New Biography About Cross Eyed Comedian Ben Turpin

On Philip Barry

Today is the birthday of the great Broadway playwright Philip Barry (1896-1949). Everyone knows his most famous creation The Philadelphia Story (1939), so I thought I’d share a few notes about a couple of his other scripts that have fallen by the wayside over the years. That is, if you feel like reading plays; people almost never do. I periodically make myself do so as a matter of professional necessity…

Holiday (1928), sparkling, witty and wise. A businessman is marrying into a rich family but throws a monkey wrench into the works by announcing that, having closed a big deal, that he wants to retire and “find himself”. In the end he hooks up with his fiance’s sister, who shares his nonconformist philosophy. Full of very funny lines and also poignant in parts. Was filmed for the screen twice, in 1930 and 1938.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931) That classic melodramatic device, the ships that pass in the night. Bored wife of wealthy businessman in a rural location…a famous young doctor comes to stay with them while lecturing at a local college…a romance…an illicit child. Years later the doctor comes back when the child falls ill and learns the truth…will romantic love win out? No, she chooses the husband. This one is more of a drama but still full of Barry’s witty, sparkling dialogue, and even some philosophy reminiscent of Shaw…influence of Neitzsche and Bergson in a gobbledegook sort of way. He seems to have a fondness for the love triangle in most of his plays.

 

 

 

 

Stars of Vaudeville #720: Jeanette MacDonald

Today is the birthday of Jeanette MacDonald (1903-1965). The Philadelphia native took singing and dancing lessons as a child, sang in church and performed with a juvenile vaudeville act produced by her teacher Al White, called “The Six Little Song Birds” (or sometimes “The Six Sunny Song Birds.”)

In 1919 she got a job in the chorus of Ned Wayburn’s Demi-Tasse Revue . This led to another ten Broadway shows between 1921 and 1929 (the last was Boom Boom). Starting in 1929 her semi-operatic voice was put to good use in a number of popular musicals, many of them hearkening back to the early Broadway’s operetta days. Her first was the pathbreaking The Love Parade (1929) with Maurice Chevalier, Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth. Chevalier was to be a frequent co-star in her earliest films; later she was usually paired with Nelson Eddy. (When I was a kid they used to sell records of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald on television, and we, being children, would be bewildered as to who would ever buy them. Why, old people of course. This was the 1970s, when there will still people around old enough to have enjoyed Eddy and MacDonald in their heyday). Other movies included The Vagabond King (1930), One Hour with You (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), Naughty Marietta (1935), San Francisco (1936), The Girl of the Golden West (1938), and Broadway Serenade (1939).

By the 40s her career was seriously slowing down; by the end of the 50s it had ground to a halt completely. Well, not completely — don’t forget, in the 1970s they were selling those records!

Here, from Naughty Marietta, perhaps the most famous song she was associated with, “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” by Victor Herbert:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Slapstick #119: Mae Busch

Today is the birthday of the great Mae Busch (1891-1946). It’s ironic that today she is best known for playing shrewish and unattractive wives in Laurel and Hardy movies; at the height of her career she was considered one of the legendary beauties and vamps.

A second generation vaudevillian from Melbourne Australia, Mae joined the family act “the Busch Devere Trio” in 1903, after the Busches had moved to the U.S. She left the act in 1912 to replace Lillian Loraine in the Broadway musical Over the River with Eddie Foy. In 1915 she started working at Keystone, where she became Mabel Normand’s best friend UNTIL the latter caught her red handed in bed with her fiance Mack Sennett. Busch is reported to have thrown a vase at Normand’s head, knocking her out of commission for several weeks.

Busch appeared in Sennett comedy shorts through 1916. After this she began to be cast in features where she gained her reputation as a vamp in such films as The Devil’s Pass Key (1920) and Foolish Wives (1923), both directed by Eric von Stroheim, and Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925) with Lon Chaney. In 1926, after years of wild partying she had a nervous breakdown and broke her contract with MGM. Her star rapidly sank and she went broke. She want back into the comedy game in 1927, working with Hal Roach where she enjoyed her ten year association with Laurel and Hardy. After this she mostly played bit parts in films, sometimes unnamed or uncredited. Her last film was Ladies Man with Eddie Bracken in 1947. 

Here’s one of my favorite Mae Busch moments, which I talk about a bit in Chain of Fools as one of the clever ways sound could be used in a slapstick comedy. It’s from the 1929 short (their first talkie) Unaccustomed As We Are. She was the best, even if she did have a wicked streak:

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #332: Blanche Sweet

Originally posted in 2011. 

Born on this day in 1896, Blanche Sweet was raised in a vaudeville and theatrical family, making her onstage debut at age 4. In 1909, she began working for Biograph Studios, becoming one of D.W. Griffith’s premier actresses. (She starred in scores of films for him through 1914. Today Judith of Bethulia would be the most famous). After this, she moved to Paramount, where she starred in numerous films for Cecil B. Demille. Sweet was one of the top actresses of the silent era, but when talkies came in, her career began to sputter. She had a flashy, melodramatic turn in the 1930 musical Show Girl in Hollywood which the Countess and I caught at the Film Forum a couple of months back. Here is the Countess’s astute review. After this, Sweet continued to act for a while on stage and on radio. Towards the end of her life she retired, passing away in 1986.

