Here are 10 things you should know about Nita Naldi, born 130 years ago today. She was one of the most memorable cinematic “vamps” of the silent era, though her screen career was brief.
Tag: Rudolph Valentino
Happy 133rd Birthday, Texas Guinan!
Actress and Queen of the Nightclubs Texas Guinan was born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan 133 years ago today in Waco, Texas. Here are 10 TG Did-You-Knows:
- Guinan was one of seven children. Her parents were Irish-Canadian immigrants. She attended parochial school at a Waco convent.
- When Guinan was 16, her parents moved the family to Denver, Colorado. There she began to appear in amateur stage productions before marrying newspaper cartoonist John Moynahan at age 20. The pair moved to Chicago, where she studied music. She eventually divorced Moynahan and began to perform in vaudeville as a singer.
- Guinan’s singing was reportedly no great shakes, but she had lots of pep and she soon found that she improved her prospects as a performer by regaling the audience with (perhaps exaggerated) tales of her “Old West” upbringing.
- In 1906, Guinan moved to New York City, where she worked as a chorus girl before finding additional work in vaudeville and on the New York stage.
- In 1917, Guinan made her movie debut and soon was a regular in western pictures. She is said to have been the first movie cowgirl (her nickname was The Queen of the West). Guinan would go on to appear in more than 50 features and shorts before she died in 1933.
- With the passage of the 18th Amendment, Guinan became active in the speakeasy industry, serving as hostess and emcee for a long string of illicit (but very popular) nightspots. Her outsized, sassy personality and her skill at evading justice, despite her many arrests for operating a speakeasy, made her a legendary figure in Prohibition-era NYC.
- Guinan’s speakeasies featured an abundance of scantily clad fan dancers and showgirls, but her penchant for pulling the legs of the rich and famous served her just as well. “Hello, suckers!” became her standard exclamation for greeting customers. Her well-to-do patrons she referred to as her “butter-and-egg men” and she coined the familiar phrase “Give the little ladies a big hand” while serving as emcee.
- Texas Guinan’s nightclubs were often backed by gangster Larry Fay and such legendary bad guys as Arnold Rothstein, Owney Madden and Dutch Schultz frequented her establishments—alongside relatively “good guys” such as George Gershwin, Walter Chrysler, Pola Negri, Mae West, Al Jolson, Gloria Swanson, John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Irving Berlin, John Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino.
- Ruby Keeler and George Raft both got their starts in show business as dancers as Guinan’s clubs, and Walter Winchell acknowledged that the inside access Guinan gave him to Broadway’s cornucopia of colorful characters helped launch his career as a gossip columnist.
- Guinan died of amoebic dysentery in 1933, one month before Prohibition was repealed. She was just 49. Bandleader Paul Whiteman and writer Heywood Broun were among her pallbearers.
Happy birthday, Texas Guinan, wherever you may be!
Happy 98th Birthday, Diana ‘Baby Peggy’ Serra Cary!
Sadly, there are very few stars of the silent era who are still with us today, but Diana Serra Cary, born Peggy-Jean Montgomery 98 years ago today in San Diego, was, as Baby Peggy, a bona fide star in her day. Here are 10 DSC/BP Did-You-Knows:
- Peggy’s father, Jack Montgomery, worked as a cowboy for some years before entering the movie business, working as a stuntman and extra. He eventually did some stand-in work for western star Tom Mix.
- Young Peggy-Jean was discovered at the age of 19 months when she accompanied her mother to visit her father, who was working at Century Studios in Hollywood. Director Fred Fishbach (later Fred Hibbard), impressed by her demeanor and ability to take direction (from her parents, that is), cast her in a short subject opposite Century’s popular canine star, Brownie the Wonder Dog. Baby Peggy’s picture debut was in Playmates (1921). When it proved a success, she was signed to a long-term contract.
- From 1921 to 1924, Peggy appeared in nearly 150 comedy shorts for Century. These films were often parodies of other popular movies of the day, so Peggy was sometimes asked to satirize popular stars (she did take-offs on both Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri in Peg o’ the Movies [1923]).
- In 1923, Peggy began to appear in full-length dramatic features for Universal. These films were “A” pictures, dubbed “Universal Jewels,” the studio’s designation for its top-shelf offerings.
- In 1922, Peggy received more than 1.2 million fan letters. She was so popular that between pictures, she was sent on nationwide promotional tours, making public appearances along the way to promote her movies.
- By 1923, Universal was paying Peggy $1.5 million a year (more than $20 million today). Her face also appeared on a wide range of commercial products, from dolls in her likeness to sheet music, jewelry and milk. It’s said that as a girl, Judy Garland owned a Baby Peggy doll.
