Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid - 1948

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) is a whimsical tale of true love, wherever you happen to find it—in a fantasy, or your wife.  Or both.

Another long post.  Go long.  I'll hit you in the end zone.

Ann Blyth was still in production on Another Part of the Forest (1948) –which we’ll discuss in a later post—when she was given over to the mad scientist ministrations of makeup genius Bud Westmore to attach a four-foot long mermaid’s tail to her lower body. 

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8893

These were very busy and prolific years for her, from 1948 to 1952.  Half the 32 films she made in her entire career were in just this four-year period, when one production rolled right on into the next.  After Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, that summer she was slated for location shooting in Utah for her first western, Red Canyon (1949).  Her career was thriving, with what must have been a gratifying variety of roles to display her freshness and versatility.

Ann was 19 years old when the film was made, and William Powell was 55, but the 36-year difference between them did not really make for any awkwardness in the crush the mermaid and the man had for each other on screen, mainly because the crush was so innocent and so was the mermaid. 

For his part, William Powell strolled through his character’s screen midlife crisis with the panache and bemused sophistication of The Thin Man, with that sly humor that uses discretion as a springboard to irony.  He’s perfect in the role.

And in real life, Mr. Powell’s wife, former actress Diana Lewis, who we saw here in Cry Havoc (1944), was 27 years his junior.  So much for impossible age differences.

As for any possible off-screen awkwardness, that was apparently dispelled by the good humor of both leads.  An article by Sheilah Graham in 1949, in a half-mocking, half-admiring tone, noted that Ann Blyth “a devout churchgoer with an innocent smile, peach blossom skin and a wolf-whistle figure” was known at this stage of her career for being shy about kissing too passionately onscreen, or at least, “refuses point blank to go all-out.” 

Mr. Powell, as discreet as his character, Mr. Peabody, apparently handled her discomfort as well any of his own, by remembering first and foremost that they were making a comedy.

Ann said in the interview, “He was kidding all of the time.  I was always afraid he was going to make me laugh as he started to kiss me.  It was such whimsical make-believe that I wasn’t embarrassed when I had to kiss him.”

Mr. Powell’s problems about their age difference ultimately had more to do with his age than hers; he had to carry the mermaid around a lot, which was a remarkable, and exhausting, feat for a man of his years.

The Montreal Gazette felt that William Powell was good but should have been better, but thought Ann “…wears the fishtail as if born to it, gives the just the right suggestion of an untutored but not unknowing denizen of the deep.  It’s her best performance.”  I think they were wrong about Mr. Powell, but Miss Blyth earned the praise.  It’s interesting reading the different reviews how critics seemed not to know how to take this movie.  It was such an offbeat charmer that I don’t think they could categorize it into any familiar pigeonhole.

The New York Times, however, (in a review NOT written by the easily irritated Bosley Crowther) called Mr. Powell’s work “an engaging and highly polished performance” and noted of Ann, “Her costuming places her beyond criticism.”  It’s signed T.F.B., and whoever he was, that’s as stylish a piece of leering as I’ve ever read.

Now, about that costuming.  The effort it took to make the film is as delightfully whimsical as the story.  William Powell may have caught his mermaid fishing, but makeup man Bud Westmore had to create her from scratch.

Photo credit unknown at this time.  I think that's Bud Westmore.

First, you need a young woman, about 5’2”, who doesn’t weigh very much because everybody, not just William Powell, is going to have to carry her around a lot when she’s wearing the tail.  Just as fish are immobile when they are “beached”, so is Ann Blyth when she’s wearing her fish tail—which, despite its inconveniences, she apparently didn’t mind too much.  She recalled in a 2006 interview with Eddie Muller (referred to in our intro post here):

“The good part about that was that I got to be carried around all day long.  Everyone was so good to me on that movie.”

 

You drop the cooperative girl on a table and get your mad scientist buddies to make a mold of her body by smooshing clay or Play-Doh or Silly Putty, or whatever you have in the junk drawer, from her torso to her toes. 

Photo credit unknown at this time.

Once you’ve got that done, you start covering her with plaster.  

Thus is an actress turned into an arts and crafts project. 

According to an article by Gene Handsaker in the Milwaukee Journal, the fish tail cost $23,000 to make.  (Life magazine says $18,000.)  “Ann lay on a sort of operating table for three hours while being molded in clay and plaster for the four foot mermaid tail of sponge rubber, she told me on the set of Another Part of the Forest.

“To each scale of Ann’s tail will be sewn a glass jewel for further sparkle—some 4,000 jewels in all…The upper part of this, the biggest rubber ‘appliance’ ever made for a movie, will blend into her torso in a chaste, piscatorial nude effect—if U-I can get that past the Johnston office.”

This “piscatorial nude effect” has to do with the fact—if you can call it a “fact” when we’re talking about a mythical creature—that a mermaid’s upper body is that of a human woman, so there’s a running gag in the movie about covering the mermaid’s naked breasts. 

State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8894

 

But teasing the censors is the last thing on the agenda.   First, we still have to finish our mermaid.  Once you have the sponge rubber tail, then you’ve got to wrestle it onto the cooperative young woman.  Can’t have been easy to slide into. 

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149884

You need help.  A team of three is good.  Hoist the girl in the air between you and yank that tail onto her.  This pit crew is also available for hire.  Can’t get into those tight jeans anymore?  These boys are professionals.  They know what they’re doing.  Having trouble wrestling your wiggling five-year-old child into a snowsuit?  Just give them a call. 

Ed and Whitey McMahan carry M'lady to the set.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8892

Then, as we mentioned, the young woman can’t walk in this thing, so she has to be carried like Cleopatra by obliging handsome slave boys to her watery home.  Where she is unceremoniously dumped in the drink.  This is likely not a good time to tell people you have to go to the bathroom.

One more thing.  Lead weights were placed in the bottom of the tail by her feet, some references say 30 pounds, some say 50 pounds—to keep the rubber tail, and the person wearing it, from floating to the surface of the water.  Sounds as ominous as stories of mobsters fitting their victims with “cement shoes”. 

Here are more photos from Life magazine, February 1948.

Newt Perry and Ann

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149882

 

Once the actress looks like a mermaid, she’s got to be trained to swim like one.  Here’s where Newt Perry and the team from Weeki Wachee Springs in New Port Richey, Florida, come in.  Weeki Wachee Springs was one of those roadside tourist attractions long before we had fast food chains lining every stretch of highway, before expensive theme parks and innumerable corporate-owned enterprises were devised to part you from your money.

Established in the fall of 1947 by Newt Perry, it wasn’t long before Universal-International came in December to build a special set onto Perry’s showcase of “mermaids.”  They were just local high school girls—not in mermaid costumes—frolicking under the water doing tricks and demonstrating scenes of, as the book Weecki Wachee Springs by Maryann Pelland and Dan Pelland notes, “eating, drinking, and even typing underwater.”  Perry devised a system for the beauties to remain under water for longer periods by sneaking breaths of compressed air through rubber hoses.

Newt Perry and Ann

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149879

Most of these photos are from the State Archives of Florida as displayed on the FloridaMemory.com site.  Newt Perry also trained Navy frogmen, helped out on several Tarzan films, and taught his nephew to swim—who was Don Schollander, 1964 and 1968 Olympic Gold Medalist.  A champion swimmer himself, Mr. Perry knew his stuff.

