This song came into my brain today - I don't know why.
I haven't heard it in a long time.
I used to play it on a country music radio station in the '80s.
You can play it on You Tube:
Oak Ridge Boys - I Wish You Could Have Turned My Head (And Left My Heart Alone)
uploader / channel: Wayne "BigNobody" Harvey
...Ever since I met you, baby,
You have done me wrong...
------------------------ [excerpt from Casablanca: Behind The Scenes, by Harlan Lebo, Copyright 1992, Simon & Schuster] -----------------------
Chapter eleven.
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship.
Warner Brothers originally intended to release Casablanca during the 1943 summer season - more than a year after the cameras first rolled. Instead, by the summer of 1943, the film was already firmly entrenched in U.S. theaters, seen by thousands of troops on the war front, and well on its way to winning the Academy Award for the Best Picture.
Today, Casablanca's reputation as an unfading film classic is undisputed, but it began that journey toward immortality with the aid of two of the most staggering coincidences that ever assisted a motion picture's rise to success.
By the fall of 1942, Allied forces once reeling from near-knockout blows from Axis attack, were prepared for their first substantive forays into enemy territory. Although the actual location of the American push was a closely guarded secret, as November approached the press began to speculate about some of the likeliest spots for an Allied landing.
At the top of the list of probable sites, with its strategic position along the Atlantic and easy access to the Mediterranean, was Casablanca.
In the early days of November, the near unbelievable coincidence that Warner Bros. possessed a film ready to distribute with a theme focused on the precise location of the focal point of World War II was not lost on studio executives.
"I thought you might be interested in the attached front page from the San Francisco Chronicle, with mention of Casablanca coming into more and more prominence in the war picture," Hal Wallis wrote to Jack Warner on November 6. "This writer feels that Casablanca is apt to be more of a hot spot than Dakar."
Indeed, the Chronicle was correct. By the time Warner was reading Wallis's memo an armada carrying joint U.S. and British forces had already begun their November 7 invasion of French Morocco and Algeria, establishing the final foothold necessary to retake Axis-held territory in Africa.
By November 1942, although U.S. forces had already inflicted substantial damage on Japanese forces during the war in the Pacific, the invasion of North Africa marked the first substantial push by the United States against the Nazis.
The effect on the American home front was electric - as stunning as the bombing raid on Tokyo led by Gen. Jimmy Doolittle had been seven months earlier. The city of Casablanca roared into the headlines of every newspaper, magazine, and radio program in the United States.
For Warner Bros., the moment to release its like-named picture would never be more opportune. Within days of the announcement of the North Africa invasion, the studio decided to reschedule the release and pushed up the premiere to the first convenient date that could be arranged.
Speaking of old black-and-white movies, Casablanca is one.
When Christie Hefner says in an interview that Casablanca is her father's favorite movie, that does a lot for his legacy.
We - get it.
That film is famous for memorable thoughts, and lines of dialogue:
"Here's looking at you, kid."
"We'll always have Paris."
-30-
Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine, loved movies.
I'm the same way. I can relate to that.
He had, at the Playboy Mansion, something different every night of the week: movies, one night, games, one night, etc.
Some of his "girlfriends" in his later years, complained about him after he died.
...If you live long enough, there are people saying nice things about you, and people saying bad things....
Some of these young ladies were saying - "he made us watch old black-and-white movies"...!
LOL.
Like he's hurting them by sharing a great movie with them.
I look back at my life and I realize, what Hugh Hefner was accused of - "abusing" people by making them watch "old black-and-white movies" - I could probably be accused of the same thing...! LOL.
Hugh Hefner and I are - both Guilty As Charged...!
Hugh Hefner's daughter with his first wife, Millie, is Christie Hefner.
(She went to Brandeis a few years before I was at B.U.
Boston has a lot of colleges.)
Christie worked at her dad's magazine, Playboy, and when she was 29 years old, she became CEO and ran it for 20 years.
I vaguely remember when it was in the news that she was going to lead that company. (Kind of unexpected.)
