Surely it’s not too early in the game…
Happy New Year to everyone in the Cladrite family! May 2013 bring you peace and prosperity, good health and contentment. And many, many toe-tapping tunes of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s!
Year: 2012
Hollywood Undressed, Chapter Nine
The ninth chapter from Hollywood Undressed, a 1931 memoir attributed to the assistant of masseuse and health guru Sylvia Ulback, a.k.a. Sylvia of Hollywood (but actually ghost-written for Sylvia by newspaper reporter and screenwriter James Whittaker), relates how Sylvia found herself in the middle of a whirlwind (if short-lived) romance between actress Ina Claire and matinée idol John “Jack” Gilbert.
HER WEDDING NIGHT
TO GET back to Ina: She moved presently into a house in Beverly Hills and, about the same time, began to be rushed by Jack Gilbert
.Jack, one day, called Ina “boyish,” meaning it as a compliment—meaning that a tomboy was to his taste. Right away, Ina began to worry a bit—because Jack’s calling her a tomboy didn’t prove anything except that he was maybe nearsighted. True, she has square shoulders and a husky, boyish voice, but at the time she was wearing a few curves that were about as masculine as a bustle. And sooner or later Jack was bound to watch her going up some stairs or something and wonder what on earth had ever made him think she resembled a boy. But a woman in love isn’t stopped by anything so temporary as a fact. Ina had a heart-to-heart talk with Sylvia and said she didn’t care how much it hurt, she wanted to get spanked loose from about ten pounds of accumulated femininity.
In a little while, Ina’s campaign developed to a point where she decided for a show-down. And she selected a certain evening as the zero hour. On that evening there was to be a big masquerade ball given by Basil Rathbone and Ouida Bergere in the Beverly Hotel. And Ina decided to go as a boy.
and Ouida Bergere in the Beverly Hotel. And Ina decided to go as a boy.For a week she conferred and argued with the costumer, until a costume, consisting of form-fitting pink velvet pants and a boyish blouse, was settled on. And Ina was still, after several weeks of violent massage, frankly feminine and hippy.
With tears in her eyes, she begged the boss to go to it, to double, to triple her fury—to do anything, just so Ina could go to that party with the silhouette of a boy.
Sylvia gave a characteristic answer: “Tell that costumer to make the size of pants you want to wear. Tell him he doesn’t need to fit the pants to you. I’ll fit you to the pants.”
Well, in the next five days Sylvia delivered a flank attack that Ina won’t forget in a hurry. Ina never whimpered. Ah, love! What sufferings we support in thy name! If some artist wants to substitute an arrow at Beauty’s heart, let him draw a pint-size Norwegian straw-blonde letting fly a fist at beauty’s mid-section.
Cladrite Radio Remembers
We suspect we’re not alone in experiencing just the slightest bit of melancholia this time of year.
Perhaps it’s an age thing: We’ve had mixed feelings about birthdays, too, ever since we turned thirty. Before that, both our birthday and New Year’s Eve were purely joyous occasions, but nowadays, both occasions engender bittersweet feelings.
The folks at Turner Classic Movies must feel the same way as they prepare their annual video tribute to those movie makers who have passed on in the previous year.
Nowadays, there aren’t so many folks from the Cladrite Era found among the departed—with each passing year, there are fewer left to leave us—but the 2012 tribute does honor a few names from the old days, including Phyllis Thaxter
Cladrite Classics: A Thousand Million Billion Points of Light
The Empire State Building remains one of our favorite New York City icons. Even after 30 years living in Manhattan, there are still occasions, when we’re out for a stroll on a crisp autumn evening, that we look up at that grand old structure and think, “Wow—we live in New York City!”
We especially love the fact that when you look up, you can see flash bulbs going off from the observation deck on the 108th floor. It warms our heart to see these small bursts of illumination; we feel a kind of connection to those tourists from every corner of the globe, situated as they are high above the greatest city in the world, capturing memories that will last a lifetime.
How many flashes have gone off from that platform over the past eighty-some years? Millions? Billions?
