First Singing Superstar--Al Jolson Had a Million of 'em

Al Jolson's signature pose from The Jazz Singer.

Record keeping was hit and miss and life perilous in Jewish village of Srednik near Kaunas in Lithuania, then part of Tsarist Russia around 1886 so Asa Yoelson was never sure about his birthday.  Years later he would pick May 26 out of a hat to serve, and it has been dutifully reported by biographers ever since.

He was the son of a Rabbi and Canter and had three surviving siblings including a brother Hirsh.  His father Moses immigrated to the United States in 1891 and was able to send for his family when he found employment at Washington, D.C.’s Talmud Torah Synagogue in 1894.

Asa and Hirsh became fascinated with American music and show business hanging out on streets outside taverns and music halls.  By 1897 they were performing for spare change on the sidewalks.

In 1902 Asa launched a paying career as a singing usher in a traveling circus.  Soon after he teamed with Hirsh and worked as Al and Harry Jolson were doing specialties on the burlesque circuit.

Over the next five decades Al Jolson would perform and triumph in every possible American show business venue—vaudeville, the Broadway stage, concerts, records, movies, and radio.  He would have conquered television as well, but he died before his planned debut.  In the process he revolutionized stage and popular music by popularizing blues and jazz forms he learned as a young touring vaudevillian in New Orleans.  His charismatic performance style was the first to “make each song an event.”  And one way or another influenced every singer who came after.

Today he is dimly remembered in the popular imagination as the star of the first sound feature film, The Jazz Singer and for his performances in black face.  His style is dismissed as hammy and old fashion.  His black face work makes him suspect as a racist to modern sensibilities.

But one of his closest friends from the streets of Washington as a kid grew up to be tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  He encouraged Black performers and featured them for the first time on the Broadway stage.  He brought Cab Calloway to Hollywood and not only insisted on equal billing but got adjoining suites in Beverly Hills penthouse hotel rooms during the filming of The Singing Kid.  Eubie Blake, with whom he never worked professionally, was one of his closest personal friends and companion at boxing matches and racetracks.  The home he shared with his then wife dancer Ruby Keeler was the only one among all the stars where Blacks were freely welcome and entertained.  His work was widely admired in the Black community, including his black face because he never performed the usual coon stereotypes, but treated black music with heartfelt earnestness and respect.  He saw the affinity of Jews and Blacks as oppressed outcasts and recognized Exodus as a common metaphorical experience.  At his funeral, the entire of Black Hollywood turned out, he was lauded in the Black press, and eulogized by the President of the Negro Actors’ Guild.

Jolson first donned blackface in 1904 while working in vaudeville in a trio with brother Harry and veteran performer Joe Palmer.  It not only boosted his career, but it freed Jolson to be more animated and emotional on the stage.

He was on his own as a touring vaudevillian by 1906 based out of San Francisco.  He claimed that he relocated there because the city needed cheering up after the famous earthquake and fire.

In 1909 with his first wife Henrietta, he returned to New York City where he joined the cast of the most popular minstrel show of the day, Dockstader’s Minstrels.  He was quickly the main attraction.

                                

                                        Jolson in 1916.

La Belle Paree at the Wintergarden Theater in 1911 was Jolson’s first Broadway show.  Not the headliner, he did Stephen Foster classics in blackface and stole the show.  From then until 1926 Jolson appeared in an unbroken string of hits with shows like Vera Violetta,  The Whirl of Society, Robinson Caruso, Jr., Bombo, Sinbad, and Big Boy.  As his popularity soared so did his weekly paycheck which grew to thousands of dollars a week making him the best paid performer in America.  At the age of 35 he became the youngest actor ever to have a Broadway theater named after him.  Overcoming paralyzing stage fright on opening night for Bombo in 1921, an ecstatic audience called him back for 37 curtain calls.

In 1911 Jolson began his recording career featuring songs from his shows and scores of others.  Had there been a Hit Parade, he would have topped it multiple times almost every year.  His signature songs included Rock-a-Bye My Baby with a Dixie Melodie, My Buddy, Swannee, Avalon, April Showers, Toot-Toot-Tootsie Good-by, Juanita, California Here I Come, I Wonder What’s Become of Sally, I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-bob-bobbing Along, My Mammy, Back in Your Own Back Yard, There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder, Sonny Boy, and Liza (Let the Clouds Roll Away).  That list is far from definitive.  Over 80 of his hundreds of recordings became hits.  No matter how you slice it, a huge chunk of the classic American song bag.

                                            Jolson's image sold sheet music as fast as his recordings.  This one from 1922 struck a note with Great War vets.

In 1928 Jolson “retired” from the Broadway stage to try his hand in a new medium—movies.

The story of the Cantor’s son who defies his father and tradition to become The Jazz Singer closely paralleled Jolson’s own life.  The Warner Bros. Vitaphone release was the first feature film to include some sound dialogue and songs, although much of the picture was still silent.  The film also highlighted the parallels between the Jewish and Black experiences as expressed by Jolson’s blackface performance.  Legendarily it was a huge hit and doomed silent movies.

What ever was playing next door this crowd is going to The Jazz Singer.

