Bobby Clark "AS THE GIRLS GO" Irene Rich / George Petty Art 1948 Sheet Music
(This is a rare piece of sheet music for the song "I GOT L...)
This is a rare piece of sheet music for the song "I GOT LUCKY IN THE RAIN" from the Original Broadway production of the HAROLD ADAMSON, JIMMY McHUGH and WILLIAM ROOS musical comedy "AS THE GIRLS GO" at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. (The production opened November 13th, 1948 and ran for 414 performances.) ..... The musical starred BOBBY CLARK and featured IRENE RICH, HOBART CAVANAUGH, BILL CALLAHAN, KATHRYN LEE, BETTY LOU BARTO, HARVEY COLLINS and BEVERLY JANIS ..... CREDITS: Book by WILLIAM ROOS; Music by JIMMY McHUGH; Lyrics by HAROLD ADAMSON; Sheet Music Cover illustrated by GEORGE PETTY; Sets designed by HOWARD BAY; Costumes designed by OLEG CASSINI; Choreographed by HERMES PAN; Directed by HOWARD BAY; Produced by MICHAEL TODD ..... DETAILS: The oversized six page piece of sheet music measures approx. 9" X 12" inches, has beautiful GEORGE PETTY Pin-Up Art on the front cover and is copyrighted 1948 by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson for Sam Fox Publishing Company, New York City ..... CONDITION: With the exception of light edge wear, this rare piece of sheet music is in excellent condition and will make a wonderful addition to the collection of any musical theatre aficionado or historian.
Michael "Mike" Todd was an American theater and film producer.
Background
Mike Todd was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen on June 22, 1909, in Minneapolis, Minn. He was the son of Chaim Goldbogen and Sophia Hellerman, who had come to the United States from Poland in 1906.
He spent his early years in Bloomington, Minn. , where his father, an impoverished rabbi, operated a general store to support his large family. By the time he was seven, Avrom was selling newspapers, working at carnivals, and playing the cornet in a boys' band. When he was twelve, the family moved to Chicago, where his father was appointed to a small synagogue.
Education
In Chicago, Goldbogen was an apprentice pharmacist, then, at fourteen, began his career as a promotor, arranging "must vacate" and "lost our lease" sales for small merchants. While a student at Tulle High School, he organized a prefabricated home company and was soon engaged in constructing apartment buildings.
Career
From an early age, Todd was a hard worker, compiling an incredible amount of business experience while still a teenager. By the time he was 18, he was president of a construction business that had revenues of more than $2 million a year. He continued with a variety of business ventures and had a considerable fortune by the time he was in his mid-20s.
Todd was always interested in show business. For a time he worked in Hollywood, soundproofing stages for the early talkies. He was a carnival barker at one point. He also tried his hand as a joke writer for the comedy duo Olsen and Johnson. In Chicago, he opened a nightclub.
In 1936, Todd began producing Broadway plays. He quickly became a top theater impresario, churning out hit after hit. In nine years, Todd produced 16 Broadway shows, including Cole Porter musicals and comedies. Most were wildly successful, and in all they took in more than 18 million dollars at the box office. Many of the big stars of the era appeared in them. Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous striptease artist, headlined The Streets of Paris. Mae West starred in Catherine the Great. Other Todd hits included The Hot Mikado, Something for the Boys, and Up in Central Park.
Todd's ability to raise money for entertainment projects was well established, and in 1945 he decided to branch out into movies. He formed Michael Todd Productions and soon became a respected and feared Hollywood mogul, a shrewd wheeler-dealer whose backing could jump-start or kill a project. Yet until the mid-1950s his name never appeared on any film credits. Because of this it is difficult to say how many movies he had a hand in financing.
The advent of television as a commercial medium sent shock waves through Hollywood in the early 1950s. Todd was one of the first in the movie business to recognize that films needed to be more panoramic to compete. In 1951, Todd partnered with radio commentator Lowell Thomas to form Thomas-Todd Productions to explore the suitability of various wide-screen techniques. Within weeks, Todd zeroed in on the work of French inventor Henri Chretien. In the 1920s, Chretien had adapted the conflex lenses, first used in World War I submarine periscopes, to provide an 180-degree movie image. Todd convinced Twentieth Century Fox president Spyros Skouras to buy manufacturing rights to Chretien's process, which the Frenchman called Cinemascope.
