A Sprinkle a Day: "Tall Story"

Full disclosure is that this post is nothing more than a little appetizer to have something up while I continue to work on my next offering, which is taking much longer than anticipated (because I am clinically insane and can never leave well enough alone when looking into things...!) After one post recently about Ensign Pulver, it got some of us talking about director Josh Logan (seen above right) and his proclivity for showcasing beefcake in many of his stage and screen projects. From there, I was interested in looking back at one example that, while very brief, is still a favorite of mine. It occurs in the movie Tall Story (1960), all about the eligibility and romantic exploits of a star college basketball player.

Adapted from an only semi-successful Broadway play of the same name (108 performances), it was the film debut of one Miss Jane Fonda (who was nervous, unsure in the part, bulimic and resistant to the cosmetic enhancements applied to her by the Warner Brothers stylists.) Warren Beatty was considered for her costar, but there was worry over casting two unknowns together, so it fell to the more established Anthony Perkins to essay the part of the star basketball player. Fonda was his adoring cheerleader girlfriend.

Gay in real life and in an on-again/off-again relationship with Tab Hunter, Perkins not only had to learn to effectively play basketball, but also learn how to take an interest in the physical attributes of his female costar! Granted, later in his life a conflicted Perkins married and fathered children, but at this stage those happenings were years away.

Fonda fell hard for her lean and lanky leading man and later remarked that both she and Josh Logan were in love with Perkins at the same time...! But I digress. We're here to talk about my favorite 15 seconds of the film.

In his customary style, Logan wanted to include a little male hunkitude and included a moment in which Fonda absentmindedly follows Perkins into the men's locker room to return his jacket, where she dreamily gazes at him, barely able to put sentences together. Suddenly, it occurs to Perkins that his gal-pal is standing in a place where a naked man is apt to appear at any moment!

...and just like that, one does!

Fonda is stunned to be facing a humpy naked collegian emerging from the showers with only a towel hanging in front of him.

Horrified at her faux pas, she is beside herself.

The slab of beefcake, however, takes in all in his stride and even flings the towel over his shoulder, giving her the Full Monty!

His sole line is: "If it's all right with you, it's all right with me," followed by a chuckle. The closer shots of this sequence do not match the long shots, in which his towel is always in front of him. So I don't know if there is some cutting of the moment involved (how dare they!) or if the approach to the scene was changed mid-stream. 

Now you just KNOW that Logan had a ball casting this part. He went with fresh, new Warner Brothers contractee Van Williams. Williams, a discovery of producer Mike Todd, had his career dreams derailed when Todd died in a 1958 plane crash, but he proceeded on, winning a couple of roles on General Electric Theater before Warner's picked him up and placed him in their detective show Bourbon Street Beat. He received this 8x10 glossy publicity photo for his less than 15-second long movie debut!

When Bourbon Street was cancelled, his character was transferred onto Surfside 6, a cookie-cutter series much like his first. The black and white show never did capitalize on his delectable physique the way many of the show's publicity pics did.

This bizarrely posed shot has Troy Donohue taking in the glory of Williams, Diane McBain contorted and looking off elsewhere and Lee Patterson seeming either to be in "time out" or taking a leak in the corner...! Ha ha!

The gorgeous Williams guest-starred on many other Warners shows, popped up in the occasional movie and eventually landed his signature role of The Green Hornet, though it only lasted one season. By 1982, the basically shy, yet still-in-demand, actor had exited the profession to concentrate on a communications business. He'd rarely been comfortable among the various types of slick businessmen that Hollywood tended to be populated by.

An interesting footnote is that this sequence, featured on lobby cards for Tall Story, is not to be found in the finished film. It's entirely separate from the locker room sequence. It takes place in the camping trailer that Perkins buys from a friend of his. Logan apparently intended for there to be another dose of unexpected male nudity for Fonda but someone somewhere decided to axe it. (Okay, I'll say it again... How dare they?! LOL)

The trailer in the movie is owned by Tom Laughlin and his wife Barbara Darrow. I don't know if it happened to be him in that cut moment, though the body (and hair!) don't resemble him at all, or if somehow ol' Van wound up in there or what...! I may never know.

