Miles O’Keefe was born in Tennessee in 1954. He is best known for his perfmance in the title role of “Tarzan the Ape Man” in 1981. Other movies include “The Drifter” and “Waxwork”.
IMDB entry:
Attended the Air Force Academy Prep School after high school. He quit and switched over to Mississippi State to play football, but was forced to quit when he broke his hand. He then transferred to the University of the South, and graduated with a B.A. in psychology. He worked a year as a counselor at the Tennesse State Prison, then traveled around a bit before being asked to appear as an extra in a TV movie. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980, and sent in his picture to the makers of Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981). The rest is history.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jason Parker and Sean Kilby <gestalt@ix.netcom.co
Diane Brewster was born in 1931 in Kansas City. She made her film debut in “Lucy Gallant” in 1955. Her other films include “Quantrill’s Raiders”, and “Torpedo Run”. She made many appearances on television programmes throughout the late 50’s and mid 60’s. She died in 1991 in California.
IMDB Entry:
Diane Brewster was born on March 11, 1931, in Kansas City, Missouri. She was largely a character actress in both motion pictures and television. She was 24 years old when she began acting on TV. Her first role was in a few episodes of the westerns Cheyenne(1955) and Zane Grey Theater (1956). Her first motion picture roles was as Sylvia Quentin in Pharaoh’s Curse (1957) in 1956. However, most older viewers remember her as the attractive grade school teacher Miss Canfield on the popular TV comedy seriesLeave It to Beaver (1957). While her last big screen appearance was as Kate Lawrence inThe Young Philadelphians (1959) in 1959, Diane made one more TV appearance onFamily Affair (1966) in 1966. Afterwards, Diane retired from the camera. Diane died of heart failure on November 12, 1991. She was 60 years old.
The best of the 40’s floozies was Gloria Grahame. She was so good that she eased herself out of supporting roles into star parts – though not many of much variation.
She was usually cast as your friendly neighbourhood nympho. She as both tough and vulnerable, a combination not rare, but here at it’s most winning.” – David Shipman – “The Great Movie Stars – The Golden Years” (1972).
Gloria Grahame was born in 1923 in Los Angeles. She began her film career in the mid 1940’s and shone in a supporting role in the classic “It’s A Wonderful Life” in 1946. The following year she was Oscar nominated for her performance in “Crossfire”. She won the award for her role in “The Bad and the Beautiful” in 1952. One of the highlights of her career was her starring role in “Oklahoma” after which her cinema career waned suddenly. She died in 1981 but over the years she has achieved cult status for her many roles in film noir such as “The Big Heat”.
TCM Overview
A femme fatale with extraordinary carnal allure, Gloria Grahame electrified moviegoers with her turns as venal, sexually aggressive women in such films as “Crossfire” (1947), “In a Lonely Place” (1950) and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. A professional actress from childhood, Grahame began her career playing sexually confident if emotionally unstable women, and essentially repeated that role throughout the 1940s and 1950s, which marked her heyday in Hollywood.
Few actresses could present such an openly wanton image as Grahame, whose heavy-lidded eyes and permanently curled lip – the result of botched surgery – lent her a physical gravitas other actresses lacked. Her women were dangerous, without question, and potentially lethal if cornered, like her mob moll in “The Big Heat” (1953), who lurked through the film’s shadowy underworld on a hell-bent mission to avenge her disfigurement by Lee Marvin. Off-camera, Grahame had a reputation as an uncooperative performer, and her 1952 divorce from director Nicholas Ray, who discovered her in flagrante delicto with his 13-year-old stepson – whom Grahame would later marry in 1960 – left moviegoers appalled. Her career waned in the late 1950s, and she would labor through TV appearances and low-budget features until 1980, when she was felled by stomach cancer. But the best of her screen roles continued to burn on late-night TV and in revival houses, where her incendiary presence had lost none of its power to entrance – or to burn.
