#David Humphreys Miller

[butterbeerandlemoncakes]

Books of 2022

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi-- I’m not typically a graphic novel person, but this one was pretty good. It follows the story of a young girl growing up in Iran, and how living in a country going through wars and political movements affected her childhood and her family. 

Animal Farm, George Orwell--For some reason, I never had to read this one in High School, so thought it was high time that I read it. I understand why its a book used in HS literature, it definitely makes you think--who’s way was right? Is there a right way? Not entirely pleasant to think about, especially with the way the world is today, but that’s the point.

Custer’s Fall: The Native American Side of the Story, David Humphreys Miller--This was a really interesting read. It was basically compiled from a bunch of oral histories from Native Americans who either lived through the Battle of Little Bighorn, or were closely related to someone who was, and thus could tell their story. It never really occurred to me before that, even though no White men survived the battle, we never really heard the Native American side of the story. We always see Custer portrayed as a hero, even though he was defeated at the battle. Would definitely recommend if you’re into American history.

May Day, F. Scott Fitzgerald--Didn’t care for this one as much of his other short stories. It portrayed a snippet of a series of intertwining lives, giving us a glimpse of essentially one weekend, one night, really, in the lives of these people, and how they treated each other and how this impacted each of their lives. 

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice--one of the few examples where I actually liked the movie better than the book. Granted, this was one of the first books ever written by Anne Rice (I think), so her writing probably got better with time, and by the movie came out, many of the other books in the series had already been written, so there was much more material to draw off of. However, still a fairly enjoyable book and an easy read.

The Arabian Nights: The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor and Other Stories, edited by Andrew Lang--Although I’d already read one version of the Arabian Nights, this one contained stories--such as those of Sindbad, that I hadn’t read before. This translation didn’t flow as nicely as the other one I had read, with the stories flowing into each other, but was still a fun read.

The Murder of King Tut, James Patterson & Martin Dugard--This was an alright read. It was fun and quick to get through, but overall seemed lacking in plot. I think the title makes it seem like it will be more of a mystery/thriller than it was.

Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry--I got this book from a friend who said it was one of her favorite plays. Its basically a spoof on a lot of the “classic”/shakespearian dramas, and does follow those basic plotlines but in a much more vulgar way. It was an entertaining, if not strange, read. Reminded me a lot of some of the  plays I would write when I was younger.

The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King--Book 2 of the Gunslinger series, I didn’t care for this one as much as the first. Again, it’s a lot of setup for the rest of the series and introduction to more important characters, but I wasn’t as drawn to it as the first book. I’ll still continue to read the rest of the series, though.

London, Edward Rutherford--This is a LONG book, it took me several months to plug through. However, it was a very enjoyable read, detailing the history of London from prehistory to now. It follows a series of families, following their ancestors through time and just seeing how everyday people lived through all these historic times. A very interesting read.

[entheognosis]

Joseph White Cow Bull (Cheyenne) being painted by Artist David Humphreys Miller. Circa 1938. White Cow Bull was a survivor of the Battle of a Little Big Horn. Mr Miller found 72 survivors of the battle. He learned their language, 13 in all, and ended up painting all 72. He also collected their stories and wrote a book, “Custer’s Fall, The Indian side of the Story.”

[kaijuno]

Joseph White Cow Bull (Cheyenne) being painted by Artist David Humphreys Miller. Circa 1938. White Cow Bull was a survivor of the Battle of a Little Big Horn.

Mr Miller found 72 survivors of the battle. He learned their language, 13 in all, and ended up painting all 72. He also collected their stories and wrote a book, “Custer’s Fall, The Indian side of the Story.”

He also wrote a book called “Ghost Dance” about Wounded Knee.

While talking to Joseph White Cow Bull, he was told what happened during the battle. White Cow Bull never said he shot Custer, but from the description of the battle, the Horse the rider was on and corroboration from the others he spoke to, he determined it was Joseph White Cow Bull that shot Custer early in the fight.

[bignaz8]

Joseph White Cow Bull (Cheyenne) being painted by Artist David Humphreys Miller. Circa 1938. White Cow Bull was a survivor of the Battle of a Little Big Horn.

Mr Miller found 72 survivors of the battle. He learned their language, 13 in all, and ended up painting all 72. He also collected their stories and wrote a book, “Custer’s Fall, The Indian side of the Story.”

He also wrote a book called “Ghost Dance” about Wounded Knee.

While talking to Joseph White Cow Bull, he was told what happened during the battle. White Cow Bull never said he shot Custer, but from the description of the battle, the Horse the rider was on and corroboration from the others he spoke to, he determined it was Joseph White Cow Bull that shot Custer early in the fight. The horse the rider was on had 4 white stockings, and Custer’s horse was the only horse with those markings.

[sunnydaysinamusicalhaze]

Joseph White Cow Bull (Cheyenne) being painted by Artist David Humphreys Miller. Circa 1938. White Cow Bull was a survivor of the Battle of a Little Big Horn.

Mr Miller found 72 survivors of the battle. He learned their language, 13 in all, and ended up painting all 72. He also collected their stories and wrote a book, “Custer’s Fall, The Indian side of the Story.”

He also wrote a book called “Ghost Dance” about Wounded Knee.

While talking to Joseph White Cow Bull, he was told what happened during the battle. White Cow Bull never said he shot Custer, but from the description of the battle, the Horse the rider was on and corroboration from the others he spoke to, he determined it was Joseph White Cow Bull that shot Custer early in the fight. The horse the rider was on had 4 white stockings and Custer’s horse was the only horse with those markings.

[indiesole]

THE 236 GREATEST PERSONALITIES IN THE ENTIRE KNOWN HISTORY/COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THIS WORLD! (@INDIES)

i.e. THE 236 GREATEST PERSONALITIES IN WORLD HISTORY! (@INDIES)

Rajesh Khanna

Lionel Messi

Leonardo Da Vinci

Muhammad Ali

Joan of Arc

William Shakespeare

Vincent Van Gogh

Online Indie

J. K. Rowling

David Lean

Nadia Comaneci

Diego Maradona

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Meena Kumari

Julius Caesar

Harrison Ford

Ludwig Van Beethoven

William W. Cargill

Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche

Samuel Curtis Johnson

Sam Walton

John D. Rockefeller

Andrew Carnegie

Roy Thomson

Tim Berners-Lee

Marie Curie

James J. Hill

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Roman Polanski

Samuel Slater

J. P. Morgan

Cary Grant

Dmitri Mendeleev

John Harvard

Alain Delon

Ramakrishna Paramhansa (Official God)

The Lumiere Brothers, Auguste & Louis

Carl Friedrich Benz

Michelangelo

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Ramana Maharishi

Mark Twain

Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri

Bruce Lee

Bhagwan Krishna (Official God)

Charlemagne

Rene Descartes

John F. Kennedy

Bhagwan Ganesha (Official God)

Walt Disney

Albert Einstein

Nikola Tesla

Alfred Hitchcock

Pythagoras

William Randolph Hearst

Cosimo de’ Medici

Johann Sebastian Bach

Alec Guinness

Nostradamus

Christopher Plummer

Archimedes

Jackie Chan

Guru Dutt

Amma Karunamayi/ Mata Parvati (Official God)

Peter Sellers

Gerard Depardieu

Joseph Safra

Robert Morris

Sean Connery

Petr Kellner

Aristotle Onassis

Usain Bolt

Jack Welch

Alfredo di Stefano

Elizabeth Taylor

Michael Jordan

Paul Muni

Steven Spielberg

Louis Pasteur

Ingrid Bergman

Norma Shearer

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

Ayn Rand

Jesus Christ (Official God)

Luciano Pavarotti

Alain Resnais

Frank Sinatra

Allah (Official God)

Richard Nixon

Charlie Chaplin

Thomas Alva Edison

Alexander Graham Bell

Wright Brothers

Arjun (of Bhagwan Krishna’s Gita)

Jim Simons

George Lucas

Swami Sri Lahiri Mahasaya

Carl Lewis

Brett Favre

Helen Keller

Bernard Mannes Baruch

Buddha (Official God)

Hugh Grant

K. L. Saigal

Roger Federer

Rash Behari Bose

Tiger Woods

William Blake

Jesse Owens

Claude Miller

Bernardo Bertolucci

Subhash Chandra Bose

Satyajit Ray

Hippocrates

Chiang Kai-Shek

John Logie Baird

Geeta Dutt

Raphael (painter)

Bhagwan Shiva (Official God)

Radha (Ancient Krishna devotee)

George Orwell

Jorge Paulo Lemann

Catherine Deneuve

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Bill Gates

Bhagwan Ram (Official God)