Another hilarious footnote is that the novel which inspired the resultant play and movie was all about a football hero, not basketball...!

No matter. The movie wound up giving us a quick glance at one of my most admired hunks. Williams passed away in 2016 of kidney failure at age 82, leaving behind his second wife, five children and nine grandchildren. His brief association with The Green Hornet will assure him a place in cult fandom, in no small part due to his friend and costar in the series, Bruce Lee.

End Quote

It's that time. We've finally burned all the way through the alphabet of the book we've been sharing with celebrity quotes about themselves and one another. We're going out with a bang this time with 20 pictures instead of the usual 12 to 15. We hope you enjoy and we'll be back soon with more classic movie and television fun.

"The closest thing we've had to me lately is John Travolta. Whether he'll want to work hard enough on his dancing I don't know. Travolta moves well, but the facts of dancing life mean that you have to work very hard to keep up to the level you're already at." - GENE KELLY "He's not a dancer. What he did in those dance scenes was very attractive but he is basically not a dancer. I was dancing like that years ago, you know. Disco is just jitterbug." - FRED ASTAIRE  Two cinematic dance legends weighing in on JOHN TRAVOLTA.

"Maybe the major thing is how sensual he is. And how sexy, too. The sensitivity and the sexuality are very strong. It's as if he has every dichotomy-masculinity, femininity, refinement, crudity. You see him, you fall in love a little bit." LILY TOMLIN waxing enthusiastically about her costar JOHN TRAVOLTA in the decidedly un-sexy Moment By Moment.

"That Valentino was certainly a very splendid fellow. And his unique glamour was not entirely due to the fact that he was unhampered by banal dialogue. Modern dialogue is not always banal, and the screen hero who could match Valentino's posturing technique with an equally polished vocal technique has a perfectly fair chance of becoming his romantic peer. It was his magnetism and dignity that assured him a peak of magnificent isolation." - JAMES MASON on RUDOLPH VALENTINO

"Jon agonizes his way toward every decision; what his next movie should be; whether to go out to lunch. He's a good, tortured person." - JANE FONDA on her Coming Home costar JON VOIGHT (the film having netted them each both a Golden Globe and an Oscar.)

"The experience of working with him was unlike any I had in more than 50 pictures. He was so painstaking and slow that I would lose all sense of time, hypnotized by the man's relentless perfectionism." - GLORIA SWANSON on her Queen Kelly director (and, later, Sunset Boulevard costar) ERICH VON STROHEIM

"He was the unqualified front runner-the most generous man I've ever met. And he had such a lovely light sense of humor. I consider it a privilege to have worked with him." - JULIE ANDREWS on her Hawaii costar MAX VON SYDOW

"He wasn't as clever as Spence, but a brilliant actor nonetheless, bigger than life in his performance-and often when he didn't have to be." - KATHARINE HEPBURN on her Rooster Cogburn costar JOHN WAYNE

"I certainly would have given anything to have worked with John Wayne. He's the most attractive man who ever walked the earth, I think." BETTE DAVIS on JOHN WAYNE in 1974.

"I could never feel much sympathy for Cheeta the chimp-who was really rather queer, I'm afraid. Didn't like the girls at all. But he adored Johnny Weismuller and was terribly jealous of me." - MAUREEN O'SULLIVAN on CHEETA and JOHNNY WEISMULLER, her costars in several Tarzan movies.