She was born Gloria Hallward in Los Angeles on Nov. 28, 1923, the daughter of architect and author Reginald Hallward and actress Jeanne McDougall, who performed under the name Jean Grahame. Her mother was also her acting coach, and Grahame began performing while still an adolescent before eventually graduating to Broadway. Even at this early age, critics made note of her earthy sexuality, which may have caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer. The MGM chief signed her to a contract that kicked off with the lightweight comedy “Blonde Fever” (1944), which featured Grahame as a gold-digging waitress on the make for lottery winner Philip Dorn.
Though unquestionably forgettable, her turn as Sally Murfin, whose curvaceous figure and blithe cluelessness blinded men from her predatory nature, would establish the tone for the majority of her screen roles. She cemented her screen presence with her turn as hapless good time girl Violet Bick, whom James Stewart’s George Bailey saved from a disgraceful fate, in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1945). Despite its success, Grahame’s stay in the MGM stable was short-lived. By 1947, her contract was sold to RKO, where she landed a small but noteworthy part in the B-thriller “Crossfire” (1947), starring Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. Her performance, as an embittered dance hall girl who witnessed a murder, impressed audiences and earned her an Academy Award nomination. She lost the Oscar to Celeste Holm, but her status as one of the sultriest stars of film noir was now established. In 1948, she was cast as a neurotic singer allegedly shot by her Svengali-like coaches in director Nicholas Ray’s “A Woman’s Secret” (1948).
Ray became her second husband that year on the same day her divorce to actor Stanley Clements was finalized. He directed her in one of her most acclaimed films, 1950’s “In a Lonely Place,” as an aspiring actress whose wounded self-esteem stranded her in a tumultuous relationship with emotionally unstable screenwriter Humphrey Bogart.
In real life, Grahame’s self image was also fraught with anxiety. She disliked her looks, especially her mouth, and endured so many plastic surgeries on her upper lip that it was left paralyzed. To compensate for the disfigurement, she stuffed her lip with cotton or tissue, which left many a leading man confused after an onscreen clinch. Grahame also had a reputation for being “difficult,” a catch-all phrase used by gossip columnists and PR flacks to describe a wide panoply of behaviors, from confidence to outright anti-social behavior.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Unfortunately for Grahame, the label stuck, thanks to a combination of her movie image, clashes with co-stars like Bogart, and the scandalous end of her marriage to Ray in 1951. She was discovered by her husband in bed with her stepson, Anthony Ray, who was only 13 at the time. At the time, the married couple was completing a glossy noir-adventure, “Macao” (1952), with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, for producer Howard Hughes, which she handily stole as a brazen gangster’s moll.
She rebounded from the scandal with Vicente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), a juicy Hollywood roman a clef with Grahame as harried screenwriter Dick Powell’s wife, whose effortless sexiness prevented him from completing the latest blockbuster for producer Kirk Douglas. She quickly followed this with equally compelling turns in “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952) as a former bad girl-turned-circus performer, whose carnal past nearly cost her a chance at redemption with big top manager Charlton Heston.
Grahame was soon back on the dark side in “Sudden Fear” (1952) as the scheming, hot-blooded ex-girlfriend to Jack Palance’s psychopath in sheep’s clothing. All four films netted her rave reviews, but it was “The Bad and the Beautiful” that landed her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It did not, however, improve her public image; she stumbled on her way to the dais at the award show, and her disheveled appearance, due in part to the grueling schedule of her next picture, Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953), prompted rumors that she was drunk. Additional stories swirled in the tabloids about her alleged disinterest in her Oscar, which she attempted to dispel in interviews, to no avail.
Though a demanding shoot, “The Big Heat” presented Grahame with her last great screen role: the acid-tongued, narcissistic girlfriend of vicious mob gunsel Lee Marvin, who infamously tossed a pot of boiling coffee in her face, leaving her hideously disfigured. Her performance, alternately monstrous and pitiable, was one of the most indelible of the film noir canon, and for most viewers, the one for which Grahame was best known. She would continue to mine the vein of the tragic wanton in several films, including Lang’s “Human Desire” (1954), a remake of Jean Renoir’s “Le Bete Humaine” (1938), and “Naked Alibi” (1954), to diminishing returns. Grahame’s face and figure had changed since her film debut, with the plastic surgery adding a heavy lisp to her speaking voice, so she was no longer convincing as a youthful sexpot.
