Guaranteed modesty

Wallace, as I say, despite all his advantages, was a thoroughly nice, modest young fellow. And I attribute this to the fact that, while one of the keenest golfers in the club, he was also one of the worst players. Indeed, Charlotte Dix used to say to me in his presence that she could not understand why people paid money to go to the circus when by merely walking over the brow of a hill they could watch Wallace Chesney trying to get out of the bunker by the eleventh green.

(from "The Magic Plus Fours," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Louis Quinze bed

In one of his short stories, P. G. Wodehouse mentions this piece of furniture. Aside from being something in which you sleep, I had no idea what it was.

Resort for bad golfers

     "It is a pity," I said, "that you could not have induced Ferdinand to go to Marvis Bay for a month or two."
     "Why?"
     "Because it seems to me, thinking the thing over, that it is just possible that Marvis Bay might cure him. At the hotel there he would find collected a mob of golfers - I use the term in the broadest sense, to embrace the paralytics and the men who play left-handed - whom even he would be able to beat. When I was at Marvis Bay, the hotel links were a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of golf. I have seen things done on that course at which I shuddered and averted my eyes - and I am not a weak man. If Ferdinand can polish up his game so as to go round in a fairly steady hundred and five, I fancy there is hope. But I understand he is not going to Marvis Bay."
     "Oh yes he is," said the girl.

(from "The Heart of a Goof," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

First male Triple Crown actor

Thomas Mitchell was probably one of the most notable actors that no one remembers. He won two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. However, he also won an Emmy and a Tony, becoming the first male actor to cop that particular Triple Crown, which really does attest to an actor's versatility.

He also played baseball

Depending upon which venue you knew him from, John Beradino was also an actor, or also a major league baseball player. He was a baseball player first, from 1939 to 1952. He played for three different clubs, with a lifetime batting average of .249.

He appeared in his first film in 1948. He was best known as Dr. Steve Hardy on the soap opera General Hospital from 1963 to 1996.

Orangey the Cat

List this fellow among the animal movie stars you might never have heard of. He won two PATSY awards for his roles in Rhubarb and Breakfast at Tiffany's. We watched Rhubarb last night, and Orangey really did a great job.

Like many human actors, Orangey could be hard to work with, sometimes scratching or biting actors. And he also would sometimes flee the set and have to be tracked down. He was at least 16 years old at the time of his death.

Gale Page - blueblood marriage

She had a pretty good lineage in her own right. Actress Gale Page. Her father was a U. S. Senator and later Ambassador to Peru. Her great-grandfather was the first Governor of Oregon. She further upgraded the family bloodline when she married Count Aldo Solito de Solis. And, she thus became a Countess.

Jack Oakie could ruin any movie

I realize that character actors are just that: they are paid to be "characters." Some of them are fairly versatile. Jack Oakie was good at one particular type of personality, but it was always an irritating one, to the point that if he is in the movie, it just loses something from the get-go.

It makes women humble

     "Women should be encouraged to take up gold. There are, I admit, certain drawbacks attendant on their presence on the links. I shall not readily forget the occasion on which a low, raking drive of mine at the eleventh struck the ladies' tee box squarely and came back and stunned my caddie, causing me to lose stroke and distance. Nevertheless, I hold that the advantages outnumber the drawbacks. Gold humanizes women, humbles their haughty natures, tend, in short to knock out of their systems a certain modicum of that superciliousness, that swank, which makes wooing a tough proposition for the diffident male. You may have found this yourself?"
     "Well, as a matter of fact," admitted the young man, "now I come to think of it I have noticed that geneieve has shown me a bit more respect since she took up the game. When I drive 230 yards after she has taken six sloshes to cover fifty, I sometimes think that a new light comes into her eyes."
     "Exactly," said the Sage.

(from "The Rough Stuff," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Women will do that

I was standing quite near to Vincent Jopp, and at this moment I saw a bead of perspiration spring out on his forehead, and into his steely eyes there came a positively hunted look. I could understand and sympathize. Napoleon himself would have wilted if he had found himself in the midst of a trio of females, one talking baby-talk, another fussing about his health, and the third making derogatory observations on his lower limbs. Vincent Jopp was become unstrung.