"I have never met anyone so badly behaved." - JAMES MASON on The Last of Sheila costar RAQUEL WELCH

"Tuesday was a dream to work with. She seemed to have an instinct for how to act a scene. I also noticed she seemed to be heading for serious trouble. ...it was apparent stardom was well within her grasp, but she conducted herself in a manner that made you think she was just another Hollywood joke-and I followed her career-it was as though she were some dizzy blonde who had no idea about what she was doing." - DANNY KAYE on his The Five Pennies costar TUESDAY WELD

"You cannot battle an elephant. Orson was such a big man in every way that no one could stand up to him. On the first day...at 4 o'clock, he strode in, followed by his agent, a dwarf, his valet and a whole entourage. Approaching us, he said, 'All right, everybody turn to page eight.' And we did it (though he was not the director.)" - JOAN FONTAINE on her Jane Eyre costar ORSON WELLES

"During The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles, drunk on Joe Cotton's Machiavellian martinis, secretly sending his chauffeur homes and pleading no transport, would I drive him? Gad, what a drive. I prayed for a policeman. Six feet four, 250 pounds and what seemed like six hands in my shirt." - ANNE BAXTER on costar ORSON WELLES

"I've learned everything from her. Well, not everything, but almost everything. She knows so much. Her insight is so true. Her timing so perfect, her grasp of a situation so right." - CARY GRANT on MAE WEST, with whom he worked in I'm No Angel and She Done Him Wrong.

"We went down to her house for rehearsals... And she was always in a sort of pale beige negligee with a train about twenty feet long. That's how we rehearsed every day. And when we'd stop for a breather, we'd sit and talk. She was just plain and simply a sweet old lady, who told me marvelous stories about her life." - ROCK HUDSON on MAE WEST, with whom he performed "Baby, It's Cold Outside" at the 30th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in 1958 (when West was 65.)

"They [the acting school] were trying to mold Robin into a standardized Juilliard product-Kevin Kline is the perfect example of it-but Robin was too special, too original, to be that." - CHRISTOPHER REEVE on ROBIN WILLIAMS

"Look, Debra is 21 years younger than I am. She has very different interests and different ways of looking at life. Just because you work intimately with someone for three or four months on a film doesn't mean there's any breeding ground for friendship. I don't think there was much of one. She loved to sit in her trailer in her combat boots and miniskirt, listening to real loud rock 'n' roll. Right there, I mean, what am I going to do that for?" - SHIRLEY MACLAINE on her Terms of Endearment costar DEBRA WINGER

"Joanne always made it her business to hold back her career while Paul was on the up and up. And that girl is one helluva talented actress. But she knew what side her bread was buttered on and let Paul become the superstar of the family. The result? They're still happily married today." - SHELLEY WINTERS on JOANNE WOODWARD (and PAUL NEWMAN)

"She was and is the only actress I really dislike. She was sickeningly sweet, a pure phony. Her two faces sent me home angry and crying several times." - VIRGINIA FIELD on LORETTA YOUNG, with whom she worked in Ladies in Love, Eternally Yours and The Perfect Marriage.

"If you want a place in the sun you have to expect a few blisters." - LORETTA YOUNG

Fun Finds: Modern Screen Magazine, November 1965

You wouldn't believe what surface-dwelling minutiae has occupied a hefty chunk of our time as of late... Your friendly webmaster Poseidon is planning a Yard Sale this coming Saturday! I've been burrowing through the house, slapping a price tag on practically anything I no longer want or need and have been making signs and otherwise organizing for the big day (which is going to be a city-wide event.) So in the meantime I give you another of my infamous Fun Finds, this one a movie rag from one of my favorite time periods, scored at an antique mall for the unbelievable price of $2.00! Hopefully, I'll make that back (and then some!) on Saturday. Ha ha!

First up is this movie review section which will give you a cross-section of the films that were released in the same general time frame of one another. (Also of interest is the bobbed model for Nestle hair colorant. Not to be confused with Nestlé, this company's name was pronounced like the verb "nestle.")

More movie reviews, but also a makeup and beauty Q&A column, so that you can achieve your best 1965 look.

