Good Ol' Dear Ol' Dad - The Exception that Proves the Rule

It's been a while, but here's the second installment of "Good Ol' Dear Ol' Dad", with guest writer - My father!

"The passing of Dick Clark this week at age 82 may constitute final and conclusive proof for human mortality.  In Philosophy 101, many of us were taught the most basic of logical syllogisms:

1.     All men are mortal.

2.     Socrates is a man.

3.     Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

For several generations of TV viewers and music lovers, Dick Clark added a new twist to deductive logic by seeming never to age.  So the syllogism came to read something like this:

1.     All men are mortal.

2.     Dick Clark is immortal.

3.     Therefore, Dick Clark is not Socrates.

Clark with the A.B. audience.

Clark is probably best remembered as the host of the TV show “American Bandstand,” which earned him the sobriquet of “America’s oldest teenager.” The moniker proved to be prescient in terms of Clark’s eerie agelessness—a “fact” that it’s tempting to hypothesize subliminally convinced his mainly baby-boomer audience that they, too, were perhaps indestructible, but this is not something I’d presume to lay at the feet of the perpetually boyish Clark.  And, though I clearly remember seeing “Bandstand” in the early sixties as a child, I will leave its virtues and vices to other commentators.  (The program did give me an opportunity to play a puerile practical joke on some visiting teenage girl cousins one summer afternoon, circa 1962; I leaned out the back door to yell out to them in the yard where they were chatting with a neighborhood friend, “Quick!  Chubby Checker is on ‘American Bandstand!’” The three screamed and ran into the house so fast that one of them lost the tip of a high heel in the grass.  As penance for my prank, I was made to help in the fruitless search for the heel tip after they learned to their dismay that Checker was not in fact on Clark’s program that day.)

Collage of Clark from 1950s-1990s

Clark’s seeming changelessness became something of a national touchstone, and his name became synonymous with eternal youth.  I recall my brother at a family reunion some 20 years ago referring to a cousin and contemporary of ours, who had remained seemingly unchanged in the years since we had last seen him, as, “The Dick Clark of Bedford, Pennsylvania.”

Clark, on the Pyramid

In the course of his long career as a TV host and producer, Clark emceed one of my favorite game shows, “The $100,000 Pyramid.” That program had two teams, each consisting of a celebrity guest and contestant partner, vying to guess a category of things from a list of component parts.  In the lightning round, one team member had to get the other to correctly identify six progressively trickier categories in the space of a minute.  (Contestants often sat on their hands, as they were prohibited from gesturing to provide non-verbal clues.)  It was a good, lively, brain-teasing show.  Arguably the best part, though, was when, at the end of a lightning round where a team had failed to guess all the categories in the pyramid, the suave Clark would cross over to the bull pen where the losing team was seated, perch one leg on the step up, lean on the railing, and in a kindly manner lead the contestants through a few additional clues to help them come up with the answer they’d missed—often suggesting a couple of clues they hadn’t thought of—enabling them, if not to win the jackpot, at least to save face.  In that sense, Clark, ever diplomatic, taught millions of Americans the value of losing gracefully.

Clark aged only when he suffered a debilitating stroke, but then, once again, became the exception that proved the rule by fighting tenaciously back against stroke-related paralysis and speech impediments to continue as an on-air TV host, most notably as the anchor of the annual TV coverage of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, right up to the current year.  Though visibly older (but still not within binocular distance of his chronological age), measured of speech, and only a trifle frail looking, he still exuded a certain brio that made him “America’s youngest senior citizen.”

You could not help but root for such a trouper. - Good Ol', Dear Ol' Dad"

Our thoughts go out to the Clark family.

Good Ol', Dear Ol' Dad

In my previous post on "Coffee Time", a musical number from the 1945 MGM musical "Yolanda and the Thief", I erroneously stated that Lucille Bremer was Fred Astaire's mistress.

