Whew! I just finished writing a seven-page theatre adjudication that has kept me occupied the last couple of days. So that I don't go too long between posts, I'll toss out this less-involved one and hope that some of you find it interesting.
You can imagine, fan that I am of all movies and television from the past, that one of my favorite channels is Turner Classic Movies. Prior to 2010, I turned to TCM first nearly every time I flipped the television on. In 2010, I got my high-definition, widescreen, 55” television and my satellite provider only has TCM in the old format, rendering the picture substandard. So, while I still check out TCM often, it's a little hard to enjoy the films on there as much as I used to with my old TV. Fortunately, there are high-def movie channels that sometimes toss out an older film.
Anyway, as a longtime fan of the network, I have seen a large number of the films they show (but even I haven't devoted myself to watching all of it! So there's always something new and good to watch every now and then.) Sometimes I find myself popping over to TCM around the time that a movie should end just to check out the in-between things that they show. There are always trailers, old documentaries (“chasers,” if you will!) and the newer blurbs about what's playing and what's for sale at the online store. My favorite thing, however, the TCM feature I love the very most is “Word of Mouth.”
“Word of Mouth” is a filler segment in which an old time star will be interviewed about a certain film or fellow actor and reveal his or her thoughts on the subject. (You've all seen them. You can hear someone - I used to know who - say, "Damn good actress!" as the opening montage ends.) Most of the time, the star being interviewed has been spackled and painted to look as good as they can in light of their age. There's often an elegant sort of background, with pretty flowers or furnishings, sometimes just a rich-looking curtain. (Or sometimes not!) Many times the star is someone we either don't see a lot of or hardly ever see at all! (Still other times, the person is now dead, but the network interviewed them as in-depth as they could beforehand and are now releasing the video from it!)
Occasionally, there will be a “Word of Mouth” with the child of a star reminiscing about his or her parent or a contemporary performer reflecting on the inspiration they received from an old performer or old movie. Naturally, I prefer the ones in which they have unearthed someone who would hardly get the time of day on Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and the like.
So here are a few of the stars who have appeared on “Word of Mouth” along with the basic gist of what they were talking about. The real joy, of course, is seeing and hearing these great stars telling their tales in their own way with those legendary faces and voices going to town!
In this one, one of the earliest I can remember seeing, Miss June Allyson tells about how, during her first days working at MGM, she used to walk to the bus stop and wait for a ride because she didn't own a car and couldn't afford one yet. None other than Judy Garland, riding in her own chauffeur-driven vehicle, saw her reporting to the studio this way and would have none of it. She picked Allyson up every day after that. What's more, if Garland was done early, she would head home, but send the driver back to fetch Miss Allyson and take her home when that time came. Before too long, Allyson got her own car, but she never forgot the expression of kindness that Judy Garland offered. They became close friends and worked on some of the same movies, but not “together.” 
Allyson made a guest appearance on Garland's 1963 variety show (at a time when she was in the throes of alcoholism herself, having just lost husband Dick Powell) and later helped bring attention and funds to The Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. (Incidentally, this museum was the site of a 2005 robbery of one of the sets of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, a crime that has not yet been solved.) Miss Allyson died in 2006 at the age of eighty-eight of bronchitis and respiratory failure.
I especially love it when Maureen O'Hara is shown because I love her voice and she has such beautiful skin and eyes. She's also the perfect blend of sincere and humorous. When she's speaking of Charles Laughton, the tremendous actor who played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there's a reverence and feeling of awe at the lengths he went to to portray that character. When she's speaking about frequent costar John “Duke” Wayne, there's a familiarly frank level of candor that comes through, laced with amusement. My very, very favorite “Word of Mouth” is the one in which she describes having to drive a sloshed Duke home from his club when he insisted that she pull over at a certain house so that they could “have a drink.” They made it to the door, he proceeded to enter and request his drink (which the inhabitants provided without issue) and then left. However, neither she nor Wayne knew these people and she thinks they didn't know them either! To hear her tell this story is anecdotal magic. Miss O'Hara is still with us today at the age of ninety-one.
