Wallace Beery and the Persistence of Rumor

The Siren can't tell you exactly when and where she first heard the rumor that Wallace Beery, the great star of such movies as Beggars of Life, Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, Viva Villa! and Treasure Island (to name just a few of her own favorites) was a murderer. She's encountered it more than once. If the Siren dug hard enough she might find that it's popped up in comments here once or twice.

Beery, whose career included many lovable oafs as well as villains, does not appear to have been especially lovable in real life. Gloria Swanson gives horrendous details of her marriage to him in Swanson on Swanson, for starters. Louise Brooks had fond recollections of Beery; Margaret O'Brien did not.

Plus, Beery looks like a brute. Looks matter everywhere, and so does image, but in Hollywood, they are close to everything. So it's not hard to see why a certain allegation, that Beery was one of three men who beat Three Stooges creator Ted Healy outside the Trocadero nightclub in 1937, gained so much traction so rapidly. Supposedly, after Healy died of his injuries, Beery was hastily sent abroad by MGM VP Eddie Mannix, and the whole matter was hushed up because the studios were so powerful.

Still, surely we can agree that no one should be memorialized as a murderer without some damn good evidence. That also goes for Albert R. Broccoli, the latter-day James Bond producer who's also alleged to have been one of Healy's attackers; and it even goes for Pat DiCicco, the third man in this fable, a Hollywood figure who was married to Thelma Todd and whose second wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, says DiCicco abused her.

That is why Larry Harnisch, of the Los Angeles Times and the wonderful blog L.A. Mirror, deserves every last eyeball his series, "The Death of Ted Healy," can get.

Here's what Larry has done:

1. He found the relevant passage about the "Beery beat Healy to death" rumor in several different Wikipedia entries. (Larry does not like Wikipedia. He has excellent reasons. The Siren finds Wikipedia useful as a starting point and not much more; Larry builds such a case for the prosecution that going forward, the Siren may not even use it for that.)

2. Larry went back to the sources cited by Wikipedia.

3. He went back to the sources that were cited in the sources that were cited by Wikipedia.

4. And then, with precision and unflagging zeal, he went to newspapers and other records from the relevant period.

Does it count as a spoiler to say that Larry demolishes this story?

The Siren urges her patient readers, in the strongest possible terms, to read these posts. Follow this link to Larry's wrapup. Then, go and click on the links to all the parts. The Siren read the material in a couple of hours. Larry starts the posts with a disclaimer that his meticulous fact-combing is "tedious." It is not; it's enthralling.

The posts do, however, show that checking up on a good sleazy Hollywood rumor is a damn sight harder than popping by a website to say "I never liked Beery in The Champ and anyway I heard he murdered one of the Three Stooges."  

Facts matter; evidence matters; history matters. But with Hollywood, more than any other topic the Siren can name, rumor and innuendo hold sway. You want to say that General XYZ once shot a lance corporal because he didn't like how the guy was standing? (I made that up, folks.) In short order a military historian will show up to say "Hold the phone, Sunshine. What's your source?" You want to say a famed director was the Black Dahlia killer? Go right ahead. You might even get a book deal. (One of Larry's projects concerns the Black Dahlia case--the facts of the case.)

Everybody loves a bit of gossip; lord knows the Siren does. Used as an aside, and clearly identified as what it is, gossip gives spice to life. But it should never be dressed up to resemble a fact. Nor does wild, unsourced gossip deserve to be the echo you hear every time a star's name is spoken, like the horse-neigh for "Blucher."

Wallace Beery: a louse and a rapist, probably. (The Siren believes Swanson.) A murderer? Not only could you not get that to hold up in a court of law, you couldn't get the attention of a halfway decent shoe-leather reporter. Who's dead drunk. On a slow Tuesday night. At the Trocadero. Sitting under a photo of Ted Healy.

Thank you, Larry.

Sweet November (1968)

So the Siren decided to plant herself in front of TCM and watch whatever was on, within reason, and what was on was the original 1968 Sweet November. Now the Siren had never bothered with this film due to her impression that it was one of those “guess you had to be there” kind of 1960s movies. She was afraid this would be the The Knack or I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. But what the Siren got was a landlocked, mod spin on One Way Passage.

Unsurprisingly, the Siren liked Sweet November a lot.

Sandy Dennis plays Sara, who meets super-cute with Charlie when she's trying to cheat on her written driver's exam. It’s Charlie (Anthony Newley, one year past being one of the only reasons to watch Doctor Doolittle) who gets tossed out. Charlie is a box manufacturer, one of several metaphors that this movie shamelessly belabors. They eat a hot dog together (sexual metaphors too). Sara asks out of nowhere if Charlie has any tattoos: “Eagles sprouting lightning, or snakes, or uh, a battleship?” Charlie responds glumly, “I’m not big enough for a battleship.”

They go to an exhibit about the wonders awaiting everyone in the 1970s (ha) and wind up at her apartment. There, Sara quizzes Charlie about his three-piece woolen personality. “Hurry-hurry, ding-ding,” she summarizes.

We know Sara is no common girl because she wears trapeze dresses and white patent go-go boots. She makes a living subletting apartments. Her own place is a Brooklyn Heights carriage house with a gazillion artsy tchotchkes scattered around and the bed swung up top near a skylight, reachable only by a sort of repurposed fire escape. Other features include an open-plan fireplace and a generous backyard. (It’s like finding a kooky bohemian who got a great rent deal on Castle Howard.)

Charlie doesn’t appreciate that fab layout, of course; he grabs the sides of the catwalk like a passenger on the sloping deck of the Titanic. Sara explains her peculiar lifestyle. She takes up men for one month only, men who seem to need her help finding their true selves. An example being the one who was “quite conservative politically. He didn't believe in foreign aid. Do you know, he wouldn't even spend money in New Jersey.”

Sara asks Charlie to be “my November”: For one month, he’ll stay with her and learn to live, live, live. Charlie will shop for mod clothes, he’ll write poetry that rhymes (Sara's hippie-ish ethos doesn't extend to free verse) and he’ll mingle with Alonzo the vegetarian sign-painter (played by Theodore Bikel, who has a special place in the Siren's heart for starring in her favorite Columbo episode).

But there’s a complication, one you can see coming. While Charlie is learning to live, he discovers that Sara is dying. He doesn’t care, he loves her — he's even learned to navigate the stairs — and he wants to stay. The scene that truly kicked the Siren in the solar plexus was when Charlie brings a huge stack of calendars, all turned to the page for November, and tells Sara it will be November for as long as they are together.

The love story is wholeheartedly sincere, which helps explain why the Siren found Sweet November so much lovelier than the frequently sour, po-faced Love Story of 1970. If you are going to make a tearjerking romance, however much comedy you put in the mix, the only way to do it is full-out. You can't play the cynic for the first reels, then hand out handkerchiefs for the remainder. One Way Passage understands this, Love Affair understands it, Dark Victory understands it, hell, even Alexandre Dumas fils understood it. This movie isn’t in that league, but it’s trying. It doesn't condescend.

