Star Wars Episode VIII: How Norma Jeane Became Marilyn Monroe (YMRT: 34)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Today’s episode tells the secret, forgotten, and highly disputed story of the making of arguably the most potent Hollywood sex symbol of all time. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe embodied a male fantasy of a woman who gave freely of herself, particularly of her body, and asked for nothing in return. Her blonde bombshell persona, “dumb” but also often touchingly vulnerable, would seem to be the exact opposite of the pragmatic femininity of the World War II era epitomized by women’s films stars like Bette Davis and “we can do it!” sloganeer Rosie the Riveter. But in fact, before she was famous,Marilyn Monroe was Rosie the Riveter: at age 18, with her husband off in the Merchant Marines, Monroe went to work at an airplane parts factory. And it was there that she was discovered, thanks (in a roundabout way) to Ronald Reagan. In this episode, we’ll explore how Marilyn became Marilyn, by tracing the former Norma Jean Baker from her troubled childhood through the war years, her early struggles to get a foothold in Hollywood, and the nude photo scandal which cemented her stardom. We’ll see how the future Marilyn’s experiences mirrored those of other American woman, and the culture at large, in the post-war decade, and we’ll see how her projection of vulnerability and even victimhood would ultimately have radical implications. 

Show Notes:

Like many women, I suspect, I’ve been studying MarilynMonroe my entire life, both accidentally and on purpose. I’ve read tons about her over the years — and if you haven’t and are looking for a place to start, I would recommend All of the Available Light: A MarilynMonroe Reader — but I had never focused specifically on her pre-fame years. Knowing I would never be able to read or reread all of the writings on Monroe in the limited time I had for researching this episode, I decided to focus on two books published within a couple of years of one another, both of which purported to offer fresh analysis of the pre-Marilyn years of Norma Jeane, and neither of which I had read before.

As a feminist reconsideration of Monroe’s personal story and legacy, I found Gloria Steinem’s Marilyn to be important, and even inspiring. It does, however, gloss over some of the details of this period inMonroe’s life, a flaw you won’t find in Donald Spoto’s MarilynMonroe: The Biography. However, if Steinem’s book is transparent about looking atMarilyn through feminism-tinted glasses, Spoto’s slants are, far less explicitly, and for lack of a better word, anti-feminist. Spoto is a generally well-respected biographer and even those who call into question some of his assertions in this book agree that it’s one of the most serious biographies of his subject. But the fact remains that anyone who writes about MarilynMonroe can only cherry pick amongst the scraps of biographical information left behind, and it seems like many of her observers choose what they want to choose to constitute evidence of the “real Marilyn” versus her sex goddess persona. There are traps within Marilyn scholarship, particularly in terms of her sexual history and appetites, which Spoto didn’t invent or end, but which he does occasionally fall into. But, you know, there but for the grace of etc etc..

Discography:

Fable of the Elements by Joan of Arc

Knife Fights Every Night by Joan of Arc

Them Brainwash Days by Joan of Arc

Oceanic Dawn by DJ Masque

Undercover Vampire Policeman by Chris Zabriskie

Les Yper-Sound by Stereolab

Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst

Foxboz by Joan of Arc

Wonder Cycle by Chris Zabriskie

Intelligent Galaxy by The Insider

Out of the Skies, Under the Earth by Chris Zabriskie

For Better or Worse by Kai Engel

Rite of Passage by Kevin MacLeod

Natural’s Not in It (The Rakes Remix) by Gang of Four

Barbara performed by US Army Blues

Gymnopedia No 2 by Eric Satie, performed by Kevin MacLeod

Marilyn Monroe by Nicki Minaj

EMPIRE, "Fake Ass Lena Horne" and the Real Lena Horne

Like, apparently, most Americans, my favorite thing on television right now is Empire, Lee Daniels and Danny Strong's nutty prime time soap about Lucious Lyon, a gangster rapper-turned-multimedia mogul who finds out he has ALS at the exact moment that Cookie -- his ex-wife/mother of his three sons/mastermind of his empire -- is released from prison after 17 years. Cookie, played by the incredible Taraji P. Henson, blasts into rooms like a hurricane; pretty much everything that happens on the show, she makes happen, and she gets most of the best lines. A major plot this season has been Cookie's rivalry with Anika, Empire Entertainment's new head of A & R and Lucious' new fiancee.

Played by the stunning Grace Gealey, Anika is very light-skinned (the show has introduced us to her black mother and white father), and is a self-proclaimed "debutante." The street-smart Cookie, who still loves Lucious and has given Anika the derogatory nickname Boo Boo Kitty, firmly believes that Anika is too polished and naive to interface with Empire's artists, who have a host of issues ranging from drug addiction (what's up, guest star Courtney Love) to ongoing criminal activity to, in the case of Lucious' own sons, homosexuality, baby mama drama and potentially violent misogyny. Where Cookie can put on a head scarf and manipulate the devoutly Nation of Islam mother of a rapper, Lucious had to protect Anika when her meeting with the same rapper is interrupted by a drive-by. In a variety of different ways, Cookie tells us and the other characters on the show over and over again that Anika isn't able to get her hands dirty, that she isn't street, that she isn't black enough.

At the end of this week's episode, Fox showed a preview of the remaining four episodes of the season, in which Cookie refers to Anika as "fake-ass Lena Horne." This was interesting to me for a number of reasons, not least because this week I published a very special, very long episode of the podcast about Lena Horne. As the podcast details, Lena Horne -- whose skin tone was similar to Grace Gealey's) was signed by MGM in 1942 to represent the hopes and dreams of entire black community. They hired her and agreed, for the first time, never to cast this black actress as a servant or maid, and they did this so that Hollywood on the whole wouldn't have to make any significant changes in its depictions and attitudes towards race -- they could always point to Lena Horne and say, "See?" 

But as my episode explains, this "special treatment" made Lena Horne a pariah within the black Hollywood community, because everybody else was still playing maids, and still being forced to feed into white people's stereotypes about how black people should look and act, in order to get a paycheck. Lena Horne was used to this reaction from fellow black people; as far back as kindergarten, she was taunted on the playground for being "too white," and when her caucasian-style beauty helped her get a promotion at the Cotton Club, the other girls working at the club saw it as a signifier of the racism operating within an establishment that only hired black performers. In Hollywood, Lena wasn't "black enough" to fit in with the black community, but she wasn't white. She was, as she put it, "suspended in midair" between the two communities, and this was a terrible place to be. She became a symbol not of black advancement in Hollywood, as she was groomed to be, but of the double standards that allow people of color who can "pass" between worlds. Because her "special treatment" was still horribly racist and demeaning, Lena Horne eventually told Hollywood they could take their special treatment and shove it, and she became a passionate civil rights activist.

Anika is the least sympathetic character on Empire, and Cookie is pretty much everyone's favorite, and given that, it's pretty remarkable how far the show is willing to go in showing Cookie's frustrations at being surpassed by this lighter-skinned beauty, and how much she expresses that frustration in racial terms (she also has a problem with her son Andre's white wife, who is also pretty much evil, but that's a topic for another day).

There is a lot more I could say about this, but it's also all in the episode. Bottom line: when Cookie compares Anika to Lena Horne, it's a lot more than a wisecrack.