His second film The Singing Fool was his first all talking picture and even a bigger hit because more theaters had been outfitted for Vitaphone sound.  Made and shown in 1928 it held the box office record until Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ten years later.  The film also introduced the tearjerker, Sonny Boy.

Jolson made four more features for Warner’s, did a short, and made cameo appearances through 1930.  Repetitive and poor quality scripts plus rapidly changing public taste made the last couple of films less successful.  Jolson decided to return to Broadway in a new show, Wonder Bar in 1931.  Although due to the Depression ticket sales to the new show did not match his earlier long string of hits, reviews were positive and helped re-boot his career.

After storied concerts in New Orleans with jazz greats, Jolson returned to Hollywood where Warner’s leant him to United Artists for his most unusual, and many believe finest, film, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  This Depression Era comedy/drama only takes its title from the Haywire Mac McClintock IWW song.  Songs were by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart with the script by Ben Hecht.  Jolson played a happy-go-lucky bum living with a bunch of others in Central Park who saves the Mayor’s girlfriend from suicide.  She loses her memory.  He falls for her, but also befriends the suffering Mayor, Frank Morgan channeling Jimmy Walker.  Much of the dialogue is in couplets. 

Despite the difference in their ages Jolson and Ruby Keeler, shown shipboard on the return from their 1928 Paris honeymoon, were described as the happiest couple in Hollywood.

His wife Ruby Keeler turned down the female lead fearing that if she made her film debut in her husband’s film she would be dismissed.  Instead, she made Forty Second Street and became an overnight top star.  Jolson’s picture, although now considered a minor classic, was a box office flop and led to a decline in his film career.

Back at Warner Bros. the next year he made a film version of his stage show Wonder Bar.  It incorporated more of the elaborate production numbers fans were now demanding in their musicals and was a moderate success.

The final film for his original studio was The Singing Kid, the film in which he showcased and co-starred Cab Calloway.  Busby Berkley, unaccredited, choreographed and shot the production numbers.

Although he appeared in several films in cameo, Jolson only starred in one more picture, Rose of Washington Square for Paramount in 1939.  He shared top billing with rising stars Tyrone Power and Alice Faye.  The film reprised some of his most famous numbers.

His film career might be winding down and changing public taste for crooners like Bing Crosby and Big Band singers might have cut deeply into his record sales, but Jolson still was a major star on radio.  He had started making broadcast appearances from the time he began making films.  He made a famous appearance on the Dodge Victory Hour early in 1928 live from New Orleans reaching an audience of 35 million over 47 radio stations, a landmark in early broadcasting.  He fronted his own network shows twice in the ’30s.  But he was most in demand as a guest on shows hosted by all band leaders, singers, and comics.  Singers like Crosby, who had eclipsed his popularity, adored him and were glad to share a microphone.  These programs also showed off his considerable comedic talents and ability to ad lib with the best of them.  For those who know Jolson only from his sometimes stiff acting in his hyper sentimental early Warner Bros. films, audio from some of these radio shows is a revelation.

                           

                                     Jolson making a 1938 NBC broadcast.

Still, in the early ‘40s Jolson was restless and depressed.  Occasional radio broadcasts and concerts were not enough to keep him busy.  His fading career and Ruby Keeler’s success mirrored the fictional story in A Star is Born.  By the late ‘30s their marriage, once considered the happiest in Hollywood was over.

World War II gave Jolson something to do.  As soon the fires of Pearl Harbor blew away, he was pressing the War Department for permission to entertain the troops anywhere in the world.  Before the USO was up and running, he became the first star to perform at a GI base in early 1942.  In fact, it was a letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt’s press secretary that is credited with the creation of the USO, into which he was later commissioned.  His first out of country tour took him to Central America and Naval bases in the Caribbean.  Not long after he was in Britain playing to packed and cheering GI audiences.  He would go anywhere—remote Alaskan stations, North Africa, the South Pacific.  He was out of the gate long before his friend Bob Hope and did many more shows.  His tireless work damaged his health.  He contracted malaria and lost most of a lung.

Jolson also found personal happiness.  He met Erle Galbraith, a young x-ray technician in an Arkansas Army camp.  Late in the war he tracked her down and got her work as an actress at Columbia.  They were married in March of 1945.

When the war was over, Jolson found his career was resurrected.  He had gained legions of new young fans among returning GIs and publicity surrounding his shows had endeared him to the public.  Columbia Pictures was eager to produce a bio-pic and in 1946 Larry Parks was tapped to play the singer in The Jolson Story.  Parks carefully studied his performances to match his signature moves and style, but Jolson himself did the singing.  He even managed to play himself in one scene—Suwannee filmed entirely in a long shot showing him dancing and doing his famous runs into the audience on a special runway extending into the theater auditorium.  The Technicolor film was one of the biggest hits of the year.  Parks even earned an Academy Award nomination for the role.

                     

                     Larry Parks won an Oscar nomination playing Jolson, but Al did the singing.

Jolson was back in the big time.  He got a new contract with Decca Records where he not only recreated many of his most famous songs, but also recorded new ones.  He had hits with both.  Among the post war hits were Carolina in the Morning, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, When Your Were Sweet Sixteen, After Your Gone, Is It True What They Say About Dixie, and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

He was back on radio in a big way too.   From 1947 to ’49 he co-hosted the Kraft Music Hall with Oscar Levant. In 1948 he bested Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and others in a Most Popular Male Vocalist poll by Variety.