I went ahead and skipped to page 88 so that we could round out all the film reviews. I found The Hallelujah Trail (1965) to be a cumbersome, long, unfunny bore, but I disagree that cutting out Burt Lancaster's bath time is the answer!

The famed Louella Parsons was still kicking it (albeit with the aid of Dorothy Manners) in 1965. In fact, this was Parsons' next to last credited column in Modern Screen as she retired in December of 1965 (and reportedly Manners had been doing most all the writing for a year prior anyway.) Jane Fonda's first marriage was the top story this time out.

The movie (not referred to by name) in this blurb on Warren Beatty was That Funny Feeling (1965.) It was initially to be directed by Gene Kelly with Beatty as the star, but ended up with Richard Thorpe behind the camera and Sandra Dee's husband Bobby Darin as (the second-billed) costar.

Needless to say, Natalie Wood did not end up marrying fiance Ladislow Blatnick. Divorced from Robert Wagner in 1962, she wed British producer Richard Gregson in 1969, though they were divorced as well by 1972. That same year she re-wed Wagner.

I LOVE the fun, glitzy photos on this page. At a premiere party for the all-star drama Ship of Fools (1965), we get glimpses of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Miss Rita Hayworth.

The glamour continues on the next page as we find Tommy Sands escorting a young Barbara Luna while hunky Doug McClure (Luna's ex-husband!) squires Sands' soon-to-be-ex Nancy Sinatra. Television legends Lucille Ball and Milton Berle are also on hand, as are Stuart Whitman and the darkly attractive Wende Wagner, who'd costarred with Whitman in 1964's Rio Conchos.

Get a load of the sleek, pert Candice Bergen, just about to make a splash in The Group (1966.) Her high-profile debut was greeted with some degree of confusion, though, when her role in the film turned out to be surprisingly small (perhaps trimmed, thanks to its then-daring Lesbian aspect.) We adore Diane McBain, but this was the year that her film career took a slide that became irrevocable as she worked more and more on TV and in lower-budget movies.

The movie referenced in the caption for Elke Sommer "Any Tom" was later changed to Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) and starred Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller in addition to Sommer.

The line from Steel Magnolias (1989) goes, "When it comes to sufferin', she's right up there with Elizabeth Taylor!" However, Patricia Neal was no slouch in that department either. Having barely survived a tumultuous affair with Gary Cooper in the 1940s, she later had a string of tragedies beginning in 1961 with one child being struck in his carriage by a taxi, resulting in severe injuries and eight brain operations, followed by the death of her seven year-old daughter the following year from measles encephalitis. Then while working on 7 Women (1966), she suffered a succession of strokes while she was pregnant, fell into a coma and later required intensive recovery treatments! So, this was indeed a miracle baby. When she finally did learn to talk, walk and memorize again, her husband left her, though she did resume her career with success.

This article, more than most, seems wholly fabricated and all about nothing. It makes it seem like there are all sorts of rumors surrounding Annette Funicello regarding her behavior.

In reality, she was having a bit of morning sickness (she wed Jack Gilardi in January of 1965 and had their first of three children that October) and, thus, was experiencing a little discomfort during the shooting of How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965.) Her career in those teen-oriented flicks tapered off completely by 1967 and she concentrated on motherhood (though she divorced in 1983, marrying a second time and final time in 1986.)

We were THRILLED to have this article on The King Family (really The King Cousins), but have to laugh that the text says they "use too little make-up!" Whaaa??

We've harbored a bit of a crush on cousin Ric (with the guitar) ever since getting our hands on some DVDs of their never-ending series of holiday specials.

We dearly love Ric's white trunks and would have loved a better look at them. Consequently, our mind wanders over what could be dangling from the right leg of them during his guitar playing and how they appear to be gaping open a little during his turn on the surfboard!

Tina is another favorite and, despite the clan's fresh-scrubbed reputation, does show off a healthy heap of cleavage in her two-piece.

This is David Janssen of The Fugitive and his wife Ellie.