Michael Phelps

Michael Faraday

Audrey Hepburn

Dalai Lama

Grace Kelly

Mikhail Gorbachev

Vladimir Putin

Galileo Galilei

Gary Cooper

Roger Moore

John Huston

Blaise Pascal

Humphrey Bogart

Rudyard Kipling

Samuel Morse

Wayne Gretzky

Yogi Berra

Barry Levinson

Patrice Chereau (director)

Jerry Lewis

Louis Daguerre

James Watt

Henri Rousseau

Nikita Krushchev

Jack Dorsey

Dev Anand

Elia Kazan

Alexander Fleming

David Selznick

Frank Marshall

Viswanathan Anand

Major Dhyan Chand

Swami Vivekananda

Felix Rohatyn

Sam Spiegel

Anand Bakshi

Victor Hugo

Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba (Official God)

Steve Jobs

Srinivasa Ramanujam

Lord Hanuman

Stanley Kubrick

Giotto

Voltaire

Diego Velazquez

Ernest Hemingway

Francis Ford Coppola

Michael Douglas

Kirk Douglas

Mario Lemieux

Kishore Kumar

James Stewart

Douglas Fairbanks

Confucius

Babe Ruth

Raj Kapoor

Titian aka Tiziano Vecelli

El Greco

Francisco de Goya

Jim Carrey

Mohammad Rafi

Steffi Graf

Pele

Gustave Courbet

Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi

Milos Forman

Steve Wozniak

Georgia O’ Keeffe

Mala Sinha

Aryabhatta

Magic Johnson

Patanjali

Leo Tolstoy

Tansen

Henry Fonda

Albrecht Durer

Benazir Bhutto

Cal Ripken Jr

Samuel Goldwyn

Mumtaz (actress)

Panini

Nicolaus Copernicus

Pablo Picasso

George Clooney

Olivia de Havilland

Prem Chand

Imran Khan

Pete Sampras

Ratan Tata

Meerabai (16th c. Krishna devotee)

Queen Elizabeth II

Pope John Paul II

James Cameron

Jack Ma

Warren Buffett

Romy Schneider

C. V. Raman

Aung San Suu Kyi

Benjamin Netanyahu

Frank Capra

Michael Schumacher

Steve Forbes

Paramhansa Yogananda

Tom Hanks

Kamal Amrohi

Hans Holbein

Shammi Kapoor

Gerardus Mercator

Edith Piaf

Bhagwan Shirdi Sai Baba (Official God)

[wvsteria]

pls like this for memes !!!

also tiny psa for muses of mine that could use more things: dan humphrey, david kostyk, cindy berman, sarah miller, kate bishop, willa lykensen, hayley marshall, dani powell, rue, rachel green (this is just give a variety of options)

[papermoonloveslucy]

MOVIES on TV!

Part 1 ~ The Movies of “I Love Lucy”

When “I Love Lucy” premiered in 1951, Lucille Ball was a bona fide movie star. By contrast, her creation Lucy Ricardo was a fan - idolizing film stars and Hollywood. 

~FACTUAL FILMS~ 

THE TALL MEN ~ “Lucy Visits Graumans” (1955) 

Other than this establishing shot, there is no mention of the film, which starred Clark Gable and Jane Russell. “Lucy” actors Will Wright and Harry Shannon were also in the cast. It premiered at Graumans on September 22, 1955. 

BLOOD ALLEY ~ “Lucy and John Wayne” (1955)

The film is promoted by Wayne approving of a large poster of the film, which co-starred Lauren Bacall. 

SABRINA ~ “Getting Ready” (1954)

LUCY: (on the phone) “Would you like me to give a message to any of the gang out there? You know, Clark or Cary or Van or Marlon? Oh, all right. (writing) Tell Bill Holden that Marion Van Vlack saw ‘Sabrina’ five times!”

Sabrina is a 1954 romantic comedy-drama directed by Billy Wilder, based on Samuel A. Taylor’s play Sabrina Fair. In addition to Holden, the movie starred Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. “I Love Lucy” character actors Ellen Corby and Nancy Kulp play supporting roles.

THE COUNTRY GIRL ~ “L.A. at Last” (1955) 

William Holden promotes his latest film co-starring Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Also in the cast were “Lucy” actors Sarah Selby, Frank J. Scanell, Gene Reynolds, Paul Fix, and Harold Miller. 

THE BIG COMBO ~ “The Star Upstairs” (1955)

Cornel Wilde promotes his latest film co-starring Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy, and Alan Wallace. Also in the cast were “Lucy” actors Jack Chefe and William Conaty. 

A PRIZE OF GOLD ~ “The Tour” (1955) 

Richard Widmark promotes his latest film, his first for Columbia Pictures. 

CAMILLE ~ “The Dancing Star” (1955)

While singing “How About You” with Van Johnson, Lucy mentions the 1936 film Camille, which starred Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. Although Taylor never appeared on the series, Lucy claims to have met him at the Farmer’s Market and gotten his autograph on an orange. As for Van Johnson, he appeared with Lucy and Desi in Too Many Girls (1940) and with Ball in Easy To Wed (1946).  

There are several other mentions of the film throughout the series, but it is unclear if they are referring to the character from the Dumas fils book and play or the film. This is also true of Gone With The Wind. 

CAPTAIN LIGHTFOOT ~ “In Palm Springs” (1955)

Guest star Rock Hudson promotes his latest film co-starring Barbara Rush and Jeff Morrow. 

THE SHEIK ~ "The Hedda Hopper Story" (1955)

MRS. MCGILLICUDDY: "Oh, and I must see the house where Rudolph Valentino lived.  Oh, I'll never forget him in ‘The Sheik’.  (sings) I'm the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me..." LUCY: "You know, they're grooming Ricky to be another Rudolph Valentino." MRS. MCGILLICUDDY: "Ricky? Ricky who?" RICKY: "Ricky me. That's who." MRS. MCGILLICUDDY: "You? (mocking laugh) Why, you're not fit to touch the hem of his bernouse!"

THE IRON PETTICOAT ~ “Lucy and Bob Hope” (1956)

As Hope enters Yankee Stadium, a young fan (David Saber) asks him for an autograph. Before granting it, he asks the boy “Have you seen my latest picture, ‘The Iron Petticoat?’”  The boy eagerly replies, “Yes, sir.”  However, the film, co-starring Katherine Hepburn, didn't premiere in the USA until early January 1957, three months after this episode aired. It was produced and directed by Ralph and Betty! Not the Ramseys, but Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. Hope had appeared in two films with Lucille Ball, and would do two more. 

LIFEBOAT ~ “The Celebrity Next Door” (1957) 

Ethel gushes to Tallulah Bankhead that she saw her in Lifeboat (1944). 

SAYONARA ~ “The Ricardos Go To Japan” (1959)

Trying to be savvy about Japanese customs, Lucy says she sat through Sayonara twice. The 1957 film details a romance between an Air Force pilot (Marlon Brando) and a Japanese woman (Miyoshi Umeki), winning four Oscars.

FOREVER DARLING ~ “Ricky’s European Booking” (1955) 

The episode features the Pied Pipers singing the title song from Lucy and Desi’s upcoming fantasy film featuring James Mason. 

At the end of the original broadcast of “Bon Voyage”, there was a tag scene to promote the film (and record). Although cut for syndication, the DVD restores this tag scene. Lucy and Desi [or is it Ricky?] are seen sitting in deck chairs.

LUCY: “Did you see the ship’s newspaper? They just raved about your new MGM record of ‘Forever, Darling.’ They said it’s gonna be one of the top records of the year. Let’s get them to play it on the public address system. I know how modest you are, but think what a treat it would be for the passengers.”

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS ~ “Lucy in the Swiss Alps” (1956)

LUCY: “You remember that picture 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'? Somebody shot a pistol and it caused a great, big avalanche.”

After getting trapped by an avalanche, Ethel asks “How'd they get out in 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'? Lucy replies that “They waited for the spring thaw!”

~FICTIONAL FILMS~

DON JUAN

The film that takes Ricky Ricardo to Hollywood is mentioned in dozens of episodes. 

“Don Juan is all about love. It’s got nothing to do with marriage.” ~ “Don Juan and the Starlets” (1955)

SIGNORA LORENZO: “Hark! Do I hear a footfall? Is that you, Don Juan?” DON JUAN: “Yes, it is I, O lovely one. Would that I had the power to tell you what is in my heart tonight.” SIGNORA LORENZO: “What do you mean, my dearest?” DON JUAN: “I have come to say farewell.“ SIGNORA LORENZO: “No, say not so.” DON JUAN: “Would that I could ask you to fly with me, but I know that you’re devoted to your husband, Count Lorenzo.” SIGNORA LORENZO: “Yes, much as I love you, I must stay with him. He is old and feeble and he needs me.” DON JUAN: “But for him, I would sweep you into my arms and carry you over yon garden wall.” SIGNORA LORENZO: “Oh, that I could cut these ties that bind me!” DON JUAN: “Do not cry, my dearest. It was not meant to be. I had no right to win your heart. I had no chance to win your love. So, now, I’m afraid I must say farewell."

