Here are 10 things you should know about Glenda Farrell, born 121 years ago today. She exhibited a facility throughout her career for playing sassy, likable dames.
Tag: George Jessel
10 Things You Should Know About Nancy Carroll
Here are 10 things you should know about Nancy Carroll, born 118 years ago today. She became a big star during a brief film career that was bracketed on both ends by stage success.
Times Square Tintypes: Owen Davis
In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles perhaps the most prolific of American playwrights, Owen Davis.
CURSE YOU—JACK DALTON!
SOME people write one play and then are never heard from again. But this fellow’s inexhaustible. OWEN DAVIS.
He is a tiptop cook.There never will be an exact count of how many plays he wrote. He wrote at least three hundred. Between the ages of twenty-seven and forty he remembers nothing but writing plays. Somehow, between scripts, he managed to get married. Also to raise a family. Didn’t notice either until he was forty. Then took up golf.
He knows much more about a lot of theatrical managers than they care to have him know.
Had a unique contract with A. H. Woods. It stated that for a period of five years he could write plays for Woods only. Also stated that during that period Woods couldn’t produce any plays but his. During those years he wrote fifty-eight melodramas, or a play a month for five years.
He’d go to Europe tomorrow if they’d build a railroad across the Atlantic Ocean.
He doesn’t drink. He’d like to.
Is a Harvard graduate. Played football on the Crimson eleven. Also held that college’s record for the hundred-yard dash until four years ago.
In those days of the thrilling melodramas Woods would select a title and order terrifying lithographs of maidens in peril. Then Davis would write a play to fit both the title and the picture.
Perhaps you recall some of them. They include such titles as Through the Breakers, Deadwood Dick’s Last Shot, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, Confessions of a Wife, The Gambler from the West, Tony the Bootblack, The Great Express Robbery, Queen of the Opium Ring, Convict 999, Broadway After Dark, The Policeman and the Millionaire’s Wife, The Creole Slave’s Revenge, A Chorus Girl’s Luck in New York, and Edna, the Pretty Typewriter.
He doesn’t remember writing Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl, although he is credited with it.
His play Icebound won the 1923 Pulitzer prize. The Detour he considers his greatest play.
Always smokes cigars. At rehearsals he makes a little cup from a newspaper to flick his ashes in. He is well house broken.
Clarence Darrow is his idea of the greatest American.
Prefers the theatre to the movies, ices to ice cream, a four-in-hand to a bow tie, a cold bath to a hot one, poker to bridge and a wicked woman to a simple one.
The first theatrical flashlight ever made was of his play The Road to Paradise. It is now pasted on the wall of his workroom. Among those in it are Mrs. Davis, then the “You Ain’t Done Right by Our Nell” girl. And George Jessel‘s stepmother, then very interested in keeping the villain from foreclosing on the old homestead.
Wrote his first play, The Rival Detectives, at the age of eight. All the characters in it were murdered.
His ambition is to have a perfect script after the first writing. Thought he had it with The Nervous Wreck. Then had to rewrite it seven times.
Once was turning out so many plays that he had to write under seven different names. Two of the nom de plumes, Robert Wayne and John Oliver, became well known. In fact, a Pittsburgh dramatic critic wrote a piece about John Oliver stating that “at last a man had come along to drive Owen Davis out of business.”
Eugene O’Neill is his favorite playwright.
When writing he moods himself to the play. While working on Chinatown Charlie he lived on chop suey.
In Your Hat, pt. 12
In Chapter 12 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she reveals what various celebrities wrote in her collection of autograph books, and she follows that with tales of what the stars of the day liked to eat when they patronized Sardi’s.
| If you took a rabbit out of those suckers’ hats They would squawk just the same: They all have two strikes on them When they are born. TEXAS GUINAN
|
THAT’S an autograph left in my book by Tex. I’m not quite clear as to its meaning, and I don’t think she is either. But vaguely, it’s Broadway’s philosophy. If somebody pats you on the back, he’s only locating a spot for the knife thrust. If you give a sucker a break, he’s liable to shove his hand in and rip it apart.
Of course, all this is only sentimental hooey, and the boys and girls on Broadway are just as maudlin about one another as boys in an English boarding school. They all want to appear like awful, terrible “bad mans” with no hearts at all. The visage is stern, but the head and heart are made of mush, and it oozes through your fingers when you squeeze it.
I’ve got three books full of autographs. Perhaps a glance at some of them might throw an interesting light on the writers. I particularly like that of Frances Williams, whose cheeriness and glibness is not limited to her appeareances on the stage.
“May every hat check bring you a fat check—and may no meanie neglect my Renee—who never wrecks hats each time she checks hats—Frances Williams.”
Most of the celebrities pore over the book, seeking inspiration in the lines already written. Very few show any originality at all. Al Jolson, in one of his brighter moments, scribbled:
“Oh, look, I am in your book—thanks for letting me.”