Jolson Sings Again, with Parks reprising his role was released in 1949 and was another huge hit.  Jolson toured in support of the film and sang before thousands in special shows in New York and in Chicago.

He distrusted the emerging new medium of television and resisted going on as a guest star.  He wanted to have his own platform.  A proposal to introduce himself with a live two-hour concert broadcast uninterrupted by commercials was naturally greeted coolly by network executives.  But talks were under way for a program of his own.

Those plans were laid aside when President Harry Truman announced he was sending troops to defend South Korea from an attack by the North in the summer of 1950.  Jolson called the White House and simply announced, “I’m going to Korea.”  With the USO officially disbanded Defense Secretary Harold Johnson tried to call him off.  There were no funds for entertainment, he was told. “Funds? Who needs funds? I got funds! I’ll pay myself!” Jolson told reporters.

Jolson in Korea.  The exhausting tour shattered his health.

By September he was on the ground with the troops.  He did 42 shows in 15 days.  He was presented with a medal by General Douglas MacArthur as he returned. 

But he paid a heavy price.  Dust settled into his remaining good lung and he was exhausted.

While playing poker in a San Francisco hotel room just a few weeks later on October 22, 1950 Al Jolson suffered a massive heart attack.  He lived long enough to tell his pals, “Boys, I’m going.”  He was 64. 

Belle Starr Was Outlaw Queen on a Side Saddle

Belle Starr was locally notorious in Texas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas but captured public imagination with lurid tales in the Police Gazette which were gathered and expanded into this Dime Novel that carried a heafty 25 cent cover price due to the many illustrations. Ever after the supposed Outlaw Queen became fodder for novels, plays, songs, and movies.

You have to admit Belle Starr was the perfect name for an outlaw queen.  It emblazoned perfectly the covers of dime novels, titillated the readers of the original scandal sheet The Police Gazette, and set off fantasies of a bewitching bandit beauty celebrated in generations of movies, TV shows, and songs.  The allure was so strong that in the back yard westerns we enacted every Summer day in Cheyenne my cousin Linda was always Belle to my brother’s Roy Rogers and my Hopalong Cassidy.   The stories we played out were just about as real as any associated with Starr.

Myra Maybelle Shirley doesn’t quite cut the same ice.  But that was her name at birth on a farm near Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848.  Her father John Shirley was a prosperous farmer.  Her mother was a member of the Virginia (later West Virginia) Hatfield clan. But it would be a mistake to read too much into that—Hatfield-McCoy feud did not break out until after the Civil War and the family was not particularly then identified with violence.

Myra got a quite proper upbringing for a young lady of her class.  She was a graduate of the Carthage Female Academy, a finishing school where she learned a little Latin, how to play the piano, and all of the social graces.

About the time Myra graduated, all hell was breaking loose along the Kansas-Missouri Border.  The well-to-do Shirleys were slave owners.  Her father and uncles may have ridden with the Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers who attacked Free Soil settlers in Bloody Kansas.  The family was close to other pro-slavery clans in the area of south eastern Missouri including the James and Younger families.  Myra was said to be particularly close to the Younger boys.

After the war broke out Confederate Missouri Guard forces under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and General Sterling Price whipped a Union force under the command of Colonel Franz Sigel, in the First Battle of Carthage, the first important engagement in the West which gave control of most of the state south and west of St. Louis to the Rebels.  The Shirley family decided to sell the farm and move to Carthage which was becoming a major regional hub for the Confederacy.  John Shirley opened an inn and livery stable on the town square.

It was probably during this period when young Myra mastered the difficult use of the side saddle which was becoming the “proper” way for a young gentlewoman to ride.  The saddle accommodated the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the day by allowing a lady to wrap one leg around a pommel draping both to the same side of the horse.  The seat was not as secure as a conventional saddle ridden with legs astride the horse.  It took a skilled horsewoman to do much more than amble along at a walk in such a contraption.  Myra could reportedly keep in the saddle at a full gallop.  She continued to use the side saddle almost exclusively the rest of her life.

In 1863 the tide of war turned in the region at the Second Battle of Carthage, a smaller but significant skirmish in which Union forces repulsed an advancing force sending them scurrying back to Arkansas.  Yankee troops occupied the town.  Myra’s brother John A. M. “Bud” Shirley joined the partisan irregulars harassing Union troops.  He became a Captain of his own band of Bushwhackers.  He may have ridden when partisans attacked the occupied town in September 1864 and burned the Courthouse and much of the Square.  With a Yankee price on his head, Captain Shirley was ambushed and killed as he ate at a sympathizer’s house in near-by Sarcoxie soon after. 

The Shirley family became refugees.  They fled the area and made their way to Scyene, Texas near Dallas where other Missouri guerillas, including the Younger Brothers and Frank and Jesse James also settled.

As May Reed the future Belle Starr took to wearing broad hats and carrying pistols like the outlaws she associated herself with in Texas.  This photo shows that as a young woman she was much more attractive than the gaunt, haggard woman of better known later pictures.