Lucy reads that Variety reports that Ricky’s Don Juan is scheduled to have a $3 million budget and be filmed in color. Errol Flynn played Don Juan in Adventures of Don Juan in 1948, which was also in color and budgeted at 3.5 million dollars. Douglas Fairbanks played the character in 1934, and John Barrymore was in a 1926 version that featured a young Hedda Hopper, before she turned to journalism.

MOON OVER BAGHDAD ~ “The Mustache” (1952)

A talent scout (John Brown) is casting a new film called Moon Over Baghdad, an Arabian nights-style Technicolor extravaganza. This is the first time we get a hint of Ricky’s movie aspirations, which will eventually take the foursome to Hollywood in season 4. Through tenuous connections (“My agent has a friend whose brother-in-law knows the talent scout’s wife.”), Ricky, Lucy (beard concealed), and the Mertzes all vie for his consideration. In the final scene, Lucy has finally managed to remove her whiskers and Ricky lands a screen test for the film, although we never hear anything about it again, even when he tests for Don Juan in season 4.  There’s also an offer for Lucy.

LUCY: “I don’t care what they pay me. I am not going to play the part of your father!”

WOMEN FROM MARS ~ “Lucy is Envious” (1953) 

Lucy and Ethel make money to fulfill a pledge by doing a stunt for an upcoming film, Women from Mars. The plot was most likely inspired by the 1953 film The War of the Worlds which is also about a Martian invasion. Two days before this episode aired, a British film called Devil Girl from Mars hit US cinemas. Also hitting the big screen in 1953 was Invaders From Mars, which featured Hillary Brooke (“The Fox Hunt”) and Richard Deacon (“The Celebrity Next Door”). America had Martian madness!

BITTER GRAPES ~ “Lucy’s Italian Movie” (1956)

On the train to Rome, Lucy is eyed by Vittorio Philippi (Franco Corsaro). Taking the title literally, Lucy investigates the wine-making business, leading to one of the funniest scenes in television history as Lucy stomps grapes. 

After a tussel in the vat, Lucy proves to ‘blue’ for the role - a typical American tourist - which goes to Ethel instead. Lucy one bitter grape! 

TROPICAL RHYTHMS ~ “Home Movies” (1954)

Ricky creates an audition film for a television project. Then Lucy and the Mertzes add their own home movie (a Western) to create a very chaotic film. 

GUYS & DOLLS ~ “Lucy and the Dummy” (1955)

When the episode was running short, a preview clip of the upcoming MGM film musical starring Frank Sinatra was inserted into the Executive Show sequence. After one airing, the sequence was removed and has never been restored. The morning after the original broadcast, fans phoned a bewildered Sinatra to tell him he was on “I Love Lucy” last night - which he knew nothing about! 

~UNMENTIONED TITLES~

Un-Titled Florida Project ~ “Desert Island” (1956)

Ricky announces that he’s going to be in a film about the history of the state of Florida. The movie will feature Claude Akins (as a giant native), Joi Lansing and Jil Jarman. Ricky says he will appear in the ‘modern’ scenes playing with his band in the hotel nightclub. In real life, Desi Arnaz got his start in showbusiness in a Florida nightclub.

CLUNY BROWN ~ “The Fox Hunt” (1956) 

A few seconds of establishing stock footage of Berkshire Manor was taken from the 1938 Ernst Lubitch film Cluny Brown, which was filmed by 20th Century Fox in a Hollywood studio, but takes place in England. In the film, the home is named Friars Carmel Manor, but with the exception of the lettering bearing the name, the footage is identical.

STAGE DOOR ~ “Lucy’s Italian Movie” (1956)

LUCY: “The calla lilies are in bloom again.”

This is a quote from Stage Door (1937), which Lucille Ball always called her ‘big break’. It was Katherine Hepburn’s first line in the play within the film, and was repeated throughout the movie. Ball always admired Hepburn, and it is possible the writers included the line as an homage to her.

BUS STOP ~ “Lucy and Superman” (1957) 

The Appleby’s come over for a social evening. As the scene opens, Caroline is in mid-sentence talking about a film.  

CAROLINE: “And he picked up Marilyn Monroe, slung her over his shoulder and carried her off!”

Although the title is never mentioned, the film they are discussing is Bus Stop, starring Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray. It was released in August 1956, two and a half months before this episode was filmed. Frequent “Lucy” character actor Hans Conried has a featured role in the film.

HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE ~ “Changing the Boys Wardrobe” (1953)

The gang is heading to the movies to see “That picture we’ve been trying to get to for weeks with Marilyn Monroe.” The movie is either Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which premiered in New York City in July 1953, or How To Marry A Millionaire, which premiered (just in Los Angeles) one day after this episode was filmed.

ETHEL: “Wasn’t that a wonderful dress she had on in the big number?”  

Both films were musicals, so this doesn’t narrow it down very much. In either case, it is likely that the title goes unmentioned because Lucy and Desi had just filmed The Long, Long Trailer for MGM Studios and How To Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were 20th Century Fox pictures.

~FILM INSPIRATIONS~

MURDER AT THE VANITIES ~ “Lucy Gets Into Pictures” (1955)

Lucy finally gets a part as a murdered showgirl in an (un-named) Hollywood movie directed by Ricky’s friend Frank Williams (Lou Krugman). The film may have been inspired by 1934′s Murder at the Vanities, in which Lucille Ball had an uncredited role as a showgirl.

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR ~ “The Kleptomaniac” (1952)

Under hypnosis (and with a knowing wink to Ethel), Lucy reverts to childhood, with a story and a voice doubtlessly influenced by Ginger Rogers in the 1942 film The Major and the Minor. 

LUCY: “It all started when I was a little girl. I was riding on the streetcar one day and I looked up and I saw a box and it said, 'take one.’ So I took one. From then on, I took anything that came into my pretty head even though it didn’t say 'take one.'  I took a bright new penny. I took a bicycle. I took a little boy. But my mother made me give him back.

DUCK SOUP ~ “Lucy and Harpo Marx” (1955) 

The mirror routine between Lucy and Harpo was first performed by Groucho in Duck Soup (1933). Lucille Ball and Harpo had appeared together in Room Service in 1938 for RKO Studios. 

DANCE, GIRL, DANCE ~ “Bullfight Dance” (1955)

The final look for Lucy’s bull costume was no doubt inspired by Ferdinand the Bull, the story of the bull who’d rather pick flowers, than face the picador.  The character was integral to the story of Lucille Ball’s 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES ~ “Second Honeymoon” (1956)

The plot of this episode very closely follows the adventures of Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In common with this episode and the film is extra Monty O'Grady, who played a passenger on both vessels!  Also look for “I Love Lucy” actors Norma Varden (Mrs. Benson in “The Ricardos Change Apartments”), Elliott Reid (Edward Warren from “Face To Face”), and Bennett Green (Desi’s stand-in and veteran background player).

Lorelei’s dinner companion turns out to be a seven year-old boy, just like Lucy’s ping pong partner turns out to be young Kenneth Hamilton played by nine year-old Harvey Grant.

Lucy gets stuck in a porthole just as Lorelei did, also draping a blanket around her shoulders so passersby wouldn’t know what was really going on.

~FILM FUNNIES~

“Ricky Needs an Agent” (1955)

Trying to suggest possible film projects for Ricky, Lucy insert him into the titles of some of Hollywood’s best-known movies:

“Ricky, Son of Flicka” / Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945)

“A Streetcar Named Ricardo” / A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

“Gone With the Cuban Wind” / Gone With the Wind (1939)

“Three Cubans in a Fountain” / Three Coins in the Fountain (1945)

“It Happened One Noche” / It Happened One Night (1934)

“Seven Brides for Seven Cubans” / Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

“Meet Me in St. Ricky” / Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

“The Ricardos of Wimpole Street” / The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957)

“Andy Hardy Meets the Conga Player” / Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940)

“Arsenic and Old Ricky” / Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

[alexlacquemanne]

Octobre MMXXIV

Films

Quartet (2012) de Dustin Hoffman avec Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins, Sheridan Smith, Michael Gambon, Andrew Sachs et Gwyneth Jones

Bob le flambeur (1956) de Jean-Pierre Melville avec Roger Duchesne, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Guy Decomble, Simone Paris, André Garret, Claude Cerval et Colette Fleury

Indian Palace (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) (2011) de John Madden avec Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Celia Imrie, Dev Patel, Ronald Pickup et Penelope Wilton