My father, a big film history buff sent me this message to correct me:




"Hi Kiddo -- I have been enjoying "Nostalgically Yours"--it's a very impressive blog. But I must rush to correct a fact in your blurb on "Yolanda and the Thief." Fred and Lucille Bremer were NOT romantically involved offscreen as you report. Fred was from all accounts faithful and devoted to his first wife, Phyllis Potter, whom he married in 1933, and with whom he had three children. Mrs. Astaire died of cancer in 1954; Astaire did not remarry until 1981. Lucille Bremer (1916-1996), a former Rockette, WAS rumored to be involved, not with Astaire, but rather with the great MGM producer Arthur Freed, who built her up in pictures like "Yolanda," "Ziegfeld Follies," "Meet Me in St. Louis," and "Till the Clouds Roll By" (the Jerome Kern biopic). Despite dancing talent, Bremer (in the words of her frequent director Vincente Minnelli) "lacked the ambition to be a star," and after several more minor movie roles quit Hollywood to marry the son of the provisional president of Mexico ("She became Yolanda," as my professor and friend, the late Joel E. Siegel, once put it). In later life, after divorce, she owned a dress boutique in Southern California. David Thomson, who deeply admired the "vivid, useless excellence" of Astaire's art, perhaps summed up why Astaire worked so well with Bremer, "another rather heartless dancer." Not so vivid but still useless information from Ol' Dad."

As I read a light bulb went off. My dad is a practically endless source of interesting stories - stories that go really well with my blog... Why not let him strut his stuff and exercise his writing chops? Well, I'm proud to introduce my new segment: Good Ol', Dear Ol' Dad. For his first column, he decided to write a follow-up obit to my previous blurb on the passing of Jane Russell: "A Farewell to Cleavage". Introducing 'Good Ol', Dear Ol' Dad':

FAREWELL TO A FULL-FIGURED GIRL
Sex Symbol with a Sense of Humor


We note with sadness the passing of Jane Russell this week at age 89. In tributes to Jane, much was made of how her voluptuousness was exploited and marketed by Howard Hughes, who discovered her and put her under personal contract for many years, as well as her good works as the founder of an organization to facilitate the placement of adoptive children. Some, but not nearly enough, attention was paid to the rare role she played in movies of the 1940s and 1950s: sex goddess with a sense of humor. As such, she brightened several movies that are still worth catching, in whole or in part.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953):
Jane's best known and best loved "mainstream" movie was done on loan to 20th Century-Fox, where she holds her own opposite that studio's new star, Marilyn Monroe. The film is sort of a passing of the torch from an established sex symbol to an upstart, but the two female stars create a generous and respectful mutual synergy--Jane even does a funny but still gracious Monroe impersonation in a courtroom scene. Tommy Noonan, Elliott Reed, and the great character actor Charles Coburn are the mainly non-threatening males who pursue Jane and Marilyn on an ocean liner. (Ten year old George Winslow, with his deadpan expression and prematurely deep voice, is the only vaguely "adult" male on board.) This very amusing film probably remains so satisfying because of the way director Howard Hawks adroitly get stars performances from Jane and Marilyn in the context of the superb ensemble playing of the eccentric supporting cast.

His Kind of Woman (1949; released 1951, John Farrow):
Jane and laconic co-star Robert Mitchum demonstrate great on-screen chemistry in this fast-paced and offbeat adventure/comedy/noir. The somewhat convoluted plot involves a deported gangster (Raymond Burr) attempting to sneak back into the U.S. by kidnaping and killing Mitchum and assuming his identity through plastic surgery. Jane is a down-on-her-luck saloon singer who meets Mitchum at the posh and remote Mexican resort where most of the action takes place. (Jane gets to sing the catchy if rather irrelevant theme song, "Five Little Miles to San Berdoo.") Burr, in pre-Perry Mason days, is a frighteningly evil heavy; Vincent Price is excellent as a hammy movie actor who tries to use his swashbuckling persona to help rescue Mitchum; Tim Holt is an earnest, pipe-smoking, but ultimately reckless G-man; and Marjorie Reynolds is amusing as Price's long-suffering wife. This well-written and mostly good-natured romp belies the fact that producer Hughes lavished a huge budget on the production and ballyhooed its premiere with fifty-foot, pyrotechnically enhanced images of Jane and Mitchum that reportedly created fire hazards along Hollywood Boulevard, and that Mitchum and Russell both despised director Farrow, whom Mitchum in a later TCM interview branded as a "sadist." Maybe there was something to Mitchum's claim: late in the picture, Jane gets locked in a closet for nearly a reel while Burr menaces Mitchum on his yacht with, among other things, a hypodermic needle (Hughes teamed Jane and Mitchum again in 1952 in the uneven "Macao," which was completed by Nicholas Ray after Hughes, as was his wont, fired original director Josef von Sternberg).