Kitty Carlisle, another one of my favorite people, recollected her experiences as a young singing actress going to work for The Marx Brothers on A Night at the Opera. She described how the brothers had worked out their schtick so thoroughly on the road that by the time they filmed the movie version, it was completely perfected. More captivatingly, she recalled how she had taken the part in order for her singing voice to be shown off, but that during filming, the playback was someone else that the studio had hired! She retreated to her dressing room and called her agent, staying there in tears for days, crying over everything and everyone including Irving Thalberg until finally she was allowed to shoot the sequence with her own voice on the soundtrack. Always a very stalwart and determined person of character and taste, it's great to know she was concerned with standing her ground even then in the 1930s! Miss Carlisle lived to be ninety-six, passing away of heart failure in 2007.
Few performers from the golden age of Hollywood are as animated and “on” as Ann Rutherford. Though she played Mickey Rooney's girlfriend a dozen times in his Andy Hardy movies, she is possibly best known for playing Scarlett's younger sister Carreen (opposite Evelyn Keyes' Suellen) in Gone with the Wind. As the stars of that film started to die off and interest in it continued to reach new heights, Rutherford and Keyes (two opposite types, to be sure) were called upon to reflect on the experience of filming the gargantuan epic. She took to distinctively wearing her thick hair pulled back and draped with a long, colorful scarf. She had also worked, among other things, on the Laurence Olivier-Greer Garson rendition of Pride and Prejudice in 1940. Her “Word of Mouth” has her telling about the way the actresses massive skirts would topple the delicate antique furniture decorating the set. She developed a love of antiques, collecting one slightly broken figurine from the trash and salvaging it, though the studio cared not a whit about any of their pieces. 
She recalls one time when Olivier was seated at a desk that wasn't the right height for the camera. So the carpenters simply sawed part of the legs off of the beautiful example of antique furniture! Having retired in 1950, Rutherford made another film at MGM in 1972, They Only Kill Their Masters, and a cameo in 1976's Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood. She's still kicking today at ninety-one and even appears in public from time to time, such as earlier this year at a TCM film festival!
Gloria Stuart (of Titanic fame) sort of wound up with a low-rent backdrop for her interview. As an actress from the 1930s who then went through some significant dry spells before being rejuvenated, career-wise, by James Cameron's shipboard saga, she had plenty to share. In one of her clips, she talks about being placed in a boat, in a studio-built lake, where crooner Dick Powell sang to her over and over as the scene was filmed from various angles for Gold Diggers of 1935. All her character had to do was just sit there and be mesmerized by the vocal attention, but after a while that became rather difficult to sustain. Having managed to preserve herself rather well, she, at age eighty-seven, actually had to be aged with makeup in order to portray the elderly Rose in Titanic! Stuart developed lung cancer in 2005, but lived until 2010 when she died at the amazing age of one hundred.
Miss Jane Wyman was nailed down for some recollections of her days in Hollywood. The Oscar-winning actress worked one time for Alfred Hitchcock on his cockeyed 1950 thriller Stage Fright. (I say cockeyed because the script had the camera “lying” to the audience, a fatal structural flaw that was off-putting and helped lead to the movie's failure.) Wyman's costar was Miss Marlene Dietrich, who had no hesitation whatsoever in making endless requests, suggestions and so on, always with an eye towards making things better. One valuable piece of advice she gave Wyman was to “always make them look at you,” meaning the audience. Both Hitch and Wyman were bemused by Deitrich's commandeering manner and would acknowledge her, maybe nod, and then proceed to do things the way they wished, but Wyman found the whole thing endearing. (Hitch was rather confounded with Wyman 
in that she kept resisting the deglamorization that was called for in her character, most likely due to being paired with one of the cinema's most all-time exotic and glamorous stars, Miss Deitrich.) Wyman, after serving a lengthy term as the matriarch of Falcon Crest, retired completely from acting in 1993 at age seventy-six. She lived until 2007, however, dying at the age of ninety from natural causes. A devout Catholic (despite starring in the sometimes lurid Crest) and a member of the Dominican Order, she was actually buried in a nun's habit!