The article is just more made-up piffle about how she has to deal with things written about him (probably some by Modern Screen and many more by the other tabloids) while enjoying the fruits of his acting labor. Incidentally, the text cuts off while looking like Richard Diamond, Private Detective "wasn't" a smash. The sentence actually continued on page 77 to say, "wasn't any slouch either." Janssen and Ellie divorced in 1968 after a decade of marriage and he rewed (to Dani Crane) in 1975, which lasted until his premature death in 1980 of a heart attack at age forty-eight.

I enjoyed this portrait of Miss Doris Day.

In the article, she bemoans the fact that so many fan mags use attention-grabbing headlines (that often people in line at the grocery mentally-absorb without ever reading the fluffy, unrelated story found within) that paint an unfair picture. And she was absolutely right. One of the episodes of That Show which I watched recently had one guest, a magazine writer, freely admitting to fellow guest columnist Earl Wilson that she would take one small seed from a story of his and fabricate an entire article out of it, complete with fake conversations, and then generate a grabber of a headline to go with it.

I LOVE Mia Farrow's hairdo in this series of photos (and on the cover, which is a slightly more elaborate version.)

The man in question for this article, the man who allegedly taught Mia Farrow how to love the three decades older Frank Sinatra? Her FATHER John Farrow!  LOL I bet Ol' Blue Eyes just loved his one...

Another actress whose hair I often loved (with its thick, curly locks) is looking a bit weary here.

Dorothy Malone married Ginger Rogers' ex-husband Jacques Bergerac in 1959, had two daughters with him, then divorced him in 1964. A nasty custody battle resulted in her obtaining primary possession of the girls, though she nearly died soon after of a gallery of afflictions including pulmonary embolism, blood clots in her lungs and pneumonia! A second marriage in 1969 was annulled after a few months and a third one barely made it to two years. She's been single ever since and is currently ninety-three!

This article, about Ryan O'Neal and his actress wife Joanna Moore (parents of Tatum O'Neal) discusses the important religion played in their lives while the lean years before O'Neal's series Peyton Place loomed heavily.

I don't know where all this religion was (or went!) when the squabbling couple divorced in 1967 over (among other things) Moore's drug and alcohol dependency. He immediately wed Peyton costar Leigh Taylor-Young and they proceeded to a successful custody hearing of Tatum and her younger brother Griffin when Moore was arrested for drunk driving in 1970.

I didn't know that David Hedison (of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and Barbara Parkins had once been a couple. Tim O'Connor and his wife Mary are listed in a few spots as having divorced in 1974, yet other places have them still wed! The big news is that he is ninety-three and she is ninety-one, whether they're married or not.

Chris Connelly and Pat Morrow didn't end up wed (he married Cindy Carol in 1969 and she married Rosalind Russell's son Lance in 1975), but Ed Nelson and his wife had a very successful union. Marrying in 1951, they stayed together until his death in 2014, sixty-three years later!

It seems so unusual to see Dyan Cannon dressed in such staid clothing. After her divorce from Cary Grant, she always seemed to be in very mod '60s get-ups that showed a lot more bod.

The couple's fairly brief union (1965-1968) resulted in Grant's (and her) only child, Jennifer Grant, who maintained a moderate acting career as a young adult. Fans of Grant must have been agog when he became a father for the first time at age sixty-two (beating fifty-six year-old George Clooney by quite a bit, but not Tony Randall who was in his late-seventies when he fathered two children!)

Quite a worried shot of Debbie Reynolds...

...meant to coincide with an old story of hers from the dawn of her career in the late-1940s when she had been prescribed the use of a sunlamp to help cure a bad cold. The automatic shut-off didn't happen and she was blinded by UV rays for 36 hours!

Fans of The Beatles ought to enjoy this series of pics from their heady days as a top musical act. (LOL at Leonard Bernstein and daughter plugging their ears at a concert!) John Lennon and Cindy divorced in 1968.