According to author Tim Hollis in Glass Bottom Boats & Mermaid Tails: Florida’s Tourist Springs, “Perry coached Ann Blyth in the proper techniques of underwater breathing, and according to all reports, she was a quick study and a natural athlete.  Though she performed the necessary water close-ups, her acrobatic swimming in most of the long shots was done by the Weekiwachee regulars, primarily Nancy Tribble.”

Mermaid doubles Nancy Tribble and Flo Wilkinson with Ann.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149877

According to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, “Between scenes she swam and dived just for the heck of it, while Powell, fully dressed, clung to a rope and shivered.” 

Ann does her own swimming here.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8897

The cast of Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid arrived in February 1948, and filmed some of the underwater scenes here, and some back at Universal in a water tank.  Andrea King, who played the rival for the affections of Mr. Powell—a rival, as it turns out, for his wife and his mermaid—is quoted on a website devoted to her career as recalling the weather in Florida that February to be cold and rainy, and much of the cast fell ill, including trouper William Powell, though, “you never would have known it.”

Back at Universal to finish up some water scenes between her and Ann Blyth—including a spectacular fight scene we’ll discuss below—Miss King recalled that though the tank was supposed to be heated, the water heater malfunctioned and the water was quite cold in the tank.  “So we tried anyway for about half an hour, but Annie and I just went numb.  I think she got terribly sick after that.”

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149881

And now, the movie…

Directed by Irving Pichel, written by Nunnally Johnson, adapted from the novel Mr. Peabody and his Mermaid.  I lead off with the title card here because this graphic of a mermaid, so coyly curled up with the credits, is the only time you will really ever see a mermaid naked from the waist up in this movie.  Ann Blyth is artfully covered by the edge of a pool and a fortunate camera angle, by a robe, by seaweed, by her flowing curly blonde hair, by a bubble bath, and by her own expressive arms.

William Powell plays Arthur Peabody, a man about to turn 50 years old, a fact which surprises him and depresses him.  He is also just recovering from a long bout of flu, so he and his wife have taken off to restore his health at a Caribbean paradise where it’s warm.

Irene Hervey is his wife, wry and understanding, and we can see from the outset that theirs is a good marriage, with comfortable bantering. 

She is no shrew from whom he is trying to escape, indeed, the only “other woman” he leers at in this entire movie is her, when she is partially hidden from view and he does not at first realize the legs he’s ogling are his wife’s.  She looks good in a bathing suit.  His demonstrated attraction to his wife also takes the smarmy edge of his “romance” with the much younger mermaid.

Andrea King is a visitor to the vacation villa, a singer and performer who blatantly chases after Powell with la-de-da joie de vivre, perhaps with no real design on him except for the fact she’s bored and there apparently seems to be a lack of other men.  And he really is charming.

Clinton Sundberg, who we’ve all seen in minor kindly “everyman” roles—I think my favorite is Judy Garland’s bartender pal in Easter Parade—here gets a larger role as a publicity man for the villa, one of the few Americans on this British protectorate, who is cynical, funny, and even surprisingly a little sinister.  There’s a running gag about his doctor forbidding him to drink or smoke anymore, and how miserably Mr. Sundberg copes with this.

Art Smith, seen at the beginning and the end of the movie, is the psychiatrist to whom Irene Hervey takes Mr. Powell to get him over this mermaid fantasy.  Mr. Smith is an especially understanding fellow, who, like Powell, also likes to fish and is amazed he could have caught a mermaid on a 12-thread line.  A wonderful old character actor (though actually younger than William Powell), he was one of the unfortunate victims of the infamous blacklisting in the 1950s when Elia Kazan threw him to the wolves. 

I won’t go play-by-play with the plot, but here are some delightful scenes to mention: At the beginning of the film when William Powell sits in the waiting room of the psychiatrist’s office and a small boy stares at him, asking his mother, “What’s the matter with him, Mommy?  Is he crazy?”

 

I like that it’s snowing outside in the city, which gives a great contrast to the sunny paradise he retreats to, representing a rebirth of spirit.  It would have been lovely to have the film in color, but it still manages to take us away to tropical splendor without it. 

 

Almost the moment he arrives, he hears a musical trilling from some far distance—he alone hears it and we presume it is the fabled siren’s call—but he suspects no mermaid, even when he takes a sailboat to a deserted rocky key and finds an ornamental hair comb.  We will soon see it belongs to the mermaid, whom he hooks on his fishing line.

The fishing scene is good; it takes time and plays out nicely, building suspense.  He hooks the tail of what he presumes to be a large sport fish.  From what we see of the tail, it could be a marlin or a swordfish, or a tuna.  Even in just these scenes of exploring, sailing, fishing—indeed, struggling to land a big fish—William Powell is already exorcising the demons of turning 50.  He’s already proving to himself that life is still exciting and he’s still man enough with strength and vigor to enjoy it.

He manages to pull the fish close enough to grasp its tail and flip it into the boat.  He’s won the fight.  Hemingway would be proud.

 

Then he is astonished to discover at its other end is a pretty young woman.

 

No more astonished than the dazed mermaid is to discover herself in a boat with a strange two-legged creature.

At first, the mermaid is only a fishing prize to him, and he gleefully carries her into the rented vacation villa as a specimen he hopes to produce before scientists.  She’s a bit faint and peaked lying on his bed, then he realizes this creature needs to be in water, so he fills the tub, while she looks around his room with the wonder of someone who’d never been on land before.  Right at this moment to us, Ann Blyth as the mermaid stops being a myth or a plot contrivance, but a person with whom we can identify, and that goes a long way towards our caring about the relationship between her and Mr. Powell.  Moreover, she is mute, so our compassion rises for this lost soul in a strange place.
 

At first, Powell has no romantic notions about her, though he warms from regarding her as a fishing trophy to referring to himself as “your old Uncle Arthur” when he swiftly becomes her caretaker.  He is giddy not with love (even when his robe slips from her bare shoulders when she slides into the tub and grins at him from under the water), but in anticipation of the fame and notoriety his accomplishment in landing her will bring—and in a celebratory mood gets a bit tipsy by the time his wife comes home.

Irene Hervey, though she has teased her husband about turning 50, nevertheless is jealous over his attention to Andrea King at the party the night before.  She suspects the splashing she hears in her tub is Miss King, but when she opens the door to confront the other woman, all she sees is an enormous fish tail protruding from a bubble bath.  It seems the mermaid, with childish curiosity, gotten into the toiletries.

Miss Hervey thinks her drunken husband has played a joke on her, and she wants that fish out of her tub.  I like the scene when she’s on the phone talking to a man she’s met at the party (she’s been making friends too) while William Powell carries the mermaid down the stairs.  He’s had a little too much to drink and, in the doghouse with his wife, so he carries the mermaid outside intending to release her back into the ocean. 

But he gets tired hefting her.  “You’re no guppy.”  (One of my favorite lines.)  He sits on the edge of the enormous ornamental fishpond to rest, with the mermaid in his lap, and finally takes a long look at her.  His fishing trophy, his scientific discovery are only a popped balloon—popped by his wife—and he now regards the mermaid in a second look, a second chance at a first crush.

