Glenda Farrell

           
            On Sunday morning I finished memorizing “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût” by Serge Gainsbourg and started working out the chords.

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on my journal and didn’t finish until it was almost dinnertime. I posted my blog, put three pizza slices in the oven at low heat and then headed out for a quick bike ride.

On Brock Avenue there were some books in a box on the sidewalk, which I can’t resist and so I stopped to look. They were mostly second-rate novels but there was one hardcover entitled, “Fact and Fantasy in the Writing of Sigmund Freud”. I almost took it but then decided that I’d rather read Freud than a book about whether or not his ideas can be proven.

I rode up to Dundas and turned the corner and found another box of books. There were more academic. One was Postmodernism for Beginners written from a philosophical perspective. It almost grabbed me but I slipped free. Another was Foucault for Beginners and I was tempted to take it but thought, “Isn’t reading Foucault first hand Foucault for beginners?” If I decide to read Foucault and need him explained afterwards I’ll look up a book explaining Foucault. The only book I did take was called, “Explorations in Musical Materials: A Working Approach to Making Music”.

I rode to Gladstone, down to Queen and then home.

The pizza was ready at 20:45, right when I would normally have dinner. I had it with a beer and watched a play from the United States Steel Hour.

This 1960 play was an entertaining romantic comedy entitled “Queen of the Orange Bowl” and it starred Anne Francis and Johnny Carson.

Ken is an advertising copywriter about to begin his two-week vacation with his girlfriend Anne, who is a Greenwich Village artist and poet. He tells his colleague Lou about her and Lou says, “Invite me to the wedding”. Ken says, “This is not the kind of girl you marry. This is the kind of girl you know before you’re married, if you’re lucky”. Ken is on his way out the door to start his vacation with Anne when his mother calls. Even though he spends every weekend at home in Rochester it’s not the same for her as a vacation. She guilts him into agreeing to come home. He goes to Anne’s studio and after some lovey doving he breaks it to her that he has to cancel their vacation together. She gets mad and kicks him out. He arrives at his mother and father’s house but a couple of minutes later the doorbell rings. Anne steps in with her bags and pretends that Ken had invited her to stay with them for his holiday. Ken’s mother is shocked because she’d never heard of this woman before and had thought that Ken had no secrets from her. Anne immediately endears herself to Ken’s father. As their houseguest Anne starts to show a domestic side that Ken had not realized she’d had. She cleans and cooks better than Ken’s mother and when she bakes him his favourite Dutch apple pie he realizes that she is no longer his pre-marriage crazy adventure girl but actually the kind of woman he would marry. Just as he is called to dinner he panics and runs out the back door. His father finds him in the local watering hole where the bartender is played by Al Lewis, who will later become well known as Grandpa Munster. Ken’s father George works in a pencil factory in the eraser division “because people are prone to make mistakes”. Meanwhile Anne is crying in the guest room. As Ken and George arrive home drunk, Anne is leaving with her things. Ken is too drunk to understand what’s going on. Back in New York Anne gathers up all of the things Ken had given her and brings them to Ken’s workplace where she meets Lou and he asks her out. Ken is about to go back to New York a day early when the next door neighbour Cora comes by with her niece Rosalinda, who has been mentioned throughout the play as Cora’s match for Ken but we expected her to be unattractive and she turns out to be gorgeous. Ken spends an extra day with Rosalinda. When he gets back to New York he goes to return the gifts to Anne that she’d brought to his office. She tells him that the day they met it was Beatnik day at the kindergarten where she teaches and the Beatnik clothes were just a costume. But since he had been attracted to her because he’d thought she was a bohemian she went with it. She also tells him that two years ago she was the Queen of the Orange Bowl but he doesn’t believe that either. He tells her that if she says she’s sorry for lying he’ll forget all about it. She says she’s sorry. They embrace and he tells her he’s saved all of Labour Day and they can see the whole city. She says, “I’ve saved something for you too. You’ll have to go there with me. I can’t go alone”. He says, “Anywhere at all!” “It’s City Hall, Marriage License Bureau.” “Now Annie, look …” “No, you look! Make up your mind! Do you want a perfect girl, or do you want me?” He asks, “What time does the Bureau close?” and they kiss.

The play ends with Ken’s mother showing Ken’s mother a magazine he found in the attic. On the cover is a picture of Anne when she was Queen of the Orange Bowl.

It seemed like kind of a rushed ending and that it should have been a little longer to convey the tension of the break-up leading up to the making up.

My favourite line was, “Modesty is nothing brag about!”

Anne was played by Anne Francis, who started modelling at age six. She started working in radio and made her Broadway debut at the age of eleven. She got her own show in 1965 when she starred as Detective Honey West.

Ken’s mother was played by Glenda Farrell, who started on stage when she was seven. In films she played tough blonde gun molls in the early 1930s in films like “Little Caesar" and “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”. Later in that decade she starred in her own series of films as Torchy Blane, girl reporter. Jerry Siegel said that her role as Torchy Blane was the inspiration for Lois Lane.

Rosalinda, who didn’t speak at all in her role, was played by Nancy Kovack, who became a college freshman at fifteen and graduated at nineteen. She won eight beauty contests by the time she was twenty. She started out on television as one of Jackie Gleason's Glea Girls and worked on episodic TV shows quite a bit. She married conductor Zubin Mehta.