Sandy Dennis, she of the one-word-forward, two-words-back vocal delivery, makes Sara's impulsiveness authentic, her implausible decisions plausible. Newley belongs to a class of actor the Siren groups under “the Pizzazz People”: performers like Mickey Rooney or Sammy Davis Jr., who have so much show-biz in them that the heart is not on the sleeve, it's planted in the middle of the forehead like a third eye. Somehow putting the pizzazz-y Newley next to the fluttery Dennis results in chemistry — the Siren truly believed this terminal girl and her box manufacturer were having a good time when the camera cut away from her bed.

Michel Legrand composed the score; in a better world, he’d do the background music for everyone's wistful love affairs. The theme song was written by Newley and his longtime song partner Leslie Bricusse, and the Siren adores every string-saturated note of it. It was shot in Technicolor by Daniel L. Fapp. No matter what you think of the movie, anyone who loves New York would have to get some pleasure out of the utterly gorgeous exteriors, so many of them long gone. This is a magical New York, like the one in Barefoot in the Park and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the streets are clean and the characters are straight out of characterville. And the movie gets another thing right. November may be gray and dull in other places, but in New York it’s dramatic rain alternating with the purest of blue skies, cool weather turning colder, but gradually. Forget spring, no New York month is more romantic than November.

There isn’t a lot of Sweet November writing out there, although the IMDB page reveals a devoted cult; one commenter recalls seeing the movie with her man just before he shipped out to Vietnam. The Siren liked Leslie Dunlap’s tribute to the original, in the course of explaining why she found the remake so dire: “I love Sweet November... I love its quirky optimism, its metaphors for sex, its trippy intimations, its flirtation with adolescent narcissism, its ending. In 1968, Sandy Dennis captured a fragile, experimental feminist moment in which heroines picked up men without a hint of fear. In the blink of an eye, that moment was over.”

Maybe the Siren wouldn't have dug Sweet November when it was released. It's such a time capsule, destined to be retro as hell from the day the cameras started rolling. 1968! they made this a year after Bonnie and Clyde, and the same year as Faces and If... and Rosemarys Baby. Sweet November is as defiantly old-school as 1968's Oliver! and The Lion in Winter (both of which, for the record, the Siren also loves). Unlike those last two, Sweet November wants to be down with the kids. It isn't — even the Jerry Wald-esque font of the credits gives the game away — but then again, as Dunlap says, it is.

The Siren has never seen the version of Sweet November from 2001, but one look at the original will tell you a remake was more doomed than Sara herself. This movie should have been left as it was, filed next to the portable 45-record player and the lace-trimmed Peacock Revolution shirt: perfectly imperfect, hopelessly old-fashioned, and utterly of its time.

June 26, 2013: Love Conquers All

"The happiest marriage I've seen in Hollywood is Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields."

--Joan Crawford (left to right, Jimmy, Billy, Joan, and Joan's husband, Pepsi executive Alfred Steele)

Manhandled (1924): The Allan Dwan Dossier

June is Allan Dwan month here in New York, and it's been a long time coming. That's him up there, on the set of What a Widow!, wearing a suit and standing next to the reflector--somewhat in the background, as he's been for too long.

The great director--"The Last Pioneer," as Peter Bogdanovich's book put it--has been dead since 1981. In the years since, he's occupied a somewhat thankless position among celebrated filmmakers. Dwan is a name recognized by most cinephiles worth their salt, but the movies he made don't have the kind of household currency enjoyed by Ford, Hawks, or any number of his contemporaries.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Gina Telaroli and film writer and editor David Phelps are here now with their project, Allan Dwan: A Dossier, a huge labor of love. It's a massive 460-page e-book (either downloadable or readable online, take your pick) that, as Gina explains in her announcement at MUBI, "contains work in 5 languages, by 39 writers, and features 41 new pieces, along with five that we're republishing thanks to some very generous authors." It is being published in collaboration with the splendid folks at LUMIÈRE.

This is the original-language version of the dossier; a full English translation will be available in a few weeks. It is available absolutely free to anyone who clicks; that is, you see, the entire idea.

In the meantime, starting tomorrow, June 5, at the Museum of Modern Art, there is a full-rigged, 35-film Allan Dwan retrospective screening all month. The Siren has a number she's planning to see. Like a lot of people, the Siren has big viewing gaps where Dwan is concerned. Gina recommends: Chances (1931), One Mile From Heaven (1937), Brewster's Millions (1945), Woman They Almost Lynched (1953), The Restless Breed (1957), and the very rare Fighting Odds (1917), East Side, West Side (1927), David Harum (1915), Stage Struck (1925), and Zaza (1923).



The Siren also has a recommendation for the MOMA series: the film she wrote up for the dossier, Manhandled. She picked that one to write about because she'd always wanted to see it, and it's marvelous. But the Siren is breathing some rarefied air with the company she's keeping via this dossier, an incredible array of film writers including Chris Fujiwara, R. Emmett Sweeney, Michael Lieberman, Zach Campbell, Serge Bozon, C. Mason Wells, Daniel Kasman and Dave Kehr; you should most definitely read everything that's been posted in English, and move on to the translations when they're online.

What follows is an excerpt from the Siren's essay, where she discusses the opening of Manhandled, which finds the shopgirl heroine Tessie enduring a subway ride as awful as any in film history. Tessie was played by the immortal Gloria Swanson. She often said Dwan was her favorite director,  and she unhesitatingly described him as a genius.

You can read the essay in full on page 111 of the dossier. At the end of the Siren's write-up, you will find a sad, but important coda about this movie; wouldn't you just know it, the Siren inadvertently chose a film that came with its own film-preservation mystery. As the years rush on, the fight to preserve artists like Dwan only gets harder, and more important.

Swaying with them against her will, Tessie does the dance of the New Yorker trying to avoid too much body contact, no matter how cramped the quarters. She drops her purse, and the men who are bookending her stoop to help her retrieve its contents. But when they reach back up for the straps, she's still got her arms looped through theirs, and for a moment she's suspended in air. Once she's back on her feet and smacking away at her gum, the movement of the car and the crowd dislodges Tessie's impossible hat, an overlarge squashy cloche adorned with what look like marbles—although they're probably supposed to be grapes—swinging from one side like the tassel on a fez. The hat falls to the ground, she does a deep-knee bend to retrieve it, and when she finally comes back up, the hat has lost its grapes.

And, for one marvelously subtle half-minute, the mood shifts. Tessie's face crumples as she looks at that hat, bereft of its ridiculous ornament. It’s clear, instantly, that the fruit was her favorite part, probably the reason she bought it, just as surely as Swanson’s expression shows that she can't afford to replace it.

Then her face regains its old hardness, she pulls the denuded hat back over her hopelessly mussed bob, and the hellish ride continues, complete with a masher all but licking his lips at her from his seat. When she tries to get off at her station, Dwan switches to an overhead shot. Perched in the rafters, poor Tessie tries to disembark and gets pushed back into the car, over and over. She can't manage to leave walking upright; she eventually has to bend over and scurry under a railing. Small as Tessie is, the subway—meaning of course New York itself—has all but brought her to her knees.

