Dorothy Lamour in Hurricane
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Lamour was born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Carmen Louise (née LaPorte) and John Watson Slaton, both of whom were waiters.[1] Her parents' marriage lasted only a few years, with her mother re-marrying to Clarence Lambour, and Dorothy took his last name. The marriage also ended in divorce when Dorothy was a teenager. The family finances were so desperate that when she was 15, she forged her mother's name to a document that authorized her to drop out of school. Later, however, she did go to a secretarial school that did not require her to have a high school diploma. She regarded herself as an excellent typist and usually typed her own letters, even after she became quite wealthy.
After she won the 1931 Miss New Orleans beauty contest, she and her mother moved to Chicago, where Lamour earned $17 a week as an elevator operator for the Marshall Field department store on State Street. She had no training as a singer but was persuaded by a friend to try out for a female vocalist's spot with Herbie Kay, a band leader who had a national radio show called "The Yeast Foamers", apparently because it was sponsored by Fleischmann's Yeast.
She left Kay's group and moved to Manhattan, where Rudy Vallee, then a popular singer, helped her get a singing job at a popular night club, El Morocco. She later worked at 1 Fifth Avenue, a cabaret where she met Louis B. Mayer, the Hollywood studio chief. It was Mayer who eventually arranged for her to have a screen test, which led to her Paramount contract in 1935.
In 1935, she had her own fifteen-minute weekly musical program on NBC Radio. She also sang on the popular Rudy Vallee radio show. When she was at her zenith as a star, her fans suggested that an agent had adopted her last name from the French word for "love" as a box-office ploy. In fact, the name was close to one in the family; Lamour adapted it herself from Lambour, which was the last name of her stepfather, Clarence.
Early in her career, Lamour met J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. According to Hoover's biographer Richard Hack,[2] Hoover pursued Lamour romantically, but she was initially interested only in friendship with him. Hoover and Lamour remained close friends to the end of Hoover's life, and after his 1972 death, Lamour did not deny rumors that she'd had an affair with him in the years after she divorced Kay.
In 1936, she moved to Hollywood and began appearing regularly in films for Paramount Pictures. The role that made her a star was Ulah (a sort of female Tarzan) in The Jungle Princess (1936). She wore a sarong, which would become associated with her, and captivated many viewers with her sensuous exotic attractive appearance. While she first achieved stardom as a sex symbol, Lamour also showed talent as both a comic and dramatic actress. She was among the most popular actresses in motion pictures from 1936 to 1952.
She appeared in the classic series of "Road to..." movies, such as Road to Morocco, also starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the 1940s and 1950s. The movies were enormously popular during the 1940s, and they regularly placed among the very top moneymaking films each year as a new one came out. While the films centered more on the talents of Hope and Crosby, Lamour held her own as their straight man, looked beautiful, and sang some of her most popular songs. Her appearance in the films was considered by the public and theater owners of equal importance to the contributions of Crosby and Hope during the series' golden era, 1940-1952. It was only after the series was essentially over with the release of Road to Bali in 1952 and her career declining while co-stars Hope and Crosby remained major show business figures that her contributions to the series began being downplayed by journalists.
During the World War II years, Lamour was among the most popular pinup girls among American servicemen, along with Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner. Lamour was also largely responsible for starting up the war bond tours in which movie stars would travel the country selling war bonds for the U.S. Government to the public. Lamour alone promoted the sale of over $21 million dollars worth of war bonds, and other stars promoted the sale of a billion more.
Some of Dorothy Lamour's other notable films include John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), Spawn of the North (1938), Disputed Passage (1939), Johnny Apollo (1940), Aloma of the South Seas (1941), Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), Dixie (1943), A Medal for Benny (1945), My Favorite Brunette (1947), On Our Merry Way (1948) and the best picture Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Her leading men included William Holden, Tyrone Power, Ray Milland, Henry Fonda, Jack Benny, George Raft, and Fred MacMurray.