And Louis Sobol, the Journal‘s columnist, wrote:
“To Renee, who expects something clever from me but won’t get it.”
Russell Patterson, the artist, who very rarely wears a hat, said as much, regretfully, with:
“To Renee, from her worst customer.”
Tony Canzoneri, the prize fighter, dragged his trade in by the teeth when he inscribed:
“To a real and sweet girl, with loads of knockouts.
Tony Canzoneri,
Lightweight Champion of the World.”
The professional gate crasher, Tammany Young, waxed philosophical and wrote:
“To Renee—
“Who takes what you give graciously. All life is a game of give and take. For what she takes she gives in a return a smile, a cheerful greeting and your belongings. May you go a long ways and prosper. Keep smiling Renee, it’s what we all go for.”
I think George Jessel‘s autograph amusing:
“To Renee—
Duchess of Sardi,
from
Baron George Jessel,
Colonel of the Bronx Grenadiers
And Vis-count of Brownsville.”
Sidney Skolsky, the paragrapher, gave me away with:
“You’ll always be Miss Shapiro to me—one of my best yarns. Sidney Skolsky
P.S. She sleeps in the raw!”
If you can remember Herbert Rawlinson, you’ll remember his signature, too:
“My hat’s off to you. (Get it?) Je parle français aussi. (I hope that’s right).”
And Jesse Crawford noted:
“My autograph I here inscribe,
A member of the organ tribe
Jesse Crawford,
Poet (?) of the Organ.”
The little movie star, Marian Marsh, gave me a a straight tip with:
“Keep your face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.”
And Reri who starred in F.W. Murnau‘s Tabu and was brought to American by Ziegfeld, wrote in the only language she knew:
“A mon amie Renee en souvenir des Ziegfeld Follies 1931.”
I offer the inscription of Sam Shipman, the playwright, because it is more or less typical of Broadway sentiment and ways of thinking:
“A hat girl who has more in her head than all the brains those hats cover. A little princess on a door mat—An oriental pearl in a suffocating shell—a ruby in a musty purse, but watch her.”
And Everett Marshall, the lusty-voiced baritone, dropped this:
“To Renee. In memory of my first daughter of four kilos.”
While Faith Baldwin, the author of Self Made Woman, wrote simply:
“Because I like red-heads.”
I’ve got lots of drawings, too, by famous artists, all of them too risqué for reproduction, and in some cases too combustible for safekeeping. Some of our best known illustrators have garnished the pages of my little books with drawings that would make those paintings on the bathroom walls of old Pompeii quiver with shame.
But not all the good things happen in autograph books or at penthouse parties. I have a lot of laughs right in the restaurant.
In Your Hat, pt. 11
In Chapter 11 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she shares tales of various characters she knew, including Jack Oakie, The Four Marx Brothers, Wilson Mizner, George Jessel, Harry Richman, Clara Bow, and Lilyan Tashman.
SARDI’S may be the place where the celebrities gather, but I get more slugs and buttons in my tip box than I can use in a year’s mending. Figure it out for yourself—the most highly paid performers and theatrical executives slip me slugs I wouldn’t even try on my molars to find out if they’re real or not.
And speaking of tipping and the things I find in my box at the end of the day, one of the most common phenomena are the little slips of paper upon which telephone numbers have been scribbled. I’ve got, or rather, I could have collected a private phone list than the Manhattan police department, not to mention the Broolynites and Bronxites who have been date-hungry.
Maybe I’m wrong, and that’s only one way of kidding me. Another way is the method Jack Oakie used, to make me feel like the butt of a bad joke.
Jack came into the restaurant one day and asked me in his really-not-obnoxious breezy manner how things were going. Just for the fun of it, I told him that I was going to get married the next day. I had no more idea of getting married, then, than the girl in the swing on the big Pepsodent sign. As some wit once said, marriage is an institution, and hwo wants to live in an institution?
But that clown of clowns, that zanie Oakie, set to work and circulated among Sardi’s guests, telling all his friends that I was an expectant mother. When people started to leave the place, I noticed that no one was looking me directly in the eyes, but instead were looking down at me and at the same time talking in a sort of reverentially hushed tone—the kind I gather that people assume when they accost young mothers-to-be.
I didn’t suspect then what was happening, but the next morning when packages began to arrive by every means of transportation except the pony express, I began to smell a good-sized rodent in Mr. Oakie’s direction. For people were sending me baby clothes—dresses, bibs, caps, towels, and all the other accessories necessary to have babies. The pay-off came when Oakie’s package arrived. It contained a dozen towels, stolen from a Pullman, three napkins from three different hotels and a couple of table cloths from a club. All of the Oakie presents were cut into reminiscent triangular shapes—with the names of the places from which they were filched neatly embroidered in the corner of each pseudo-diaper.
But the height of pure nuttiness was achieved by the Four Marx Brothers when they were making Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts at the Astoria studio for Paramount.