Manhattan Thoughts on a Hot Evening

Tonight I stopped by the bank after work. I was all alone in the vast lobby, except for a long wall of ATMs and one young woman in a cheap but pretty dress. As I fed my card and got my cash I realized she'd stepped back from the machine and had started crying. By the time I left she was sobbing, but her back was to me, and the body language said to this longtime New Yorker, "Back off, I don't want comfort."

So all the way home, I wondered why a girl would turn away from the ATM screen and start crying.

If it were a silent movie, she would be crying because she had no money to feed her child at home, and the social worker is about to take him away. She's wondering if she must take the Easy Way and walk the streets.

If it were a pre-Code movie, she'd have told me little Timmy, her kid brother, needs an operation so he can walk again. I'd have withdrawn the maximum and left with her saying "God bless you!" As soon as I was out of sight she'd have walked out, hips swinging, and there'd be Warren William just around the corner, waiting for her. They'd get drunk celebrating at Slim Jim's Speakeasy and laugh at me.

If it's film noir, she's crying because Dan Duryea is going to kill her milksop husband unless she comes up with 10 grand by midnight. He's not much of a husband, but he's all she's got. She walks slowly down the street, smoking a cigarette and thinking of that mean old man across the airshaft, who keeps his money in his mattress, and has no one to miss him if he's gone.

If this were an early 1960s arthouse import, she would be weeping at the futility of man's existence in a postwar world without meaning. As she left the bank, the streetlights on 6th Avenue would cast no shadow.

If it were a 1970s New Hollywood piece, she'd be crying because she finally decided to divorce her uptight, undersexed, Establishment husband, and now he's cleaned out their joint bank account. She goes home and the nebbishy guy who lives downstairs offers to share his Chinese food. They eat it out of the takeout containers, as they sit on the floor of her now-empty apartment.

If this were Manhattan in the early 1990s, as I knew it, she'd be weeping because her dealer told her that her credit is no good.

But this is New York in 2013, and she was most likely weeping because Citibank has plenty of money, and she does not.

Happy Cinco de Virginia Mayo!

From the whimsical suggestion of Comrade Lou Lumenick, who announced on Twitter a craving to see She's Working Her Way Through College, here's a little celebration of the gorgeous Virginia Mayo. A great screen moll, she was exquisite in Technicolor musicals and delightful in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which the Siren will defend to the death no matter how many times you quote James Thurber's horrified reaction at her.



Mayo was discovered by Samuel Goldwyn when she was playing in a Billy Rose revue at the Diamond Horseshoe in New York. The revue was called, and this is the sort of thing the Siren tries to remind herself of when she gets all dreamy-eyed about the golden age of New York nightlife, Mrs. Astor's Pet Horse. Sure enough, like Mack Sennett before her, Virginia Mayo was playing in a horse act, although she was the straight woman, and not playing either end of the horse. The act itself was called "Pansy." (The Siren has no more information than that, nor does she want any.) Samuel Goldwyn swept Virginia Jones, who was performing under her brother-in-law's surname of Mayo, off to Hollywood to become the next Anna Sten.

From A. Scott Berg's definitive Goldwyn, which the Siren hopes you own:

[Goldwyn] provided her acting lessons, voice lessons, speech lessons, and dance lessons. Twice a week, Hollywood's leading charm coach, Eleanore King, instructed her in posture and appearance. A nutritionist put her on a diet. A masseuse "contoured" her face after Miss King pronounced Virginia Mayo's cheeks "too fat for screen work." Goldwyn himself called her every night at nine o'clock, inquiring if she was keeping up with her lessons and if she had brushed her hair one hundred strokes.

After six months of this regimen, Virginia Mayo had improved in every department. But one problem remained. Every time a motion picture camera turned her way, she froze.

Mayo had warmed up quite a bit by 1946. And by 1949, she was positively smokin'.

"Hotcha do, Countess?"






(To celebrate the real Cinco de Mayo, do read the wonderful Bobby Rivers on La Perla, the golden age of Mexican cinema, and the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, right here.)

In Memoriam: Deanna Durbin, 1921-2013

(This, the Siren's tribute to the admirable Deanna Durbin, combines, updates and elaborates on several previous pieces.)

A curly-haired teen stands on a set, surrounded by adoring middle-aged men. She clasps her hands, and the bright eyes look upward as though asking an archangel to give her the downbeat. She opens her mouth, and out comes a soprano you'd associate with a woman twice her age and size.

This is the image of Deanna Durbin, who has died at age 91: winsome, wholesome, able to hit high C without creasing a single dress ruffle. That hasn't exactly kept her name evergreen with modern critics, who react to wholesome as Frankenstein did to fire.

“She was boring, and therefore bored, in movies,” once wrote Richard Brody of Durbin, Universal’s great star for a span that lasted from Three Smart Girls in 1936 through For the Love of Mary in 1949. But really, this will not do. You can accuse her of being tricksy, of lacking truthful emotion on screen. Like many child stars she developed a highly technical mode of acting; Jean Renoir, when he walked off the Durbin vehicle The Amazing Mrs Holliday, said she “was unable to escape from the style that made her famous.” That style, however, included excellent comic timing, an ability to seem fresh no matter how contrived the plot, and striking charisma.

Boring she was not.

Today, the best-known Durbin fact concerns not her films, but her fate. Charles David, who directed her in Lady on a Train in 1945, became her third husband in 1950, after Durbin made him promise to give her what she wanted: "the life of nobody."

Like that other immortal Hollywood walkout, Greta Garbo, Durbin's motivations may have included an ability to read the handwriting on the wall. Before 1949's For the Love of Mary was released, Universal, the studio that Deanna Durbin films once saved from bankruptcy, announced they were ending her contract due to "increasing public apathy." One imagines Durbin snapping, "Likewise, buddy."

She was the highest-paid woman star in Hollywood in 1945 and 1947; she made good investments, and her retirement was comfortable. It needed to be, as it lasted 64 years. When Durbin said goodbye to the movies, it was forever.

David, having kept his promise to his wife, died in 1999. In the early 1970s it was reported that Durbin was living in France, and that she still enjoyed singing. In 1980, tired of reading rumors that she had grown enormously fat in retirement, Durbin released a picture of herself, looking trim and polished, holding up a current issue of Life. She gave an interview to film historian David Shipman in 1983. Otherwise, Durbin refused to talk publicly to the press or anyone else about her Hollywood career, although she's said to have sent pictures to fans. John McElwee of Greenbriar Picture Shows, who calls Durbin his favorite actress along with Norma Shearer, writes that he received a "friendly" note from her dated 1/30/86. That's more than almost anybody ever got from Garbo. Durbin wasn't a hermit, it seems. She wasn't bitter. She was just through.

Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, 1936) was Durbin’s first starring role for Universal, after MGM signed her for a brief period but failed to exploit her. (The probably apocryphal legend goes that Louis B. Mayer saw a musical short subject Durbin made with Judy Garland and told his staff, "Drop the fat one"--meaning Garland. Durbin was cut instead, and wound up at Universal.) Three Smart Girls is a good-natured precursor to The Parent Trap. It's another movie that tells children of divorce, "You can get Mommy and Daddy back together! All you gotta do is reveal Daddy's girlfriend for the gold-digging tramp she is."