Joan Leslie is someone who never appeared on my radar at all for many, many years. It wasn't until I saw the Joan Fontaine melodrama Born to Be Bad that I discovered Miss Leslie and realized how appealing and attractive she could be. Her “Word of Mouth” relates the story surrounding her appearance in Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney (who took home the Oscar for that film.) She mentions his generosity in helping the still-burgeoning actress work out a little song and dance routine with him, the very first take of which was printed and used in the finished product. Leslie made some TV movie appearances, the last one being in 1991, and is still kicking even now at age eighty-six.
Another Cagney costar who had nothing but praise for him was Virginia Mayo. Mayo worked with him in one of his iconic roles, a psychotic criminal in White Heat. According to Mayo, there was no need to attempt to “act” in his presence, but merely to just know ones lines and say them in accordance to what what happening in a scene with him. Any necessary fear, tension, romance or anything else would come about because of the intense way he approached his craft. Basically, one just hung on and tried to stay with it! She felt that he deserved even more Academy Awards, but that in the '30s and '40s, it was not considered appropriate to award someone playing a gangster versus someone portraying a hero, real or fictional. 
My own striking memory of Miss Mayo is from a 1971 appearance on Rod Serling's Night Gallery. She was fifty-one then and playing a washed up actress being vilified in the media by pudgy gossip reporter Patty Duke. Duke kept hurling invectives towards Mayo about her faded looks and age, but Mayo actually looked quite amazing! She certainly looked better than her antagonist. In the 1990s, Mayo worked on a few low-budget horror and thriller movies, retiring completely by 1997. She died in 2005 at the age of eighty-four from heart failure and pneumonia.
Sometimes “Word of Mouth” will feature a two-fer (or maybe even more), with a couple of stars commenting on the same movie. Such was the case with On the Town. Betty Garrett and Ann Miller both were shown discussing the filming of that musical, the first studio musical to employ location filming in New York City. According to the ladies, MGM originally planned to take only the three leading men to The Big Apple, but then the gals found out and wanted to go too. Reportedly, Miller was the one who fretted with the studio heads until they gave in and allowed the ladies to go, too. Only one tiny scene of the girls, filmed of them from behind as they waved goodbye to a ship, made it into the final cut. 
Garrett was rarely, if ever, one of the glamorpusses that frequently ruled the day in Tinseltown. She always seemed to come off as far more down to earth and does the same in her interview segment. Garrett enjoyed a second act when her film career ended (thanks in part to the infamous Hollywood blacklist), playing recurring character Irene Lorenzo on All in the Family and the landlady on Laverne & Shirley (eventually becoming Laverne's stepmother.) Miss Garrett worked up until 2009, but died of an aortic aneurysm in February of this year at the age of ninety-one. As for Miss Miller, she had a small part in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. in 2001, which was her last screen role. She died in 2004 at the (comparatively young, for this group anyway!) age of eighty from lung cancer.
Miller's costar from Kiss Me Kate, operatic soprano Miss Kathryn Grayson, occasionally pops up on “Word of Mouth” as well. This series of shots of her are from the DVD for Kiss Me Kate, but snippets from the same sit-down have been used for the feature we're discussing today, too. (Apparently, she also came upon a discarded wig from Ava Gardner in Earthquake!) She tells on herself for not being able to adeptly navigate her movement on the treadmill during the number “We Open in Venice,” seeming to always be a bit behind everyone else. Then, with more serious expressions, she recalls the physical pain that Cole Porter was in at the time of the filming of the 1953 movie. Grayson exited the movie biz in 1956 due to the lack of appropriate musical material for her, 
but did a little bit of TV for two years after. Then, after twenty years, she popped up on Baretta as a guest star and then proceeded to make three appearances on Murder, She Wrote, playing the same townsperson each time. From 1989 on, she did no more acting work on TV. She lived until 2010, when she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-eight.