In 1866 Myra, now generally called May, married James Reed, a young man from back home in Carthage on whom she once had a teen age crush.    No contemporary accounts remark on her beauty, although once or twice she was called handsome.  What May might have lacked in conventional attractiveness, she made up with a sense of style, even when they young family struggled on a farm near town.  She cut a swath in riding habits and plumed hats when she rode into town.

James did not take much to sod busting and his wife’s taste in finery compelled him to find extra income.  He fell in with her old chums the Younger Brothers and began to ride with their gang.  He may also occasionally have ridden with the James Gang—the two groups were friendly and often shared personnel.  All were former Confederate guerillas and at least at first considered their robberies as an extension of the war.

May took to the life style.  She soon added a pair of Colt revolvers to here riding gear and was known to display her marksmanship to admiring locals.

Scyene served as a safe haven and base for the outlaw gangs’ far flung raids, bank, and train robberies.  Reed would be gone for weeks at a time, return, and resume what looked like an ordinary life on the farm.  May gave birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Lee, who they called Pearl in 1868.

Outlawry was dangerous work and was apt to disrupt family life sooner or later.  In 1871 Reed was charged with robbery and murder in Arkansas and wanted posters with a price on his head began to circulate in Texas—a sure invitation to some greedy or ambitious neighbor to turn him in.  The couple fled to California where a son, James Edwin—Eddie—was born.

When things cooled off, they returned to Texas.  Reed soon fell in with a new gang, the Starrs, a Cherokee clan based in Indian Territory who specialized in running whiskey to the tribes, cattle rustling, and horse thievery.  Strong arm robbery, Reed’s specialty was a side line.  

It is unclear if Mrs. Reed actively took part in the commission of her husband’s crimes during these years or was merely an accomplice.  But her continued show of being an armed and her swagger did nothing to discourage a notion that she was an active participant.  In April 1874 that supposition was enough despite a lack of any evidence placing her on the scene, to get a warrant issued along with her husband and members of the Starr gang for a Stagecoach robbery. 

The Reeds shifted their base of operations to Paris, Texas where James was shot and killed that August.
A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.

In 1880 31 year old May married Sam Starr and settled with him on a ranch, renamed Younger’s Bend, on the Canadian River near present-day Eufaula.  It was there that she finally became something like the bandit queen of legend.  She adopted the name of Belle, probably to obscure her identity, but perhaps as a pet name given to her by her new husband.  In Texas she was still known as Mrs. Reed or May.

Belle turned out to be a woman of great organizational skill and was soon assuming a leadership position among the Starrs.  She organized and directed cattle raids and planned robberies.  She regularized the clan’s business dealings, cultivating markets and keeping lawmen on the payroll for protection.  She was seen in her full regalia in company of the boys, her brace of pistols now upgraded to a nickel-plated pearl handle horse pistol and a lighter .38.  She kept a shotgun in a saddle boot. But whether she actually led any of the gang’s crimes is doubtful.  No reliable witness ever put her on the scene.

But in 1883 Belle and Sam were found in possession of stolen horses by a Federal Marshall operating in Indian Territory.  The pair was dragged before the notorious Hanging Judge Isaac Parker’s Federal Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Both were convicted.  Belle was sent to the Detroit House of Corrections in Michigan because the Feds had no facilities for women.  There she was regarded as a model prisoner, was made a trustee, and won the admiration and affection of the supervising Matron.  The rebellious Sam served time at hard labor, much of it on a chain gang and in the hole for various infractions.

Belle was released after nine months.  Sam rejoined her in Indian Territory when his sentence was up.  Then they were back in business.

Belle and her husband Sam Starr in Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1886 months before Sam was killed in a shoot out with an Indian Police Officer.  She is shown riding side saddle and heavily armed. 

In 1886 Belle was again hauled before Judge Parker on a theft charge but escaped conviction.  While in Ft. Smith she posed on horseback fully armed for her most famous photograph.  It was a triumphant moment, but Belle’s happiness was cut short when Sam and Indian Police Officer Frank West shot each other to death in a gunfight on December 17 of that year.

Widowed once again, Belle was rumored to have had several short relationships with members of her outlaw circle—Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French.  In order to be able to remain on her land in the Indian Nation, Belle married the much younger Jim Starr a/k/a Jim July.

Belle with Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw who rode in the Starr gang.  After Sam's death he was one of a series of lovers she took and was rumored by some to have briefly been her husband.  Blue Duck is most famous as the relentless and remorseless killer in Larry McMurtry's  novels Commanche Moon and Lonesome Dove, both of which were made into successful TV mini series.

Despite these relationships, her active leadership in the Starr gang had ended with Sam Starr’s death.

On February 3, 1889 just two days before her 41 birthday Belle was riding home from a visit to neighbors in Eufaula when she was ambushed.  She was hit in the back and neck with a blast of buckshot from a shotgun.  She was knocked off of her horse.  He assailant turned her over on her back and finished her off with a second blast directly in the face, and act of such rage and savagery that suspicion was immediately drawn on those closest to her. 

Those suspects included her husband, and her son.  A tenant sharecropper named Edgar J. Watson, a Creek, was charged with her murder supposedly because Belle had threatened to turn him into the law on an outstanding murder charge in Florida.  But Belle, who had harbored many outlaws at her ranch including Jesse James himself once for several months, would be unlikely to betray anyone.  Evidence was slim to non-existence and the jury did not believe the prosecutor’s case.  Watson lived until 1910 when he was shot and killed.

