Along about Thanksgiving time this past
year, one of my faithful friends in The Underworld expressed to me
his love for The King Family Singers and their holiday specials. I
had only the fuzziest idea who they were and had only seen occasional
glimpses of them over the years. Well, Christmas Eve, after having
endured my own personal family gathering, I decided to take a look at
The Kings and ever since I've been OBSESSED with them!
The whole thing started in Pleasant
Grove, Utah back in the 1930s. A Mormon music teacher named William
Driggs found it hard to make ends meet on his salary, a situation
made further pressing by the fact that he and his wife had eight
children! He formed a family band, moved to California and they all
successfully toured that part of the country. As his three eldest
daughters (Maxine, Luise and Alyce) emerged as young ladies, they
formed their own singing trio, taking their father's middle name of
King and billing themselves as “The King Sisters” (rightly
surmising that “The Driggs Sisters” didn't summon up the same
sort of appeal.)
Their films included Meet the People
(1944), with Dick Powell and Lucille Ball, Thrill of a Romance, with
Van Johnson and Ester Williams and Cuban Pete (1946) with, oddly
enough, Desi Arnaz, who was already married to Ball, though they were
not in each other's movies. In this shot from Pete, you can already
see the matching outfits and frou-frou clothing elements that would
forever punctuate their on-stage lives.
As the years wore on, The Four King
Sisters (as they were now known) worked on their on local, Los
Angeles based television show and continued to record albums. In
1957, they made a considerable departure from their previous sound
and began to sing in lower keys with decidedly punctuated accents
within the harmonies. The result was a newfound appreciation that
even won them a Grammy nomination and occasional forays onto national
television series.
By now married and with children of
their own, they often incorporated their youngsters into the
performances they were giving, making it a family affair. Like
themselves, the next generation of Kings were inherently musical and
most learned how to sing without lessons and play instruments
instinctively.
Their church was host to one big King
Family spectacular, which was a roaring success, and it led to
further engagements of that sort. Once, when Brigham Young
University enlisted them to perform a massive benefit shindig, the
show was taped and King sister Yvonne (“Vonnie”) used an edited
version of the tape to pitch a series to ABC television. And it
worked!
They “tried out” on the weekly
variety show Hollywood Palace a couple of times (to tumultuous
acclaim and viewer response) before winning their very own special
and, ultimately, weekly series, The King Family Show (1965-1966.)
Here, the Four King Sisters, decked to the nines in satin, chiffon,
rhinestones and wiglets, were joined by their extended family,
sometimes as many as forty people (!) during the course of the
telecast.
The younger generation had its own
segment called Top 20, in which the gaggle of (mostly) blonde,
wholesome youngsters would come out and take turns singing a variety
of selections from that week's Top 20 Billboard magazine hits. After
viewers fretted over not being able to sort out who was who amongst
the multitude of King Cousins, the show's costume designer decided to
emblazon each cousin's name across his or her sweater so that there
would be no mistake as to who was who. And that designer's name?
None other than Bob Mackie! There was even a third generation of
Kings now, billed as The King Kiddies, and they would also make
appearances on the show.
Anyone who is a regular here knows of
my fondness for the hair, clothing and make-up of this period. The
gals were blonde, bouffant and bubbling over with swoops and falls.
Though the series was eventually
cancelled due to a change from one-hour to a half-hour and stiff
network competition, that was not in any way the end of the King
Family. They proceeded to offer up splendiferous specials, a dozen
and a half of them sprinkled throughout the late-'60s and early-'70s,
with color TV now providing some eye-popping sights.
Specials included holidays such as
Valentine's Day, Easter (shown here, with the sisters sporting their
various distinct bonnets and their broods of children who amusingly sang their own number), Halloween and
so on. They also, naturally, began to provide Christmas specials.
(These specials were so prevalent that a popular joke at the time was
to make mention of the fictional TV special “Groundhog Day with the
Kings!”)
This series of shots is from The Kings
in Washington D.C. and a dozen of the King ladies singing “If They
Could See Me Now” in front of The White House! Cars are ambling by
without any discretion as the women form a kick line and strut their
ever-blonde and bedecked selves! As the singers never forgot their
Mormon roots, they would sometimes alter lyrics as when they
replaced, “drinkin' fancy wine” with “eatin' chow so fine!”
I can remember as a child seeing people from The Lawrence Welk Show
and others doing that and it used to burn me up. Somehow I just
chuckle at it now. In any case, the look, color and style of this
frosted and tipped sister would have been to me in the early-'70s,
THE last word in beauty! LOL
There would be inspirational songs,
albeit often from musical theatre, such as when Alyce sang “Climb
Ev'ry Mountain” while standing in a studio sprinkled with fake snow
and evergreen trees while wearing a purple evening gown, pearls and a
fur coat! “You'll Never Walk Alone,” naturally, meant that the
family would be artfully arranged en masse to provide vocal back-up
for the big finish. You can call it corny, cheesy, whatever you
wish, but I live for stuff like this!
Their albums became (and still are)
prized possessions, the covers featuring the whole gaggle of King
Sisters, husbands, children, etc... All of the women were some shade
of blonde, though there was one pesky brunette who was sometimes let
out of her cage and permitted to breathe the same air as the rest of
them! Knowing that you want to see the photos closer up - you do,
don't you? - I am providing the album covers and then just the
picture, cropped, which you can open in a new tab or window.
This album is like the sort of royal
world I would have killed to be a part of during my childhood of
divorced parents and lower-middle class income. (Yet, don't be
fooled... several of the King women went through
divorces along the way. They weren't superhuman.)
