Sunday, October 6, 2024

RIP: JAY POPA

 I recently lost a dear friend with the passing of Jay Popa. Anyone who is a big band fan is familiar with the website The Big Band Alliance, which Jay and his brother Chris run. Jay had a big heart, and I count him as a friend. Here is his beautiful obituary...

Everyone should have a devoted son, loving brother, and best pal like James Michael Popa, known to family and friends as “Jay.” After a brave two-year battle with esophageal cancer that metastasized to his liver and bones, Jay passed away August 17, 2024 at age 70.

He was born in and grew up in Alliance, and was a gentle, kind, generous, thoughtful, and humble person to all, with a beautiful soul.

All his life Jay liked to draw and, even while in ill health recently attended art classes at the North Canton Public Library. His favorite color was gold. While he appreciated stylish designs, furniture and decorations, he preferred shopping at Goodwill and other thrift stores. He enjoyed music ranging from the Motown sound of The Supremes and The Temptations to the big bands of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller, and spent time (especially after he retired) watching dozens of old and new TV shows such as “Dark Shadows,” “NCIS,” and “The Masked Singer.” Comedies like “The Three Stooges,” “The Munsters,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Laverne and Shirley” made him laugh. And he loved dogs.

A graduate of Alliance High School and Bowling Green State University, he had a long career as a Computer Programmer with Central Trust (later Bank One) in Canton, then, after moving to Columbus, worked for Riverside Methodist Hospital there.

He was preceded in death by his father, Aurel Howard Popa (1993); his mother, Mildred Carol Crist Popa (2020); and several aunts and uncles including Tillie Stahl (1999) and Sophie Teeters (2014).

Those left to cherish his memory are two brothers, Stephen of Aloha, Oregon, and Christopher (Jose Luis) of Chicago, Illinois; several cousins including Carolyn Frank of Alliance, Cheryl Citino of Salem, Margie (Danny) Engle of Salem, and Diane (David) Kieffer of Delaware, Ohio; and other extended family members.

Thank you to Dr. Amir Iqbal and the ladies of the Oncology and Palliative Care departments at Aultman Alliance Community Hospital, as well as the staff of Aultman Woodlawn in Canton and Christopher J. Graff of Cassaday-Turkle-Christian Funeral home in Alliance...



HOLLYWOOD URBAN LEGEND: LORETTA YOUNG & CLARK GABLE

URBAN LEGEND: DID LORETTA YOUNG HAVE A LOVE CHILD OUT OF WEDLOCK TO FELLOW ACTOR CLARK GABLE?

ANSWER: YES! 


Judy Lewis (1935-2011) was the out of wedlock offspring of screen legends Loretta Young and Clark Gable. At the time of her birth, Gable was married, Young was unmarried. Young covered up the fact of her pregnancy, later announcing she had adopted the girl. Judy graduated from Marymount High School in 1953. She moved to New York and began her acting career, landing a small part on Ponds Theater (1953). She appeared on Broadway in Jean Kerr's "Mary, Mary", and became a featured performer on a number of daytime series, including The Secret Storm (1954) and General Hospital (1963). Judy had a successful career behind the camera, as well. It took her eight years, when she was 31 and appearing on the soap opera “The Secret Storm,” to confront her mother. Young, after throwing up in the bathroom, told her that Gable indeed was her father. Loretta then made Judy keep the truth secret until 1994 when she wrote a book exposing the truth. Loretta Young refused to talk to her daughter for three years until 1997. Loretta died in 2000...



Tuesday, October 1, 2024

THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1954

Looking back at the year 1954 - some 70 years ago it was pretty much the same top stars from the year before. After 1954 though the movies were changing, and the next generation of youth would soon be taking over the box office...


1. JOHN WAYNE

2. DEAN MARTIN/JERRY LEWIS

3. GARY COOPER

4. JAMES STEWART
5. MARILYN MONROE
6. ALAN LADD
7. WILLIAM HOLDEN 
8. BING CROSBY
9. JANE WYMAN
10. MARLON BRANDO 

Thursday, September 26, 2024

CELEBRITY ADS: BERT LAHR

 The great Bert Lahr was performing right until the end. Here is a print ad that Bert did for Lays potato chips in early 1967. He would pass away later that year on December 4, 1967...