“You don’t want to go back in the sea, do you?  It’s so big, and you’re so pretty.” 

He lightly kisses her, off to the side of her mouth, and the astonished mermaid, uncomprehending eyes wide open, is gobsmacked.  Trying to figure this out, she parts and closes her lips as if to taste the kiss he’s left there.  She likes the sensation and wants to kiss again.

He leaves her in the fishpond, half-pet, half-mistress.

William Powell is so entertaining and so sweet in his role, which is basically comic, but lends it such skillful depth and poignancy. 

Ann Blyth’s work here is luminous and captivating.  It is a non-speaking role, but there is remarkable and touching eloquence in the way her eyes roam over his face, as if trying to read him, trying to understand his words and his facial expression.  Middle-aged Mr. Peabody is wondrous and fascinating to her, and her unlikely crush for him alone adds another level to the comedy, and the poignancy.  We can see why he might take a fancy to her, but her radiant and achingly silent adoration of him is charming.
 

The funniest scene in the movie is when Mr. Powell heads to a women’s clothing store in town to purchase some sort of top for his mermaid.  His befuddled awkwardness sets the stage for a terrific scene, and he plays the straight man for Mary Field, whom you’ve probably seen uncredited in a zillion movie walk-on parts.  Here she gets a good role as the primly officious clerk, who delights in her soliloquy sales pitches to the uncomfortable Mr. Powell.  She sounds like a Banana Republic or J Peterman catalog description gone amuck. 

 

She displays a sweater, “Light as a whisper, gay as a sunbeam, wearing it will be an emotional adventure spangled with the moon glow of twilight.”  (I swear, if just one sales clerk ever spoke to me that way, I’d buy everything in the store.  I am so heartily sick of, “How you guys doin’?” when I am not a guy, and they never know the answer when I ask a question and too lazy to find out.  They discuss their personal lives in grating voices with coworkers and I am just a shadow who hands them money when they've paused to notice me.  Oh, for the days of professional sales help.  Call me ma’am, just once, please.)

Miss Field continues her merry prattle, “A gay spectrum of springtime hues—fuchsia, purple almond, banana, marshmallow, peach dream and licorice!”

Mr. Powell replies, “Would you be good enough to tell me something?”

Miss Field: “Enchanted.”  (I love her over-the-top playfulness with proper speech.)

Mr. Powell: “Whatever became of blue?”

She finds he is going to be trouble, especially when he wants to know if someone can swim in her sweaters.

“May I ask is the young lady’s prejudice against swimming in a swimming suit quite deep-seated?”  (One of my all-time favorite lines.  I just love her.  In a way, her intonation and enunciation reminds me of a reformed Eliza Doolittle when she is carefully trying to explain to Freddy Eynsford-Hill that, “Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.”  Her careful stroking of the difficult language as if to tame it.)

Mr. Powell just realizes he could buy his mermaid a two-piece swimsuit instead of a sweater and she could just wear the top part.  But Miss Field, Saleswoman of the Year, insists they do not sell half of a bathing suit.  She holds one up, “The diaper model.  Provocative, n'est–ce pas?”  (She’s straight-faced, slam-dunk hysterical.)

Nobody in the movie calls these two-piece suits a bikini, but the name, as well as the design, was still quite new.  They arrived in 1946, about a year and a half before this movie went into production, and were named by the designer for the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, where the U.S. conducted its first peacetime nuclear test explosions.  He wanted the swimsuit to similarly bear (or is that bare?) the reputation of an intense "reaction".

Mr. Powell buys three bikinis, and next we see him sitting by the fishpond, separating the panties from the bras with delicate thoroughness as the mermaid solemnly watches. 

He gently begins his lecture: “Darling, I don’t want to offend you, but you’re not dressed for company.”  (Another favorite line.)  He tries to explain modesty to her, but she is uncomprehending. 

She plucks one of the bras he has displayed on the edge of the pond for her perusal, and she places it on top of her head.  She has no idea what to do with it.

 

He stretches a bra across his own chest to demonstrate, but she’s not interested.  She wants attention.  She wants him to kiss her again, but he won’t and gently remonstrates her, too, that she must also stop eating the expensive rare tropical fish in the fishpond.  The camera cuts over to a neat lineup of fish skeletal remains on the side of the pool.  He wants her to eat canned sardines instead.

She is upset and starts to tear up (and for me, as silly as this scene is, it’s as heartbreaking as when you see a toddler’s face fall when he is told “no”).  She just wants to be loved.  She just wants this wonderful male two-legged creature to talk sweetly to her again and leave soft kisses on the side of her mouth.

He comforts her and is amazed by her.  “My age means nothing to you, does it?”  She explores his face with her adoring eyes, and now he’s a goner, pleasantly lost in the first flush of his second spring.

But the mermaid can also be quick to anger.  She does not like Andrea King messing with her male two-legged creature.  She hisses when Mr. Powell talks about Miss King.  Here Ann Blyth is dubbed (not for the last time in her career—but we’ll get to The Helen Morgan Story eventually).  According to a syndicated article in the St. Petersburg Times, Gene Fowler, Jr., assistant producer, could not find a suitable sound for a mermaid snarl, so they took a crew to the San Diego Zoo and found the sound they wanted from an irritable ocelot.  They recorded him on tape, and the sound of the ocelot snarl, played backwards, is apparently what we hear on screen.

When Andrea King stops by, the mermaid spies on her overt flirtation with Mr. Powell and becomes jealous.  When Miss King teasingly strips off her evening gown and dives into the fishpond in her unmentionables, the mermaid sneaks up on her in the murky depths of the pool, and grabs her.  There’s a vigorous fight underwater between them, no doubles here—it’s really Ann and Andrea in an oxygen-deprived soggy girl fight—and the mermaid bites her leg.  Andrea can kick her way to the surface, but Ann’s got 30 to 50 pounds of lead weights in her tail keeping her nicely submerged.

 

In the middle of the night, Powell hears the mermaid’s trilling, and sneaks out to the pond to find her sitting on the edge of the pool in Miss King’s gown as a trophy (Miss King, terrified, has run off without it), which she wears like a debutante to impress him.  With great tact and understanding, he compliments her appearance, and she clings to his hand, kissing it.

 

But his wife is fed up with him, sure that he’s carrying on with Miss King, so she leaves him.  When she disappears, the local authorities think he murdered her, and now poor Mr. Powell has to get the mermaid back to the ocean and get back his wife.

A nice shot here when the mermaid overhears Powell telling the sardonic Clinton Sundberg that he’s in love with a mermaid, and she responds silently with a brilliant, ecstatic smile.  The only thing better than your male two-legged creature telling you he loves you, is hearing him talk about how much he loves you to somebody else.

Ann Blyth has some clever and remarkable stunts to perform underwater, most especially the fight scene, but also a bit where she swims around an enormous castle-like structure, where she cries underwater into a handkerchief and blows her nose, and gathers up her comb collection when Mr. Powell tells her they have to leave this place.