She attempted a drastic image change with 1955’s “Oklahoma!” in which she was cast as Ado Annie. The film was more than a departure for Grahame than a complete left-field choice, as she had no singing voice to speak of, which required her key number, “I Cain’t Say No,” to be sung one note at a time and then reconstructed by the music editors. Grahame was also undergoing a traumatic divorce from director Cy Howard, as well as a custody struggle with Nicholas Ray for their son, Timothy, and the stress spilled over into her work in the film. She reportedly refused to learn her dance numbers and repeatedly upstaged other cast members. After physically attacking co-star Gene Nelson, she was declared persona non grata by her fellow actors, and word of her behavior soon spread throughout Hollywood. She would enjoy one last notable role as a semi-masochistic woman who fell for racist crook Robert Ryan in “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959). The following year, she outdid her own previous scandal record by marrying Anthony Ray, her former stepson-in-law, in 1960. She bore him sons in 1963 and 1965.
Grahame worked steadily in television throughout the 1960s before disappearing for a period at the end of the decade, during which she was rumored to have suffered a breakdown and spent time in an institution. She resurfaced in the early 1970s in a string of TV movies and low-budget features, including the grisly “Blood and Lace” (1971) and “Mama’s Dirty Girls” (1974). After divorcing Anthony Ray in 1974, she rebounded, after a fashion, with a trio of turns as unstable older women in “Chilly Scenes of Winter” (1979), “A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), with the latter merely a glorified cameo. In her final years, she performed the classics in regional theater before learning that she had stomach cancer in 1980. Grahame refused to stop working, but suffered a collapse during rehearsal of a play in London. While undergoing a routine operation to drain fluids from an inoperable tumor in her stomach, her surgeon accidentally perforated her bowl. Peritonitis set in, and she was flown home to New York by her romantic companion, actor Peter Turner. After several agonizing days, Grahame died on Oct. 5, 1981 at the age of 57.
Gilbert Roland was born in 1905 in Mexico. His first major role was in 1927 in “The Plastic Age” with Clara Bow. This was the beginning of a very long career. His films of note include “We Were Strangers” in 1949 with Jennifer Jones and John Garfield, “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” and “The Bad and the Beautiful”. He died in 1994 at the age of 88.
His “Independent” obituary:
Luis Antonio Damaso de Alonso (Gilbert Roland), actor: born Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico 11 December 1903; married first Constance Bennett (died 1965; two daughters; marriage dissolved); secondly Guillermina Cantu; died Los Angeles 15 May 1994.
MORE Mexicans live in California now than when it formed part of Mexico. The Hollywood studios, however, have never regarded them as a lucrative audience and have made few films either for or about them. Yet one of the most remarkable stories of a Mexican immigration occurred right under the studios’ noses.
Gilbert Roland was born Luis Alonso in 1905 in Juarez, on the Mexican border with Texas. His father, Francisco, was a bullfighter who had come from Spain. Luis had ambitions to follow his father as a torero and Francisco encouraged him. ‘Remember’, he told his son, ‘Women gore more often than bulls.’
When the revolution swept over their town, Francisco Alonso led his family to safety across the Rio Grande. In El Paso, Texas, they encountered anti-Mexican hostility and Luis retreated more and more into the welcoming dark of the motion-picture houses, even though he was relegated to the balcony ‘For Colored People Only’. He was particularly enamoured of the serial star Ruth Roland. When his mother gave him money to buy groceries for the family, he spent it on the movies. ‘I was punished, but it did not matter. The movies were my life.’
Luis became a newspaper boy, and occasionally attended school, but encountered little but open hostility for being a ‘greaser’. He was once beaten for not knowing all the words to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. He graduated to working as a messenger boy until he was hit by a car and almost killed. Recovery was slow; when his father went to fight bulls in Tia Juana, Luis went with him, staying on a ranch in San Diego. There he met a Mexican who played bit parts in movies, Chris-Pin Martin. Martin advised Luis to go to Hollywood, and to try to get work at the studios on Gower Street – Gower Gulch. Luis did so, and was hired as a cowboy extra – then as an Indian. ‘All day I chased myself on horseback for three dollars and lunch. My baptism in silent movies.’
