This Day in Entertainment History (Judy Holliday and Fellow “Revuers” in Show-Biz Start)

August 28, 1939—Attendees at the Westport County Playhouse saw The Revuers, a satirical musical act that had been together less than a year, but were already performing with a wit and skill that would play out over the next several decades.

Two of the five-member group would become songwriter partners in Hollywood and on Broadway: Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Another was an 18-year-old who perfected a dumb-blonde act that was exactly the opposite of her frighteningly talented and intelligent real-life persona: Judith Tavin, better known to vintage-film aficionados like myself as Judy Holliday.

The group—whose members also included Alvin Hammer and John Frank—got its start in December of the prior year at the Village Vanguard. Its owner, Max Gordon, had no liquor license but thought the youngsters’ satirical skits, dances and songs (with words and music by Comden and Green, since they couldn’t afford to pay for anyone else’s) would give his place the bohemian ambiance that had existed in Greenwich Village only a few decades before.

For the next five years, the Revuers went on a whirligig of engagements—uptown theaters, nightclubs, and radio—where they performed their collaboratively created material. They even managed an extended run at Radio City Music Hall. Sometimes they were even joined by recent Harvard alum Leonard Bernstein, a friend of Green’s from summer camp a few years before, who got into the spirit of the enterprise by playing the piano for the hell of it.

The group was infused with a sense of camaraderie. Even the most serious obstacle in the face of their progress—Frank’s heavy drinking—was resolved as amicably as could be expected, with Frank leaving the group but still retaining a financial interest.

That mutual loyalty stood the group in good stead in their brief Hollywood stint, and in the sometimes-troubled years beyond. Agents tried to sign Holliday separately from the rest of the group, but she refused, until a compromise was worked out: the Revuers as a whole would be cast in one picture, but only Holliday would be granted a standard multi-year contract.

The group’s single scene in its single film—Greenwich Village—ended up on the cutting-room floor. The contracts for Hammer, Comden and Green were not renewed—pretty amazing lack of foresight, when you consider the incredible contributions the latter two made to the movie musical within the next 16 years (e.g., The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, It's Always Fair Weather, and Bells are Ringing).

Holliday wasn’t used in much better fashion, making only three films before she, too, had to decamp back east. Her breakthrough came on Broadway, when she replaced Jean Arthur—afflicted with an attack of the nerves—before the opening of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday.

Stefany Anne Goldberg has a fascinating take on Holliday and her Born Yesterday character Billie Dawn as the epitome of “the dumb broad,” as opposed to the “dumb blonde” epitomized by Marilyn Monroe. I think that comparing the two women yields these interesting similarities:

* Both experienced difficult childhoods (the mental illness of Monroe’s mother meant that Marilyn was sent to an orphans’ home, while Holliday’s parents split);

* Both were afflicted at points with depression (Monroe’s, obviously, far more disabling than Holliday’s);

* Both had film careers that lasted for roughly the same period, 1949-1960;

* Both died young, in the 1960s.

And yet, Marilyn has become an American icon, celebrated in song (Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”), while Holliday—possessed of looks, talent, and intelligence (an I.Q. of 172!!!!)—does not have anywhere near the same mass recognition. What a shame.

Back to the Revuers. I mentioned that the group had some troubled years. One of these came in the midst of one of the high points of Holliday’s career, her Tony-winning Broadway triumph in Bells Are Ringing. (The character—an employee at a telephone answering service—was one that she could identify with, since she’d worked as a switchboard operator for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater before she took up with The Revuers.)

Holliday’s love affair with co-star Sydney Chaplin provided a year’s worth of backstage drama. Early on, she championed Charlie Chaplin’s son—a charmer who, unfortunately, did not have much of a singing voice—when everyone else (starting, but by no means ending, with Comden and Green) insisted he would not do.

Later, when their affair ended and she made clear she not only she wanted no part of him but also no part of anyone who continued to socialize with him, her two longtime songwriting friends found their relationship with Holliday sorely tested. After all they’d been through, Comden and Green had come to like Chaplin, and wouldn’t hear of disinviting him to parties.