Grosse Fatigue (1994) de et avec Michel Blanc et aussi Carole Bouquet, Philippe Noiret, Josiane Balasko, Marie-Anne Chazel, Christian Clavier, Guillaume Durand, Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Hallyday, Estelle Lefébure et Gérard Jugnot

L'Air de rien (2012) de Grégory Magne et Stéphane Viard avec Grégory Montel, Fred Scotlande, Céline Milliat-Baumgartner, Michel Delpech, Martine Schambacher, Miossec, Jérôme Huguet, Benoît Belleville et Pauline Moulène

Code Mercury (Mercury Rising) (1998) de Harold Becker avec Bruce Willis, Miko Hughes, Alec Baldwin, Chi McBride, John Carroll Lynch, John Doman, Peter Stormare et Kim Dickens

Le Privé (The Long Goodbye) (1973) de Robert Altman avec Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, David Arkin, David Carradine et Arnold Schwarzenegger

Mon oncle Benjamin (1969) d'Édouard Molinaro avec Jacques Brel, Claude Jade, Bernard Alane, Paul Frankeur, Rosy Varte, Lyne Chardonnet, Robert Dalban, Bernard Blier et Armand Mestral

Le Tueur triste (1984) de Nicolas Gessner avec Guy Marchand, Edwige Feuillère, Michel Creton, Béatrice Agenin, Franck Olivier Bonnet, Jean Louis Richard, Jacques François, Amélie Gonin et Marcelle Barreau

Indian Palace : Suite royale (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) (2015) de John Madde avec Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Dev Patel, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, Diana Hardcastle, Richard Gere et Tina Desai

Gremlins 2 : La Nouvelle Génération (Gremlins 2: The New Batch) (1990) de Joe Dante avec Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, John Glover, Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo, Christopher Lee, Haviland Morris, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph et Kathleen Freeman

L’Été meurtrier (1983) de Jean Becker avec Isabelle Adjani, Alain Souchon, Suzanne Flon, Jenny Clève, Maria Machado, Évelyne Didi, Jean Gaven, François Cluzet, Michel Galabru et Roger Carel

Baisers volés (1968) de François Truffaut avec Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Delphine Seyrig, Michael Lonsdale, Harry-Max, André Falcon, Daniel Ceccaldi, Claire Duhamel et Catherine Lutz

Key Largo (1948) de John Huston avec Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Gomez, Harry Lewis et John Rodney

Soleil rouge (1971) de Terence Young avec Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, Toshirō Mifune, Alain Delon, Capucine, Bart Barry et Lee Burton

Le Chien des Baskerville (The Hound of the Baskervilles) (1958) de Terence Fisher avec Peter Cushing, André Morell, Christopher Lee, Marla Landi, David Oxley, Francis De Wolff, Miles Malleson et Ewen Solon

L'Arnaque (The Sting) (1973) de George Roy Hill avec Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning, Ray Walston, Eileen Brennan, Harold Gould, John Heffernan, Dana Elcar et Dimitra Arliss

Au service de Sara (Serving Sara) (2002) de Reginald Hudlin avec Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell, Cedric the Entertainer, Amy Adams et Terry Crews

Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) de François Truffaut avec Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier, Serge Davri, Claude Mansard et Richard Kanayan

Séries

L'été rouge

Episode 1 - Episode 2 - Episode 3 - Episode 4 - Episode 5

Castle Saison 8

M. et Mme Castle - Meurtre a cappella - Témoin-clé - L'Espion qui venait du froid - Huis clos - Le Rêve américain - Escapade à L.A. - Le ver est dans le fruit - Le Cœur ou la Raison - Votre mort est un ordre - Trahisons - L'immortel - Beaucoup de bruit pour un meurtre - La Fin du monde - Tirs croisés

Psych Saison 1, 2, 3

Voyances et Manigances - T-R-I-C-H-E-U-R - Qu'il parle maintenant ou se taise à jamais - Esprit, es-tu là ? - 9 vies - Champ de bataille - La Maison hantée - Shawn chez les super-héros - Souvenirs, souvenirs - La Guerre de l'étoile - Coup de soleil - Avis de meurtre - Jeu, Set et Meurtre - Poker menteur - Esprits féminin - Les Nouvelles Stars - 65 Millions d'années plus tôt - Un médium de trop - Trop facile pour être possible - Petit… mais costaud - Un plat qui se mange froid - Les Petits Génies - Recherche nounous désespérément - Chasseurs de primes - Un mort au pied du sapin - Mariage en sursis - Coups de vieux - Un rôle de composition - Dans le secret de la loge - Fashion victimes - Une nuit au musée - Chasse aux fantômes - La Folle Soirée de Shawn - Le médium qui tombe à pic - La Chasse au trésor - Au pays de l'or noir - Henry les bons tuyaux - Comme sur des roulettes - Haut les mains !

Friends Saison 1, 2, 3

Celui qui avait un singe - Celui qui rêve par procuration - Celui qui a failli rater l'accouchement - Celui qui fait craquer Rachel - Celui qui a une nouvelle fiancée - Celui qui détestait le lait maternel - Celui qui est mort dans l'appart du dessous - Celui qui avait viré de bord - Celui qui se faisait passer pour Bob - Celui qui a oublié un bébé dans le bus - Celui qui tombe des nues - Celui qui a été très maladroit - Celui qui cassait les radiateurs - Celui qui se dédouble - Celui qui n'apprécie pas certains mariages - Celui qui retrouve son singe : première partie - Celui qui retrouve son singe : deuxième partie - Celui qui a failli aller au bal de promo - Celui qui a fait on ne sait quoi avec Rachel - Celui qui vit sa vie - Celui qui remplace celui qui part - Celui qui disparaît de la série - Celui qui ne voulait pas partir - Celui qui se met à parler - Celui qui affronte les voyous - Celui qui faisait le lien - Celui qui attrape la varicelle - Celui qui embrassait mal - Celui qui rêvait de la princesse Leia - Celui qui a du mal à se préparer - Celui qui avait la technique du câlin - Celui qui ne supportait pas les poupées - Celui qui bricolait - Celui qui se souvient - Celui qui était prof et élève - Celui qui avait pris un coup sur la tête - Celui pour qui le foot c'est pas le pied - Celui qui fait démissionner Rachel - Celui qui ne s'y retrouvait plus - Celui qui était très jaloux - Celui qui persiste et signe - Celui que les prothèses ne gênaient pas - Celui qui vivait mal la rupture - Celui qui a survécu au lendemain - Celui qui était laissé pour compte - Celui qui s'auto-hypnotisait

Affaires sensibles

La chute de Nicolas Hulot - Blur vs Oasis : la bataille d'Angleterre - Août 44, La Libération de Paris, Épisode 1/2 : Août 44, des Parisiens en armes - Août 44, La Libération de Paris, Épisode 2/2 : Eté 44, De Gaulle, la marche d’un président - Docteur Petiot, faux résistant, vrai tueur - Hitler l'insaisissable cadavre - Benito Mussolini, un cadavre en cavale - Le mystère des noyés de la Deûle - Les trois de West Memphis - "Naissance d’une nation" : Naissance d’une contestation - Little Rock, neuf lycéens noirs contre la ségrégation - Emmett Till, le lynchage de trop - Marseille 1973, quand le racisme tue en toute impunité - L'argent russe du Front National - Affaire Alstom : la guerre secrète - Le procès de Lady Chatterley - Les survivants de la Cordillère des Andes - "Tcherno-Blaye" : le scénario d'un Tchernobyl français ? - La tour Montparnasse ou la folie des grandeurs en direct des Rendez-vous de l'histoire de Blois - « Sans haine, sans arme, ni violence » : le casse du siècle de Nice - "La Grande Bouffe" ou le festin orgiaque - Taylor Swift, le phénomène total - L’abominable homme des neiges, une rencontre au sommet

Brokenwood Saison 9, 3

Comme chien et chat - En plein cœur - La mariée était en cuir - Le veuf noir

Le Coffre à Catch

#188 : La dernière avec UVA !