Dorothy Lamour starred in a number of movie musicals and sang in many of her comedies and dramatic films as well, introducing a number of standards including "The Moon of Manakoora", "I Remember You", "It Could Happen to You", "Personality", and "But Beautiful". Lamour's film career petered out in the early 1950s and she began a new career as a nightclub entertainer and occasional stage actress. In the 1960s she returned to the screen for secondary roles in three films and became more active in the legitimate theater, headlining a road company of Hello Dolly! for over a year near the end of the decade.
Lamour's lack of pretension and good humor allowed her to have a remarkably long career in show business for someone best known as a glamour girl. She was a popular draw on the dinner theatre circuit of the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, she lived with her longtime husband William Ross Howard III (whom she married in 1943), in the Hampton suburb of Towson, Maryland.[3] After he died in 1978, Lamour kicked her career into high gear, publishing her autobiography My Side of the Road in 1980, reviving her nightclub act, and performing in plays and acting on such television shows as Hart to Hart, Crazy Like a Fox, and Murder She Wrote.
As she entered her late seventies, in 1990, she made only a handful of professional appearances but she remained a popular interview subject for publications and TV talk and news programs. In 1995 the musical Swinging on a Star, a revue of songs written by Johnny Burke opened on Broadway and ran for three months; Lamour was credited as a "special advisor" in the credits. Burke wrote many of the most famous "Road to..." movie songs as well as the score to Lamour's And the Angels Sing. The musical only ran three months but was nominated for the Best Musical Tony Award and the actress playing "Dorothy Lamour" in the Road movie segment, Kathy Fitzgerald was also nominated.
Lamour died at her home in North Hollywood, California at the age of 81 from a heart attack. She was interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California, after a Catholic funeral service
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Joan Crawford Signatured mounted with Hurrell Reprint.
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Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1905 in San Antonio, Texas. She was the product of a broken home before she was born in that her parents were already separated before the birth. Her mother had trouble keeping husbands after having married three times. Joan was fond of dancing and had entered several dance contests. She wanted a career in show business because it was much more glamorous than the odd jobs she was working. One dance contest she won landed her in a chorus line. Before long, Joan found herself dancing in the big cities of the Mid-West and along the Atlantic coast. After almost two years dancing, Joan decided to take a chance and packed her bags and moved to Los Angeles, California and the movie colony of Hollywood. She felt movies might afford her a chance of fame and glory and she was determined to succeed. Not long after arriving in California, Joan got her first bit role as a showgirl in Pretty Ladies (1925) in 1925.
Three other films quickly followed. Although the roles weren't much to speak of, Joan continued to toil away. Throughout 1927 and the first part of 1928, Joan was handed menial roles. That ended with the role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). The film was the one to get her elevated to star status. She had made the tough hurdle of making the "big time". Now she was faced with another. The "talkie" era was upon the movie colony and many stars of the era were suddenly worried about their futures. With silent pictures, it didn't matter what kind of voice you had, but with sound pictures it made a tremendous difference. While some stars saw their livelihood halted, Joan's strong voice enabled her to continue. Her first film with sound was in Untamed (1929). The film was a success and Joan's career was still in top form. As she entered the 1930s, Joan became one of the top stars in the MGM stable. Films such as Grand Hotel (1932), Sadie McKee (1934), No More Ladies (1935), and Love on the Run (1936), kept movie patrons and film executives happy. Joan was in top form.
By the time the 1940s rolled around, Joan noticed she wasn't getting the plum roles which once came her way. There were new stars in town and the public wanted to see them. She left MGM and went to rival Warner Brothers Studio where she landed the role of a lifetime. In 1945, Joan landed the lead in Mildred Pierce (1945), a film depicting the rise of a housewife to a successful businesswoman. The film landed Joan her first and only Oscar for Best Actress. The following year she appeared with John Garfield in the well-received Humoresque (1946). In 1947, Joan landed the role of Louise Graham in Possessed (1947). Again she was nominated for a Best Actress from the Academy, but lost to Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (1947).
