In Your Hat, pt. 6

Here’s Chapter 6 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars, Renee Carroll, in which she reflects on her salad days and shares a true-life gangster chronicle, a tale in which she finds herself playing an unexpectedly key role.

WHEN people write of themselves as having been born on the lower East Side of New York, they hope you’ll overlook the fact and think of the place and the occasion as something to forget. But I first saw light on the lowest East Side with a couple of big Jewish mammas doing things to a couple of herrings in the kitchen and a bearded gentleman or two sucking tea through lumps of sugar they held between their teeth. Taking advantage of my birth by sponging on the family for a meal!
     Specifically it was a Friday, the day on which all my troubles subsequently descended, and the street was Madison, in honor of a president. The bawling infact raised a yell in the improvised crib and my father, than as now, an orthodox rabbi, descendant of a line of rabbis, muttered a prayer that his daughter would be a healthy and obedient child who would honor her parents and bring only happiness to Madison Street. Or maybe I’m wrong. I suppose a more sensible translation would be: “So if it can’t be a boy, it can’t be. And she should marry wealthy because where would a rabbi get anything resembling a dowry for his daughter?”
     From early girlhood I learned that life was a serious bowl of cherries. It’s all right for Eddie Cantor to reflect on his East Side upbringing with a great deal of sentimentality. Eddie has lost two million dollars since then—I haven’t saved two hundred. I’m the unique case of a lower New York birth with nothing to show for it but an aversion for dialect stories and a strawberry mark on my hip.
     I attended classes in Public School 62 and soon after I left they tore it down for a new subway. I didn’t exactly hate school, but when I heard that they were ready to tear down the building, I could honestly say that I threw the first stone—right smack through the window of the room where arithmetic gave me nightmares.
     Later when Jews found it fashionable to migrate to outlying districts such as Brownsville, Flatbush and the Bronx, my family found itself doing likewise because trade follows the flag, and the trustees of my father’s synagogue decided that it would be advisable to move to 115th Street.
     Once uptown the flyaway bug began to tell me stories and it occurred to me that there was nothing except the tradition of the home and keeping the family intact and all that sort of clannish business, to keep me from striking out on my own.
     My family wanted me to go to college and become a lawyer, but I figured that Portia had had a tough enough time and that men won’t listen to a women except when her legs are crossed, so I thumbs-downed that idea. Business college had a momentary appeal and I attended a business school and learned how to type. With this equipment I decided to flee the camp.
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Pitch perfect: Cameras

As the Pitch Perfect series continues, we today feature a collection of 1949 advertising slogans that were used to market cameras and photographic accessories.

All-purpose film (Kryptar Corp.), Rochester, N. Y.

Better pictures, with less effort (G. E. exposure meter).
Big enough for any Kodak print (Engel Art Corners).

Forever yours (Kodak snapshots).
For superb personal movies (Filmo), Bell & Howell.

Gets great pictures (Graflex).

If it isn’t an Eastman, it isn’t a Kodak (camera).
In pursuit of happiness, Revere adds to your pleasure (movie cameras).
It deserves to be preserved (Dura Pictures Corp.).

Kodak as you go (camera).

Make every child a picture (G. H. & E. Freydberg).
Make the world brighter, send a smile (Hutton Photo Stamp Co.)

Negative for positive results, The (Gevaert film).

One pictograph tells more than a thousand words (Pictograph Corp.).
One picture tells more than a thousand words (Pictograph).
Only Eastman makes the Kodak (camera).

Pays for itself in the money it saves (Multistamp Co.).
Photographs live forever (Photographers Assn. of America).
Photographs live forever in loving hearts (Photographers Assn.).
Photographs of distinction (Bachrach, Inc.).
Photographs tell the story (Photographers Assn.).
Photography that tells and tells (McManus Studios).
Pictures that satisfy or a new roll free (Agfa films).
Putting ideas into picture form (Retlaw Visualizations).

Say it with pictures (Commercial Photo Service Co.).
Say it with pictures (Stereopticon Lantern Slides), E. A. Richter.
Say it with pictures, often (Photographers Assn.).
Sign of pretension, The (Skan), Exposure meter.
Snapshots you’ll want tomorrow, you must take today, The (Kodak).
Snapshots remain long after you go (Photographers Assn.).
Snapshots, often, are all that remain after your dear ones go.

