For many years, when blowing out birthday candles or on other occasions that gave me a free wish, I wished that someone, somewhere, would re-record all of the wonderful LeRoy Shield tunes heard as background music in the Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, and Charley Chase Hal Roach Shorts. I don’t know which wish-making opportunity yielded the results: the incredibly wonderful recordings by The Beau Hunks Orchestra.
I still have birthdays, so I’ve switched over to the next impossible dream – seeing The Beau Hunks at a live performance.
I’ve talked to Piet Schreuders and Gert-Jan Blom about playing here in the U.S., and the financial implications of a tour are staggering. Not out of the question; just staggering.
Perhaps inspired by the concept behind stem cell research, Piet Schreuders informs me that there may be a solution that allows the sound and spirit of The Beau Hunks to travel. According to Piet, the formula is that the “…Beau Hunks ‘inject’ a few key members into existing local orchestras, bring their charts, rehearse for three days, and bingo, a good time is had by all. This opens up new possibilities — for instance, a performance on Roy Shield’s birthday in Waseca, Minnesota someday!”
Sounds great to me, as does the recent rehearsal above. According to Piet: “The Beau Hunks orchestra and the German Filmorchester Babelsberg recently combined to give a performance of Leroy Shield’s music and to accompany two silent Laurel & Hardy films. The performance was in Potsdam, near Berlin, Germany, on August 24, 2007. This clip shows a rehearsal of the tune “Let’s Face It” the day before, conducted by Scott Lawton. Beau Hunks leader Gert-Jan Blom watches from the front row.”
I was looking at the books in the vault of Lyrical Ballad in Saratoga Springs when I chanced upon the interesting volume at left. I was keen to find out exactly who this “Tracer of Lost Persons” was. Actually, that’s not quite correct. I wanted to find out if this “Tracer of Lost Persons,” printed in June, 1906, was Keen.
A little over 31 years after this book was published, a detective/mystery radio show debuted on the Blue Network: Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. The show was wildly popular, running from 1937 through 1955. But the show is always credited to Frank and Anne Hummert, whose forte was soap operas – Ma Perkins, Stella Dallas, and Mary Noble, Backstage Wife. Was this book the beginning of Mr. Keen? After all, the show opening said something about “the famous fictional character,” but the closing said the show was “based on the novel Mr. Keene.” Even so, this has to be him, right? Not the cover picture, obviously, but in the pages inside.
He was thirty-three, agreeable to look at, equipped with as much culture and intelligence as is tolerated east of Fifth Avenue and west of Madison. He had a couple of elaborate rooms at the Lenox Club, a larger income than seemed to be good for him, and no profession.
Page one, but the name “Mr. Keen” does not appear. The Hummerts paid writers little, churned out thousands of episodes of dozens of series, and and were hardly ever mistaken for creators of art… or even nice people. Did they rip off the idea for Mr. Keen from a 31 year-old book? Did somebody else? I’d never seen or heard of this tome before.
Gatewood, before the mirror, gave a vicious twist to his tie, inserted a pearl scarf pin, and regarded the effect with gloomy approval. “Say to Mr. Kerns that I am – flattered,” he replied morosely; “and tell Henry I want him.”
It’s page two. Still no Mr. Keen, although we have a “Mr. Kerns.” Were the Hummerts so lazy that they named their rip-off radio character by changing two lousy letters from the second name mentioned in “Tracer of Lost Persons?”
Page three. Gatewood meets Kearns. Nothing.
Page four.
“Besides, there’s too much gilt all over this club. There’s too much everywhere. Half the world is stucco, the rest rococo. Where’s that martini I bid for?”
No Mr. Keen on page four. No Mr. Keen on page 5.
“I never have seen my ideal,” retorted Gatewood sulkily, “but I know she exists – somewhere between heaven and Hoboken.”
I’m surprised that the Hummerts never created a soap opera called “Between Heaven and Hoboken.” Great title.
I plunge onward to page 6. The dandy Gatewood is now sprinkling French words and phrases into his utterances. OK, but…
Wait! Page 7:
“I don’t want you to; I don’t know anybody. All I desire to say is this: I do know a way. The other day, I noticed a sign on Fifth Avenue: Keen & Co., Tracers of Lost Persons.”
Sorry to have ever doubted you, Hummerts.
Mr. Keen himself does not show up until page 17:
Gatewood sat down and looked at his host. Then he said: “I’m searching for somebody, Mr. Keen, whom you are not likely to find.”
“I doubt it,” said Keen pleasantly.
I’m about 60 pages in by now, and so far, there is no physical description of Mr. Keen. I don’t think a description is forthcoming – the book is a series of vignettes more focused on Mr. Keen’s clients than Mr. Keen himself. We do not know how Mr. Westrel Keen (radio historians who say “we don’t know his first name” are wrong!) acquired his amazing ability to find lost persons. We do not know what he looks like, unless we credit the book’s illustrations. If there was a radio series based on this guy, it should have been The Shadow.