Jim Starr may not have been entirely happy in his marriage to a dominating older woman, but he had little motive to murder her since he had no claim on the land on which he was living comfortably.  Most historians discount him as a suspect.

Belle with her children.  James "Eddy" Starr, upper right, was her eldest and has been suspected of her murder.  Pearl, standing in back of her seated mother became a prostitute and successful madame after her mothers death. 

Eddy, however, had recently been beaten by his mother for abusing a horse and was known to be furious with her.  The fact that the shotgun used in the murder probably belonged to Belle also linked him to the crime.  But there was never enough evidence to charge him.  Belle’s murder remains officially unsolved.  

Eddie Reed was convicted of horse theft and receiving stolen property in July 1889 and the family nemesis Judge Parker sentenced him to prison in Columbus, Ohio.  Like many former outlaws Eddie switched sides, becoming a lawman in Fort Smith.  He was involved in a famous gun battle with two outlaw brothers named Crittenden in 1895 who he killed.  He died in another shoot out in a Claremont, Oklahoma saloon on December 14, 1898.

Belle's daughter Pearl turned to prostitution after her mother's murder and went on to be a successful madame. 

Pearl Starr turned to prostitution to raise money to try and secure her brother’s release from the 1889 prison sentence.  Her efforts did earn him a pardon which opened the door to his law enforcement career.  Pearl continued to ply her trade and operated brothels in Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas, up to and through World War I.  

At the time of her death Belle was locally notorious in Indian Territory, Texas, and Arkansas, but unknown in the rest of the country.  Richard K. Fox, editor and publisher of the Police Gazette, always on the look-out for exciting yarns, picked up the story of Belle’s murder from the Western press. Intrigued he did a modicum of investigation into her life and launched a series of lurid articles in his magazine.  These were consolidated and expanded into a dime novel, Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James published late in the year of her death.  Some Western historians continue to cite the book as a source on her life although it is riddled with errors and exaggerations.

But it did prove popular.  More dime novels followed along with the inevitable stage melodrama.  Woody Guthrie was just one of those who immortalized her in song. 

The luminous Gene Tierney actually got second billing to Randolph Scott in the highly fictionalized 1941 20th Century Fox bio-pick Belle Starr the Bandit Queen. 

Belle has been portrayed, rarely very realistically, in dozens of films.  Actresses portraying her included Betty Compton in 1928, Gene Tierney opposite Randolph Scott in 1941, Jane Russell in 1953, Elsa Martinelli in a spaghetti western with a feminist touch directed by Lina Wertmüller in 1968,  Elizabeth Montgomery in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and Pamela Reed in the same year’s The Long Riders.

In her statue at the Woolaroc Museum in in the Osage Hills of Northeastern Oklahoma Belle is toting a rifle, not the usual shotgun she had in the boot of her side saddle. 

Belle is commemorated in the former Indian Territory where she spent much of her life with a gun-toting life size statue at Woolaroc, Oklahoma.

 

The Maiden Flight of the China Clipper Was Romance of the Air

 

Note--Technical problems here at Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout world headquarters delayed this post and may continue to disrupt service until your scribe and editor and get some damn thing fixed.

She was without a doubt the most famous--and romantic--single commercial aircraft ever to take wing, an icon of a shrinking world, and an honest-to-God movie star in her own right.  It all began on November 22, 1935 when the Pan-Am World Airlines China Clipper lifted out of the water of Alemeda, California with a cargo of air-mail bound for Manila in the Philippines.

Heavily laden with cargo and fuel the mighty four-engine Martin M-130 struggled to gain altitude.  A scheduled loop around San Francisco for the befit of the press and newsreel cameras had ti e scrubbed and pilot Edwin Musick realized he could to get over the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge then still under construction so he dramatically flew under the span.  It was a risky start bt the plane was on her way.

It was epic, arduous, and took seven days with lay-overs for fuel and to rest the crew at Honolulu, Midway Island, and Guam.  Setting down in Manila Bay her cargo of 110,000 pieces of mail was cause for national celebration.  The Clipper was soon in regular scheduled service and carrying passengers.

Pan-Am President Juan Trippe following flight progress on maps and a globe.

 The flight was a long time coming.  It was the vision Pan-Am founder and President Juan Trippe, a swashbuckling Wall Street investor turned aviation entrepreneur.  After earlier forays into the infant industry, Tripp founded the Aviation Corporation of America which opened Latin American air mail service with a flight from Key West to Havana in 1917 with Musick at the controls.  He saw the future of international commercial aviation was in flying boats and put Pan-Am's resources into helping develop and put them into operation.  With planes like the Sikorsky S-42 which made Trans-Atlantic service feasible.  With well-established routes to South America, Africa, and Europe Pan-Am was the unofficial U.S, flag carrier.  Trippe turned his gaze East.

But Asia was far Away and regular service would require new, larger, and more powerful aircraft.  Trippe commissioned a new plane from the Glen L. Martin Company of Baltimore, Maryland.  The builder designated the new planes as the M-30 Martin Ocean Transports--all-metal flying boats with streamlined aerodynamics and four Pratt & Whitney radial engines.  The planes could accommodate 36 day or 18 overnight sleeper passengers and carry a flight crew of 7 plus cabin attendants for passenger service.  Three of them were built for Pan-Am.