Star Wars Episode VII: Lena Horne

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Signed to a contract by MGM in 1942, stunning singer/actress Lena Horne was the first black performer to be given the full glamour girl star-making treatment. But as the years went on and her studio failed to make much use of her, Horne started feeling like a token — and she wasn’t just being paranoid. A tireless USO performer during World War II, Horne and MGM were deluged with fan mail from African-American soldiers, an outpouring of support which still didn’t change the fundamentally racist institutional attitudes holding Horne back. We’ll trace her journey from the stage of The Cotton Club to the Hollywood Hills; her two marriages and her relationships with Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles and Ava Gardner; her triumphs and disappointments on screen and off throughout the war era; the final insult which soured LenaHorne on Hollywood for good, and her remarkable late-in-life comeback.

Show Notes:

Before even listening to this episode, you might have noticed that there’s something a little different about it: it’s loooonnnng. This is not because I’ve suddenly fallen in love with the sound of my voice; it’s because I’ve fallen in love with the sound of LenaHorne’s voice. In the middle of my research for this episode, I discovered this public radio interview with Horne originally broadcast in 1966 and distributed by the Black Media Archive, and I thought it was so great that I immediately devoted the next couple of days to listening to all of the LenaHorne interview audio I could find. The episode is long because I included Lena’s version of her own story whenever possible, whether spoken or sung. 

There are several excerpts in this episode from the autobiographical stage show Lena mounted in the early 1980s, “LenaHorne: The Lady and Her Music.” Some of these excerpts come from a television version of the show that’s been posted on YouTube; others are from the official soundtrack album.

Other audio-video sources used in this episode, not including music:

LenaHorne on the Tonight Show

LenaHorne on Good Morning America, 1981

Clip from Cabin in the Sky

Jubilee! Episode #89, from Armed Forces Radio Service, July 24, 1944

Other sources include Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin; Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood by Donald Bogle; A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli by Mark Griffin; and the book that got me started on the idea of including an episode on Lena into our Star Wars series, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen by Sherrie Tucker.

Discography:

Stormy Weather instrumental, from a compilation called “Relaxing Jazz Instrumental 1940s Music”

Passing Fields by Quantum Jazz

Money by Jahzzar 

Dances and Dames by Kevin MacLeod

Make a Wish (For Christmas) by Lee Rosevere

Laserdisc by Chris Zabriskie

I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod

Stormy Weather part 1, performed by LenaHorne in “LenaHorne: The Lady and Her Music”

Derelict by Beck

Main Stem performed by US Army Blues

Dagger by Slowdive

Gnossiennes No. 1 by Eric Satie

Can’t Stop Loving Dat Man performed by LenaHorne in ’Til The Clouds Roll By

There’s Probably No Time by Chris Zabriskie

Stormy Weather part 2, performed by LenaHorne in “LenaHorne: The Lady and Her Music”

Marlene Dietrich Extras

If this week's episode on Marlene Dietrich piqued your interest in this fascinating broad, two things.

First: I forgot to mention in the show notes Maximilian Schell's incredible, experimental documentary on Marlene, called (as so many things about her are) Marlene. This is by no means a conventional biographical documentary, to its credit -- it's actually rather advanced Dietrich studies. I love it. It's on Amazon Instant video, iTunes, etc.

Second: last night I happened to catch on HBO a harrowing film called Night Will Fall, which tells the story of a British documentary shot primarily during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps which was, for various reasons explained in the film, never finished or released. Alfred Hitchcock was brought on at some point as the director of this shelved, and ultimately suppressed film. This was actually first brought to my attention by a post on our forum by Moominmama, and so once I realized it was on TV last night I was excited to watch it anyway. However, I didn't know that the film would include a rather substantial segment on the concentration camp documentary on which Billy Wilder worked, Death Mills, which I mentioned in the Marlene Dietrich episode. Night Will Fall even includes clips from Wilder's film, and much more backstory than what I was able to include in the episode. And it is also full of really powerful footage of survivors and victims of the camps, so, watch at your own risk (I admit that I did not sleep well last night), but do watch.

Star Wars Episode VI: Marlene Dietrich at War (YMRT #32)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

German actress/singer Marlene Dietrich — famous for her revolutionarily ambiguous, highly glamorous sexual libertine persona, as displayed on-screen during the 1930s in films like Morocco and Shanghai Express — was embedded with the Allies during World War II as a performer, propagandist, and de facto intelligence agent. We’ll explore how and why this happened, why the experience left Dietrich depressed and financially destitute, and how Billy Wilder convinced Marlene to play a Nazi sympathizer in the filmmaker’s attempt to make a post-war Hollywood propaganda film, A Foreign Affair. Also: a few of Dietrich’s many affairs with co-stars such as John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, her plot to kill Hitler, and the FBI investigation that tried (and failed) to prove that Dietrich was a German spy.

Show Notes:

A Foreign Affair, which I discuss in the episode and highly recommend, is not on DVD. I first saw it in a rep house in Paris two years ago, and then found a copy on VHS while I was working on this episode. The short clip I included in this episode comes from the radio version of the film, which is on YouTube.

To keep things interesting, this week two of my sources, though very different books, both have the same title. Dietrich’s own autobiography Marlene, first published in 1989, claims to set the record straight on all of the previous books written about her, which she insists are rubbish. She’s so persuasive on this matter that I ignored all other books published while she was alive, and focused on Marlene: A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler, who spent some time with Dietrich in the 1970s and also interviewed many of her friends and lovers, but held back publishing her book until 2011, long after Dietrich’s death. 

In looking for information on the making of A Foreign Affair, I discovered two books new to me: Charles Brackett’s diary of working with Wilder, It’s the Pictures That Got Small; and A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films by Gerd Gemunden. I found the former to be almost too bitchy, and the latter to be a little academic but very useful in its detailing of Wilder’s wartime and post-war experience.

Two other sources worth mentioning, both of which I read years ago but did not consult directly this week: Josef von Sternberg’s memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry, and Gaylyn Studlar’s book on Sternberg and Dietrich’s collaborations, In the Realm of Pleasure.

The bit about Dietrich’s FBI file comes from this Guardian story, and details on Operation Muzak and other aspects of Dietrich’s war experience come from this article on the CIA’s own website.

Discography:

You Go to My Head performed by Marlene Dietrich

Rite of Passage by Kevin MacLeod

Give Me The Man performed by Marlene Dietrich

Assez performed by Marlene Dietrich

Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst

Benbient by Canton

Lili Marlene performed by Marlene Dietrich

Prelude No. 21 by Chris Zabriskie

Look Me Over Closely performed by Marlene Dietrich

Black Market performed by Marlene Dietrich

Gymnopedie No.3 by Eric Satie

Illusions performed by Marlene Dietrich 

Star Wars Episode V: Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles (YMRT #31)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Margarita Cansino went to work at age 12, pretending to be her father’s wife so that the pair could get work as a dance team in Mexican nightclubs. Within a decade, chubby, visibly Hispanic wallflower Margarita had been transformed into Rita Hayworth — the quintessential all-American sex goddess of the World War II era. At the peak of Hayworth’s stardom, she fell in love with and married writer/director/actor/radio personality/magician Orson Welles. The glamour girl and the boy genius were happy together, for awhile — as long as both bought into a utopian plot they had cooked up to leave Hollywood. When that soured, the couple broke up…and then made a movie together, The Lady From Shanghai, in which Welles distorted their failed relationship into a bad-romance masterpiece.  

