THE WIVES OF FATTY ARBUCKLE

Comedian Fatty Arbuckle had a sad and short life. Due to his raping scandal, he was banished from Hollywood. The poor soul was married three times but never had any children. Even though Fatty was divorced twiced, all three of his wives said he was a good man. Here is a break down of the three wives of Fatty Arbuckle...

MINTA DURFEE (1889-1975)

Minta was a minor silent screen actress. She met Roscoe Arbuckle when he was attempting to get started in theater, and the two married in August 1908. Durfee entered show business in local companies as a chorus girl at the age of 17. She was the first leading lady of Charlie Chaplin.. 

Durfee and Arbuckle separated in 1921, just prior to a scandal involving the death of starlet Virginia Rappe. There were three trials and finally Arbuckle was acquitted. His career was destroyed and he received few job offers. Durfee and Arbuckle divorced in 1925. Durfee in her later years said Arbuckle was "the most generous human being I've ever met", and "if I had to do it all over again, I'd still marry the same man.

A regular performer on television, Durfee appeared on such shows as Noah's Ark (1956). She had minor roles in motion pictures including How Green Was My Valley (1941), Naughty Marietta (1935), Rose-Marie (1936), It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), and Savage Intruder (1970). In later life, Durfee gave lectures on silent film and held retrospectives on her and her husband's pictures. She was surprised and excited by the renewed interest in silent film.

DORIS DEANE (1901-1974)

Doris married film director Roscoe Arbuckle May 16, 1925. The marriage followed soon after his divorce from Minta Durfee and followed the rape and manslaughter accusations against him in the death of Virginia Rappe.They planned to honeymoon in New York. They later divorced and she sued for alimony in 1929. She and Arbuckle were guests of writer Gouvineur Morris before their marriage.She was in the 1944 play The Day Will Come.

ADDIE MCPHAIL (1905-2003)

Addie was another actress that Fatty married. She appeared in 64 films between 1927 and 1941.She was married to Fatty when she died. After she retired from acting, she served for 17 years as a volunteer nurse at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. 

DAVID DUNCAN'S HOLLYWOOD: SAN FRANCISCO

Here is a new video series from Australian film historian and producer David Duncan...

RIP: PAUL SORVINO

Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83.

His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”

Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”

“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.

“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)

Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”

Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.

Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.

In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.

Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.

Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.

Then his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.

The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.

He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”

Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.

Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.

Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.”...

CELEBRITY ADS: JANET GAYNOR

Here is a very vintage ad. It is from December of 1929, and popular actress Janet Gaynor is advertising for Max Factor make-up. What a great advertisement!

THE MURDER OF DANNY LOCKLIN

One of the most brutal  murders in Hollywood and Broadway history was that of the talented Danny Lockin who played the role of “Barnaby” in both the Broadway and movie version of “Hello Dolly” at the age of 34.

In 1965 Danny Lockin replaced Jerry Dodge in the role of Barnaby Tucker in Hello, Dolly! and went across the United States on six traveling productions. Several actresses playing Dolly Levi he performed with included: Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Dorothy Lamour and Anne Russell. He remained in the role for the movie version of Hello, Dolly! after enduring an audition and 13 callbacks before finally getting the role. When filming for movie ended, Lockin continued the role on Broadway again where he worked with both Ethel Merman and Phyllis Diller until it closed on Dec. 27, 1970. One of the actresses that Lockin had mixed feelings about was Carol Channing as Dolly, about whom he once said: “Carol Channing is rather disconcerting. You’ll notice her looking at you with those big baby-stare eyes. Then eventually it dawns on you that the person behind those eyes is, in show business terms, about 200 years old.” He also later expressed unhappiness with the way audiences reacted to Merman in the role of Dolly Levi, and how this changed the show. “She wasn’t Dolly up there, she was Ethel Merman in Dolly clothes. … The audiences came, of course; they came to see the Ethel Merman version. But it wasn’t Hello, Dolly! any more, it was her show. … Channing or Streisand, they were part of a cast, trying to act out a character. But with Ethel Merman—and not just her fault, with the audience, she was such an institution—the rest of us felt like just her chorus boys or her chorus line.

