BORN ON THIS DAY: ORRIN TUCKER

Orrin Tucker is one of the last surviving big band members. He may not be as famous as Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, but he is the last one left! Today he turns 100 years old! Tucker was born in St. Louis, Missouri on February 17, 1911. Though he had studied to be a doctor, Orrin Tucker ended up as a singer and a bandleader. He was leading a successful, though not well-known, orchestra in 1939 when his female vocalist, Wee Bonnie Baker, recorded an old WWI tune called ''Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!''

With the help of her sexy sighs and coos, Tucker found himself with a hit record and one of the hottest bands in the country. Tucker, though, didn't let fame go to his head. He realized his limitations and knew his orchestra's strength, and that strength was in playing dance music for the middle-aged crowd. That he continued to do, very successfully, long after many of his contemporaries had called it quits.

After graduating from high school in 1929, Tucker learned that Northwestern University's School of Speech offered one one-year scholarship per year to an Illinois resident interested in studying theater arts. He figured once enrolled, he could then take pre-med courses. After completing his freshman year, he transferred to North Central College in Naperville, which was closer to Wheaton. To help meet college expenses, Tucker formed a band to play at the Spanish Tearoom in Naperville. The band was so good that it drew patrons from as far away as Chicago. Noting his success, a local agent booked Tucker and his band for a three-week engagement at a New Orleans hotel during Mardi Gras. The band faired well at the "Crescent City" engagement which inspired Tucker to then focus all his energies full time to band leading. "That did it for me," Tucker said. "Staying in music what was what I wanted to do. From then on, there was no turning back."

In 1933, Tucker organized his first full-time band, opting to stay in the Chicago area. Two years later, the band began a long stay at the Troutdale Hotel in Evergreen, CO, with a successful engagement at the "Windy City's" Edgewater Beach Hotel the following year. The clientele at the Edgewater Beach Hotel loved Tucker's music so much that the band returned for a six-month stay at the posh resort in October 1937. By March 1938, the Tucker band found itself playing in the "Big Apple," at the famed Roosevelt Hotel.

Orrin Tucker himself was a pleasant enough singer and his band was gaining popularity. However, when he hired Bonnie Baker as his girl singer in February 1938, the band's popularity increased. "We were in Kansas City at the time and I received a telephone call from Louis Armstrong telling me about this singer named Evelyn Nelson who was singing at the Claridge Hotel in St. Louis," Tucker said. "He told me that she sings with a cute voice and that if I wrote cute songs for her, I could make her a star." Tucker went to check out the five-foot charmer from Orange, TX. He was pleased with what he heard. "It wasn't easy, but I talked her into joining the band," Tucker said. "I also talked her into changing her name. I'm very much in favor for a person's name to begin with consonants. I thought 'Bonnie Baker' was a strong name with confidence. It turned out to be true."

During the early years Tucker was sole vocalist until Louis Armstrong pointed him to Bonnie Baker. Baker's cute voice was just the thing to help push the group over the top. Columbia Records signed them in 1939. ''Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!'' was one of songs in their first recording session. It remained their most popular number, reaching the number two spot on the pop charts. Other vocalists over the years included Helen Lee and Scottee Marsh.

During WWII Tucker served in the Navy as a Lieutenant, Junior Grade. He remained active in the music business until health problems forced him to slow down during the 1990s. In 1997, a fire destroyed all of his record and music collection. Reportedly, Tucker has since moved into an assisted living facility, but he was still giving interviews as recent as 2005.

MICKEY ROONEY'S COURT BATTLE

Actor Mickey Rooney has been the alleged victim of elder abuse at the hands of his own stepkids, according to restraining orders filed Monday.

The 90-year-old actor, who, born into vaudeville has had one of the longest careers of any actor, was granted court protection from stepson Chris Aber and his stepdaughter Christina Aber, after he filed a case against them charging verbal, emotional and financial abuse, and for denying him such basic necessities as food and medicine.

The court documents say that both Chris and Christina Aber have been keeping Rooney as "effectively a prisoner in his own home" through the use of threats, intimidation and harassment.

Christ Aber has also been accused of taking control over Rooney's finances, blocking access to his mail and forcing the actor into performances he does not wish to do.

With the assistance of attorneys Bruce Roth and Vivian Thoreen of Holland & Knight LLP, Rooney sought and was granted temporary protection for not only himself but for his wife, Jan Rooney, and his stepson, Mark Rooney, who lives with the actor.

Rooney fears for their safety and is worried Chris and Christina Aber might retaliate in a physically abusive way, or try to kidnap the actor now that the case has been filed, court documents say.