She has said working with her father in that business went well because his main interest was in the editorial and creative side of the magazine, while her focus was on business strategy.
She said it also didn't hurt that in the era when she was CEO, her dad lived in Los Angeles, and she still lived in Chicago.
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-30-
The founder of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, was born in 1926 and lived to be 91 years old.
One of the documentaries I listened to said he had 3,000 scrapbooks.
Three - thousand - ??????
That's - a - lot of stuff.
Apparently, he liked to document everything about his life.
Of course, his lifetime was for the most part before the current practice of putting everything on your phone....
When you listen to these interviews and documentaries on You Tube, and the American Playboy series on Amazon Prime, there are these parts of the story that are interesting, exciting, and uplifting - winning lawsuits over freedom of expression, putting on concerts and parties, having two TV shows where talented musicians and comedians were showcased - those parts, you feel like, "Yes! This is great!"
Then - there are other aspects, too.
The debate about the nude pictures in the magazine: are they celebrating women? Or degrading them?
Hefner spent two-and-a-half years writing the "Playboy philosophy," which was published in series form in the magazine.
Two and a half - years?
You know, he's working for himself, he's his own boss, so he can do whatever he wants, and - for a lot of people, some of this behavior would appear to be - a little extreme.
In the Sixties or Seventies, when the magazine had become very successful, Hugh Hefner wanted to work around the clock, so he would take Dexadrine, an amphetamine, to, as his girlfriend Barbi Benton said, "stay awake."
(R & B musician Ike Turner did some of that Stay-Awake-For-Several-Days-Working-by-taking-stimulants behavior, too, in the Sixties and / or Seventies.)
(But then don't you just "crash," and make up for all the sleep you missed, and end up having no more Awake Hours than anyone else...?)
Hugh Hefner and Millie Williams were married from 1949 to 1959, and had two children. Their daughter Christie said growing up, she saw her father three or four times a year.
He was always gone, working on the magazine, and he left the family home and lived at the office, first, and then later at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.
-30-
--------------------- [info and excerpts from "The Making of Playboy - A Chicago Stories Documentary" (available on You Tube] ---------------------
In 1960, a young Chicago girl named Gloria Johnson worked at the Urban League as a secretary. She looked forward to the Playboy Jazz Festival, and dreamed about the party afterwards....
Gloria Johnson: "All I could think about was how I could get my - self an invitation to that party.
I picked up the phone and called Hugh Hefner!
I said, 'Mr. Hefner, my name is Gloria Johnson, and I am 19 years old, I measure 34-22-34, with the complexion of a Boston coffee. And I'd like to come to your party.'
He said, 'Gloria, I'll make sure that there's an invitation waiting for you at the door.'
I had my little gold la-may dress on, went into the main ballroom, looked down upon a whirling sea of dancing celebrities; all of a sudden, a warm, reassuring hand reached out to me and said, 'I'm Hugh Hefner, may I have this dance?'
I felt like Cinderella!"
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{a note: I realize the word "la-may" is spelled l-a-m-e with an accent mark. I don't know how to make an accent mark over the "e" on my Chromebook, so I spelled it phonetically - the way it sounds...}
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Gloria Johnson was invited to become a "Playboy Bunny" at the Playboy Club in Chicago. She was the first black bunny - hired three years before the Civil Rights Act banned workplace discrimination.
She says, "It was a job that required dedication and hard work."
------------------------- [excerpts from "Chicago Stories: Playboy" documentary on You Tube] -------------------------------
When Playboy founder and editor Hugh Hefner had his first TV show, "Playboy's Penthouse," in 1959, the syndicator got back to Mr. Hefner to say, "We can't get carriage in the South, because it's integrated. So we need to - change that."
Christie Hefner says, "And my father's attitude was, Well then we're not going to get carriage on - many stations in the South."
(Shrug.)
Some of the African American entertainers "Hef" invited onto the show were Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and Count Basie.
