If I were a wealthy bidder at Debbie Reynold's auction...

I would buy the following.

Images from Debbie Reynolds: The Auction

Norma Shearer's Purple Velvet Dress from Romeo & Juliet (1936)

Norma Shearer's Silk Velvet Dress by Adrian from Marie Antoinette (1936)

Norma Shearer's Three Tiered Rhinestone Earrings from Marie Antoinette (1936)

Norma Shearer's Ivory with Black Velvet Gown by Adrian from Marie Antoinette (1936)

Ann Blyth's Grey Two Piece Suit from Mildred Pierce (1945)

(for when I'm feeling bitchy)

Peter Lawford's Raccoon Coat from Easter Parade (1948)

I've always had a fascination with men's fur coats.

Jean Hagen's Period Costume in Singin' in the Rain (1952) 

I WANT THIS ONE SO BAD IT HURTS!

Debbie Reynold's Flapper Dress from Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Marilyn Monroe's Subway Dress from Seven Year Itch (1955)

If this isn't iconic, I don't know what is.

Grace Kelly's Dress from To Catch a Thief (1955)

Shirley MacLaine's Dress from Some Came Running (1958)

What would you bid on if money were no object?

Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan

Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan
800 pages
Hardcover November 2010 9780385518048 $35.00
Paperback November 2011 9780767924238 $18.95
also available in ebook and audio book formats
Anchor (an imprint of Random House)


Before I say anything else, let me warn you that this 700+ page tome stops at 1954. There is no volume 2. There is no printing error. In the life of Frank Sinatra, the book comes to an abrupt halt at 1954 when he won the Oscar for his performance in From Here to Eternity (1953). 1954 is a pinnacle year for Frank Sinatra. After having a tremendous singing career and some nice roles in a few key films, Sinatra's career was in a major slump. Rock 'n Roll was making waves and girls stopped swooning over Frank Sinatra and started swooning over other singers. It seemed like his career was over and his tumultuous second marriage to Ava Gardner didn't help much.

While it was interesting reading about the early life and career of Frank Sinatra, I really want a volume 2. Why? Because the 1960s Sinatra fascinates me the most. The Sinatra of the Rat Pack, Las Vegas, Ocean's Eleven (1960), Tony Rome (1967), The Detective (1968), etc. Heck, I even like the late 1950s Sinatra of The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Pal Joey (1957),  High Society (1956), The Frank Sinatra Show and Come Fly With Me. Sinatra was living large during these years after living small for a while. I want to read about what happened after the big comeback! But alas, Kaplan's book is not going to give any of us that.

While I can complain all day about there is no volume 2, I cannot say that this book was no good. Frank: The Voice was beautifully written, well-researched, very organized and most important interesting. It's the perfect book for die-hard Frank Sinatra fans (especially ones who prefer his earlier career as a singer), lovers of unique biographies and avid nonfiction readers.

In the book, we learn a lot about Frank's early years and the effect his mother Dolly had on him. His mother problems started right when he popped out of the womb. The delivery was so horrendous that Dolly she never had another child and in fact wanted to make sure no one else went through that experience too and became a midwife and abortionist. It also didn't help that the forceps the doctor used to pry out Sinatra gave him a permanent scar. Not a very auspicious start for our Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra wasn't the nicest guy. He was short-tempered and his mob connections made him more dangerous than your average skinny Italian singer. In fact, when Sinatra heard that Peter Lawford had dined with Ava Gardner he threatened Lawford to the point where Lawford was scared for his life. But he had good moments too. Kaplan sad "Frank's commitment to tolerance [for minorities] was genuine and profound." He didn't discriminate in the way many other stars in that era did. Kaplan really delves into Sinatra's first two marriages, first with Nancy Sinatra and then with Ava Gardner. We really learn a lot about him as a person when he's put side-by-side these two totally different women.