The ever-growing collection of Kings
(none of who was ever actually born with the last name of King!)
included Luise's husband Alvino Rey, a highly-accomplished guitarist,
and Alyce's husband, Robert Clarke, who'd acted in movies and also
produced some. However, it was the daughters of several of the
sisters who began to carve out a name for themselves – the name
being The Four King Cousins.
From left to right, Tina, Cathy,
Carolyn and Candy began recording their own four-part songs and
winning appearances on TV. (Like the King Sisters, they'd begun with
one line-up, an additional cousin, but ultimately emerged with
another as the foursome shown here.) They eventually became the centerpiece of a revived, short-lived version of The King Family Show in 1969.
These gals did songs that were popular
at that time, versus the standards that the elder ladies tended to
gravitate towards. They would sing songs like The Turtles' “So
Happy Together,” Petula Clark's “I Couldn't Live Without Your
Love” or Beatles' medleys.
They would frequently change up their
looks, nearly always blonde no matter what, from lengthy falls to
bobbed hurricane-resistant coiffures.
Whenever the two foursomes met up, the
older gals would be dressed in glamorous, floor-length gowns with
long sleeves and then the young'ns would bop out in the same style
dresses, but short-sleeved or sleeveless and with hems above the
knee. (In this series, sister Marilyn appears to have suffered a
hair-teasing accident and has her arm in a sling! She and her
diminutive sibling Vonnie would often poke fun at their considerable
height difference.)
The statuesque Marilyn never shied away
from elongating herself further with a huge pile of additional
“hair.” Sometimes, she would adopt a Grecian goddess look and
perform amongst pillars in a one-shouldered gown and her hair
pointing the way to heaven.
Whichever one of them in whatever
combination, I am now utterly obsessed with them. The colors, the
styles, the glitz, the music, the MASCARA!
The King Sisters had gone through vast
permutations over their long career and while, yes, they might have
looked just a tad silly in some of their frilly, festive, frolicsome
attire while beating the door of middle age down, they remained
dazzling.
Then as the '70s wore on, there were –
like it was for so many folks – the occasional slips into dastardly
hair-styling:
As glittering '80s and early-'90s
arrived, the gals could once again turn on the sparkle without shame.
The last major appearance of The King Sisters as a performing whole
took place in 1985 at Ronald Reagan's inaugural gala.
The King Cousins had disassembled at
the dawn of the '80s, their 1979 album seeing release only in Japan,
where they were wildly adored. They had families of their own to raise now as it turned out. Thirty years later, they began to reunite again for some concert engagements.
A few more tidbits. If bubble-haired
King Cousin Tina looks at all familiar, it may be because you
recognize her from her substantial stint on My Three Sons (from 1967
to 1972.)
She (as Tina Cole) played the wife of
hunkalicious Don Grady and the couple became the parents of triplets
on the long-running sitcom. (You knew I was going to try to sneak
into this post some sort of handsome guy, right??)
How lucky can a girl get to portray the
wife of one of TV's most adorable young men?! I don't know if she
ever got her hands on that, but I couldn't blame her if she did...
She was married from 1965-1970 to her first husband, then divorced.
Grady didn't marry for the first time until 1976. Ironically, Tina
later wound up marrying the real-life son of her Sons costar Beverly
Garland, but in 1979, long after the show had been cancelled! That
union also eventually ended in divorce, however.
This series of shots is from a 1971
special that the Kings did in San Francisco. Note the way a couple
of the cousins had gone brunette! It is my favorite, favorite thing
I've come upon from them. The song, “Leavin' It All Behind,” is
so groovy, funky and fun that I have listened to it over and over and
over and over the way I do anything that I become enthralled with.
Sadly, it is interrupted after about a minute and a half by a segue
into solo before returning again at the end. I cannot find the
entire song by them anywhere. The “choreography” is positively
hysterical, their clothes, hair and makeup divine... Note the way a
cop is shown in he background corralling a Volkswagen Beetle out of
the area while another one seems to be issuing a ticket! And then
note the way the cousins scare off a series of seagulls as they
be-bop down the pathway. If there is a heaven, the first 1:30 of
this clip will be playing on an endless loop in my quarters! LOL
Lastly, by far, the most memorable
moment EVER to come out of a King Family special was the time that
Alyce King was positioned at the piano to sing “I'll Be Home for
Christmas” while a photo of her handsome son Ric was in a frame
nearby. This being during the Vietnam War, he was in the army at the
time. Without her prior knowledge, it was arranged that he would
come to the set and surprise her while she did the number. As she
thoughtfully posed between verses of the number, he began speaking,
then entered the frame, causing her to completely lose her composure
and stamp the floor and flail around, her mind-boggling hair
remaining firmly in place throughout. I cannot even type this
without welling up, it's such a touching, real, manipulative (who
cares?!) moment in TV history... It might take just a tiny bit of
drama out of it to know that he was stationed stateside, performing
in an army band rather than slogging through the dangerous jungles,
but nevertheless it is an unforgettable occurrence. Of course, her inbred professionalism required that she finish out the number one way or another!
I have never once claimed to have even
an ounce of taste (it still amazes me when I post something here and
an avalanche of people come forth to testify that they too happen to
love it, whatever it is!) I am a longstanding devotee of the cotton
candy cholera that was The Lawrence Welk Show and now have been
introduced to something as good or better! If you think you might be
apt to like these people, check them out on youtube, where there is a
healthy hunk of material to sift through. Just make sure you allot
enough time to the task because it can become addicting!