Hefner's battles in the Jim Crow South were expected, but he was infuriated by home-town resistance, something that came to a head in 1959.
Gloria Johnson: "Jazz was really, really big, at that time. And Chicago was just full of it. I mean, it was just so much fun. And Hugh Hefner started having the Playboy Jazz Festivals. That was the talk of the town."
Count Basie and other jazz artists were scheduled to play at Soldier Field - until Catholic leaders pressured Mayor Daley.
"So they pulled the permissions at Soldier Field, more or less at the last minute...."
Hefner moved Jazz Fest to Chicago Stadium and donated the first day's receipts to the Urban League.
--------------------- [end, documentary excerpts]
I had heard of the Urban League, but had to Google exactly what it is:
"The National Urban League...is a nonpartisan historic civil rights organization based in New York City that advocates on behalf of economic and social justice for African Americans and against racial discrimination in the United States."
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You can hear the song Sammy Davis Jr. performed on "Playboy's Penthouse" via You Tube:
type in "Sammy Davis Jr., Chicago"
The video is titled
Chicago
uploader / channel: Sammy Davis Jr. - Topic
___________________________
To me, he is just such a conversational singer.
What a talent.
-30-
I was recently reflecting on how information is sometimes in our minds and we don't know how it got there. You know? Cultural phenomena one is aware of, and then you think, 'How did I become aware of this? I know I didn't seek out knowledge of this...'
It's in the air, and we find that we somehow know about it.
I can remember reading an article about Hugh Hefner and the "Playboy lifestyle" sometime in the late 1970s or early '80s - probably in Rolling Stone magazine, or People.
It said Mr. Hefner wore pajamas most of the time, drank a lot of Pepsi-Cola, and entertained guests at parties around the clock.
The article mentioned that there were refrigerators all over the mansion, with Pepsi in them, for his convenience.
Something about all those refrigerators stayed with me....
------------------------------------- In a documentary, a guy says people visiting Chicago from out of town liked the Playboy Club because it was an exciting idea: they would think, "What's gonna happen if I go there?"
What's going to happen if you go there? Well - nothing! The "bunnies" were not allowed to date customers.
That's one of the funny things about the so-called "sexual revolution." People were going to be free from old constraints and repression, but then as soon as you had a Playboy Club, you had new rules and constraints ... can't date customers, etc.
There's an episode of The Dick Cavett Show where they had Hugh Hefner and feminist Susan Brownmiller as guests.
You can find it on You Tube.
Ms. Brownmiller makes a firm, clear pronouncement: "Hugh Hefner is my enemy!" She says the Playboy bunny costume makes women look like rabbits. She says, "We're not rabbits! We're human beings!"
(To me, the costumes don't make the women look like rabbits. They look like what they are - young ladies dressed in costumes. But some of the feminists felt like these girls, working at the Playboy Clubs in what were essentially waitress jobs, were being objectified and even exploited, and the activists had a point.)
Amidst their discussion, Brownmiller challenges Hefner: "The day that you are willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end..." - she doesn't get to finish that sentence, because the audience explodes in delighted laughter and applause.
It's pretty funny.
"Humorous History."
When Playboy magazine started, the U.S. Post Office refused to give them the magazine-rate for mailing, because of its content.
Hugh Hefner sued the post office and won.
In the magazine's second decade, the 1960s, Hefner was arrested for "obscenity" because of pictures in the magazine of the movie actress Jayne Mansfield.
I tend to think that it's a little harsh - and maybe completely wrong - to refer to mere nudity as "obscenity," or "pornography."
I mean, for heaven's sake, is everyone's personal body "obscene" or "pornographic"? Everyone has to have a body, or else how could we walk around, and get things done? - lol. And if we're created by God, wouldn't it be disrespectful to Him if we think negatively about the human body?
(Larry Flynt: "You call that pornography? - Hold my beer...")
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[Footnote: Jayne Mansfield's daughter is the actress Mariska Hargitay, who plays Olivia Benson on Law & Order S.V.U.]
