Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy Blog

Today’s post is about Nelson, appropriately enough. I like this particular quick blurb:

“3/5/1940 SFC Jimmie Fidler: Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, individually concert touring, will try to arrange at least one joint date before returning to Hollywood.”

Background data: Jeanette and Nelson had reunited at this point after his marriage and they kept tabs while both were on tour…However, Nelson started to fall apart as the realization of their predicament hit him. He collapsed after his Chicago concert just before this blurb was published…and he had to cancel a March 5 concert in Cleveland. One wonders whether Jimmy Fiedler was tipped off as to the turmoil going on in Nelson’s life? Could it be coincidence that Nelson and Jeanette decided on a “joint date” so she could go to his side without public suspicion?

If you take a look at “Sweethearts”, pages 275-276, you’ll note that Nelson managed to get through 8 more concerts before suffering “a final crackup,” according to his mother - who flew to Milwaukee to bring her son home to a local hospital.

On page 529 of “Sweethearts,” I reproduced a handwritten letter from 1947 naming a list of people “who know all but are loyal…can you imagine it being this well known and not a leak anyplace?” Jimmy Fidler is on that list!

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Tags: JEANETTE MACDONALD, NELSON EDDY by maceddy
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So many folks have written me over the years, telling me about that awful day when they woke up to hear the early-morning news that Nelson Eddy had died in Miami, at the too-young age of 65.

I have also heard from several people who reported that a framed picture of Nelson that they had hanging on the wall, inexplicably fell to the floor that day.

Face it, there are movie stars that we love…and then there are celebrities that truly touch our lives. For those of you who met Nelson, you have that personal moment to remember always. But for those of us who only “met” him through his films or his music, it still is a deeply emotional connection.

Only a handful of “stars” or celebrities seem to have that special something that transcends time and the generations. I get emails from young teens just discovering Nelson or Jeanette, and their bubbling enthusiasm just reaffirms the sense that there was something a little special, a little different, about Nelson and Jeanette. And it is timeless and “new” for each person who experiences their art … and “gets it.”

I was unable to post my thoughts on January 14, as we suffered a major computer problem that day…but for me, that date is more than just the date of Jeanette’s passing. It’s also the very same day that her sister Blossom died, in 1978. For me this was a rough year, being the 30th anniversary.  Blossom was my friend and the person who introduced me to Jeanette and Nelson. There are people who scoff at Blossom and try to downplay her efforts to get her sister’s story told. Only if they can try to discredit Blossom perhaps they can then persist with the whitewashed version of Jeanette’s life. The truth remains that without Blossom’s encouragement, no other sources would have likely stepped forward to dispute the “happy” Jeanette-Gene or Nelson-Ann marriages. Blossom was a very courageous gal, with a stubborn will - I am sure all three MacDonald daughters were similar in this regard.

At the last club meeting in Clearwater, Florida, my mother attended and I asked her point-blank to discuss and verify whether Blossom was indeed a family friend, was she “coherent” and able to communicate (despite a stroke that affected her speech) and did we indeed go shopping, hang out, discuss Jeanette’s life, etc., etc. My mom talked a bit about how it all came about and yes, this was actually all true.

I would love to hear from you today in regards to Nelson Eddy…and hope you enjoy the picture posted here.

Watch one of their films today…take a few minutes to think about them…and then have fun and celebrate their lives.

Tags: NELSON EDDY by maceddy
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“…1929’s “The Love Parade” and 1930’s “Monte Carlo” are both sunk by the same torpedo: a mysterious desire to punish the powerful women at their centers. In both films, wealthy, well-born women, played by Lubitsch mainstay Jeanette MacDonald, boss around their henpecked lovers only to have the tables turned on them. Order is returned to the world with women - even queens and duchesses - made properly subservient to their husbands.

The rank odor of these films’ ideas about matrimony is only partially offset by their narrative exuberance. Maurice Chevalier, who plays the mistreated husband in “Love Parade,” breaks cinematic convention to address the audience directly, a trick he returns to with greater success in 1932’s “One Hour With You.” The French actor was Lubitsch’s ideal comic instrument, though in “Love Parade” he comes off as too smirky and goggle-eyed by half, like a Gallic Al Jolson imitator.

Still, “Love Parade” establishes the fundamental sweet-and-sour pairing of Chevalier sparring with the game-but-stiff MacDonald. Their duets encapsulate their relationship perfectly, with MacDonald’s operatic trills a distant second to Chevalier’s ordinarygentleman croak - with a side of French dressing.

“Monte Carlo” suffers from the casting of British theater actor Jack Buchanan opposite MacDonald. Chevalier was just fine without MacDonald (as proved by “The Smiling Lieutenant,” Lubitsch’s next film), but without Chevalier to balance her, MacDonald overwhelms “Monte Carlo” with her prissy officiousness. Lubitsch’s men were never overwhelmingly masculine Clark Gable types, but Buchanan takes foppishness to new extremes.