Show notes:

Special thanks to Larry Herold, who played Orson Welles — and the many others who auditioned to play Orson Welles. 

This episode was initially inspired by the succinct, beautifully written description of Cansino/Hayworth’s transformation/rise to fame in Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets. The other key sources for this episode were Barbara Leaming’s If This Was Happiness, which seems to be the only substantive biography of Hayworth (I would say it’s time for a new one, but Leaming’s book is the rare star biography which seems to lack glaring distortions or omissions); My Lunches with Orson by Henry Jaglom and Peter Biskind; and Simon Kellow’s Hello, Americans! Regarding the latter, I would have loved to have fleshed out Orson Welles’ South American misadventures, but I figured it would be best to save that for a future episode of its own.

There is a clip in the episode from The Lady From Shanghai, excerpted from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qay6OgDXfT0

Discography:

This episode includes several songs from the White Stripes album Get Behind Me Satan, which was apparently inspired in part by RitaHayworth. Two songs on the record mention her by name; the title another, "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" — which I’ve used as the closing song of the episode — is basically an echo of Orson Welles’ emotional turn away from Hayworth, once she had fully invested herself in him.

Keeps on a Rainin’ (Papa Can’t Make No Time) by Billie Holiday

I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod

Fiery Yellow by Stereolab

Calabash by Co-fee

Je t’aime…Mon non plus au motel by Serge Gainsbourg

The Hardest Button to Button by The White Stripes

Cups by Underworld

The Nurse by The White Stripes

Laserdisc by Chris Zabriskie

Dance of the Stargazer by the US Army Blues

Cylinder One by Chris Zabriskie

For Better or Worse by Kai Engel

Danse Morialta by Kevin MacLeod

Passing Fields by Quantum Jazz

Wonder Cycle by Chris Zabriskie

White Moon by the White Stripes

Forever For Her (Is Over For Me) by the White Stripes

Here's Three Seconds of Karina Warming Up Her Marlene Dietrich Voice

Happy Friday!

Star Wars Episode IV: Gene Tierney (Or, The Many Loves of Howard Hughes, Chapter 5)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

On-screen, gorgeous brunette actress Gene Tierney helped to invent the femme fatale in movies like Laura and Leave Her to Heaven, and off-screen, she had serious romances with four of the great playboys of the 20th century: John F. Kennedy, Howard Hughes, Prince Aly Khan and costume/fashion designer Oleg Cassini. So how did she end up, at age 38, standing on a ledge fourteen floors above 57th Street, wondering what her body would look like on the pavement if she were to jump? The answer to that question begins at the Hollywood Canteen.

Show notes:

This episode is technically a cross-over between our Star Wars series and our most long-running series, TheManyLoves of Howard Hughes. I haven’t found a Hughes biographer who categorizes Tierney as one of the aviator’s great loves, but like Ida Lupino, Tierney was a woman who moved in and out of Hughes’ life over the course of a couple of decades. And, like Lupino, Tierney was a sometime lover who benefitted from Hughes’ largesse, but also saw it get in the way of a marriage. 

But this episode had to be told from Gene Tierney’s perspective, and not Howard Hughes’ — or Oleg Cassini’s, or John F. Kennedy’s — and so while there are plenty of books one could read about Gene’s various lovers, my primary source was Tierney’s own autobiography, Self-Portrait. Are all celebrity autobiographies inherently suspect and probably at least partially fiction? Of course! But Tierney’s book is so compelling, and her story so inherently tragic, that it almost seems like bad form to fact-check her version of it. 

Special thanks to Noah Segan, who reprised his role as Howard Hughes. 

Discography:

Wonder Cycle by Chris Zabriskie

Tikopia by Kevin MacLeod

Ghost Dance by Kevin MacLeod

Take Good Care of it by Spiritualized

Will Be War Soon? by Kosta T

Undercover Vampire Policeman by Chris Zabriskie

Honestly Now by Joan of Arc

Glamorous Glue by Morrissey

Cylinder One by Chris Zabriskie

This is a Low by Blur

We have our Orson Welles!

I was totally overwhelmed by the response to my open call auditions for Orson Welles. Not only did I get a ton of entries, but a lot of the auditioners really took the endeavor seriously, and I was left with a very, very tough decision. In the end, I chose Larry Herold to play Welles on this episode. Congratulations, Larry! And many thanks to everyone else who auditioned -- you guys are an incredibly talented lot when it comes to the art of the Orson Welles impression.

Stay tuned for this episode next week! 

Looking for Orson Welles

I'm currently working on an episode about Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, and I'm looking for someone to portray the latter. It doesn't have to be an actor; it doesn't even necessarily have to be someone with a voice that sounds exactly like Welles. In case you haven't noticed (or didn't listen to the part of the Dory Previn episode where I admitted that my Dory Previn voice sounded nothing like Dory Previn), I'm more interested in emotional realism than realism-realism.

The person who is cast would be required to record a few lines on their own, using either a recording app on a phone or whatever else they have on hand, and then send me an MP3 file of the recording. There would be no payment, but you would get a credit within the episode itself and in the blog posts/tweets promoting the episode. And, you could say you once played Orson Welles on a podcast listened to by, like, dozens of people.

Interested? Here's what to do.

1. Listen to a little bit of Orson Welles' voice to "get in the mood." I recommend his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, which are available on the Internet Archive.

2. Practice reading this line, which is an actual quote from Welles, about Rita Hayworth:

"Her sex goddess persona was a total impersonation — like Lon Chaney or something. Nothing to do with her. Because she didn’t have that kind of sex appeal at all. She carried it off because of her 'gypsy blood.' But her essential quality was sweetness. There was a richness of texture about her that was very interesting, and very unlike a movie star.”

3. When you're ready, it's time to audition! Call this Google Voice number: (805) 622-9678 and leave a voicemail in which you read the lines. Don't forget to identify yourself and tell me how I can contact you. Please do this no later than Sunday, January 25, 6pm PST.

4. I will listen to the auditions and announce my casting decision on Monday, January 26. If you're chosen, you'll then get to see the full script for the episode and will have about two days to record your lines (should be about 4-5 of them).

5. Sit back and wait to bask in the spotlight of podlebrity!!!

Questions? Email me at karina at vidiocy dot com or Tweet @rememberthispod

Thanks!

Star Wars Episode III: Hedy Lamarr (YMRT #29)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Hedy Lamarr was a pioneer in more ways than one. After inventing the movie sex scene scandal as the Austrian teenage star of the banned film Ecstasy, she gave up acting to become a trophy wife to a Fascist arms dealer. Then, on the brink of world war, she fled her marriage, hopped a boat to New York, and talked her way into a contract at MGM. In Hollywood, the exotic Hedy was held up as a fresh new face in contrast to the "box office poison" girls of the late 1930s. With her first Hollywood film, Algiers, Lamarr became a major star, and the so-called "most beautiful girl in the world" had a promising career ahead of her. But she was bored in Hollywood, and in the midst of World War II, she used her free time to co-invent a radio-control technology meant for 1940s-era torpedoes, which would ultimately pave the way for cell phones, wifi, bluetooth, and drone warfare. She also accumulated six ex-husbands, stumbled onto an inventing partner through her quest to increase the size of her breasts, publicly disowned her own autobiography, sued Mel Brooks for making fun of her, and got arrested and tried for shoplifting from a Beverly Hills department store a full decade before Winona Ryder was even born.

