The Best American Poetry

Put your dreams away for another day. . .

Happy anniversary, everybody!

November 7, 1951

What Happened to Hot Toddy? (by Laura Orem)

Okay, I can't leave it alone. For your consideration: Hollywood murder mystery #3.

Blonde, voluptuous, and bubbly Thelma Todd was a popular film comedienne of the late silent/early sound era. Born in Lawrence, MA in 1906 (some accounts say 1905), she was a good student and wanted to become a schoolteacher, until she began entering beauty pageants in her late teens. Her exuberant beauty and poise got her noticed, and, after winning the "Miss Massachusetts" pageant in 1925, she was invited to Hollywood by a talent agent to begin working in movies.

Thelma found work right away in silent films, but it wasn't until the talkies arrived that she started to get some decent roles. She had a light, pleasant voice that recorded well, and Hal Roach cast her in several Laurel and Hardy features. Known as "the Ice Cream Blonde" and "Hot Toddy," she also gave a memorable turn in as Mrs. Miles Archer in the first version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931.  But it was in comedies where she really found her calling, proving herself a match for some of the best comedians of the day. Besides Laurel and Hardy, she worked with Harry Langdon, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton, and, most famously, the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers (right).

Unfortunately, her personal life was less successful. In 1932, she married Pat DeCiccio ( below right, with Thelma), a small-time hood with tenuous mob connections and a vile temper. He frequently beat her, and the marriage ended in 1934.Thelma then became involved with director Roland West. Thelma, savvy in business dealings, partnered with West in a Pacific Palisades restaurant, Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe. It was successful with both the Hollywood crowd and tourist clientele. Thelma and West lived in adjoining apartments above the business, renting a garage up a long outdoor staircase behind the building for their automobiles. Their relationship, however, was complicated by Thelma's drinking and partying.  West apparently felt that Thelma was neglecting the business in favor of her social life, and the two frequently argued.

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe

Thelma Todd's life came to an abrupt end on or about Monday, December 16, 1935.

Miriam Haskell and Me [by Rosanne Wasserman]

I’ve been wrapped up with Miriam Haskell for years: her definitive, needy ghost; her really good story; the internet full of her eye-candy-gorgeous work.  Life was stressful: my school’s ten-year accreditation report fell on me to edit; my latest collection of poems bounced back from publisher after publisher; my therapist started repeating herself: I sought distraction. I turned from words to look at beads, and before too long, my bedroom had seventy drawerfulls of glass and brass and lucite, as well as some busted-up Haskells I thought I’d repair, and some wearable treasures.I liked the hyperreal butterflies, dragonflies, moths, baby turtles, all plated in Russian gold; I liked the leaves. Dara Wier asked me once, “How did you know when to stop buying?” Well, I ran out of discretionary funds. If I live to 3000, I’ll never use up this stuff: but that’s not the point. 

In the late 1990s, the Miriam Haskell Co. cleaned out its warehouse: not finished costume jewelry, just findings, beads, and filligrees: its stock. Their designers had worked these older gems and backings into new configurations for decades, but the raw-materials inventory became too expensive to store.So at auctions, the lots were snapped up by craftspeople and traders, for resale, on websites and Ebay, curlicued fragments and bright-colored bits of Miriam: I bit hard.Not only were the internet offerings gorgeous in themselves, but I imagined that I could make Haskells by hand without apprenticeship, just by looking at them. Ah: I couldn’t do that, though: no way.I learned some simple techniques, then I discovered, to my chagrin, that I preferred the beads unstrung: they lost something for me as soon as a necklace was finished.

So instead, I wrote about Miriam, after my mother died in June 2006—a book of poems: so, not “about” but around, not “around” but “because of,” “while thinking of,” “with.” I wanted my mother’s ghost but I couldn’t get her. Miriam was, on the other hand, abundantly on call, clearly undercelebrated, mysterious, hanging like Sybil on all my walls, related to my back-home Louisville family of engineer-artists, jazz d.j.-statisticians, accountant-jewelers: double-brainers.Esther Haskell was my grandmother Sarah’s double cousin; Esther’s husband, Arthur, was Miriam’s brother. My mother, they said, was “a diamond in the rough.” Miriam was her opposite, brilliantly cut, designed, and set artificial sparkle.  But she lost her business before I was even born: all that courage, acumen, chic, lonely glamour, heroic care, descended into delusions and O.C.D., despair, and pain. At a wedding reception, reportedly, she hallucinated that the restaurant was an outdoor garden—was she really crazy?Was that in LouisvilleWas that my mother’s wedding?

At five, I hoarded treasures from Sarah’s business’s window displays, a Falls City Liquor red-velvet Seagram’s-Seven whiskey-sack, full of gold-paint-backed, faceted cabochons—sapphire and ruby glass­­­—gifts from my Grandpa Joe, a tailor, my son Joseph Richie’s namesake. My mom, paging through a magazine, saying, “I guess your cousin got all of Sarah’s Miriam Haskells”: how many were there? I tried researching her: what I found was the jewelry, not the woman.There were two pretty books with her bio, but no entry in Wikipedia (there is now).  I fear she’s portrayed in some flix of the forties, in fact, in a sorry light. A car-rental heir broke her heart when he ditched her for Myrna Loy: no kidding. Someone should make a movie, a romance novel, an operetta. There’s a rumor that in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera film, Christine’s jewelry is vintage Haskell.