But such good fortune was rare, and the youthful Alonso trekked from studio to studio – often incredible distances – finding little employment. He managed to land a job answering fan mail for Antonio Moreno. One night he was working on the backlot when a great star visited the set – Norma Talmadge. Alonso had long admired Talmadge, and had even decorated his bedroom wall with her photograph. He was gratified to find his idol as beautiful and charming in real life as she was on the screen.
Thanks to his knowledge of bull-fighting, he was retained as a dresser’s assistant to prepare Valentino for the arena scenes in Blood and Sand (1922). When a fight erupted among the extras and Luis received a superficial stab wound, it was Valentino – to his amazement and delight – who bandaged his wound with a monogrammed handkerchief.
Alonso had grown into a remarkably handsome young man, and an agent called Ivan Kahn decided he looked like John Gilbert, who was then MGM’s leading star. MGM cast him in The Midshipman (1925) with Ramon Novarro, a fellow Mexican whose family knew the Alonsos before the revolution.
What with Valentino and Novarro, Kahn thought there were too many Latins in the movies, and suggested Alonso changed him name to George Adams. Alonso chose his name from his two favourite starts – Ruth Roland and John Gilbert.
Kahn secured Roland a substantial role in a Clara Bow film The Plastic Age (1925). Roland fell in love with Clara Bow, and nearly married her, but her father told him, ‘What do you make? A hundred and fifty a week. Clara makes two thousand. When you make two thousand a week, you marry Clara Bow.’
Cast opposite Ann Rork (Mrs J. Paul Getty) in The Blonde Saint (1926), Roland at last won critical attention. As a result, he was signed to a contract by Joseph M. Schenck, president of United Artists. The Los Angeles Times carried the headline of his dreams: ‘Gilbert Roland to Star with Norma Talmadge in Camille’. His was the part Valentino had played a few years before. But suddenly, Valentino was dead of peritonitis and a Hollywood weekly declared ‘Gilbert Roland looms as Valentino’s successor.’
Once again, Roland fell in love, but Norma Talmadge was married to the much older Schenck who refused her a divorce. He also threatened Roland with an unspeakable fate. Talmadge and Roland went on a voyage together, but the relationship failed to last. She met the actor and producer George Jessel, Schenck agreed this time to a divorce, and the studio doors closed for a while on Roland. He found himself playing Armand again, opposite Jane Cowl – on the stage. Without any kind of theatrical training, he found it a terrifying experience.
Roland worked his way back into pictures, becoming a dependable supporting actor rather than the star he had been for a brief and heady period.
When David Gill and I were making a documentary about Buster Keaton, we contacted Roland in the hope of filming an interview with him, for Keaton had been one of this closest friends. He invited us to lunch at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, where he played well into his eighties. And there was no mistaking him when he arrived; he wore a white hat, and open-necked white shirt, showing the old religious medallion hanging at his chest. He had great charisma, and immense charm; he embraced people instead of shaking their hands, and he had no Anglo-Saxon reticence about emotion.
But reticent he was about being interviewed. He refused point- blank to appear on camera. We had the distinct impression that he was shy. He had been a sky- rocketing star in the last years of silent films, and his affection and admiration for silent films was apparent. But he would not repeat his reminiscences on camera.
Fortunately, he spent the last years putting his memories on to tape – when he could play back, edit and re-record if necessary. And in 1988, he proved himself as a writer, with an autobiography – as yet unpublished – in the style of a man he greatly admired, Ernest Hemingway. He called it The Wine of Yesterday.
This “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Diana Lynn was born in 1926 in Los Angeles. Her film debut was in “They Shall Have Music”. She played Ginger Roger’s younger sister in “The Major and the Minor”. In 1944 she starred in “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” directed by Preston Sturges. She was in Dean Marin and Jerry Lewis’s first film “My Friend Irma” in 1949. Her last film was “Company of Killers” in 1970. Diana Lynn died in 1971 at the age of 45.