Les Brigades du Tigre : « Les Années-Folles » Saison 6

Les Princes de la nuit - Rita et le Caïd - La Grande Duchesse Tatiana - Les Fantômes de Noël - La Fille de l'air - Lacs et Entrelacs

Commissaire Moulin Saison 1

Le Diable aussi a des ailes - Intox - Fausses notes - Les Brebis égarées

Les Simpson Saison 3

Mon pote Michael Jackson - Lisa va à Washington - Le Palais du Gaucher - Le Petit Parrain - Une belle simpsonnerie - Tel père, tel clown - Simpson Horror Show II - Le Poney de Lisa - Un père dans la course - Un cocktail d'enfer - Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk - Vive les mariés - Un puits de mensonges - L'Enfer du jeu - Homer au foyer - Bart le tombeur - Homer la foudre - Le Flic et la Rebelle - Chienne de vie - Imprésario de mon cœur - La Veuve noire - Le Permis d'Otto Bus - Séparés par l'amour - Le Retour du frère prodigue

Belphégor ou le Fantôme du Louvre

Le Louvre - Le secret du Louvre

Nestor Burma saison 6

Panique à Saint-Patrick - Atout cœur

Rematch

Episode 1 - Episode 2 - Episode 3 - Episode 4 - Episode 5 - Episode 6

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Saison 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Halloween - Halloween II - Halloween III - Halloween IV - Halloween V

Le tribunal de l'impossible

La Bête du Gévaudan

Spectacles

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, Director's Cut (1972) d'Adrian Maben

Chers parents (2024) de Emmanuel Patron & Armelle Patron avec Elise Diamant, Bernard Alane, Emmanuel Patron, Rudy Milstein et Frédérique Tirmont

Stevie Wonder: Live at Last (2008)

R.E.M : Perfect Square (2004)

Bénabar : la tournée des indociles (2022)

Le Chien des Baskerville (1974) de Jean Marcillac avec Raymond Gerome, André Haber, Christian Alers, Jean Pierre Gernez, Bernard Musson, Christiane Moinet, Pierre Hatet, Colette Teissedre, Robert Bazil, Liliane Patrick et Jean Jacques Steen

Livres

Putzi de Thomas Snégaroff

Kaamelott, tome 10 : Karadoc et l'Icosaèdre d'Alexandre Astier et Steven Dupré

Lucky Luke, tome 28 : Le Pony Express de Morris, Xavier Fauche et Jean Léturgie

Philip Marlowe : Le Grand Sommeil de Raymond Chandler

OSS 117 : Agonie en Patagonie de Jean Bruce

Batman : Un long Halloween de Jeph Loeb et Tim Sale

[ulkaralakbarova]

In small-town Texas, affable and popular mortician Bernie Tiede strikes up a friendship with Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow well known for her sour attitude. When she becomes controlling and abusive, Bernie goes to great lengths to remove himself from her grasp. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Bernie Tiede: Jack Black Marjorie Nugent: Shirley MacLaine Danny Buck Davidson: Matthew McConaughey Scrappy Holmes: Brady Coleman Lloyd Hornbuckle: Richard Robichaux Don Leggett: Rick Dial Sheriff Huckabee: Brandon Smith Rev. Woodard: Larry Jack Dotson Molly: Merrilee McCommas Carl: Mathew Greer Townsperson: Marjorie Dome Townsperson: Tim Cariker Townsperson: Fern Luker Townsperson: Jack Payne Townsperson: Sonny Carl Davis Townsperson: Chris Humphrey Mourner: Jesse Lucio Townsperson: Ann Reeves Townsperson: Kay Epperson Townsperson: Ira Bounds Townsperson: James Baker Townsperson: Kay McConaughey Townsperson: Kristi Youngblood Townsperson: Kenny Brevard Townsperson: Margaret Bowman Townsperson: Mollie Fuller Townsperson: Tanja Givens Townsperson: Glenda Jones Townsperson: Travis Blevins Townsperson: Sylvia Froman Townsperson: Martha Long Townsperson: Jo Perkins Townsperson: Reba Tarjick Townsperson: Dale Dudley Townsperson: James Wilson Townsperson: Teresa Edwards Townsperson: Billy Vaticalos Townsperson: Rob Anthony Larry Brumley: Tommy G. Kendrick Townsperson: Pam McDonald Townsperson: Kathy Gollmitzer Townsperson: Cozette McNeely Professor Fleming: Richard Andrew Jones Friend of Deceased: Charles Bailey Mrs. Pebworth: Suzi McLaughlin Mr. Estes: Grant James Mrs. Estes: Juli Erickson Dwayne Nugent: J.D. Young Dwayne Jr.: Charlie m Stewart Lewie: Joe Stevens Esmerelda: Raquel Gavia Church Goer: Amparo García Oil Worker: Toby Metcalf Chainsaw Artist: Doug Moreland Pianist: Edward Ji Guys & Dolls Performer: Jill Blackwood Mel: David Blackwell Kevin: Gabriel Luna Photographer: Deana Newcomb Assistant Director: David Steakley Bank Manager: Peter Harrell Jr. Deputy Sheriff: Joe Leroy Reynolds Truck Driver: Christian Stokes Generator Operator: John Hornbuckle Sheriff’s Deputy #2: Wray Crawford Café Waitress: Margaret Hoard IRS Agent: Charles Allen Eskew TV Reporter: Quita Culpepper Cashier: Mona Lee Fultz Judge: Jerry Biggs Lead Juror: Robert Works Community Theater Group: Chris Barfield Community Theater Group: Taylor Bryant Community Theater Group: Colin Bevis Community Theater Group: Jacqui Bloom Community Theater Group: Joshua Denning Community Theater Group: Ellie Edwards Community Theater Group: Alaina Flores Community Theater Group: Jennifer Foster Community Theater Group: Leslie Hethcox Community Theater Group: Jordan Hill Community Theater Group: Berkley Jones Community Theater Group: Trevor McGinnis Community Theater Group: Mika Odom Community Theater Group: Chell Parkins Community Theater Group: David Ponton Community Theater Group: Gray Randolph Community Theater Group: Rachel Hull-Ryde Community Theater Group: Ian Saunders Community Theater Group: Madelyn Shaffer Community Theater Group: Larissa Slota Community Theater Group: Daniel Rae Srivastava Community Theater Group: Ellen Stader Community Theater Group: Lara Wright Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Betty Andrews Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Marcia Bailey Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Umpy Bechtol Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Nita Bouldin Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Nellie Hickerson Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Jeanette Kloppe Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Geraldine Miller Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Sharon Rigsbee Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Debbie Shaw Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Flo Weiershausen Mrs. Senior Carthage Pageant Contestant: Gina Wooten Juror: Gary Askins Juror: Ben Bachelder Juror: Meredith Beal Juror: Stacey Bruck Juror: Michelle Briscoe Juror: Lesa Brooks Juror: Gayla Bruce Juror: Brenda Bunton Juror: Kristi Copeland Juror: Jeff Davis Juror: Orion Gallagher Juror: Kenneth C. Liverman Juror: Linda Rudwick Juror: Mary Stifflemir...

[lboogie1906]

Marcus Miller (born William Henry Marcus Miller Jr.; June 14, 1959) is a film composer, jazz composer, record producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, known as a bass guitarist. He has worked with trumpeter Miles Davis, pianist Herbie Hancock, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn, among others.

He is classically trained as a clarinetist and plays keyboards, saxophone, and guitar. He began to work regularly in New York City, playing bass and writing music for jazz flutist Bobbi Humphrey and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith. He became a session musician.

He was nominated for numerous Grammy Awards as a producer for Miles Davis, Luther Vandross, David Sanborn, Bob James, Chaka Khan, and Wayne Shorter and won two Grammys. He won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Song, for Luther Vandross’ “Power of Love” and he won Best Contemporary Jazz Album for his seventh solo instrumental album, M².

He was appointed UNESCO Artist for Peace supporting and promoting the UNESCO Slave Route Project. His album Afrodeezia earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[whileiamdying]

The Reluctant Star

By David Denby August 19, 2013

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), a bitter fable about the movie business, gave the picture’s star one of the most craftily prepared entrances in the history of cinema. The setting is a night club in Madrid. A dancer named Maria Vargas is performing, but Mankiewicz shows us only the reactions of the crowd: the men rapt and ravenous; the women irritable. As Vargas finishes her act and goes backstage, three men from Hollywood arrive to meet her. She refuses to come out, but Harry Dawes, a down-on-his-luck writer and director (Humphrey Bogart), barges into her dressing room, where he notices her bare feet below a drawn curtain; she is embracing her lover. Dawes teases her, and, enraged, she yanks the curtain aside. Then, at last, we see her: Ava Gardner, with her thick black hair, bowed lips, cleft chin, and green eyes, wearing a scarlet necklace that matches her lipstick, and a white peasant blouse pulled off one shoulder. Admiration struggles against disbelief: how could anyone look that good?

First glimpses of Gardner were often designed to stun. When she was young, she was the most beautiful woman in the movies, more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe—both of whom were better actresses. Monroe, despite her stern tutelage by Lee Strasberg and Arthur Miller, brought humor to much of what she did. Taylor had a driving ambition that led her to focus relentlessly on a part. In “The Barefoot Contessa,” after that startling entrance, Gardner looks lost during most of the movie, though it’s not really her fault. Maria Vargas, who quickly becomes a Hollywood star, is supposed to be an earthy proletarian from the Madrid slums, yet she speaks perfect English and carries herself haughtily. She goes to bed with working-class men, but you never get more than a glance at that side of her life, so her imperious manner, combined with the soulful palaver that Mankiewicz wrote for her, comes off as a humorless imposture. Mankiewicz finally lets us see Maria dance—a provocative Americanized flamenco—but, except for that moment, the part is nearly unplayable. So were many of Gardner’s roles. Her career stretched from the early nineteen-forties to the mid-eighties, but Hollywood rarely knew what to do with her, and she didn’t care enough, she said, to work it out for herself.