"All I want to do is live a peaceful life, to regain my life and be happy," Rooney wrote in a statement to his fans. "I pray to God each day to protect us, help us endure and guide those other senior citizens who are also suffering."

In addition to two temporary restraining orders granted against Christina and Chris Aber, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Reva Goetz appointed attorney Michael Augustine as temporary conservator of his estate. A hearing on who should take over as permanent conservator of the estate will take place in March, Bruce says.

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RIP: LEN LESSER

LOS ANGELES – Len Lesser, the veteran character actor best known for his scene-stealing role as Uncle Leo on "Seinfeld," died Wednesday. He was 88.

Lesser's family said in a statement that he died in Burbank, Calif., from cancer-related pneumonia.

"Heaven got a great comedian and actor today," his daughter, Michele, said in the statement. "The outpouring of sympathy we've already received has been amazing and is so greatly appreciated. Thank you to all the people who helped make my father's last journey special and surrounded with love."

Lesser's lengthy list of television credits included parts on "Get Smart," "That Girl," "The Munsters," "The Monkees," "The Rockford Files," "thirtysomething," "ER," and "Everybody Loves Raymond," which featured Lesser in a recurring role as the arm-shaking Garvin. His film credits included "Outlaw Josey Wales," "Kelly's Heroes," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "Death Hunt." He most recently appeared on the TV drama "Castle."

He is survived by his daughter, Michele; son, David; daughter-in-law, Julie; and grandchildren, Jonathan, Kayla, and Mayah.

RIP: KENNETH MARS

GRENADA HILLS, Calif. – Kenneth Mars, a Mel Brooks collaborator who played a Hitler-worshipping playwright in "The Producers" and an earnest police inspector with a malfunctioning artificial arm in "Young Frankenstein," has died. He was 75.

In a statement Monday, Mars family said the actor died Saturday of pancreatic cancer at his home in Grenada Hills.

In Brooks' 1968 romp "The Producers," Mars co-starred as Franz Liebkind, a Nazi enthusiast whose play, "Springtime for Hitler," is the basis for a scheme by two conniving showmen (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) to bilk investors by putting on a surefire Broadway flop. Brooks cast Mars again in 1974's "Young Frankenstein" as the constable poking around the castle grounds on the trail of mad scientist Wilder's monster.

In both films, the Chicago-born Mars demonstrated his talent for vocal farce, lending over-the-top German accents to the characters.

Mars' nearly 50-year career included a long list of voice credits, including "The Little Mermaid," "The Jetsons" and the "The Land Before Time" movies and TV series.

Among Mars' other film credits were Woody Allen's "Radio Days" and "Shadows and Fog," and Peter Bogdanovich's "What's Up, Doc." His extensive television work featured regular roles on "Malcolm in the Middle," "Fernwood Tonight" and the 1960s series "He & She."

On stage, Mars appeared in such plays as "The Affair" and "Anything Goes."

Mars is survived by two daughters, Susannah Mars Johnson and Rebecca Mars Tipton, and six grandchildren.

A private funeral service was planned.

RIP: GEORGE SHEARING

George Shearing, the prolific pianist and composer who penned 'Lullaby of Birdland,' died Monday at 91 in New York City. The case of death was heart failure, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Shearing was born in London in 1919 and was blind from birth. He began playing the piano almost as soon as he could stand, and when he entered a school for the blind as a teen, he studied everything from Mozart to Glenn Miller. He began playing professionally at 16 at a local bar and just four years later his career took off when he met the pianist and music writer Leonard Feather.

By the early '40s, Shearing was one of the most popular performers in the country, at one point winning seven consecutive awards from the influential Melody Maker newspaper. After World War II, Shearing came to New York City to try and replicate his fortune abroad.

Shearing formed a quintet in 1949 with whom he would largely perform with well into the '70s, and with it developed what became known as "the Shearing Sound": an (at that time) unorthodox instrumentation that included guitar and vibraphone combined with Shearing's method of using block chords to build a complex, orchestral-leaning sound. This sound endeared Shearing -- already known as a player who favored contemplative Debussy-and Satie-inspired melodies over more common lightning bebop lines -- to a broad new audience searching for accessibility among the complex and experimental classical and jazz sounds of the time.

Shearing quickly found fame with a string of hits, including 'September in the Rain' and 'Lullaby of Birdland.' In the '60s, at the height of his popularity, Shearing and his quintet often released multiple records in a single year. After launching an independent label that ultimately failed, he re-emerged in the late '70s through his new association with the Concord label and a series of collaborations with Mel Torme. That partnership led to other collaborations with Nat "King" Cole, Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson and John Pizzarelli, among others, during the ensuing decades.

