I learned so much about Penny Marshall while reading My Mother Was Nuts that my awareness and appreciation of her talent has grown. I must say, I wish I had Penny as a friend.

From early in her life, she lived by a few valuable rules: always try hard, play by the rules, tell the truth, help your friends, don’t get too crazy, and have fun. As she began her groundbreaking career as a director in film and TV, she learned another important rule from her brother, Garry Marshall: how she could “give someone a life.”

Born October 15, 1943, in the Bronx, New York, Carole Penelope Marshall was the third child of Marjorie and Anthony. Penny’s father was of Italian descent, and he changed his last name from Masciarelli to Marshall before Penny was born.

Her mother was a dancer and entertainer, and gave dancing lessons in her own school, the Marjorie Marshall Dance School. It was clear to Penny at an early age that her mother hated her husband and found her independence in teaching other people’s children to dance. She had 360 students over the years, and according to the book, she was beloved by 359 of them. Penny was the hold out.

Dancing did give Penny confidence and eventually put her on the stage of the Ted Mack Amateur Hour with a group of students from her mother’s school. Penny found her acting start on the stage and in bit parts on TV shows like That Girl. Garry was the producer of the hit sitcom Happy Days and cast Penny in five episodes as Laverne before he wrote and launched a spin-off. Penny went on to become Laverne DeFazio in the popular sitcom Laverne & Shirley, which ran from 1975 to 1983. She received three Golden Globe nominations for her performance.

Penny was married and divorced twice, the second time to actor Rob Reiner who has also become a successful director and producer. While Laverne & Shirley was the No. 1 sitcom on TV, Rob was working on the No. 2 sitcom, All in the Family. It made for an interesting social and home life.

During this time, Penny began to make history behind the scenes as the first woman director of a feature film and the first woman to direct a film that grossed over $100 million, not once, but twice. Over the course of a decade’s time, she directed Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Big, A League of Their Own, Awakenings, Renaissance Man, The Preacher’s Wife, and Riding in Cars with Boys.

Penny’s path as an actress and director is impressive, and it led her to connections and lifetime friendships with a long line of names we all know. But who knew she had such a long and wonderfully romantic adventure with Art Garfunkel? The name-dropping in this book is amazing—her personal Rolodex is an impressive collection of Who’s Who from the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. Her loyalty and devotion to her friends, and they to her, is truly inspiring.

Throughout this memoir, Penny talks frankly as if she’s sitting next to you. She tells it as it happened—the good, the bad, and the weird; the successes and the struggles; all the fun she’s had and that she still wants five more minutes.

My Mother Was Nuts is available from Amazon for a list price of $26.

Book Review: My Mother Was Nuts The Saturday Evening Post

I literally grew into my favorite role—the part of Velvet in the picture National Velvet. I started to qualify for it as a small child by learning to love horses, and began riding at the age of three. When I was four, my godfather gave me a field horse, and soon I started jumping and steeplechasing. Later, I read Enid Bagnold’s novel, “National Velvet,” and began to dream of playing Velvet in a movie.

So when I reached a relatively ripe thirteen and heard tbat M-G-M planned to produce a picture based on this story, I went to Producer Pan Berman and told him bow much I wanted the role.

“But you’re too small and frail,” he said.

“I’ll grow,” I promised.

Afterward mother wondered why I had said tbat. “You know you haven’t grown a quarter inch in three years,” she pointed out.

“It wasn’t necessary then,” I said. “Now it is.” Until then, I had eaten like a bird. But after making that promise I started packing away steaks and chops like a lumberjack. In three months I grew about three inches and gained weight besides. Maybe Nature poked a helpful hand into my build-up program, but I like to think I did it all myself. Anyway, I got my favorite role—and King Charles.

King Charles was supposed to be a mean horse, and only his owner and his trainer were allowed to ride him. But I managed to win his trust by visiting him day after day. Then I persuaded the studio to buy him for the picture, and finally King Charles was presented to me as a birthday present.

By the time another 17 years had passed, she had left such ingenue roles far behind her to win the 1967 Academy Award for Best Actress playing the bitter, destructive Martha of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

Next: Taylor’s Most Passionate Role, as an AIDS Activist

Remembering Elizabeth Taylor The Saturday Evening Post

Elizabeth Taylor – December 3, 1966

Elizabeth TaylorPhoto: Paul RonaldDecember 3, 1966

Elizabeth Taylor may have been a shrew on the December 3, 1966 cover, but she was also a stunner. She and Richard Burton were starring in The Taming of the Shrew. The Paul Ronald photo gives credence to those who argue she was the most beautiful screen actress of all. To my surprise and delight, the cover folded out to show the man attempting to tame her (Burton as Petruchio). Well, it certainly never happened in real life.

