Variety (Aug 1946)

VednjSBdayt Augnet 81, 1946 LITERATI 61 Unusual Column T'lc /ollotuinff copi/fiohted.column by Eleonor Roosefelt, tohich ap- ceoreii last iueefc {« the W. Y. Worltl-Teleflra??! and u'as syndicated bu ifti'i/cd Peotures, is reprinted for three reosoris: First, /or those sliou) Keople luJio raa^ mis*' it both here ond obroad; seco?id, \>eca\isf. tt is Sif/ictiit to name another promiTient woman u;ho would u'rite swch n ijffce nbout he7sel/; and third, becouse this deportnietit deems it o I'^mnrfcable coliuun by o remarfcabic looman. • ' Auto Accident By Eleanor Roosevelt 1 am sorry to have to write a different type of column frbm what T have beeit writing but, untorlunately, while driving down from Hyde Park yesterday, I must have become drowsier than I realized and, before I knew it, I had come head on with another car in a collision and then sideswiped a second one. i was terrified to think that soraer one else might have been hurt. My son's maid, whom I had in my car, was slightly injured, but r hope she will be all right in a few days. And the little grandson of another maid fortunately was not hurt. The hospital tells me that the people in the other cars were not .seriously hurt, either, but I , know what a terrible shock this mu.st have been for ah ol tliem. I have never had a motor accident before and had no idea that the sun, together with the fact that I had no one sitting by to talk to, me, could have such a bad effect in making me so drowsy, I can only be thankful to a kind providence if no one was seriously hurt. I myself am quite well, though for some time I shall look as though, rhad been in a football game without having taken any training. My " eyes'are black and blue. In fact, I am black and blue pretty much all, over. Jf I'tied a bandana around niy head', I think I would resemble soiric of the Pirates of Penzance. 1 am told that I will feel more of a reaction in the next few days, but at present I just feel that I have much to be grateful for and that what little discomfort I have should be borne most cheerfully. This accident, I am afraid, will prevent my doing a number of things which I had planned to do during the next few weeks, because I am quite sure no one would like to .see me. I am'interested to learn how many things the doctor can find to. think about when you have had an accident. There are many things that can go wrong but. thank heavens, none of them did with me. However, I had to spend three and a half hours at the dentist's this morning. A great many years ago, on the steps of the station in XJtica, when I was on my way to make a speech one wintry day, I feU and cracked both my front teeth, chipped bits off ot them. As a result, I suppose, they were fragile, and so, in this accident, they broke off about halfway up. Now I shall have two lovely porcelain ones which will look far better than the rather protruding large teeth which most of the Roosevelts have. Howevei-, three hours and a half is a'long while to spend' with the dentist under the best of cir- cumstances, and I mast go back to him tomorrow and again next week. . ■; : ' I was able yesterday to wait until I saw that everyone else had been taken care of. A very kind gentleman, Harold Godfrey, who was ■ 0)1 his way to Newburgh, turned around and took me the re.st of the ■ way into New' York. I shall! always think of him as a good Samaritan. His kindness and his efTorLs to cheer me up, by assuring me that no one was badly hurt and that the cars were not too badly damaged, were much appreciated; He was probably being more optimistic than he was justified in being. Nevertheless, it was comforting, and I; was deeply grateful. Literati UN -Scrap ■ ^ Lep Friedman, of Loow'.s, and Dick Berlin, of the Hearst organization, arc prominent in the faction fighting to keep United Nations world head- quarters away from Harrison, N. Y. The choice has narrowed down to five Westchester sites, two of whicTi are in the town of Harrison. The group, of which Friedman and Berlin are members, maintains that selection of the Harrison sites would Vmean the abandoning of 600 homes by . their occupants. A number of other Harrisonities favor letting UN move in. It promises to become quite a local scrap. Doubleday's Winnabs Doubleday's 28th annual O. Henry Memorial prize contest ended this ■week with editor Herschel Brickell and committee of judges making the lollowing awards; First prize of $300 for the best- short story, John Mayo 'Goss for "Bird Song," published in Atlantic Monthly; second prize of $200, Margaret Shedd, "The In- nocent Bystander," Harper's; third $100, Victor .UUman, "Sometimes You Break Even," Atlantic Monthly. Cord Meyer, Jr, drew special award «i£ $100 for "Waves of Darkness," a first published story in the Atlantic Monthly. .. Prize winning stories, along Avith 18 otliets, will be published tomor- row (Thursday) by Doubleday in the O, Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1946." In Brickell's in- ti'oduction