When you picture moves, it lives (Cine Kodak).
YOU press the button, IT does the rest (camera film).
You press the button, we do the rest (Eastman Kodak).
Your snapshots look better enlarged (Sterling Photo Co.).
Your story in pictures leaves nothing untold (American Photo Engravers Assn.).

Snapshot in prose: Alice Faye

In this series, we’ll explore some career snapshots of familiar Cladrite-era performers, profiles and interviews written long ago that capture the individual at a particular time in his or her career.

The initial entry in the series dates from 1935 and puts the spotlight on the lovely and talented Alice Faye. She’d made only a handful of pictures at this point in time, and was still rumored to be “that way,” as Walter Winchell used to say, about Rudy Vallée. She had yet to wed (or perhaps even meet) Tony Martin, to whom she was married from 1937-1940, or Phil Harris, with whom she would build a long and happy life. They were happily married from 1941 until his death in 1995, and they raised two children together.

But at this point in time, in a profile first published in the June 1935 issue of Popular Songs magazine, Faye’s just hit the big time, with a great career still mostly in front of her.

hat put the song in Alice Faye‘s heart? What made her change the personality that was hers as a dancer in a night club? Was it her meeting with Rudy Vallee?
     I saw Alice Faye recently when she came back from Hollywood on a visit. She had come to the NBC studios to see Rudy and the Connecticut Yankees.
     Imagine the delicious curves of her figure emphasized by a chic and tight gown, a little black hat perched over one eye, lithe legs encased in silver silk—and her hair—dozens of little corncolored ringlets curving around those come-hither eyes and pointing to that seductive mouth.
     The boys were frankly crazy about her for they crowded about, asking her questions and telling her how glad they were to have her back with them again.
     This was Alice Faye of 1935.
     Now let us take you back to the Alice of but three years ago.
     Do you remember the song?

“Don’t you Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt, Sweet Alice with hair so brown; She wept with delight when you gave her a smile, And trembled with fear at your frown.”

     That, my lads and lassies, is an excellent description of the Alice-that-was just a few years ago, an Alice that was coy and sweet, who had medium brown hair that coiled up the back of her neck, who never rouged unless unless she had to and who was afraid of her own shadow.
     What transformed the demure little lass with the cast-down eyes into the “hot” blondlined torch singer of the arched eyebrows and the come-hither gaze in her orbs?
     It was while the Scandals of 1932 were playing in New York city that Alice Faye met Rudy Vallee. Not really “met” him, mind you, but came face to face with him. For Rudy in 1932 was already sitting on his throne and Alice was just another chorus girl who had yearnings to be something better someday.
     Here is Rudy Vallee, a top-notcher on the stage, whispering musical nothings into the shell like ear of Ethel Merman, his co-star. Watching them, her eyes glued on the pair, is a little obscure dancer named Alice Faye whose soul burns and seethes with ambition to rise to stellar heights.
     And Rudy probably never knows of her existence, never knows that soon she will be the leading singer in his band, and some say of his heart as well.
     It is a long cry now from Alice the chorus girl. Her childhood days spent somewhere in New York city, where she was born, foresaw nothing of the girl who would some day become a dancer in a night club or a red-hot singer of the blues.
     Alice worked hard at the Chester Hale Ballet School which she entered right after her graduation from high school. She was the most conscientious pupil they had. She came for her lessons and left when they were over.
     From Chester Hale’s, she graduated into a job at the Palais Royal. Theer again it was all work, no play with her. Other girls may have hung around after closing hours, may have flirted and dated with some of the customers, but not Alice Faye. Her thoughts were on a dancing career.
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Happy 88th, Ms. Whiting!

Songbird Margaret Whiting is 88 years old today.

Whiting, the daughter of successful songwriter Richard A. Whiting—he wrote “Hooray for Hollywood,” “Breezin’ Along With the Breeze,” and “Too Marvelous for Words,” among many others—signed a deal as a young woman with family friend Johnny Mercer, who had just launched Capitol Records. Mercer’s gamble, if it can fairly characterized as such, paid off royally, as Whiting went on to have numerous hits in throughout the 1940s and ’50s.