Bibliography:

Hedy Lamarr is not exactly a household name these days, but there has been enough interest over the past 25 years in her contributions to our wireless culture that I wanted to make sure I wasn't simply retreading familiar territory. The good news is that her life encompassed so much that there would be enough for a full episode even if I had left out her her groundbreaking invention (and in fact, after this episode was in the can, I regretted somewhat not going into more detail about her later marriages, particularly the one to Howard Lee, who divorced Hedy and immediately married Gene Tierney -- the subject of next week's episode). The bad news is that most modern-day sources of information about Hedy both acknowledge that her autobiography Ecstasy and Me was fictionalized by its ghost writer, and also reiterate stories told in that autobiography as though the source's reliability isn't in question. In this episode, I quote from Ecstasy in order to talk about Hedy's opposition to the book, but I tried to find other sources to back up its version of events elsewhere. The two most significant other sources (although both are, at times, guilty of sourcing from Ecstasy and Me) were Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes (which isn't very interested in Hedy's movies, or any aspect of her life outside of her inventions, but gets credit for having one of the best book covers of all time), and Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr by Stephen Michael Shearer.

Discography:

Preludes for Piano No. 1 by George Gershwin

A Froggy Day performed by Cyril Grantham and his orchestra

Goodbye Emmanuelle by Serge Gainsbourg, performed by Tricky

Stars by Warpaint

Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst

Sleeping with the TV On by Double Dagger

White by Frank Ocean

Man O’ War by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

OLPC by Marco Raaphorst

The Operation by Morrissey

The Waxen Pith by Aphex Twin

 Oh, Lady Be Good performed by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra

No Joy in Mudville by Death Cab For Cutie

Dark Paradise by Lana Del Rey

Divider by Chris Zabriskie

Cylinder One by Chris Zabriskie

The Future by Prince 

Star Wars Episode II: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable (YMRT #28)

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

After struggling to find her niche in Hollywood, Carole Lombard came into her own in the mid-1930s first as the queen of screwball comedy, and then as romantic partner to the star dubbed The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable. When the US entered World War II, to the chagrin of her stoic husband, Lombard immediately volunteered their services to FDR, and the actress ended up spearheading the first of many Hollywood whistle stop tours to sell bar bonds. Hurrying back from that tour, Lombard died in an awful plane crash, leaving a guilt- and grief-ridden Gable behind. In the traumatic aftermath of his beloved wife’s death, Gable — the epitome of Hollywood's idea of unimpeachable masculinity -- had a physical and emotional breakdown. In his despair, the 41 year-old Gable had strings pulled so that he could join the army to fight against Hitler -- a huge Gable fan who reportedly became desperate to capture the actor while he was flying combat missions over Germany.

Bibliography: 

My main sources for this episode were Robert Matzen’s book on Lombard’s life and the investigation into her death, Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3; Garson Kanin’s memoir Hollywood, which includes a wonderful chapter on Lombard; City of Nets by Otto Friedrich; and the Gable biography Long Live the King by Lyn Tornabene. I was not able to find copies of two books by Warren Harris, Gable and Lombard and Clark Gable: A Biography (and actually, at the Hollywood branch of the LA Public Library, the librarian told me both had been stolen). And I didn’t realize until after I finished the episode that there was a biopic about the pair made in 1976, starring James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh. You can watch it on Amazon Instant Video; I can’t tell you whether or not you should. 

This episode includes an audio clip from Nothing Sacred (1937), directed by William Wellman.

Discography: 

Preludes for Piano No. 1 by George Gershwin

Little Room by The White Stripes

All of My Tears by Spirituaized

Motoroller Scalatron by Stereolab

Faster Does It by Kevin MacLeod

Gagool by Kevin MacLeod

Out of the Skies, Under the Earth by Chris Zabriskie

Prelude No. 21 by Chris Zabriskie

Off to Osaka by Kevin MacLeod

Dances and Dames by Kevin MacLeod

Transparent by Peter Rudenko

Most At Home in Motels by Joan of Arc

Rock My Boat (Roger O’Donnell mix) by DNTEL

Rock My Boat by DNTEL

Cylinder One by Chris Zabriskie

Gymnopedie No. 3 by Eric Satie, performed by Kevin MacLeod

For Better or Worse by Kai Engel

I’d Die Without You by PM Dawn

YMRT #27: Star Wars Episode I: Bette Davis and the Hollywood Canteen

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Today we’re launching a new series for the new year, Star Wars, which will focus on movie stars and their lives and careers during times of war. Our first eight episodes will explore stories of women during World War II, and we’ll start with the woman who dominated all aspects of Hollywood, including its war effort, in the late 1930s-early 1940s: BetteDavis.

This is the story of how BetteDavis evolved from a wannabe starlet who was constantly told she was too ugly for movies, to the most powerful woman in Hollywood, by playing heroines that had never been seen on screen before — to borrow a term from Davis herself, sympathetic “bitches.” After Pearl Harbor, the tenacious Bette became the figurehead of the Hollywood Canteen, a nightclub for servicemen staffed by stars, which was the locus of the industry’s most visible support of the troops on the home front.

The Hollywood Canteen was a catalyst for propaganda in more ways than one, aims Hollywood furthered by telling the story of the Hollywood Canteen in a movie called, um, Hollywood Canteen, starring Davis, John Garfield, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre and other celebrities as “themselves.” The movie and most press accounts of the Canteen portray it as a miraculous force for good in the world, which it probably was, but that narrative leaves out a lot, including illicit affairs, a murder, and an FBI investigation whose findings would have an impact on the blacklist of the following decade. 

Show Notes

This episode was a hell of a thing to research. BetteDavis published two autobiographies and both are very, very far from being impartial, but I consulted The Lonely Life a bit, as well as the authorized biography The Girl Who Walks Home Alone by Charlotte Chandler. I’d also recommend the Mysteries and Scandals episode on Davis, mostly to marvel at all of the ways in which A.J. Benza manages to call her a bitch without actually using the word “bitch.” Mark Harris’ Five Came Back was useful, particularly in its shading of the relationship between Davis and William Wyler.

More difficult was nailing down the story of the Hollywood Canteen. Hollywood Canteen: Where the Greatest Generation Danced With the Most Beautiful Girls in The World is as prosaic as its title; at least Hollywood’s propaganda about the Canteen, including the Delmer Daves movie Hollywood Canteen (excerpted in the episode) makes the spin fun. Much, much better is Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen. by Sherrie Tucker — a fascinating, beautifully written and researched study of the Canteen which goes into deep consideration of the social/racial/class/political conflicts enmeshed into this supposedly squeaky-clean nightclub which has become an icon of the supposed uncomplicated patriotism of the generation who fought WWII.

