Voices Carey

Just a real quick post on an entertaining father-daughter combo I learned about recently.

The dad MacDonald Carey (1913-1994) was someone I knew about throughout my childhood — he played Dr. Tom Horton on one of my moms’s “stories” (soap operas), Days of Our Lives. He also intoned its memorable intro “Like sands through the hourglass, THESE are the Days of Our Lives”. That rich, distinguished voice was his prime asset. In earlier years, the Iowa native had been a radio star. Success in the Broadway show Lady in the Dark (1941) with Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye led to dozens movies — but few distinguished ones. I’ve only seen a handful of them: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which he plays the cop; Variety Girl (1947), the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby (1949) in which he played Nick Carroway, Excuse My Dust (1951) with Red Skelton; John Paul Jones (1959) in which plays a pretty un-fiery Patrick Henry; The Damned (1962), Roots (1977), and American Gigolo (1980). But mostly that soap — 3,500 episodes over nearly three decades.

I might have taken my own sweet time about doing a post on him (if ever) but for the fact that he had a real cool daughter.

Lynn Carey (b. 1946) is an actress, model, and jazz and rock singer connected with two my favorite movies, which just happen to two of the weirdest films of all time. She has a decent supporting part in George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966) with Tuesday Weld and Roddy McDowell. And she supplies lead singer Dolly Read’s vocals in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and co-wrote a couple of the tunes, as well. She also performed in Russ Meyer’s next film The Seven Minutes (1971). Surely, swimming amongst the Meyerverse is how she got to be Penthouse‘s Pet of the Month in December 1972.

Can you imagine what McDonald Carey’s reaction to all this was? I picture him puffing his pipe, looking concerned, in a white lab jacket, saying “Have you…considered all the ramifications of this type of behavior, Lynn?” Around this time, she was singing with a group called Mama Lion and performed on the Merv Griffin show, probably the peak of her visibility.

Lynn Carey’s earlier acting credits included appearances on The Wild Wild West, Lassie, The Donna Reed Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the 1968 comedy How Sweet It Is. In the 1980s she turned to jazz, the type of music she has sung ever since, all over the world.