What Gardner could play—and did play successfully, in a few films—was a stylized version of herself. Her talent was for directness and pungency, for sexual longing and wrathful regret. She tried to live on her own terms, and her independent temperament is one of the most memorable things about her. She avoided the casting couch, but had the kind of freewheeling sex life that had always been available to powerful men. Before she was thirty, she had been married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra; she slept with many of her leading men and, occasionally, like Maria Vargas leaving a little something for the poor, with crew members. She drank and she liked to brawl, and for long stretches she withdrew from the movie colony to live in Spain, whose flamenco-and-bullfighting popular culture never struck her as a cliché. She was a Hemingway type of woman; she often drank with the writer, and even played Lady Brett in “The Sun Also Rises” (1957), but the movie built around her was miscast and tedious. Through all this, she attained what few Hollywood actresses can: a distinctive personal voice. In conversation, she was blunt, profane, and often searingly intelligent.

Gardner died in 1990, at the age of sixty-seven, but her voice comes alive in a new book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” (Simon & Schuster). In 1988, retired and partially paralyzed by strokes, Gardner was living in the Knightsbridge section of London. Running out of money, she approached Peter Evans, an English journalist who had written biographies of Aristotle Onassis and Brigitte Bardot, and asked his help with a memoir. She told him, “I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” They worked in a haphazard fashion. She would drink late, and then call him. (“Were you sleeping, honey?” she asked, at three in the morning. “I miss Frank. He was a bastard. But Jesus I miss him.”) Evans took notes and, in the morning, turned them into orderly speech. Soon, he began meeting with Gardner in her flat, where, on his first visit, she greeted him wearing a bath towel.

Eventually, they settled into long conversations, but there was a problem: Gardner’s natural candor struggled against her fear of violating confidences. She and Sinatra, her last husband, had been divorced for thirty years, but they were still close. She gave Evans juicy material—high times and low “in the feathers,” in Hollywood clubs and restaurants, and on movie sets all over the world—then angrily shut down. “Why can’t we settle for what I pretend to remember?” she said. At times, the project was just too much. “I’m so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner,” she told him at one point.

Evans worked with her fitfully for months and, from time to time, gave her pages to read. Then, apparently, she had second thoughts, because Evans’s text suddenly halts. In a brief epilogue to the book, Ed Victor, Evans’s literary agent, tells what he thinks happened. It seems that Sinatra disliked Evans and thought that Gardner was revealing too much to him, so he may have ended the collaboration by giving her the equivalent of what she would have been paid for the memoir.

In any case, shortly thereafter, she started over with two ghostwriters, Alan Burgess and Kenneth Turan. The book, “My Story,” which is amusing but somewhat cautious, came out a few months after her death. Then, in 2006, the biographer Lee Server published “Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing,” a chronicle of Gardner’s life that tells every tale of her wildest moments. Finally, in 2009, with the permission of Gardner’s executors, Evans began turning his transcripts into a book, but he died in 2012, before he could finish. The manuscript, twice abandoned, turns out to be a bristling look at Hollywood attitudes and sexual manners in the pre-feminist period, when a woman could hold her own only by giving up as much as she took.

Ava Gardner’s “discovery” story rivals Lana Turner’s visit to the soda fountain. Gardner was born in 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, and she grew up poor. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer who became a sharecropper; her mother ran boarding houses. In the spring of 1941, when Gardner was eighteen and enrolled in a secretarial course, she visited her older sister, Bappie, who was living in New York. Bappie’s husband, a photographer named Larry Tarr, made a portrait of Gardner. Wearing a print dress and a straw hat, she looks like the prettiest girl at the county fair. Tarr put the picture in the window of his studio, where an office boy from Loews, M-G-M’s parent company in New York, saw it and, hoping for a date with Gardner, presented himself to Tarr’s receptionist as an M-G-M employee. He never got the date, but the portrait made it into the right hands, and, in short order, M-G-M gave Gardner a screen test, followed by a seven-year contract, starting at fifty dollars a week.

A publicist named Greg Morrison was on hand when Gardner arrived in Los Angeles. More than forty years later, he summed up the moment in a note to Peter Evans:

She’s 17 or 18 with one pair of shoes, cardboard suitcase, leaving everybody in her life to enter the MGM University. They teach her to walk, talk, sit, sleep, shave her legs, shake hands, kiss, smile, eat, pray. Her ass is great, fine tits, short but good legs, great shoulders, thin hips, fix the toes, do the hair—clean it, but don’t touch the face. Everybody and every camera is drawn to that face. The town is jammed with pretty, but not like that—the eyes, the mouth, are from another world. She becomes the “armpiece du jour,” learns what they want. Learns how to do it without giving her soul away, and learns everything but how to Act. In her whole shitkicking, barefoot life she never really learned to pretend, nor did poverty give her much humor, certainly none about herself.

It’s the voice of Old Hollywood in its purest form: cruel yet sympathetic, and shrewd. The studio “educated” her, as Morrison described, and for five years put her mostly in walk-on roles. Her first big part came in “Whistle Stop” (1946), in which, violating the Hays Code, she gave George Raft an ardent, openmouthed kiss. The scene caught the attention of John Huston, and within months she had a role in “The Killers,” a noirish adaptation of the Hemingway story, which Huston co-wrote (uncredited) with Anthony Veiller. It’s not a major role, but Gardner, crooning at a piano in a black gown that displays her famous shoulders, is so devastating that you understand immediately why Burt Lancaster’s vulnerable, defeated boxer, from the moment he looks at her, doesn’t stand a chance. Despair and death follow.

After “The Killers,” Gardner might have remained a seething sex goddess. Many of the previous generation of female stars—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford—were high-strung, demanding women who put together long and productive careers. But Hollywood in the forties and fifties wanted something else; it wanted young women who were low-strung and sultry. Lana Turner, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and, in even more exaggerated form, Yvonne De Carlo, Jane Russell, and Jayne Mansfield were as much projections of male fantasies as living women. But it’s hard, perhaps impossible, to survive as someone else’s fantasy. Pulled this way and that by the culture’s erotic dreams and by the gray light of reality—“Men go to bed with Gilda,” Rita Hayworth grimly noted, and “they wake up with me”—many of those women had difficult lives, and some had careers cut short by alcohol or illness.

Gardner was too sharp-tempered to play slow-witted girls, as Lana Turner and Kim Novak did (though she didn’t play intellectuals, either), and too proud to be constantly available and yielding in her roles, as Hayworth and Monroe were. Gardner went in a different direction. The studio removed all traces of her North Carolina drawl, and, with her collaboration, managed to turn a bright, feisty woman into a hollow beauty. She played refined types with boring elocutionary precision—not only Maria Vargas but the demigoddess Pandora, in Albert Lewin’s preposterous, art-conscious “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” (1951). She played Guinevere, listlessly, in “Knights of the Round Table” (1953), and what Hollywood saw as semi-exotics: the biracial Julie in the remake of “Show Boat” (1951); an Anglo-Indian clutching at Stewart Granger in “Bhowani Junction” (1956); and, in “The Naked Maja” (1958), Goya’s model. “I never played a woman who was smarter than me,” she told Evans, which was both a boast and a lament.

She might have helped herself if she had fought for better roles. But that wasn’t her fight. A key to her resistance may be suggested by remarks she made to Evans as she recalled her happiness in being loved—“possessed,” as she put it—by her father:

To be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved. But later if anyone tried to possess me—oh boy, I was out of there. That was something Frank never understood. He just couldn’t deal with it, and I couldn’t explain it to him. Probably because I couldn’t understand it myself.

Her father died in 1938, when she was fifteen, and it’s possible that after losing him she struggled to hang on to her selfhood so strongly that she couldn’t completely give herself over to a musical genius, much less to a fictional character.

She liked the fast times, the soft Hollywood nights filled with swing bands and torch singers. In 1942, at nineteen, she married her first lover, Mickey Rooney, who was at that time an enormous box-office draw for M-G-M as the wholesome Andy Hardy. Rooney would take her to the Cocoanut Grove, where Tommy Dorsey’s band played, and abandon her for hours while he sat in on drums. “That’s where I learned to drink, I mean to drink seriously—not just the Beachcomber’s zombies,” she said, “although they were damn lethal, too, but real grown-up-girls’ drinks.” Rooney was unfaithful, dishonest, and self-righteous—it was still a time when men were astonished, even hurt, when women refused to accept the lies they told them. Gardner left him after a year, but they had frequent, bittersweet reunions before the divorce came through. “It’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love,” she told Evans. “Especially a husband.”