Discography:

Dance of the Stargazer performed by the US Army Blues Band

Rite of Passage by Kevin MacLeod

Lonely Town performed by Blossom Dearie

Ghost Dance performed by Kevin MacLeod

Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst

I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod

The Insider Theme by The Insider

5:00 AM by Peter Rudenko

Will be war soon? by Kosta T

Off to Osake by Kevin MacLeod

Balcarabic Chicken by Quantum Jazz

Hi Ho Trailus Bootwhip by Louis Prima and His Orchestra

Divider by Chris Zabriskie

My Country by Tune-Yards

Hollywood Frame by Frame Archive

Each episode in this second season of You Must Remember This has some relationship to Karina’s book Hollywood Frame by Frame, released in September 2014. The book compiles contact sheets from still photo sessions related to Hollywood movies from the early-50s through the mid-90s. Some of the episodes are inspired by or related to images in the book, while others deal with other great moments in Hollywood still photography/promotional image making.

Hollywood Frame by Frame Episodes:

• MADONNA: FROM SEAN PENN TO WARREN BEATTY, PART ONE: The biggest female pop star of the last decades of the monoculture, Madonna was also perhaps the first and last contemporary pop star who was also a serious Classical Hollywood cinephile, to extent that, for awhile, she seemed to be using pop music as a vehicle for a kind of conceptual art about movies and movie stardom. When she kept her passion for Hollywood cinema in the realm of celebration, commentary and critique, Madonna was able to engineer a number of truly transcendent images and cultural moments; when she aimed for straight movie stardom, however, her efforts more often than not fell flat. Over the course of two episodes, we will explore the high-cinephile period of Madonna’s life and work, roughly bracketed by her relationship with Sean Penn (whom she met on the set of the “Material Girl” video, while dressed as Marilyn Monroe), and ending with the dissolution of her rebound affair with Warren Beatty, as documented in the self-consciously Felliniesque tour film Truth or Dare. Here in part one, we start with Madonna’s typecasting in Desperately Seeking Susan, trace her tumultuous and allegedly abusive relationship with Penn from “Material Girl” through Shanghai Surprise and beyond, and explore how processing her first divorce through the concept album Like a Prayer led to Madonna’s highly cinematic collaborations with David Fincher, including the zenith of her public cinephilia, the video for “Vogue.” Listen
  

• BOGEY, BEFORE BACALL: Humphrey Bogart is perhaps the most enduring icon of grown-up masculine cool to come out of Hollywood’s first century. But much of what we think of when we think of Bogart — the persona of the tough guy with the secret soft heart, his pairing on-screen and off with Lauren Bacall — coalesced late in Bogart’s life. Today we take a look at how Humphrey Bogart became Bogey, tracing his journey from blue blood beginnings through years of undistinguished work and outright failure (both in the movies and in love), to his emergence in the early 1940s as a symbol of wartime perseverance who could make sacrifice seem sexy. Finally, we’ll look at what it took to get him to take the leap into a fourth marriage that seemed to saved his life … until the world’s most glamorous stoic was faced with cancer. Next week, we’ll present the sequel to this story: Bacall, After Bogey.. Listen

• BACALL, AFTER BOGART: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart fell in love on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944 and were together until his death in 1957 (see YMRT #13, Bogart Before Bacall). The marriage was blissful, but it required Bacall to put her own acting career on the back burner. When her beloved Bogie died, Bacall was just 32 years old, and at first, she was totally adrift, both personally and professionally. Today on what would have been the former Bette Perske’s 90th birthday, we tell the story of how Bacall spent the remaining 57 years of her life, from the disastrous rebound affair with Frank Sinatra to the almost as misbegotten second marriage, from her midlife reinvention as a musical theater star to her lifelong struggle to find a balance between being Mrs. So-and-So, and being Lauren Bacall.  Listen
  

• MADONNA FROM SEAN TO WARREN, PART TWO: In the concluding chapter of a two-part episode about Madonna and movies, we talk about her mutually beneficial professional and personal involvement with Warren Beatty. In 1989, Beatty, the self-described “president of Hollywood,” was coming off the disaster of Ishtar, and decided to star in and direct Dick Tracy as a way to prove that he still had his finger on the pulse of the culture. Madonna, who was still reeling from the end of her marriage to Sean Penn, saw Beatty and Dick Tracy as her avenue to legit Hollywood movie stardom — but she hedged her bets by producing her own cinematic showcase, Truth or Dare. Listen

  
  MARLON BRANDO 1971-1973: In the early 1950s, Marlon Brando became the first post-war mega-movie star, redefining screen acting and heralding the end of the star system by refusing to sign a studio contract. But as the studio system fell apart in the 1960s, and a new generation of moviegoers rejected the previous decade’s movie stars, Brando acquired a reputation as box office poison. This is the story of how, with two movies shot in 1971 — The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris — Brando turned his career around. He then spent his regained celebrity capital on an act of social activism that simultaneously drew attention to a good cause, and put Hollywood’s culture of self-adoration in its place. Listen

• THEDA BARA, HOLLYWOOD’S FIRST SEX SYMBOL: Theda Bara might be the most significant celebrity pioneer whose movies you’ve never seen. She was the movie industry’s first sex symbol; the first femme fatale; the first silent film actress to have a fictional identity invented for her by publicists and sold through a receptive media to a public who was happy to be conned; and she might have been America’s first homegrown goth.  She was one of the three biggest stars in Hollywood during her heyday — the other two being Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford — but by the early 1920s, the Victorian sexual panic she represented was way passé, thanks to the rise of the flapper, and Bara couldn’t get a job. Today most of her films are lost, and culturally she’s all but been forgotten. In this episode, we’ll trace her life and brief, bright career, and talk about what it was like to be a working actress, one of the most famous women in the world, and the embodiment of an intentionally scary fantasy during the very first days of Hollywood. Listen

• RAQUEL WELCH, FROM PIN-UP TO PARIAH: The poster for Raquel Welch's second film,One Million Years B.C., became the top pin-up of the late 1960s, and Welch — a divorced mom of two who had been a cocktail waitress just a few months earlier — found herself in the odd position of being an old-fashioned sex goddess in the age of flower children and feminism. With her unprecedentedly athletic curves, Welch was willing to exploit her natural gifts to some extent, but was adamant about not doing full nudity. Her stubbornness about maintaining control over the representation of her body made her unpopular in an industry which wasn’t interested in anything about her but her body; at the same time, Welch was disdained by contemporary feminists for her sexualized image, even though in several of her films, Welch set the prototype for the modern day action heroine. Fed up at age 40, Welch sued a major Hollywood studio for conspiracy to defame her and end her career. Listen
  

• LIZ <3 MONTY: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were best friends and co-stars in three films. The first, A Place in the Sun, is an undisputed classic which captures both stars at the peak of their talents and physical beauty. The shoot of the second, Raintree County, was interrupted by a horrible car accident in which Clift’s face was disfigured. This episode tracks Taylor’s relationship with the troubled Clift, from their first, studio-setup date through his untimely death — the result of what some have called “Hollywood’s slowest suicide.” Listen

