Many of the shows I danced in don't exist on film, but they do exist in the memories of those who were in the theater for that single moment in time. And nothing can replace that.
--Chita Rivera
Only in people's memories? Chita, darling, I know you're a Broadway legend and all that, but every Spider Woman must have her...
...Web!
Did you catch what Katie Couric said at the end of that? I'd like to think even Little Miss Tuffet would stick around for these posterity-positive performances:
Singer and comedian--no, no, that's not right--comedian and singer--no, I had it right the first time--singer and comedian Dennis Day was born on this day in 1916 (he died in 1988.) Day thought of himself as a singer first and a comedian second, and I have to respect that. Yet watching this clip from the once-popular game show What's My Line, it's hard for me not to think of him as first and foremost a comedian:
If you haven't figured it out, the way the What's My Line mystery guest segment worked is the blindfolded celebrity was allowed to keep asking questions as long as each answer approximated a "yes". A "no" and the next celebrity to the right got their turn, or if you were at the very right, as was Random House publisher and best-selling joke anthologist Bennett Cerf, then the next celebrity up would be the one at the very left, in this case Broadway gossip columnist and occasional true-crime journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. Dorothy's string of correct guesses was unusual. In most cases, there's were enough "no" answers to go around, assuring each panelist got a chance to ask a question. I suspect it was no accident that the line of questioning began with stage and radio actress Arlene Francis, that the producers hoped that the segment would reach an exciting climax once radio comedian Fred Allen's turn came up. If I'm right, then obviously, things didn't go according to plan. Why does it matter? Well, in the larger scheme of things it really doesn't, except that Allen previously had been engaged in decades-long mock feud with...
...radio, and by this time, television comedian Jack Benny, Dennis Day's long-time boss. As it was, poor Fred had to settle for blurting out Benny's name afterwards, but it would have been a lot cooler, and a lot funnier, if the acerbic comic had guessed the answer instead of Kilgallen. Oh, well, at least you know the contest wasn't rigged. As for whether Day was first and foremost a singer or a comedian, we have Benny to thank for that bit of confusion. Day indeed started out as a singer. Mary Livingston, Benny's wife and radio show castmate, had heard the 23-year-old Day sing on some local New York program and told hubby about it. Benny liked what he heard and hired him on, a big break for Day since he was now heard coast-to-coast. But he couldn't just sing, he had to perform comedy when asked to do so, and as time went on, he was asked to that more and more. Day was most certainly as good a comedian as he was a songster, more than holding his own with program regulars Livingston, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson ("EEE-yeeeeeeeesssss?") Phil Harris (a band leader first and Baloo the Bear second?) and Benny himself. You just heard how good he was with the mimicry, but he became best known as the smiling innocent who couldn't help but get on the dryly prickly Benny's nerves.
It's more than nerves at stake in this gangster film parody:
Given the all the shootings in public places--there's been several just this past week, including that one in Buffalo--you may question whether the gunplay in the above video is an appropriate subject for humor. But that sketch is from 1960. Back then, as far as the average person was concerned, shootings in public places mostly happened in fictional movies and on fictional TV shows, and not on the nonfictional news found on yet-to-be-invented smart phones. So give Benny and his writers some slack. In the meantime, Turner Classic Movies fans may have recognized the first gangster to succumb to Jack's bullets. It's Dan Duryea, a supporting actor mainstay of the 1940s and '50s genre we now call film noir. Gunplay for him was rare enough outside a movie set that he could make fun of it, and himself.
By 1968 both the long-running radio show and the long-running TV show were off-the-air, but Benny and Day occasionally found things to do together, such as this Texaco commercial. Day is in his early 50s by now, but gamely still plays the insouciant youth of yore:
Life before the self-serve pump.
OK, I've said Day was also, even primarily, a singer, but what did he sing? Usually novelty-numbers, especially when he sang on TV. But the son of Irish immigrants seemed particularly drawn to...
...Irish songs (or songs written in America about Ireland.) Here's one such song. Longtime Benny announcer Don Wilson provides a bit of musical accompaniment towards the end:
Maybe Day was a singer after all. A comedian shouldn't let the announcer have the last laugh.