Those little flashes also makes us chuckle, of course, since they accomplish precisely nothing. It would take a terribly powerful flash, indeed, to reach out from the top of the Empire State Building and illuminate the vast city below, or even a small patch of it.
You can see the flashes of light we’re referring to in the shakycam video below, if you watch carefully.
Enjoy.
Hollywood Undressed, Chapter Eight
The eighth chapter from Hollywood Undressed, a 1931 memoir attributed to the assistant of masseuse and health guru Sylvia Ulback, a.k.a. Sylvia of Hollywood (but actually ghost-written for Sylvia by newspaper reporter and screenwriter James Whittaker), tells the tale of a run-in over Sylvia’s services between actresses Ina Claire and Alice White.
HIGH HAT
PHILOSOPHICAL observation: There comes a time in most lives when you begin to step on the gas; you make speed; also, you bounce!Sylvia began bouncing the minute she went under contract to Pathé and began working on the sacred cows that were grazing on that lot. Dough, dough! But also trouble, trouble! Ooh, lots of trouble. In fact, Sylvia got hooked up professionally with all four of the following at once: Gloria Swanson, Ina Claire, Grace Moore, and Constance Bennett.
, Ina Claire, Grace Moore, and Constance Bennett.There’s a quartet for you! Maybe there’d be a fight if it was said flatly that those four were at the top of the Hollywood heap. There’s room for argument, with Greta Garbo left out—and Marlene Dietrich, and—oh well, write your own ticket. But nobody is going to dispute the statement that, in their own estimations, they are.
left out—and Marlene Dietrich, and—oh well, write your own ticket. But nobody is going to dispute the statement that, in their own estimations, they are.There was a queen of antiquity who used to protect her standing as the most beautiful woman in the world by a simple device. If any of the other lookers inside her borders got possession of some beauty secret, she would call out the head executioner and pay the rival a little call having for object a funeral and confiscation of the beauty preparation.
Since Cleopatra’s day thing have changed. Less cutting off of heads, but more beauty preparations. It has the career of the professional beauty much tougher. It was a lot simpler, maintaining supremacy by killing off the competition. It’s got so tough nowadays that a Queen of Beauty actually has to be beautiful. Not only that, but she has to stay that way. When you figure that, if left to her own devices, a woman stays at the top of her form only about three or four years (and those usually the years when nobody but her school-teachers and the neighbors’ boys are giving her a tumble), you can see what she’s up against. By the time her photographs are beginning to appear in the silver frames in jewelers’ windows, she doesn’t look like them any more.
The professional beauty has to watch two angles: building up her rep, and living up to it when she’s got it. I’ll say one thing for the girls that claw their way to the top. They they have their press agents to pull them and their beauty experts to push them, they do most of the work themselves. Being on the inside, where they are pulling all the strings and going through all the contortions of their beauty jobs—that’s excitement! To be behind the scenes and watch them feint, grab, and foul when the referee isn’t looking—that’s high comedy!
The opening scene of a sample of it is the Pasadena station of the Santa Fe Railroad, with the Chicago-New York train due in any minute. Choo-choo. Toot-toot. A general rush of press agents, cameramen, Path´ executives, porters, dogs, and dust. Who is this stranger who trips as lightly as may be from the drawing-room car?
It is Ina Claire. Look out, Hollywood!
THE famous Broadway actress came to Hollywood with a chip on her shoulder. They usually do. When they’ve been here a while—they get another chip and wear them symmetrically, one on each shoulder.
The boss had her first glimpse of the Eastern invader a short while later, after Ina had reported to the Path´ lot for work in her first sound movie, “The Awful Truth.” A three-alarm went out for Sylvia after the first test shots. Avoirdupois.
Hedda Hopper
, our old reliable booster, was the messenger. She was on the phone with the S O S: “Ina Claire has to be taken down ten pounds in three days. Come and do it!”
, our old reliable booster, was the messenger. She was on the phone with the S O S: “Ina Claire has to be taken down ten pounds in three days. Come and do it!”