• THE BIRTH OF BARBRA STREISAND’S A STAR IS BORN: There have been four Hollywood films made under the name and/or with the basic story of A Star is Born. The definitive version may be the one starring Judy Garland, directed by George Cukor in 1954; the most reviled version is the one starring Barbra Streisand, made in 1976 and produced by Barbra’s hair dresser-turned-boyfriend Jon Peters. In the middle of the New Hollywood 1970s, when American film was supposedly engaged in a mass project of questioning establishment myths, Streisand and Peters embraced Hollywood’s oldest, most institutionalized myth and appropriated it as a way to build an enormous (and enormously un-self-aware) monument to their own lives and their real-life romance. The result was both a huge success and a disaster. It paved the way for Streisand’s future directing career and Peters’ future as a Hollywood mogul, while also branding both with bad reputations — partially thanks to an expose on the production of the movie published by its jilted director. Listen

• AUDREY HEPBURN: SEX, STYLE, AND SABRINA: Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, it sometimes seems as though Audrey Hepburn’s actual movies have been swallowed up by a superficial image of her as a star. When you think of her, you probably think of her in a black cocktail dress, swinging a cigarette holder — an image from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film about a golddigging party girl which somehow convinces the viewer that it’s about a girl-next-door princess. This ability to mix sex and class and innocence was Hepburn’s real trademark, and along with her ballerina/waif body type - the total opposite of the bombshell look that was in vogue at the time — it made Hepburn not just a great star, but a groundbreaking one: she was the first glamorous actress whose style seemed to be to dress for herself, and not to appeal to men. 

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s came along fairly far along in Hepburn’s evolution as a star. Today we’re going to talk about a film which sparked that evolution, Sabrina — Hepburn’s second Hollywood film, on which she was romanced by William Holden, resented by Humphrey Bogart, and first dressed by Givenchy. It was also the first film on which her complicated star persona as a “new woman,” who used fashion to both broadcast her individuality and negotiate around the censors, started to come together. Listen

• MIA FARROW IN THE 1960S PART ONE: MIA AND FRANK: Before MiaFarrow was an outspoken activist, devoted mother to 14 children, and the famously jilted partner of Woody Allen, she was … a lotof other things. Today in the first of a two parter, we’ll begin to explore MiaFarrow’s life and career from 1960-1970 — a time period during which she lived in both a Catholic convent and an Indian ashram; married and divorced Frank Sinatra and became pregnant by Andre Previn, who was still married at the time to the songwriter Dory Previn. Farrow also starred in Peyton Place, the first prime time soap sensation;Rosemary’s Baby, one of the key films of the “new Hollywood” of the 1960s-1970s; and a couple of nearly forgotten but really interesting smaller films which are just as much of their era. Today we’ll cover Mia’s life up to early 1968, tracing her emergence as a star and her relationship with Sinatra. Also: Salvador Dali, Ava Gardner, Roman Polanski, Dean Martin and more. Listen

• MIA FARROW IN THE 1960S PART TWO: MIA AND DORY: In our last episode. we learned about Mia Farrow’s transition from Catholic school girl to wife of Frank Sinatra, and her breakout role in Rosemary’s Baby, which cost her her first marriage. This episode, while continuing the story of Mia Farrow’s life and career in the 1960s, is a little different. We’ll trace Mia’s flight to India, her time studying transcendental meditation with the Beatles, and the production of two of her most interesting movies, Secret Ceremony and John and Mary. It was whilst shooting the latter film that Mia fell in love with Andre Previn, who was married at the time to lyricist Dory Previn — whose story will guide the second half of this episode. A schizophrenic pill addict who was afraid to fly, Dory Previn tried, and failed, to fly to London to stop her husband from leaving her for Mia. Instead, Dory wrote a song about it — and touched off a new career as a groundbreaking autobiographical singer-songwriter. Listen

• THE SHORT LIVES OF BRUCE AND BRANDON LEE: A martial arts master on the verge of major movie stardom, Bruce Lee died suddenly in 1973, at the age of 33; the official cause was “death by misadventure.” Twenty years later, Bruce Lee's son, BrandonLee, died suddenly in an accidental shooting on the set of The Crow — the movie which was poised to turn Brandon into a major star. These parallel tragedies have led some to suggest that the Lee family have been the victims of a curse, or a conspiracy. In this episode, we’ll explore what really happened to Bruce and BrandonLee, and discuss what happened over several decades, so that an extraordinary talented artist who was essentially run out of town thanks to Hollywood’s racism came to be one of the industry’s biggest moneymakers long after his death. Listen

• TALES OF CELEBRITY DRUNKENNESS 2014: In our first annual end-of-year clip show, we’ll listen to some of the booziest excerpts from the 25 episodes of You Must Remember This released thus far. Highlights include day drinking with Judy Garland; the irresistible antics of Kay Francis; the drunk driving arrest that wrecked Frances Farmer’s career, plus stories about Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and more. Also: a zone-out-for-a-second-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of the topic of our first show of 2015! Listen

TALES OF CELEBRITY DRUNKENNESS 2014 {YMRT #26:}

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

In our first annual end-of-year clip show, we’ll listen to some of the booziest excerpts from the 25 episodes of You Must Remember This released thus far. Highlights include day drinking with Judy Garland; the irresistible antics of Kay Francis; the drunk driving arrest that wrecked Frances Farmer’s career, plus stories about Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and more. Also: a zone-out-for-a-second-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of the topic of our first show of 2015!

Discography

“Say You Will” by Kanye West

“Preludes for Piano” by George Gershwin

“Buddy Stay Off That Wine” by Betty Hall Jones

This episode includes clips from the following episodes:

#2: Frank Sinatra in Outer Space

#4: (The Printing of) the Legend of Frances Farmer

#5: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Judy Garland

#10: Kay Francis, Pretty Poison (Follies of 1938)

#13: Bogart, Before Bacall

#14: Bacall, After Bogart

#20: Liz <3 Monty

For soundtrack information for each of those excerpted episodes, please go to the show link.

YMRT #25: The Short Lives of Bruce and Brandon Lee

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

A martial arts master on the verge of major movie stardom, Bruce Lee died suddenly in 1973, at the age of 33; the official cause was “death by misadventure.” Twenty years later, Bruce Lee's son, BrandonLee, died suddenly in an accidental shooting on the set of The Crow — the movie which was poised to turn Brandon into a major star. These parallel tragedies have led some to suggest that the Lee family have been the victims of a curse, or a conspiracy. In this episode, we’ll explore what really happened to Bruce and BrandonLee, and discuss what happened over several decades, so that an extraordinary talented artist who was essentially run out of town thanks to Hollywood’s racism came to be one of the industry’s biggest moneymakers long after his death. 

Show notes!

This episode marks a couple of different landmarks for You Must Remember This. It’s our 25th episode. It’s the last episode of our second season, which has been devoted to stories loosely or not-so loosely related to my book, Hollywood Frame by Frame — making this also the last time I’ll mention the book in or around the podcast (there are pictures from the set of The Crow in it and you can buy it here. </plug>.) And, it’s our final all-new episode of 2014. We will have a special not-all-new episode next week, then we’ll take a week off and be back with the first episode of a new season on January 6. 

Bibliography:

There are a lot of books about Bruce Lee, and, honestly, I had trouble wading through them to figure out which were the most substantive/reliable. As I mention in the episode, the the demand for information about Lee after his death created a financial incentive to publish which didn’t necessarily support fact checking. I ended up putting more stock in newspaper/magazine articles written from the perspective of the future. Matthew Polly’s Playboy feature Chasing the Dragon was an important source for this episode, as were the LA Times and Entertainment Weekly’s extensive coverage of Brandon Lee’s death on the set of The Crow, particularly this story by Mark Harris. Also, I watched the documentary I Am Bruce Lee, as well as, um, this Unsolved Mysteries episode about the Lee deaths. 