And now Judith of Bethulia:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Sammy Cahn

What a great day for songwriters! Not only Louis Alter and Con Conrad, but also Sammy Cahn (Samuel Cohen, 1913-1993). Cahn came along a little too late for vaudeville, but he did attend constantly as a teenager and learn from it and later says “I think a sense of vaudeville is very strong in anything I do.” He also had some of his earliest songs performed in vaudeville, as when Jack Osterman sang “Like Niagra Falls, I’m Falling For You”. He also wrote special material for Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope and Phil Silvers.

Though he had a musical background (he’d played violin in a burlesque pit orchestra and in Dixieland bands that toured the Catskills, and also knew his way around a piano), he would become known as a lyricist who usually worked with musical collaborators such as Saul Chaplin, Jules Styne, and Jimmy Van Heusen. He began to enjoy success in Hollywood in the mid 1930s. His list of songs is too long (and hopefully too well known) to list here, but some of them include “Three Coins in the Fountain” (1954), “Love and Marriage” (1955, later used for Married with Children), and “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” (1945). 

He was one of the few working within  the tin pan alley aesthetic to take it quite far past the advent of the rock era. For example, I was surprised to learn this morning that “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” was written in 1964! And Cahn was still crankin’ ‘em out long, long after that. For example, this song “All That Love Went to Waste” was written for the 1973 film A Touch of Class (and nominated for an Oscar)

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Vaudeville #719: Con Conrad

Today is the birthday of Con Conrad (Conrad Dober, 1891-1938). A New York native, he started out playing piano in a Harlem movie house as a teenager, and gradually worked his way up to playing Keith vaudeville houses. He published his first song “Down in Dear New Orleans” in 1912, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that he became a major success writing a ton of songs we associate with the period, such as “Margie”, “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me”, “You’ve Got to See Mama Every Night” and “Memory Lane”. Between 1921 and 1928 he wrote songs for a dozen Broadway shows, then moved out to Hollywood, where he contributed tunes to dozens of films, including Eddie Cantor’s Palmy Days (1931) and The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (1934) for which he co-wrote the Oscar-winning “The Continental”. Here it is:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Vaudeville #718: Louis Alter

Today is the birthday of songwriter Louis Alter (1902-1980). Alter started out as a silent film accompanist at the age of 13. In time he worked his way up from nickelodeons to accompanying headliners in vaudeville and on Broadway, including Irene Bordoni, Helen Morgan, Beatrice Lillie and Nora Bayes, whom he played for the last four years of her life.

Trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, he had also written special material for his singers. His first hit song had been “Hugs and Kisses” (1926) and his first Broadway show A La Carte (1927). From here he became primarily a songwriter, supplying tunes for both Broadway and Hollywood. He contributed the song “Paris” for the otherwise Cole Porter dominated show of the same name in 1928, and also wrote the songs for the 1928 edition of Earl Carroll’s Vanities, Sweet and Low (1930), Ballyhoo of 1930, and Hold Your Horses (1933). From 1927 to 1949 he wrote original songs for dozens of movies. Among the better known tunes from these years were “Dolores” (nominated for an Oscar), “Manhattan Serenade”, “My Kinda Love”, and “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?”

Here’s a recording of “Manhattan Serenade”:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Slapstick # 118: Flora Finch

Today is the birthday of Flora Finch (Flora Brooks, 1867-1940). Born  in London, she began her career on the legit stage and in music hall before moving to the U.S. and performing in vaudeville.

In 1908 she became an actress at Biograph, the same year D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett started at the studio. In 1910, she moved over to Vitagraph, where she was paired with comedian John Bunny. The physical contrast between the skinny, gawky, bird-like Flora Finch, with the grossly corpulent Bunny made for comedy gold. Usually the two played a married couple, with Bunny as sort of a party guy, and Finch as a scold. Their co-starring shorts were nicknamed “Bunnyfinches”, “Bunnygraphs” or “Bunnyfinchgraphs”. Incredibly, 160 of these were made, very few of which survive.

In 1915, Bunny passed away. Finch got her own starring series of comedies for a couple of years, but these weren’t as popular. For the rest of the silent era she was a character actress in features. In the sound era, her parts got smaller and smaller, until she was just a bit player. Her last film was The Women (1939).

And now one of the few surviving Bunnyfinches A Cure for Pokeritis (1912).

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Slapstick #117: Louise Fazenda

Today is the birthday of Louise Fazenda (1895-1962). This adorable Indiana native was hired away from Universal by Mack Sennett in 1915 to play country girls mostly, feisty female rubes with an outsized sense of decency. One of the mostly frequently screened of her Sennett comedies today is Fatty’s Tintype Tangle, in which she plays an innocent stranger accidentally photographed in the park with Fatty Arbuckle, causing marital trouble aplenty.

After leaving Sennett in the early twenties, she tried her hand at vaudeville for several months, then played dramatic roles in features for most of the major studios. In 1927, she married famed Warner Brothers producer Hal B. Wallis and continued to act for another dozen years before retiring to concentrate on her philanthropic activities.

Now here she is in A Versatile Villain (1915), with Charley Chase (then Parrott), Minta Durfee, and Hank Mann:

 

To learn more about silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.