On the night of August 21, 1977 Danny Lockin went to a bar The Mug, in Garden Grove, California. He left the bar with a slight, 34-year-old unemployed medical clerk, Charles Leslie Hopkins (who already had a police record and was on probation at the time). Several hours later, Hopkins called police to say that a man had entered his apartment and tried to rob him. Upon arrival, police found Lockin’s body on the floor of Hopkin’s apartment. He had been stabbed ovwe 100 times, and bled to death. Lockin’s body had also been mutilated after death. Hopkins claimed he had no idea how the dead body got in his apartment.

Hopkins was arrested immediately.

Police found a book of pornographic pictures in Hopkins’ apartment which showed various embarrassing acts. Prosecutors initially intended to seek a first degree murder conviction, and to use the book to prove that Hopkins had planned the murder. Hopkins’ trial began in May 1978, but endured a two-month delay. During the delay, the Supreme Court of the United States held in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1 (1977), that police may not engage in warrantless searches of an individual’s property in the absence of an exigency. On July 31, the trial court ruled the pornographic book inadmissible as evidence. On August 8, the trial court judge held that the death penalty could not be applied to Hopkins due to lack of evidence of premeditation.

On September 28, 1978, Hopkins was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to a three-year prison term. Since the court was permitted to consider suppressed evidence if the evidence was not seized merely to obtain a lengthier prison sentence and it did not “shock the conscience of the court,” the trial judge increased Hopkins’ sentence from the usual three years to four years. Hopkin’s was released in just over two years. Many believe that due to the “homosexual nature” of the case and societal prejudice at the time, justice was not served. After being released from prison, Hopkins married. It has been reported that Hopkins “died an unusually slow and painful death from cancer.”

Danny Lockin was buried in Westminster Memorial Park cemetery in Orange County. His grave is in Block 29, Section 219, Grave 4 with a simple stone that calls him “Beloved Son”...

THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1945

 1945 was a very important year in American history. It marked the end of the war, and it was a beginning of normalcy that the country hadn't seen in years. People were flocking to see Hollywood movies and here are the biggest stars of that year...

                              

1. BING CROSBY
2. VAN JOHNSON

3. GREER GARSON
4. BETTY GRABLE
5. SPENCER TRACY
6. HUMPHREY BOGART
7. GARY COOPER
8. BOB HOPE
9. JUDY GARLAND
10. MARGARET O' BRIEN

RIP: JAMES CAAN

James Caan, the veteran screen actor known for his work in such films as “The Godfather,” “Misery” and “Elf,” has died, his family said in a statement on his verified Twitter account. He was 82.

“It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Jimmy on the evening of July 6,” the statement read. “The family appreciates the outpouring of love and heartfelt condolences and asks that you continue to respect their privacy during this difficult time.”

They did not disclose a cause of death.

Caan first found fame playing Chicago Bears halfback Brian Piccolo in “Brian’s Song,” a widely seen 1971 TV movie. The tear-jerking film chronicled Piccolo’s real-life battle with terminal cancer and drew praise for its treatment of the interracial friendship between Piccolo and a Black teammate, Gale Sayers.

The curly-haired actor was known for playing tough-guy characters in such films as “Thief” and “Rollerball.” But he was a versatile actor who also exuded vulnerability in movies like “Misery,” the 1990 Stephen King adaptation about a mild-mannered romance novelist held captive by an obsessive fan.

He is probably best known to younger audiences for his role in 2003’s “Elf,” the Christmas tale in which he played Will Ferrell’s Scrooge-like father, a workaholic children’s book publisher unhappy to learn he has an abnormally cheerful grown son who wears an elf costume and pours maple syrup on his spaghetti.

It was not a cuddly role, but Caan, playing the straight man to Ferrell’s exuberant manchild, brought a welcome dash of cynicism – and many tight-lipped looks of exasperation – that tempered the movie’s sweetness.

In the same CBS interview, Caan said he almost turned down the “Elf” role over the film’s title alone but Ferrell convinced him to join the project.

Caan was born in 1940 in the Bronx borough of New York City to Jewish immigrants. His father was a butcher. He played football at Michigan State and later began studying acting as a student at Hofstra University, where one of his classmates was “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola.

After appearing in a few plays on and off-Broadway, Caan moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to launch a film career. Coppola gave him one of his first roles, as a drifter in the 1969 drama “The Rain People.”

Caan’s other memorable movies included the Howard Hawks Western “El Dorado,” James Toback’s “The Gambler” and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), Richard Attenborough’s ensemble World War II epic.

Later in his career, he appeared on TV in the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0” series, alongside his son Scott Caan.