Saturday, September 21, 2024

RIP: KATHRYN CROSBY

Kathryn Crosby, a 1950s Hollywood starlet who gave up her film career to marry Bing Crosby, the Oscar-winning actor, radio star and mellifluous “White Christmas” crooner, and as his widow became chief protector of his legacy, died Sept. 20 at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.The death was announced in a statement by publicist B. Harlan Boll, who did not note a cause.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Kathryn Grant — as she was then known — dominated the Texas beauty contest circuit between Houston and Corpus Christi. A 5-foot-3, auburn-haired stunner, she was crowned “Golden Girl of the Texas Baseball League,” “Miss Buccaneer-Navy” (dressed in pirate motif) and “Queen of the Houston Rodeo and Fat Stock Exposition,” for which she was teased among rivals and friends alike as “Miss Fat Stock.”

She had met Crosby in 1953, a year after she was named first runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant and landed a Paramount studios contract. She was 20 at the time and was on the studio lot, breathlessly ferrying a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department, when she rushed past Crosby, then 50 and a recent widower. He was leaning against the doorjamb of his dressing room, casually whistling a tune.

"Howdy, Tex,” he asked with bemusement. “What’s your hurry?”

Crosby had been a box-office juggernaut on the lot for two decades, an audience favorite not only for his vaudeville-style “Road” movies with Bob Hope but also for his Oscar-winning turn as a singing priest in “Going My Way” (1944). In her spare time between walk-on roles, the starstruck young Kathryn filed dispatches for newspapers back home under the title “Texas Gal in Hollywood” and soon returned to Crosby to request an interview.



“You a reporter?” Crosby asked.

“I’m a columnist,” she said.

“The dickens you are,” he replied. “I didn’t know they came so pretty.”

Crosby agreed to the interview, then invited her to tea and later to dinner. She described an instant and mutual infatuation between herself and Crosby, who exuded a languorous sex appeal with his piercing blue eyes and the virile romantic baritone voice that had sold hundreds of millions of records, among them “Please” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

Their courtship lasted nearly four complicated years. Crosby disappeared from her life for months at a time and jilted her twice, only to emerge with reinvigorated ardor. As he pursued other on-set romances, including with actresses Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens, Kathryn was determined to focus on her own pursuit of stardom.


After being dropped by Paramount, she was picked up by Columbia studios and promoted as a versatile leading lady. She had a featured role as a card dealer in the anti-corruption drama “The Phenix City Story” (1955) and co-starred opposite Audie Murphy in the western “The Guns of Fort Petticoat,” Jack Lemmon in the military comedy “Operation Mad Ball” and Tony Curtis in the drama “Mister Cory,” all in 1957.

She was a princess in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), a trapeze artist in “The Big Circus” (1959) and, in perhaps her best performance, a surprise witness in “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), holding her own in a cross-examination showdown with a slick attorney played by George C. Scott.

By the time Bing Crosby eloped with her to Las Vegas in 1957, Kathryn, a Methodist, had converted to Catholicism at his insistence but extracted a promise that she could continue her career after their marriage. But he soon reneged, preferring she stay at home as he wound down into semi-retirement and managed his many business interests and investments, ranging from baseball teams to thoroughbred horses to real estate.

She ultimately went along. Mrs. Crosby later said she wished to give her husband a life vastly different from his anguished and thoroughly dysfunctional first marriage, to actress Dixie Lee, whose alcoholism left him so despairing that he often stayed away from home, leaving her and his children to fend for themselves.


By the early 1960s, Bing and Kathryn had left Southern California and settled in a 24-room Norman-style mansion in Hillsborough, an upscale suburb of San Francisco. She had three children with Bing — including actress Mary Frances Crosby, whose character shot J.R. on the TV series “Dallas” — and spent five years completing a degree in registered nursing. She also was a public-school teacher, host of a morning TV talk show in San Francisco, and the author of a rosy 1967 memoir (“Bing and Other Things”).

She modeled clothes for designer Jean Louis, did occasional summer stock with Bing’s approval, accompanied her husband and children on bird-hunting and fishing expeditions and helped him manage his constellation of properties across the West and in Mexico. She vivaciously sang duets with Bing on TV specials, including his annual Christmas show, and appeared with their children in Minute Maid frozen orange juice commercials, a product Bing endorsed.

As a more contented spouse and father, Bing spent a great deal more time with his second family than he had with his first, Mrs. Crosby said. Nevertheless, she said, he could be a controlling and mercurial perfectionist at home, even as he tried to live up to the laid-back Mr. Lucky persona he had long cultivated — the charming and carefree all-American fellow who just happened to have a voice of peerless emotional resonance.