Shearing composed some 300 tunes over his career, and performed frequently as a classical recitalist with full orchestras. He continued recording and performing well into his 80s. His accolades included two Grammys, performances for Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, a lifetime achievement award from the British Academy of Composer and Songwriters and being knighted by the Order of the British Empire.

Shearing is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Wendy Ann.

CLASSIC MOVIES FOR VALENTINE'S DAY

Here is an interesting article I found online, just in time for Valentine's Day. I agree on their picks...especially the underrated THE CLOCK.

Everyone knows that favorites such as "Casablanca," "An Affair to Remember," "Ghost," and "Titanic" are perfect DVD fare for Valentine's Day. But there are other terrific, lesser-known romantic films that will have you swooning — and perhaps weeping — as you celebrate the day with a loved one (or even by yourself). Here are four films guaranteed to fire up your heart.

THE CLOCK
Judy Garland is luminous in her first non-singing role in this lovely 1945 romantic drama. Garland plays Alice Maybery who meets an earnest soldier, Joe Allen (an equally poignant Robert Walker), on a two-day leave in Manhattan when she trips over his duffel bag at Pennsylvania Station and breaks the heel of her shoe. When Joe insists that a shoe-repair shop open its doors after hours to fix her heel, the two end up on an adventure that includes dinner, helping a milkman make his deliveries during the night, and, of course, falling in love.

Joe asks Alice to marry him the next day, but they go through all sorts of red tape before they say their "I Do's" in an impersonal civil ceremony. Alice doesn't feel married until they repeat their vows together at a local church. When Joe's leave ends, they bid goodbye at Pennsylvania Station so he can return to the battlefield.

Fred Zinnemann was the original director of "The Clock" but was removed after a month because the filmmaker and Garland weren't hitting it off and the early footage wasn't promising. Garland requested that Vincente Minnelli, her romantic partner who had directed her in the 1944 classic "Meet Me in St. Louis," replace Zinnemann. One of the improvements Minnelli made was to make New York City a major character, spending some $66,000 to replicate Penn Station on the MGM lot. The movie turned out swell — and Garland and Minnelli married soon after the production ended.

THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE
Some cynics may hold their noses at this tender 1945 fantasy, but true romantics will devour it like a big bowl of popcorn with extra butter. Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, who had scored a major hit with 1943's "Claudia," reunited for this endearing story of a young pilot (Young) who was disfigured during the war. He has rented a cottage from an older woman (Mildred Natwick) in order to hide from his mother and fiancée. McGuire plays Laura, the shy, homely maid who cleans up the cottage.

The two misfits fall in love and as they do, their appearances alter whenever they are together in the cottage. His war wounds have disappeared and she is strikingly beautiful to him. Laura believes the cottage is "enchanted" because it had been used previously by honeymoon couples.

HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT
The Oscar-winning director Frank Borzage, who had an exceptional touch with romantic movies including 1927's "Seventh Heaven" and 1932's "A Farewell to Arms" is at the peak of his powers with this unusual 1937 production. It deftly mixes romance, comedy, drama, murder, suicide and a Titanic-esque ocean disaster.

Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur are the stars of "History," and their chemistry is palpable. Arthur plays Irene Vail, who is desperately trying to divorce her sadistic ship-magnate husband, Bruce (Colin Clive of "Frankenstein" fame). Bruce instructs his chauffeur to enter Irene's hotel room and force her into an compromising position. Bruce plans to catch them together and force her to drop the divorce proceedings. Things change when Bruce discovers a jewel thief (Boyer) in the room, who takes Irene's jewels and kidnaps her. The passionate scenes between Boyer and Arthur after the ship they're traveling on hits an iceberg are the highlights of this rarely seen classic.

LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING
Jennifer Jones and William Holden make beautiful music together in this lush 1955 romance that was nominated for eight Academy Awards including best picture and lead actress, winning three for Charles LeMaire's costumes, song for Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster's title tune and Alfred Newman's vivid score. Set in Hong Kong in1949-50, the melodrama finds Jones as Han Suyin, a Eurasian doctor who falls in love with handsome Mark Elliott (Holden), a married but separated American war correspondent. Their love affair encounters racial prejudice from Hong Kong society and her family.

In fact, when the book by Belgian-Chinese physician Han Suyin, which was a fictional account of her love affair with a British journalist, was published in 1952, the Production Code of America stated that "Love" wasn't suitable for a movie because it dealt with adultery and miscegenation. Finally, they let 20th Century Fox make the film as long as it was never suggested that their relationship was sexual. So how did their rapturous love scenes get past the PCA censors?


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RIP: BETTY GARRETT

LOS ANGELES – Betty Garrett, the vivacious Broadway star who played Frank Sinatra's sweetheart in two MGM musicals before her career was hampered by the Hollywood blacklist, has died in Los Angeles, her son said Sunday. She was 91.