Holliday bristled at Green about her feelings of betrayal, but continued with the show's run—as well as the movie, the last one she would make. She died after a horrific struggle with breast cancer, at age 43.

Once you’re done looking at some of the best of Holliday on film (I’d recommend the hilarious card scene with Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday or her emotionally lacerating discovery that her son has just died, in the incredibly underrated The Marrying Kind), go back a little further in time, and listen to these audio clips of her with the other Revuers, and see how she got started. After you've stopped laughing, wipe away a tear for what we've all lost.

This Day in Entertainment History (Welles’ “War of the Worlds” Scares America Out of Its Wits)

October 30, 1938—It was just going to be a Halloween episode of the weekly Mercury Theatre broadcast, but instead the CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds frightened the daylights out of a country already on edge—and made an overnight star of its 23-year-old director, Orson Welles.

Nearly 22 years later, in an interview with talk-show host David Frost, Welles identified the following factors as crucial in terrifying the audience—and convincing it that the outlandish events they were hearing about Martians landing in Grover Mills, N.J., were really happening:

* An FDR sound-alike who assured everybody there was no cause for alarm: “I think that’s when they really ran out on the streets.”
* A ham-radio voice trying to talk to others.
* An announcer who coughed, then suddenly stopped.
* The lengthy silence that followed this—and on a full network, no less.
* The faux amateur-radio operator returning to say now, “Isn’t anyone out there?”

You might remember the great scene in Woody Allen’s Radio Days when lovelorn Aunt Beau (played by Dianne Wiest) ends up with the true date from hell, when her boyfriend, hearing the Welles broadcast on his car radio, panics, runs out of the auto hysterically and leaves her out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t entirely exaggerate how America really reacted that night.

An estimated six million people heard the broadcast. At four separate points in the program—including the beginning—came a disclaimer that this was a dramatization.

But if you came in late—and heard only enough to persuade you that something weird was going on—or if you were a senior citizen who didn’t recognize Welles as the voice of the radio show The Shadow, you might have reacted as the following people did:

* The New England mother who packed her children and all the bread she could manage into her car, then drove away from her home.
* The listeners who hid in cellars, praying that the poison gas would pass over their homes.
* The college senior who broke every speeding record in existence to save his girlfriend. (What a guy!)

This was a radio audience, you must recall, that was hearing a daily drumbeat of worsening news from Europe. Only the month before, Adolf Hitler had gotten everything he’d wanted at Munich. In other words, it was a world ready for the notion that the worst could happen.

Several years ago, at a post-show discussion of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Roundabout Theatre, I asked Kitty Carlisle Hart, the widow of one of the playwrights who collaborated on the comedy, Moss Hart, about her impressions of Orson Welles’ TV version of her husband’s classic. She groaned and related a tale of an ego run amok, including Welles’ penchant for imbibing so much wine at lunch breaks that most sequences filmed in the afternoon turned out to be useless.

It was a different Welles who updated H.G. Wells’ classic for a new generation. He was young, healthy, and not quite yet (though getting there) at the point where the principal screenwriter of Citizen Kane, Herman Mankiewicz, could later wisecrack, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”

(Mankiewicz had reason to be annoyed with Welles: Not content with being an actor-director-producer, Welles wanted sole screenwriting credit for Kane. I’d call it the greatest act of literary larceny I’ve ever heard of, but then I have to remember that this is Hollywood that we’re talking about.)

No, the Welles of Worlds still had the power to exercise his lifelong fascination with magic with authority untrammeled by studio interference or his own creatively self-destructive tendencies. The radio broadcast was nothing if not sleight of hand and misdirection used in a revolutionary new medium.

In that sense, a line of continuity runs from his early success to a final, unfinished project: a movie called The Magic Show, a kind of free-floating film essay in which Welles performed his own magic tricks, related the history of a famous magician, and reenacted a disastrous trick performed by another illusionist. It would have been his way of ending a career with the kind of razzle-dazzle that characterized its beginning.