RIP: PAULA KELLY JR

Our friend, Alan Glasscock, posted this very sad news about Paula Kelly Cole on Facebook this morning:

"I am saddened to report that Paula Kelly Cole (Paula Kelly Jr.) passed away peacefully at 8:25pm (PST), according to her sister, Julie Dickinson Lancaster."

For those of you who did not know Paula, she was the daughter of two of the greatest vocal group singers of all time, Paula Kelly Sr. and Hal Dickinson, founders of The Modernaires. The Modernaires were long associated with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, racking up dozens of hit recordings before embarking on a solo career which took them into radio, television and motion pictures.

Paula Jr. took over her mother's place as lead singer in The Modernaires in the late-'70s, a position she held until just a few months ago when she was sidelined due to surgery on her vocal cords. Sister Julie stepped in to sing lead, and Ginger Berglund was brought on board to fill out the quartet. Paula Jr. became ill about a week ago with a brain aneurysm, followed by other complications, and was removed from life support earlier this afternoon, with family at her bedside...

"I can say will all certainty that Paula was one of the most gracious, cheerful and funny people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. She was full of enthusiasm for big band music (my kind o' people!), and I enjoyed many conversations with her over the past few months. Her only concern she expressed to me as of late was worrying about not being able to sing again after her surgery. That is no longer a concern of hers, as she is surely singing in an all-star vocal group above!" George Spink

More about Paula;

PAULA KELLY Jr was born in Grove City, PA, the middle daughter of Hal Dickinson and Paula Kelly. Early on she sang in church choirs. Educated in San Fernando Valley, CA schools, she majored in music. Singing with “The Modernaires” from 1966 through 1971 she traveled most of the world learning the lead part from her Mother. Hal, her father passed in 1970 and in 1971 she retired to marry. 1972 brought her a beautiful red haired daughter, Jennifer Holly Cole.

Previously Paula had performed with her two sisters, Julie and Martha in a trio called “The Kelly Sisters”. They made several appearances on the Bob Crosby and Dean Martin television shows. When her Mom, Paula Kelly retired in 1978, the natural replacement was her daughter, Paula Kelly Jr. She was so privileged to have worked with most of the great acts of the 40’s and 50’s. These were her parent’s friends and colleagues.

They were great Entertainers such as, Helen Forrest, Tex Beneke, Helen O’connell, Bob & Ray Eberle, Peter Marshall, Tony Martin, Count Basie, Les Brown, The Mills Brothers, Rosemary Clooney and yes, even Louie Armstrong. “The Modernaires” toured six times in Australia. Three of the tours were with surviving members of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Billy May, an original, actually took trumpet lessons to do the tour. Among others on the tour were Paul Tanner, Wilbur Schwartz, John Best, Jimmy Priddy, Al Klink and Zeke Zarchy...

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ERNEST BORGNINE SETS SAIL

McHale's Navy star Ernest Borgnine to sail again -- on a cruise
By Gene Sloan, USA TODAY

Film and TV legend Ernest Borgnine is heading back to sea in December, this time on a cruise ship.

Theme cruise organizer Sixthman says the star of the 1960s television show McHale's Navy will be among the headliners on the first TCM Classic Cruise, scheduled to kick off on Dec. 8.

The four-night sailing on Celebrity Cruises' 1,950-passenger Celebrity Millennium is aimed at classic movie fans and also will include appearances by Tippi Hedren, Norman Jewison and Eva Marie Saint.

The Academy Award-winning Borgnine is no stranger to the high seas, having served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy before moving on to acting. In addition to McHale's Navy (1962-1966), Borgnine appeared in dozens of other TV shows and movies including From Here to Eternity (1953), Marty (1955), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969).

Also onboard the sailing will be Turner Classic Movies primetime host Robert Osborne and weekend-daytime host Ben Mankiewicz. The voyage will include performances by the Alloy Orchestra, a three-man musical ensemble that has written and performed live accompaniment to classic silent films for more than two decades.

The Celebrity Millennium will be sailing from Miami to Key West, Fla. and Cozumel, Mexico, and the trip will include movie-themed events such as screenings, panel discussions and trivia contests...

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RECENTLY VIEWED: MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO TOWN

One of the great memories I had as a child were of Sunday mornings when the local television station would rerun old comedy movie series. Each Sunday they would rotate a series so I remember seeing Abbott and Costello, Blondie, and of course Ma and Pa Kettle. Like so many many things in life, when I get a chance to catch a Ma and Pa Kettle movie, it takes me back to a simpler and less stressful time. I recently got the chance to watch Ma and Pa Kettle Go To Town (1950). Of course, I could not stop watching the film.