“He doesn’t exactly lose his temper in the traditional way,” Mrs. Crosby told an interviewer. “He just gets very quiet. That’s when I start wondering what I’ve done. You see, Bing will never say what is bothering him.”


With her nursing credentials, she looked closely after Bing’s well-being amid health setbacks, including after he plummeted 20 feet from a sound stage in March 1977 while rehearsing a TV show, seriously injuring his back. “She really took care of him,” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, an authoritative Bing biographer. Because she was emotionally stable and the family disciplinarian, he added, “She also allowed him to be the kind of father he had not been in the first marriage.”

In October 1977, he was on a golfing trip in Spain with friends when he died suddenly, at age 74 after a heart attack, just after completing a round of play.

Mrs. Crosby gradually restarted her acting career, mostly with touring theater companies and also in a cabaret act that paid tribute to Bing.

To tell her own story, Mrs. Crosby wrote “My Life With Bing” (1983) and “My Last Years with Bing” (2002). Of all the roles she would play — on screen and stage and in private life — she said there was one that made all the others possible. “I want you to understand,” she once told People magazine, “that my position in this world rests on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.


BRIGADOON: A 1954 REVIEW

Here is the original review of the movie musical Brigadoon, which was released 70 years ago. This review appeared in the New York Times on September 17, 1954...



By Bosley Crowther


AS we recall, the drama critics had a bit of a difficult time placing their pen-points precisely on the secret of the charm of "Brigadoon" when that whimsical play with music opened on Broadway some seven years ago. Was it the dancing, the music, the acting, the story, the decor—or, indeed, a graceful blending of all these elements—that made it a bright and spinning joy? As we recall, the secret was never entirely resolved.And now we're afraid the film critics—at least, this one—will find it equally hard to say why the film made from that triumph is so curiously flat and out-of-joint, rambling all over creation and seldom generating warmth or charm.It cannot be blamed on the story, for the story told in the film, which M-G-M delivered to the Music Hall yesterday, is exactly the same wistful fancy that was spun out upon the stage as written by Alan Jay Lerner, who also prepared the script. 


It is the story of two American hunters who go astray in the Scottish hills and there come upon a spectral village that is lost to the world and to time. Naturally, one of the fellows falls in love with a bonnie ghost, which leads to disturbing complications. It's a fairy-tale story, but it's okay.And it certainly cannot be for want of elaborate and handsome decor that this huge, polychrome motion picture lacks the joy of the show upon the stage. For Arthur Freed has produced it with what appears not a thought of the expense of Scottish costumes, thatched cottages, heather blossoms, scenic backdrops and furze-covered hills. A whole highland village and half a county are spread across the CinemaScope screen. To be sure, it does look artificial, but it is scenery. That, too, is okay.

The music? Well, let's acknowledge that a few of the better songs that made the stage show sweet and lovely are strangely omitted from the film. "Come to Me, Bend to Me" is missing. So is "My Mother's Wedding Day." And, for some unaccountable reason, they have dropped "There But For You Go I."However, "Waitin' for My Dearie" and "I'll Go Home With Bonnie Jean" are still given choral circulation, with a big boost from stereophonic sound, "The Heather on the Hill" still has its fragrance. And there's "Almost Like Being in Love." These, plus some other choral numbers, keep the musical franchise in line.But the dancing and the performance—well, we're afraid that it is in here that the life and the smoothness of the original have been perceptibly lost—which is odd, because the personable Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse have the lead dancing roles. Even so, their several individual numbers are done too slickly, too mechanistically. What should be wistful and lyric smack strongly of trickery and style. And the several ensemble dances—with the exception of the wild and fierce "The Chase," wherein the Scots pursue a fugitive from their village—seem as calculated as Rockette parades.It might be noted that Mr. Kelly has taken credit for the choreography. On the stage, it was by Agnes De Mille.And those performances! Mr. Kelly's is as thin and metallic as a nail; Miss Charisse's is solemn and posey. A dismal young Scots lassie she! Van Johnson as the friend of Mr. Kelly pouts in a most unfunny way, and Barry Jones, Hugh Laing and Jimmy Thompson make peculiarly stagey Scottish ghosts. Vincente Minnelli's direction lacks his usual vitality and flow."Brigadoon" on the screen, we must say, is pretty weak synthetic Scotch.On the stage at the Music Hall are Gill Johnson and Mike Madill, comedians; Marlene Dell and Don Farnsworth, ballet soloists; Anthony Makas, pianist, and the Glee Club, Corps de Ballet and Rockettes...