“Word of Mouth” continues on, now including performers who are still working, such as Joanne Woodward, shown here. I don't know if the all black background is due to the fact that her husband Paul Newman had recently died or if she wanted to be seen in a less Olan Mills Photography sort of way. 
In any case, she surely doesn't come off in a very luxurious way the way her elders had before her. It's far more subdued and austere looking. That's fine if she wants to come off more as a "serious actor” and I reckon she looks pretty good for her age, but would just a smidge of color on the face or a hairdo kill her? Anyway, she's shown here discussing the marvels of nearly-forgotten (except to classic film buffs) actor John Garfield. Garfield, a Group Theater actor (an organization that eventually led to the Actor's Studio, where Woodward trained) was a dynamic and explosive actor who was blacklisted and died of a heart attack at thirty-nine before Woodward had made her first movie. Miss W. is eighty-one at present.
I love my actresses, quite obviously, but the featurettes do often center on an actor, too. Here we have Mr. Ernest Borgnine recalling his days of working with the potentially explosive Bette Davis, who he admired quite a lot. 
In fact, after having teamed up as man and wife in The Catered Affair in 1956, they reappeared as costars in 1971's notorious Bunny O'Hare. Initially intended to be a senior citizen take-off of Bonnie and Clyde called “Bunny and Claude,” with amusing social commentary, it instead was edited into more of a slapstick comedy, prompting Ms. Davis to sue American International Pictures (though the suit was eventually dropped.) Mr. Borgnine is a hero in The Underworld for his role in, natch, The Poseidon Adventure, but we also respect the fact that he has sustained a SIXTY-plus film career and continues to act today at the incredible age of ninety-four. Some may have scoffed at his marriage to Norwegian makeup magnate Tova Traesnaes, who is almost a quarter of a century his junior, but they are edging up to their 40th wedding anniversary! Utterly sharp as a tack and so good-natured, he is a rarity in his field. Near the end of next month he will turn ninety-five and we wish him all the best!
There are many other stars, from James Earl Jones to Virginia Grey, who have been the subjects of these wonderful little shorts. Perhaps I'll revisit them again sometime when I have another stockpile of examples (and pictures!) I must also toss out a warm "Welcome Back!" to TCM host Robert Osborne, who was absent from the network for three months for a "vacation" that seemed much more like a medical leave of some sort. He was sorely missed and it's great to have him there again.
Well, I've gone and stumbled upon another find: a trio of magazines from the early '80s that focus on the glory days of the film industry. 
Called Hollywood Studio Magazine, it was a black and white monthly, with a color front and back cover, that contained articles on classic stars, plenty of vintage still photos and the occasional nod to the stars and happenings of the present day. Most interesting to me was the information on events that were heavily attended by older stars who, by then, were not making the rounds too much at occasions covered by the more prominent mainstream press. (In order to enlarge these to full size, you will have to click on them, then - if they go into that new photo viewer, which limits the size - click on "Show Original" and the pages will open in a larger size in a new window. Sorry, but that's the way Blogger is these days...)
The first issue I retrieved, from 1982, profiles the then-fairly-recent, 
tragic deaths of William Holden and Natalie Wood (oddly enough, the former longtime companion and wife, respectively, of (still airing) Hart to Hart co-stars Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner.) Along with the articles, there are collections of photos from their lengthy careers. Looking at the shot of Holden from Golden Boy, his debut, you can really see how quickly he aged in the years beyond that (from a combination of sun, booze and cigarettes), though he still remained handsome for several years afterwards. Though the magazine relied heavily on still photos, an occasional rare shot like the one with him and George Brent occasionally saw print.
