Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

hearse_1973_oldsmobile

A customized 1973 Oldsmobile hearse, listed on EBay at Buy It Now for $13,500.


Queen of the Dead – dateline July 23, 2012

•   I adored Celeste Holm (who died on July 15, at 95) as an actress—she was warm and sharp and witty in All About Eve, Gentleman’s Agreement, High Society—often, she was the best part of her films, even in small supporting parts. But . . . when she died, I heard from several friends and acquaintances who had worked with her or knew her, and not a single one of them had a nice word to say about her. The same word cropped up a lot, but it was not “nice,” and “copper-bottom” was frequently attached to it. So I implore readers to post lovely stories about what a sweet, good-natured woman Celeste Holm was—let’s hear ’em!

 

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Movieland Mystery Photo [Updated]

July 19, 2012, Mystery Photo

Here’s another photo from the amazing collection of Steven Bibb!

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Lana Turner Elopes!

July 18, 1942, Comics

July 18, 1942, Lana Turner

July 18, 1942: Lana Turner elopes to Las Vegas with Stephen Crane in a marriage performed by the same judge who did her marriage to Artie Shaw in 1940. Turner is 22 and Crane is 27. It is the second marriage for both of them.

The NAACP’s annual convention, meeting in Los Angeles, condemns the police beating of tenor Roland Hayes in Rome, Ga.

Hayes’ wife had taken their daughter to buy shoes and objected when the clerk asked them to sit in the back of the store. The clerk called police, The Times said.

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Movieland Mystery Photo [Updated]

July 16, 2012, Mystery Photo

March 7, 1937, Frank Vosper

Here’s today’s mystery photo, courtesy of Steven Bibb!

This is a still from “Power” showing Frank Vosper, who disappeared from an ocean liner in 1937.

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Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

hearse_harold_maude

A model of the Jaguar XKE hearse from “Harold and Maude” has been listed on EBay with bids starting at 125 GBP.


Queen of the Dead – dateline July 16, 2012

•  I’m a real bear on architectural preservation, so I was interested in the obit of John Papa, who died at 87 on June 24 (and who was no relation to Papas John of Pizza or rock group fame). He was something of a hero in San Francisco, where the clothing-store and real-estate businessman bought up the six Selfridge houses, designed by the Reid brothers in 1894. He was also one of the great hosts of the town (what is male for “socialite, anyway?), throwing bashes for everyone from ballet stars to Olympic athletes to Tāufa’āhau Tupou IV, King of Tonga. “Abroad for six months each year,” notes his obit, “he spent many winters in Puerto Vallarta, and summers in Europe. He will be most fondly remembered for the many amusing postcards sent and anecdotes brought back.” Sounds like quite a fellow.

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Posted in Art & Artists, Comics, Eve Golden, Film, Found on EBay, Hollywood, Museums, Queen of the Dead | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Seeing L.A. Through the Lens of History – C.C. Pierce’s Photos

My latest column for The Times is on early L.A. photographer C.C. Pierce.

Posted in History, Photography | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Movieland Mystery Photo – Film Within a Film Edition [Updated ++]

Movieland Mystery Photo

And this would be?

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Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

hearse_1999_cadillac

Photo: A 1999 Cadillac hearse listed on EBay with bids starting at $1, or Buy It Now for $10,995. 


Queen of the Dead – dateline July 9, 2012

•   Andy Griffith (who died at 86, on July 3), I thought, was kind of sexy, in a carved-out-of-roast-beef way.  Mayberry scared the heck out of me, though: I know it was supposed to be all bucolic and heartwarming, but it had a Twilight Zone vibe to me: if my type of East Coast eccentric showed up, I would never be seen again, and “Aint Bee” would be serving meat pies to Andy and Opie for the next month. But I loved Andy in his earlier No Time for Sergeants and especially A Face in the Crowd mode—if you have never seen that last movie, rent it now.  He plays every kind of political populist glad-hander from Huey Long and Glen Beck on the right to Jon Stewart and Will Rogers on the left. One of those movies that never goes out of date. 

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Movieland Mystery Photo

July 7, 2012, Mystery Photo

Here’s another photo from the collection of Steven Bibb!

Posted in Film, Hollywood, Mystery Photo | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

‘Casablanca’ Cast Honors Michael Curtiz’s 15 Years in U.S.

Juyly 7, 1942, U.S. Forces Batter Rommel
July 7, 1942, Comics

July 7, 1942:Twin brothers Walter and Sol Brundo, jazz musicians, join a military band stationed at Camp Haan in Riverside County.   I can’t find any trace of Sol and Walter. I wonder what became of them.

“The Magnificent Ambersons”opens at the Pantages in Hollywood and the RKO Hillstreet, billed with “Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost” and the latest “March of Time.”

The cast of “Casablanca” gives a party for director Michael Curtiz marking his 15 years in the U.S. “Mike said he’d talked with many refugees on his set and worked their actual experiences, escaping from Nazi countries, into the picture, Hedda Hopper says.

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On Assignment

I’m on assignment this week, so posting will be light.

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Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

Hearse U-Haul

This gag postcard of a hearse has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at  $19.95.


Queen of the Dead – dateline July 2, 2012

•  Don Grady, the hottest of My Three Sons, died on June 27; he was 68. Grady started on The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, and racked up an impressive résumé before being cast as Robbie Douglas on My Three Sons (1960-71), on which he aged from kid to dad of his own triplets. But Grady’s big love was music: he was a drummer for a rock band, and after leaving acting he became a composer for movies and TV shows (The Phil Donahue Show, Switch, Good Neighbor, The Burning Sands). The Modern editor Ron Sklar calls him “a really, really good guy.” Grady told Sklar last year that My Three Sons “was a wonderful experience, in the sense that I learned that fame is not everything . . . I needed to do something that satisfied me and was fulfilling. And for me, that was music.”