The second of Universal's "Ma and Pa Kettle" series, Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town stars, as ever, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride. This time, the Kettles win a letter-writing contest, which offers as first prize an all-expense-paid trip to New York City. Once in Manhattan, the huge Kettle brood raises all sorts of Holy Ned, culminating in an episode involving stolen bank money. Somehow this all ends with a riotous, slapstick-laden square dance. The film's romantic subplot is handled by Richard Long as oldest son Tom Kettle and Meg Randall as his high-society wife Kim. Also carried over from the first Kettle entry are Ray Collins and Barbara Brown as the Kettle's wealthy in-laws. A winner at the box-office, Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town helped pay for many of Universal's "prestige" releases of 1950.

Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride are the only actors I could ever picture in the Ma and Pa Kettle roles, and they make the film. If the movies were just them two talking back and forth, I would watch it. However, in this film there were some good character roles. I liked Charles McGraw (1914-1980) as the gangster that Pa has "good feelings" about so he watches their children. McGraw was a very dependable character actor, who sadly died relatively young when he fell in shower. The plot line of a stranger watching someone's children is kind of far feteched, but the story does take place in a backwards town in 1950. Times were different then. Also in a surprisingly straight role, Jim Backus (1913-1989) played one of the other gangsters.

Ma And Pa Kettle Go To Town is no great cinema masterpiece, but it made a lot of money for Universal in 1950. It is also a movie you can just sit back and relax. The movie is simpler so it helps you to hark back to maybe a simpler time in your life. I know whenever I watch a Ma and Pa Kettle movie my mind is not only watching the movie, but I see myself as a young boy laying on the floor and enjoying an uneventful Sunday morning. Those were the days...

MY RATING: 7 OUT OF 10

KIM NOVAK AND MENTAL ILLNESS

For a time in the 1950's and 1960’s she was a major Hollywood movie star and famous around the world. She appeared on screen with the some of the biggest names in movies, starring in such films as Hitchcock’s classic “Vertigo,” “Pal Joey” and “Picnic.”

One day at the zenith of her career she turned her back on Hollywood and left show business. Now former actress and movie star Kim Novak reveals she was mentally ill at that time.

Novak told an audience at the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Classic Film Festival Friday that during those days she was suffering from a bipolar disorder and sometimes now regrets her decision to leave Hollywood in the late 1960s at the height of her fame, according to a new report in the Los Angeles Times.

The report says Novak was teary-eyed at times and emotional when she told Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne before an audience of about 300 people at the Avalon in Hollywood that she was actually suffering from mental illness when she made those movies saying, "I'm bipolar ... but there's medicine you can take for this now," Novak said. "I was not diagnosed until much later. I go through more of the depression than the mania part."

Novak is now 79 years old. She was in Los Angeles to have her handprints and footprints enshrined in the forecourt at the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Saturday.

The former actress, who lives in Oregon with her husband, an equine veterinarian, and their five horses said her father suffered from depression and she had a difficult childhood in Chicago which oddly prepared her, in a way, for Hollywood.

"I was used to having conflict in the home, so having conflict on a set ... felt normal," she said.

Perhaps due to her illness Novak was branded as “difficult” by studio executives who tried to micro manage her image up to and including stopping a friendship with a major black star at the time, Sammy Davis Junior.

Finding the emotional pressures of Hollywood too much to handle she moved to Big Sur to paint, according to the report.

She has acted a bit since then but her career never regained its early success...

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PHOTOS OF THE DAY: SPENCER TRACY AND HIS LEADING LADIES

Without question Spencer Tracy is considered one of the greatest actors of all time. This past month was his birthday. He would have been 112 years young. Tracy has left behind some great cinema magic with some of the most beautiful co-stars of all time...

with BETTE DAVIS (1908-1989)

with JEANETTE MACDONALD (1903-1965)

with JEAN HARLOW (1911-1937)

with MYRNA LOY (1905-1993)

with KATHERINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)

with ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1932-2011)

DICK CLARK AND PAYOLA

Dick Clark, "the oldest living teenager" has died at the age of 82. I never fully understood his appeal, but I remember my grandfather truly disliked him. My grandfather blamed Clark for ruining music and being involved in payola in the 1950s. It is where Clark first made his fortune...