(from "The Heel of Achilles," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

He had treated her abominably

     "How are you, Agnes?"
     "If you had asked me that question this morning, Vincent," replied Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I should have been obliged to say that I felt far from well. I had an odd throbbing feeling in the left elbow, and I am sure my temperature was above normal. But this afternoon I am a little better. How are you, Vincent?"
     "Although she had, as I recalled from the reports of the case, been compelled some years earlier to request the Court to sever her marital relations with Vincent Jopp on the ground of calculated and inhuman brutality, in that he had callously refused, in spite of her pleadings, to take old Dr. Bennett's Tonic Swamp-Juice three times a day, her voice, as she spoke, was kind and even anxious. Badly as this man had treated her - and I remember that several of the jury had been unable to restrain their tears when she was in the witness-box giving her evidence - there still seemed to linger some remnants of the old affection.

(from "The Heel of Achilles," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Why Washington was so influential as a young man

"Powerful Virginia elders, who saw much of loose living and indolence around them, found stimulation and reassurance in a young man of unassailed morals and of mature, sound judgment, who was full of energetic vigor and was devoted to the defense of a people slow and slothful in defending themselves."

(from Volume 2 of Doughas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer Price-winning biography of George Washington)

The Pat and Jean Abbott mystery series

Written by Frances Crane. I have head only the first two of them, in which the Abbotts are not yet married. Pat is a private detective who inadvertently gets involved in her life because of a local murder mystery. I don't know how the others will be, but the first two were very good. Sometimes mysteries get a little long and the action starts to bog down, but not in these.

Got to have the goods first

     "Does that mean he did it, Pat?"
     "It means he's an unreliable witness."
     "Do you know who did it?"
     "Who committed the two murders? I have a pretty good idea, but I haven't collected enough evidence to hook a fly. You don't just walk up to a murderer and say, 'You done it, you skunk!' unless you can prove it, Jean."

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

Imprudent arrangements

Evidently his late uncle hadn't been just an ordinary small-town grocer, weighing out potted meats and raisins to a public that had to watch the pennies, but something on a much more impressive scale. I learned later that he had owned a chain of shops, one of them as far afield as Birmingham, and why the ass had gone and left his money to a chap like Bingley is more than I can tell you, though the probability is that Bingley, before bumping off with some little-known Asiatic poison, had taken the precaution of forging the will.

(from Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Just wasting your time

For though I had affected to consider that the ancestor's scheme for melting L. P. Runkle was the goods, I didn't really believe it would work. You don't get anywhere by filling with rich foods a bloke who wears a panama hat like his; the only way of inducing the L. P. Runkle type of man to part with cash is to kidnap him, take him to the cellar beneath the lonely mill and stick lighted matches between his toes. And even then he would probably give you a dud check.

(from Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Mothers as murderers

"A desperate mother is the most understandable of murderesses, Mr. Fabian. Most of us not only understand but would almost applaud such a mother, even though she herself was guilty of matricide. Such a mother takes a comparable risk in doing murder for the sake of her child that she would take in rescuing it from a burning building. She does it knowing the risk. She doesn't care, because the child is more important than her own life."

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

The Turquoise Shop

Like many arrogant, selfish people, Mona Brandon is hypersensitive to the opinion of those she pretends to despise. She knew that you had many friends and would have heard the gossip, and she was trying to get you to talk. She would think it beneath what she calls pride to come right out in the open and tell you why she wanted to know what was being said.

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

When art casts away morals

I said then, "Poor Michael."

"Poor? A man who cheats and murders?"

"But he was such a fine artist!"

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

+++

So many people think that way, don't they? Excuse any sort of immorality as long as it is for art's sake.

The westerns meet Laurel and Hardy

Rand Brooks was a minor actor who appeared in a number of Hopalong Cassidy movies and as Lucky in several episodes of the television series. He was at one time married to Lois Laurel, the daughter famous movie comedian Stan Laurel.

