Wasn’t I a dish?

In the 1997 blockbuster, “Titanic,” Gloria Stuart portrayed Rose, a centenarian who survived the sinking disaster of the luxury liner in the title of the film. Stuart was 86 when she filmed the role. As her character looks at a sketch that was drawn of her aboard the ship, she exclaims, “Wasn’t I a dish?”



Why yes, Gloria; you really were! In the 1936 film “Poor Little Rich Girl,” Stuart was given the thankless task of playing the romantic lead in this Shirley Temple musical. She wasn’t given much to do except look pretty in the few scenes that she had.



Above she is shown with Michael Whalen, who portrayed Shirley’s father in the film. Below, with Claude Gillingwater and Shirley.



In a 1996 interview Gloria had this to say about working with Shirley:

“My agent called me one day and said, ‘You’re going to make a Shirley Temple film!’ I said, ‘Oh no!’ He said, ‘Gloria, it’s wonderful!’ I said ‘What’s wonderful about it?’ W.C. Fields said never be in a movie or on the stage with dogs or children. It’s a losing battle. So I asked to see Darryl Zanuck and I said, ‘Mr. Zanuck, I’m a dramatic actress. It’s not for me.’ He said, ‘Gloria, you could be in film for the next ten years or on the stage and nobody would ever see you or hear about you, but if you’re in a Shirley Temple film, millions of people will see you.’ She was really a get-away girl. You watched her and she was so completely composed and happy and talented and up up up. She was a real tonic. She was a miracle. Indescribable. It’s impossible that one child was all those wonderful things but she was.”



Stuart reconnected with Shirley sixty years later at the 1998 Academy Awards ceremony. “I was sitting at the banquet afterwards and she came up and put her arms around me,” Stuart recalled. “I was the only one left that she worked with.”



Perhaps in a nod to her less-than-enthusiastic response to playing alongside Temple, studio head Darryl Zanuck had the publicity machine crank out some fashion shots of Stuart. This caption accompanied the below image:

Three high fashion notes of the spring season, a strictly tailored suit, men’s wear fabric, and the newly favored shade of grey striped in chalk white, are incorporated in this costume worn by Gloria Stuart playing in “The Poor Little Rich Girl” for 20th Century-Fox. Horizontal bands of the material finish the seams of the skirt and the slot pockets, evidence of the meticulous tailoring of this suit. The blouse of white pique has a pleated frill for collar and closing. A grey felt hat and grey suede accessories complete the outfit.



Neither one of these outfits were visible in the final film.



Stuart co-starred with Temple again in 1938’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” alongside Randolph Scott. At least she was given more to do in this film and a number of comic zingers which she delivered perfectly.



Yes Gloria - you were a dish!

See more photos at my main website.

Trip to Titanic

I was very excited to stumble upon a Titanic exhibit in Los Angeles, as I have long been obsessed with the tragic story of the ship deemed “unsinkable.” I rushed to buy tickets before it left town on 12/31. Fever was the ticket agency that handled this exhibit, and I would have to give them a “you s#$k” in the customer service department. I ended up not needing the second ticket, so contacted them (only option was email) to see if I could upgrade into one single premium ticket (which would have included a photo and exhibition booklet). Other than the automated “we have received your inquiry” email, nothing else came of my request. Strike #1. The drive up to LA is always a negative, but I can’t blame anyone on that (I’ll just silently stew on that one). Upon entering the large building that housed the exhibit, guests were given one of these:



Here’s what an original Titanic ticket looked like:



In this day and age of computer graphics, would it really have taken that much more effort to design something that at least looked authentic? The answer is “no.” Strike #2. The backside of the ticket gives a passenger name that you can look up later in the exhibit to discover their final fate.



My guy survived! Edited from an online article unrelated to the exhibit:

On the evening of the disaster, Chevré was playing cards in the Café Parisien with Pierre Maréchal and Alfred Fernand Omont and Lucien Philip Smith. When the ship stopped, Chevré thought it too cold to go outside to investigate, and asked a Steward to open a porthole and have a look. Even though the accident didn't appear to be serious, Chevré and Omont pocketed their cards and decided to get into one of the first lifeboats being lowered, No. 7. Some of their companions chided them for getting into the boat, but Chevré wasn't taking any chances. He died in Paris on 20 February 1914. "Paul Chevré was a passenger on the ill-fated Titanic," read his obituary in the Montreal Gazette, "and although he survived the shock, it is doubtful he ever recovered from it."