He's been called America's Oldest Living Teenager, but behind his famously boyish demeanor, Clark was a razor-sharp businessman—sharp enough to be accused of questionable practices during the early years of rock and roll, yet smart enough to set those practices aside when public scrutiny demanded it. On April 2, 1960, Dick Clark concluded his second day of testimony in the so-called Payola hearings—testimony that both saved and altered the course of his career. If Alan Freed, the disk jockey who gave rock and roll its name, was Payola's biggest casualty, then Dick Clark was its most famous survivor.

It may be difficult for those who first encountered Dick Clark in his TV Bloops and Blunders days to understand the power he once wielded from his platform on American Bandstand, but it was great enough in the late 1950s to make a star out of nearly anyone he chose, from Connie Francis to Fabian. It was also great enough to attract the attention of the House Committee on Legislative Oversight—the congressional subcommittee investigating the Payola scandal. At the Payola hearings, Clark would testify to holding an ownership stake in a total of 33 different record labels, distributors and manufacturers that all profited handsomely from the rise of Clark-anointed stars like Danny and the Juniors and Frankie Avalon. One of the companies in which Clark had a financial interest was Jamie Records, the label that made Duane Eddy famous and returned a tidy profit of $31,700 to Clark on an initial $125 investment. "Believe me this is not as unusual as it may seem," Clark told the Payola committee. "I think the crime I have committed, if any, is that I made a great deal of money in a short time on little investment. But that is the record business."

More important than any denials issued by Dick Clark during his Payola testimony was the fact that over the preceding months, he had—at the direction of his network, ABC—divested himself of all of his ownership interest in music-related businesses and in the roughly 150 pop songs from which he earned royalties as a credited "songwriter." This action, in combination, perhaps, with his good looks and famously ingratiating demeanor—the New York Times called the then-30-year-old Clark "smooth, slim and youthful on the witness stand"—led Congress to give Clark a pass while encouraging prosecution of the uncooperative Alan Freed. "Obviously you're a fine young man," is how committee the committee chairman, Representative Oren Harris (D-Arkansas), concluded the hearings held on this day in 1960. "I don't think you're the inventor of the system, I think you're the product."

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WHERE ARE THEY NOW: LYDIA REED

If you are a fan of Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra or great musicals, then you have probably seen MGM's "High Society" (1956). No other movie then or now could boast a cast of Crosby, Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong.

However, a child star in the cast nearly stole the movie away from those titans of music. Lydia Reed played Grace Kelly's younger sister in the movie who had a devoted crush on Der Bingle. Mutual Bing collector and friend David Shelton gave me the idea for this article and made me wonder what happened to Lydia Reed? No much is known about Reed after the 1960s, and I searched for a couple months to find some more about Reed, but very little is available.

Reed was born on August 23, 1944, at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York. She was best known for her role as Tallahassee "Hassie" McCoy from 1957 to 1963 in 145 episodes of the ABC situation comedy The Real McCoys, starring Walter Brennan in the title role of Grandpa Amos McCoy. Irving Pincus was the creator, and Hy Averback the first principal director.

The pilot episode of the series "Sweet Fifteen," which aired on April 9, 1957, centers on Grandpa's determination to keep Hassie's looming fifteenth birthday party a secret. After its five-year run on ABC, The Real McCoys switched to CBS for its final season in 1962-1963 without the services of Kathleen Nolan as Kate McCoy. Reed appeared less frequently in the final year, as did Michael Winkelman (1946–1999) as Little Luke McCoy, who played Reed's younger brother on the series.

Reed's first performances were in 1952 episodes of two NBC anthology series, Hallmark Hall of Fame (the second episode of the series entitled "Dr. Serocold") and Robert Montgomery Presents. In 1955, she played Mary Foy in the Bob Hope film, The Seven Little Foys. That same year, she played another "Mary" in the episode "Ride with the Executioner" of the anthology Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre. In 1956, she appeared in the role of Caroline Lord in High Society, with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly, and in the episode "Hit and Run" of the NBC series Big Town. Her last role other than that of Hassie McCoy was as Betsy Beecher in a horror film The Vampire.

Reed left acting after her role on The Real McCoys ended and did not appear in a 2000 cable television reunion special (The Nashville Network) with Nolan, Tony Martinez, who portrayed farmhand Pepino Garcia, and Richard Crenna, who played the role of Luke McCoy, Hassie's older brother, for the entire duration of the series. Reed has left entertainment completely to raise a family in the San Fernando Valley area of California...