Durbin is the youngest of the three daughters engaged in these shenanigans, and by far the most interesting. She is occasionally too cute, too overemphatic, but when she’s onscreen, everything else recedes. And when Durbin’s gone, and she’s offscreen more than you’d expect, you miss her, despite Ray Milland’s best efforts as the heir to an Australian banking fortune. She has only three songs, the first sung in a boat sailing on a Swiss lake, the second to her father (Charles Winninger) as she’s being tucked into bed. Her voice is lovely, but neither number is a standout.

The third is. Durbin is in a police station, trying to convince the police officer in charge that she’s a Metropolitan Opera star. (If you’re the sort who insists on knowing the plot machinations that got her into that predicament, this movie probably isn’t for you.) She sings Luigi Arditi’s “Il Bacio” to the captain and two cops, and gradually the room fills with other uniformed men, all listening. By the time a man being hauled to the drunk tank tries to stop and get a listen, too, Durbin has become more than the main reason to watch the movie. She’s a star.

She was about 15 when Three Smart Girls came out, and though she's often described as a child star, her little-girl years were already numbered. She made the transition to adult roles--admittedly dulcet, charming adult roles--without much trouble, receiving her first screen kiss from Robert Stack in First Love in 1939. Stack remembered her as "completely self-contained, courteous, private, almost aloof off-camera."  On camera, her rendition of "One Fine Day" from Madame Butterfly brought both him and the crew to tears. But even in 1939, Durbin wasn't eager to stick around the studio. Stack recalled that "Deanna's penchant for leaving the set after her close-ups led to my first love scene with a blackboard."

Durbin's IMDB profile claims she was Winston Churchill's favorite actress, and that he screened One Hundred Men and a Girl after World War II victories by way of celebration. (Maybe. I have also read that Madeleine Carroll was his favorite actress, and elsewhere I was informed That Hamilton Woman was his favorite movie.) In the early 1940s, though, with or without Winston Churchill's approval, Durbin movies continued to rake it in.

The first Durbin movie the Siren ever saw was from the star's peak years: It Started With Eve. This spun-sugar, silly, irresistible 1941 comedy, directed again by Henry Koster, made the Siren a fan ever after. Charles Laughton plays Jonathan Reynolds, some sort of tycoon who's on his deathbed as the film opens. Robert Cummings, Reynolds' devoted but somewhat feckless son, wants to bring his fiancee to meet the old man, but the fiancee is out shopping and can't be found.

Since Laughton could cross the great divide at any moment, Cummings grabs a hat-check girl (Durbin) and drags her to the family mansion to pose as the absent betrothed. Well, one dose of Durbin is all the old man needed, and he recovers. The charade continues due to the fear that Laughton won't survive the shock of realizing his future daughter-in-law is really skinny Margaret Tallichet, who probably couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Durbin, on the other hand, can sing up a storm and dreams of performing at the Met. Will she get a chance to sing for Leopold Stokowski and marry the rich son? Or is it back to the hat-check counter for her? (Take a wild guess.)

The great Laughton's scenes with Durbin are the funniest ones, and they obviously enjoyed each other. (This fan site says they stayed friends until Laughton's death in 1962.) The chief flaw is that Durbin's rapport with Laughton is much greater than with her supposed love interest. It isn't even that she and Robert Cummings lack chemistry, it's that they barely have enough screen time to get acquainted.

Still, the script was by Norman Krasna and Leo Townsend, and it has the same verve Krasna showed in Wife vs. Secretary and Bachelor Mother. When the doctor finds a forbidden cigar in Laughton's room, Durbin says "Don't look at me, I smoke a pipe." Cummings visits Durbin in her cluttered walk-up and remarks, with no conviction whatever, that it's a nice place. She responds, "Uh-huh. On a clear day you can see right across it."

It Started With Eve, and Durbin herself, always make the Siren wistful for the golden age of American middlebrow culture. Exact dates for this vanished era depend upon which old fogey you're reading, but Durbin singing a pop version of the waltz from Sleeping Beauty is a perfect example. She belonged to a time when educated people were expected to cultivate a taste for classical music, and that music permeates films from the 1930s all the way through the 1940s. Leopold Stokowski and Jascha Heifetz are name-checked in Eve, and the audience would have recognized the names, even the faces, as quickly as they'd have spotted Benny Goodman.

As that era receded, the sight of a pretty young woman singing opera's greatest hits became quaint, and so did Durbin's films. The voice, which made her a star, later made her a relic.

The restlessness set in. By the time she made Lady on a Train, in 1945, she had already tried, and failed, to alter her typecasting with Robert Siodmak’s fervidly sexed-up noir, Christmas Holiday (1944).

Nowadays this is the Durbin movie to cite approvingly, if you are a hip cinephile type, and it is easy to see why. Aside from the kind of auteurist cred that you just don't get from Henry Koster, Christmas Holiday is impeccably twisted. Siodmak and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz take every last one of the fans' expectations, and back over them with a Mack truck. Erstwhile maiden Durbin shows up about 15 minutes in, wearing a black halter gown cut from here to eternity in her role as a barely disguised prostitute. Gene Kelly plays a psychopath, "mother-fixated" which, as David Ehrenstein points out, once was code for homosexual--as if all the delicate talk of Kelly's problems and his mother's hopes that marriage will "fix" him weren't tipoff enough.

The "holiday" of the title is soldier Charlie's (Dean Harens) last leave before heading for the battlefield. Charlie is on his way home, quite possibly with plans to kill the fiancee who's married another guy. Christmas comes into play at a gleaming, moving midnight mass where Deanna breaks down into sobs at the intonation of "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Durbin also sings Irving Berlin's exquisitely romantic "Always" like a death march.

The narrative structure swerves around even more than Mankiewicz's screenplay for Citizen Kane. The first flashback shows the wreck of Durbin's marriage and the next shows its beginnings, then we leap back again to show the consequences. The Siren's favorite moments are the sequences on the staircase of the New Orleans mansion Durbin is sharing with Gene Kelly and dear old mom, Gale Sondergaard. As Durbin cleans house in whistle-while-you-work style, chirping up and down the stairs and peering in the window, she gradually realizes that Sondergaard is concealing a murder for Kelly.

It's a real poisoned candy-cane of a movie, and therefore wonderful, but the Siren eventually began to wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to alienate everyone, it is that perverse. It's never been on video and--go figure--it never became a holiday TV staple alongside The Littlest Angel and Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, to name two that bring the Siren to what Ehrenstein calls the true holiday spirit of "suicidal despair."

Durbin must have had some despair herself. Against all expectations, audiences dug the new her. Christmas Holiday made money. Ticket buyers were fine with a slutty-but-repentant Durbin; critics, not so much. ("Imagine a sweet school girl performing the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain!" protested Bosley Crowther.) Sometimes Hollywood's adherence to the tried and true defies not only logic, but its own box-office results. Universal scurried back to the old formulas. By most accounts, it was at this point that Durbin lost whatever interest she'd had in "that asshole business."