Their adventure culminates on a rock at sea, with the British authorities after them.  It is a tragic moment when he sees he cannot stay with the mermaid, and must let himself be taken back to the land.  He reunites with his wife, and gives her a present: one of the mermaid’s ornamental combs.

I think the above–mentioned New York Times reviewer hit the nail on the head when it comes to the ending of this movie: “Mermaids are not good subjects for cinematic comedy, since they just can’t settle down and live happily ever after.”

True, for though we may be happy for the Peabodys’ reunion, there is a sense of sadness that we don’t know what happened to the mermaid, and wonder if she will ever find another male two-legged creature to love her.

Ann Blyth and William Powell parted with a happier mood.  In the 2006 interview with Eddie Muller, referred to in our intro piece and posted on The Evening Class blog transcript of the event, she recalled of Powell:

He was so dear, tender…I had asked him for a picture at the end of the movie and he took several lines from the movie and wrote them on the picture.  Actually he taped it to the picture and said, "I like you.  I like you very much."

 

You can watch Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid currently here at YouTube.

Come back next Thursday when we jump eleven years later to 1959 and a new medium—television—for Ann Blyth’s first of five appearances on the western Wagon Train.  It’s The Jenny Tannen Story, where she has a dual role of a cold, bitter woman, and the young daughter who travels across the continent to see her.  This one’s dedicated to your friend and mine, the Caftan Woman, for her particular fondness for this episode.  It was during the filming of this episode that Ann was surprised by Ralph Edwards on This Is Your Life.  We'll talk about that too.

____________________________

Andrea King website 

Evening Class blog, July 28,2007, transcribed interview of Eddie Muller with Ann Blyth at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco, July 2006.

FloridaMemory.com website, Florida Photographic Collection of the State Archives of Florida.

Hollis, Tim.  Glass Bottom Boats & Mermaid Tails: Florida’s Tourist Springs, (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2006) p. 99.

Life magazine, February 9, 1948, pp. 91-94.

The Milwaukee Journal, article by Gene Handsaker, December 18, 1947; article by Sheilah Graham, August 22, 1949, p. GS1.

The Montreal Gazette, October 23, 1948, p. 21.

The New York Times, review by T.F.B., August 14, 1948, p. 6.

Ocala (Florida) Star Banner, April 14, 1981, p. 10A

Pelland, Maryann and Dan Pelland.  Weecki Wachee Springs (Charleston, SC., Chicago, Portsmouth, NH, San Francisco, 2006), p.7

St. Petersburg (Florida)Times, December 10, 1947, p. 14; April 4, 1948, p. 34

Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator, syndicated article by Hedda Hopper, March 8, 1948, p. 16.

 

The Year of Ann Blyth - Intro to the Series

This post begins what, by default, I’m calling The Year of Ann Blyth—because I’m going to be writing about the career of actress Ann Blyth for pretty much the entire year. 

About as simpleminded as calling another blog about old movies Another Old Movie Blog.

I’m not terribly clever.

This is also going to be a series, by default, about acting in the 20th century. Actors, from the beginning of the trade, have struggled to find work, struggled in their performing to find fulfillment in self-expression, and then struggled to find the next job. The 20th century, for the first time in the history of theatre, exploded with new outlets for actors beyond the proscenium. “The theatre” became “the media”.

Movies, radio, television—our entertainment industry became America’s greatest export to the world, for better and for worse.  I want to examine this watershed century in the acting profession and the media through the career of one actress, and am particularly drawn to Ann Blyth for different reasons; including that she moved comfortably between the different media and excelled at each, and because long after she performed in her last movie she continued to work when it suited her, on television and most especially, the stage, including plays, musicals, concerts, night clubs and cabaret.  Throw in a few TV commercials, and you can see she tagged all the bases. 

And something else...something intangible and perhaps only evident when you stack her performances on a timeline: if you know Ann Blyth only through her frothy MGM musicals, you don't know Ann Blyth.  In dramas she has morphed into the epitome of hateful, sensual, heartbroken, and shamed.  If you know her only as the demon teen Veda in Mildred Pierce, you don't know Ann Blyth.  The same colossal greedy train wreck of a girl who spit invective at Joan Crawford and smacked her in the jaw also performed a night club act to enthusiastic crowds in Las Vegas, bringing them to tears with the sentimental "Auld Lang Syne" and sang at the California state fair.  If you only know her from The Helen Morgan Story or melodramas, you are missing her genuine gift for screwball comedy.  Sinking herself intellectually, just as much as emotionally into these roles, she swims against the powerful and unrelenting current of studio typecasting . 

The scene of her debut was radio variety and drama, the true child of the 20^th century that, with few exceptions, became orphaned long before the century was over.  It trained her to use her voice, not only as a singer, but as a character.

As Gary Merrill’s character says in All about Eve: It’s all theatre.

This intro post to the series is going to take a while.  You might want to call in sick to work. 

Ann Blyth’s career is interesting for its length—she began at six years old on radio; for its diversity—she leapfrogged from radio to Broadway to Hollywood before she became an adult, then jumped into a variety of screen roles in that common struggle not to be typecast, and continued, during and after raising her family, to appear on television and the stage.  Along with her seemingly effortless versatility, most especially laudable is her ability to successfully keep in perspective her career and private life—yet nothing is simple about the way we weave our lives, particularly for someone who juggled so much even from a very young age.

Her ambition certainly, but also her self-discipline and work ethic, perhaps sense of responsibility to her mother, to directors, fellow performers, her husband and children, her faith--must have been enormous. 

Ann Blyth has been described in the press that always looks for catch phrases, slug lines and labels, as a devout Catholic, and she herself would credit her faith as being of major importance in her life.  Being labeled a Nice Girl by the press eager to call her somethingwas probably better than getting tagged “The Oomph Girl” or “The Dynamite Girl”, which Ann Sheridan and Alexis Smith, respectively, hated, but I wonder if it may have sometimes been a detriment.  We’ll talk about that in a later post.  She has also been called reserved (to the point of driving some interviewers crazy over her reticence to speak ill of coworkers), serene, “the calmest person in Hollywood.”

Interviewer Clyde Gilmour of the Vancouver Sun wrote with humorous exasperation that Blyth, “is one of the sweetest gals any columnist could ever hope to talk with—and one of the most difficult to interview.  No matter what you ask her, all she does is smile and nod and chuckle and utter a series of gentle dove-like murmurs indicating her total satisfaction with every phase of human existence on this planet.”

That one cracked me up.

In her senior years, celebrated as a veteran of old Hollywood at benefits or being interviewed at film festivals, Ann Blyth is invariably described as elegant, classy, drawing awed remarks on her still stunning beauty.  Even more thought-provoking is her character and the career choices she’s made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

 

Look at the photo above, which is striking for its sweetness of attitude—we may notice the girl is quite pretty, but there is more to read in the glance she gives the camera.  A slight lowered tilt of the head, a calm, level gaze that invites as much as it withholds from the viewer.  She's studying us as much as we are studying her.  An actor’s audition headshot, or a publicity photo from her Broadway turn in Watch on the Rhine?  I don’t know.  But you can see the girl in this photo, young Ann, is carefully tended. 

She was the gently-bred daughter of an Irish immigrant, a mother she adored.

