TCM will air Three Daring Daughters (1948) on Sunday, May 13 at 8:30 am Eastern time.

Tickets and more information are at this link.

Pictured here is the cover of this month’s catalog from Movies Unlimited. As you can see, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy are featured on the cover!

The reason? Two more DVD releases coming up, Rose Marie (1936) and Maytime (1937).

Right now they are having a pre-release sale on these films which you can see at this link. Take advantage of the sale price before May 1st.

Photos of the upcoming DVDs are below….enjoy!

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Or just discuss what Nelson Eddy has meant to you.

Spend a wonderful Jeanette MacDonald – Nelson Eddy afternoon in San Diego!

I will be doing a one-hour lecture and also a book signing after a performance of “A Scandalous Affair” which is based on my book “Sweethearts.”

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in San Diego so am looking forward to seeing many of you there! Sharon

Link to details

Note: if you would like to spread the word, please right-click on the photo above and “save” to your computer. You can print it out and share with others!

One consideration was choosing a design “theme”  that would allow visitors to easily see and navigate the site whether using a desktop computer, iPhone, iPad or any other available gadget. A 21st century website needs to be able to automatically adjust itself to any format.

So watch as we fine-tune our new, upgraded Jeanette and Nelson site with lots of new features!

The just-released March, 2012 Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair magazine features a section on diets of Hollywood stars from the 1920s until today.

Jeanette MacDonald is mentioned as using a “Ginger Ale and Ice Cream Diet.”

You will recall that in the late 1920s, Jeanette was underweight and visited a New Jersey live-in treatment center where she did nothing but drink tons of milk to GAIN weight.

Herbert Stothart, Jr., son of the MGM’s musical director during Jeanette’s studio years, said that whenever Jeanette came over to their house for a meal, “She ate like a bird.”

Nelson Eddy was promptly put on a diet when he arrived at MGM by none other than the studio mogul, Louis B. Mayer. When at the studio, Nelson’s diet consisted of coffee and Mayer’s mother’s chicken soup. That’s right, any time Nelson dined at the studio commissary he was presented with a bowl of soup. That was the entirety of his “diet.”

Other sources told me in passing that during the 1930s, more sinister diet secrets of the stars could include pills (such as was prescribed to teenaged Judy Garland), swallowed tapeworms and even heroin.

Jeanette’s “Ginger Ale and Ice Cream Diet” seems much more delightful than any of the above!

Thanks, Vanity Fair, for mentioning her!.

My own research showed that around 1960-61 Jeanette MacDonald was seeing an oncologist at UCLA Medical Center for a benign brain tumor. Yes, she was treated by a cancer doctor but no, one of the employees there stated that the tumor was benign. In the book that I annotated, Jeanette MacDonald Autobiography: The Lost Manuscript, I present written documentation by Fredda Dudley Balling, Jeanette’s collaborator on her unpublished book. In her letters, Ms. Balling explained that Jeanette was so ill it was feared she might not live long enough to complete work on the book.

However, even if the manuscript was never polished up to completion, Jeanette did not die in 1960 and in fact lived 5 years more. Her health battles were with a longtime heart condition that resulted in an arterial transplant – a new and novel treatment by Dr. Michael DeBakey.

See below for the article excerpt.

The late songwriter Hugh Martin wrote “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for Judy Garland’s 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis, along with dozens of other songs for MGM and Broadway musicals.

A new CD chronicling his seven decades in musical theater was released earlier this month. Hugh Martin: Hidden Treasures features mostly demo recordings and rarities from Martin’s vast catalog of tunes, from a 1941 selection from the musical comedy Best Foot Forward to a 1961 song written for the unfinished musical Here Comes the Dreamers, which was never produced after lead actress Jeanette MacDonald was diagnosed with cancer. The CD also comes with an 88-page booklet chronicling Martin’s career, with essays by Stephen Sondheim, Sheldon Harnick and Michael Feinstein.

Martin was heavily involved in the creation of the CD in the months leading up to his death in March 2011. He worked closely with producers Bill Rudman and Ken Bloom, both of whom join Terry Gross on Fresh Air for a discussion of Martin’s songs and his lengthy career in show business.

Link

An interesting excerpt from the DVD review today in the New York Post:

Warner Archive also recently released another much-requested composer biopic, “The Great Waltz” (1938), one of several films about Johann Strauss Jr., who’s attracted the attention of filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney and Andrew L. Stone.

This black-and-white MGM epic is officially credited to French director Julien Duvivier in his Hollywood debut (the same year his “Pepe Le Moko” was remade as “Casbah”), but major portions are known to have been reshot by Victor Fleming and Josef von Sternberg on orders from Louis B. Mayer, making it an interesting puzzle for auterists.

This one announces in an opening title that it doesn’t pretend to be an accurate depiction of Strauss’ life. Instead we’re offered up a romantic triangle straight out of “The Great Ziegfeld” with the composer (Flemish actor Ferdinand Gravey, borrowed from Warners, which had renamed him Gravet, and announced for an MGM version of “Scaramouche” that would never get made), his adoring wife (Louise Rainer, fresh from her Oscar win for “Ziegfeld”") and a flirtatious soprano (Polish-born Miliza “Rhymes with Gorgeous” Korjus) who helps further Strauss’ career ambitions.

This relatively star-light casting for MGM (the studio had considered the unlikely duo of Clifton Webb and Jeanette MacDonald) may have been the reason for the last-minute decision to scrap costly Technicolor for a movie that still looks very, very expensive.

As in “Rhapsody,” the story is but something to hang Strauss’ melodies on — and here, they get superb arrangements by Dimitri Tiomkin and Englsh lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The most famous, or notorious, sequence (quite possibly directed. at least in part, by Fleming) has Strauss spontaneously inspired to create “Tales from the Vienna Woods” while riding with his soprano through the woods in a carriage (the driver is ubiquitous character man, Christian Rub, briefly seen as the janitor who breaks the news of his teacher’s death to Gershwin in “Rhapsody”).

Von Sternberg is known to have re-shot the film’s climactic sequence. Mrs. Strauss races to the Vienna opera house to confront her errant husband and his mistress, who she knows are planning to run away. Mrs. Strauss (Rainer at her most smilingly tearful) gives the guilty couple her blessing, which she also knows will stop them in their tracks. Somehow this inspires Strauss to write “The Blue Danube” (a nice montage, also reportedly directed by Von Sternberg).

This film ends with an unfortunate epilogue (Fleming?) set 43 years later, when Emperor Franz Josef (an unhappy-looking Henry Hull) honors Strauss, who like everyone else is wearing old-age makeup. That is, all except for the glass-shattering Ms. Korjus, who is superimposed in her youthful glory, singing her heart out at the climax.

Korjus was Oscar nominated for her Hollywood debut but MGM scrapped plans to star her in a musical called “Guns and Fiddles” opposite Robert Taylor after she suffered a serious leg injury in an automobile accident. She made just one more movie, in Mexico in 1942, and died in 1970 in Culver City, Calif., where she made a movie thirty years earlier at Metro.

Link