Despite Durbin's increasing distaste for her persona and her career, Lady on a Train is delightful. Usually described as a whodunit, it’s more of a farce, the presence of Edward Everett Horton being a huge tipoff. Durbin plays Nikki Collins, a San Francisco heiress who witnesses a murder as her train pulls into Grand Central. With the kind of logic common to Durbin plots, Nikki drafts her favorite mystery author (David Bruce) to help her track down the killer. This is a movie where a single conk on the head can knock a man out cold, only to have him revive minutes later, perfectly able to say something funny. Dan Duryea gets to be menacing and Ralph Bellamy shows up to fail at getting the girl. (Bellamy also has a line toward the end that’s as clear an incest implication as I’ve heard in any movie from that era, and that was, I must say, unexpected.)

Charles David’s direction is able, at times even surprising. The best visual moments include a noirish take on Durbin’s singing of "Night and Day," where’s she shot through a net, and an equally noir-looking scene where Duryea chases Durbin through a shipyard’s storage area, the hills of grain looking even more dangerous than Duryea.

Also interesting, and deeply strange, is the scene where Durbin sings “Silent Night” on the telephone (this is another Christmas-set movie). She lays down on the bed, her hair fanning out on the covers, and sings into the telephone, her expression and the lighting and framing no less romantic than Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know” on the phone in Hello, Frisco, Hello. The weird part isn't that the character is crooning a hymn; it’s that her father's on the other end of the line.

Elsewhere Durbin plays with wit and spontaneity, whether she’s shushing a pair of mastiffs, posing as a nightclub singer or handing Horton a ice bucket for a black eye he got while trying to keep her in line. She never looked prettier, either; her future husband shoots her like a man who knew what kind of a jackpot he'd hit.

Deanna Durbin once said her screen persona "never had any similarity to me, not even coincidentally." Perhaps. Post-retirement, no writer ever got close enough to her to find out. The Shipman interview does suggest that the serene self-confidence of Durbin’s characters was consistent with her personality off-screen. The Siren would love to believe that the poised, vivacious woman in Lady on a Train was some part of Durbin herself, the part that decided life away from Hollywood would, after all, be a happier ending.





(The pictures of Durbin in pajamas with future husband Charles David, on the set of Christmas Holiday with Robert See-odd-mack and the final shot are all from Deanna Durbin Devotees. There are many who will always love her.)

The Love Song of Samuel Hoffenstein: Coda

THIS, via the ever-obliging Yojimboen, is Samuel Hoffenstein. Pretty much exactly how one feels he should look.

The response to the Siren's first piece on Hoffenstein was delightful. Particularly touching was how, spurred no doubt by the deep feelings engendered by "Maid of Gotham" and "The Shropshire Lad's Cousin," people went and found out stuff. Longtime Siren commenter Jeff Gee pointed out (as the Siren should have) that the Internet Archive has a nice selection of his poetry. Jeff also mentioned that David Cairns of Shadowplay already had a Hoffenstein tag going.

The wonderfully named T. Migratorius came up with a map of Hoffenstein's Manhattan migrations:

FWIW, since he was so elusive, I thought I would look him up on Ancestry.com. Not much there, but some New York locales in his history may make the Siren feel even a bit closer to him.

Ancestry has his June 1917 WW I draft registration card showing him, at the age of 26, employed in "theatrical publicity" and officing at the Eltinge Theater. (I looked it up. It was at 236 West 42nd Street and "now survives as the facade and lobby of the AMC 42nd Street Movie multiplex." Yes, just part of the theater was moved to a new location.)

His entry in the 1930 Census shows him living at an apartment house at 501 Lexington Ave. (now the Hotel Roger Smith) with a wife, Edith. Edith was roughly 7 years Samuel's junior and born in Oklahoma. One wonders how they met.

In the 1940 Census, the last before his death, he was living on Thayer Avenue in Los Angeles, alone with two servants.

What about Edith? The only other thing I found for her was a passenger list from 3/18/31 showing her as a Los Angeles resident traveling from Agua Caliente, Mexico to San Diego. A Mexican divorce, perhaps?

The Siren should have guessed there was an Edith, somewhere.

I've been in love a dozen times,
And fashioned several thousand rhymes;
For love I've suffered much, indeed,
And rhyming makes my spirit bleed;
And yet, I have unhappy times
When I am out of love and rhymes.

Whereupon Samuel Wilson came up with the denouement:

Google News Archive sources indicate a 1938 divorce, Edith citing mental cruelty. A UPI article quoted a poem reportedly written after their honeymoon and dedicated to Edith:

When you're away I'm restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected.
Only here's the rub, my darling dear.
I feel the same when you're here.

The Siren didn't intend to crowdsource Hoffenstein, but she is glad she did.

And she herself has further findings of a Hoffenstein nature. The Siren was walking through her living room when she glanced up at a shelf filled with books placed there solely for the beauty of their spines. And immediately the air around the Siren turned blue with her curses, because she realized: "@#$%, I've @#$%ing forgotten Salka Viertel."

Salka relaxes with Sergei Eisenstein on the beach in 1930. Replaces another photo circulating as Salka with Garbo, that is not. Kindly identified for the Siren by Donna Rifkind, whose book on Salka will arrive in 2020.

Salka truly deserves her own post one day, so the Siren will keep this brief. The book is The Kindness of Strangers, Viertel's memoir, which the Siren hasn't re-read in years. Born Salomea Steuemann in Sambor, now part of Ukraine, Salka grew up in a well-to-do and cultivated Jewish family. She married the director and screenwriter Berthold Viertel, whose writing credits include Murnau's Four Devils and City Girl. She had three sons, including Peter Viertel of White Hunter, Black Heart fame. (Peter also married Deborah Kerr, thereby becoming the envy of the world.) Salka moved to California with her family in 1928 for a four-year stay that wound up lasting the rest of her life. She met Greta Garbo and they became friends, perhaps more than friends. She wrote movies for Garbo that included Queen Christina, Anna Karenina and Conquest, and Salka even had a part in Anna Christie. She also co-wrote Deep Valley, a very fine movie.

Salka's home in Santa Monica became a magnet for the European expat community. As the Nazis gained more and more power, Salka tried to help people get out. The glitter and genius of the people surrounding Viertel was astonishing. To read this memoir is to encounter casual sentences like, "It is unpardonable of me not to remember on what occasion I was introduced to Thomas Mann." If you were a European-born intellectual in Los Angeles in the 1930s, you knew Salka Viertel.

So you see why the Siren's first action on taking The Kindness of Strangers down from her shelf was to gently hit herself in the head with it.

If the book has a major flaw, it's the lack of an index, so the Siren flipped to the Hollywood chapters, and way towards the back, in seconds, here's what was found.

