MAURICE de PAREE: A MAN AND HIS MUSICALS

“Perhaps the greatest movie musical of all time” — that’s what film critics like Leonard Maltin called Singin’ In The Rain (1952). If you’ve seen it, you know it’s a spoof of the transition from silent to sound films in 1928-29.

“Only in 1929 did the talkies really begin to talk–and sing–to much of America. By year’s end, nearly half of the country’s twenty thousand movie houses were wired for sound. Nine out of ten Americans were going to the movies at least once a week. Paramount was the most Continental of studios and took pride in the elegance, inventiveness, and visual dazzle of its product. With the shift to talkies, it lured name stage entertainers like Maurice Chevalier, the Marx Brothers, Gertrude Lawrence, Walter Huston, and Claudette Colbert.” –Edward Baron Turk, arts critic, educator and prize-winning author on the culture of France and Hollywood film.

This post is ‘a remembrance of sings past’ for the first-named of the above entertainers, Maurice Chevalier, who was born in Paris (Sept. 12, 1888) and died in Paris ((Jan. 1, 1972). He signed with Paramount in 1928 and came to America in 1929 to star in musicals, the first of which was INNOCENTS OF PARIS….but the second was the one that won him instant international acclaim. That film, THE LOVE PARADE, was adapted from a French play (Le Prince Consort) and starred Chevalier as Count Alfred Renard, a Sylvanian military attaché in Paris who has been ordered back to Sylvania by the Queen to be reprimanded for his scandalous affairs.

Co-starring Jeanette MacDonald as Queen of Sylvania, it was the first talkie directed by the man with “the [Ernst] Lubitsch touch.” In this scene from the show, the playboy Count plays the Queen’s frustrated gigolo:

In real life, Chevalier was far from the jaunty, insouciant character he played on stage and screen. Again quoting Edward Baron Turk: “Lubitsch understood that behind the Frenchman’s bubbly image was a troubled man. From his alcoholic father, Chevalier had inherited a predisposition to panic attacks, suicidal fantasies, and [other] disorders. Above all, Chevalier suffered from a chronic sense of inferiority.” Nevertheless, after a nervous breakdown in 1923, he went on to become the ‘Toast of Paris’ in solo triumphs at such venues as the Casino de Paris and Folies Bergère, leading to his being enticed to Hollywood before the end of the decade.

Following his great success in THE LOVE PARADE, in 1930-31 he appeared in four more films, including PARAMOUNT ON PARADE, a variety revue devised to show off the studio’s large roster of stars. But it wasn’t until 1932 that Chevalier again found artistic and box office magic in what critic Leonard Maltin called (and I agree) “One of the best musicals ever made”: LOVE ME TONIGHT. Among the many things this film had going for it was the inspired directing of Rouben Mamoulian and the glorious songs of Rodgers and Hart, including “Lover,” “Isn’t It Romantic,” and this ‘signature’ Chevalier chanson:

By the mid-1930s, his popularity in the U.S. waned, and he returned to France. He came back to the U.S. in 1947, but didn’t recover his former luster until his role in GIGI (1958), for which he received an honorary Oscar. Do you remember this Lerner & Loewe song which introduced the story of Gigi? I remember it well:

What is left but to say Happy 133rd Birthday, Maurice Chevalier….and Thank heaven for Maurice de Paree, his alter ego.

SOMETHING TO REMEMBER HIM BY

“More than [various species] becoming extinct in our time, we in the painted jungles of the theatre are also faced with our own disappearing species: charm, [which] lately has been critically outlawed on the grounds of criminal literacy. I can only shrug sadly and chalk it up as another victim of that creeping nastiness called modern civilization.” –Alan Jay Lerner, January 1974

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The above quote is from the foreword to Dancing in the Dark / Words by Howard Dietz / An Autobiography. Dietz (one of my all-time favorite songwriters) was the decades-long lyricist and librettist of 32 Broadway musicals, whose (Sept. 8, 1896) birthday the day after tomorrow, I remember today.

I suppose that I’m just an old romantic at heart,
A lover of love songs, when such songs were an art
❤️ Such that music and lyrics with taste and charm
❤️ Went Dancing in the Dark, and left arm in arm,
Alone Together, to live out a dream til death do us part?

Here, then, are three Howard Dietz songs, starting with something from Three’s A Crowd (1930), starring Libby Holman, Clifton Webb, and Fred Allen:

In his autobiography, Dietz wrote that “Libby Holman was game for anything. She was a child prodigy and had gone to law school at the age of 16 but decided that she preferred a career on the stage. Though she had studied law, she was a frivolous personality who appeared in the nude in her dressing room, and therefore had a lot of visitors.” Well, I imagine that WAS something to remember her by.

Next, we have Dancing in the Dark from The Band Wagon (1931) starring Fred and Adele (Fred’s sister) Astaire. This clip is from the movie version (1953) starring Fred and Cyd Charisse, she of the “phenomenal legs” (so pegged by film critic Pauline Kael):

Our curtain call, Alone Together, is from the 1932 musical Flying Colors starring Clifton Webb and a cast which included Imogene Coca, who seniors may remember as Sid Caesar’s TV co-star in Your Show of Shows in the 1950s:

NOTE: Pay no attention to the “Video unavailable” below, which I tried, but was unable to delete.