After an interlude in 1943 with Howard Hughes, who continued to pursue her for the next twenty years, Gardner met the bandleader Artie Shaw. She revered Shaw for his erudition (he was a great reader), and married him in 1945. Shaw gave her books, but even when she read them he brutally insulted her ignorance. When they socialized with the likes of S. J. Perelman, William Saroyan, and John O’Hara, she told Evans, “Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. But if I kicked off my shoes and curled my feet up on the couch, he’d go bananas. ‘You’re not in the fucking tobacco fields now,’ he’d scream.”

She was able to distill the good times and the bad and also express what she knew of life—what she felt of desire and desperation—in two extraordinary performances. The first was in “Mogambo” (1953), a remake of Victor Fleming’s “Red Dust” (1932), one of the most openly sexual films of the pre-Code era. In Fleming’s movie, set on a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia, Jean Harlow, barely clothed at times, fights a proper married lady, played by Mary Astor, for Clark Gable’s affections. Two decades later, John Ford set and filmed the story in East Africa, with Gable, still hanging in there, as a big-game trapper with a camp in Kenya. This time, he is fought over by Gardner, playing a stranded American showgirl, and the flawless Grace Kelly, cast as a demure married Englishwoman who is highly attracted to him. Kelly is very good, but it’s Gardner’s movie. Outfitted in tightly belted safari slacks, her body is shaped like a Martini glass. She’s completely at ease, even joyous, as she cavorts among the tents, plays with a baby elephant, tosses a snake out of her bed, and teases and vamps her way into Gable’s arms. Gardner isn’t raucously funny, like Harlow, but she’s more womanly, and more grievously wounded, her eyes flashing, when Gable rejects her for Kelly. She fights her way back, of course, and bags the hunter. Gardner received her only Oscar nomination for the performance, but she said she was relieved when she didn’t win—she wasn’t eager to take herself more seriously.

Sinatra accompanied her to Africa. When they started their affair, three years earlier, in 1949, the bobby-soxer adulation of the war years was dying out; it was the beginning of the Sinatra Troubles. He and Gardner played lawlessly together, maybe as a way of fending off his despair. She told Evans:

We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town—Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were—with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.

By the time they married, in 1951, Sinatra’s career had almost completely stalled, his voice frayed from a hemorrhage of the vocal cords. Gardner stuck by him, often selflessly, as he tried to regain his footing. As a married couple, however, they were hapless. Reporters pursued them everywhere, playing them off against each other, and Sinatra flew into rages, which only encouraged the press. Each accused the other of infidelity and of putting career before marriage. During the shooting of “Mogambo,” they hurled pots and pans at night, causing Gable and Kelly to poke their heads out of their tents to find out what was going on. To Gardner’s relief, Sinatra went back to the States to audition for the role of Maggio, in “From Here to Eternity.” He got the part, and it relaunched his career. They didn’t divorce until 1957, but the marriage was over, and she escaped to Spain and the company of writers and matadors. Emissaries from Hollywood had to prove their mettle by drinking and clubbing with her for nights on end before she would talk business.

Much of what she knew of romantic failure shows up in her other great performance. In John Huston’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play “The Night of the Iguana” (1964), she plays Maxine, the widowed owner of a ramshackle hotel on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Gardner was in her early forties, and her face and her body had thickened, but, in a loose-fitting poncho, her tangled hair pulled back tight, except for a few stray tendrils, she was volatile and ripe. The Southern drawl that M-G-M had made her drop returned in alternating shades of malice and kindness. Again, she is fighting for a man—Richard Burton’s alcoholic defrocked minister—who is drawn to an honorable, well-bred woman, played by Deborah Kerr. (Maxine is not strictly honorable; she frolics with a couple of beach boys from time to time.) Burton’s fretful drunk and Gardner’s Maxine, needy and fragile, offer each other touching consolation. “I really brought that broad to life,” she told Evans, and she didn’t have to pretend much to do it. The performance makes you think of the actress she could have been if she had played other Williams heroines, or had persuaded her writer friends to fashion roles around her own remarkable self. But we’ll have to settle for a few performances and for Evans’s book, in which a journeyman writer and an often regretful star made a small monument for themselves in the largely forgotten wastes of Hollywood’s corrupt but enticing history. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 26, 2013, issue.

[tvintedspvrkmoving]

mobile muse list : television

* original character. ** written as an original character.

it's always sunny in philadelphia :

frank reynolds , fifty eight , danny devito

the waitress , thirty four , rachel mcadams

american horror story :

violet harmon , twenty one , taissa farmiga

bob's burgers :

gene belcher , twenty three , noah centineo

louise belcher , twenty one , hailee steinfeld

tina belcher , twenty five , barbie ferreira

doctor who :

amelia pond , twenty one , karen gillan

clara oswald , twenty six , jenna coleman

rose tyler , twenty one , billie piper

euphoria :

barbara "bb" brooks , twenty three , katie douglas

cassie howard , twenty three , sydney sweeney ( @howaerds )

lexi howard , twenty two , maude apatow

maddy perez , twenty three , alexa demie

ruby "rue" bennett , twenty two , zendaya

glee :

brittany s pierce , twenty three , heather morris / alt tbd

finn hudson , twenty three , adam dimarco

rachel berry , twenty two , hailee steinfeld

santana lopez , twenty two , cierra ramirez

quinn fabray , twenty three , dianna agron

the good place :

eleanor shellstrop , thirty two , kristin bell

janet , ageless , d'arcy carden

jason mendoza , twenty eight , manny jacinto

trevor , immortal , adam scott

gossip girl :

blair waldorf , twenty two , leighton meester

dan humphrey , twenty two , penn badgley

serena van der woodsen , twenty two , blake lively

grey's anatomy :

alex karev , twenty four plus , justin chambers

april kepner , twenty four plus , sarah drew

cristina yang , twenty four plus , sandra oh

george o'malley , twenty four plus , t.r. knight

isobel "izzie" stevens , twenty four plus , katherine heigl

josephine "jo" wilson , twenty four plus , camilla luddington

jules millin , twenty four , adelaide kane

lucas "luke" adams , twenty four , niko terho

lexie grey , twenty four plus , chyler leigh

mark sloan , twenty eight plus , eric dane

meredith grey , twenty four plus , ellen pompeo

mika yasuda , twenty four , midori francis

jury duty :

noah price , twenty six , mekki leeper

new girl :

nick miller , thirty six , jake johnson

winston bishop , thirty four , lamorne morris

outer banks : now at @pcguelife

parks and recreation :

april ludgate , twenty four , aubrey plaza

schitt's creek :

alexis rose , twenty seven , annie murphy

david rose , thirty one , dan levy

shameless :

fiona gallagher , twenty eight , emmy rossum

mickey milkovich , twenty four , noel fisher

phillip "lip" gallagher , twenty six , jeremy allen white

stranger things :

kimberly holloway , twenty two , inde navarrette *

robin buckley , twenty three , maya hawke

supernatural :

brooklyn winchester , twenty two , kaitlyn dever *

charlotte winchester , twenty two , olivia holt *

dean winchester , twenty six plus , jensen ackles

ed zeddmore , twenty seven , nicholas galitzine **

elena gilbert , twenty one , nina dobrev **

harry spangler , twenty five , devon bostick **

hayley wilson , twenty three , maia mitchell *

iliana , unknown , astrid berges-frisbey *

joanna "jo" harvelle , twenty five , dianna agron

kevin tran , twenty one , osric chau

layla rourke , twenty six , rebecca rittenhouse **

lucas barr , twenty four , nick robinson ** ( @medaeium )

sarah blake , twenty three , taylor cole ** ( @provenaence )

weston lane , twenty eight , pete davidson *

superstore :

cheyenne lee , twenty two , nichole sakura

teen wolf :

allison argent , twenty four , crystal reed

asher mccall , twenty two , niko terho *

chris argent , forty three , j.r. bourne

cora hale , twenty one , adelaide kane

daniella coleman , twenty two , chase sui wonders * now found at @ch1maeras

derek hale , twenty five , tyler hoechlin

emma martin , twenty two , madelyn cline * now found at @lupaeus

emmett hale , twenty five , mike faist

erica reyes , twenty three , gage golightly

hadley cooper , twenty three , abigail cowen *

isaac lahey , twenty three , daniel sharman

kira yukimura , twenty three , arden cho

laura hale , twenty eight , phoebe tonkin **

lydia martin , twenty three , holland roden now found at @quiritaetus

malia tate , twenty two , shelley hennig

melissa mccall , forty six , melissa ponzio

noah stilinski , fifty , linden ashby

paige krasikeva , twenty five , maia mitchell **

peter hale , forty five , ian bohen

riley hale , twenty two , zoey deutch / maia mitchell * now found at @haelestorm

scott mccall , twenty three , tyler posey

sierra ngata , twenty four , courtney eaton *

stiles stilinski , twenty three , dylan o'brien

vada parker , twenty six , fivel stewart

walker :

clint west , thirty six , austin nichols

emily walker , thirty six , genevieve padalecki

micki ramirez , thirty four , lindsey morgan

stella walker , twenty one , violet brinson

[sergiosantos]

