April 15, 1944
EIGHTEEN YEAR OLD PATRICIA MUNZEL*, the singing thrush from Spokane, who got herself into the Metropolitan by winning an audition, has a Hollywood job. She is signing a contract with Jack Warner that will pay her in the neighborhood of $50,000 a picture. He is now looking for stories for her. The state of Washington is very proud of their songbird, who is very young to sing operatic roles.
*This is Patrice Munsel, who was recently featured in Life magazine, if you’ll recall.
April 15, 1944
Some quotations from the Motion Picture Herald, including this about “Princess O’Rourke.”
I played this fine picture on Sunday-Monday to just fair business and had more raves about it than anything I played in years. Maybe it was the title that kept them away. I really exploit my pictures, using four weekly newspapers, 100 tack cards and 1,000 heralds; plus a public address system. If the preview had a hillbilly chirping “Coming Round the Mountain” or something, maybe that would have got them. My patrons like corn, green, ripe, in muffins, cans or jugs, and I simply have got to give it to them and that’s what they are going to get from now on. This picture business is getting me, or has it got me?
Unless you prowl the outer fringes of the publishing industry, you may have never heard of Lily DuTertre, who is an avid compiler of “high quality Wikipedia articles” into books. Like this one on unsolved murders, selling for $26.68.
This is the 1972 film “Pulp,” starring Michael Caine.
Notice that imdb is not always reliable: “Michael King is a seedy writer of sleazy pulp genre novels under a half dozen sensational pseudonyms whose ambition is to dictate 10,000 words per minute to stenographers a la Earle Stanley Gardner.”
The Selig baseball team, courtesy of the Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library
Long before there was radio, television, the Internet, social media, computer games or rotisserie leagues, major league baseball dominated the American landscape. For decades, it filled newspaper sports pages, led social chatter, taught teamwork and sportsmanship and trimmed American waistlines. More Americans played baseball than any other sport into the middle of the 20th century.
In many ways, baseball shaped American culture: sublimating individual play into teamwork, democratizing and integrating citizens, giving hope for the future, offering a chance at the American dream. Baseball represented the national pastime, and America itself. In 1888, Walt Whitman pointed out, “I like your interest in sports — ball, chiefest of all — base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character.” “Baseball in America” states that Mark Twain called it “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century.”
Mary Mallory’s “Hollywoodland: Tales Lost and Found” is available for the Kindle.
This is one of the “ghost bikes” that have cropped up around the Los Angeles area as memorials to bicyclists who have been killed.
April 11, 1944
HOLLYWOOD, APRIL 10 — So many movies are mentioned for Cary Grant that when I hear he is to make a picture I say, “Does Cary know it?” This time he does know he is to star in “The Greatest Gift,” an original by Phillip Van Doren Stern, for Charlie Koerner bought it with the popular Mr. Grant in mind.
Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, visits Milwaukee and talks with columnist Buck Herzog.
April 11, 1944
HOLLYWOOD, April 11 — Greer Garson’s underwear scene in “Mrs. Parkington” is giving the Hayes office a problem.
I recently watched an episode of “Saturday Night Live” (guest star Jill Clayburgh) that I taped in 1978, and I found rather sad. Out of the four people in this skit, only Bill Murray is still alive. John Belushi, Clayburgh and Gilda Radner are all long gone.
And then there’s this:
Belushi gets a fix from Jane Curtin in a satiric ad for “Nutrifix.”
April 10, 1944
Life’s cover story is Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris, who backed the theory of mass bombing. The movie of the weeks is “Buffalo Bill,” starring Joel McCrea.
Life visits the home “in the majestic setting of California’s San Gabriel Valley” of Disney artist Ward Kimball, who is giving a party featuring his Grizzy Flats Railroad, which he keeps on his two-acre lot.
April 10, 1944: Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! “The Lone Ranger.” Courtesy of otronmp3.com.
The reject pile! Aspiring authors, avert thine eyes!