You know that if I'm going to scan anything, I'm going to scan the male shirtless shots! Thus, in the Natalie Wood retrospective, we have both Jeffrey Hunter and William Devane (from the TV miniseries From Here to Eternity) on display. The attendant articles don't shed any remarkable light on either death, but there are plenty of tributes to both stars from people they worked with. Interestingly, recovering alcoholic Dana Andrews is quoted as saying the the media was correct in emphasizing the presence of alcohol in both deaths as it inevitably contributed to them.
Hollywood Studio Magazine featured a regular segment called Man About Town by one-time bit actor-turned-columnist Lee Graham. By the time of this set of magazines, 
the great era of Hollywood gossip columnists and reporters had faded (soon to be replaced by a set of tabloid journalists who saw print in various products like The National Enquirer and Star Magazine.) HSM gave Graham a home base from which to continue printing updates on the stars from his era. Check out the descriptive way he profiles Liberace in this edition of the column.
There's also mention of Mickey Rooney, then riding high with Sugar Babies on The Great White Way. The article refers to a future Broadway project that never actually came to fruition. Then there's the odd item about his agent and her three most unusual pets. There was a bizarre accident at the party, though apparently no one was seriously hurt. 
Lee Graham himself appears far right in the photo with Mickey, Mickey's wife Jan (to whom he remains wed still today!) and others.
On the following page, the celebrity chit-chat continues. There's mention of Carol Lawrence's recent engagement (the marriage would only last about a year.) She's shown with Hugh O'Brian and Foster Brooks. Below are Barbara Stanwyck with long ago costar Burt Lancaster and another photo with former child-star Jane Withers and Marsha Hunt, a victim of the 1950s Communist witch hunt/blacklist. These are the types of pictures I think make this magazine so collectible now because they are so rare and unique.
Then we have an article by the number one “fan/friend” of Miss Ann Miller. The devotee fell in (platonic??) love with her as a child, watching her films at a neighborhood theater, and began collecting photos and other memorabilia concerning her from then on. Having inspired him to become a dancer in his own right, he later met up with her and they formed a friendly relationship (she being impressed by the gargantuan assemblage of items he had collected over the years and brought to share with her at a rehearsal space.)
I enjoyed these various shots of Miller, 
but my favorite is the one of her with Edith Head because it was taken at a time when you tended to see less of her. She had a fairly dormant period after her days in those classic musicals before swinging back into the spotlight with Broadway's Sugar Babies. I've always been fond of Ann Miller, but after seeing her on a TCM Private Screenings one-on-one with Robert Osborne, I started to appreciate her even more. Below is a link that has become something of a recent obsession of mine. The whole thing is a bizarre scream, but at the 9:15 mark, I always develop an ear-to-ear grin and proceed to sing that song for hours afterward.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi-iFKmuOu8
The back cover has an ad/offer for a personally signed print featuring the career of Mr. Burt Reynolds. Am I crazy for thinking that $100 in 1982 currency was more than a bit steep for this?! Perhaps they are hard to find and have retained their value, but I'm a tad doubtful... Of seemingly greater value are the ones shown below of stars from an earlier era such as Mae West, Ray Bolger and many others.
The second issue I picked up in from 1983.
It features Robert Wagner (with Natalie Wood) on the cover, billing him as "TV's Classiest Actor." An article inside relates the way his persona recalls the glamorous and debonair qualities of the golden age of Hollywood and describes how he is continuing to work through the death of Wood along with their children (and with the aid of constant companion Jill St. John.) His charity work with The American Heart Association is also revealed.
This issue's Man About Town article depicts a variety of stars attending an event honoring Danny Thomas for his work with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. There is mention in the text of Erik Estrada and his "fiancee" Kathy Showers (no wedding ever took place.) Also reported is Dorothy Lamour's recent cabaret act along with a shot of her getting a smooch from attendee Robert Mitchum.
One thing that stands out here for me is the reportage of an AIDS benefit; a show called "Women Behind Bars" that spoofs women's prison movies. It's good to see that some sort of work was being done in Hollywood during this still-early stage of the disease. 