For this year-long series, I’m not going to dwell on Ann Blyth’s personal life too deeply, rather touching upon her private life only as it bears upon her career.  Nor am I going to proceed in chronological order, for I want to present this series as snapshots of moments.  We’ll be leaping back and forth across the years like time travelers playing hopscotch.

But today we need to start at the beginning, if only for a foundation from which to leap first.   She was born in Mt. Kisco, New York in 1928, but never actually lived there.  Mrs. Blyth was visiting her sister at the time of Ann’s birth.  (Her name was Anne, but lost the ‘e’ on Anne when she went to Hollywood.  Ann remarked in an interview that her surname also once carried an 'e' on the end.  Perhaps for a previous generation?  Silent vowels are easily misplaced in transit if they are not firmly affixed.)  Ann grew up in a fourth-floor walkup by the river in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a world narrowed to her mother and a sister who was some ten years her senior (her father left the family when she was still a child), and a few city blocks.  They struggled financially.  Her mother took in washing to make ends meet.  (One columnist would later write that Mrs. Blyth once worked for actor Joseph Cotten as a housekeeper.)

In an interview quoted by author Karen Burroughs Hannsberry in Femme Noir-Bad Girls of Film, Ann recalls a "rather meager" childhood:

The fact that my father left my mother with two daughters to raise is, of course, something many families and children have to face...My mother faced it, as indeed anyone who knew her and loved her felt she would.  And she always saw to it that my sister and I had enough to eat, and clean, pretty clothes on our backs--but I know that it wasn't easy for her.

Ann’s very early desire to sing and perform, and perhaps a precocious talent for both, led Mrs. Blyth to seek outlets for her daughter, which led to auditions and lessons, and soon, jobs.  Ann began singing and reciting on New York’s WJZ (on the NBC Blue Network) at six years old in the middle of the Depression.  She was one of the regular gang for several years on a children’s program called Coast to Coast on a Bus, where the bus "conductor" was Metropolitan Opera announcer Milton Cross...

“Coast-to Coast on a Bus—The White Rabbit Line jumps anywhere, anytime!”

It was a show to discover talented children. Future Metropolitan Opera star Risë Stevens appeared here, and other kids on the bus included Billy and Florence Halop, Billy and Bobby Mauch,Walter Tetley and Jackie Kelk.  They sang songs and hymns and recited poetry, and picked up guest “passengers” along the way.  Other shows she did were The Sunday Show, Our Barn, and Jean Hersholt's  Dr. Christian program.  (On the other network, little Beverly Sills, future opera star, was also doing a kids’ show.)  WJZ also gave us Little Orphan Annie, Amos n' Andy, and Death Valley Days. 

A teenage boy working as a pageboy in the same NBC building while little Ann was working at the microphone in one of the studios would meet her for the first time only many years later in California.  His name was James McNulty, her future husband.  Kismet, you might say.  (Yeah, we'll get to that movie down the road.)

Of these early years, Ann gives us a brief glimpse in an article syndicated in newspapers and published in a collection of stories of faith conquering adversity, edited by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and published as Faith Made Them Champions. (The chapter is posted at the SE Entertainment blog here.)

“Mother worked very hard and her tiny body wasn't nearly as big as her heart.”

Mrs. Blyth was Ann’s cheerful emotional rudder, her advisor, and her close companion.  It’s interesting that for someone who did not come from a show business background that Mrs. Blyth, with apparently no “stage mother” temperament, was still able to guide her daughter through a world that was strange to both of them.

From an interview with The New York Times in 1952: "Life was one big struggle then, but mother managed somehow to keep me in parochial school and later in professional school.  She provided me with singing and dramatic lessons besides."
 

Ann was given minor children’s roles with New York’s San Carlo Opera Company, in Carmen, Pagliacci, and La Boheme, where she was introduced to the colorful and irresistibly larger than life storytelling world of opera.  She became a lifelong fan.  The opera company performed during these years at the Gallo Opera House on West 54^th Street, and Ann’s world stretched a little wider, all the way uptown.  (The opera house later became the site of the disco era’s Studio 54 nightclub.)

She had some small parts in minor plays, along with her radio work, and actor, later agent, Richard Clayton, who knew Ann as far back as their New York casting days and appeared on different radio shows with her, recalled for interviewer Sue Chambers in 1954 how the stage mothers of other kids at auditions would look pityingly at Ann, “the quiet, skinny little girl effacing herself in the corner.  But when the time came to read for the part, the other kids didn’t have a chance.”

But there were other jobs she did not get, and the Depression rolled on while she attended parochial school, later dramatic and singing lessons at the Professional Children’s School (then at Broadway and 61^st Street), and stood before the mic in the radio station.  

“When I tried for something better and failed, she would smile her wonderful warm smile, put a pert new feather in my hat, and together we'd go to St. Boniface's to pray.

‘Just have faith, my darling,’ she'd say cheerfully as we walked home in the fading light. ‘Something better will come.’  And it did.  It came so fast it was like riding a giant roller coaster clear to the top.  We two looked out over the whole world.”

Ann was called to the principal’s office at school.  Usually a heart-stopping moment for any kid.  Her fate was behind the door, literally.

Herman Shumlin and Lillian Hellman were there, asking if she would read for a part in Miss Hellman’s new play Watch on the Rhine.  Ann Blyth was 12 years old.

 

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

She did not know anything about the famous producer-director or the famous playwright, but she passed the auditions and spent the next year at the Martin Beck Theatre on West 45^thStreet (renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003) as her world now included Broadway.  Any Broadway play would have been a feather in her cap and a terrific notch on her résumé, but Watch on the Rhine was a major theatre event and its illustrating the danger of foreign fascism on American soil in the home of one sheltered family made it one of the most meaningful productions of the era.  Brooks Atkinson’s review in The New York Times lauded the power of that play to glaringly reflect the current political climate which inspired it.

“Lillian Hellman has brought the awful truth close to home…Curious how much better she has done it than anybody else by forgetting the headlines and by avoiding the obvious approaches to the great news subject of today.”

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

Cast members included Paul Lukas, Mady Christians, Lucile Watson, and George Coulouris.  (Lukas, Watson, and Coulouris would, of course, reprise their roles in the 1943 film.)  It was a monumental play, and if Ann, who turned 13 during its Broadway run, was not mature enough to fully appreciate the political message, she must certainly have been impressed by the prestige the production garnered.  Especially when she, along with other cast members, was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

She could also appreciate that, as author Hannsberry quotes, "It meant that for the first time in years, my mother wouldn't have to work so hard."

 

Postcard advertising the play, author collection.  Ann Blyth is in the top right photo.

Here are some photos of the production as published by Life Magazine in April 1941.

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

 

 

 

Watch on the Rhine Playbill, September 1941, author's collection.

The show closed in February 1942; afterward it toured for nine months across the country, and Ann joined the touring company.  It was during this period they gave a command performance for the President and had dinner at the White House.  She recalled for The New York Times in 1952, "I was so excited that I still can't tell anyone anything coherent about it.  I still have a souvenir, though, which the President gave me--a beautiful green match box which has a ship embossed upon it with FDR worked onto the boat."