I no longer saw those who still represented glamorous Hollywood. Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Hoffenstein died that same year. Embittered, disgusted with Hollywood, post-war Germany, and the whole world, Sam rarely left his house. From time to time he would ask two or three intimate friends for dinner, usually a young screenwriter Elisabeth Reinhardt (no relation to Max) and me. The evening would start with martinis, of which Sam took too many; then he made us laugh with his outrageous blasphemies, uproarious improvisations and solemn Hebrew incantations. Then, invariably, he would become 'Swiftian,' aggressive and bitter, and abused everyone and everything. One morning Elisabeth rang me, in tears. Sam had phoned her at four in the morning, asking her to come; he was alone and feeling ill. When she arrived he was slumped at the telephone, dead. It was a great loss for us all.

"After so many deaths the last/ Is only the locking of an empty house," Hoffenstein wrote in Pencil in the Air. We still don't know his cause of death, but it seems heartbreak became literal. Viertel, who writes of how the Holocaust survivors she met haunted her, and whose own brother was murdered by the Nazis, understood.

If there's one unassailable fact that the Siren has discovered about Hoffenstein, who remains mysterious to her, it's that his humor was hard-won. The best wit is never the product of a light mind; it's a conscious choice made by someone who sees things with harrowing clarity:

Talent in evil
Ends on the gallows,
But genius in evil,
Avoids the shallows,
Rides currents high and free
And fashions heroes for humanity.

The Siren didn't want a death scene to be her last glimpse of a man she had taken to heart. Stubbornly she scanned each page in The Kindness of Strangers, hindered not only by the lack of an index but by Viertel's habit of referring to everybody by their given name; do you realize how many people were named "Sam" in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s?

There's only a handful of other mentions. Viertel quotes Hoffenstein's opening "Proem" from Pencil in the Air: "Wherever I go/ I go too/ And spoil everything." And this, from shortly after she met him:

Often I wondered how this Chassidic soul landed in Hollywood, but he made a lot of money. Hoffenstein's two volumes of verse, one called In Praise of Practically Nothing [sic], had had great success and become very popular. Today, I am afraid, not many people remember them. Expressing himself in exquisite English, slightly tinged with an Irish brogue, he would surprise one by bursting into a Yiddish song or Kol Nidre and other Hebrew prayers. When intoxicated, he would improvise for hours in verse which, unfortunately, he forgot next day.

Kindness of Strangers was published in 1969, so alas, Hoffenstein was already becoming obscure by then. And it seems possible that his ode to Gloria Stuart's "Goose with Kirschwasser Aspic" was forgotten once he sobered up the next day:

I won't get up tomorrow,
Or go to bed tonight,
Unless I know the red wine
Is standing by the white.

Oh, I want the red wine,
And I want the white,
Or I'll sleep with my clothes on
Until I look a sight.

That bit is from another Edna St. Vincent Millay parody; Edna really got it in the neck from Hoffenstein. But did you spot the real mystery?

"Irish brogue."

Irish WHAT? Where did he pick that up, in Oklahoma when he met Edith? Although it does shed some light on "You've Got to See Mamma Every Night or You Can't See Mama at All (Mr. John Millington Synge interprets an American theme)".



The Siren has saved the best for last. It may, in fact, be the best picture she will ever get of what it meant to be Samuel Hoffenstein, or any other screenwriter, in Hollywood.

Viertel met him when she was working on a script for Garbo then called Marie Walewska, the story of the affair between Napoleon and a Polish countess. It later became Conquest. Viertel's script, co-written with S.N. Behrman (another brilliant "Sam") had run aground with MGM producer Bernard S. Hyman, who didn't like it and wanted it rewritten. Hyman called Viertel into a meeting.

'What do you think of Sam Hoffenstein?' he asked.

'Very highly. I love his poetry.'

'He is reading your and Behrman's script.'

A few hours later Hoffenstein burst into my office waving the blue-bound script and shouting: 'This is the best screenplay I've ever read. It's brilliant--I could not put it down! Congratulations! Where is Behrman? I must send him a telegram.'

Gottfried heard his shouting and came in. [Gottfried Reinhardt, son of Max, was Hyman's assistant and like most other European expats was a friend of Viertel's.] Hoffenstein repeated what he had said to me, adding more flattering adjectives and suggesting that we all go to Hyman. We had to tell him that not a word of the screenplay should be changed. I said that as I was involved it would be much better if he and Gottfried went alone. Ten minutes later Goldie, Hyman's blond secretary, called and said I should come to his office.

Bernie was sitting behind his desk, two girls in white uniforms attending to him, one to give him a manicure, the other a scalp treatment. He looked gloomy. 'Sam says he likes the script as it is.' Not reacting to Bernie's statement, I asked the girl who was rubbing his scalp if she could grow hair on bald spots. 'Positively, yes' she said. Bernie, now more cheerful, launched into a long explanation. He had not said 'Positively no.' He admitted that there were some good scenes and lines in the script, but it had 'no heart.' It was sophisticated and cold. It did not make you cry. When 'that man' was all alone on St. Helena--he meant Elba--waiting for 'his Empress,' and Marie arrived instead of her, 'this should bring tears into everyone's eyes.' I said that what we wanted to show was Napoleon's growing megalomania, his ruthless use of the Polish Legions without any intention of restituting their country, and Marie's disillusionment with the man she worshiped, her realization that he was an egotistical monster but whom she could not cease loving.

'If you want to feel sorry for Napoleon then let Garbo play him,' suggested Hoffenstein.

But Bernie said sternly: 'I want this film to be the best Garbo ever made,' and went off to lunch in the executive dining room.

Hoffenstein, Gottfried and I left the studio and drove to the 'Little Gipsy,' a Hungarian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. After two martinis we felt much better and were more inclined to listen to Gottfried's analysis of Bernie's psyche. There was no use resisting: the script would be rewritten even if William Shakespeare had been its author. It was imperative for Bernie's ego to start from scratch, because that way he could get used to the story and the characters, and this always took a great length of time. 'For you and Sam and Salka,' he went on, 'it will be leisurely work, pleasant, because you like each other and Bernie is a nice man. I am sure that you can save many scenes from the Behrman script, as in the course of time Bernie will become convinced that everything has been invented under his guidance. This may seem cynical to you and a waste of money, but that's not your responsibility. The more Bernie spends, the closer he is to becoming an executive. On the other hand, if you refuse the assignment, somebody else, much less scrupulous, will tear down Berhman's and Salka's script, and suggest another story, which Garbo will reject, and we'll have to start all over again!'

'Gottfried is right,' said Hoffenstein, and called for the wine list.

The Love Song of Samuel Hoffenstein

The Siren likes screenwriters; she's said that before. But there's one screenwriter she never knew had anything to do with the movies until the wonders of the Internet told her so some years back: Samuel Hoffenstein. Hoffenstein was, to the Siren, a poet. A funny poet, which is an uncommon gift.

Long ago the Siren bought a thrift-store copy of Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, copyright 1941, originally published in 1928. Right away, the Siren felt the lure of a kindred spirit.

I'd rather listen to a flute
In Gotham, than a band in Butte.

We understood each other, Mr. Hoffenstein and I.

Now, alas, it is too late
To buy Manhattan real estate,
But when my father came to town,
He could have bought for fifty down,
And I should not be where I am:
Yet does my father give-a-damn,
Or ever say, "I'm sorry, boy,"
Or looking at me, murmur, "Oy"?
He does not grieve for what I've missed,
And yet I'm called an Anarchist!

