DAVID DUNCAN'S HOLLYWOOD: IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1946

By 1946, World War II was over, and America was getting back to normal. A part of being normal was going back to the movies. The year 1946 was one of the biggest years of movie audience attendance on record. Continuing his streak as the number one star, Bing Crosby continues his reign as the king of the box office in 1946.

Here are the box office champs of 1946:

1 Bing Crosby
2 Ingrid Bergman
3 Van Johnson
4 Gary Cooper
5 Bob Hope
6 Humphrey Bogart
7 Greer Garson
8 Margaret O?Brien
9 Betty Grable
10 Roy Rogers

HOLLYWOOD BEAUTY: INGER STEVENS

Inger Stevens led a troubled life. Broken relationships and depression clouded her career in Hollywood. She died tragically in 1970 at the age of 35. In her short life she made countless memorable appearances on television and movies, and we have some great photographs of this fallen Hollywood beauty...

MUSIC BREAK: JIMMIE LUNCEFORD - BLUE PRELUDE

HOLLYWOOD MYSTERIES: THE DEATH OF JIMMIE LUNCFORD

In the 1940s, Seaside was witness to a curious and disturbing incident. Despite an abundance of musical clubs and dance halls — Club Monterey, The Lodge and the Bungalow — race relations were tense. Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Wayne Morse, a champion of civil and labor rights, joined progressive politicians in calling for equal rights for all races with the passage of a national Civil Rights Act.

Many Oregonians — including the editor of the Seaside Signal in a 1948 editorial — feared Morse’s stance would create a backlash and lead to “even more terrible persecution in America.”
In the ‘40s, Sandy Winnett worked as a waitress at the ice cream shop adjacent to the Bungalow. Today she is a volunteer at the Seaside Museum and Historical Society. Winnett remembers an “open-minded attitude” among most Seaside residents, a time when people of all backgrounds “came to dance” in Seaside.

 
“Dancing in those days was a much bigger social event than it is today,” added longtime Seaside resident and author Gloria Stiger Linkey. “We danced every Friday night at the high school. After the basketball and football games, we had a dance. We danced all the time.”
Linkey remembered a time when teens would drive their cars — or their parents’ cars — to Seaside’s Cove, turn their radios on and dance through the night by the beach.

It was into this environment that bandleader and alto saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford arrived in July 1947 to play the Bungalow, the city’s preeminent dance hall. It wasn’t just white bands like Glenn Miller and Tex Beneke that headlined Seaside’s top club, but groups like Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.

“To the local teenagers, the Bungalow was heaven,” Lunceford’s biographer Eddy Determeyer wrote.

Lunceford was considered to be on an equal with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, Linkey said. “He had a master’s degree in music. He was a very educated man.”

But Lunceford’s arrival was said to be anything but civil. Lunceford and his band were an all-black ensemble, although Lunceford had in the past led integrated bands.

Rumors have circulated throughout the years that a racist restaurant owner poisoned Lunceford. According to accounts presented in his biography of Lunceford, 2009’s Music is Our Business, Lunceford’s musicians learned the Bungalow dance was to be played for a segregated crowd — whites only.

 
Management asked Lunceford’s black valet to stand out front and discourage black couples who came to purchase tickets from buying: “They don’t want to sell to people like us.” Lunceford band bass player Truck Parham remembered that band members walked into a restaurant on Downing, not far from the Bungalow.

 
On scanning the group, the waitress is said to have told the musicians: “Can’t serve you. We don’t have no food.”

 
Determeyer writes that Lunceford, normally even-tempered, even restrained, pounded the table with his fists.

 
“What the hell do you mean, you can’t serve us?!” Lunceford demanded. “Call the manager!” The waitress panicked and hurried back to the kitchen.

 
After a minute or two, Determeyer wrote, she came back and said the men could order after all. The guys ordered hamburgers.