At the age of 14, her world grew wider still with every train stop in towns and cities across the continent.  Finally, they played the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles, where Henry Koster, a director for Universal, saw her and she was given a screen test.  By the time she performed with the touring company in San Francisco, Ann was signed to the Universal studio.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper spread the word in February 1943: "Henry Koster has little Ann Blyth...who was so good in Watch on the Rhine...when talking to her, he discovered she could also sing."

Her first four films, all released in 1944, were a series of small roles in B-musicals (which we’ll discuss in later posts), and then the big break when she was allowed to test for Mildred Pierce at the Warner Bros. studio.  (We’ll cover her role in that film, also, in a later post.) 

 

It was five days after wrapping this major film that Ann Blyth experienced an horrific event, and would spend her remaining teen years in a most heartbreaking series of personal challenges.

Her mother took Ann and some friends up to the Lake Arrowhead area in the San Bernardino Mountains to have a few days’ holiday in the snow in April 1945.  Ann was injured in a toboggan accident.  From her article on the incident in Faith Made Them Champions:

“One minute we were sailing down the hard-packed icy hillside like snow birds, then there was a crash and I fell on my back with a sickening thud.”

She was 16 years old.  She had fractured her spine.

“I didn't cry out.  The feeling was too big for that.  Involuntarily, from long habit, my spirit reached out for faith and halting prayers rose to my lips.” 

First newspaper reports called it a “near-fatal accident.” 

“At the hospital, the doctors were grave; my back was broken.”

She was told she might not walk again.

“At first, I couldn't look at my mother.  When at last I raised my head, I was startled.  Those warm, hazel eyes under her crown of auburn hair were actually smiling.

‘Have faith, my darling,’ she said.  ‘You'll walk.’”

Ann spent several months flat on her back in a body cast.

“I concentrated on high school work, determined to graduate with my studio class.  But still there were those long periods of just lying down.  The busy, exciting world I had known faded away and my life slowed down to little things.”

It may be at this period that Ann learned her later-to-be-celebrated patient demeanor.  From a 1953 Miami News article she was: “…long noted as the most serene actress in town…”

“A visit with her is like taking a tranquilizer pill,” according to a producer interviewed for an article syndicated in the Miami News in 1957.

“Miss Blyth is a singularly soothing young lady to have around,” noted an article in The New York Times from 1952, that called her “serene and almost childlike.”

And something else, a faith in which she’d been trained since childhood began to evolve into a source of strength that would take her into adulthood.

“I found myself blessed, for a new sense of prayer began to unfold to me.  Now there were not the busy times of telling Him what I needed, but rather, times of listening communion, of gathering strength, when my human strength and courage seemed to ebb away.”

After seven months, she was freed from the body cast, put into a steel back brace from her neck to her lower back, and allowed to take a few steps.  She spent several months in and out of her wheelchair, in therapy (which included swimming in Joan Crawford’s pool) and finally did graduate with her studio school class in her wheelchair. 

Years later, her teacher at the Universal schoolhouse, Mrs. Gladys Hoene (pronounced "Haney"), was interviewed on what it was like to teach at the studio school by the syndicated columnist Bob Thomas, who noted that so many child stars had unhappy adult lives.  Mrs. Hoene agreed, having seen first-hand the pressures faced by child stars and the peculiar circumstance of playing roles “that are far apart from reality.  You can’t expect them to have a down-to-earth attitude toward life.”

 

Publicity still from Universal Studios in front of schoolhouse. 

I believe Ann is 2nd from right, with Sabu just to the right.  Can you name the others?

Mrs. Hoene was prompted to “tell tales out of school,” as it were, on her former students.  She recalled that, “When Ann and Donald O’Connor were put together, they could cut up,” but she put Ann, who was reportedly one of her favorite students, in a different category than the other kids who might grow to unhappy adults.

“I think the exception is Ann Blyth…I would stake everything I had on her chances of success.”

She was not speaking of career success.  Nor did Ann, apparently, regard career success as her only yardstick on happiness, though she certainly remained very keenly ambitious and loved to work.

“Now, at last, my life was again the same.  Only, not quite the same.  I found within me an immense gratitude for simple things.  An acute appreciation of all I might have lost, all the things I had accepted unconsciously before.”

There was a bright, shining moment during her convalescence when she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Mildred Pierce (a heck of a get well card), and she attended the Oscars ceremony with her mother, a sublime evening of personal triumph they both shared.  The studio arranged for a special gown to be made for her which would hide her back brace.  The gown was pink, made of pre-war bengaline silk.

 Ann & Mrs.Blyth at Grauman's Chinese Theater, March 1946,
from a newsreel of the 1945 Oscars
 

What anguish Mrs. Blyth endured over Ann’s injury and long recovery anyone can only imagine, but the dark days were left behind by the renewed prospect of Ann’s return to good health and a bright future as a Hollywood actress. 

In April 1946, gossip columnist Louella Parsons remarked, "Ann is extremely ambitious.  Her career comes first in her life, and I think you'll see that she'll go far...I couldn't look at the sweet young face of Ann Blyth without feeling that she was something very special, and is not the ordinary girl.  She's well bred, quiet...."

This happy, hopeful time was cruelly brief, and in turn, eclipsed by another, greater tragedy.

Four months after the Oscars, over a month after Ann was finally allowed to remove the back brace for good, only a few weeks after her returning to work on a new movie, Mrs. Blyth died of cancer in July 1946. 

Ann was 17 years old, less than a month shy of her 18^th birthday. 

Despite sympathy from those around us, grief is inevitably an agony faced alone, even for the very young.  The very depth of our mourning isolates us.  Fortunately, her mother’s sister and brother-in-law around this time gave up their home in Connecticut and moved out to California to help during the family crisis, and stayed.  As guardians and parent-figures her aunt and uncle thereafter had a huge supportive part in her life.  Ann dealt—forever after would deal—with the loss of her mother through the prism of her religious faith.

“There was an aching emptiness.  Until it came to me, almost in a revelation, that she had not left me.  She had prepared me for her going as she had prepared me for everything else I'd met in life.

Reaching out again for my faith came the assurance that she would be by my side in every good, beautiful, and true experience, wherever I might go; a part of every decision, every success and every happiness –for they all stemmed from her inspired teaching.  They would become the flowers of the mustard seed of faith she had placed in my heart.”

Now we jump ahead several decades.  Have a look below at the video taken at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco July 6, 2006 for a special screening of Mildred Pierce.  Miss Blyth is interviewed on stage by Eddie Muller.  She is 77 here, elegant, classy, gentle, stunningly beautiful, and delightfully funny.  She’s slaying her audience.  Note how effortlessly she launches into imitations of co-star Butterfly McQueen and director Michael Curtiz.  She's good with accents; we can imagine the first accent she ever learned to mimic as a child may have been her mother’s Irish brogue.  Her mother was Nan Lynch of Dublin.  (‘Tis a grand name, to be sure, but I’m sorry to say I have no reason to believe we are related.)

Note how, at the very end of the video, she is prompted to sing a line from Kismet’s “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” – the strength and loveliness of her voice, the almost startling power of it.  We have to marvel at the still prodigious talent of a lady who, we sense, as Emerson said, became the person she decided to be.