 Go ahead: search for Miriam Haskell on Google Image.  It’ll knock you out.  Don’t mind me if you want to bid on something; I’m over that.

Rosanne Wasserman has been publishing her poems in books, journals, and magazines—including The Best American Poetry—and on line, for decades now, as well as publishing other people’s poems via her small press.  She has taught twenty years at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Her latest title, Miriam Haskell, has not found a publisher yet.

Film Still Series # 120 [by Bill Hayward]

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.

On Movies and Beauties (part two) by Mark Strand

It is hard to account for my infatuation with certain movie stars over the years. Whenever I try to recall Janet Blair, well, I can't. I can only remember something of the way I felt about seeing her when I was an eight or nine year old. More available to recall is Lizabeth Scott. She was the first of the tough women I fell for. I liked her voice and wished only that she had more of a nose. I mention her nose only because in the old days my friends and I in comparing actresses would rate their features. The other tough or seemingly tough "broads" were Ida Lupino and Ann Sheridan. Sheridan's voice did it for me back then. And I liked what I perceived to be Lupino's scrappiness. The actresses in whom I had no interest, but whose looks found favor with my friends were Olivia de Havilland, Maureen O'Hara, Loretta Young, and Paulette Goddard. All of us favored the way Veronica Lake's hair fell, covering one side of her face. I don't know why except that it was such an obvious declaration of style, and in those days obviousness was our ally. We had no way of dealing with subtlety or even recognizing it. I liked Ingrid Bergman and I still do, never tiring of watching reruns of Casablanca, Notorious and Spellbound. As I recall, she had a boyish quality in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which appealed to me in those days.  My father liked Greer Garson i suppose because she struck him as classy, just as my mother found Walter Pidgeon dashing.  I never really cared for either. I never cared for Irene Dunn either, especially after hearing her sing in Roberta, one of the weaker Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire films, even though there was something about her smile and her high cheekbones that reminded me of my mother. I never thought much about Greta Garbo, probably because she couldn't act, although the same could be said for some of the actresses I did like. I still don't know what it was about Garbo that left me cold and still does. Along with Ingrid Bergman, the actress I had the deepest crush on was Vivian Leigh. 

Pictured above, Ida Lupino; below Ruth Roman on the cover of Life, May, 1 , 1950.

"I'm not really into poetry," said Quentin Tarantino . . .

"But the movie made me think about taking a poetry class.  One of the best things that can happen from a movie about an author is that you actually want to read their work."
     Quentin Tarantino on Jane Campion's movie "Bright Star" about the epistolary romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne (NYT September 13, 2009).  The movie opens Wednesday, September 16.

-- sdh

On Movies and Beauties (part one) by Mark Strand

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls.  Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [below right: the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [left] but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. 

Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.

-- Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008).  Read more about Mark Strand here.

Film Still Series #125

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.

More Murder, Hollywood Style, or The Magnate Did It (by Laura Orem)

Last week, I wrote about the unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor. This week, I thought it would be fun to continue by  writing about another mysterious Hollywood death of the silent era, that of Thomas Ince.

Thomas Ince (below) was a film actor, director, and producer, sometimes called the "father of the Western." Born in 1882 to a family of stage actors, he began working in the infant film industry in New York in 1911. Ince is credited with inventing the concept of the "shooting script" and of planning out all aspects of production before shooting - at the time, movies were essentially made up as they were shot - and of redefining the producer's role as the overseer of production from start to finish, rather than just the financier of the film. In 1915, he moved to Santa Ynez Canyon, not far from Hollywood, and founded his own studio, Inceville, where his organized and carefully thought-out system of film-making produced some of the finest Westerns of the silent era. One of his greatest stars was the cowboy hero, William S. Hart. He also had a reputation for discovering and grooming new talent.

The mystery surrounding his death begins in November 1924, when Ince and his wife Nell were invited for a weekend cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, to celebrate Ince's 43rd birthday. Besides Hearst and the Inces, also on board for the festivities were Hearst's mistress, the actress Marion Davies (right, with balloons, on board the Oneida); Charlie Chaplin, with whom Davies was rumored to be having an affair; the then-unknown columnist, Louella Parsons; the author Elinor Glyn; and assorted other hangers-on and wannabes who had somehow cadged a coveted invitation to hang out with Hollywood's high and mighty.

The boat left San Pedro on Saturday, November 15. Thomas and Nell Ince joined the cruise in San Diego on Sunday for Ince's birthday celebration. By early Monday morning - or maybe Tuesday - Ince was dead.

What happened? Well, that depended on whom you asked.

Film Still Series #124 [by Bill Hayward]

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.