Sophia Loren – October 21, 1967

Sophia LorenPhoto: M-G-M PhotoOctober 21, 1967

Just when you stick your foot in it and assert that Liz was the greatest screen beauty ever, you run across a gorgeous cover of Sophia Loren from 1967. The battle rages on. The movie star had a rough beginning, “even for a poor Neapolitan,” wrote John Cheever in the accompanying article. “She was seven years old when the three-year of bombardment of Naples began during World War II, and she and her mother suffered the hazards of poverty and war.” Forty-three years later, she’s still gorgeous.

Ann-Margret – May 4, 1963

Ann-MargretPhoto: Lawence J. SchillerMay 4, 1963

Looking sassy, sexy and joyful all at once is Ann-Margret, an “explosive new star.” Her rise to Hollywood fame was considered lightning fast. “At 22, having emerged from nowhere by way of Sweden and Illinois, Ann-Margret has worked the film town’s official chroniclers into a froth of admiration,” wrote Dean Jennings. As ingenuous as the young star was, she planned “to be the girl who sustains, year after year.” We’re delighted she succeeded.

Faye Dunaway – September 7, 1968

Faye DunawayPhoto: Jerry SchatzbergSeptember 7, 1968

I have been known to rue the day photography replaced art and illustration on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, but a photo like this reminds even a curmudgeon like myself that photography is an art form, too. The beautiful star was nominated for Best Actress for Bonnie and Clyde from the year before.

Julie Andrews – January 29, 1966

Julie AndrewsPhoto: Philippe HelsmanJanuary 29, 1966

I love the fresh-faced Julie Andrews of this 1966 cover. She was a long way from the Mary Poppins of only a couple of years before, starring in a cold-war themed Hitchcock movie. With her in “Torn Curtain” was Paul Newman (who’ll be one of our “leading men” next week). She was the first to make fun of her squeaky clean image. When Hitchcock complained during a scene, “That light is making a hell of a line over her head,” she responded with hands primly on hips, “That’s my halo.” Okay, no halo, but she certainly had a radiance.

Brigitte Bardot – May 8, 1965

Bridget BardotPhoto: Dan Ornitz and OrlandoMay 8, 1965

“For people like me,” Bardot was quoted as saying, “there is no place left to hide.” The sex kitten was still a hot property at the ripe old age of thirty. According to the article, “police almost lost control of the mob when she got off the plane in Mexico City to assume her part in Viva Maria! Being hounded by the paparazzi isn’t a new thing—the alluring actress was brutally pursued by photographers. She retired less than ten years later and became an outspoken advocate for animal rights.

Classic Covers: Leading Ladies of the ’60s The Saturday Evening Post

Elizabeth

Gone with the Wind The Saturday Evening Post

The critics who attended the premiere saw a thin melodrama, unremarkable musical numbers, a few minutes of spoken dialogue, and dismissed it as a forgettable novelty.

However, the audience saw a different movie. They saw the future of motion pictures. The New York audience was electrified. They responded with delight to the dialogue, which occupied only a fourth of the movie and was improvised during filming. Some remember that people actually cheered when Jolson delivered his first line of dialogue, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

He was inserting a plug for a song he had written, entitled “You ain’t heard nothing yet.” It wasn’t used in the movie, but Jolson thought using the title in a throw-away line was good advertising.

The words, themselves, were unimportant. What mattered was that the audience was hearing someone talk—a breakthrough in movies.

Sound was nothing remarkable. Ever since theater owners began exhibiting movies, sound accompanied the feature, usually from a piano, organ, or, in big cities, perhaps a symphony orchestra. Some theaters had even begun using sound-effects teams. When incorporated into a World War I movie, Post writer Jerome Beatty reported, “the newspaper critics sniffed at the sound effects. Some were out of register, they said, and the whole thing was artificial and ineffective. But the crowds fought to get in and the people who saw the show told their friends to see it.”

The Sound Investmentby Jerome BeattyMarch 9, 1929.