 
“No, I’m sorry,” the waitress said. “We don’t have nothing but beef sandwiches, hot beef sandwiches.”
The grumbling musicians ordered the sandwiches, with the exception of bassist Truck Parham. “The rest of the band ate it,” Parham said. “Lunceford had it.” Parham left without eating. According to Determeyer’s account, after the meal, the band members returned to the Bungalow, except for Lunceford, who complained he was tired and wasn’t feeling well. He headed across the street to Callahan’s Radio and Record Shop at 411 Broadway, next to the Broadway Café, to autograph albums for fans.

 
There Lunceford collapsed and died. He was 46 years old.

 According to the news story in the July 1947 Signal, Lunceford was about to autograph Callahan’s record store wall, reserved for musical celebrities who came to Seaside, when owners Edward and Walter Hill noticed the bandleader looking weak and ill. A moment later Lunceford collapsed and was seized by severe convulsions, according to the newspaper’s report. The owners called the police and an ambulance, but Lunceford died before reaching Seaside hospital. The show, despite Lunceford’s death, went on that night, Determeyer wrote, but one musician after the other left the bandstand and headed to the restroom. “I’m the only one that didn’t get sick,” Parham said. “Botulism, you know.”

 
Lunceford, a teetotaler, was “a perfectly healthy man who had boxed, run track and played softball,” according to trumpeter Joe Wilder. “It was one of the saddest days of my life.”

 
At the request of his wife, Crystal, Lunceford’s body was flown to New York City for the funeral service. The leader was buried in Memphis, his hometown. A memorial service with remaining band members took place that week at Rockaway Beach, the last concert before the Lunceford Orchestra permanently disbanded. But before long, Determeyer wrote, “the myth surrounding Lunceford’s death was in full swing.” The Clatsop County Coroner declared Lunceford died of “coronary occlusion, due to thrombosis of anterior coronary artery due to arteriosclerosis” — in other words a heart attack caused by a blockage. Determeyer’s telling casts doubt on the coroner’s report. “Simple, plain racism is really the key word here,” Determeyer said via email last week.

 
Controversy lingers But Seaside residents and even a jazz musicologist, disagree. Seaside’s Linkey thinks it’s not plausible Lunceford and his bandmates were sickened or worse, or even turned away.
“Oh, he was served,” Linkey said. “There was no animosity. No racism at all. At least growing up in Seaside, I didn’t feel it.” As a tourist town, the goal was to sell as many tickets as possible, she said. “Because if you can serve tourists, you can serve an African-American.”

Linkey added the biographer “takes giant leaps” in suggesting a racial incident was a factor in Lunceford’s death. Linkey said while there “weren’t many blacks in the area,” there were no segregated dances.

 
“We did have African-Americans in the summer from Portland. There was an influx during World War II. They worked in the shipyards.”

 
Seaside’s Mary Cornell, who attended dances since she was in eighth grade in the war years, said people of all ages were welcome at the Bungalow. She said she never saw anyone turned away.
African-Americans also came to Gearhart and Seaside as domestics for wealthy families, Cornell said. Sandy Winnett said Determeyer’s account was “extremely unlikely.”

 
Even a jazz musicologist, Lewis Porter, pianist, Rutgers University professor and author of “Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present,” doubts the poisoning rumor.

 
“It was probably not a good idea for Determeyer to throw in at the very last sentence of the chapter that Jimmie may have been poisoned for being black,” Porter said via email.

 
Botulism is not a poison and cannot be “manufactured” or “planted,” Porter said. “It’s simply a severe form of food poisoning that can occur in, for example, rotten meal. But he (Lunceford) died from a heart attack — nothing to do with the food! He’s not the first guy to die suddenly at a relatively young age from unsuspected heart trouble, especially in those days.”

 
Poisoning is not the only rumor to survive surrounding the cause of Lunceford’s death, which range from “Lunceford ate a double portion of chili con carne while on tour and died almost immediately” to a theory he was shot by a gangster while signing records at Callahan’s.

