Last night Charles and I screened two episodes of the 1950’s series General Electric Theatre which we’d downloaded from archive.org, including one with Myrna Loy and one with Johnnie Ray. The one with Loy was called “It Gives Me Great Pleasure” and cast her as Kate Kennedy, a widow with two sons who since the death of her husband (presumably in World War II, though that isn’t specified) has become a star on a lecture circuit run by David Wadsworth (Zachary Scott, who’s supposed to be playing a mostly sympathetic character but still comes off as a bit of a rotter, especially given that the cinematographer lit his head in a way that made it look like there was a white streak down the middle of his hair, leaving us to wonder if he were wearing a skunk). She’s getting restive because the time she spends lecturing and the even greater time she spends traveling from one city to another is keeping her away from her kids, and she thinks she’s found a way out when she lectures in Dallas and meets the wealthy Jim Tweedy (Robert Preston) — only there’s a misunderstanding between the two that derails their budding relationship and propels her not only back onto the lecture circuit but into the waiting arms of her long-time unrequited lover, David Wadsworth himself (and the sight of Myrna Loy and Zachary Scott, of all people, locked in what’s supposed to be a happily-ever-after embrace is actually a bit queasy; one wonders where William Powell and Joan Crawford are when they’re so clearly needed!).
The other one was considerably more interesting: it was called “The
Big Shot,” aired in 1955 (as was “It Gives Me Great Pleasure”) and starred
Johnnie Ray (though he was credited with the more normal spelling of his first
name, “Johnny,” which irritated him) as Johnny Pulaski, an aspiring singer who
wins an audition in New York with a demo of a song called “Paths of Paradise”
(though what we hear is a fully orchestrated arrangement of the song —
obviously it was his then-current Columbia single and he was hoping the show
would promote it) and looks set for a job on a radio show. Only he bristles at
being asked to sing songs like “Moonlight in Vermont” (a then-current hit and a
lousy vehicle for Ray’s voice)
and bristles even more about being told by his would-be manager, Norris (Ralph
Sanford), that he can’t be successful with an ethnic name like “Pulaski” and he
will need to change it. At one point Norris starts rattling off a long list of
names and it soon becomes clear both to Johnny and to the audience that he’s
asking Johnny to pick one — and one of them is “Johnny Harvard.”
This plot is
so close to the famous story of Harry James’ attempt to get Frank Sinatra to
change his name to “Frankie
Satin” (Sinatra, as the world knows, refused, and later he joked, “If I’d gone
along with it I’d be working cruise ships today”) I wondered if that was the
inspiration for Beatrice Joy Chute’s script. Ray, his famous hearing aid
clearly visible on screen (he had become partially deaf in one ear due to a
childhood accident, and later he began to lose his hearing in the other ear as
well; needless to say, nasty critics who didn’t like him joked that he’d been
deafened by the sound of his own voice), is actually quite credible as an actor
(a good deal better than he was in his only feature film, There’s No
Business Like Show Business), clearly
nervous at being forced into a mold and a style not his own, equally nervous
about whether he’s good enough to make the grade in the big-time, and
forthright and fervent about keeping his family’s last name when even his
father (Steven Geray) says he won’t mind his son compromising and taking
another name for his career. (It occurred to me that “Palmer” might have been a
workable Anglicization of “Pulaski,” just as Italian-American singer Antonio di
Benedetto from San Francisco Anglicized his name and achieved enduring fame as Tony Bennett) —
and the song “Paths to Paradise,” grandiloquent as all hell and more than a bit
pretentious, is nonetheless quite good and could stand with a revival.