This is a sample of review copies that are cast aside in bins to be rummaged through by the staff. Usually they are contemporary genre fiction (“50 Shades of Stealing Maps for the OSS/CIA/NSA/FBI Written by Tom Clancy From Beyond the Grave”), self-help books (“Lose Those Stubborn Last 50 Pounds While Raising Young Einsteins in Five Days!”) and scholarly works (“The Socio-Cultural Effect of the Introduction of the Crimped Bottle Cap in the Belgian Congo.”)
But occasionally there are books that seem somewhat interesting. At least interesting enough to lug back to the Daily Mirror HQ. Because it’s sad to see them junked by the cartload.
This week’s subject is “Kitty Genovese,” by Catherine Pelonero, which looks fairly interesting.
Continue reading
Here’s another political cartoon by Edmund Waller “Ted” Gale, formerly of The Times, who moved to the Examiner. “There’s a Burma Girl a-Settin’ ” refers to the poem “Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling.
April 10, 1944
JUST THE DAY BEFORE JOAN BLONDELL signed her contract to play Aunt Sissy in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” she took her two children, Norman and Ellen, to the beach and got a terrific sunburn. I talked with her Friday and she was applying every known remedy to her face to try to get it in shape before she starts at 20th. Joan and her suit for divorce against Dick Powell will be filed this week. I understand she will ask for custody of the children, although that is only hearsay. Dick is still living in the house, but there is no chance of a reconciliation.
April 9, 1944
Sidney Skolsky says: In “Objective Burma,” there is a soldier named Cesar Negulesco who is described as being “very concerned about his lack of experience with women,” which is a rib directed at wolf Jean Negulesco.
April 9, 1944
“A man is downstairs with a black eye,” announced Collins, my butler, who in the nine years he has been with me has seen many stars come through that front door.
I stumbled across this photo in going through the LAPD scrapbooks at the city archives. This is Rodger Young Village, built for returning veterans due to the acute housing shortage in Los Angeles. This site is now occupied by the Autry museum.
I recently visited the city archives and thanks to archivist Michael Holland, I learned that the LAPD kept scrapbooks in the 1940s.
This is an editorial from the California Grocers Journal, which says: At one time police brutality was common and the need for reform existed. Now the pendulum has swung too far the other way. The criminal, with the support of sob sisters and radical political groups, is winning public sympathy.
Why look! It’s our old friend cartoonist Edmund Waller “Ted” Gale, who left The Times to go to the Los Angeles Examiner. In 1944, April 8 was Holy Saturday and the papers are full of stories and ads for Easter. This was, of course, in the days when many papers (including The Times) published Bible quotations every day.
April 8, 1944
HOLLYWOOD, April 7 — The official choice of Joan Blondell to play Aunt Sissy in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is an inspiration. Who, better than Joan, can play these goodhearted gals whose mistakes in life are often more on the comic than the tragic side. Aunt Sissy is a wonderful character and Joan will play her to the nth degree.
As is Darryl Zanuck’s custom when he hands out a surefire role, he signs the player on a long term contract. Joan, therefore, becomes today a 20th star with a grand array of movies planned for her. Alice Faye, who was to have played Aunt Sissy, has told her company she can not report for work before June or July. Her baby is due any moment.
In 2013, I was given a box of material that was cleaned out of the old press room at the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters, sometimes called “the cop shop.” The box was a jumble of press releases, photographs, artists’ sketches and other items dating from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
This is one of the oldest items in the cop shop files: Two pages from a 1957 phone directory for the municipal courts, which no longer exist. Notice the telephone exchanges: AT lantic, CU mberland, OL eander, OL ympia, TH ornwall, VI ctoria, etc. Notice Judge Ralph C. Dills (d. 2002), who was also an assemblyman and a state senator.
As readers remember (some fondly, others not so much) the late Mickey Rooney, here’s a post I wrote about the fifth Mrs. Mickey Rooney (Barbara Thomason) in 2008.
ladailymirror.com 