In 1952, Todd joined with Skouras and other partners to form the Cinerama Corporation. The company contracted optics manufacturer Bausch and Lomb to produce a better lens to minimize distortion in Chretien's film process. Todd also decided that a wider film stock was needed to produce Cinerama. He invented a 70-millimeter film in which 65 millimeters were used to hold the elongated Cinerama picture and the remaining five millimeters were reserved for five synchronized sound tracks. Picture and sound could be integrated and projected from a single 70-millimeter projector. With a characteristic lack of humility, Todd named his invention "Todd-AO, " with "AO" standing for "all-in-one" synchronized sound and image projection.
Todd enlisted Thomas as narrator and produced a semi-documentary film called This is Cinerama to introduce audiences to the new technique. With his son, Michael Todd Jr. , Todd supervised the European sequences in the film. The first widely released Cinemascope movie using Todd-AO 70-millimeter film was The Robe in 1953. A Biblical epic about the followers of Jesus, the film garnered an Academy Award for Chretien. Todd was not credited for any contribution to the film.
In years to come, other studios would follow with wide-screen innovations, but Todd's was the first, most elegant and most successful method. Among industry insiders, Todd-AO was recognized as one of the saviors of the movie business. And special effects extravaganzas for decades continued to use the 70-millimeter film Todd invented.
The restless Todd quickly moved on to exploit the processes he had invented. In 1953, he sold his shares in Cinerama and formed the Magna Corporation with movie executive Joseph Schenk. The company's first project was an adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Oklahoma. It was a box-office smash. Interestingly, it combined all of Todd's major life pursuits: Broadway plays, movies, and the new wide-screen techniques. But once again, Todd's name was missing from the credits.
Despite the lack of formal recognition, Todd's role in 1950s Hollywood was well known. He was an impresario with a clear vision of how to thrill the masses and a solid business plan for getting those thrills to pay off. His next project was his biggest extravaganza ever: an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days. Based on the travels of a Victorian gentleman and his wife in a hotair balloon, it was an adventure story that could fully utilize Todd's wide-screen palette and also exploit his many connections in Hollywood. A total of 44 appearances by Hollywood stars contributed to the box-office appeal of the spectacular undertaking. Todd coined the term "cameo" to describe these brief star turns, and the cameo has been popular ever since.
For the first time, Todd's name appeared on a film. He was the producer of Around the World in 80 Days, and the movie was widely regarded as his baby, a sort of self-homage to his incredible showmanship. "The film is less an exercise in traditional skills than a tribute to its producer's energy, " notes Halliwell's Film Guide.
The film crew traveled around the world to shoot vista after vista. Todd frantically dispatched crews to India and Europe, spent money on huge crowd scenes, and manipulated finances and publicity. Perelman coughed up scene after scene written for the growing number of cameos, and Todd paid him on a piecework basis in cash.
Audiences got their thrills and the film won the Academy Award for best picture, but not every critic swooned. In fact, many dismissed the film as something of a giant con job, a bit of cinematic hokum and star-power overkill. "Todd wasn't above putting a few things over on the audience, " noted People many years later. "He was salesman as much as showman, and in this flaccid film his is the only real energy. "
On the evening of March 21, 1958, Mike Todd left California to fly to a dinner in New York. At the dinner, Todd was to be honored as "Showman of the Year. " He wanted Taylor to come along, but she was working on an MGM film and had come down with a fever. The two-engine plane was Todd's own Lockheed Lodestar, nicknamed "The Lucky Liz. " Over the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico, the Lucky Liz encountered a bad storm. At 2 a. m. , the pilot radioed a control tower for permission to climb from 11, 000 feet to 13, 000 feet to get ice off the wings. That was the last radio communication received from the plane. Its wreckage was found scattered over half a mile across a high valley in the Zuni Mountains. It was a tragic end to the life of one of the era's greatest showmen.