Dialect comedy has fallen out of favor in this century, arguably for a very good reason. By poking fun at foreign (as well as homegrown ethnic) accents, it encourages xenophobia and racism, which so plagues present-day politics (and, increasingly, present-day police dockets, hospitals, and cemeteries.) Yet I don't think Dennis Day's intent in the above video was meant to be so harmful. It was all in fun, and, besides, the British, French, and Germans haven't historically been among the more oppressed groups to make a home on these shores. The Irish are a different matter. If you go far enough back in time, you'd find they were a put-upon group in the early days of our republic. But as Dorothy Kilgallen already told you, Day was really Owen Patrick Eugene McNulty. Jack Benny (Benjamin Kebulsky) was another first-generation American, in his case the son of Russian Jews. It all harkens back to an earlier "great replacement" that took hold on an island named Ellis, one of those occasional moments in our nation's history when people aren't afraid of foreigners, or the descendants of foreigners, whether they have accents or not.
Movie star Rita Hayworth was born on this day in 1918 (she died in 1987.) The daughter of two professional dancers, she herself became a professional dancer at the age of four, appearing on Broadway with mom and dad in The Greenwich Village Follies. The family moved to Hollywood, and before she was out of her teens, Rita had signed a contract with a movie studio that eventually became 20th Century Fox. However, it was the contract that she signed a few years later with Columbia Pictures that made Rita a star. Her considerable dancing skills, acting prowess, and stunningly beautiful features made her one of the top box office draws in movie musicals throughout the 1940s. In this clip from 1942's You Were Never Lovelier, she more than holds her own along side one of the biggest movie musical stars of all time:
There you have it. Rita Hayworth in her full glory singing and dancing up a storm. In this--Oh, wait, it seems I got the weather report all wrong. Rita is still dancing up a storm, but it's...
...Big Band vocalist Nan Wynn who's doing the singing, as she had done in at least two other Hayworth musicals.
It may have been Rita's dancing (and her looks) that originally got Hollywood's attention, but her acting just got better as time went on. Soon she was in as many nonmusicals as she was in musicals, including this film noir classic:
Today, this nonmusical is musical star Hayworth's most well-known movie. If that's not ironic enough for you, this nonmusical movie about murder and betrayal and unbridled passion has in it film noir star Hayworth's most well-known musical number. Watch and listen:
You can blame the San Francisco earthquake and the Klondike shooting on Mame, but credit...
...Anita Ellis with the vocals that matched Rita's lip movements.
I wanted to study singing, but Harry Cohn kept saying, ‘Who needs it?’ and the studio wouldn’t pay for it. They had me so intimidated that I couldn’t have done it anyway. They always said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t let you do it. There’s no time for that, it has to be done right now!’ I was under contract, and that was it
--Rita Hayworth
So, does any of this matter? Was some big con job being foisted on the moviegoing public? Fictional movies are con jobs to begin with. Acting is a con job. Scripted dialogue is a con job. Anything not filmed on location, anything indoors, anything in a different historical period, anything on another planet, is a con job. Maybe con job is too harsh a word. How about make-believe? No more so than musicals which often have characters singing songs that they're supposedly making up at the spur of the moment when they could just be talking instead. As far as lip syncing goes, just about any musical made after 1935 is lip synced. Remember "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz? No, I'm not suggesting that's not actually Judy Garland's voice you're hearing. It most certainly is, but it's not what's coming out of her mouth at the very moment she's standing on a set designed to look like a Kansas barnyard. She recorded the song a few days earlier in a recording studio so it would sound like it was recorded in a recording studio and not a Kansas barnyard or even a set made up to look like a Kansas barnyard. When it came time for the actual filming, Garland lip synced herself, which was how they did it in movies then and how they do it in music videos now. You'd have to go back to the early days of sound film to find songs sung as the camera was still rolling. The first sound picture, in fact. In The Jazz Singer, when Al Jolsen sings "Mammy" he's doing so live on film (as contradictory as that may sound.) And frankly, Al sounds better in his later movies than he does there (he comes across as less racist, too.) Once Hollywood decided that what you're seeing and what you're hearing can best be done at two different locations at two different times, it wasn't long before it occurred to somebody that what you're seeing and what you're hearing can occasionally be done by two different people as well. Rita Hayworth was a terrific dancer with a terrific screen presence whose singing wasn't quite terrific enough. Nan Wynn and Anita Ellis were terrific singers but not dancers at all and though both appeared in movies from time to time, neither had what it took to become stars. There are only so many Judy Garlands in this world. The rest is make-believe. Or, if you prefer, con jobs.
Still, you might be curious as to just what Rita Hayworth's voice did sound like. Well, she does talk in her movies. Nobody has ever suggested that was dubbed. But what about her singing? For that we'll have to turn on the TV--early 1970s TV:
Television may be even more make-believe than the movies!