A scale model of the ship was on display in the lobby:



Once I whizzed by the souvenir photograph/tourist trap, I entered the first extremely dark display room. Each room had similar dim lighting with only a handful of plexiglass enclosed displays but lots of large descriptive signage that gave some history of the Titanic. For me, I want to see the artifacts; the space-filling signage meant very little. One of the first “artifacts” I saw was this White Star Line ceiling rose. It was from the Nomadic, not the Titanic. Granted, that ship was launched around the same era as Titanic (on April 25, 1911), but it was built to transfer passengers and mail to and from RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.



This gold pocket watch was given to a Titanic Harland and Wolff employee upon his retirement. Kind of cool, but not a piece recovered from the wreck. In fact, virtually none of what was on display here had come from the wreckage; most were from other White Star Line ships. 



I was somewhat excited to see the almost full-size recreations of the Titanic interiors. Sadly, these created a three-strikes-and-you’re-out situation.



With inappropriate-period light fixtures that looked like they came from Lowes (maybe not even that good), these recreations didn’t even seem passable for a local TV production.



Supposedly a first-class parlour suite; don’t look too closely or you’ll be disappointed by the cheapness of it all.



None of the china at the exhibit was from the actual Titanic, but rather what was left from the other White Star Line ships’ stock. Here’s what would have been seen in second class:



These pieces were salvaged from the Arabic, a White Star Line ship that was sunk on August 19, 1915 by a German submarine.



A first class dining room chair from…you guessed it, another ship. This one was from the Olympic:



The big “showstopper” was the recreation of the grand staircase, where all the exhibit guests loitered taking endless selfies.



If you squint and don’t look too long, you’ll think it’s not all that bad.



If you look closer, you’ll see it for the horribly cheap and shoddy disaster that it is.



At the Las Vegas Titanic exhibit at the Luxor hotel, the recreation of a ship deck was cooled to the appropriate temperature so that guests could feel what the passengers experienced the night the ship struck an iceberg. No such attention to detail here. Just a few cheap patio chairs from Lowe’s and some twinkle lights. The mirror on the right was to give the illusion of depth.

Trust me, I was not fooled.



A White Star Line deck chair and blanket from…fill in the blank but be sure not to put “Titanic.”



The boiler room recreation. I think the ship would have sunk even faster if the boiler room looked like this.



Hang on folks, we actually have an artifact that was recovered from the body of Edward Lockyer:



Lockyer was a Titanic third class passenger traveling to Ontario, Wayne County, New York. Unfortunately, he died in the sinking with his body later recovered by the Cable Ship Mackay Bennett.



The exhibit had a few props from the 1997 James Cameron film:



For the Heart of the Ocean prop, they used a J. Peterman replica. Not even from the film, this is what people could buy from the Peterman catalog at the time of the film’s release.



The WORST replica in the exhibit were these two costumes that were supposed to represent Rose’s flying dress and Jack’s garb.



The word “cheap doesn’t even cover it. Did these come from Amazon’s Halloween collection?



At the end of the exhibit they had an interestingly tasteless interactive display. A cheap representation of the wreckage that Rose Dawson (Kate Winslet) clung to while waiting to be rescued in the 1997 film:



You have to see it to believe it.



There was an entire room devoted to a recreation of the wreckage site:



Yes, I was completely disappointed. It was hardly worth the drive up and back to L.A.

BUYER BEWARE! If you decide to see a Titanic exhibit, be sure to do your homework and see what is on display and especially who put the exhibit together. I would only recommend this one to those who have very little knowledge of the ship and are mainly concerned with social media selfie opportunities.

See more Titanic related photos at my main website.

Temple Tuesday: The Titanic Connection

On July 12, 1938, Shirley Temple and family departed for Bermuda:

With three bodyguards and two toy dolls, Shirley Temple yesterday sailed for Bermuda. The child star’s departure was kept secret to permit her to escape hordes of admirers. Shirley and her mother, Mrs. George F. Temple, arrived only five minutes before the Queen of Bermuda sailed. Adopting her usual simplicity with the press, Shirley told reporters: “I want to ride a bicycle and those little carts they have in Bermuda. I want to go swimming and I expect to have an awfully good time.” Completely unnoticed by the sailing crowd of 300 at the pier was another of the ship’s passengers, Vincent Astor.

Shirley stayed at the Castle Harbour Hotel and visited various local attractions, including the Bermuda Aquarium which had been founded in 1926. Vincent Astor and Aquarium curator Louis Mowbray would often take a motor yacht down to South America and bring animals back to Bermuda, like Crooked Nose, the Galapagos tortoise. American millionaire and philanthropist Vincent Astor accompanied Shirley to the Aquarium:

Shirley Shoots Fish

Bermuda—Inside of Bermuda’s Government Aquarium at the Flatts Village, Bermuda, Vincent Astor is shown with Mr. Louis Mowbray, curator of the Aquarium and one of the world’s foremost Icthyologists, and Shirley Temple, child movie star, on holiday in Bermuda. A little boy gazes in awe at Shirley, and not at the queer fish in the tanks.

Astor also invited Shirley to ride on his private railway which ran through his 22-acre estate. Vincent was very fond of trains, and built a narrow gauge track consisting of about 1400' of track. The train had two passenger cars (each sat four) and two luggage cars. The train was used to take his guests around the large estate and over the hill to his private station where he connected his tracks to those of Bermuda’s Main Railway. The junction point was known as Astor’s Siding. The railway no longer exists, apart from trails and remnants.

Vincent’s parents were wealthy American business tycoon John Jacob Astor IV and Philadelphia heiress Ava Lowle Willing. They divorced in November 1909. As if that wasn’t scandalous enough, in 1911 John Jacob remarried (at the age of 47) 18-year-old socialite Madeleine Talmage Force. Vincent did not care for his stepmother, yet still served as best man at his father's wedding. The couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt to avoid all of the gossip back home, but still managed to make headlines since their honyemoon vessel was the ill-fated Titanic. John Jacob Astor put his five months pregnant wife Madeleine on one of the ship's lifeboats. She was rescued eight hours after her husband went down with the ship.

When Astor helped his wife onto the lifeboat, he was wearing his dinner suit, complete with his favorite 14 karat gold Waltham pocket watch, which was intact and in his coat pocket when his body was discovered nearly 13 days later. John Jacob Astor’s body and his belongings were shipped to Nova Scotia, where Vincent arrived a few weeks later to collect them. Vincent wore the watch for years and showed it to Shirley when they were aboard the Queen Bermuda. Eventually, he gave the watch to his godson, William A. Dobbyn V.

John Miottel (shown above with the watch), who collects luxury ocean-liner memorabilia, said in a phone interview that he bought the Astor watch “in 1997 in a small auction house in Asheville, North Carolina, around the 85th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking.…The ironic thing is that almost nobody, including the Astor Foundation, knew about this watch at the time. There would have been a lot more bidders if they had.” Mr. Miottel said that he bought the watch after Mr. Dobbyn’s widow died and her heirs put it up for auction. “Mrs. Dobbyn had a young cousin in Asheville in the auction business, so instead of going to Sotheby’s or Christie’s she took it to him,” he said.

And that is Shirley’s Titanic connection!

See more Shirley Temple photos at my main website.

Palooza Pt. 2: The Fox Tour

Looks like everyone followed directions and is in single file ready for the Fox Studios Tour! I really have to hand it to Fox; the historic buildings practically gleamed. It was fantastic to see all of the architectural details still intact and lovingly cared for.





The original studio gate and guard booth, where Shirley Temple and her Mother once entered the lot:



The one somewhat sad point of the tour was seeing what was originally Shirley's bungalow/dressing room. Before:



And after:



Could it really be the same building? Unfortunately, yes. Time truly marches on. Moving on...

The carpentry area was impressive, and according to our amazing guide, everything is done with sustainability in mind.



Lots of choices in wood trims and details. Sure beats Home Depot!



Upstairs near the costume/wardrobe department was a wonderful display of some of the more famous Fox outfits, such as these that Kate Winslet wore in "Titanic":





"Mrs. Doubtfire"'s sweater:



A Betty Grable worn dress from 1948's "When My Baby Smiles":



Back in daylight, we entered New York City. Well...not quite, but here it's referred to as New York Street. On the West Coast, it's probably the closest you're going to get to the Big Apple:



The Bruno Mars Uptown Funk video was shot here, complete with Palm Trees in the background. Oops.





Where bad Tour-goers are placed:



When we come back tomorrow, we'll enter an actual Soundstage and see the sets for a TV show!



See more Fox Studios photos at my main website.