TCM Profile:
A more-than-capable actress with chipper good looks and a pleasantly piquant personality, Diana Lynn began in films as a precocious adolescent and settled into a career as a dependable leading lady before stretching her acting muscles on the stage and, especially, in television.
Born Dolores Loehr in Los Angeles in 1926, Lynn was a musical prodigy who was playing piano professionally by the time she was 10. She made her movie debut at age 13 in Samuel Goldwyn’s They Shall Have Music(1939), unbilled as one of a group of classical music students. After a similar appearance at Paramount in There’s Magic in Music (1941), she signed a long-term contract at that studio and was groomed to become a featured player.
Lynn’s first film under her new contract, The Major and the Minor (1942), marked Billy Wilder’s U.S. directorial debut and Lynn’s emergence as a bright young spirit in films. In this comedy about a grown woman (Ginger Rogers) who poses as an 11-year-old girl, Lynn is the wisecracking youngster who sees through the ruse. She gained even more attention as Betty Hutton’s irrepressible kid sister in Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). Lynn played Emily Kimbrough to Gail Russell’s Cornelia Otis Skinner in the film version of the writers’ joint memoir Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1944), a surprise hit that spawned a sequel, Our Hearts Were Growing Up (1946).
The more mature Lynn starred in another successful pair of comedies, My Friend Irma (1949) and My Friend Irma Goes West (1950), playing straight woman in a cheerful style that allowed Marie Wilson (as Irma) and the new comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to shine. In Every Girl Should Be Married (1949), Lynn plays third fiddle to Cary Grant and his wife-to-be, Betsy Drake, in the story of a young woman obsessed with landing a handsome pediatrician as her husband. Cast as the heroine’s sidekick and sparkling when she has the opportunity, Lynn might just as easily have taken on the lead. She performed yeoman service as Ronald Reagan’s intended bride in Bedtime for Bonzo, the future president’s most notorious vehicle; and as Spencer Tracy’s protective daughter in The People Against O’Hara (both 1951).
In the mid-1950s, Lynn starred in two films produced by John Wayne. In Plunder of the Sun (1953), she had a change of pace as a hard-drinking temptress with designs on Glenn Ford, who plays an insurance investigator smuggling a mysterious package from Cuba to Mexico. In William Wellman’s stylized Western Track of the Cat (1954), photographed in color on black-and-white locations with dashes of color, Lynn wears a yellow blouse to signify her character’s positive nature. (Villain Robert Mitchum wears a red coat.)
Lynn’s final feature film was Company of Killers (1970), a crime drama originally produced for television. She had turned to that medium in the 1950s and became one of its busiest and most accomplished performers in such series as Playhouse 90 and The U.S. Steel Hour. She shone in Katharine Hepburn’s old role in a 1959 TV version of The Philadelphia Story and also had some success on Broadway, especially as a replacement for Barbara Bel Geddes in the hit comedy Mary, Mary in the early 1960s.
Lynn had settled in New York City, where she ran a travel agency after retiring from films. Her old studio, Paramount, offered her a choice role in Play It As It Lays (1972), and she returned to Los Angeles in preparation for a comeback in films. But she suffered a fatal stroke before production began, prematurely passing away at age 45 in 1971.
by Roger Fristoe
The above TCM profile can also be accessed online here.
Elizabeth Russell was born in 1916 in Philadelphia. She is particularly reknowned for her performances in some key horror films of the 1940’s including “Cat People” with Simone Simon in 1942, “Seventh Victim”, “Curse of the Cat People”and “Bedlam”.
IMDB Entry:
Minor character actress who appeared rather unsympathetically in a number of films for director Val Lewton in the 40s, including “The Seventh Victim,” “Bedlam” and “Cat People” and her best known part in “The Curse of the Cat People.”
Sister-in-law of Rosalind Russell.
Her first film assignment came almost immediately after her arrival at Paramount in Hollywood when she replaced Frances Farmer, who had been loaned to Samuel Goldwyn for the starring role in “Come and Get It, in “Girl of the Ozarks” opposite Farmer’s new husband Lief Erickson.
