The Washington Post recently ran an article about Ilona Massey’s longtime Bethesda residence, which has fallen into disrepair and is for sale:

Time was probably kinder to Hollywood starlet Ilona Massey than it was to her Bethesda home. Although she died in 1974, she lives on forever, her blond hair and deep voice just a Netflix rental away in movies such as “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” and “Love Happy.”

Her house, on the other hand, is described in its sales literature as a candidate for a tear-down. The front gutter is pulling away from the roof of the white neoclassical rambler on Goldsboro Road near MacArthur Boulevard. Wallpaper peels from the walls like so much desiccated lichen. The kitchen floor is littered with bits of shattered skylight.

Kristin Gerlach, the agent selling the 1935 house, gingerly steps over what is either the tail of some forest creature or a tiny mink stole.

“It’s been on the market for a year,” Kristin says of the house, called Happy Valley and priced, along with its 5.5 acres, at $1,495,000. “It’s been under contract a few times, but then they backed out.”

Ilona was under contract once, too, to Metro Goldwyn Mayer. She was one of three dozen actresses imported from Europe in 1937 to feed Hollywood’s insatiable desire for the next sultry foreigner.

Ilona Hajmassy — her original name — had grown up in Hungary, the daughter of a disabled typesetter. “My salvation,” she once said, “is that I have known misery and hunger. In my youth in Budapest I didn’t know the taste of meat until I was 7 years old. That’s how poor my family was.”

She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and spent her earnings on singing lessons. She got a job dancing in the chorus of a Budapest musical comedy house, then sang at the Staats Opera. Her Hollywood debut was in 1939’s “Balalaika,” opposite Nelson Eddy. [Note: her first film with Nelson was actually 1937’s Rosalie, pictured here.] Wrote the New York Times: “She looks like Dietrich, talks like Garbo and will probably be smiling from all the fan magazine covers in no time.”

In the end, Ilona would make only 11 films, the last 1949’s “Love Happy” with the Marx Brothers.

Her fourth and final husband was the reason she settled in our area. Donald Dawson was a U.S. Air Force general and a former aide to Harry S. Truman. Perhaps the two shared a hatred of communism, as well as a love for each other: Ilona often led pickets in front of the Soviet Union’s United Nations headquarters.

During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, she taped a message to her former countrymen while packing CARE packages. “I will try everything within my power to help you,” she said. “If necessary, we will give our blood, too.”

Ilona sang occasionally — nightclub gigs in Havana and South Africa — but her life in Bethesda was quiet. She was content, she said, to make paprika chicken and play with her two dogs: black Great Danes named Hero and Nero. She loved animals, and in 1972 the Happy Valley estate was the setting of a party celebrating the opening of a Washington office of the Fund for Animals. Two Canadian timberwolves — Jethro and Clem — were the guests of honor. Ilona died two years later and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Her husband remarried, then died in 2005 at age 97.

Their house is vacant. In one dusty room, a large photo of the general is propped on a mantel. A picturesque stream trickles outside, just six feet from the edge of the house.

The stream is the problem. The Corps of Engineers says any new house must be 100 feet away. The lot may not be subdivided. The existing house is probably too far gone to save.

We all eventually will fall into disrepair and disappear, our only trace a pile of photographs, a few home movies. Some of us will have better movies than others.

The filmed musical show Les Miserables opened over Christmas with much fanfare. Reviews have been slightly mixed..those receiving huge praise are singing actors Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway (who apparently is an early favorite to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). But some of the other (great) actors have been criticized for not being able to sing the Broadway score in a traditional manner. The director Tom Hopper (The King’s Speech) filmed the musical numbers live so there is “talk-singing” in some instances. Musical purist and “American Idol” star Adam Lambert has taken a lot of heat this week for voicing on Twitter what some movie-goers are thinking:

“Les Mis: Visually impressive w great Emotional performances. But the score suffered massively with great actors PRETENDING to be singers. It’s an opera. Hollywood’s movie musicals treat the singing as the last priority. (Dreamgirls was good). The industry will say ‘these actors were so brave to attempt singing this score live’ but why not cast actors who could actually sound good?”

“Those raw and real moments when characters broke down or were expressing the ugliness of the human condition were superb. However… My personal opinion: there were times when the vocals weren’t able to convey the power, beauty and grace that the score ALSO calls for.”

“DO go see it for Anne Hathaway’s performance. It’s was breathtaking….One last thing though: Anne Hathaway was so good- had me tearing up. Oscar worthy performance for sure!”

Whatever your feelings about this film (feel free to add your comment about it), it is interesting that a few reviewers have brought up Jeanette and Nelson… always the highest standard singing stars for comparison when discussing a movie musical!

HeraldNet.com: “As the adult Cosette, Amanda Seyfried (who also warbled in “Mamma Mia!”) displays a sweet soprano that makes her a throwback to the days of Jeanette MacDonald. Her scenes with young lover Marius (Eddie Redmayne) give the movie its dewy, tragical romance.”

Voxxi.com: “There are moments when Redmayne and Seyfried resemble a modern-day Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in their fluting, birdlike lyricism.”

This New York Times article caught my attention. Marc Blitzstein was a contemporary of Nelson Eddy’s and they both studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Even in his earliest career, Nelson was known for singing music of upcoming new American songwriters and composers.

Although in the same league with George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, subjects of two earlier biographies by Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein is relatively unfamiliar for a variety of reasons, among them his leftist politics and his openly gay sexuality in an era when both were disdained. Three years after Blitzstein’s death from what was evidently a gay-­bashing in Martinique in 1964, Copland said, “It is disheartening to realize how little the present generation knows who he was or what he accomplished,” and Leonard Bernstein expressed dismay in 1976 at “the rapidity with which his name’s been forgotten,” calling him “the greatest master of the setting of the American language to music.” ….

Born in 1905 and raised in a nonreligious Russian Jewish Marxist family in Philadelphia, Blitzstein was a prodigy at piano, a child with perfect pitch. By the age of 14 he had already formed the ambition to be a composer. He studied with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and Alexander Siloti in New York, and completed his education with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin.

But Blitzstein’s career followed an uncertain path, as the opportunities for having his works performed were continually thwarted…. Some of his songs did manage to reach a public, including “The Dream Is Mine,” which was heard on Broadway in 1925; “Two Coon Shouts,” sung by Nelson Eddy in Philadelphia in 1928; and two of several songs with Walt Whitman texts that were performed in recitals. He gave the first performance of a one-movement piano sonata in 1928, but only after it was revived in the 1980s did it receive critical acclaim.

Here’s a quote from the book itself:

Blitzstein premiered [his piano sonata] in New York at a league of Composers concert…on February 12, 1928, his first major new York appearance…Blitzstein repeated the piece in Philadelphia on March 13, 1928, at the same concert on which he accompanies Nelson Eddy in the first performance of “Two Coon Shouts”…Audience members responded well to the Philadelphia world premieres of “Gods” and “Two Coon Shouts,” insisting that Nelson Eddy encore the second “coon shout”. Both works also elicited some positive remarks in the local press (along with some highly negative ones), one review…saying of “Two Coon Shouts,” There is elemental power and terror in them.”

The book is available at Amazon.com.