The Paleface (1948, Norman Z. MacLeod)
and Son of Paleface (1952, Frank Tashlin):
Hughes loaned Jane to Paramount for these two highly successful western parodies that paired her with comedian Bob Hope. Big budgets, Technicolor, songs (including the Academy Award winning, "Buttons and Bows," which is reprised with special lyrics in the sequel), and plenty of slapstick humor. Of the two, I prefer "Son," which has Roy Rogers as the third lead for good measure; and leave it to ex-animator Tashlin to throw in "boing" sound effects as Jane sways her hips while singing "Wing Ding Tonight."


Now, two more that need to be taken in smaller doses, but which typify (and, let's face it, objectify) Jane as a Hollywood "product":

The Outlaw (1940; released 1943 and re-released in 1946):
Produced and directed by Howard Hughes. Jane's notorious screen debut, this bizarre western was critically dismissed, but critic David Thomson has astutely noted that it is "very funny, very sexy, and as much Howard Hawks [whom Hughes initially hired to direct but later fired, taking over direction himself] as Howard Hughes." Jane seems to be in on the joke and demonstrates a screen presence that rises above director Hughes's outlandish focus on her breasts. Ironically, despite such overt fetishism, the male characters, Wyatt Earp (Thomas Mitchell), Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), and Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) often seem as interested in one another as in Jane. I wouldn't go so far as to call "The Outlaw" good, but it's not as bad as is generally thought and worth slogging through with a sort of cultural anthropologist's eye.

The French Line (1954, Lloyd Bacon):
Not for the faint of heart, this bloated Hughes technicolor musical production was shot in 3-D (you guess the rest). I wouldn't recommend trying to sit through it, but those who are curious to see how baldly Hughes feinted at the 1950s censors may want to go to YouTube to see Jane's numbers, including "I'll Be Switched" (in a bubble bath) and the rather alarming "I'm Looking for Trouble." Jane must have had a great sense of humor (and a fantastic salary) to weather all this. Gilbert Roland is Jane's love interest and a woman who may be a very young Kim Novak (this is still debated) can be seen in the chorus in several production numbers.

Jane tried her hand at producing a starring vehicle for herself in 1957, "The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown" (Norman Taurog), but the comedy about a movie star kidnaped by a gangster was not a success. Jane turned to a nightclub and recording career, making movies only sporadically, including a cameo in 1966's "Billy Jack" (!); in the early 1970s, Stephen Sondheim tapped her to replace Elaine Stritch in his Broadway musical "Company," where Jane sang Sondheim's "The Little Things You Do Together."

Russell with composer Stephen Sondheim

Her famous body and sense of humor still very much intact, Jane later became TV commercial spokeswoman for Playtex bras, designed for, as she put it, "us full-figured girls." She may not have made as much money from these ads as, say, Alec Guiness did from his percentage of "Star Wars," but there's still cosmic justice in Jane's being able to profit in middle age from her famous screen image of 20 years earlier. If you want to see what all the excitement was about, and how good Jane was in spite of all the hoopla and the frequent indignities of the era, have a look at some of the movies mentioned above.

Good Ol', Dear Ol' Dad


Hope you all enjoyed this first in what I hope will be many future columns written by my favorite dad.

PS: If you haven't yet watched "Coffee Time", it's well worth watching!