Russell met writer Peter Viertel through friend and roommate Maria Montez, and he introduced her to Val Lzewton. She ultimately appeared in five pictures for Lewton’s unit.
Russell wrote an as yet unproduced screenplay on the life of friend Maria Montez.
After Paramount dropped her and she returned East to act in theater with Zasu Pitts. Russell and the comedienne became good friends and Pitts had her cast in two of her films, “Miss Polly” and “So’s Your Aunt Emma.”.
Elonor Donahue will be forever remembered for her performance as Betty Anderson the eldest daughter of Robert Young and Jane Wyatt in the 1950’s long running television series “Father Knows Best”. She was born in 1937 in Tacoma, Washington. She was also featured in oher television programmes such as “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Odd Couple”. Her films include 1947’s “The Unfinished Dance” with Margaret O’Brien.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Tap dancing at the age of 16 months, pert and pretty Elinor Donahue has been entertaining audiences for six decades. Born Mary Eleanor Donahue in Tacoma, Washington in 1937, she appeared as a radio singer and vaudeville dancer while still a mere toddler, then was picked up by Universal Studios at the age of 5. Cast in minor child roles in such pictures as Mister Big (1943), the precocious youngster eventually moved to MGM but didn’t attain the juvenile stardom of a Margaret O’Brien or Elizabeth Taylor, whom she supported in both The Unfinished Dance (1947) and Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), respectively. Still and all, Elinor’s talent and wholesome appeal was recognized and the 50s brought her into the TV era, where she became more accessible, finally winning nationwide “girl-next-door” notice in her late teens as the oldest daughter of “ideal” parents Robert Young and Jane Wyatt in the classic family show Father Knows Best (1954). Suffering more than her share of teen angst, she played Betty (“Princess”) Anderson from 1954 to 1960. By the time the series was finished, she seemed ripe for romantic ingénues. She became Andy Griffith‘s first longstanding girlfriend on The Andy Griffith Show (1960) for one season, but then suffered a major slump. She revived in the 70s with steady roles on The Odd Couple (1970) (as Tony Randall‘s girlfriend), Mulligan’s Stew: Pilot (1977) as a typical sunny mom, and as a guest for countless other shows, including Barnaby Jones (1973), Newhart (1982) and The Golden Girls (1985). An extremely pleasant personality, she was primarily tapped into playing nice, friendly, unflashy parts in both lightweight comedy and dramatic. Possessing a suitable voice for commercials and cartoons, she has lately found recurring roles on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993) and a few soaps, including Santa Barbara (1984) and Days of Our Lives(1965), the latter in which she played a rare malicious part. Though she may not have had much of a chance to shine in her career, Elinor has certainly been a steady, reliable player who has not let her fans down with her obvious warmth and pleasing disposition. The widow of TV executive producer Harry Ackerman (he was 25 years her senior), whose list of credits included Leave It to Beaver (1957), Bewitched (1964) and Gidget (1965), and a mother of four sons, Elinor lives with her third husband, contractor Louis Genevrino (married since 1992), in California. In 1998, she published a memoir entitled “In the Kitchen with Elinor Donahue”, in which she relived some of her memories of Hollywood along with providing more than 150 of her top-grade recipes.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Gene Nelson was born in Oregon in 1920. He served in the Army during World War Two and then began appearing on Broadway. On film he alternated between musicals where he was a talented dancer and gritty noir dramas. His films include “The Daoughter of Rosie O’Grady” in 1950, “Painting the Clouds With Sunshine”, “Oaklaholmaa, and “Crime Wave”. In 1971 he was in the cast on Broadway of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” with Alexis Smith and Yvonne de Carlo. He also directed films and television shows in his later years. Gene Nelson died in 1996 at the age of 76.
His IMDB entry:
Gene Nelson was barely a teen when he saw the Fred Astaire movie Flying Down to Rio(1933), which would change his life. It was then that he decided he would be a dancer. After graduating from high school, Nelson joined the Sonja Henie Ice Show and toured for 3 years before joining the Army in World War II. After he was discharged, he appeared in a handful of movies before 1950. He worked with Debbie Reynolds in The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady (1950), Doris Day in Tea for Two (1950) and Virginia Mayo in She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952). He would be best known for his role of cowboy Will Parker in Oklahoma! (1955), where he would twirl the lasso to the tune of “Kansas City”.