We encountered Ms. Whiting a few times in the 1980s. She occasionally patronized a restaurant on Central Park South where we were tending bar and waiting tables in those days. As a customer, she was amiable enough, but she seemed a bit private, keeping largely to herself, so we have no stories to share of our encounters.

Ms. Whiting was long involved with Jack Stillman, better known as Jack Wrangler, renowned gay porn star. Though Stillman, twenty years Whiting’s junior, insisted he was gay, not bisexual, the pair obviously forged a lasting connection, as they were together from the late 1970s through his death in 2009. The two were married for the final 15 years of their time together.

We hope this birthday finds Ms. Whiting in happy spirits and good health. We’re celebrating the occasion by sharing with the Cladrite Clan her first hit, recorded as the vocalist for Freddie Slack and His Orchestra, That Old Black Magic.

Margaret Whiting with the Freddie Slack Orchestra—”That Old Black Magic”

Past Paper, pt. 5: At the Drive-in, ca. 1958

Drive-in movies theatres are connected in the minds of many with the 1950s and ’60s, and those decades might certainly be fairly considered the heyday of the “ozoner,” which is the term Variety has used for drive-ins for many years.

But as drive-in buffs and regular readers of Cladrite Radio well know, the first drive-in opened way back in 1933, and by the 1940s, outdoor theatres had cropped up all over the country.

You can even catch scenes in drive-ins in some movies of the 1940s (we know of no such scenes in the 1930s, though we’d love to be corrected if some exist). Perhaps most memorable is the scene in White Heat (1949), when Cody Jarrett, so memorably portrayed by James Cagney, pulls into Burbank, California’s San-Val Drive-in as he tries to elude capture by a pursuing police car with sirens at full volume.

(The San-Val, by the way, was the second drive-in ever built in California. It opened for business in 1938 and was shuttered in the mid-1970s.)

There are many today who believe the drive-in to be all but extinct, but that’s simply not the case. There are far fewer today than there once were, it’s true, but there are still between 400-450 ozoners in operation, and many of those are thriving.

There are dearly held clichés about the drive-in experience that have been around since the 1950s and may never die, chief among them being the idea that the drive-in is a place where teenagers congregate to get away from their parents and misbehave in various and sundry ways, that the average drive-in is more a passion pit than a movie theatre.

But today’s drive-ins are relying more on family fare than the exploitation pictures and troubled teen epics of yesteryear. And in doing so, they are actually returning to their roots, for the drive-in wasn’t always a place for restless youth to meet and mingle.

One of the strongest selling points for early drive-ins was that they eliminated the need for a baby-sitter. Parents could dress the kids in their PJs and enjoy a night at the movies, with Junior and Sis nodding off in the back seat long before the second feature started.

Drive-ins also sold the idea that you could “come as you are.” Folks still dressed up a bit to go to the movies in the 1940s and ’50s—at least, if they were attending a downtown movie palace, they did—but they could patronize their local ozoner in their shirt sleeves.

We love finding advertising flyers for drive-ins, like the one pictured below.

Hi-res view	Hi-res view
Hi-res view	Hi-res view

We’re not entirely certain which drive-in this flyer is from, as Laurel, Mississippi, appears to have played host to four different ozoners over the years—the Crossley, the Northside Twin, the Original, and the Rebel Drive-In—and we’re not entirely certain whether all were in operation in 1958, when this flyer was printed.

But the flyer does shine an interesting light on the unnamed theatre’s booking policies.

There are eight pictures listed on the flyer—four double features—and only four of those eight pictures—I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Lady Takes a Flyer, Jet Attack, and Suicide Battalion—came out in 1958. Revenge of the Creature and Rebel without a Cause were released three years earlier, in 1955; The Last Wagon came out in 1956; and Blood of Dracula was a 1957 release.

It’s as if you went to see, say, Toy Story 3 at your local drive-in, and it was paired as part of a double-bill with The Simpsons Movie or Superbad.

On the other hand, the four older movies are available today on DVD, while the same is true of none of the 1958 releases. What that says about the quality of movies released in the year we were born (and possibly about us, too), we’ll leave to you to decide.