 
Lunceford band member Truck Parham died in 2002. Trumpeter Joe Wilder died in 2014. With them go their eyewitness accounts.

 
Are the still lingering suspicions about the Lunceford death akin to the mistrust so many black Americans still feel about the police and other authorities?

 
Maybe the best way to reflect upon this incident is by stressing the goal of diversity that Lunceford, progressive politicians like Sen. Wayne Morse and Seaside’s young music lovers of the 1940s — in love with the bands, the swing and the dance — were so desperately attempting to foster.

SOURCE

RIP: MARSHA HUNT

TORONTO — Marsha Hunt, one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood's so-called Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s who worked with performers ranging from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a career disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist, has died. She was 104.

Hunt, who appeared in more than 100 movies and TV shows, died Wednesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, California, said Roger Memos, the writer-director of the 2015 documentary "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity."

A Chicago native, she arrived in Hollywood in 1935 and over the next 15 years appeared in dozens of films, from the Preston Sturges comedy "Easy Living" to the adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" that starred Olivier and Greer Garson.

She was well under 40 when MGM named her "Hollywood's Youngest Character Actress." And by the early 1950s, she was enough of a star to appear on the cover of Life magazine and seem set to thrive in the new medium of television when suddenly "the work dried up," she recalled in 1996.
Hunt protested the House Un-American Activities Committee

The reason, she learned from her agent, was that the communist-hunting Red Channels publication had revealed that she attended a peace conference in Stockholm and other supposedly suspicious gatherings. Alongside Hollywood stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt also went to Washington in 1947 to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting a witch hunt for communists in the film industry.

"I'd made 54 movies in my first 16 years in Hollywood," Hunt said in 1996. "In the last 45 years, I've made eight. That shows what a blacklist can do to a career."

Hunt concentrated on the theater, where the blacklist was not observed, until she began occasionally getting film work again in the late 1950s. She appeared in the touring companies of "The Cocktail Party," "The Lady's Not for Burning" and "The Tunnel of Love," and on Broadway in "The Devil's Disciple," "Legend of Sarah″ and "The Paisley Convertible."

Marcia Virginia Hunt (she changed the spelling of her first name later) was born in Chicago and grew up in New York City, daughter of a lawyer-insurance executive and a voice teacher. Slender and stylish, with a warm smile and large, expressive eyes, Hunt studied drama and worked as a model before making her film debut.

Hunt's first movie was 1935′s "The Virginia Judge." She went on to play demure roles in a series of films for Paramount, including "The Accusing Finger" and "Come on Leathernecks," but, as she told The Associated Press in 2020, she was tired of "sweet young things" and begged for more substantial work.
She nearly landed a key role in 'Gone with the Wind'

Hollywood proved a painful education. In "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity," she remembered almost getting the part of Melanie Wilkes in "Gone with the Wind," even being assured by producer David O. Selznick. Within days, Olivia de Havilland was announced as the actor who would play Melanie for the 1939 epic.

"That's the day I grew up," Hunt said in the documentary. "That's the day I knew I could never have my heart broken again by this profession of acting."

She left Paramount for MGM around the time of "Gone with the Wind" and had lead or supporting roles in "These Glamour Girls," "Flight Command" and "The Human Comedy" among other movies.

She remained vigorous and elegant in old age. In 1993, she put out "The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and '40s and Our World Since Then," a lavishly illustrated book of the fashions during her Hollywood heyday.

More recently, she helped create a refuge for the homeless in Los Angeles' Sherman Oaks neighborhood, where she lived and was feted with the title honorary mayor.

Looking back on her activist years, Hunt remarked in 1996: "I never craved an identity as a figure of controversy. But having weathered it and found other interests in the meantime, I can look back with some philosophy."

MUSIC BREAK: JIMMIE LUNCEFORD - I USED TO LOVE YOU