CHANGE OF PACE: OLD NEW ENGLAND

I have long had an interest in American history, so when I rediscovered a book of old New England houses as I was perusing my overloaded book shelves (looking for ‘downsizing candidates’), it brought back memories of several long-ago trips to and through that venerable region….and I decided to do this post as a change of pace from my usual fare.

OPEN HOUSE IN NEW ENGLAND is, for want of a better term, a biography in words and pictures of 242 houses, taverns and other buildings which were old (built 1600s to 1840s) when the book was published in 1937 — though at least one home (Longfellow’s birthplace in Portland, demolished in 1955) has since been lost to the ravages of time/vagaries of fate and progress. There is too much to cover in one post, so I will confine the following to just one of the six New England states: Maine, home of my blogging friend and yours, Rivergirl (River’s world).

Among the 22 Maine edifices listed, there are several familiar names, such as the HARRIET BEECHER STOWE HOUSE in Brunswick, Maine, which was recently restored by nearby Bowdoin College:

Here, minus the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Birthplace, are some of the other listings (alphabetically by city/town):

AUGUSTA: THE BLAINE MANSION (built 1830s, one-time home of James G. Blaine, former Republican congressman, senator, Secretary of State, and presidential nominee in the late 1800s)

AUGUSTA: FORT WESTERN (built 1754, consists of two restored block houses and original garrison house)

FARMINGTON: NORDICA HOMESTEAD (built circa 1840, home of Lillian Nordica, opera singer, the first American woman to achieve international acclaim in her field

GORHAM: BAXTER MUSEUM (built 1797, birthplace of former Gorham mayor and home of former Maine governor

KITTERY POINT: LADY PEPPERRELL HOUSE (built 1760) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Pepperrell_House

MACHIAS: BURNHAM TAVERN (built 1770) https://www.burnhamtavern.com/

YORK: THE OLD GAOL (built 1653) https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ME-01-031-0003

We end up appropriately AWAY DOWN EAST IN MAINE, recorded almost a century ago:

I HAVE KNOW IDEA

“It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.” –George Santayana

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People are ever (as in never) asking me where I get the ideas for my posts. The answer is, ideas just poop into my head….which may be explain why some people call them crap. But why should I care what “some people” say, when a philosopher like George Santayana thinks I have “a wonderful brain”? Now there’s an ideas man who knows what he thinks about…..whereas I’m a man who has know idea what all the stink’s about.

What about other men who get ideas, such as….

And then there’s this poor guy whose idea may have been a bit short of realistic, but he probably got his comeuppance before long:

If I were a Richman, I’d go with other Ideas (recorded in New Orleans in 1928):

And so I close, as I began, with a George Santayana quote — this one, on a questioning note:

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.“

Has there never been a man alive with any idea how to keep men from making war?

FREE PUN-ISHMENT HERE

“Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.” –Fred Allen, late comic & wit

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May 15 is International Pun Day. It may appear that I’m being very un-pun-ctual with this 2021 post, but would you believe I’m actually beating May 15, 2022 to the punch –so let’s not be too punctilious about my pun-date-ry, or I’ll have to charge you by the pun (though it would be worth every punny).

Now that I’ve set the stage, let’s pun with it:

Why do thieves have a hard time ‘getting’ puns?
They take things literally.

A good pun is its own reword.

I used to hate puns….but lately, they’ve groan on me.

What did newly-pregnant Lady Baker say to her pun-gent partner?
We have a pun in the oven.

The pun is write-ier than the sword.

And then there’s the store-y about the comedian who couldn’t remember punchlines, so he used cue-puns.

So….what do you want for nothing?

FOURthCOMING DAYS TO CELEBRATE

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” –quatrain from ye olde English fairy tale JACK AND THE BEANSTALK.

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I didn’t smell the blood of an Englishman, but I did smell a killer foreword to this four-poster based on the (old English fèower line) poem above. Well….maybe not exactly a “killer,” but a ‘fours’ to be reckoned with — the fours being the next four days:

August 10 – LAZY DAY
August 11 – PRESIDENTIAL JOKE DAY
August 12 – NATIONAL VINYL RECORD DAY
August 13 – BLAME SOMEONE ELSE DAY

August 10: I see no reason why I should exert myself writing about LAZY DAY. Four-tune-ately, I have a fill-in:

August 11: If Trump were still President (he did lose, didn’t he?), PRESIDENTIAL JOKE DAY would be a no-brainer. But he IS still a four-flusher, so I’ll go with an H. L. Mencken quote suggesting that such would-be [again] Presidents “be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation.”

August 12: For NATIONAL VINYL RECORD DAY, it’s only fitting that I choose a serious selection from my vinyl collection — which, lucky for us, also appeared in a 1945 film as scene here:

August 13: For BLAME SOMEONE ELSE DAY, I would blame whoever is responsible for this post, but it’s just my luck that the perpetrator happens to be me. So I blame whoever made this day fall on Friday the 13th — notwithstanding which I quote whoever said, “Friday the 13th is still better than Monday the whatever”….and today just happens to be MONDAY.