Discography:

Atmosphere by Joy Division

Intelligent Galaxy The Insider

Strict Machine by Goldfrapp

Cyllider One by Chris Zabriskie

Money by Jahzzar

The Insider Theme by The insider

5:00 AM by Peter Rudenko

Laserdisc by Chris Zabriskie

These Days by Joy Division

Auto-Suggestion by Joy Division

Private Hurricane (Instrumental Version) by Josh Woodward

Undercover Vampire Policeman by Chris Zabriskie

For the Damaged (coda) by Blonde Redhead

Wonder Cycle by Chris Zabriskie

Dead Souls by Joy Division

YMRT #24: Mia Farrow in the 1960s, Part Two: Mia and Dory

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

In our last episode. we learned about Mia Farrow’s transition from Catholic school girl to wife of Frank Sinatra, and her breakout role in Rosemary’s Baby, which cost her her first marriage. This episode, while continuing the story of Mia Farrow’s life and career in the 1960s, is a little different. We’ll trace Mia’s flight to India, her time studying transcendental meditation with the Beatles, and the production of two of her most interesting movies, Secret Ceremony and John and Mary. It was whilst shooting the latter film that Mia fell in love with Andre Previn, who was married at the time to lyricist DoryPrevin — whose story will guide the second half of this episode. A schizophrenic pill addict who was afraid to fly, DoryPrevin tried, and failed, to fly to London to stop her husband from leaving her for Mia. Instead, Dory wrote a song about it — and touched off a new career as a groundbreaking autobiographical singer-songwriter.

Show notes!

Once again, special thanks are owed to Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly and The Canon podcast, who played Mia Farrow. 

If you haven’t listened to part one of this episode, please do! All of the sources used last time were relevant this time, but this episode is heavily indebted to DoryPrevin’s two autobiographies, Midnight Baby (the super crazy, jazz poetry version of her bad childhood), and Bog-trotter (the much more lucid account of her adult life, with lyrics). Both are out of print, but if you can find them used, they’re great, particularly Bog-trotter. Also, any of Dory’s music that you can get your hands on is incredibly worthy. In addition, this episode references the following articles: 

“I’m Insane,” says DoryPrevin PEOPLE, January 17, 1977

“An interview with DoryPrevin” Croydon Municipal

“DoryPrevin, Songwriter, Is Dead at 86” New York Times, February 14, 2012

See also these two radio interviews (the BBC clip is excerpted in the episode):

Bernadette Cahill interview, 2005

DoryPrevin BBC interview

Discography:

Sun King by The Beatles

This Protector by The White Stripes

Blue Jay Way by The Beatles

Goodbye Charlie by Dory and Andre Previn, performed by Bobby Darin

Dear Prudence by The Beatles

Calabash by Co.fee

Quasi Motion by Kevin MacLeod

Back in the USSR by TheBeatles

Lady Jane by The Rolling Stones

Holy Thursday by David Axelrod

Cylinder One by Chris Zabriskie

Whole Lotta Love performed by Ike and Tina Turner

In Pompei by Joan of Arc

Bobby’s Dream by Ralph Burns

Theme From Valley of the Dolls by Dory and Andre Previn, performed by Dionne Warwick

For Better or Worse by Kai Engel

Benbient by Canton

Once Tomorrow (instrumental version) by Josh Woodward

Undercover Vampire Policeman by Chris Zabriskie

I am a Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor by Chris Zabriskie

Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign by DoryPrevin, performed by Kate Dimbleby and Naadia Sheriff

Exlibris by Kosta T

How’m I Gonna Get Myself Together by DoryPrevin

live recording of Mary C, Brown and the Hollywood Sign, performed by DoryPrevin

YMRT #23: Mia Farrow in the 1960s, part 1: Mia & Frank

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Before MiaFarrow was an outspoken activist, devoted mother to 14 children, and the famously jilted partner of Woody Allen, she was … a lotof other things. Today in the first of a two parter, we’ll begin to explore MiaFarrow’s life and career from 1960-1970 — a time period during which she lived in both a Catholic convent and an Indian ashram; married and divorced Frank Sinatra and became pregnant by Andre Previn, who was still married at the time to the songwriter Dory Previn. Farrow also starred in Peyton Place, the first prime time soap sensation;Rosemary’s Baby, one of the key films of the “new Hollywood” of the 1960s-1970s; and a couple of nearly forgotten but really interesting smaller films which are just as much of their era. Today we’ll cover Mia’s life up to early 1968, tracing her emergence as a star and her relationship with Sinatra. Also: Salvador Dali, Ava Gardner, Roman Polanski, Dean Martin and more.

Show notes!

This episode was inspired by two things which came to my attention over the past year. The first was Maureen Orth’s October 2013 Vanity Fair profile of Mia, which began the recent wave of attention to the paternity of Ronan Farrow and the long-dormant allegations that Woody Allen molested his and Mia’s adopted daughter, Dylan. The second was a film called John and Mary, which I had never heard of, but needed to research in a hurry when we found contact sheets from the set of the film, contact sheets that were too beautiful to not include in my book, Hollywood Frame by Frame. That movie stars Farrow and Dustin Hoffman right at the moment when the two were the hottest, newest young stars around — to put it in completely reductive, contemporary terms, this would be like if Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart made an arty, one-night-stand movie at the peak of Twilight — but it’s basically been forgotten, and I couldn’t find much information about its production. In attempting to research it, I came across MiaFarrow’s autobiography, What Falls Away, published in 1997, which wasn’t much help on John and Mary, but which was full of other stories that I wanted to explore. 

The primary sources for this episode in addition to What Falls Away were Roman Polanski’s autobiography Roman; Robert Evans’ autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture(and the audiobook version, which I excerpt in the episode); and Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers and Robyn Swan, published in 2005. There are many Sinatra biographies; I picked up this one this time because I had never looked at it before, and it had a substantial amount about Mia. I also read this 2006 interview with Mia by Gaby Wood in The Guardian.

Discography:

"Moonlight Saving Me" performed by Blossom Dearie

"Flying" by The Beatles

"Come Rain or Come Shine" performed by Frank Sinatra

"I’ll Be Your Mirror" by The Velvet Underground and Nico

"The Beat Goes On" by Buddy Rich

"Au coin de la rue" by Marco Raaphorst

"Out of the Skies, Under the Earth" by Chris Zabriskie

"Something" by The Beatles, performed by Frank Sinatra

"With Plenty of Money and You" performed by Tony Bennett

"Tikopia" by Kevin MacLeod

"Melody" by Serge Gainsbourg

"Melancholy Aftersounds" by Kai Engel

"Private Hurricane (Instrumental version)" by Josh Woodward

"Divider" by Chris Zabriskie

"Main Title Theme to Rosemary’s Baby" by MiaFarrow and Dick Hazzard

"Laserdisc" by Chris Zabriskie

"I Am a Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor" by  Chris Zabriskie

"Tinkerwench" by Loveliescrushing

"Undercover Vampire Policeman" by  Chris Zabriskie

"Runaway" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

YMRT #22: Audrey Hepburn: Sex, Style and Sabrina

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, it sometimes seems as though Audrey Hepburn’s actual movies have been swallowed up by a superficial image of her as a star. When you think of her, you probably think of her in a black cocktail dress, swinging a cigarette holder — an image from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film about a golddigging party girl which somehow convinces the viewer that it’s about a girl-next-door princess. This ability to mix sex and class and innocence was Hepburn’s real trademark, and along with her ballerina/waif body type - the total opposite of the bombshell look that was in vogue at the time — it made Hepburn not just a great star, but a groundbreaking one: she was the first glamorous actress whose style seemed to be to dress for herself, and not to appeal to men. 