The burden of artsy towns

     "It's no joke," I said.
     "Joke?" he said. 'It's about as funny as a corpse. I never saw such a lunatic fringe. I'll be one myself if I hang around here much longer. The place is crawling with nuts. I doubt if it's worth trying to be an artist if it means that you have to live in places like this."

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

Living in the past

I daresay there are people who can go cleanly from one moment to the next. Not I. The past encroaches on my present which is already crowding the future.

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane

REALLY a liar

"Chimpie," said Mr. Molloy, I wouldn't trust you as far as a snail could make in three jumps. I wouldn't believe you not even if I knew you were speaking the truth."

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Get another head

     Mr. Molloy uttered an agonized cry. His presentiment had been correct.
     "I'd have thought of that myself," he wailed.
     "Sure you would, replied Chimp, comfortably, if you'd of had something that wasn't a hubbard squash or something where your head ought to be. Those just-as-good-as-imitation heads never pay in the long run. What you ought to do is sell yours for what it'll fetch and get a new one. And next time," said Chimp, "make it a prettier one."

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A lovely voice

So absorbed was he with this spectacle that he did not see her enter, and was only made aware of her presence when there spoke from behind him a clear little voice which, even when it was laughing at you, always seemed to have in it something of the song of larks on summer mornings and winds whispering across the fields in spring.

(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

No one cried for him

     "Oh, ah, yes. She was a pal of yours, you told me."
     "The best I ever had, and she was always saying to me, 'Dahlia, old girl, if I pop off before you, for heaven's sake look after Phyllis and see that she doesn't marry some ghastly outsider. She's sure to want to. Girls always do, goodness knows why,' she said, and I knew she was thinking of her first husband, who was a heel to end all heels and a constant pain in the neck to her till one night he most fortunately walked into the River Thames while under the influence of the sauce and didn't come up for days."

(from How Right You Are, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Dick Powell trivia

First of all, was born at Mountain View, Arkansas, and went to college at what is now UALR.

He got his show business start as a singer for the Charlie Davis Orchestra, with whom he recorded a number of records.

He made his film debut as a singing band leader in Blessed Event in 1932.

After years in light-weight musicals, Powell was able to change his on-screen persona in the movie Murder, My Sweet in 1944, in which he played tough guy detective Philip Marlowe.

Powell's ranch-style house was used for the exterior filming on the television series Hart To Hart.

One of his brothers was a Vice President of the Illinois Central Railroad.

He died the same day as actor Jack Carson. They had different forms of cancer. Powell's cancer stemmed from the filming of the movie Conqueror in 1956 near a nuclear test site in Utah.

He sold his 55-foot yacht to Humphrey Bogart.

Late in his career, Powell became a director, about which work he said, "The best thing about switching from being an actor to being a director is that you don't have to shave or hold your stomach in anymore."

A hearty aunt

She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stern. I've never hunted myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two ploughed fields and a spinney.

(from How Right You Are, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

All bark and no bite

     "Talking of being eaten by dogs, there's a dachshund at Brinkley who when you first meet him will give you the impression that he plans to convert you into a light snack between his regular meals. Pay no attention. It's all eyewash. His belligerent attitude is simply . . ."
     "Sound and fury signifying nothing, sir?"
     "That's it. Pure swank. A few civil words, and he will be grappling you . . . what's that expression I've heard you use?"
     "Grappling me to his soul with hoops of steel, sir?"
     "In the first two minutes. He wouldn't hurt a fly, but he has to put up a front because his name's Poppet. One can readily appreciate that when a dog hears himself addressed day in and day out as Poppet, he feels he must throw his weight about. His self-respect demands it."

(from How Right You Are, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Dead or alive rewards

Back in the wild west days, we hear of "dead or alive" rewards being offered by individuals. How much this actually happened, I do not know, but it did a good bit in Hollywood. But, if you think about it, that would have been strictly illegal, the same as putting out a contract by a mob hit man in the 1920s.

Goofy females

One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul's Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I'd met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with. Her whole aspect was that of a girl who at the drop of a hat would start talking baby talk.

(from How Right You Are, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)