Frankie Laine was born in 1913 in Chicago. He was especially popular as a singer during the 1940’s and 50’s. His songs include “That Lucky Old Son”, “Mule Train”, “Cry of the Wild Goose”, “Jezebel”, “High Noon”, “Answer Me” and “Rawhide”.He made a number of films mostly for Columbia Studios and they include “Make Believe Ballromm” in 1949 and “Sunny Side of the Street”. He was married to actress Nan Gray. Frankie Laine died in 2007 at the age of 93.
His “Independent” obituary by Spencer Leigh:
Bob Hope once called Frankie Laine “a foghorn with lips”, an amusing but accurate description, as Laine is best-known for his powerful, full-blooded treatment of tales of ill-fated romantic liaisons, religious ballads and western songs, such as “Jezebel”, “I Believe” and “Rawhide”. Although he displayed more range in his lesser-known singles and album tracks (such as the racial lament “Black and Blue”), the public preferred him bellowing out ballads with supreme confidence. If ever a singer could be called a man’s man, it was Frankie Laine.
Like many of his show-business contemporaries, Laine came from an Italian background. He was born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio in 1913 to Sicilian immigrants in Chicago’s Little Italy. His father was a barber who had cut Al Capone’s hair and his grandfather had been the victim of a mob killing. The young LoVecchio was a choirboy at the Immaculate Conception church. When he saw the film The Singing Fool (1928), starring Al Jolson, he determined to become an entertainer.
Although he did make some club appearances, his first success came in 1932 when he took part in a marathon dance contest. “I had 45 minutes on and 15 minutes off in every hour,” he said:
It went on like that for 24 hours a day for four and a half months. It sounds ridiculous but I had nothing else to do and there were no expenses. My partner and I won $1,000 between us, which was a lot of money then. We also collected tips from the people who came to see us.
He was not exaggerating: he and Ruth Smith danced for 3,501 hours over 145 consecutive days to create a world record.
In 1937, Perry Como left his job as the vocalist with the Freddy Carlone orchestra and LoVecchio replaced him. After that, he became a singer on a New York radio station, teaming up with the pianist Carl Fischer for a night-club act. In 1946 the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael heard LoVecchio perform one of his songs, “Rocking Chair”, at Billy Berg’s club in Vine Street, Hollywood. He recommended him to Mitch Miller at Mercury Records and also told LoVecchio to adopt a simpler name. As Frankie Laine, he won a gold disc with his first record, “That’s My Desire” (1947). Laine recalled, “That record started selling in Harlem first of all because everyone assumed I must be black.” All his fan-club members received a miniature gramophone record which either said “Hello, baby” or “Hi ya, guy”, before going into six bars of “That’s My Desire”.
Laine had further successes with “S-H-I-N-E”, “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “We’ll Be Together Again”, which featured his own lyric. Another of his songs from this period, “It Only Happens Once”, was recorded by Nat “King” Cole. When he was talking with Mel Tormé, one of them said, “It ain’t gonna be like that”, which prompted them to write a song of the same title that Laine recorded.
Laine’s bellowing style was heard to good effect on “Mule Train” (1949), which he sang to a whip-cracking accompaniment. He made his film début in When You’re Smiling (1950) and sang the title song. Although he made several romantic comedies, Laine never appeared with his second wife, Nan Grey, a leading lady from the 1930s, whom he married in 1950.
In 1950 Laine followed Mitch Miller to Columbia Records and Miller found him one hit song after another. Songs like “Jezebel” and “Satan Wears a Satin Dress” were regarded as controversial for their religious references. “I didn’t pay much attention to all the fuss being made over them,” Laine told me in 1978:
I was being given great songs to sing and I’d have been a fool to turn them down. “Jezebel” is still a great song. It’s the sort of song you’ve got to close on. How can you top a finish like that?