Books read in 2023

All the books I read in 2023, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites. You can also check my lists for 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Fiction

Red Star - Alexander Bogdanov Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson Ghostwritten - David Mitchell ⭐️ Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler ⭐️ Utopia - Thomas More & Ursula K. Le Guin Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison The Terraformers - Annalee Newitz The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood Radicalized - Cory Doctorow Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Non-fiction

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies - Leslie Kern Uses of Disorder - Richard Sennett Radical Cities - Justin McGuirkn ⭐️ Moods of Future Joys - Alastair Humphreys Microadventures - Alastair Humphreys The Autonomous City - Alex Vasudevan ⭐️ Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists - Nick Moore Mismatch - Kat Holmes La anarquía explicada a los niños - José Antonio Emmanuel Company of One - Paul Jarvis Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchy - Simon Read Something Should Be Done - Peter Good Ur-Fascism - Umberto Eco ⭐️ Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook - Mark Bray Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne Journey to Portugal - José Saramago Art for UBI - Institute of Radical Imagination La trinchera doméstica - Cristina Barrial Anarchy Works - Peter Gelderloos The Utopia of Rules - David Graeber FIRE - Dama de Ouros The Beach Machine - Kyklàda Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans - Douglas Coupland Off the Map - Alastair Bonnet Pirate Enlightenment - David Graeber

[xcziel]

oooops i forgot

tuesday new releases for november 14:

patrick rothfuss novella the narrow road between desires (same size as slow regard of silent things)

david baldacci has new thriller the edge

mitch albom novel about the lives of three holocaust survivors little liar

new novel from michael cunningham day

a return to the time-travel cafe: before we say goodbye by toshikazu kawaguchi author of before the coffee gets cold, english translation by geoffrey trousselot

elizabeth crook's western sequel to the which way tree, the madstone

harmony new book of poetry from whitney hanson

jacquelyn mitchard's new familial drama a very inconvenient scandal

.just once new christian fiction by karen kingsbury

letters of j.r.r. tolkien edited and selected by humphrey carpenter with assistance by christopher tolkien

rush drummer geddy lee's new memoir my effin' life

johnny cash: the life in lyrics with mark stielper

the night parade: a speculative memoir by jami nakamura lin

a woman i know: female spies, double identities, and a new story of the kennedy assasination by filmmaker mary haverstick

city on mars by kelly and zach weinersmith (good non-fiction gift for those who like the martian and laughing at elon mushk)

tomlin: the soul of a football coach by john harris

entangled life: illustrated edition by martin sheldrake - new gorgeous hardcover for the mushroom and fungi fans

core of an onion another micro-history - with recipes - from michael kurlansky, author of cod and salt

new leather gifting style black cover of 48 laws of power: special powers edition

the bill gates problem the myth of the good billionaire by tim schwab

the money kings by daniel schulman

new hardcover collector editions of madeline miller's circe and anthony doerr's all the light we cannot see

also new romance collector hardcovers of archer's voice by mia sheridan and one last stop by casey mcquiston

star wars the eye of darkness a high republic novel by george mann

the marvel multiverse role-playing game core rulebook is out now

the upcycled self by tariq 'black thought' trotter

political books 😔:

network of lies about fox news by brian stelter

biography mitt romney a reckoning by mckay coppins

mike pence's advice(?) book go home for dinner

tired of winning by jonathan karl about trump and the gop

[tvintedspvrkmoved]

mobile muse list : television

* original character. ** written as an original character.

american horror story :

moira o'hara , twenty three / seventy six , alexandra breckinridge / frances conroy

tate langdon , twenty one , evan peters

violet harmon , twenty one , taissa farmiga

bob's burgers :

gene belcher , twenty three , noah centineo

louise belcher , twenty one , hailee steinfeld

tina belcher , twenty five , barbie ferreira

disney / nickelodeon :

alex russo , twenty three , wizards of waverly place , selena gomez

carly shay , twenty two , icarly , miranda cosgrove

maddie fitzpatrick , twenty four , suite life , ashley tisdale / olivia holt

doctor who :

amelia pond , twenty one , karen gillan

clara oswald , twenty six , jenna coleman

rose tyler , twenty one , billie piper

euphoria :

barbara "bb" brooks , twenty three , faceclaim tbd

cassie howard , twenty three , sydney sweeney

lexi howard , twenty two , maude apatow

maddy perez , twenty three , alexa demie

ruby "rue" bennett , twenty two , zendaya

suze howard , forty six , stefania spampinato

gossip girl :

blair waldorf , twenty two , leighton meester

dan humphrey , twenty two , penn badgley

serena van der woodsen , twenty two , blake lively

grey's anatomy :

cristina yang , twenty four plus , sandra oh

isobel "izzie" stevens , twenty four plus , katherine heigl

josephine "jo" wilson , twenty four plus , camilla luddington

jules millin , twenty four , adelaide kane

lucas "luke" adams , twenty four , niko terho

mark sloan , twenty eight plus , eric dane

meredith grey , twenty four plus , ellen pompeo

mika yasuda , twenty four , midori francis

it's always sunny in philadelphia :

frank reynolds , fifty eight , danny devito

the waitress , thirty four , rachel mcadams

outer banks :

cleo , twenty three , carlacia grant

jj maybank , twenty two , rudy pankow

john b routledge , twenty two , chase stokes

kiara carrera , twenty one , madison bailey

pope heyward , twenty two , jonathan daviss

sarah cameron , twenty one , madelyn cline

schitt's creek :

alexis rose , twenty seven , annie murphy

david rose , thirty one , dan levy

patrick brewer , thirty , noah reid

shameless :

fiona gallagher , twenty eight , emmy rossum

mickey milkovich , twenty four , noel fisher

phillip "lip" gallagher , twenty six , jeremy allen white

supernatural :

alex jones , twenty one , faceclaim tbd **

brooklyn winchester , twenty two , kaitlyn dever *

castiel , unknown , misha collins

charlotte winchester , twenty two , olivia holt *

dean winchester , twenty six plus , jensen ackles

ed zeddmore , twenty seven , nicholas galitzine **

elena gilbert , twenty one , nina dobrev **

harry spangler , twenty five , devon bostick **

hayley wilson , twenty three , maia mitchell *

iliana , unknown , astrid berges-frisbey *

jessica moore , twenty two , adrianne palicki **

joanna "jo" harvelle , twenty five , dianna agron

kevin tran , twenty one , osric chau

layla rourke , twenty six , rebecca rittenhouse **

lucas barr , twenty three , nick robinson **

olivia sawyer , twenty six , alexandra daddario *

sarah blake , twenty three , taylor cole **

weston lane , twenty eight , pete davidson *

teen wolf :

allison argent , twenty four , crystal reed

asher mccall , twenty two , niko terho *

caleb miller , twenty five , michael trevino *

cora hale , twenty one , adelaide kane

daniella coleman , twenty two , chase sui wonders *

derek hale , twenty five , tyler hoechlin

emma martin , twenty two , madelyn cline *

emmett hale , twenty five , mike faist

erica reyes , twenty three , gage golightly

hadley cooper , twenty three , abigail cowen *

hayden romero , twenty one , victoria moroles

indiana stilinski , twenty nine , lily james *

isaac lahey , twenty three , daniel sharman

kira yukimura , twenty three , arden cho

laura hale , twenty eight , phoebe tonkin **

liam dunbar , twenty one , dylan sprayberry

lydia martin , twenty three , holland roden

malia tate , twenty two , shelley hennig

melissa mccall , forty six , melissa ponzio

noah stilinski , fifty , linden ashby

paige krasikeva , twenty five , maia mitchell **

peter hale , forty five , ian bohen

quinn fabray , twenty three , dianna agron **

riley hale , twenty two , zoey deutch / maia mitchell *

scott mccall , twenty three , tyler posey

stiles stilinski , twenty three , dylan o'brien

victor perez , twenty six , diego tinoco

misc :

emma forbes , eternally twenty two , the vampire diaries , madelyn cline * ( extremely selective original verse , reserved for existing threads / plots )

kimberly holloway , twenty two , stranger things , inde navarrette *