he declares there are no Sign.s of a slump in the annual crop <>t short stories produceS^ for maga- zines in this country despite reports at intervals that the short story 'is decadent. ILionfbair News Montbly Columbia Concerts will launch a longhair news monthly after Labor .Eay, titled Artists Life. Mag will be nailed free to about 3,000 people, representing managers, music organ- ization heads, agencies, etc.. to bring them news of Columbia artists. Brain-child of Dorle Jarmel, press o<ipnrtment head, mag will be edited »y -Miss Jarmel and Nelson Lansdale, one time music ed of News week and Keelance. Mag, of eight pages. printed on glossy paper, will carry pix as well as new.s, plus some ad- vertising, with Columbia handling all costs. First issue will be dated September. Billy Bose's Syndication Four months after Billy Hose started his "advertorials" in the N. Y. Daily News—informative in-! stitutional ads for his Diamond Horseshoe nitery—under a $1,500 weekly ad budget, lie was signed by the Bell syndicate as a paid colum- nist. Starting Jan. 1 next his new deal guarantees the showman-col- umnist $52,000 per annum. Starting Sept, 10 next there will be no more paid ads, but his "Pitching Horse- shoes" column Avill continue to be released cuffo in 76 papers. These include sheets in Honolulu, Mexico City and Toronto. After Dec. 31 the.papers must pay for the column. I Anomaly on Rose's "advertorials" I (fashioned with an a-ssist^ from the Blackstone ad agency's Lee Rogow) has, been that sonie: dailie.s, nptaibjy the Toronto Star & Globe and the Buffalo New,s, insist now on pay- ing for its use; Rose has. referred such well-intended requests to John N; Wheeler, head of BeU Syndicate. Incidcntiill}', the showman who started as a crack stenographer, has been widely publicized as having been secretary to Bernaird Baruch but it. now develops he also was amanuensis for the same Wheeler who is now guaranteeing him $1,000 a' week for his column and Who "feels sure" Rose will make $100,- 000 a year. ' :^ PM, the first to ask for Rose's column as a syjwiicated col., albeit cuffo, will remain the lone N. Y. outlet and will match the top syndi- cation fee, says Ralph Inger.s.oll. In addition, the adless tabloid plans- a ballyhoo buildup for Rose's col. as .soon as it bows out of the News as a paid ad. Presumed that adman Rogow, if he continues functioning as Rose's columnar assistant.witl share m the syndication income. . hoo for one of its books, Prentice- Hall has lined I'p an extensive market research tost for "Miracle of the Bells,'' which is slated to run from Sept. 8, day belore publication, to Sept. 21. Publishers will .■'pend aboht $5,000 in each of three cities .on spot radio commercials, local new.spaper ad.s, etc., with one of the cities serving as si ■ cohtroi. ■ ■■■ Gii ies, pot .idgntified through fear of ruining results of the; tests,; are of ;i()0,00O population, each with the same income level and sufficiently, isolated from N. Y, and Chicago; publishing centers, so as not to be affected by the: campaigns in those cities. If the tests prove that ..expl-pitation of this type, suf- .ficiehtly -bypoes bock sales, the pub- lishers expect to up their exploita- tion budget.s on luture books to be- tween $50.000-$100,000, as compared to the present $10,00-$15,000 budgets. CHATTER Peggy laeBoutililer doing Mexico series for Holiday. Jack Lait. N. Y. Mirror editor, did an interest.irig col. on the late E. F. Albee and hi.s vaudeville dynasty last Sunday (18). ^ "Restless Road," novel by Bert R. FerriSi , vet legit slock player, to be published by Houghton-Mifflin Sept. 24, "Lucky to Be a Yankee," penned by joe: ■r)iMaggid : J)nd published by Rudolph Field, i"io'.y in its third large pi-inting, with' 46,000 copieS: sold to date. ■ . ,.: ' Florence Fisher Parry, film col- umnist of the Pittsburgh Press, in Hollywood to visit her son, David Parry, screen writer. David A. Smart, publisher of Es- quire, IS due in Hollywood to huddle with Lloyd Bacon oh the filming of Jack Moflilt's stoiv, "The Esquire Girl." Drew Pearson , pulled a new one for a newshawk by releasing the Briti.sh "top secret'' paper, on the Palestine problem to other, news- men. After, of course, he used it himself that a.m. Geflfen, Dunn & Co., parent firm of Omnibook and Book Reader maga-. zines, acquired a' large plot in the Sutton PJ. section of N, Y. for a 12- story building to liouse the^prihtirig^ and piiblishing act'-vities, ■ N. Y. news row is talking about tiiat "American postcard" version of actress Martha Hodge, in a Sara- toga Springs strawhat escapade, as shown in the first editions of the N. Y. News, but later retouched. News pix are copyrighted by the News, as an exclusive. "Quiz Book of the Seven Arts," by a couple ot radioites, Jo Ranison and Dick Pack, due off the .Summit Press around Xtnas, with illustra- tions by Leo Garei. It's a switch on the quiz books with a shQvir . biz flavor, dealing with radio,: lei^it, films, dance, music, etc. ■ ; SCULLY'S SCRAPBOOK « " « <« M « . »f By Frank Scully Boff Season Continiiecl from page 1 Pic-l'ype Ballylioo for 'Bells' Marking the fir.st u.se by a pub- lisher of motion picture-type bally- lined up for Chi spots iilone, rangr ing from the Coliseum and Medinah Temple Of Orchestra Hall and the Civic Opera Houscj which are all optimistic about the outlook despite the flood of bookings. House scale at the Opera Hou.se for A&C. wiio are out to break Bob Hope's recent record of $24,000 at the Coliseum, is $1.80 to $4.80 for Sat. mat. and evening performances Aug. 31. Booked through Music Corp. of America, it's ju.st one stop dh their two-week tour by plane for the Lou CosteUo, -Jr.