The China Clipper was the first one built and was test flown on December 30, 1934.  It was delivered to the airline fleet on October 9, 1935.  Her sister ships were the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper.

Meanwhile Tripe sent Musick, now Pan-Am's senior captain on two flights in a Sikorsky @-42 to scout routes to the Philippines and from Manila to China.  Musick was then one of the most famous aviators in the world holding more the 10 world records for long-distance and flying boats.  He was also by far the most experienced pilot in world having racked up nearly two million trans-oceanic air miles.

Captain Edwin Musick was the most experienced global pilot and had personally scouted and laid out the routes of the China Clipper.

With the route laid out, Musick was the easy choice for senior captain on the inaugural flight.  The rest of the crew were also respected veterans and included First Officer R.O.D Sullivan and navigator Fred Noonan, later famed for doing the same duty on Amelia Earhart's doomed round the world flight.

Weekly passenger flights across the Pacific began in October 1936 with the Hawaii Clipper.  Connecting service from Manila to Hong Kong began in 1937 using S-42 with the Clipper class Martins taking over that leg a year later.  All three Martins flew these routes but in the public's eye they were all China Clippers.

 

A lobby card for Warner Bros. 1936 China Clipper starring Pat O'Brien, Hmphry Bogart, Henry B. Walthall, Ross Alexander, and, of course, the China Clipper herself.

Public fascination with the Clipper was so high that Warner Bros/First National Pictures rushed into production a film aptly named China Clipper staring Pat O'Brien as a thinly disguised Trippe who was single-minded and ruthless in his aim to establish trans-Pacific service no matter the cost.  The turgid melodrama was noted as an early non-gangster role for Humphey Bogart as a safety conscious pilot at odds with his boss but saved the day by flying the plane safely through a storm and into a mail contract.  The movie used newsreel and stock footage of the real Clipper including a clip of Edwin Musick flying under the bridge.

The China Clipper was featured in other films including the 1937 comedy Fly-Away Baby and the 1939 adventure Secret Service of the Air and was referenced in others.  Much later Alec Baldwin portrayed Trippe in the bio-flick of his rival Howard Hughes in The Aviator.  She also figured in radio serial and popular pulp fiction.

The China Clipper and her sister aircraft and two crew of that inaugural flight all met disastrous ends, a reminder of how dangerous long distance air travel still was in even the most advanced planes.

On January 28, 1938 Musick and his crew of six died in the crash of the S-42 Samoan Clipper near Pago Pago, American Samoa, on a cargo and survey flight to Auckland, New Zealand.  A few month later in July the Hawaii Clipper disappeared between Guam and Manila with the loss of nine crew and six passengers and Amelia Erhart's twin engine plane vanished somewhere over the Pacific with navigator Fred Noonan on board.

The Philippine Clipper survived a Japanese air raid on Wake Island, an event depicted in the 1942 moral boosting film Wake Island.  Pressed into war-time service with the Navy along with the China Clipper, she was lost in January 1943 between Ukiah and Boonville, California on a flight from Honolulu killing Pacific submarine force commander Admiral Robert H. English and 18 others.

 That left the original China Clipper as the sole survivor of the fleet.  Released from Navy service she was assigned to the inaugural flight of Pan-Am service between Miami and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo via Rio de Janero.  The plan was attempting to touch down at Port of Spain, Trinidad with an inexperienced pilot at the controls under the supervision of a veteran captain.  After aborting one approach the pilot misjudged his altitude and came in nose down hundreds of yard short of his designated landing zone.  The plane's hull smashed on impact, took water, and quickly sank.  All 28 on board were killed.

I'm surprised the History Channel has not had a breathless Curse of the China Clipper feature, or maybe it has.  But no mystery curse or cover-up conspiracy is needed--aviation was still that dangerous over vast distances and violent storms.

Trippe would go on to lead Pan-Am for decades introducing more innovations like  the Boing 747, the workhorse of international aviation.  He died in 1981 at the age of 81.  Mercifully, he did not live to see the ignominious failure of what had been the world's premier airline a decade later.

 

The Shadow Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men

 

The Shadow was one of the first radio dramas to hook listeners with secret coded messages,

When Street and Smith, a Depression era publisher of pulp fiction, decided to boost the sagging sales of its flagship Detective Story Magazine they took a flyer on radio, which was just coming into its own as a platform for dramas.  David Chrisman of the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency was hired to create a package that would frame stories from the magazine adapted by editor/publisher William Sweets.  It was decided to have the stories introduced by a mysterious, nameless narrator.  Several possibilities were tossed around until writer Harry Engman Charlot suggested the eerie and sinister sounding The Shadow.

Detective Story Hour premiered on Thursday July 31, 1930 on the CBS Radio network.  It was the first version of an American cultural phenomenon which would go on to become one of the longest running a most popular radio dramas of all time, a long running series of twice-a-month pulp novels, and spawn movie serials and features, comic books, and a TV series.  The character of The Shadow would help inspire the superhero genre in comic books, especially The BatMan and the Green Hornet on radio.  The Hornet was depicted as the modern nephew of the Lone Ranger by a Detroit radio station desperate for a mystery program to match The Shadow.

