The Silver Screen Oasis

JULY 27th. BIRTHDAYS


SUSAN GORDON is 60 today


LUPITA TOVER is 98 today


KEENAN WYNN (1916 - 1986)


ROSS ALEXANDER (1907 - 1937)


DONALD CRISP (1882 - 1974)

Here is most of the Ernie Kovacs/Edie Adams story :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Kovacs

Jeanne Crain bubbles over rehearsing a tub scene as "Margie" in 1946

Oh Jeanne Crain is the prettiest actress ever.....

Wow, Joe, that Wiki entry doesn't tell the half of it. Kovacs' wife first gave up the girls, and then abducted them from Kovacs. They were missing for months and months. Mother and daughters roamed from state to state, and I think may have turned up finally in Florida. The little girls did not want to live with their mother, who was, apparently, not too tightly wrapped. Kovacs had a very hard fight to win them back -- it was even harder back then for fathers to get custody of children than it is now. I remember very well following this story in the newspapers -- I was the same age as the daughters, and my parents didn't get along, either. I suppose the whole story was very frightening to me. Through all of this, Edie Adams supported her husband (emotially, that is), and was just as eager to get the girls back as he was. The girls always called Edie "Mommy," and in interviews always referred to her as "my mother Edie."

Imagine having to go through all this and be expected to be funny all the time. There's a TV movie about Kovacs during this time period which stars Jeff Goldblum. Although he is of course much too tall, Goldblum has the same low-key, seductive way of talking that Kovacs had, and it's a very engrossing tale.

As far as I know, one of the daughters is deceased (I think the one called Kippy). And the daughter of Kovacs and Adams is also deceased, killed in an auto accident, as was her father years earlier.

Reading those Wiki article descriptions of what Kovacs did really doesn't tell you very much. You had to see it -- he was one of the first to understand that TV isn't just radio with pictures; it's a visual medium, and he used it that way. A great deal of the conceptual video art we are accustomed to seeing owes a lot to the pioneering work of Ernie Kovacs.

Judith, I read the Wiki article word for word and felt it explained quite a bit, much of what you mentioned (about the first wife, the kids, the deaths, etc.)
One thing for sure Kovacs was a genius before his time and Adams a gem for allowing him to use her for the most of bombastic skits. I remember it well.

I seem to recall hearing Ernie Kovacs quoted as saying that medium was a good word for television, as it was seldom rare or well done.

JULY 28th. BIRTHDAYS


DARRYL HICKMAN is 78 today


LAIRD CREGAR (1913 - 1944)


ANN DORAN (1911 - 2000)


BILL GOODWIN (1910 - 1958)


RUDY VALLEE (1901 - 1986)


BARBARA LA MARR (1896 - 1926)


JOE E. BROWN (1892 - 1973)

George C. Scott in the deleted war-room pie fight scene from "Dr. Strangelove"

I always thought Ross Alexander was so handsome, but he looks like a total goofball in that picture - like a ventriloquists dummy.

I think Darryl Hickman's a cutie. His brother too.

JackFavell wrote:I think Darryl Hickman's a cutie. His brother too.

I just can't think of Dwayne Hickman without seeing him as the eternal teenage optimist in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", forever dashing away from his post at the family grocery, after seemingly always accidentally shutting his Dad (perfectly cast veteran character actor Frank Faylen) in the walk-in freezer.

"I gotta kill that boy, I just gotta."

Dobie Gillis is the BEST.

That's sweet. He looks almost the same....well, except for the blond hair.