Tuesday, September 17, 2024

FORGOTTEN ONES: CARL GRAYSON

Anyone remember Carl Grayson? Born in Canton, Ohio to Swiss and German Immigrants, his name at birth was Carl Frederick Graub. At the age of 5, he suffered a serious injury when he fell on a board that caused a protruding nail to penetrate into his forehead. During childhood, violin lessons helped him achieve a full recovery, and he became more proficient at playing as he grew older. By his late teenage years, Graub began playing recitals and concerts professionally throughout Ohio and Indiana. He went abroad to study music at Oxford University.

While in Europe, he met bandleader Johnny Hamp who signed him as a violinist and vocalist for Hamp’s Kentucky Serenaders Orchestra during the band’s 1930 England tour. Not long after, Graub began singing and playing with the Henry Busse Orchestra. Busse was the bandleader at the Chez Paree Night Club in Chicago owned by notorious gangster boss Al Capone. At Chez Paree, Graub met a singer named Georgia Madelon Baker and they married in Chicago in June, 1933.

Around this time, Graub began billing himself professionally as Carl Grayson, while his new wife billed herself as Madelon Grayson. One night in June 1936, Grayson was spotted by Columbia Studio Chief Harry Cohn singing “Is It True What They Say About Dixie”. Cohn offered Grayson a job on the spot, reported the next day by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as “the quickest contract in film history”. Grayson moved to Hollywood the same year. At Columbia, Cohn visioned Grayson as a replacement for Roy Rogers who wanted out of his Columbia contract to work for Republic Pictures. Columbia billed him as Donald Grayson for several pictures, beginning with Dodge City Trail (1936) and Outlaws of the Prairie (1937) with Donald Grayson singing with the Sons of the Pioneers. Next came The Old Wyoming Trail (1937), Cattle Raiders (1938), and Call of the Rockies (1938). Bob Nolan replaced Grayson as the Sons lead singer, and about as quick as he had been signed, his three-year contact with Columbia was not renewed.

In the meantime, Madelon Grayson appeared in Girls of the Road (1940) and soon thereafter, filed for divorce against her husband, with the Los Angeles Times reporting the couple’s contentious allegations as front page news on March 16, 1940.

Free to return to musical opportunities, Grayson answered the calling from Spike Jones who was actively pursuing unique and talented musicians willing to play and perform his brand of zany musical comedy. The band signed a long-term engagement as the house band for the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, billing itself the Donald Grayson and His Jonathan Club Dance Band. When Jones recruited clarinetist Del Porter, he brought in members of his band, the Feather Merchants, and the growing new orchestra emerged as Spike Jones and the City Slickers, the name a derivative from an early 1940’s Cindy Walker song called “Gonna Stomp Them City Slickers Down”.


Jones quickly incorporated Grayson’s vocal talents into songs and routines that included his unique and cartoonish vocal ability of his that became known as “glugging”. The earliest City Slicker recording of this style of vocalization was used in the song Siam (recorded July/August 1942). More famously, Grayson reemployed “gluggling” in “Cocktails For Two” (1945), and the routine was immortalized through a Soundies film version that can be enjoyed on YouTube. His last “gluggling” effort was recorded in “Hawaiian War Chant” released in October 1946.

It was no secret that early member of the City Slickers were heavy drinkers, and when Jones gave up drinking himself, he quickly became intolerant of alcohol abuse among the musicians he employed in his band. As popularity of the City Slickers soared after the release of “Der Fuhrer’s Face”, Grayson was among several members who made a mass exodus in the transition where Jones soon found himself in a better position to pick talent for his band from a broader pool of expert musicians, skillful comedians and multi-talented performers, rather than rely on the comparatively frat house party culture that pervaded among the band’s earlier ranks. Grayson’s alcoholism had become problematic, and he was replaced by clarinet player and equally-competent “gluggist” Mickey Katz in 1946. He played with Eddy Brandt and the Hollywood Hicks, but faded into obscurity, most likely due to pervasive drinking that too often becomes its own fulltime and all-consuming job.

He died in obscurity in April 1958 at age 49 without fanfare or an obituary. The cause of death was said to be liver cirrhosis and cancer. Only a handful of people who remembered him were said to have attended his funeral or memorial service, but there is no published record known. Disposition of his remains may have been assigned through indigent means: a sad ending for this once-talented and promising star whose light faded far too early on this earth...