* Youth Founda- tion fund. Another likely prospect is the l$pitaln.y date at the Medinah Tem- ple, a 4,000-se:ifer on the hear north side. He'll get his usual $3,500 guarantee, - plus 60'v), of . the gross, with admissiqn.s scaled: from $1.20 to $3.60. Booking was arranged by Sid Page, who has quit vaude and nitery booking- for concerts. . .Spitalny'dear is also unusual be- cause Page i.s putting It oh. iti con- junction with the ShrinerSiWho have over 12.000 members here. Public will be admitted, of course, i but the guys with Uie fezzes get first | choice, Maestro, incidentally, did $14,000 at the 12,000-capacity Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis last March 27, and is expected to better that here. He'll appear at the Murat theatre, Iiidiahapolis, night before the Chi date. Page is al.so booking Romberg, Melchibr. etc., into Cincinnati, Peoria: St. Louis, Indianapoli.s, Mil- waukee and Chi, first of the series being the Guizar .S'tand in Indianap- olis, Oct. 5. It looks like the best year in the biz to date, according to Page; and he feels it'll get better, "because the midwest is hungry for concerts." Donaskme, Wy., Aug. 17. Mark Hialiinger's mob in "The Killers" are diUcrs, and tracking: tliein. down is hard work and takes a lot of time—lots inore time, in fact, to tell it on the screen that Ernest Hemingway took to tell it in a short ..story. ,T. had ho idea it Would, work out that way. I thought that vi-sual education: had reduced to half an hour what might othcrwLse take a half a year to get over. Didn't the; Army training'films cut down the science of slaughter to a lew bold strokes? The added time is surprLsing for another reason. A couple of Gls piny important roles in "The Killers." After all that basic training they shoukt be able ,to kill people vi'ithout killing time. One of them is'Burt L;in-' caster, wh.p was a circus acrobat before he Went in the SS .division of .the Fifth Army. The other is Edmond O'Brien, who might have been a cloak- and-dagger boy the way he plays the role of an insurance dick in "The Killers,"' ■ , :' .Both of them were born iJ) New York. The bo.ss bad man, Hon. Albert Dekker: came from Brooklyn. Sam Levene, who plays a Philly plain- clothes man. comes from New York too. He and I,anoaster, in fact, legitted in "A Sound of Hunting" together. All, this sounds pretty clubby, but there's nothing clubby about the way they talk to each other in "The Killers.'' Pictures, like fiolitics. make straiige bed fellows. Revealing, as this picture does, why insurance companies track down murderers long after the police have dropped out, it is good V.E. stuff, even if it does take 102 minutes to get the lesson over. The policy boys want to get their client's money back from the surviving holdup bandits for a simple reasont If they don't do it, the insurance company will have to pay o(f and rates will go up and there's enough inflation as it is. They'd go to any lengths rather than pay off. They'd even finance, a .million* : dollar production like "The Killers"- rather than pay off,. Hon. Dekkcr's Double Life In a -way I . was 'educated by this documentaire. I hidn't the slightest suspicion that Hon., Albert Dekker headed a gang of holdup men. I thought he was Assemblyman frorh Hollywood and was helping me, Will. Rogers . and Jimmy IJoosevelt "get shady people out .of politics in sunny Califor- nia."'. In fact'at this moment Dekker is my campaign manager. I had no idea that in his spare moments he held up payrolls of hat companies whose factories, looked like a dead image of Universal studios. But I suppose I'm not the first nominee for political'office who didn't quite know where his financial support came from. Look how surprised Congressman Coffee was when he learned that a $2,500 contribution came to him from a guy for whom he had wangled a $1,000,000 contract. He never thought of it as a bribe at all. He thought it was a campaign con- • tributiori. Hon. Albert Dekker as the head of a gang of . killers. . . . It will cei> tainly be a'shock to our constituents. I'm afraid he'll have to resign , as my campaign manager. The MoU Who Talks En8:lish That Ava Gardner turned out to be the Hon. Dekker's moll surprise.? me, too, but not quite .as much as Dekker's other life. The last I heard , of her she was getting B in English at UCLA. But then I remember she's divorced from Mickey Rooney and almost divorced from Artie Shaw arid so quite plausibly could be Dekker's girl—except that I happen to know that the.Hon. Dekker has a beautiful wife and three children, and all the running around they do i.s together! ' . The re.