Rock Hudson, one of the the most prominent celebrities to be claimed by AIDS, didn't die from it until 1985, after which it seemed to become far more heavily reported upon and discussed. Even amfAR wasn't founded until 1985, having been formed by two separate organizations on opposite coasts, one of which started up in 1983. So it's remarkable and satisfying to see that efforts were being made earlier and by less-publicized celebrities. Patti Page and Adele Jergens (one of the ladies shown recently in my Halloween post of cheesecake photos) are among those pictured.
And are you ready for the reported cast of a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?? Pat Hingle as Big Daddy, Alice Ghostley as Big Mama, Kirstie Alley as Maggie the Cat and Patty (The Bad Seed) McCormack as Sister Woman! No mention of who played Brick in this stunner... Now you know I wasn't about to let such a mystery rest, so I looked it up! 
Brick was played by the less-famous actor James Morrison who has nonetheless carved out a lengthy and enduring career as a character actor, best known probably for his recurring role on 24 over the course of several seasons. This is him then and now.
Finally, there's reportage on a (failed?) musical based on the life of Charlie Chaplin, portrayed by Anthony Newley (who also likely composed the songs for this as well.)
Here, at the end of the issue, is a remembrance of David Niven by former actress-turned-writer/editor Joan Evans. (See more about Evans at the tail end of this post!) She offers up a rarely told account of Niven's devilish sense of humor when it came to sharing his income with their stingy boss Samuel Goldwyn. Niven died in 1983, thus the timing of this tribute to what many people considered a talented, witty and wonderful man
.
The bulk of my scans come from the third issue I picked up, from early 1985. The cover shot is of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh from Gone with the Wind. You know, I've seen GWTW countless times, but I have no memory of the outfit Scarlett is wearing here! Did she really appear in this in the final cut and, if so, how did I miss that mammoth brooch at her neck?
There's a feature on a recently released book by prolific author and celebrity biographer Douglas McClelland called Hollywood on Hollywood: Tinsel Town Talks. The tome was apparently loaded down with collected opinions on the film capitol from stars of every size, shape, stature and era. There are a few amusing quotes chosen for the article and a deliciously gauzy photo of Miss Joan Fontaine.
This time, in addition to his Man About Town column, Lee Graham reports on the recent second annual American Cinema Awards (I've never even heard of them! Are they still given out or did they go the way of the recent TVLand Awards...) The event honored my kind of stars: Dorothy McGuire, Robert Mitchum, Robert Preston and Jane Wyman. You can keep your Mira Sorvinos and Cuba Gooding Juniors!
How neat to see then-ninety-two year-old Ina Claire making a very rare appearance. There's a fun and rare reunion of Pollyanna costars Hayley Mills and Jane Wyman. 
And what about gay favorite Guy Madison, older. but still quite handsome. (He would have been about sixty-three here.) The second page offers up even more old stars, including John Payne (who would have been around seventy-three here!), Ruby Keeler, Virginia Mayo and Rock Hudson (who, if you'll recall, would soon be passing away...) But who was it who threw together this tribute to the olden days? That I will not reveal, but will let you discover when you click on the article and read the final sentence! Let's just say he was a man good at bringing the near-dormant back to life!
There's a two-page article on ill-fated hunk Jon-Erik Hexum (who is profiled here at The Underworld.) The piece is written by a man described as a writer-photographer, but who is revealed within the text to be more of a costumer/wardrobe man. I have no idea what went on between the two, but if you read the article it is more than clear that Brian had - at minimum - an attraction for Hexum. 
Whether it was ever reciprocated I don't know and probably never will. However, as the man in charge of dressing Hexum on Voyagers and then Cover-Up, he may very well have had one of the greatest jobs in the history of show business!
The Man About Town segment in this issue has a lot of chatter about various events, none of them earth-shaking. Still, it's fun to read through and hear about the celebs that the author had been hobnobbing with.