- You can probably guess the rest of the story: Her parents blew through all that money Peggy was earning, putting nothing aside for her. Her movie career came to a halt in 1925 (she was all of seven years old) when her father had a falling out with a producer over her salary and cancelled her contract. She was successful in vaudeville for a few years thereafter, but with a stage name like Baby Peggy, her career was bound to trail off. It was a relief to her when her career slowed down, but her parents relied on her for their income and kept the pressure on her, so she returned to pictures, playing bit parts and doing extra work.
- Finally, in 1938, Peggy appeared in her last film, Having Wonderful Time, and married Gordon Ayres, after which she changed her name to Diana Ayres (and then to Diana Serra Cary when she converted to Catholicism and remarried—Serra is her confirmation name, and her second husband was named Robert “Bob” Cary).
- In her later years, Diana has authored several books, among them The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History, Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era, Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star and her autobiography, What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy: The Autobiography of Hollywood’s Pioneer Child Star.
- These days, Diana lives in Gustine, California. There was a push recently for her to be allowed to reside at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Woodland Hills retirement facility, but she is in good health, physically and mentally and wanted to remain in California’s Central Valley, near her son and his family. What she needed was financial assistance, not a residence. If you’d like to help her out, you can buy one or more of her acclaimed books (she’s a very good writer), you can send her a Paypal donation using the email address BabyPeggy1920 at att.net (her son oversees that account), or you can send her a card with a check to 738 Fifth Avenue, Gustine, CA 95322.
Happy birthday, Diana Serra Cary, and many happy returns of the day!
Silence is golden
We enjoyed this video tribute to the silent era, and thought we’d share it with you.
The person behind it, Alejandra Espasande Bouza, is an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA. and here’s what she has to say about the project:
This video is a tribute to the forgotten pioneer Hollywood cinematographers who captured the moving images of the silent film era. In turn, these images serve as a reminder of the intrinsic beauty and charm of silent cinema, and the importance of its preservation. To that end, and in the tradition of this historic film period, no narration is employed. Apart from film stars of the time, the video showcases scenes that represent main themes of this film period: slapstick, adventure, horror and romance.
Sit back and enjoy the beauty of these moving images edited to the rhythm of Antonio Vivaldi.
Featured actors include: Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Harry Gribbon, Harold Lloyd, Mary Philbin, Lon Chaney and Roscoe Arbuckle.
If you enjoyed this, cast your vote for Ms. Bouza’s work in the MishMash Getty Images Music/Video/Remix competition.
A Reynolds wrap
Many years ago, we attended a “Hollywood: Legend and Reality,” an exhibition of movie memorabilia from the Golden Age of Hollywood at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The exhibition included such offerings as an eight-inch gorilla figure used in the filming of the original King Kong, the golden calf from Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments, Rudolph Valentino‘s matador costume from Blood and Sand (1922), Tom Mix‘s 10-gallon hat, and best of all, for our money, Sam’s piano from Casablanca. We wanted so badly to reach out and tinkle those tiny keys (the piano’s a miniature, with something fewer than 88 keys, sized so that it might be easily pushed from table to table in a nightclub, as Dooley Wilson does in Rick’s Cafe.
Looking back, we’re now left wondering if a number of the artifacts in that exhibition weren’t loaned by Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds long held out hope that her extensive (to put it mildly) collection of Hollywood memorabilia would one day be housed in a museum, but with no funding forthcoming, she’s now auctioning much of it off. The sale is to be held on June 18.
“My lifetime dream has been to assemble and preserve the history of the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood has been an enormous part of my life as I know it has been for countless fans all over the world. This collection represents a lifetime of collecting Hollywood artifacts and this is a rare opportunity to own a piece of Hollywood History for those who love the movies as much as I do. For the first time in nearly five decades, these iconic pieces will be made available to the public through a series of auctions presented by Profiles in History beginning in June 2011.”—Debbie Reynolds
It’s hard to name a star who’s not represented in Reynolds’ collection. Humphrey Bogart? A brown sport coat he wore in Knock on Any Door (1948) is up for auction. Harpo Marx? One of his familiar top hats with attached blonde wig is included (it was a gift from Harpo to Reynolds many years ago). Judy Garland? There are no fewer than seven items associated with her up for sale, including the blue dress she wore playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz.
We could go on and on. It’s a very impressive collection, and frankly, it’s heartbreaking that these amazing pieces will now go into the hands of private collectors, quite possibly never again to be enjoyed by the general public. It’s a crying shame that the collection couldn’t have been kept together and placed on permanent exhibition somewhere, anywhere.
The official website for the auction has much more information (if you’re in the Los Angeles area, you should make it a point to attend the public previews that precede the sale; who knows when you’ll again have the opportunity to see these treasures?). There’s also a bound catalogue for sale on the website for $39.50, but for those of us for whom even that is a bit more than we’re comfortable spending, there’s a PDF catalogue for the downloading, too.