=t of the killers, dicks, waiters, barlteepers and doormen were, like the horses m "Gotterdammerung," adequate. I rather sus,pect that Mark Heliinger will make more out of the case-history than the insurance com- . pany. Tliey recovered: 400G. He should gross $3,000,000. Gross that, is. Less taxes, Say, $200,000 het. That's okay. That's better than holding, up Ijayroll.*. operating racetracks or even playing politics. For an ex-sobber, Mark My Heliinger, he's'doing all right. ",',,Cliacu]i a,Son<irOut-, ,, That "Our Hearts Are Growing Up" and "The Killers" should exist in the same town, practically, as neighbors, one at Par and the other at Universal, reveals how broadminded Hollywood's tastes are becoming. The.se two pictures spell entertainment, but they certainly don't spell, it with the same letters. One of them seems to spell it backward. They both involve underworld characters, but Brian Donlevy and Bill Demarest in "Our Hearts Are Growing Up" seem to be more like Daddy.Long Legs than like Daddy Bootlegs, Gail Russell as Cornelia Otis Skinner and Diana Lynn as Emily Kimbrough seem to be much nicer girls than Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins. Certainly they weie more tru.sting and came out with better report cards, and not from a reformatory either. Sh, Not a S-Q-L! This picture could be killed with a whispering campaign: The code word would' be "sequel," which reduces many people from growing up to frowing up. Actually it is not a s-q-1, but one of the mo-st relaxing comedies of the year. Even after the suspense of the picture is over Billy DeWolfe manages to prolong it with a routine of a Greenwich Village hobohemian that is as hilarious and believable as Bill Fields as Micawber. Lielit Hearts and "Heavies" That hearts can grow up and heavies can show a finer side I have no doubt. Bad debts may even be forgotten in the process of a cardiac ex- pansion. But sometimes the memory of a clipping lasts a lifetime and even aftects persons who only get into the picture by association. I remenlbcr that Alfred Hitchcock had a heavy in his first hit in England named Donald Calthrop. The picture was called "Blackmail." It'.starred Annie Ondra, who later lost her identity as the wife of Max Schmcling before both of them succetsded in drowning in a sea of swastikas.: Herbert. Marshall played his first talker in this picture, too, , But our main interest was in Donald Calthrop, He, a little fox-like looking character, stole the picture and ih doing so more or less sustained the theory that blood will tell, for he was a nephew of Dion Boucicault. : He fir.st played in "A Wire Entanglement" as far back as 1906, but he still seemingly was lip to his heck in barbed wire as late as 1930. I was a material witness to, his carrying his character part from "Black- mail" into his private left—an offstage performance that really co.st the : poor innocent Hitchcock a lot of partonage because between "Blackmail" and "Notorious" nobody connected with our family cared to see a Hitch- cock picture. They brought back unpleasant associations, and who goes : to a picture for an emetic? The Bite On "Greater" The untoward incident happened at Monte Carlo about a year after Calthrop had made his hit in "Blackmail." We were honeymooning there ^ and happened to run into him on the tetrace of the casino. He took quite : a .shine to my bride. He thought she looked like Garbo, a name well- known in .show business at the time. Personally, I thought .she looked like Greater Garbo, but I was not challenging him to a duel in the sun about it. Later he phoned us that he had to see us right away; Mine. Scully did all the driving, so she went to town to pick him up and drove him to our : place. Once there he: threw-all the charm he had into the scene and put the bite on her for a mille. That's liOOO francs. - He must have had a touch, of Thurston in his makeup, for she had re- ceived only that morning a wedding present of exactly 1,000 francs! Quelle coincidence! He would wire the money back from London in two days. And that was the last my beautiful wife ever saw of her mille or Donald : Calthrop,, except for a flash of him. in the lobby of a hotel in Paris aboufi; a year later when John Emerson, Anita Loos, Walter Duranty, Harry Lachman. and your easily chumped Scullywags were meeting to go out to ' dinner. He disappeared in'the night faster than you could say "Blackmail." As a i-esult up to now I have never been able to get our little Alice to enter the wonderland of a Hitchcock picture until 1 finally got her to see : "Notorious." I think she'd okay now, but if they ever revive "Blackmail" ■she'll relapse;' :•