More recently, actor Damian Conrad-Davis played Caan in “The Offer,” the 2022 Paramount+ miniseries about the making of “The Godfather.” James' final film role was in 2021's "Queen Bees"...

MUSIC BREAK: HELEN MORGAN - WHERE'S THAT RAINBOW

SINGER SPOTLIGHT: HELEN MORGAN

There are a lot of singers who died young from Amy Winehouse to Elvis Presley and even further back. One of the early singers who died young was Helen Morgan. A quintessential torch singer, she made a big splash in the Chicago club scene in the 1920s. She starred as Julie LaVerne in the original Broadway production of Hammerstein and Kern's musical Show Boat in 1927, as well as in the 1932 Broadway revival of the musical, and appeared in two film adaptations, a part-talkie made in 1929 (prologue only) and a full-sound version made in 1936, becoming firmly associated with the role. She suffered from bouts of alcoholism, and despite her notable success in the title role of another Hammerstein and Kern's Broadway musical, Sweet Adeline (1929), her stage career was relatively short. Helen Morgan died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 41. She was portrayed by Polly Bergen in the Playhouse 90 drama The Helen Morgan Story and by Ann Blyth in the 1957 biopic based on the television drama.

She was born Helen Riggin in 1900 in Danville, Illinois. Her father, Frank Riggin, was a farmer in Davis Township, Fountain County, Indiana. After her mother, Lulu Lang Riggin, divorced and remarried, she changed her last name to Morgan. Her mother's second marriage ended in divorce, and she moved to Chicago with her daughter. Helen never finished school beyond the eighth grade, and worked a variety of jobs just to get by. She worked as an extra in films. By the age of 20, Morgan had taken voice lessons and started singing in speakeasies in Chicago. Her voice was not fashionable during the 1920s for the kind of songs in which she specialized; nevertheless, she became a wildly popular torch singer. A draped-over-the-piano look became her signature while performing at Billy Rose's Backstage Club in 1925. Morgan became a heavy drinker and was often reportedly drunk during these performances.

In 1927, Morgan appeared as Julie LaVerne in the original cast of Show Boat, her best-known role. She sang "Bill" (lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse, music by Jerome Kern) and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" in two stage runs and two film productions of Show Boat over a span of 11 years.

During the run of Show Boat, however, Morgan's stardom led to difficulties. Her prominence in the world of New York nightclubs (actually illegal speakeasies in the era of Prohibition) led to her fronting a club called Chez Morgan, at which she entertained. On December 30, 1927, only days after the opening of Show Boat, she was arrested at Chez Morgan for violation of liquor laws. Charges were dropped in February 1928, and the club reopened as Helen Morgan's Summer Home, but she was arrested again on June 29 and this time indicted. A jury acquitted her at a trial held in April 1929.

Morgan starred in a radio program, Broadway Melodies, on CBS. The show, which featured light, popular, and semiclassical music, ran from September 24, 1933, to April 22, 1934. A later version, retitled Broadway Varieties and without Morgan, ran from May 2, 1934, to July 30, 1937.

Her last film appearance was in the 1936 version of Show Boat, often considered to be the better of the two film versions of the stage musical. It was remade in Technicolor in 1951. The 1929 film version was based on Edna Ferber's novel of the same name, from which the musical was adapted, rather than on the show.

In the late 1930s, Morgan was signed up for a show at Chicago's Loop Theater. She also spent time at her farm in High Falls, New York. Alcoholism plagued her, and she was hospitalized in late 1940, after playing Julie La Verne one last time in a 1940 Los Angeles stage revival of Show Boat. She made something of a comeback in 1941, thanks to her manager, Lloyd Johnston. However, the years of alcohol abuse had taken their toll. She collapsed onstage during a performance of George White's Scandals of 1942 and died in Chicago of cirrhosis of the liver on October 9, 1941.

Morgan was married three times. Her first husband was Lowell Army, a fan she had met at a stage door while she was performing in Sally. On May 15, 1933, she married Maurice "Buddy" Maschke III, the grandson of longtime Ohio Republican Party leader Maurice Maschke. Morgan ended up suing Buddy Maschke for divorce in 1935. Her third husband was Lloyd Johnston, whom she married on July 27, 1941. On June 25, 1926, in Springfield, Illinois, Morgan had a baby girl named Elaine Danglo who was adopted out of the family.

Sadly her voice was stilled on October 9, 1941 at he age of 41...