The poems are both louche and nerdy, a combination the Siren finds as irresistible in art as she does in life. Exhibit A is a section called "The Mimic Muse": parodies of other poets, executed with the kind of precision that comes only from knowing what you're mocking really, really damn well. Here we have a favorite, "Miss Millay Says Something Too":

I want to drown in good-salt water,
I want my body to bump the pier;
Neptune is calling his wayward daughter,
Crying 'Edna, come over here!'

It's not Keats, but all the same, the Siren loves this book dearly. It has that devil-may-care Jazz Age vibe, described so well by Raymond de Felitta as "a jangly, up and down and extremely kinky sense of reality."

Some years later, upon the advent of Google, the Siren looked up Hoffenstein and discovered his other career as a screenwriter. A darned impressive career, at that.

And so the Siren loped off to find out more about Hoffenstein and found...

Nada.

All right, that's an exaggeration. The Siren found the filmography and several tributes to the man's poetry. She read his Wikipedia stub, which says that Hoffenstein was born in Russia in 1890, the child of Lithuanian parents. The Siren had long ago taken a flying deductive leap and decided that the name is Jewish, and one does not have to have an overly active imagination to come up with reasons why a brilliant young Jewish man would leave Russia in the first part of the 20th century to come to the U.S. He wrote for Vanity Fair, among other outlets. Wiki claims that in addition to co-writing the book, Hoffenstein helped compose the music for the Broadway version of The Gay Divorce, a claim of which the Siren is skeptical considering the credited composer is Cole Porter, but hey, maybe. He moved to Los Angeles in 1931, wrote many screenplays and was nominated for an Oscar for Laura and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No marriages mentioned, no kids recorded. Hoffenstein died much too soon, in 1947. The Siren can't tell you what killed him.

Any photos? Just this one, on this Website, date unknown, although the style and his evident age suggest early 1930s. If indeed this is Hoffenstein, he seems to have a bit of a self-dramatizing streak, as befits a poet. Oh no, wait; it's Maurice Chevalier. Would that amuse Hoffenstein, or annoy him no end?

The Siren went to her old friend City of Nets, and found this marvelous story about Hoffenstein's first screen credit, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Once the contracts were signed, Hoffenstein set to work writing a script, and Dreiser, who had discovered a new girl, set off with her for Cuba, leaving no forwarding address. When Hoffenstein finished his script and wanted to get Dreiser's approval, Dreiser could not be found. Paramount sent out official notices that filming would soon begin. Dreiser reappeared in New Orleans, and denounced all previous correspondence as 'the usual Hollywood swill and bunk.' He demanded the right to discuss Hoffenstein's script. With some trepidation, Hoffenstein sent his screenplay to New Orleans and asked if he could meet Dreiser there. 'IF YOU CAN DISCUSS THIS AMICABLY OTHERWISE NOT,' Dreiser wired back. Amicable as could be, Hoffenstein flew to New Orleans, to find at his hotel a note from Dreiser saying that the script was 'nothing less than an insult,' and that 'to avoid saying how deeply I feel this, I am leaving New Orleans now without seeing you. You will understand, I am sure.'

Hoffenstein understood. Paramount understood. The studio went ahead and started making the movie.

This told the Siren that Dreiser, whose Jennie Gerhardt she read in college convinced that the man wrote prose with the express intention of killing her, was at one point trying to kill his screenwriters too. But the anecdote told her little about Hoffenstein, other than that he must not have been the type to get discouraged about a little thing like a famous author throwing a hissy fit over your screenplay of his book.

The Siren combed through the rest of her film books. No luck.

The Siren ordered The Complete Poems of Samuel Hoffenstein online. When it arrived she tore into the padded envelope, convinced there'd be a magisterial introduction that would tell her about Russia and whether Edna St. Vincent Millay was p.o.'d about "The Mimic Muse" and which uncredited lines of The Wizard of Oz were Hoffenstein. The Siren cracked open the book to find--you guessed it--nothing. It's a Modern Library edition. They're wonderful books, those old Modern Library hardcovers, light and perfectly sized. But they're no-frills, and usually no intros, either.

The sensible approach was the library, of course, but the Siren isn't always sensible. Now in possession of a book that included two later poetry volumes, Year In, Year Out and Pencil in the Air, the Siren was more inclined to let biographical criticism run riot. The poems were so blatantly personal that it was more fun, and more romantic, to piece Hoffenstein together line by line. For example, he was definitely Jewish, and wrote several melancholy poems about life back in Russia and as an emigre.

A tree that walked, but never grew,
A living semblance, but a Jew,
Lost in the United States,
Lost behind the Ghetto gates,
No bird yet wingless, lost in air,
Alone and alien everywhere.

And he also (rather startling, this next bit) probably converted to Christianity.

Now I am a large and mellow,
Mild and philosophic fellow,
Of amiable thought and speech,
Sweetly disposed toward all and each,
A stanch disciple of Saint Paul,
A friend of sparrows as they fall...

He still got a kick out of teasing his poetic betters, with a 9-page, er, tribute to T.S. Eliot:

Hula, hula,
Hula, hula.
Old Mother Hubbard she made my bed.
But what good is it
Since Ivan the Terrible
The Brooklyn Bridge
And Staten Island
Fell on my head?

Hoffenstein has many poems devoted to liaisons with women, who drove him crazy

Lovely lady, who does so
All my waking haunt,
Tell me, tell me, do you know
What the hell you want?

and of whom he didn't have a terribly high opinion.

She walks in beauty, like the night
And so she should, the parasite!

By the time of Pencil in the Air, he's sadder and more serious. He writes a lot about insomnia

At night, when you should sleep, you can't sleep yet;
By day, when you shouldn't, you laugh at sheep yet...

and illness

I paid my taxes, I got sick.
The doctor said I was going quick
Of double multiple complications,
Confirmed by seven consultations.

and postwar despair.

Fear not the atom in fission;
The cradle will outwit the hearse;
Man on this earth has a mission--
To survive and go on getting worse.

Yet his filmography seems to show continuing success. And Hoffenstein was a practical sort, as poets go.

Tax me not in mournful numbers,
Come and make a total haul,
For the residue that slumbers
Is no good to me at all.

Pencil in the Air does find him finally commenting on his day job, as it were, and he felt as deeply appreciated as most screenwriters do. From "The Notebook of a Schnook":

So what happens? The usual factors--
The studio simply can't get actors,
Directors, cutters, stagehands, stages,
Or girls to type the extra pages:
The way it ends, to put it briefly,
Is what happens is nothing, briefly.

Unfortunately, none of this nailed down what the Siren wanted to know. Look at that filmography, studded with so many witty, sophisticated films: Desire. Tales of Manhattan. Lydia (the Siren adores that one). Cluny Brown.

