Last night (Friday the 13th) I was a guest on Tommy Kovac’s horror film podcast “Splat From the Past”. We celebrated the 80th anniversary of the release of Nelson Eddy’s starrer “Phantom of the Opera” (1943) featuring Claude Rains as the Phantom. The gorgeous Technicolor film (nominated for two Oscars) had a rocky beginning, first envisioned as a comedy for…
Jeanette MacDonald, the “Queen of Hollywood”, is pictured above with the younger generation of singing stars. All of them are smiling and happy-looking. From left to right: Susanna Foster, Kathryn Grayson, Jeanette, Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin. What all five singers had in common were amazing voices and private lives quite different than what the public knew. Susanna Foster and…
Some time after Sweethearts was published in 1994, I did a joint book signing with Judy Lewis, the illegitimate daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, at the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club. Her story was poignantly told in her autobiography, Uncommon Knowledge. In a nutshell, this is Judy’s story as noted in Publisher’s Weekly, ©1994: Born in 1935, Lewis was…