When the first UK record sales chart was published in November 1952, Laine was at No 7 with the theme song from the Gary Cooper film High Noon and at No 8 with “Sugarbush”, a romantic duet with Doris Day. Speaking of High Noon, he commented, “I didn’t sing that song in the film, although I’d have been glad to have done so. Tex Ritter did the soundtrack, but I had the hit.”
Because of its success, Laine was then asked to sing western soundtracks including Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and The Hanging Tree (1959) as well as the theme song for Rawhide, which was Laine’s final Top Ten hit in the UK in 1959. “I was very grateful for that TV series as it kept me on the air for seven and a half years,” Laine said:
I also had a part in one of the episodes. Clint Eastwood was in the series, but no one dreamed that he’d ever make it big, least of all Clint himself.
Despite his own rugged demeanour and his love of western songs, Laine never made any westerns himself. “It’s simply that I was never offered anything suitable,” he said:
I can see with hindsight that it might have been a good thing to have made some westerns, but I never plan my life. I drift along. I’m the sort of person who considers what comes in rather than the type who goes out to make things happen. I’m willing to have a go at most things. If someone saw me as a New York detective or as the King of Spain, I’d do it.
The religious ballad “I Believe” was Laine’s biggest success, topping the UK charts for 18 weeks in 1953.
The song accomplished an awful lot in its day because it said all the things that needed to be said in a prayer, and yet it didn’t use any of the holy words – Lord, God, Him, His, Thine, Thou. It said it all and it changed the whole spectrum of faith songs.
Astonishingly, Laine topped the UK charts for 27 weeks in 1953, “Hey Joe” occupying one week and “Answer Me” another eight. The last-named was another “God-botherer”. The singer, to an organ accompaniment, is asking God what has gone wrong with his relationship. Because many US radio stations refused to play the record, Nat “King” Cole shrewdly recorded an amended version, “Answer Me, My Love”. Laine himself recorded the revised lyric for South Africa and both lyrics are well-known today.
With the advent of rock’n’roll in the mid-Fifties, Laine began to appear old-fashioned, although his style influenced Tom Jones. He sought songs from the new Brill Building writers, the best example being “Don’t Make My Baby Blue” (1963). His contract with Columbia ended in 1963. “I spent some time considering offers and I signed with Capitol,” he said:
We spent two months getting the material ready for an album, but before it came out, Capitol received the masters of some group from Liverpool. That was the Beatles. They started selling like crazy and I was ignored.
Laine switched to ABC Records and returned to the US charts in 1967 with “I’ll Take Care of Your Cares”. He followed it in 1969 with the very successful “You Gave Me a Mountain”. “Marty Robbins was a friend of mine and he gave that song to me,” Laine recalled:
I knew right away that it was going to do well. He then wrote “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” for me, but his wife wouldn’t let me have it and made him keep it for himself.
In 1974 Laine recorded the theme song for the spoof western Blazing Saddles. The film’s director, the actor Mel Brooks, had heard Laine singing “Cry of the Wild Goose” on the Merv Griffin Show. “He’d just finished his picture and so he asked me to sing the theme song,” Laine said. “I did the song straight because I had no idea that the film was a comedy. As it turned out, it worked fine.”
Although Laine continued to tour, he was plagued with health problems and had quadruple bypass heart surgery in 1985. It didn’t affect his performance and he still favoured songs with big endings. With the exception of Jazz Spectacular in 1956, Laine never concentrated on albums, but this changed in the 1980s, with albums like Country Laine (1987), which included a beautiful, whimsical ballad, “She Never Could Dance”, and New Directions (1988) among his best.
He contributed three songs to a western album, Roundup (1987), with Eric Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and was surprised to find himself on the US classical chart. He also recorded a CD of standards, Wheels of a Dream (1998) and a CD of songs “for people who have reached the age of retirement”, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over (also 1998). A video filmed in Las Vegas, Live at the Orleans, was released in 1999, but, in his later years, Laine took more interest in the value of his investments.
Laine wrote his autobiography, That Lucky Old Son, in 1993 and, although he had not written many songs, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1996. He was proud when the compilation album Lyrics by Laine was released in 1999.
Spencer Leigh
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