But all of that was as yet in the future.  The character and the radio show both had some growing and adapting to do.

In those early broadcasts, the eerie introduction that became famous was not yet in its full form.  The Shadow did not yet have a secret identity and was not an active participant in the stories, just a kind of omnipresent observer to the unfolding yarn.  But the narrator voiced by James LaCurto and later Frank Readick uttered the now familiar introduction “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…” 

The Shadow Magazine eventually came out twice a month with a complete short novel in each issue plus short stories and features.  The Shadow in the magazine had a more complex back story than depicted on radio. 

Audiences were hooked from the beginning.  Smith and Street were gratified by the success of the show, but somewhat stunned by the audience reaction to The Shadow.  But being smart purveyors of popular culture, the company wasted no time in cashing in.  On April 1, 1931 the company launched a new magazine, The Shadow, a quarterly which featured a complete novel in each issue plus additional detective short stories.  The editors commissioned Walter B. Gibson, a prolific pulp writer and stage magician as the principal author of the novels which were published under the name Maxwell Grant.

Gibson fleshed out the character and invented the mythos surrounding him.  The new book was such a sensation that within months it went from a four times a year schedule to twice a month—requiring the hyperactive writer to churn out 75,000 word stories every two weeks in addition to later contributing to the radio program, comic books, and a daily syndicated comic strip.  Although eventually other writers were brought in to take up some of the slack, Gibson would go on to pen 282 of the 325 Shadow novels.  And after the pulp magazine folded he went on to write three additional longer form novels under his own name in a new series issued by Belmont Books.

Gibson fleshed out the character and invented the mythos surrounding him.  The new book was such a sensation that within months it went from a four times a year schedule to twice a month—requiring the hyperactive writer to churn out 75,000 word stories every two weeks in addition to later contributing to the radio program, comic books, and a daily syndicated comic strip.  Although eventually other writers were brought in to take up some of the slack, Gibson would go on to pen 282 of the 325 Shadow novels.  And after the pulp magazine folded he went on to write three additional longer form novels under his own name in a new series issued by Belmont Books.

In the Gibson stories The Shadow’s secret identity was Kent Allard, a World War I air ace who flew for France and was known as the Black Eagle.  After the war, Allard turned to the challenge in waging war on criminals.  He faked his death in the South American jungles, then returned to the States.  Back in New York City, he adopted numerous identities to conceal his existence, Lamont Cranston, a “wealthy young man about town,” being just one of them.  Alard blackmailed the real playboy into allowing him to assume his identity while he traveled the world.

Assuming the identity of Cranston and others the Shadow pursued villains relentlessly by night employing the skills of a cat burglar, hypnotist, magician, and master of disguise to seemingly be anywhere.  He would often torment the men—and occasional woman—he stalked them with ominous taunts from the darkness, often driving them to near insanity.  In the end either The Shadow would cut the bad guy down in a blaze of gun fire or lead him into a police trap, or even have him killed by his own accomplices or victims.  For most of the duration of the pulp series there was no hint that The Shadow possessed any supernatural powers.

                                    Lurid covers with endangered beauties and oriental villains sold magazines.

The lurid pulp covers gripped readers with an unforgettable image of the anti-hero. He wore a large, wide brimmed black hat pulled low over his face revealing only intense staring eyes.  Over an ordinary black business suit he wore a crimson lined black cape pulled up revealing only a hawk-like nose.

With the magazine launched, the company was still a little unsure how to use the character on the radio show.  They even tried to employ him as the narrator for another short lived series based on a Smith and Street rag, Love Story Hour, which took over the original Thursday night slot.  Detective Story Hour shifted to Sunday evenings.  In September, 1931 the program acquired a commercial sponsor and was re-named the Blue Coal Radio Revue but it remained an hour long program with Frank Readick starring as The Shadow. 

The following year the show and its sponsor jumped to NBC on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.  Readick remained the star, although LaCurto sometimes filled in.  And the program was now officially what audiences had called it all along The Shadow.

As the radio dramas began to integrate the narrator into the story lines, some of them borrowed from and adapted from the novels for the sake of simplicity some elements of character as portrayed by Gibson were dropped or altered.  First to go was any mention of Kent Allard or other assumed identities.  The Shadow was Lamont Cranston.  To avoid bringing the action to a screeching halt to explain in each episode how the Shadow seems to be everywhere, a key part of the novels, it was said simply that he “had the power to cloud men’s minds.”  This was inferred to be a form of hypnotism mastered by The Shadow in the Orient.  Later in the series  he seemed to have acquired a super power of invisibility.

                    Agnes Morehead was The Shadow's accomplice on the radio show.

One of the most important differences between the books and the show was the introduction of a female accomplice, Margo Lane, who learns Cranston’s secret, becomes his companion, possible lover, and abets him in his crusade.  The part was added to give a feminine voice to the series, and Lane sometimes stepped in as narrator explaining her part in the unfolding drama.  Gibson was resentful of this change and refused for quite a while to include Lane in his novels, finally giving in to public pressure after 1940.  In 1937 the program moved to the Mutual Network and Sunday nights where it became an institution.  And with a new Shadow, youthful wiz kid Orson Welles, and Agnes Morehead as Margo Lane the program took on the form that is most remembered, and which is still heard on old time radio programs and available in CD collections.  Although the famous introduction and the closing sinister laugh were still provided by recording of Readick,  Welles’s deep rich voice and nuanced performance built tension as never before.