In short, “The Love Parade” and “Monte Carlo” are records of what life was like before writer Samson Raphaelson. Mostly unschooled, Lubitsch was a wizardly rewriter, but not much for creating original material. His collaboration with Raphaelson on “The Smiling Lieutenant” (co-written with Ernest Vajda) is the first of his sound films to truly click - where the ingredients of sex and romance and humor and music are baked into a delightful soufflé, without prematurely collapsing. Chevalier is a military man whose maneuvers take place primarily between the sheets. An officer in “the boudoir brigadiers,” as Max Robin’s song has it, Chevalier effortlessly romances Claudette Colbert, the bandleader of a traveling all-ladies’ group, the Viennese Swallows (Lubitsch was enamored of bawdy double entendres). Shortly after, he falls into the orbit of a clueless princess (Miriam Hopkins) who snookers him into marriage. For the first time, the music advances the plot, rather than stopping it dead in its tracks. And with Raphaelson on board, even the dialogue sounds like music: “Someday maybe we’ll play a duet,” offers Colbert; “I love chamber music,” Chevalier parries.

“One Hour With You” has a famously convoluted history, only partially cleared up by the credits, which list the film as directed by Lubitsch with assistance from George Cukor. Actually, Cukor was assigned to direct “One Hour” before Paramount executives (and Lubitsch himself) realized that he was stepping on the comedy. Lubitsch suited up and replaced Cukor on set, and the final result is one of the most Lubitsch-ean of his films, and easily the best of his early musicals. Here, even the dialogue rhymes, and the charm of the initial setup never wears off.

“One Hour” reunites Chevalier and MacDonald as a married couple still enamored of each other - they open the film making out on a park bench. Chevalier’s fidelity is challenged when he meets his wife’s best friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin), a flirtatious scamp who refuses to take no for an answer. “I don’t want to mix business with Mitzi,” he complains to his wife, but Chevalier is shoved into compromising situations with her until he can no longer resist.

“One Hour with You” is a surprisingly adult drama, risqué in ways that contemporary films would still be leery of, but it is melodrama with a punch line and a chorus. The sumptuous Art Deco decor echoes the cool suavity of the characters, never caught short for a retort or a snappy song. They are lovers as we would like to be - debonair, charming, passionate, and ultimately faithful, more or less.

Lubitsch makes perfection seem easy: as if it were merely a matter of the right actors saying the right lines on the right sets. “One Hour,” a neglected masterpiece in its own right, ushers Lubitsch into his golden period: The remarkable 15-year stretch includes “Ninotchka,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” “To Be or Not to Be,” and “Heaven Can Wait.” To watch a Lubitsch movie is to be ushered into a perfect world, where the drinks are cold, the clothing is perfect, the decor is timeless, and the women (and men) are gorgeous.”

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Tags: JEANETTE MACDONALD by maceddy
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…”Ernst Lubitsch virtually invented, in his own Teutonic-vaudeville way, the movie musical. Today, the new Criterion Eclipse set of early Lubitsch films for Paramount is not only a four-step lesson in how Hollywood was taught by Lubitsch to make a stiff and unforgiving technological handicap into a feather-light form of audio-visual confection; the four movies — “The Love Parade” (1929), “Monte Carlo” (1930), “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931), and “One Hour With You” (1932) — are also entrancing gray heavens of impish élan, barely disguised sex talk and the toast-dry comic timing Lubitsch had already made famous back home. The goofy songs are secondary, though adorable for their antique joy, and the performers are front and center: In three out of four, Maurice Chevalier could be unctuously dopey when allowed to stage-leer, but watch him do chagrined and exasperated and you see Lubitsch’s fine-tuning at its most essential. (He is substituted rather adroitly by song-and-dance stalwart Jack Buchanan in “Monte Carlo.”)

Also in three out of four (Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins are required to replace her in “The Smiling Lieutenant”) is Lubitsch discovery Jeanette MacDonald, who’s still famous for the enervatingly pious and stuffy musicals she made in the ’30s with Nelson Eddy, but who is a discovery here, ridiculously sexy and game and saucer-eyed. Her bratty grin might’ve been the filthiest in Golden Age Hollywood. The films are variations on the Ruritanian royalty romance template (”One Hour With You” steers clear of fake peerage aristocracy, but it’s also, naturally, the most assured of the bunch), and all are, with their silk nighties and vaguely veiled innuendo, absolutely pre-Code. These were movies made not for some mythical dull-minded Depression-era innocents, but for sexually active grown-ups brimming with spunk and irony and attuned to Lubitsch’s approach, which could suggest entire unshowable scenarios with a shrug or a smirk or a raised eyebrow.

