Fifties Guys with Great Hair: Deceased Artistes Tony Curtis and Eddie Fisher

So what did Eddie Fisher and Tony Curtis have in common, besides dying within a week of each other? Well, first and foremost they became famous in the Fifties (Tony’s fame continued on into the Sixties, with diminished box-office returns). They both had famous acting daughters (Carrie Fisher and Jamie Lee Curtis). They both were children of Jewish immigrants and served in the Armed Forces (Tony in the Navy during WWII, and Eddie in the Army in the early Fifties). They both had memorable marriages to movie stars, with Tony having one (Janet Leigh), and Eddie having two (Debbie and Liz). What is the most significant link between these guys for me, however? Good freakin’ hair!

For me, Tony Curtis was a function of the 4:30 Movie here in NYC on Channel 7. A lot of Tony’s bigger (and lesser) features I first saw shoehorned into that ridiculous timeslot (about 70 minutes of movie, give or take — you wouldn’t believe how calm Deliverance was on the 4:30 Movie….).

I also have always been amazed at Tony’s resilient heterosexuality, as Janet Leigh was perhaps one of the prettiest starlets in Fifties Hollywood, and yet he cheated on her a lot (by his own admission) because he felt that acting with someone gave him license to sleep with them (again, his own statement on talk shows). He famously said his love scene with Marilyn in the completely perfect Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot was like “kissing Hitler,” but then somehow came up recently with the “confession” that he slept with her (he said they had an affair when she was a starlet in 1949 or so, but how come this never came up before?).

Also, the Bob Woodward book Wired reveals that Curtis was watching TV with John Belushi and found out that an actor “of his generation” had died an accidental death — I’m thinking it was William Holden — and he said something to the effect of “less competition!” The oddness of Curtis thinking that Holden was still competition at that late a date — and in fact Holden was still starring in items like Network and S.O.B when Tony was starring in The Bad News Bears Go To Japan.

But let us not remember the guy only when he was older and stranger. Well, let’s…





Let us celebrate his great movie work, but first a very strange video I discovered:



and of course the amazing Skip E. Lowe:



Two of the more enjoyable items that showed up regularly on the 4:30 Movie:




The whole movie can be found here.

And, without question, his finest performance, as Sidney Falco:


The whole movie can be found here.

Now, as for Eddie, I just had to pay tribute to him because he was my Mom’s own Justin Bieber. My mother was one of the two members in the Astoria, Queens, chapter of the Eddie Fisher fan club back in the early Fifties. I asked her this week what the club did — did they wait outside Eddie’s hotel room, attend his concerts, haunt toy stores for doll-like effigies of him? No, this was a far calmer time (Sinatra and Martin and Lewis to the contrary), so she and her friend just listened to Fisher’s records and got together and watched his TV show Coke Time, which ran a total of four seasons from 1953 to ’57.

According to different obits I read, Fisher had anywhere from 35 to 50 Top 40 singles during his heyday (1950-56). He is best known, however, for two of his five wives, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor (who formed with Fisher the original Brad/Jen/Angelina guy/wholesome [dull] girl/sexier girl trio). Eddie, of course, was then dropped by Liz in favor of Richard Burton, and he continued on as a singer and a guy “who lost Liz.”

Time to revisit his wholesome tunes for a bit. Here is his big hit “Anytime,” which was popularized decades before by Emmett Miller (biographized in the amazing Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches):



Eddie’s biggest hit, the (let’s be honest) corny but wholesome “Oh My Papa”:



A boppin’ tune (but god knows, not really rock ’n’ roll), “Dungaree Doll”:



An example of the selfsame Coke Time that my Mom enjoyed back in the early Fifties. This ep finds Eddie singing the always-mellow Perry Como’s “Mama Loves Mambo” and joining (gulp) Florence Henderson for “Fanny”:



Eddie in his Army uniform on What’s My Line?, which I still miss incredibly in the late evening hours (curse you, Game Show Network!):



Two Sixties variety show appearances by Eddie. First, on The Andy Williams Show with Bobby Darin:



And on The Dean Martin Show:



I close out with two of my favorite Eddie discoveries. A goofy Xmas tune from Spike Jones that really doesn’t sound like a Spike Jones recording. The title? “I Want Eddie Fisher for Christmas”:



Oh, yes, Eddie kept recording in the Sixties. Here he is, doing the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill”:

Too fast, they go...

This is not strictly a Deceased Artiste blog, but since I coined that phrase in the mid-90s on the Funhouse TV show I’ve felt a sort of obligation to pay tribute to those who’ve kicked off whose work I’ve loved.

This week has been insanely busy in terms of dead film-folk, so I thought I’d just move through three of the recent departed quickly. Gloria Stuart means nothing to me in terms of Titanic (I got no feelin’ for that kinda stuff, though I have indeed sat through it), but she is important as a starlet in the 1930s, and also as the wife of Arthur Sheekman, a Marx Brothers writer in good standing and the only person who actually did ghost-write some of the magazine pieces credited to Groucho. Ms. Stuart can be seen to lovely advantage (read: pre-Code “scanties”) in this scene from the James Whale 1932 classic The Old Dark House, which can be found in its entirety here:



Next, I salute Arthur Penn, who was a director whom I appreciate most for his participation in the absolutely miraculous “maverick” period in American film that lasted from the late Sixties through the mid-Seventies. He made one historically important pic that I like but don’t utterly love (Bonnie and Clyde), one great hippie pic (Alice’s Restaurant), a fairly good insane Western (The Missouri Breaks), and two great “revisionist” Seventies films (Little Big Man and the terrific, low-key Night Moves).

I feel, though, that his true masterpiece is not Bonnie and Clyde, but Mickey One, his almost indescribable 1965 modernist drama featuring Warren Beatty as a standup comic on the run from crooks. It’s a film that was obviously influenced by what was going on in European cinema at the time (it resembles nothing less than Alphaville, which came out the same year). Here’s the dynamic trailer for the film, but actually the film’s opening is an even clearer look at how radically weird it was for its time (unless, of course, you’d been watching European films….).



As ridiculous as it is to consider Beatty as a stand-up comic (his finest performance will always be McCabe and Mrs. Miller), Mickey One makes everything it presents believable — or is that entirely incredible? (It also seems to heavily prefigure the astoundingly perfect TV series The Prisoner.) Penn had one really good movie after his “maverick” period, the thriller Dead of Winter. I’m not gonna talk about Penn and Teller Get Killed.

And, to finish off this little grouping, and move onward to the Fifties gents with great hair, I offer a tip of the fedora to Joe Mantell, a character actor who died at 94 and is best known for playing Ernest Borgnine’s friend in Marty, and also for playing Jake Gittes’ sidekick and uttering one of the greatest closing lines in movie history: