Happy (Belated) Birthday, June!

Yesterday was the 99th birthday of beloved actress, June Lockhart. While she had a number of memorable roles throughout her long career (starting in 1938 with “A Christmas Carol”), she will always be Maureen Robinson to me. From 1965-1968, she played everyone’s favorite space-age mother on “Lost in Space.” Unlike many of the other early TV-moms, Maureen Robinson had a career as a doctor, often challenging and pushing back (successfully!) against some of the stubborn males in the show. ALWAYS with love, though!



In the first episode, she passes out when her body is re-animated from the Jupiter 2’s freezing tubes. It would be one of the few times that her character was helpless.



She brought a warmth, strength, and dash of comedy to all her roles. It was somewhat disappointing that the campy Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris) overshadowed the central heart of the show, Maureen and John Robinson (Guy Williams). When that occurred, a promising drama about the space family Robinson descended into a silly hour of having to listen to Harris’ character mug, moan, and eventually have to be rescued. My caption for the photo below would be Harris telling Lockhart and Williams:

OK, here’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to ad lib my role and endear myself to producer Irwin Allen, while you two will end up in the background. Got it?



Below is a behind the scenes shot from the Shirley Temple movie, “Miss Annie Rooney” (1942).



Seated at the table, you can see the back of June’s head at left, then Shirley, and Dickie Moore. Gloria Holden and Jonathan Hale are in back.



June’s character, Stella Bainbridge, is a snotty young rich girl and rival to Shirley. Dickie Moore’s character, Marty White, refers to her as “an old drizzle puss!” Here she is in a screenshot from the movie (far left), looking disapprovingly at Shirley’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks character, Annie Rooney.



Miss Annie Rooney wins out in the end. Marty’s parents, played by Hale and Holden, are won over by Annie’s dance moves. The drizzle puss is left out.



Before June and Shirley made “Rooney,” they attended school together. As June recalled in a Time article written when Shirley died in 2014:

I was at Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles and in 1941, Shirley joined as a freshman. It was her first school experience with other students because up until that time she’d been tutored on the set at Fox. Her contract had run out, so she had the opportunity to go to a real school and interact with the girls. We wore uniforms at Westlake and she integrated very easily into the student body once she learned about uniform compliance. It turned out that I being a junior at the time was one of the people on the committee that had to watch them all go into morning assembly and I had to make sure that the skirts weren’t too short, and that there was absolutely no lipstick and no rouge. So once Shirley got the hang of having to take off her lipstick and rouge every morning, she was fine. But of course, this is something she’d been so used to all her life. She was very charming about it though. I joined the military drill team at Westlake and was a captain, so she joined too and we both agreed it was really great fun—we’re talking early war here, 1941. We agreed that it was really rhythmic movement, with dance steps, to a military tempo. So she had no problem getting the hang of that. The next year, we made a movie together, Miss Annie Rooney. I played the snotty girl and she was, of course, the leading lady. And Dickie Moore was in it, and he gave her her first on-screen kiss—a most chaste kiss. We were the only two Guild Members at school and to have a chance to work together that way was really nice. But she was a good student, I remember the principal telling me about her—she was working when we were taking our chemistry tests, so she had to do them later, and she graduated with her class but my memory of it is that she had to come in alone and take her chemistry test in the lab—which she passed with flying colors.

June also had a minor role in the Judy Garland film, “Meet Me In St. Louis” (1944). Her character, Lucille Ballard, was an off-screen villain for most of the movie. Once she is introduced, we realized it was all a figment of sisters Esther (Judy) and Rose Smith’s (Lucille Bremer) imaginations.



It is Lucille who plays matchmaker and selflessly gives up her date so that Rose can be with the one she loves.



In real life, June was hardly a drizzle puss or a doormat. Bill Mumy, who played her son Will on “Lost in Space,” called her a “rock and roll goddess.” You can see what he has to say about her at the 40 minute mark of this video:



I hope that June had an incredible birthday yesterday!

See more “Lost in Space” photos at my main website.