Consider as well that, unlike everyone else in that theater, Ann Blyth has just watched the screening of Mildred Pierce not as a favorite classic noir, but something more akin to a home movie of herself as a teenager only weeks before her life so shockingly changed.  The other actors on screen were all friends and colleagues—and all of them, down to little Jo Ann Marlowe who played her younger sister Kay, are all gone.  They are ghosts on the giant screen.  A thousand people in the theater have watched the intimacy of her, a solitary survivor, watching her own past.

The whole interview is not recorded on this video, but you can read a bit more of the conversation in a transcript of the interview at Michael Guillen’s blog The Evening Class.  Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

Come back next Thursday, and we’ll talk about Ann Blyth’s underwater adventure, which included a four-foot long fish tail with lead weights in it to make her sink, in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948).

 ________________________________________

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 162.

The Evening Class blog, July 28, 2007

The Film Daily, July 24, 1946, p. 2.

Hannsberry, Karen Burroughs.  Femme Noir - Bad Girls of Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc.) pp. 32-33.

Ladies Home Journal, article by Cynthia McAdoo Wheatland & Eileen Sharpe, "Young Hollywood at Home", February 1957, p. 104.

Life Magazine, April 14, 1941, pp. 81-84.

Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1946, p. A8; also August 12, 2013, article by Susan King.

Miami News June 26, 1953, p. 6A; November 23 1957, p. 10B

The Milwaukee Journal, syndicated article by Sue Chambers, May 1, 1954, p. 3

Muller, Eddie.  Interview on stage with Ann Blyth, Castro Theatre, San Francisco, July 6, 2006.

The New York Times, article by William Brownell, October 12, 1952, p. X5.

Peale, Dr. Norman Vincent, ed. Faith Made Them Champions (Guidepost Associates, Inc., 1954).

The Radio Annual, 1944, p. 732.

SE Entertainment blog, August 5, 2012.

Spokane Daily Chronicle, syndicated article by Dorothy Roe, July 29, 1955, p. 11.

St. Petersburg Times, syndicated article by Hedda Hopper, February 18, 1943; syndicated article by Louella Parsons April 21, 1946, p. 39.

The Tuscaloosa News, syndicated article by Bob Thomas, May 11, 1955, p 5.

Universal Studios Entertainment Tumblr site.

The Vancouver Sun, article by Clyde Gilmour, June 28, 1952, p. 45

 

 

Contest Winner...And Preview of Coming Attractions

And the winner of a paperback copy of my time travel adventure novel Myths of the Modern Man is…..

BOB!

Congratulations, Bob, and thanks so much to everybody who entered.

*******

 As I’ve been touting for a few weeks now, I’m going to be spending 2014 discussing the career of Ann Blyth, not only  her films, but also her stage work, television and radio appearances.  Here’s a preview of the intro post…


...if you know Ann Blyth only through her frothy MGM musicals, you don't know Ann Blyth.  In dramas she has morphed into the epitome of hateful, sensual, heartbroken, and shamed.  If you know her only as the demon teen Veda in Mildred Pierce, you don't know Ann Blyth.  The same colossal greedy train wreck of a girl who spit infective at Joan Crawford and smacked her in the jaw also performed a night club act to enthusiastic crowds in Las Vegas, bringing them to tears with the sentimental "Auld Lang Syne" and sang at the California state fair.  If you only know her from The Helen Morgan Story or melodramas, you are missing her genuine gift for screwball comedy.  Sinking herself intellectually, just as much as emotionally into these roles, she swims against the powerful and unrelenting current of studio typecasting.

The scene of her debut was radio variety and drama, the true child of the 20^th century that, with few exceptions, became orphaned long before the century was over.  It trained her to use her voice, not only as a singer, but as a character.
 
The first Ann Blyth essay will be posted Thursday, January 2^nd. 

This will be my last post until then, because I’ve got some other fish to fry.  So I’ll say goodbye for now, and very blessed and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and of course, a very Happy New Year to all. 

Thank you for the pleasure of your company this year.

I’ll leave you with a holiday song from Ann Blyth and Perry Como, who perform “Winter Wonderland” here on Perry Como’s TV show, broadcast December 20, 1958.

See you in 2014.

Thanksgiving Dinner Trivia & A Book Giveaway - Myths of the Modern Man

The answers to our Thanksgiving Dinner trivia photos are as follows:

A. Joanne Woodward in No Down Payment (1957) which we discussed here.
B. Alexis Smith in The Sleeping Tiger (1954) discussed here.
C. Joan Crawford and Bruce Bennett in Mildred Pierce (1945) discussed here.
D. Betty Grable in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), discussed here.
E. Curly.  The Master Chef. 
F.  Spring Byington in I'll Be Seeing You (1944) discussed here, and also here.

Thanks for playing the game.

******************

Now I have one last book giveaway for a while. This is for a paperback copy of my time-travel adventure Myths of the Modern Man. Just send me an email to JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com with the message: I WANT THE BOOK, and I'll throw your name in the hat. I'll pick the winner next Thursday, December 12th, and then I'll email the winner for the address to send the book. Nobody's email or mailing address will ever be published on this blog.

Now for a little synopsis:

A late twenty-first century time traveler battles bards, druids, warrior queens, and Roman cohorts for survival during the Celtic rebellion against the Romans in Britannia, 60 AD.

Time traveler John Moore’s fate is determined by four women: the Celtic warrior queen Boudicca; Tailtu, a gentle slave purchased from another clan; Dr. Eleanor Roberts, a severe, jealous and brilliant woman who spearheads the time travel mission; and enigmatic Dr. Cheyenne L’Esperance, herself a time traveler from an even more distant future. Moore’s mission to survive three battles against the Roman legions coincides with survival tactics and backstabbing in the modern government department. The savage past clashes swords with the desperate future in a time continuum of treachery.

The interesting (or irritating, depending on your point of view) quirk about this novel is that the chapters alternate between first person narration -- when the time traveler goes back to Britannia, and third person -- when we see the future world from where his mission is being run, and possibly being betrayed. To show you what I mean, here's a couple samples from the book. This part here is in first person. The time-traveler is telling his version of the story:


We did not speak. They wanted to kill me now that we were far from the tribe and they were free to do it, but that would no longer serve their purpose and none of them could return to the Iceni if they did. For my part, I was here because I was a liability to the Queen now that I had shamed her, so she had to get rid of me, and yet she must have felt that I was the most potentially useful member of this diplomatic corps because of my ability to see in the future. I could impress and scare Cartimandua into joining the Iceni, in a way Dubh, nor Nemain, nor Cailte would be able to impress or frighten. Boudicca was that vindictive, and that brilliant.

And now we were going off the script. Boudicca, history tells us, did not achieve an alliance with Cartimandua. History does not record that she ever sought one. But, here we were, and how much of this was due to me?

When we were approached, disarmed, and brought to the queen’s tent under guard, Dubh strutted like a man who was about to get his terms.