Joan continued to pick and choose what good roles she wanted to appear in. 1952 saw Joan nominated for a third time for her role of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (1952). This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Her career slowed down tremendously after that. Movie after movie saw her relegated to menial roles, with the possible exception of 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with her arch-rival, Bette Davis, who she detested.
By now the feud, between the two was well-known. No one is sure exactly how it started, but one time Miss Davis said of Joan, "She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie." In return Joan said, "I don't hate Bette Davis even though the press wants me to. I resent her. I don't see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms, instead of real acting ability. Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words and what have you got? She's phony, but I guess the public really likes that".
Her adopted daughter, Christina, wrote a tell-all book that did not put Joan in a flattering light called, "Mommie Dearest". Needless to say Christine was cut out of the will. Her final appearance on the silver screen was a 1970 flop called Trog (1970). Turning to vodka, she was not seen much afterward. On May 10, 1977, Joan died of cancer in New York City. She was 72 years old.
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HURRELL REPRINT PHOTO WITH RITA HAYWORTH CUT SIGNATURE.
GEORGE HURRELL , RITA HAYWORTH, 1941, rare image, 11'x14', each image is 'dodged and burned' making it slightly unique, double weight silver gelatin FERROTYPE lovingly printed by Mark Vieira, Hurrell's Biographer, using the exact printing technology of the 1930's and printed in Hurrell's former studio building, EXQUISITE HURRELL , STAMPED ON VERSO.
Also included; Certificate of authenticity as well as appraisal for $950... just for the photrograph, a copy of a great letter from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and another from Helmut Newton both discussing Hurrell!
Margarita Carmen Cansino was born in New York on October 17, 1918 into a family of dancers. Her father, Eduardo was a dancer as was his father before him. He immigrated from Spain in 1913. Rita's mother met Eduardo in 1916 and were married the following year.
Rita, herself, was trained as a dancer in order to follow in her family's footsteps. She joined her family on stage when she was 8 when her family was filmed in a movie called 'La Fiesta' (1926).
It was her first film appearance, albeit uncredited, but by no means was it to be her last. Rita was seen dancing by a Fox executive and was impressed enough to offer her a contract. Rita's 'second' debut was in the film Cruz Diablo (1934) at the age of 16. She continued to play small bit parts in several films under the name of Rita Cansino until she played the second female lead in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) when she played Judy McPherson.
By this time she was at Columbia where she was getting top billing but it was Warner Brothers film The Strawberry Blonde (1941) that seemed to set her apart from the rest of what she had previously done. This was the film that exuded the warmth and seductive vitality that was to make her famous. Her natural, raw beauty was showcased later that year in Blood and Sand (1941) filmed in Technicolor.
She was probably the second most popular actress after Betty Grable. In 'You'll never get Rich' (qv) with Fred Astaire, in 1941, was probably the film that moviegoers felt close to Rita. Her dancing, for which she had trained all her life, was astounding. After the hit Gilda (1946), her career was on the skids. Although she was still making movies, they never approached her earlier work. The drought began between The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Champagne Safari (1952). Then after Salome (1953) she was not seen again until Pal Joey (1957).
Part of the reasons for the downward spiral was television, but also Rita had been replaced by the new star at Columbia, Kim Novak. After a few, rather forgettable films in the 1960s her career was essentially over. Her final film was The Wrath of God (1972). Her career was really never the same after 'Gilda'. Her dancing had made the film and had made her. Perhaps Gene Ringgold said it best when he remarked, 'Rita Hayworth is not an actress of great depth. She was a dancer, a glamorous personality and a sex symbol.
These qualities are such that they can carry her no further professionally'. Perhaps he was right but Hayworth fans would vehemently disagree with him. Rita, herself, said, 'Every man I have known has fallen in love with Gilda and wakened with me'. By 1980, Rita was, wracked with Alzheimer's Disease. It ravaged her so, that she finally died on May 14, 1987 in New York City. She was 68.
