Cladrite Radio Remembers: Bea Wain!

04/30/202304/30/2023 cladriteLeave a comment

Regular listeners to Cladrite Radio surely recognize the voice—and perhaps the name—of one of the most popular songbirds of the Cladrite Era, Bea Wain, born on April 30, 1917. Ms. Wain’s was one of the last voices of the big band era to be stilled. She lived to be 100 before passing away on August 19, 2017.

Wain got her start in nightclubs and on the radio before joining Larry Clinton and his orchestra in 1937. Wain and Clinton were a good team, enjoying great success, but her pay was low (shame on you, Mr. Clinton) so she stepped out from the Clinton outfit to forge a solo career, playing colleges and theatres and appearing frequently on the popular radio program Your Hit Parade.

We’ll be featuring Wain’s music all day long on Cladrite Radio, so why not tune in now?

Goodbye to Another Glorious Gal: Diana “Baby Peggy” Serra Cary

02/24/202002/24/2020 cladriteLeave a comment

Here are 10 things you should know about Diana Serra Cary, who as Baby Peggy was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the early 1920s. Ms. Cary passed away today at the age of 101.

We had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Cary briefly some years back and founder her a lovely, warm person. May she rest in peace.

Goodbye to Another Glorious Gal: Mary Carlisle

08/01/201808/11/2018 cladriteLeave a comment

There are precious few stars of the 1930s who are still with us today, and it is with sadness that we share the news that Mary Carlisle, born Gwendolyn Witter in Boston, Massachusetts, has passed at the age of 104.

The last of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, an annual promotional campaign sponsored from 1922-1934 by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers that honored 13 young actresses (the number was 15 in 1932, the year Carlisle was honored) whose careers showed great promise, Carlisle was discovered in 1928 by studio executive Carl Laemmle, Jr. while dining at the Universal Studios commissary. She was just 14.

In 1930, Carlisle signed a one-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, appearing mostly as a dancer in musical shorts, but it was with Paramount Pictures that she would achieve her greatest success. She appeared opposite Bing Crosby in three films—College Humor (1933), Double or Nothing (1937) and Doctor Rhythm (1938)—and would go on to appear in more than sixty pictures in the course of her 14-year career, most of them “B” pictures with titles reminiscent of the early scene in Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels, in which successful but artistically frustrated director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is reminded of some of his greatest successes: Ants in Your Plants of 1939, Hey Hey in the Hayloft, and So Long, Sarong.

Some of Carlisle’s pictures could’ve been plugged right into John L. Sullivan’s filmography, titles like Hotel Haywire (1937), Ship A Hooey! (1932), and Handy Andy (1934), and we’d pay good money and line up early to see that triple feature tonight, if only some bijou were screening it.

Carlisle was wed to actor James Edward Blakeley (he would go on to become an executive producer at 20th Century-Fox) in 1942 and retired from motion pictures soon thereafter. But more than five dozen pictures is nothing to sneeze at, nor is living (and staying vital) to 104 years of age. What a rich, full life Ms. Carlisle enjoyed.

Rest in peace, Ms. Carlisle, and thank you.

This story originally appeared in a slightly different form on February 3, 2016.

Goodbye to Another Glorious Gal: Dorothy Malone

01/19/2018 cladriteLeave a comment

We were sorry to learn that Dorothy Malone had died, just days short of her 93rd birthday. She enjoyed a long career in motion pictures and television, mostly playing bad girls, but to us, she’ll always be the most memorable bookstore employee in the history of the movies, and if you doubt us on this, just watch this scene with Humphrey Bogart from The Big Sleep (1946).

Goodbye to Another Glorious Gal: Peggy Cummins

01/05/201801/05/2018 cladriteLeave a comment

We were sorry to learn Welsh-born stage and film actress Peggy Cummins died at age 92 on Friday, December 29, 2017, in London. She began as a child star and worked in the United States for only a few years, but if she’d played no other role than the sharp-shooting, bank-robbing femme fatale Annie Laurie Starr in Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), she’d have made an indelible mark.

As noir expert Eddie Muller said of Cummins in introducing the film on Turner Classic Movies in July 2017, “Peggy’s performance, her Hollywood swan song, would galvanize the Gun Crazy production and earn her lasting fame as the tiniest, but most ferocious, femme fatale in the history of film noir.”