DROWN, THE CHIROPRACTOR

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” –Charles Darwin

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A few years ago, after suffering a slipped disc in my neck (which an orthopedist mistakenly diagnosed as arthritis, believe it or not), I went to a neighbor-recommended chiropractor, who successfully identified and treated the injury. I’d been hesitant to go to a chiropractor in the first place because I’d heard horror stories about such practitioners, such as Dr. Ruth B. Drown, who warranted inclusion in a book (The ENCYCLOPEDIA of LIARS and DECEIVERS) that I mentioned in my previous post.

DR. DROWN (1891-1965) was quite the quack. Case in point, excerpted from her DROWN ATLAS OF RADIO THERAPY: “Any patient who is weak and depleted should never take shower baths and stand in the water over the drain, because the patient’s magnetism is washed down with the water through the drain. Also, a weak patient, after having had a tub bath, should leave the tub and have someone else drain the water. Too many people sit in the tub while finishing the bath, and their magnetism is sucked away through the drain pipes, leaving the patient with that much less reserve.”

After years of making false claims and promoting fraudulent devices, according to the Encyclopedia, “In May 1963 the California State Dept. of Public Health deployed an undercover agent to gather evidence against Drown. The agent gave Drown blood samples from ‘her three children’ to analyse. The blood actually came from a turkey, a sheep and a pig. She also bought a Drown Therapeutic Instrument for $588. An expert dismantled the Instrument, showing that its switches, which had settings from 1 to 10, were totally ineffective: the power in the circuit was the same irrespective of how they were set.” But Dr. Drown died before justice could be served. Did Drown drown? The cause of death isn’t stated.

But perhaps Dr. Drown’s most egregious humbug was that she “also discovered a hitherto unknown cause of cancer: jazz music,” which she claimed “could be reversed by listening to more soothing music.” Fortunately, I’ve learned that it pays to seek a second opinion. I recommend….

or….

LIAR, LIAR, ROMANCE ON FIRE

I’ve been browsing through a titillating tome titled THE ENCYCLOPEDIA of LIARS and DECEIVERS, published in 2014 – two years prior to Donald Trump becoming President (which may explain why he’s not in the book) of the United States of Autocracy. This got me thinking, not about the (in)famous liars in history depicted in the dramatis personae (which may inspire a subsequent post), but about love lies and liars in song….to wit:

….which brings us to this 1940 hit sung by a very young Frank Sinatra:

We close on a most lachrymose note with this sad tale about a blackguard who burst Mildred Bailey’s bubble:

Good night.

LATTER-DAY SCAT-AWAY

In a recent series of Golden Age vocalists, my posts included such scat-singing greats as Louis Armstrong, Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, The Boswell Sisters, and the First Lady of Song (and Scat), Ella Fitzgerald. But the post-Golden Age period (post-WW era) also recorded its share of scat-singing virtuosos, led by the multi-talented Mel Tormé. Here he pays tribute to Ella (whose career, like Mel’s, spans both eras) with this scintillating rendition of Gershwin’s OH, LADY BE GOOD!

Next, we turn to “Sassy” Sarah Vaughan, whose scatting (in my opinion) takes second place to her singing….but you be the judge:

We close with, at age 84, the only living (and undeservedly most obscure) of our three latter-day scatters, Carol Sloane. Take it away, Carol!

MORE QUESTIONABLE QUOTES AND QUARRELSOME COMMENTARY

It is said that one can never get enough of a good thing….so you’ll be happy(?) to hear that I’m doing another post of “Questionable Quotes and [my] Quarrelsome Commentary.” Admittedly, it is also said that one should leave well enough alone — let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. But why should I rest on my quarrels, if many of my previous post readers voiced their opinion with Likes (unless they thought they were clicking Lies). Whatever.

Heedless to say, my followers are definitely not dogs (sleeping or sentient). The only dogs in my life are my feet, which may bark but don’t lie — if they did, I’d smell a rat, and my dogs smell ratty enough without liars….or with outliers, for that matter. Let’s make no bones about it — it’s a dog’s life.

“If a dog could talk, he wouldn’t long remain man’s best friend.” –Evan Esar

True. He would soon become woman’s best friend.

“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say “No’ in any of them.” –Dorothy Parker

Maybe she learned them all under cover.

“Those who write clearly, have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.” –Albert Camus

Clearly right. Beyond that, I have no comment.

“As an American, I naturally spend most of my time laughing.” –H. L. Mencken

My dear sir, that was B D T (Before Donald Trump). If H L M lived today, I C U (him) singing a different hymn:

“The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” –E. B. White

By all means, writer, satisfy yourself….but please don’t quit your day job unless you’re prepared to eat your words.

“A man marries one woman to escape from many others, and then chases many others to forget he’s married to one.” –Helen Rowland

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

“History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.” — Konrad Adenauer

Not to mention, the story of my life.

“Life itself is a quotation.” –Jorge Luis Borges

So, what is DEATH — the last word?