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Keaton Sons Change Names to Talmadge

image

July 2, 1942, Comics

July 2, 1942: Buster Keaton’s sons Robert, 18, and James, 20, legally change their last names to Talmadge after a petition to the court by Keaton’s ex-wife Natalie Talmadge.

Lee Gilcrease, 29, kills his wife, Ethel, and commits suicide in an orange grove near 14333 Van Nuys Blvd., leaving their children, ages 3 and 2 months, without parents. Gilcrease apparently suspected his wife of being unfaithful and said in a suicide note: “I am stopping it all.”

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Man Held as ‘Orchid Bandit’

June 27, 1942, Ship Off West Coast Torpedoed
June 27, 1942, Comics

June 27, 1942: James D. Hannah liked orchids. He liked them so much that he usually gave several of them to his girlfriends to put in their hair, a habit that led to his arrest when robbery victim  Elva Sieburg identified him from a mug shot.

Sieburg told police that Hannah was the man who held up the Postal Telegraph office at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue. Unfortunately, The Times failed to follow up on the tale of the orchid bandit, although a photographer managed to take a very strange picture of him with several alleged victims.

Hedda Hopper has an amusing tale — possibly true– of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland going bowling in Monterey, Calif., during a vacation in Carmel.

Jessie Beck, ex-commissary girl at Metro, wrote “Other People.” It’s a candid view of the screen great from a waitress’ angle, Hopper says.

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Drunken Brawl at Errol Flynn’s Birthday Party

June 26, 1942, Soviet Sub
June 26, 1942, Comics

June 26, 1942: A brawl at Errol Flynn’s  32nd birthday party involves Barbara Hutton’s butler – Eric Gosta Hadler —  and Flynn’s secretary and stand-in, James Fleming. Hadler says: “It all happened so suddenly I can’t remember what happened.”

Judging by Los Angeles County assessor’s records, Flynn’s home at 7740 Mulholland Drive was torn down and replaced in 1967.

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Movieland Mystery Photo

June 25, 2012, Mystery Photo

Here’s another mystery photo from the collection of Steven Bibb!

Update: This is Billy House. Please congratulate Arye Michael Bender (1), Mike Hawks (2), Jenny M (3), Bob Levinson (4), Herb Nichols (5) and Don Danard via email for identifying him.

Posted in Film, Hollywood, Mystery Photo, Photography | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

Motorcycle Hearse
A motorcycle hearse listed on EBay at $10,000.


Queen of the Dead – dateline June 25, 2012

•  Remember a couple months ago when Thomas Kinkade died and there were all these debates about “was he a worse painter than LeRoy Neiman?”  Well, now they can fight it out in Bad Artist Heaven, as Neiman died on June 20, aged 91. Neiman started his career with Playboy in the 1950s, creating garish Eisenhower/Kennedy-era kitsch (he also created the “Femlin,” the semi-naked sprite who cavorted on Playboy’s Party Jokes page). Neiman’s later paintings sold for three figures, says the New York Times, and that does not include a decimal point. The Times added that Neiman “cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes,” which explains the spinning noises I heard from all those Paris cemeteries I toured last month. I actually think Kinkade was a worse artist. Neiman at least had some kitsch value; Kinkade’s work looked like it was painted by an evil teddy bear, using another evil teddy bear as a brush.

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Eurasian Held on Suspicion of Being Japanese

June 23, 1942, Comics

 

June 23, 1942, Eurasian

 

June 23, 1942: Meet Stanwood Gertz Jr., who was arrested because he was suspected of being Japanese. Gertz told detectives he was German, Chinese and Hawaiian – and his dyed hair presumably made him even more suspicious.

The Times never followed up on the case of young Mr. Gertz, which it called a “man of many mixtures,” but we have Google. Let’s see what we find.

The website japaneserelocation.org provides a few details. A man named Stanwood Gertz is listed as being born in 1921, which would have made him 20 or 21, not 19. He’s listed as Japanese and white, and apparently was sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo. Notice that he’s a college graduate.

In 1943, he apparently tried to enlist in the Army and eventually served. And that’s about all I can find.

“This Gun for Hire” is coming to the Paramount in Hollywood and Downtown.

Tom Treanor, who was killed covering the liberation of France, describes a trip in a cargo plane to an undisclosed destination, just him and a large piece of machinery that he’s forbidden to identify.

“I have taken five life preservers off the wall and I lie on them hour after hour,” he says. “There are only three things to look at outside the plane — the clouds above, the clouds below and the water below the lower clouds, which is a different color every few minutes.”

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Hedy Lamarr’s Sarong: S’awright!

June 22, 1942, Tobruk

June 22, 1942, Comics

June 22, 1942: Hedda Hopper says: Joan Crawford got a mighty entertaining picture in “They All Kissed the Bride.” I’ve always liked Joan. She says, “I love being a star and everything that goes with it. I love the work, the adulation, the people who want my autograph. Some may call it drudgery, but to me it’s always been fun.”

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Movieland Mystery Photo [Update +]

June 21, 2012, Mystery Photo

And here’s Thursday’s mystery chap!

Update: This is Ben Blue. Please congratulate Gary Martin (1), Don Danard (2), Mary Mallory (3), Bob Levinson (4), Mike Hawks (5), Greg Clancey (6), William (7), Jenny M (8), Dewey Webb (9), Gregory Moore (10), Herb Nichols (11), Rick Scott (12), Lorenzo (13) and Mike Rose (14) for identifying him.

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Posted in Film, Hollywood, Mystery Photo, Photography | Tagged , | 19 Comments