Breakfast at Tiffany’s came along fairly far along in Hepburn’s evolution as a star. Today we’re going to talk about a film which sparked that evolution, Sabrina — Hepburn’s second Hollywood film, on which she was romanced by William Holden, resented by Humphrey Bogart, and first dressed by Givenchy. It was also the first film on which her complicated star persona as a “new woman,” who used fashion to both broadcast her individuality and negotiate around the censors, started to come together.

Show Notes!

My book Hollywood Frame by Frame contains several pages of images taken on the New York set of Sabrina. There’s one page that shows Hepburn, Holden, director Billy Wilder, and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, sitting around a table together — without Bogart. When I started researching that photo, I learned that Bogart had been an antagonist on that set, in part because he seemed to feel threatened by the up-and-coming Hepburn, who he thought was getting special treatment, and who would thus upstage him. That reminded me of the portion of Sam Wasson’s book Fifth Avenue 5 A.M., in which he details the special treatment that Hepburn did get, in that she was sent to Paris to pick out items for her character’s (and her own) wardrobe at the atelier of Hubert de Givenchy, the designer with whom Hepburn would work for the rest of her career. I thought it would be interesting to explore ways in which Sabrina, made when Hepburn was still a total newcomer, put in motion various aspects of her now-indelible star persona. 

This episode features more film criticism/analysis than usual, and because I had researched these films and Hepburn’s life before, I didn’t need to do the usual exhaustive research. But most of the quotes and information about Hepburn’s early and personal lives came from Barry Paris’ biography Audrey Hepburn.

Discography:

"Moon River" by Henry Mancini, performed by Morrissey

“Benbient” by Canton

“Free and Easy” by Brian Jonestown Massacre

“Oceanic Dawn” by DJ Masque

“Just in Time” performed by Blossom Dearie

“Big Deal” by Everything But the Girl

“6,49” by Black Ant

“Wonder Cylce” by Chris Zabriskie

“Sous le soleil exacttement (orchestre)” by Serge Gainsbourg

“Transparent” by Peter Rudenko

“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie

“Gunshy” by Liz Phair

“Inside You” by Eddie Henderson

“The Slide Song” by Spiritualized

“The Girls Want to Be With The Girls” by The Talking Heads

YMRT #21: The Birth of Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

There have been four Hollywood films made under the name and/or with the basic story of A Star is Born. The definitive version may be the one starring Judy Garland, directed by George Cukor in 1954; the most reviled version is the one starring Barbra Streisand, made in 1976 and produced by Barbra’s hair dresser-turned-boyfriend Jon Peters. In the middle of the New Hollywood 1970s, when American film was supposedly engaged in a mass project of questioning establishment myths, Streisand and Peters embraced Hollywood’s oldest, most institutionalized myth and appropriated it as a way to build an enormous (and enormously un-self-aware) monument to their own lives and their real-life romance. The result was both a huge success and a disaster. It paved the way for Streisand’s future directing career and Peters’ future as a Hollywood mogul, while also branding both with bad reputations — partially thanks to an expose on the production of the movie published by its jilted director. 

Show notes!

This was the toughest episode I’ve done to this point, because there are so many stories to tell about Peters, Streisand and the making of this film, and it’s hard to know which of those stories people have heard before, and what background I needed to provide. I probably could have done this episode without summarizing Streisand’s relationship with Elliott Gould, say, or Peters’ post-Columbia struggles, but that stuff is sort of why I was interested in what happened in the middle. In the end, I wrote and rewrote the script many times in the editing.

Nothing in this episode is “secret,” but I think a lot of it has been forgotten, particularly Frank Pierson’s expose on the making of A Star is Born, which was published first in New West magazine, and then in New York magazine. (One thing I couldn’t fit into the episode: at that link, there’s a quote from Barbra about Pierson’s article, which she gave to Geraldo Rivera. Rivera was one of Jon Peters’ best friends.) It’s hard to imagine a world in which such a thing would be possible, for a director to pull back the curtain and reveal what working with a much-more-famous star/producer was really like. It probably couldn’t have happened ten years before, and it definitely wouldn’t have happened ten years after. Sometimes people talk about the New Hollywood era as though the lunatics were running the asylum, and that was never really entirely true — there were always executives, and studios were becoming corporate entities — but it is true that several wormholes of possibility opened. One of those wormholes allowed for unfiltered writing about the making of movies and the people who made them — which of course also has something to do with the ways in which journalism changed in the 1960s and 70s. 

An excellent example is the reporting of Grover Lewis, some of which is collected in the out-of-print, essential, Academy All the Way. In this episode, I referenced Lewis’ 1971 profile of Streisand, “The Jeaning of Barbra Streisand,” which you can also read here. 

Special thanks to Noah Segan, who played Jon Peters. 

Additional bibliography:

Hit and Run by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? by Rachel Abramowitz

Barbra by Christopher Andersen

“It Should Be Called ‘Dickhead’” by Nikki Finke, Deadline Hollywood

“Studio Head” by William Stadiem, Vanity Fair

Interview with Joan Didion, Academy of Achievement, 2006

Mediography:

Streisand’s director’s commentary on the 2004 DVD release of A Star is Born was useful for research purposes, and is also excerpted in the episode.

Discography:

“The Man That Got Away” from A Star is Born, Instrumental, performed by Warner Brothers Orchestra

“Private Hurricane (Instrumental) by Josh Woodward

“Evergreen” by Barbra Streisand

“Moonlight Saving Me” performed by Blossom Dearie

“Chiado” by Jahzzar

“Holy Thursday” by David Axelrod

“I Was the Fool Beside You For Too Long” by Yo La Tengo

“Money” by Jahzzar

“Funny Lady: How Lucky Can You Get” by The Studio Sound Ensemble

“Make a Wish (For Christmas)” by Lee Rosevere

“Benbient” by canton

“Fiery Yelloe” by Stereolab

“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie

“Whole Lotta Love,” performed by Ike and Tina Turner

“Out of the Skies, Under the Earth” by Chris Zabriskie

“Dnaces and Dames” by Kevin MacLeod

“Object Du Desire” performed by James Figurine

“Au coin de la rue” performed by Marco Raaphorst

“Undercover Vampire Policeman” by Chris Zabriskie

“Cylinder One” by Chris Zabriskie

“Intelligent Galaxy” by The Insider

“Inside You” by Eddie Henderson

“Make it Drums” by Daedelus

“Finale: Watch Closely Now” from A Star is Born, performed by Barbra Streisand