The cover of the magazine promises a Gone with the Wind centerfold poster. This is fortunately still there, intact, though it's nothing to shoot the cat over. It doesn't even include Miss Olivia "Melanie" de Havilland at all! Nonetheless, not wanting to disappoint my readers, I have scanned it and soldered it together for you.
Douglas McClelland, the author mentioned above, also provided a review of the recently released compilation film That's Dancing!, a Terpsichorean documentary made to cash in on the success of the prior That's Entertainment and That's Entertainment Part II. He bemoans the pedestrian nature of the project and the lack of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable while wishing there had been more of Dan Dailey as well.
In what seemed to be a recurring facet of Hollywood Studio Magazine, there was a personal recollection of another star by a lesser-known person who worked with him. Fledgling English actor Patrick Brock relates his experiences working with legendary swashbuckler and lady-killer Errol Flynn towards the end of his life.
There's an article about Oscar-winning supporting actress Alice Brady 
(for In Old Chicago, 1937) whose career was cut short by illness. A few years ago, thanks to an Internet blind item, a rumor spread like wildfire that Alice Brady was actually a man posing as a woman! Her early life is fairly well documented, so this is virtually disproven, if it ever even needed to be. (Never mind the fact that she gave birth to a son in the early 1920s!)
Interestingly, this issue contained a photo of then-hot (and still active today) actor Tom Selleck, reading a copy of the magazine. He is described as being
one of the two sexiest stars working at the time (the other being Mel Gibson!)
After debuting in the late '60s, this periodical continued for quite a few years. There isn't a great deal out there about it, but I am pretty sure that, in time, it morphed into the magazine Hollywood Then and Now before finally petering out in the mid-'90s(?) I have seen various issues for sale on eBay for upwards of $8.00, sometimes quite a bit more, so I was more than thrilled to nab all three of these in one fell swoop for the very reasonable price of $3.00 total!
This magazine was edited, for at least a significant part of its existence, by Joan Evans Weatherly. Evans was the daughter of Hollywood writers Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert. They were close friends of Joan Crawford, for whom Evans was named and whose godmother of Evans she was. Signed to a contract with Samuel Goldwyn at the impossibly young age of fourteen (but augmented to sixteen by her mother in an attempt to diffuse the way such a fact appeared), she was featured as the title character in her very first movie, Roseanna McCoy, opposite Farley Granger. It was a love story based on the Hatfield and McCoy feuds of Appalachia.
Within a couple of years, at the age of seventeen, Evans made up her mind to marry a car salesman she loved, but her parents were aghast at the idea. They asked Evans' godmother and mentor Crawford to “talk some sense into her” and squelch the idea. For whatever reason, Crawford supported the union and instead held a wedding at her home for the couple, completely circumventing Eunson and Albert's wishes (not even inviting them!) Albert never again spoke to Crawford and Eunson, author of The Star, was suspected of lacing that screenplay with unflattering attributes that mirrored Crawford's ways.
The laugh was on them, though, because not only did the marriage last beyond the demise of everyone else involved and result in two children, but Evans and her husband Kirby Weatherly remain wed to this day, nearly 60 years later! They now reside in Nevada. Crawford must have somehow sensed, despite her own rocky choices when it came to romance, that this was the real deal!
I hope you got a kick out of this latest "Fun Find." I try to share my unusual discoveries here whenever I'm able to.
In honor of St. Valentine's Day, we present a brief photo tribute to the holiday for lovers, featuring a few starlets strutting some of their best heart-themed pictorials. I let Marilyn have two turns because a) they're cute pics and b) I didn't have every many to start with! If you're wondering who in the hell Rae Corry is, she was more than a bit of a mystery to me, too, but apparently was featured on a few episodes of Hawaiian Eye during its run (as what?! I could find no concrete record of this.) The bigger mystery is why the network would send out a publicity photo of Ms. Corry that features a big ol' cellulite pock-mark on her thigh! Airbrush, please! May Cupid's arrow find you where it counts this February 14th!