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Tags: JEANETTE MACDONALD by maceddy
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…”In the first advertisement, published in the January 1941 issue of Esquire magazine, a well-dressed woman is sitting in the driver’s seat of a luxurious convertible. The only other traveler is her groomed poodle riding in the backseat. Underneath this picture, the main image of the advertisement, is a smaller illustration of four people riding in the same car. The woman from the lager image is still driving, and her passengers are now one other woman and two men.

In these images, the woman exercises power and ownership over the vehicle. Not only is the car her personal car, but, as explained by the advertisement’s headline—“Jeanette MacDonald Chooses Plaid for her Beautiful Chrysler Convertible” (italics not mine)—she chose its details completely in accordance with her own taste.

The accompanying text continues, “Jeanette MacDonald…loves sunshine. Therefore her personal car is a convertible.” (italics mine). The image of ownership is emphasized by the presence of the dog, another of the woman’s personal possessions, and so we know that the car belongs exclusively to her. In the smaller image, it is clear that this ownership does not depend on the absence of men, for they are pictured as her passengers.

In the following text, it reads, “Perhaps like Miss MacDonald, you like to drive a car yourself.” This demonstrates that the woman car-owner has mobility. Her ownership of the car allows her to drive wherever she feels compelled to go.

Furthermore, Chrysler is using the image of a woman’s personal relationship with her car to help sell their product. This ad was run in Esquire Men’s Magazine. The image of a woman driver is supposed to entice men to buy the product themselves. Not only does the image illustrate the ownership women had of automobiles during WWII, but that it wasn’t read as specifically a woman’s relationship, but a driver’s relationship.”

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Note: Click on the picture above twice to see the ad at nearly full size.

Tags: JEANETTE MACDONALD by maceddy
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Tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano dead at 86

the associated press

Tuesday, March 4th 2008, 4:00 AM

ROME - Giuseppe Di Stefano, one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century and a celebrated singing partner of soprano Maria Callas, died Monday, his wife said. He was 86.

Di Stefano died at home in Santa Maria Hoe, north of Milan, from injuries sustained in a November 2004 attack at his family’s villa in Kenya, wife Monika Curth said.

Unidentified assailants struck the retired tenor on the head during the attack. Di Stefano underwent surgery twice in Mombasa before being flown to Milan. He awakened from a coma, but never fully recovered.

“He was 100% disabled, he couldn’t even eat alone,” Curth said. “Lately he frequently had colds and pneumonia.”

Di Stefano, born in Sicily in 1921, made his debut in 1946 in the northern city of Reggio Emilia with Massenet’s “Manon,” and went on to sing at the world’s top opera houses, including Milan’s La Scala, New York’s Metropolitan, and in Vienna and Berlin.

His last performance was in Rome in 1992.

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Note: I mention Di Stefano’s passing here because I am reminded of my good friend - the late, great John Martin. John was a devout Jeanette and Nelson fan and it was his persistence and genius that resulted in Jeanette’s “lost” Fox films being saved for us to enjoy today. Those of you who attended early Mac/Eddy club events in Los Angeles will remember John as both our film projectionist and piano accompanist for singers at our events.

In his younger years, John lived in New York City. As an accompanist he moved in musical circles and saw all the of operatic greats of that era. I asked him once who were the most memorable stars he’d seen in person (aside from Jeanette and Nelson, of course). For Wagnerian opera - Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad in Tristan and Isolde. For the opera Andrea Chenier: Mario del Monaco and Renata Tebaldi. For several other operas: Maria Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano.

John explained that some of the above may not have had the greatest voices from a technical point of view but seeing them in a live performance was a totally different story. And sometimes a particular performance was simply - magic.

I understood what John was saying. My paternal grandmother nearly half of her life in New York City, deeply involved in the music world. She, for instance, saw Jeanette on Broadway and heard Nelson’s debut in Beethoven’s 9th at Lewisohn Stadium. I once asked her the same question: what was the greatest live performance she’d ever seen? Her response: Caruso live at the Met, in any opera. She sniffed at listening to “restored” Caruso records, saying that he didn’t sound anything like that in person, you had to be there to experience it.

I am reminded repeatedly by those who saw Nelson or Jeanette live in concert, that they were “even better” singers off-screen than on. For Jeanette, we at least have one of her Hollywood Bowl recitals on CD that shows how in love with her that audience was - screaming and shouting their love - and song titles that they wanted her to sing! One wishes that a concert recording of Nelson’s from the earlier days would surface, although we can “feel the love” from the audiences at some of his live radio shows.

One wonders where the generations of the 21st century will find their opera greats. The Metropolitan Opera is making an effort to find new audiences by broadcasting live performances in movie theaters in High Definition. Young baritone Josh Groban is probably the closest singer we have today to Nelson Eddy - an operatic voice who has successfully crossed over to rock star fame.

Tags: R.I.P. by maceddy
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