                    Orson Welles became the most famous voice of The Shadow.

Welles only stayed with the show for two seasons, moving on to his own ambitious Mercury Theater of the Air and Hollywood, taking Morehead with him on both adventures, but his stamp remained on the program through the several other actors called upon to portray the mysterious crime fighter including Bill Johnstone (1938-1943), John Archer (1944-1945), and Bret Morrison (1943-1944, 1945-1954).  Lane was portrayed by Morehead through 1940 then by Majorie Anderson (1940-1944), Grace Matthews (1946-1949), and Gertrude Warner (1949-1954).

                            Bret Morison and Marjorie Anderson were a '40s pairing as The Shadow and Margo Lane.

The show remained popular and Blue Coal remained the usual sponsor on the East Coast until replaced by the U.S. Army and Air Force, and later by Wildroot Cream Oil.  After 1953 no regular single sponsor could be found and the program was sustained by the network with spot advertising.  That was writing on the wall, listeners and advertisers were abandoning long form drama radio for the glamor of television.  The Shadow aired its last original episode on December 26, 1954.

The Shadow also lived across multiple other media.  There were several film versions, mostly by minor studios, beginning with a series of two reel shorts produced by Universal Pictures during the first flush of success on the radio in 1930-31.  The first entry in the series, A Burglar to the Rescue, was filmed in New York City with the voice of The Shadow on radio, Frank Readick.  Subsequent instalments were filmed cheaply in Hollywood with different actors.  In 1937 and ’38 Rod La Rocque starred in two Grand National Pictures releases. 

Victor Jory played The Shadow in a Columbia Pictures serial.  Poverty Row B-movie studios churned out cheep bottom-of-the-Double feature films.

The Shadow was a 15 episode cliff hanging serial starring Victor Jory in probably the most memorable cinematic portrayal for Columbia in 1940.  Poverty row Monogram Pictures, best known for their westerns, made three super-low budget entries in the post war years.

In the 1958 two pilot episodes of a failed TV series were slapped together and released to theaters as Invisible Avenger.

The character did not get a first class film presentation until 1994 when Alec Baldwin and Penelope Ann Miller appeared in The Shadow in what Universal Pictures hoped would be a blockbuster.  The film feature John Lone as an Asian supervillain working to develop an atomic bomb, and a supporting cast of Peter Boyle, Jonathon Winters, Ian McKellan, and Tim Curry.  Although the film made money, it was not warmly greeted by critics and failed to become a mega-hit.

The Shadow finally got a big budget production in 1994 when Alec Baldwin played the lead and Penelope Ann Miller played Margo Lane.  It was supposed to set up a movie franchise for Universal Pictures, but failed to become a blockbuster.

The Shadow fared better in illustrated print.  Walter Gibson participated in a daily strip drawn by Vernon Greene which ran for two years, 1940-42 and covered six adventures adapted from his novels until it was cancelled along with many other strips to preserve paper during the war years.  The strips were assembled and released as two comic books.

Publishers Street and Smith published their own comic book series, Shadow Comics for 101 issues between 1940 and 1949 based on the magazine version of the hero.  Archie Comics tried to cash in on the super hero craze in 1964 with a new series based on the radio show.  In the second issue of an eight book arc, a blond Lamont Cranston and The Shadow was transformed into a muscular superhero in green and blue tights.  Loyal Shadow fans were not amused and neither was the intended teen age audience.

                                Street and Smith issued the first comic book which ran for 101 issues through the 1940s.

D.C. Comics produced four Shadow series—a 12-issue series (Nov. 1973 - Sept. 1975) drawing heavily on the atmosphere of the novels and the graphic content of their covers; a 1986 mini-series, Shadow: Blood and Judgment that brought the old hero to modern New York; and in 1987 a new a monthly series by writer Andy Helfer and drawn primarily by artists Bill Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker continuing the modern universe of the mini-series.  During this period The Shadow also made cross appearances in other DC Comics, particularly Detective Comics where Batman acknowledges the now elderly Shadow as his inspiration and we learn that the character had once saved the lives of Bruce Wayne’s parents.

From 1989 to 1992, DC published a new Shadow series, The Shadow Strikes, written by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto set in the ‘30s and returning The Shadow to his pulp origins.

At DC Comics The Shadow had his own book and showed up with the company's superheroes, notably Batman in other books.

Marvel Comics also had a crack at The Shadow with a graphic novel, The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Michael Kaluta who had worked together on D.C.’s first series.

Dark Horse Comics acquired the rights to The Shadow and published the mini-series In The Coils of Leviathan in 1993, Hell’s Heat Wave, and The Shadow and Doc Savage both in 1995 as well as two single issue specials.

In 2012 Dynamite Entertainment began yet another new series written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Aaron Campbell and a mini-series Masks, teaming the 1930 era Shadow with the Spider, The Green Hornet and Kato, and a 1930s version of Zorro. 

It seems that after all of these years pop culture fans still can’t get enough of The Shadow.