George Harrison wound up marrying Pattie Boyd in 1966, but they separated in 1974 and divorced three years later. Ringo had married Maureen in 1965, but they were divorced in 1975 (both unfaithful, she'd had an affair with Starr's band-mate Harrison!) Starr more successfully wed Barbara Bach in 1980. Paul McCartney never wed Jane Asher, but in 1969 he wed Linda Eastman, his future Wings collaborator.

Patty Duke is the subject of this article over an apparent romance with... wait for it...

Troy Donahue! I sure never knew about this (if it even happened), but Patty married for the first time in 1965 to a man other than Troy. And Troy married for the second (of four) time in 1966. None of his marriages stretched beyond a couple of years.

Sean Connery and his marriage to Australian actress Diane Cilento is profiled here.

Whatever the arrangement, the union had petered out by 1973. She wed again in 1985 to playwright Anthony Shaffer and that lasted till his death in 2001 and Sean wed Micheline in 1975, to whom he's still married today at age eighty-six.

Carroll Baker was at or near the peak of her productivity and popularity at this particular time...

However, it was not long after this that the wheels came off. She became identified with blonde, buxom types of roles, engaged in a legal battle with her studio and saw her marriage fall apart. In time, she remarried and also rebounded career-wise, but never again to the heights she'd once experienced.

Jacqueline Kennedy (later Onassis) was a constant subject for tabloid magazines and so much of the content was mindless, unsubstantiated babble.

The angle of this article is that young Mia Farrow could learn grace, etiquette, composure and so forth from Kennedy in order to measure up better as a possible wife to Frank Sinatra. As it was, their marriage only lasted from 1966-1968, though it seemed pretty doomed from the start.

Glamorous Gila Golan, a 1961 Miss Israel, was hot off the hit movie Ship of Fools (1965) and went on to other movies such as Our Man Flint (1966) and Valley of Gwangi (1969) before departing the biz for marriage and three children.

Her life got off to a calamitous start as she was left abandoned in Poland during The Holocaust and taken in by a Roman Catholic family. (Sources vary as to whether she was three years old or an infant in a bundle.) She's still alive today at seventy-six, though long retired from performing.

Robert Vaughn was currently enjoying the success of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran from 1964-1968.

Though he and Joyce Jameson did enjoy a long relationship, it didn't end in marriage. He wed in 1974 to a woman who remained his wife until his death last November. Sadly, Jameson, who suffered from depression and chronic insomnia, committed suicide in 1987 at age fifty-four.

We may never know the exact circumstances of this quickie marriage. It's a fact that Edwards and Kersh wed, the divorced after the briefest of unions.

She had his child. Then a year later, while guest-starring on Batman, she met Burt Ward and soon married him in 1967, though they too were divorced by 1969. Kersh had once been the key fascination of producer Martin Ransohoff, who planned to give her a star build-up, but before that happened, he met Sharon Tate and turned his efforts towards her instead.

The happy little family unit shown here unfortunately didn't last beyond 1969.

This was Alain Delon's only marriage, though he had several lengthy relationships (and two additional children, much later.) The text states that the couple were expecting another baby, but unfortunately that never came to pass in this instance.

Our last little feature is a hair-do how-to with Marianna Hill. At the time known for much television work, she was also breaking into movies like The New Interns (1964) and Red Line 7000 (1965.) The movie noted in the caption would ultimately be called Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966.) Hill later worked in Medium Cool (1969), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) and is still with us today at seventy-five. This particular magazine seemed to have a bigger dose of colorful or interesting ads than many, so I will end with shots of those!

Check those razor-like eyebrows! Blue eyeshadow later became the target of derision for a whole generation. Ha ha!

This is SO 1960s slick. Love it.

I am obsessed with slim, sleek skirt lines like this! I don't care how cheap they were or what they were made of. I also cannot get enough of the gal on the left's makeup!