SATURDAY RUBRICS: 10/19/24

MITZI GAYNOR

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS

Mitzi Gaynor died this past week at the age of 93. I remember her from her glitzy Mitzi television specials from 1967 - 1978. Even then, I was more curious in an almost appalled way about that glitz and determined cutesy sexuality of hers than I was drawn to it in the way that, say, Ann-Margret back then could insert that hyphen of hers into my burgeoning gay sexuality and make me wonder what, you know, it would be like. Gaynor instead curtsied toward the carnality she inspired in certain sorts of 1950s shifty show-biz guys, although with a blink-of-your-eye and wink-of-her-own quick little twist in her always ready hips. She wore skimpy as well as any woman in her Hollywood heyday which morphed into a long stretch in Vegas and then those variety hours on NBC. Spangles found a home on her. But even when she was older and holding forth at TCM confabs and letting Michael Feinstein pull her out a stool to sit upon onstage, you could never imagine her wearing Spanx. There was always something brand spanking new about her even when she became a bit old-hat. She didn’t wear skimpy and spangles with the same high-kicking ease but here’s the final kicker: she always found a way to wear her bullshit detector with a style all her own. She was perky, but only if it came with perks. She was Doris Day with a need for some night blinds.

Mitzi Gaynor starred opposite, among others, Frank Sinatra and Yul Brynner and Gene Kelly and Kirk Douglas and David Niven and Rossano Brazzi and Noël Coward. In 1954’s There’s No Business Like Show Business she shared the screen with two other female stars, Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe. She was a kind of combination of those two. Gaynor is what could have been concocted if you had put some Monroe in Merman or some Merman in Monroe. She was married to her husband, Jack Bean- also her agent and manager - for 52 years. He died in 2006 after a long illness. She died herself this week peacefully in her sleep. I like to think he’s been waiting for her for the last 18 years to get off the stage and come home to him so he could draw those night blinds for her one last time.

I wondered if salty sophisticate James Bacon had ever written a column about her, so Googled it. He did. “A reporter for The Associated Press for 23 years and later as a columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Mr. Bacon had a knack for befriending A-list celebrities,” I read in the AP’s 2008 obit for him. “He palled around with John Wayne, shared whiskey with Frank Sinatra, was a confidant of Marilyn Monroe and met eight United States presidents.

“Mr. Bacon accompanied [his friend] Elizabeth Taylor’s physician to her home to break the news of the death of her third husband, Mike Todd, in a plane crash. Posing as a coroner, he once made his way past a police barricade to get Lana Turner’s firsthand account of the fatal stabbing of her lover Johnny Stompanato by her daughter, Cheryl Crane.

“He always made you feel as if ‘he was a pal looking to hang out,’ Clint Eastwood once said of Mr. Bacon.”

Here is Bacon’s AP column from May 31, 1964:

Movies Wrong For Gaynor
By JAMES BACON
HOLLYWOOD (AP) – Mitzi Gaynor is a victim of box-office chemistry.
And that may also be what’s wrong with the movies.

The last time Mitzi was cast opposite the right leading man — Rosanno Brazzi — the picture, “South Pacific,” wound up seventh in the top 10 list of all-time moneymaking films.

Her next two pictures were comedies opposite Yul Brynner and Kirk Douglas.
Result: Mitzi had to go into the nightclub field where she commands $40,000 a week.
At the Las Vegas Flamingo she was given two points—two per cent — of the action of the entire hotel-casino operation to sign a 10-year contract.

Jack Entratter of The Sands, who wishes he had her under contract, comments:
“She’s the only new night club star to emerge in the last decade.”

But there are no movie scripts. Josh Logan once said Mitzi can do more things better than anyone else in Hollywood. That’s partly her trouble. When Brynner and Douglas, both serious actors, chose Mitzi, she was so good that she made them look bad.
A smart producer would cast her opposite Jack Lemmon or Cary Grant — and you would have a female Sandy Koufax pitching against a Willie Mays.

Also, she was producer Ray Stark’s first choice to do “Funny Girl” on Broadway, but declared:

“I knew I wouldn’t be believable as Fanny Brice so I turned it down. And look what Barbra Streisand is doing with it.”

Jack Bean, her husband and manager, explained why she refused the role.
“Fanny Brice was no beauty. Neither is Barbra—she kids about it herself. Look at Mitzi. How can you make her unpretty?”

Now Stark has a Broadway show called “The Passionate Witch,” based on the old Fredric March-Veronica Lake movie “I Married a Witch.”

Mitzi’s interested. If she takes it, you may see a repetition of the Betty Grable saga.
For years Betty couldn’t get herself arrested around Hollywood. Then she did “Dubarry Was a Lady” on Broadway and the movies discovered her. For the next ten years, she was in the movies’ top 10 box office list—usually the only woman there.

(Above: Gaynor and Bean on their honeymoon in NYC in 1954 which coincided with the premiere of There’s No Business Like Show Business.)

[TO READ AND VIEW THE REMAINING RUBRICS THIS WEEKEND, PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY FOR ONLY $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS.]