11/7/23
Newsletter #506
The Crack of Dawn
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers being dance partners came to be as a fluke. Before getting to Hollywood, Fred Astaire had already made a name for himself on Broadway dancing with his sister, Blanche. Fred and Blanche were hired by RKO Pictures to perform a dance routine in a silly musical film, Flying Down to Rio (1933), with Delores Del Rio. This was the moment that Blanche announced that she was getting married and quitting show business. In a quandary, and thinking he would be dropped from the film, Fred headed out to Hollywood anyway.
RKO was under the tutelage of an exceptional man at that time, Marion C. Cooper, who is best remembered as the co-director of King Kong (1933). Cooper’s head of production was the young whippersnapper, David O. Selznick, who is best known for producing a little picture called Gone With the Wind (1939). RKO had just released the smash hit, and the definitive musical of the Great Depression, Gold Digger of 1933 (1933). All of the overblown musical numbers, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, are amazing and ridiculous, but the highlight is We’re in the Money, with all the chorus girls dressed as coins. The soloist in that number is the exceptionally young, Ginger Rogers (whose real name was Virginia Katherine McMath). Ginger steps forward and sings the song, and she hasn’t got much of a singing voice. Then, quite unexpectedly, Ginger switches to Pig Latin – Ear-way in the Uny-may – and it’s so completely ridiculous, and delivered with such joy and conviction, that she is simply a bundle of star quality. So, very wisely (back when there was such a thing as a wise studio executive), instead of telling Fred Astaire to go home, Marion Cooper and David Selznick teamed him up with Ginger Rogers, who wasn’t really a dancer. But Fred Astaire was a great dance teacher and showed her how to do the steps, and the rest is history. As has been said in awe about Ginger Rogers, she did all of the same steps as Fred Astaire, except backward in high heels.
Joan Crawford is remembered as the constantly horrified, middle-aged, Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won an Oscar. Joan had already been in the movies for 20 years, and her Oscar was sort of a Lifetime Achievement Award. Joan Crawford (whose real name was Lucille Fay LeSueur) started in movies in 1925.
By 1927 Crawford was a known commodity. She was in ten movies in two years (as you could be then), but hadn’t stood out. Then she made The Unknown (1927) with Lon Chaney, Sr. as a carnival knife thrower with no arms who hopes to marry her. It’s a truly weird, unique film that everyone noticed. But the next year Joan appeared in her breakout role in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), where, as F. Scott Fitgerald said, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper.” The late-1920s, Jazz Age, party girl. At a drunken soiree, Joan Crawford gets up and does an incredible dance number on top of a piano.
Then Joan Crawford remained a big MGM star throughout the 1930s, often paired with young Clark Gable. So, by 1945 when she got her Oscar, she was a veteran. The fact that she kept working into the 1960s is incredible. You certainly couldn’t have gotten anyone better to be tortured by the demented Bette Davis than Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
The manager of the building of my first apartment in Hollywood, on 666 N. Van Ness, was Con Covert. Con was at that time, 1976, a reasonably handsome, fabulously gay, actor on the fringes of the movie business, who always wore a kimono, and far too much cologne. He told me that he was a prominently seen extra at the end of Baby Jane. I believed him. I’d seen the movie and remembered the teens on the beach at the end. Anyway, they were going to show the movie at the L.A. County Museum, which would probably meant they made a new print. I went and saw the screening with my buddy Rick and it was a new print, and looked great. At the very end of the film, with the teens on the beach, Con Covert appeared behind Rick and I, surprising us (we should have smelled him coming). He tapped me in the shoulder, then pointed up to the screen and whispered, “That’s me.” And sure as shit, it’s him.
Another one like this was, Shalani Waran, the British/Indian production manager on Sam’s film, Crimewave (1985). Shalani told me that her grandmother was the main extra casting service in London in the 1960s. Because of this she got quite a few extra bits in a diverse range of British films from that period. Since she was Indian, any film that needed natives, like Lord Jim (1965) with Peter O’Toole, and I believe, Tarzan Goes to India (1962), which was an odd, British produced Tarzan with Jock Mahoney. I saw it in the theater. Shalani also mentioned that she had a close-up as a screaming teenager in A Hard Day’s Night (1964). I said, “OK.” She said, “I do. Really.” I said, “I believe you.”
Ten years later I rewatched A Hard Day’s Night, and goddamn if Shalani doesn’t have a close-up, with a snap-zoom in. I called her up, having not spoken to her in several years, and said, “It’s true. You do have a close-up in A Hard Day’s Night.” She said in her snotty, upper class British accent, “I told you so.”
It’s sort of near dawn, I guess.
Thanks, I enjoy writing them.
I forgot about Crimewave! I love that film...