Three guys bigger than him pushed the moron to his knees before the queen. I smiled. Nemain dropped to his knees quite voluntary and stared obediently at the ground. Cailte and I stood quietly, calmly looking around like we were going to buy the place, and then both of us slowly knelt as casually as if we had nothing better to do. A little more solemnity by either of us and it would have appeared we were jointly kneeling to receive our marriage blessing. It sickened me to discover how much alike he and I could be sometimes.

Now I had to take something into account. If for some reason I did not get myself to the correct quadrants within southern Britannia by the end of October, which I would know because of the celebration of the Samhein, then Eleanor could not bring me back. I would be stuck here. There was a geographic element to the successful machinations of gravitational time travel, even if you were sent to a time with no atlases. Getting hung up far north of where I was supposed to be would seal my fate and keep me here for the rest of my life.

Not that I really wanted to live the rest of my life in the late twenty-first century either, where survival fell into the hands not of the fittest, but of only those who could afford it. At least here, I stood as good a chance at living as anyone else here did. We all have to die sometime. It’s how you fill up your hours in the meantime that’s the big deal.

And this bit here is in 3rd person in the futuristic lab where all this larger-than-life science/sociology is being concocted:

Dr. L’Esperance ordered Eleanor, gently but firmly, to take off her clothes.

Eleanor’s growing sense of panic reduced her ability to think clearly, and her near-hysteria took the form of a sudden helpless resignation to take orders. Eleanor undressed, wondering what she would say if General English suddenly entered the lab, but almost wishing he would, anything to delay or stop this. Dr. L’Esperance looked pleased with the tunic she lifted from the satchel in which it had been secreted to the lab and as she examined it, spoke again of Milly’s efficiency, which Eleanor again grudgingly acknowledged to herself was the truth. She had never given Milly enough credit for being a good administrative assistant. Now Eleanor was being sent to hell, otherwise known as 60 A.D., because of it. This is what happened to people who were not kind to their staff.

Dr. L’Esperance slipped the long, saffron-colored tunic of some coarse linen over Eleanor’s naked body, and gave her a gentle hug to comfort her, because Eleanor was shaking. She fastened a plaited leather belt around Eleanor’s waist to draw the baggy tunic in close to her slender waist. Dr. L’Esperance then draped a woolen cloak around Eleanor’s shoulder, and fastened it with a thin silver brooch.

“They were quite vain, weren’t they?” Dr. L’Esperance said, “They loved their finery.” She placed a torque of twisted silver around Eleanor’s neck, to mark her as noblewoman and not peasant.

“Sit down,” Dr. L’Esperance said, and Eleanor, weak with anxiety, lowered herself to a lab stool. Dr. L’Esperance cupped Eleanor’s face in her hand and began to remove Eleanor’s makeup.

“My hypothesis about the staging area for captives is based on reports from this agency,” Dr. L’Esperance continued, “For you see, after your mission failed and Colonel Moore was not returned, as a way of deflecting public outcry against the agency, a follow-up mission occurred to save Colonel Moore, to attempt to retrieve him. Of course, you did not have the electromagnetic tracking technology then, so your operative’s mission was to remain for roughly half a year and manually search out Colonel Moore or information about his final status. His return was to be accomplished through a synchronized rendezvous point, in a similar arrangement to what you had with Colonel Moore.”

Eleanor glanced up into the luminous green eyes as Dr. L’Esperance delicately wiped Eleanor’s lips.

Eleanor found her voice again. “What happened?”

“Alas, the second attempt was also unsuccessful. That operative was also lost.” Dr. L’Esperance then brushed Eleanor’s hair, and the slow, soft stroking relaxed her to the point of recalling briefly her mother and her sister in the trailer park, the only other two important women in her life, and how she hated them, wishing now it were not so.

Mesmerized, she quietly replied, “The…the only other candidate qualified at this time is Colonel Yorke.”

“Yes. Brian K. Yorke was also lost.”

“I am responsible for two deaths.”

*************************

See you next Thursday when we announce the winner of a paperback copy of Myths of the Modern Man, and for a sneak preview of my 2014 project of examining the career of Ann Blyth.

How to Make Thanksgiving Dinner

A

 

Forty-three guests for Thanksgiving and you forgot how to roast a turkey?  Don't fall apart.  Listen to me.  Here's what you do.

 

B

 

First, get a grip.  Say a quick prayer.  Or just stand there wondering what that spot on the ceiling is.

 

C

 

Get the stuff out of the fridge.  Ignore the guy who just came in the kitchen, or else put him to work.

 

D

 

Sautee the onions and celery.  Come on, come on.  We haven't got all day.

 

E

 

Stuff the turkey.  Any way you can, even if it's not pretty.

 

F

 

See?  Nothing to it.  Now go change.  And do something with your hair.  They just pulled in the driveway.

 

Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans.  Now tell me who these cooks are and from what movies?  Answers next week.











Requiescat in pace et in amore.

 

She was 34 but had the sophistication & sense of history to plan a State Funeral for all Americans #wbzat 6 pic.twitter.com/5ZdG4Y7Hof

— Paula Ebben (@PaulaEbben) November 19, 2013

Continuing our observation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, this noticed in a recent Twitter stream, tweet by Paula Ebben.   I grew up in an era when you could expect to see Jacqueline Kennedy on the cover of a magazine very often.  I don't think there was ever a photo of her more beautiful.  May she rest in peace and love.
 

JFK - 50th Anniversary - The Weekend at the Movies

 

 

Today we draw our attention to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but in terms of what our world was like with a view towards the movies that were playing in theaters at that time.

 

Most people who remember that awful four-day event of shock and mourning from Friday to Monday remember where they were and what they were doing, almost in detail.  Most, I suspect, were not at the movies.  Most were either at communal mourning services or firmly planted in front of their television sets watching a new era of chaos born from the weird and terrible string of events that occurred that weekend.  Television and radio took the lead and were the real chroniclers of our experience that weekend, not the movies, and perhaps the movies never would be again the forefront record of our popular history.  Radio and TV cancelled all regular programs and devoted the entire weekend to the national emergency and the protocol, newly learned for all of us, of national mourning.

 

 

We can see in these movie ads a lot of fluff, a lot of eager, daring attempts at sexual situations--which may seem somewhat sophomoric now, certainly more innocent than what was to come later. 

 

 

We look like a country that didn't take much seriously.

 

 

It was a world still of grand downtown movie palaces, such as the Loew's Poli in Springfield, Massachusetts.  It was a world where we still had plenty of drive-ins, though most would close in the northern parts of the country for the winter--and eventually for good.

 

 

This drive-in below even advertises electric heaters, which is a plus in November in New England, though exactly how that worked, I'm not sure.  I'd love to know.

 

There was still a Cinerama theater in Hartford, Connecticut at this time, a movie process and selling gimmick we should probably tackle someday.  As far as I know, there were only three Cinerama theaters in New England: including one in Boston, the other in Providence, Rhode Island.  If any reader can correct me or fill me in on more, please do.

 

 

For the most part, we see in these ads a lighthearted and superficial world that surely could not really have been. Perhaps we were blind to social strains and movements, a tense undercurrent that was there all along, unknown to us until we were forced to see.

 

 

 

 

If you remember what you were doing and who you were at that time, that weekend, I'd love to hear from you. 

 

 

The JFK anniversary is also discussed on my New England Travels blog this week.