Garrett died Saturday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, most likely from an aortic aneurysm, said her son, Garrett Parks. Garrett had been in good health and taught her usual musical comedy class at Theater West, the non-profit organization she helped found, on Wednesday night, but Friday checked into the hospital with heart trouble, and died with her family at her side the following morning.

Garrett was best known as the flirtatious girl in love with the shy Sinatra in "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "On the Town," both in 1949, and later in life she became well-known to TV audiences with recurring roles in the 1970s sitcoms "All in the Family" and "Laverne and Shirley."

Her movie career was brief, largely because of the Red Hunt led by congressmen who forced her husband, actor Larry Parks, to testify about his earlier membership in the Communist Party.

Parks had won stardom and an Academy Award nomination as best actor for his dynamic portrayal of singer Al Jolson in the 1946 "The Jolson Story." But in 1951, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he admitted that he had joined the Communist Party in 1941 and left in 1944 or 1945.

Pressed to name his fellow members of the party, Parks pleaded not to be forced "to crawl through the mud as an informer." He agreed to testify fully in executive session.

He made one more film, "Love Is Better Than Ever" with Elizabeth Taylor, then his film career was over.

"It was a dark period, a foolish, foolish period," Garrett said in 1998. "It destroyed a lot of lives and ruined my husband's career."

Garrett had also had a brief dalliance with the party but wasn't called to testify, perhaps, she said, "because I was nine months pregnant with my second son, and they didn't think I would be a good witness."

Garrett's stage career began to click when she sang the show-stopping "South America, Take It Away" in "Call Me Mister" on Broadway in 1946. That brought Hollywood offers, and at 27 she signed a contract with MGM, then the king of musical movies. Her son said aside from her family she considered the work she would do for MGM her life's highest point.

"She was very proud of the MGM musicals," Parks said.

Particularly memorable was "On the Town," the Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Leonard Bernstein musical about three sailors on leave in New York City. She played the comically aggressive cab driver who pursues Sinatra (singing the racy "Come Up to My Place") while his pals, Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin, team up with Vera-Ellen and Ann Miller.

Besides the two pictures with Sinatra, she appeared in "Words and Music" and "Neptune's Daughter," in which she and Red Skelton sang the Oscar-winning song "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

MGM dropped her after Parks' testimony, and she received no film offers until she co-starred with Jack Lemmon and Janet Leigh in the 1955 musical version of "My Sister Eileen," playing Eileen's (Leigh's) sister, Ruth.

Unable to find much work in Hollywood, she and Parks hit the road with a musical act. It proved a hit in Las Vegas, London and other cities. When the bookings thinned out, Parks became a home builder. He died in 1975.

Betty maintained a busy career in theater and television. She played recurring roles in "All in the Family," as the chatty friend of Edith Bunker who duels with Archie, and "Laverne and Shirley," as a landlady who married Laverne's father.

She garnered an Emmy nomination in 2003 for guest actress in a comedy series for an appearance on the Ted Danson sitcom "Becker."

Over the years, she also had sporadic roles on Broadway, including parts in "Spoon River Anthology" in 1963 and "Meet Me in St. Louis" in 1989. She was back on Broadway in 2001 in a revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies."

In 1998, she published her autobiography, "Betty Garrett and Other Songs," which was the title of her one-woman show.

She also taught and appeared in plays at Workshop West, which she helped found in the late 1950s.

Asked in 1998 if she retained bitterness that she and Parks were blacklisted, she replied: "It's not my nature to be bitter. What I feel is deep sorrow. We both, I think, were just on the verge of becoming really big stars, particularly Larry. And it just went crashing down."

Betty Garrett was born in 1919 in St. Joseph, Mo. Her father, a traveling salesman, moved his wife and daughter to Seattle. He died of alcoholism when Betty was 2. She attended Roman Catholic schools though she wasn't a Catholic.

She had demonstrated a talent for dancing and acting, and her ambitious mother took her to New York where she had won a scholarship at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse. Betty was 17.

Garrett's stage debut came with "Danton's Death" at Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre in 1938. Later shows included "All in Fun," "Something for the Boys," "Laffin' Room Only" and "Bells Are Ringing." She also danced with the Martha Graham troupe, worked summers on the Borscht Belt, and even wore a fake jewel in her navel as a $25-a-week chorus girl in the Latin Quarter in Boston.

In addition to Garrett Parks, a composer, his wife Karen Culliver Parks and her granddaughter Madison Claire Parks, she was survived by her son Andrew Parks, an actor, and his wife Katy Melody.

The family did not plan to have a funeral, but was planning a memorial service for later in the month.