Frank Sinatra's rise was slow at the beginning but sped up very quickly. In his early days, he was popular with young women in the same way Elvis would be years later. Instead of having Elvis' height, build and hips, it was Sinatra's thin frame and magnificent blue eyes that made women want to bring him  home to feed him and worship his golden voice. It wasn't long before Sinatra got a film contract to act in movies but even that start was a big rocky. He had a 7 year contract with RKO but he barely made any movies with them and MCA got him out and into a contract with MGM. He was recording, performing and filming like a mad man and it seemed like the work (and the fame and the money) would never run out but it did.

By 1953, his marriage with Nancy Sinatra had long ended, his marriage to Ava Gardner was about to end, he was going into debt, Capitol Records booted him out the door and it seemed like there was no hope. Then the novel From Here to Eternity made it's way into his hands. He read it over and over again dreaming about himself in the Maggio role. Kaplan says:

From Here to Eternity was his big chance, in every possible way: not only because of the distinguished material and company and the huge conspicuousness of the project, but also because of where Frank was in his life. His first legitimate shot at a big dramatic role had arrived at a moment when he was truly old enough, and experienced enough, to give a complicated performance.

Makes you want to see the movie again, huh?

One adverse affect the book had on me, was that it made me despise Ava Gardner more than I had already. The author by no means bashes her. In fact, he attempts to make us understand that Gardner's actions, much like Frank Sinatra's, were born out of those formative early years that mess us all up. However, her but because her actions and her words (from her autobiography) showed what a self-centered, childish and manipulative woman she was. On particular passage (pg 701 in the hardcover) almost made steam come out of my ears. If you can read this book and still love Gardner, you are a bigger person than I am.

One last note. I do have a beef with who ever designed the jacket of the book though. While it's very gorgeous, I love the skinny Frank Sinatra on the spine, they used a post 1954 image of Frank Sinatra on the back of the jacket. Most likely because it had him at a microphone. But I think it's disingenuous to the book to not acknowledge the 1954 cut off by including a picture from a later time. Here is the picture in question:

It's a John Bryson photograph circa 1960s.

Below is a preview of the book, I hope you'll check it out!

Full Disclosure: I won a copy of Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan on Goodreads.

IOU: Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987)

Who I Owe: I met illustrator/author Matt Phelan recently at Book Expo. The company I work for publishes some of his books for children. Phelan told me that he was currently working on a graphic novel for younger kids on the childhood of Buster Keaton (see a preview of the artwork for the book here). I got really excited because I love Buster Keaton! We chatted about Keaton for a while and he told me about this great documentary on the life of Keaton called Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow. He mentioned that it was available on YouTube and I promised that I would watch it. And so I did! Thanks Matt Phelan for the recommendation and I'm so excited for your book to come out!

Review: Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow was a 3 part British TV Mini-Series about the life and career of the great physical comedian of the silent film era. Watching the documentary and I realize how much I appreciate contemporary documentaries and how they clearly indicate who it is that is being interviewed. It took me a while to understand that it was Eleanor Keaton, Keaton's third and last wife, speaking!

The show follows Keaton's life and career from the very beginning to the bitter end. It starts in those early days in Vaudeville, when he got the name Buster after falling down some stairs, an event witnessed by the great Harry Houdini who then proclaimed that that was quite a Buster! We see the rise, the very bad fall and then the subsequent slow rise again.

I learned many things about Keaton. He had impeccable timing, a fearlessness that made for incredible shots, a talent for subtlety and a genius for comedy. Keaton was really an actor destined for the silent screen and talkies did him very few favors. He took to alcohol which almost killed him and even with all his success he still had many money problems. However, he still had a wonderful career, fame and recognition that lasted a lot longer than he expected and a long and fruitful life. That's a lot more than many of us get. It was great to watch the documentary and to see how spectacular his stunts really were. Put into context of how dangerous and groundbreaking they were makes you really appreciate Keaton's work. Keaton never complained about injuries! He had a high threshold for pain. Seeing snippets of many of Keaton's films made me want to watch more. And it made a new Keaton fan out of Carlos too!

I created a playlist of all the 10 minute YouTube segments of the documentary. You can watch it here. I'd love to hear what you think. And many thanks to Matt Phelan for recommending this to me!