Murder Mystery Monday

By the fall of 1963, Karyn Kupcinet was an actress with a somewhat successful career that had  begun to tank, thanks to her abuse of diet pills, drugs, and booze. Not a good combo. And oh yes...that little shoplifting incident. Her relationship with actor Andrew Prine was also headed south; he saw the red flags and already had another girlfriend, which only served to make Karyn become more cuckoo. From the vintage publicity blurb that accompanied the above photo:

December 2, 1963—HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.: Police said here 12/2 that actor Andrew Prine and the late actress Karyn Kupcinet (shown together in an 10/63 photo) had both received a number of letters threatening their lives. Miss Kupcinet, daughter of newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet, was found dead in her apartment 11/30. Authorities said she had been dead for “two or three days.” She was 22.

Turns out Kupcinet had created those threatening letters herself. Yup. Cuckoo.

The night before her death, Kupcinet had dined with actor Mark Goddard (“Lost in Space”) and his wife Marcia.



HOLLYWOOD, December 1, 1963: DISCOVERED ACTRESS’ BODY—Actor Mark Goddard and wife Marcia wait at a Hollywood police station today to tell detectives details of how they happened to find the strangled body of actress Karyn Kupcinet in her Hollywood apartment last night. The pair said they were friends of the actress and went to her apartment because they had not heard from her for several days.



I can’t help but notice the black gloves on Marcia; and Goddard’s cup of java and a cig. Do you still get free coffee today when interrogated?

Kupcinet was living in the Monterey Village apartment complex located in West Hollywood:



It really is a charming little time capsule of old Hollywood, and supposedly where Randolph Scott and Cary Grant once shacked up.



The steps up to Kupcinet’s second floor apartment:



Where it all happened, which (coincidentally) is just a few doors away from where I once spent the night with a good friend of mine who resided in this complex a number of years ago:



Somehow, Kupcinet is part of the many conspiracy theories linking her to President John F. Kennedy’s death. According to the Hazlitt website:

[S]he was the mystery woman who, just 20 minutes before Kennedy’s death, called the FBI from an Oxnard, California, telephone exchange and breathed, “the president will be shot.” Jones gave no reason for his unshakable belief that Kupcinet was the mystery woman. Her ex-lover, Andrew Prine, later stated he and Kupcinet were in another part of the state during the shooting. There is no concrete evidence Kupcinet was psychic or privy to such explosive information, and when the Today Show, in 1992, flashed her picture among those whose deaths “connected” to Kennedy’s, her father’s next Sun-Times column was irate: “That is an atrocious outrage… The list apparently has developed a life of its own and for Today to repeat the calumny is reprehensible.”

Kupcinet’s death still remains officially unsolved. If you want to read an excellent account of what happened, visit Scott Michaels’ Find A Death website

See more Movie & TV photos at my main website.

Screen Gem Saturdays: Lost in Space—still my fave

Picture this: the cheesiest of props…ham acting…juvenile (sometimes) scripts, and the most heart-warming sentimental drivel this side of whatever planet you care to name. And yet, it still remains one of my favorite shows. Irwin Allen sure knew how to stretch a dollar, and often enough it shows on “Lost in Space.” With a fantastic ensemble cast and just about every kind of alien imagineable, LIS has achieved a legendary cult status that continues to grow. The initial pilot was very serious in tone, and any laughs were strictly unintended. Dr. Smith, played by eternal guest star status Jonathan Harris, began on the show as 100% evil, with very few (if any) redeeming qualities. Realizing this could mean a short shelf-life for his character, Harris injected a bit of camp into his character and it paid off in spades. Unfortunately, by the 3rd season, the entire show degenerated into a campfest and lost any grounding that it originally had. Even so, it was a lot of fun. And I still love to watch it!

Didn’t every kid wish they could have their own Jupiter 2?



And I’m sure that most kids wished their parents were as cool as Maureen & John Robinson. The things she could whip up with a few alien ingredients! She put Betty Crocker to shame—and knew how to use a laser to boot!



Who could forget the dashing Major West (played by Mark Goddard), who had the extremely watered-down "relationship" with Judy Robinson:



This photo shows Bill Mumy, who portrayed Will Robinson, with his stand-in. Yup...a female stood in for the young Mumy who eventually did a comic-book version of the classic 1960’s Irwin Allen TV show. Stand-ins do a lot of the grunt work; dressed in similar costumes, they make sure all of the lighting is correct before the star steps on the set.



See more “Lost in Space” photos at my main website.