The radio series lasted forever, but very few people think it was much good. The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio describes it as “a prime-time mystery with serious soap opera trappings,” pointing out that “…the dialog was simplistic, identifying each speaker and subject fully in each utterance: ‘Before I open this door, Mr. Keen, let me tell you something. No one in this house right now had anything to do with the murder of young Donald Travers, my niece’s husband.’” Not until Judson Fountain came along were the Hummerts topped in dramatic character-based explication of the obvious (“See this? If you don’t know what it is, I’ll tell you. It’s a gun.”)
From the program “Turning Point” with Art Friedman, recorded August 14, 1957. Art is a bit of a bloviator. You’ll be yelling “Shut up!” at your speakers and pounding your fist against the furniture as Art rambles on and asks some supremely stupid questions. Art inexplicably laughs at the mention of the name “Broncho Billy Anderson.” Stan’s first answers are short; he sounds as if he’s just a bit annoyed by the inane opening questions. But things warm up and Stan takes over, talking at length about his early career. And for that, we thank you, Art Friedman.
1) Avoid crowds. 2) Sever ties to family and friends. 3) Be careful near big bodies of water. 4) Be on the move by the seventh trumpet blast, or – better yet – the fifth.
3) The Nightside Hour. Tom reserved the final hour of his three-hour radio show for audience members who wanted to call in. This is from Sept. 8, 1992.
And for those of you who may have missed it, from The Tommorow Show, a favorite episode featuring Disney animator Ward Kimball that somehow survived the years on my 3/4″ video copy, taped off the air.
I have searched for Terry Rivers online, but cannot find him. If he’s alive (doubtful) I think he’s owed a sincere apology from everyone on the planet. The line between comedy and tragedy has never been as thin as it appears here; this is life as a Laurel and Hardy comedy minus the laughs. I was going to redact the photo and address information; but then I thought, “Why? Because ’something bad’ might happen as a result?” Be as incredulous as you like when you click on the picture to read about Terry’s post-high school life, but please be aware that this is no joke. It is an actual excerpt from a 20th high school reunion booklet.
Mike Nichols and Elaine May were a comedy team for a short time – from 1957 through 1962. Their recorded output was tiny – just three LP’s: Improvisations To Music (1959), which, powered by the team’s television appearances, became a ‘top forty’ LP; An Evening With Nichols and May, which contained excerpts from their hit Broadway show of 1960, and their final record, Nichols and May Examine Doctors, from 1961.
Nichols and May were improvisational situation comedians: sophisticated, funny, and cool. They appealed not only to adults, but also to kids. Steve Martin says that each routine was “…like a song – you could listen to it over and over. I used to go to sleep to them at night.”
The ten sketches on the final album, …Examine Doctors, were originally recorded for “the greatest show in network radio history” – Monitor, an NBC extravaganza that ran pretty much the entire weekend, pretty much across the country, from 1955 through 1975. At its peak, the monitor beacon could be heard for forty hours, from 8 a.m. Saturday morning through midnight Sunday. If you’d like to listen to excerpts from Monitor, you’ll need Real Player and Dennis Hart’s Monitor site.
Nichols and May were Monitor regulars for a couple of years. The ten tracks on the …Examine Doctors LP are but a small fraction of their work for Monitor. The rest remains unreleased, which is a shame, because it may well be some of their very best work. See if you agree.
A couple of years ago, Mike Nichols appeared on Inside The Actors Studio, the show hosted by what’s-his-name… you know, the guy married to Kedakai Turner Lipton?
When Mike Nichols said the following, I grabbed a pencil and paper, backed up the Tivo, and copied it down word for word. It may well be the best advice ever offered to to anyone working on a creative project.
The most unacknowledged factor in our work is down time. Time not “working on it.” You’ll find that – over and over and over – you can’t solve something… and you leave it alone, and you go away, and you come back… and you can.
That’s your unconscious. Once you’ve acknowledged that it exists and that it works in this strange way, you can begin to cater to it more, by “putting things away.”
This is really a very fancy name that I’ve given my own laziness. It’s literally true. All my working life, I’ve thought, “I really am very lazy.”
And indeed I am, in some ways. But we all feel lazy; there’s always more work that we know we should be doing. And everybody says, “Lazy?! Are you nuts?! You’ve made us work now 48 hours in a row! And you say you’re lazy?” Yes.
Put it away. So that you can rediscover it, or discover something else next time.
You know how, in rehearsal, almost invariably a very good day is followed by a lousy day. That’s the unconscious. The lousy day is as important as the very good day.
My only remaining battle with the studios is that since they are not creative people, and they live their life in meetings, they think that things you say in meetings are work. ‘Cause that’s their only work! Therefore they can’t be expected to love, as we do, process.
The whole point of process is that you can only have one or two good ideas a day. That’s all you can do! And then, with God’s help, you’ll have another one tomorrow, and another one the day after… and then maybe none for days.
If our process can include that reality, then we are encouraging the unconscious, and we are able to keep having good ideas, which is the only thing that makes us happy when we’re working.
"Isn't Life Terrible" is a Charley Chase short from 1925. The title was derived from a 1924 D.W. Griffith film, "Isn't Life Wonderful?" Other Charley Chase film titles that ask questions are "What Price Goofy?" (1925), "Are Brunettes Safe?" (1927), and "Is Everybody Happy?" (1928). Chase abandoned his titles with question marks for titles with exclamation points during the sound era.
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