IOU: The Grub-Stake (1923)

Who I owe: Poet and Musician John "Jack" Hayes from Robert Frost's Banjo and I met March of last year. We had breakfast in Concord, MA and during breakfast John told me about a silent film that he and Eberle composed and performed the music for. The movie was The Grub-Stake (1923). He also told me a lot about Nell Shipman and sent me a copy of The Nell Shipman Collection Volume 3 which contained The Grub-Stake. I had the film in my to-watch stack for too long. Way too long. Now I'm making amends and discovering how wonderful Nell Shipman, the movie and the music all were. Thanks John!

In John's Words:  Eberle Umbach and I composed the music to Nell Shipman’s “The Grub-Stake” in 2005-2006, following our first silent film score, for Shipman’s “Back to God’s Country,” which we composed in 2004-2005. The late Tom Trusky, director of the Idaho Film Collection, commissioned our score for the release of Shipman’s complete existing works in a DVD collection. Mr Trusky was a wonderful man, a Shipman scholar and largely responsible for the re-discovery of her work, and he was very kind and supportive of our music.

The score uses 18 instruments, from the very familiar, like the guitar and the flute, to the more obscure, like the zither, melodica, slide whistle and marimba, as well as variations on common instruments, such as the tenor guitar, toy piano and the plectrum banjo. Eberle and I wrote the score so that it could be performed live as written, so there were a lot of instrument switches! But at least one of us keeps a steady background of music going throughout the entire film, and we play as a duo the majority of the time.


We incorporated a number of different musical genres in the score—from ragtime to bossa nova, and with a number of other musical gestures in between. Eberle in particular strove to capture an old-time Americana feel in much of the music. When we scored and performed these silent films, we did so under the name of the Bijou Orchestrette.

Review: First of all, let's talk about Nell Shipman. Wow. What a woman. Hailing from Canada, Nell Shipman was a one-woman movie making machine. She founded the Shipman Curwood Producing Company as well as the Nell Shipman Productions. Nell Shipman wrote, acted, directed, produced, marketing, funded and cast her acting crew. And this is in the 1910s and 1920s! Early film history has a severe deficit of female directors. So for Nell Shipman to be able to do what she did is amazing. She was independent, a business woman and creative to boot. Also, she shot a lot of her films on location, in the wild and did a lot of "stunts" herself. She was also an animal trainer and used some of her animals in The Grub-Stake. Wow! I'm so impressed by her. I'm also hypnotized by Nell. She wasn't a gorgeous woman but she has a very inviting face and a curvaceous figure. I couldn't help but be mesmerized by her on screen.

The Grub-Stake (1923) was one of Shipman's biggest pictures. With a $180,000 budget, she shot the film on location in Washington State and Idaho (even though the plot mostly takes place in Alaska). Unfortunately, the distributor of the film went under so the film never made it out to theaters. And it also bankrupted Nell Shipman's production company. She couldn't take care of her animals financially after that either and had to send them to the San Diego Zoo. A sad ending to a good project.

The film follows the story of Faith Diggs, a small town girl whose father is in poor health. She takes on odd jobs (and even sells her to make ends meet and to help her dad out but it isn't enough. So Faith grub-stakes an older businessman. What does the term grub-stake mean?

Basically, she promises to work for the man, and then accepts his proposal of marriage, in exchange for his help. The man brings Faith and her father to Alaska. But turns out the man has sold Faith to a brothel! And he's already married! What's a girl to do? She escapes with a friend, her father and a bunch of sled dogs and finds refuge in the wilds of the Klondike. She gets separated from her father for a while, befriending some bears and other wild animals. And the drama continues as she falls in love with another man and her "husband" sends out a bounty hunter for her (and the dogs she stole). The film moves at a steady pace but doesn't have that many dull moments. Nell Shipman really milked the ending though, which could have been much shorter than it was.

I think John and Eberle did a wonderful job with the music. The different instruments suited the plot which was very varied itself. I loved the American folk feel to it and it's pretty cool that a film from Idaho has music played by residents of that state! I'm sure composing music for a silent film is no easy task so kudos to John and Eberle for doing such a fantastic job giving sound to such a vibrant film.