Here, Kitty Kitty

One reviewer of The Curse of the Cat People
described Simone Simon's costume as "a relief
map for a book called What Every Young Husband
Should Know." (He was right, of course. It makes
the whole movie worth seeing.)

Great Earrings #1

(This could be called "Great Hair," too.)

Birthday Girl Teresa Wright

Today, Oct 27th, is Teresa Wright's birthday.
She was born in Harlem in 1918 and grew up
in the New York and New Jersey areas. She
studied acting, appeared in the legitimate
theater, and shunned cheesecake photography
and "the star treatment." She is the only
person ever nominated for an Oscar for her
first three films: The Little Foxes (1941),
Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Pride of the
Yankees (1942). She's the star of Alfred
Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and
sparkles in The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). She once said, "I only ever wanted
to be an actress, not a star." Her husband,
Niven Busch, wrote the script for Duel in
the Sun for her just to change her "good girl"
image, but Teresa got pregnant and couldn't
do the role, which eventually fell to David
O. Selznick's girlfriend, Jennifer Jones.
So she remains in our memories as one of
Hollywood's great Good Girls.
Happy birthday, Teresa!

Girls With Pearls #1

I'm not sure who said it, but...
"Women, like dogs, should not wear hats."

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but girls
look better in pearls.

Smoking with Barry Sullivan

So one evening in the 1970s, Barry Sullivan's
daughter, Jenny Sullivan, was appearing in or
directing a Peter Weiss play called Marat/Sade
or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum
of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade, which is supposed to be the longest play
name in history, at a tiny theater in Santa
Barbara, California. She was married to Jim
Messina of the band Loggins and Messina at
the time. Your parents might have listened
to their songs Your Mama Don't Dance or Angry
Eyes back in the day. Uh-huh. I digress. So
anyway, Messina was probably there, too, but
I didn't see him. It was a really strange play,
performed in-the-round, with characters popping
up out of the audience and weird things like
that. I probably enjoyed it. I don't really
remember. What I do remember is going out on
the sidewalk at the intermission for a smoke.
And Barry Sullivan was there. And we stood and
smoked cigarettes together. I said something
about the play being interesting, and Barry
looked grim and said "Yes" and seemed pretty
tense. He was probably tense that his daughter's
play would come off okay. Since then, I've been
a father, so I understand such fatherly tensions.
So the evening sun was setting, and Barry and I
finished our cigarettes. And the intermission
ended. And the play began again. And Barry died
of a "lung ailment" in 1994 at the age of 82,
so he didn't do too badly for a heavy smoker.
He wasn't a starlet, but he was in, like, 183
movies and television shows with stars like
Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert, bitchy
people like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and
starlets like Frances Dee, Senta Berger, Angie
Dickinson, Martha Hyer, Joey Heatherton, Jane
Wyman, Phyllis Kirk, Arlene Dahl, Jane Powell,
Claire Trevor, and a bunch of others. Barry
didn't live long enough to see blogs. Ah well.

Forget Brando. Watch Janet Margolin.

Back in 1965, Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner
made a strange war movie called Morituri.
Brynner and Brando compete to see who
can chew up the most scenery. It takes
place aboard a ship, and it's about Nazis.
It was also called The Saboteur, Code Name
Morituri, and the reviewers at the Internet
Movie Database think it's just a swell film.
Yeah. Whatever. Trevor Howard is in it,
and he's always fun to watch. Much more
importantly, Janet Margolin was in it,
and she is absolutely PEACHY. (We'll talk
more about her some other time.)

You ever seen eyes like that? Jeez Louise!

Car Girl #1

No seat belts, a non-collapsing steering wheel, hard
dashboard, no safety features, and it probably gets
12 miles to the gallon. Basically a death trap.
But Pier looks great, doesn't she?

Parrish the Thought

Leslie Parrish studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of
Music before she moved to New York and got a modeling job. The
soft-spoken girl was 19 when she signed with 20th Century Fox and
21 when she moved to MGM. Considered one of the quintessential
Sixties blondes, she always seemed to be vaguely embarrassed by
her roles in such television fare as The Wild Wild West, Batman,
and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Her roles in Sex and the Single Girl,
Three on a Couch, and The Giant Spider Invasion didn't challenge
her skills as an actress. She married author Richard Bach in 1977
and became the subject of two of his books before their divorce in
1999. My favorite Leslie Parrish movie is The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) in which she plays Laurence Harvey's girlfriend and becomes
a "queen of diamonds."

German Starlet Maria Solveg

German actress Maria Solveg (AKA Maria Matray) was born in Niederschönhausen in 1907. Her aunt was German artist Kathe Kollwitz. Two of her older sisters were actresses; one was a dancer. Maria studied ballet as a child. At age 14, she left school and joined Ernst Matray's theatrical tour. She began appearing in German films at 16. In 1927, while touring America, she married Ernst. She developed into a fine choreographer and worked with Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt. In the early 1930s, the Nazis took control of German theaters and motion pictures, and Maria and Ernst fled to France and then England. They eventually settled in the United States, where they choreographed movies, often without screen credit, most notably White Cargo (1942), Swing Fever (1943), and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947). The Matrays moved back to Germany in 1953, and Maria began writing novels and scripts for television with Answald Kruger. Ernst and Maria were divorced in 1962. She continued writing scripts with Kruger until his death in 1977. She worked with different authors well into the 1980s. She died in Munich in 1993.

Silly White Eyes

Style Tip #2

Stefanie Powers has a wonderfully symmetrical
face. These two pictures show her with sort
of a 1960s bullet hairdo and a 70s or 80s
freer, more relaxed and far more attractive
look. Some folks might call the hair-up look
an "age appropriate" hair style. I call it
Nuclear Missile hair. If hair is put up, I
believe it should look like it could fall
down at any moment. That's just my opinion
from years and years of studying the problem.
The careless, untamed lioness look is better.



Stefanie somehow got cuter with age. And she's
got a great smile and great eyes. Her birthday
is November 2nd, but I just couldn't wait.