But these are co-writing credits, and it's hard to find out which part of a screenplay came from which writer, even if it's as celebrated a duo as Brackett and Wilder. Maybe one wrote a line, and the other edited it, or flipped it, or gave it to another character. Maybe they passed the pencil back and forth a lot. Who could tell the Siren which part of a Hoffenstein screenplay was Hoffenstein? Did the man who wrote

Maid of Gotham, ere we part,
Have a hospitable heart.
Since our own delights must end,
Introduce me to your friend.

come up with this exchange in Love Me Tonight:

Jeanette MacDonald: What are you doing now?
Maurice Chevalier: I'm thinking. I'm thinking of you without these clothes.
Jeanette MacDonald: Open your eyes at once!
Maurice Chevalier: Oh no, pardon madam. With different clothes. Smart clothes.

Years after imagining A.E. Housman's doleful mien at the circus

I think of all the corpses
Worm-eaten in the shade
I cannot chew my peanuts
Or drink my lemonade.
Good God, I am afraid!

was Hoffenstein the one who had Charles Boyer tell Jennifer Jones, "In Hyde Park, some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels. But if it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am I to say nuts to the squirrels?"

At last the Siren checked out a database to which she has occasional access, and found a Toronto Star article from 1993, about Laura, Hoffenstein's second Oscar-nominated screenplay. The Siren knows some people don't like Laura, but as for her, it's the only Otto Preminger joint she'll drop everything to see once more. And no wonder.

Preminger remembered that Samuel Hoffenstein was imported to pep up the script. Hoffenstein practically invented the part of Waldo for Webb (adding lines like "sentiment comes easy at 50 cents a word!").

Hoffenstein was a contemporary wit of Alexander Woolcott's at the famous round table luncheons in the 1920s.

Aha! So if he wrote Waldo's part as we know it, that means Hoffenstein came up with most of the movie's best lines. And indeed, the Siren can hear it:

"I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves."

"Laura, dear, I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don't come with me this instant I shall run amok."

"My dear, either you were born in a extremely rustic community, where good manners are unknown, or you suffer from a common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct."

"Ordinarily, I am not without a heart...Shall I produce X-ray pictures to prove it?"

And a key scene of Laura takes place at the Algonquin, the Siren's favorite place for a quiet drink these days. Hoffenstein at the Round Table? He must have fit right in.

A delighted Siren continued, but found only one other article that didn't discuss Hoffenstein as a talented purveyor of light verse and oh-yes-he-wrote-screenplays. Still, the article was a good one: The Los Angeles Times, from 2000. Sylvia Thompson discusses the dinners her mother made at the Garden of Allah villa complex in the early 1940s. Her mother was Gloria Stuart, her father was writer Arthur Sheekman, and the guests often included Groucho Marx, Julius Epstein and Humphrey Bogart. And one more:

Cooking for writers could bring special rewards. Samuel Hoffenstein, writing the screenplay for Laura with his true love, Betty Reinhardt, composed a poem to Ma's "Goose with Kirschwasser Aspic."

The Siren at last had a scene starring Hoffenstein the man, even if it was a cameo. Enjoying himself at a wartime dinner party, composing a poem for the hard-working hostess--Kirschwasser aspic, wonder how he rhymed that. Hoffenstein would only be alive for about three more years, but he and Betty Reinhardt created the Laura script together, and Hoffenstein put Waldo's best lines on the page, and they were in love.

Of course, Hoffenstein's poetry and Hoffenstein's screenplays--no matter which lines of the latter you attribute to him--are pretty cynical. He had a sophistication that said there's no such thing as happily ever after, kiddo, so happy right now better be good enough. Laura's a fleshly movie, there's depravity in the romance--all those heedless, dissolute people rattling around the penthouses.

And if you think finding out stuff about Samuel Hoffenstein is hard, just try looking up Betty Reinhardt. Who knows, thought the Siren, maybe that affair was over as soon as someone on the Laura set called, "that's a wrap."

No--she double-checked the filmographies--surely not. All of Hoffenstein's subsequent screenplays were written with Reinhardt. Together they wrote the adapted screenplay for Cluny Brown, with its exquisitely funny declarations of love: "I would build you the most beautiful mansion, with the most exquisite and complicated plumbing. I would hand you a hammer, and say 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Madame Cluny Belinski is about to put the pipes in their place.'"

By the time they wrote that movie, Betty was credited as "Elizabeth Reinhardt." The Siren pulled out her introduction-less Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry of Samuel Hoffenstein, and turned to the title page for Pencil in the Air, published in 1947, just after he died.

There it was below the title: "To Elizabeth."

In Memoriam: Annette Funicello, 1942-2013

"She's the perfect girl next door, she doesn't have a bad bone in her body. She's the sweetest girl I know, and nothing's ever changed."

—Frankie Avalon

"Even sitting in a wheelchair, life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful."

—Annette Funicello

The Siren isn't much for 1960s beach movies, but she always feels a pang when a truly sweet soul has passed on.

(Both quotes from Swingin' Chicks of the 60s.)

In Memoriam: Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

As certain critics age, they seem to drag around years of bad movies like ankle chains. They remind me of Gothic heros, betrayed lovers convinced virtue never existed at all. Once long ago these critics were hurt by a movie, oh yes, many movies, and now they say to each sweet young prospect, "You cannot deceive me! I know what you are!"

Roger Ebert wrote some of the most bitingly funny pans of all time, but he never went that route. He was writing raves right up to the end. Each movie held the possibility of love. He was a true romantic.

Here's how I recall an old "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno where Ebert appeared with Gene Siskel. Like many other people, I grew up with those two bickering in the balcony. Leno had the bright idea of putting soundproof headphones on one critic, so the other could tell the audience what he really thought of his partner. Ebert went first with the headphones. He put them on, paused a second, and with a grin of delight said, "Mozart!" And his hand started beating out a little conducting session.

Leno asked Siskel, so what do you really think of this guy? And Siskel replied calmly, "First of all, I'm a much better critic than he is." The audience roared. Leno cracked up. Even with headphones on, it should have been obvious to Ebert that something was up.

Except he was still conducting. I'm not even sure he turned his head. He was listening to Mozart. Art mattered to him.

Many film writers owe a debt to Ebert. Mine comes from what must have been a 1983 "At the Movies" broadcast. He and Siskel were doing a rundown on the Academy Awards, one of those "If We Picked the Winners" shows.

I don't remember Siskel's choice (although it might have been E.T.). But Ebert chose Tootsie. "It's an almost perfect comedy," he said. Gandhi was going to win, he predicted, "but which movie do you think you'll still want to see in 20 years?"

My kid mind reeled. I'd seen Gandhi, and I'd seen Tootsie. I loved Tootsie, but it was about Dustin Hoffman in drag. Gandhi had Ben Kingsley. Bald Ben Kingsley. With an accent. Bald Ben Kingsley getting assassinated. Gandhi was--OK, it was stuffy. But it was serious. That's what wins Oscars. Right?

In roundabout fashion, Roger Ebert had introduced me to the notion of white elephant art, years before I ever heard the name Manny Farber. He'd also planted the idea that if you had a blast watching a movie, that alone meant it was worth some serious thought.

I haven't watched Gandhi since 1982. Tootsie I've seen several times. Think I'll watch it this weekend.

Rest in peace, Mr. Ebert. You were right about many things.