The popularity of The Jazz Singer surpassed any of these cosmetic additions of sound because it captured sound and image on the same film. The audio couldn’t stray from the video, as it might on a short phonograph record. The Vitaphone process used in The Jazz Singer enabled spoken dialogue and opened a new dimension in movie-making.

Many movie studios saw the wave of the future and dove in. “Pictures … with even a few minutes of talking in them, made at a cost of less than $50,000, were grossing more than [movies that cost] $1,000,000 … all-talking pictures were paying their entire production cost with the rental received from New York and Brooklyn first-run engagements alone. Theaters that had been operating at a loss installed sound equipment and jumped their receipts 50 to 100 percent.”

One year after The Jazz Singer premiered, over 1,000 theaters were using its Vitaphone system. “By the end of [1929],” Beatty reported, “if present plans are carried out, there will be 3,500 wired theaters in the United States and Canada, and at least 600 abroad.”

Movie critics continued to disparage the new “talkies.” It appeared as if the public and critics were purposely heading in different directions. A theater manager in Dallas summed up the situation in a business telegram to his Los Angeles boss. “Criticism terrible. Business tremendous.”

Several studios worried that “talkies” would prove a short-lived fad. They played with the idea, adding varying amounts of sound to their movies. As a result, audiences never knew what to expect when they entered the theater. The industry began using an informal rating system.

“A picture With Sound is a picture that contains no talking, that has merely a synchronized score. A picture With Sound and Effects contains no talking, but has a score and cued noises. A Talking Picture has talking, music and effects, although the percentage of talking may be comparatively small. When you see An All-Talking Picture advertised, you may be sure that all lines are spoken.”

Sound added a new dimension to motion pictures. According to some historians, dialogue revived the industry just as the public was growing tired of the limitations of silent stories.

It took time, though, for movie companies to make natural sound. It took even longer for them to offer dialogue that was both believable and memorable.

Fortunately, though, early audiences weren’t expecting great dialogue. They also proved that hearing was less acute than vision, and sound effects didn’t have to be realistic if well-timed.

“Provided the volume is right, they [sound-effects engineers] find that exact imitation of noises is not necessary. The eye registers a revolver shot, for instance, and almost any sort of noise, from a bang to a plop, will make the spectator believe he has heard a shot. In recording music and effects for an airplane picture a company took great care to produce the exact and widely different sounds of a British plane, a German pursuit plane, and a German bomber … In an effort to learn whether it was worthwhile to be accurate, persons were questioned after they had seen the picture. Out of more than 100 who were questioned, only 11 had noticed any difference in the sounds, and 6 of those were aviators. These aviators [also] had high praise for the reproduction of the sounds of machine-gun fire which had been made by means of a whirling cogwheel and a barrel stave, after it was found that actual machine-gun fire was so rapid that it did not give the proper staccato effect.”

With the images and voices of actors presented simultaneously, movies seemed more realistic than ever, leading to some unrealistic expectations:

“On the stage … a play may be laid in a foreign land, but the actors speak to one another in English and nobody complains. But one motion-picture critic has complained of a lack of realism in a scene, which was taken from [such] a play and … never questioned. The unrealistic scene is one in which a French peasant speaks to a German. In the picture, as in the play, both talk in perfect English.”

Speaking a foreign language had not been a problem in silent movies. The inter-title card simply gave the original text and an English “translation.” Eventually, the industry adopted a standard that audiences soon learned: Whenever an actor starts delivering his line with a strong accent, we assume he has begun conversing in a foreign language.

Movie sound continued to improve over the decades. Studios added immense orchestral scores. Multiple microphones picked up every spoken word with a clarity better than life. Engineers added stereo, surround-sound, and digitally enhanced effects. None of these improvements, though, match the impact made 82 years ago by the voice of Al Jolson.

Click here to read “The Sound Investment” by Jerome Beatty, March 9, 1929.

“Criticism Terrible … Business Tremendous.” The Saturday Evening Post

In August of 2001, she appeared at the Rhode Island Film Festival in Providence. I found her to be beautiful, charming, and gracious. I had a picture taken with her, side by side, and she autographed my copy of The Saturday Evening Post from January 1980, in which she appeared on the cover for the movie 10.

I treasure that copy of the Post, which I had bought and saved all those years back. Julie Andrews was meant to sign it! I thank her for all the joy she has brought to me and all her other admirers through the years!

Michael

Cranston, Rhode Island

Julie Andrews The Saturday Evening Post