by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a quite
interesting download from archive.org I had just burned to disc: the October 9,
1965 Hollywood Palace program
hosted by Joan Crawford (one of the things that came up when I did an
archive.org search for her — I was hoping they’d have her Brunswick records,
but they didn’t) and featuring some of the same dorky acrobat acts and dance
troupes that also appeared on Ed Sullivan (and which begged the question of
where else these people worked!) as
well as a brilliant set by the Black comedian Godfrey Cambridge (whom I always
wanted to see play Charlie Parker in a movie: he was not only a skilled actor
but his resemblance to the real Parker was almost uncanny — and when he died in
1975 on the eve of filming a TV-movie about the Entebbe hostage raid, in which
he was supposed to play Idi Amin, I thought, “There goes the Charlie Parker
movie” — ironically, the Parker biopic was made in 1988 with Joel Oliansky as
screenwriter and Clint Eastwood as director, and Parker was played by Forest
Whitaker … who 18 years later would win the Academy Award for The Last King
of Scotland, in which he played, you
guessed it, Idi Amin), two songs by Jack Jones (including a version of the Mondo
Cane theme song “More” by Riz
Ortolani) and one by Joanie Summers, whom Crawford introduced with the lines,
“Of course I may seem a bit partial, but this charming lady happens to be my
favorite singer. I guess it’s because she always hits the spot, and for those
who think young, here she is, Miss Joni Summers.” Just about anyone who was
alive and sentient in the mid-1960’s will recognize those lines as
catch-phrases from the Pepsi-Cola commercials of the day, and indeed Miss Joni
Summers was the pitchwoman for Pepsi (which Crawford still owned in 1965,
having inherited it — and its debts — from her last husband, Pepsi founder
Alfred Steele), though on this program instead of a soft-drink jingle she did
an ill-advised uptempo swing version of Meredith Willson’s lovely ballad from The
Music Man, “Till There Was You”
(neither Barbara Cook, Shirley Jones, Peggy Lee nor Paul McCartney, who sang
lead on the Beatles’ cover of this song, was liable to have been up at night
worrying about the competition). Also on the bill was the comedy team of Marty
Allen and Steve Rossi, doing a mildly amusing sketch about the Boy Scouts.
The
acrobat acts weren’t so bad, actually: there was an eight-member German troupe
called the Rodos and a no-hands bicyclist named Lily Yokoi from Japan — and she was astonishing, ending her act by making the bike
do a pirouette with herself on it (just how she got enough pedaling done to
sustain the momentum a bike needs to keep going was pretty mysterious in
itself!). The show we were watching was 46 minutes, cut down from the original hour
length by eliminating most of the commercials (one for Sherwin-Williams paint — they had an
animated sign on the way from San Francisco to the East Bay when I was growing
up that demonstrated in neon their slogan, “Covers the Earth,” with an unseen
hand pouring a giant can of paint over a globe and literally covering the earth) and also cutting out a trained
animal act called Stebbings’ Boxers, which was just as well as I’m concerned
(few things put me off more than watching these sorts of acts with animals,
especially dogs), though the show ended with a seemingly endless
“inspirational” reading by Crawford that was supposed to be something about the
innocence and beauty of children (something Joan Crawford was an expert on, of course!) and just got more and
more boring despite Joan throwing all the lessons she’d learned lo those many
years ago from the MGM voice-and-diction department of how to put claptrap like
that over and make audiences believe it. And it’s an interesting indication of how far removed this show was from the younger audiences and artists who were remaking the world of entertainment that there was no mention that the date this show aired was also John Lennon’s 25th birthday!