Achievements
American entertainment in the middle of the twentieth century was shaped by the contributions of master showman Mike Todd, a Broadway producer turned Hollywood movie mogul. Todd pioneered 70-millimeter film, the wide-screen movie spectacular, and the use of major stars in cameo roles.
Todd became widely known for producing the Oscar-winning star vehicle Around the World in 80 Days. He made possible many other films for which he got no formal credit. He popularized Cinemascope and Cinerama, trade names for wide-screen film processes, and he invented the "Todd-AO" system of synchronizing multiple sound tracks on 70-millimeter film. Married to Elizabeth Taylor, he was at the height of his fame when he died tragically.
Quotations:
"SAS' metadata management gives us a lot of control and security over our clients' data. We have employees distributed all over the country. With SAS, we can access data on multiple databases and platforms and we work directly off the server, so we are all using a single, consistent view of the information. "
"I've never been poor, only broke. "
"Being poor is a frame of mind. "
"Being broke is only a temporary situation. "
"Beaver do better work than the Corps of Engineers. "
"Everybody who was there is in agreement that we should do this. We've already reached consensus, now it's a matter of working out the details. "
"Remember, you can't steal second if you don't take your foot off first. "
"I spend money as if I had it. "
"Beaver do better work than the Corps of Engineers. "
Personality
In appearance and style, Todd resembled a Hollywood version of Napoleon—small but commanding and sometimes tyrannical. "Squat, muscular, intensely dynamic, Mike Todd was the very pattern of the modern major moviemaker—voluble, cunning, full of huckster shrewdness, slippery as a silverfish, and yet undeniably magnetic, " wrote S. J. Perelman in the New Yorker in 1972. Biographer Alexander Walker described him as "a restless, stocky man with deep-set eyes and a chin that seemed permanently thrust forward, as if its owner were asking himself, 'Is the world ready to face me?"'
Quotes from others about the person
Perelman was enlisted as the screenwriter for the film, and he wrote about Todd and the project in tongue-in-cheek fashion: "This sinister dwarf who consumed nine weeks of my life has no peer in his chosen profession, which—stated very simply— is to humiliate and cheapen his fellow man, fracture one's self-esteem, convert everybody around him into lackeys, hypocrites and toadies, and thoroughly debase every relationship, no matter how casual. His enormity grows on you like some obscene fungus. "
"Mike is the most exciting man in the world, " actress Elizabeth Taylor swooned in 1957, explaining why she was marrying Todd.
Connections
At age 17, Todd married Bertha Freshman in Crown Point, Indiana, on Valentine's Day 1927. He had been interested in Freshman since age 14, but needed to develop confidence before even asking her out. In 1929, the couple's son, Mike Todd, Jr. , was born. Todd's wife, Bertha, died of a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) on August 12, 1946, in Santa Monica, California, while undergoing surgery at St. John's Hospital for a damaged tendon in her finger. Todd and his wife were separated at the time of her death; less than a week before Freshman's death, he had filed for divorce.
On July 5, 1947, Todd married actress Joan Blondell. They were divorced on June 8, 1950, after Blondell filed for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty.
Todd's third marriage was to the actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. The couple exchanged vows on February 2, 1957, in Mexico, and the ceremony was performed by the mayor of Acapulco. It was the third marriage for both the 24-year-old bride and her 47-year-old groom. Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, was their witness. Todd and Taylor had a daughter, Elizabeth Frances (Liza) Todd, who was born on August 6, 1957. Todd and Taylor made plans to adopt a second child, but those plans were never fulfilled.
Father:
Hyman Goldbogen
(1872–1931)
Mother:
Sophie Hellerman Goldbogen
(1868–1962)
Brother:
David Goldbogen
(1910–1976)
Spouse (3):
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
(27 February 1932 – 23 March 2011)
She was a British-American actress, businesswoman, and humanitarian.
Sister:
Edith Goldbogen
(1904–1964)
Daughter:
Elizabeth Frances (Liza) Todd
(born on August 6, 1957)
Son:
Michael Todd
(1929–2002)
Spouse (2):
Rose Joan Blondell
(August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979)
She was an American actress who performed in movies and on television for half a century. She began her career in vaudeville.
