloha!