travsd

Elyse Knox: Designing Woman

Given that my ordinary beat is old time performers, I learned about Elyse Knox (Elsie Kornbrath, 1917-2012) the wrong way ’round. One of her daughters married Ricky Nelson and gave birth to their famous children. and her son married Pam Dawber of Mork and Mindy!

But Elyse had a career in her own right. Initially she was a fashion designer. Modeling her own creations in the pages of magazines got her noticed by Hollywood and she began to get cast in movies. She’s in over three dozen films including Lillian Russell (1940, as Russell’s sister), Girl From Avenue A (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), Hay Foot (1942, with Sawyer and Tracy), Follow the Boys (1944), and a half dozen of the Joe Palooka movies. Her last film was the appropriately titled Forgotten Women (1949).

In 1944 Knox married football star Tom Harmon in a self-designed dress made out of the parachute he’d used to bail out of a plane in the jungle during World War Two. It was with Harmon that she settled down to raise her famous family.

For more on show business history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.