30 Days of The Fade Out: Sentimental Journeys.

The pop-culture references in The Fade Out seem to fade into the background as the plot gains steam, and perhaps the last major references are in the calm before the storm in issue #7, as Charlie and Maya enjoy their love affair -- and an escape from the Hollywood machine -- at a Malibu hideaway.

"Saturday night she cooked them dinner, and afterward Charlie put on the radio...

"Glenn Miller... Lena Moore... The Andrews Sisters...

"They laughed and danced...

"Until he couldn't stand it anymore..."

As we recounted earlier this week, Glenn Miller died in military service in 1944, but RCA Victor released two compilation albums in 1945 and 1947, both hitting number one for multiple weeks on the new Billboard album charts.  The most romantic song in the two collections -- and a personal favorite of mine -- is the gorgeous "Moonlight Serenade."


Lena Horne performed the driving, tropical number "Love" in the 1946 movie Ziegfeld Follies, but she is perhaps best known for "Stormy Weather," which she recorded multiple times, including in 1941 and in 1943, the latter of which for a movie of the same name.


The Andrews Sisters' harmonies are synonymous with wartime music, but they enjoyed a lengthy career, and in 1947 they reached number two on the Billboard chart with the infectious "Near You."


With the music that was playing on the radio toward the end of the 1940's, it probably wasn't easy to escape the long shadow of World War II, but it was probably quite easy to fall in love.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Latin-American Music of Desi Arnaz.

In The Fade Out #6, Maya Silver is seen arguing with famous bandleader Desi Arnaz: my conjecture is that she thought Phil Brodsky and Victory Street Studios had pressured Arnaz to replace her ex-husband Armando Lopez, when it is more likely that Armando was simply unable to continue playing the trumpet after Brodsky's men got done with him.

The influence of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball remains immense, with a pair of colorized reruns of I Love Lucy getting better ratings than the Mad Men finale, albeit on broadcast television rather than on cable.

Even apart from the work produced after it was sold and renamed Paramount, their production company Desilu may cast an even longer shadow, both with a multi-camera approach to studio television and with its producing a ground-breaking sci-fi show pitched as "Wagon Train in the stars;" the former revolutionized the sitcom and dominated the genre for more than half a century, and the latter has resulted in a massive franchise with its thirteenth film and sixth television series due in 2016 and 2017, respectively.

But long before all that was the band that Desi Arnaz led in real life -- the Desi Arnaz Orchestra, which performed on Bob Hope's radio show before transforming into the Ricky Ricardo Orchestra for I Love Lucy.  In a 2008 story on the last surviving member of the Ricky Ricardo Orchestra, NPR reports that Arnaz and his band had clear crossover appeal, tailoring his Latin music to the "Americanos" in upscale venues.

The best example of Arnaz' crossover approach might be seen, not in the song "Babalu" that was made famous on the TV show, but in "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás:"  the English version "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" has been recorded many times since, but it was first recorded in 1948, by Desi Arnaz.

30 Days of The Fade Out: Darn That Dream.

We've been spending some time with the real-life cultural touchstones of The Fade Out, and we conclude our journey through issue #4 with something that writer Ed Brubaker discussed in the back pages of the issue, the song "Darn That Dream."

Victory Street actors Maya Silver and Tyler Graves had a contrived night on the town to feed the publicity machine, and Charlie talks with Maya afterwards.

"What'd you dance to?"

"Darn That Dream..."

"Well, that's fitting... but a bit unsubtle... Darn That Dream... It won't come true..."

In the letters pages, Brubaker writes that he knows that Charlie "slightly misquoted" the song, and he recommends that interested readers track down the rendition by Billie Holiday, "which takes it to the depths of dispair, [unlike] the siwng band era versions, where you have to stop and think to realize the song is a tragedy."

There are times where I quite like songs where dark lyrics are obscured by ebullient music:  the contrast and the tension can be interesting, and I can redirect my focus depending on my mood.  For examples much more recent than the big band era, I'd point to U2's grossly underrated single from 1997, "Discotheque," and to David Gray's hit 2005 single, "The One I Love."  Both were the lead singles from their respective albums, and I'd say more about each song, except I think listeners should discover these two songs for themselves.

"Darn That Dream" was published in 1939 and introduced in the Broadway musical Swingin' the Dream.  By 1948 and the era of The Fade Out, it had only been recorded three times, all around 1940.  Billie Holliday recorded the song in 1957, as did quite a few others through the 50's and 60's, including Miles Davis, Tonny Bennett, Doris Day, Thelonious Monk, and Ella Fitzgerald with Nelson Riddle.

What version was Charlie and Maya thinking of, apart from what was probably played by a live band?  Perhaps it was the original version by Benny Goodman and his orchestra.



Billie Holliday's version has an entirely different feel, with the music more relaxed and the singing much more wistful.


Darn that dream and bless it too
Without that dream I never would have you
But it haunts me and it won't come true
Oh, darn that dream

30 Days of The Fade Out: Hollywood at War.

In addition to that brief reference to Sinatra, The Fade Out #4 features a significant cameo by Clark Gable -- and some details about Charlie Parish's wartime experience, as he helped Gable make war documentaries, including bomber runs over Europe.

(We do wonder whether there's more to learn about why Charlie returned from the war a broken man.)

What the comic documents about Clark Gable is true, and you can read all about it between a brief account of his service on a Clark Gable fan page and an extensive article from defense-sector publisher,  Gable's wife Carole Lombard had died in January, 1942, in the crash of a DC-3 airliner returning from a war bonds tour.  Gable subsequently telegrammed FDR asking to serve, and the President replied, “STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”

Clark Gable defied Roosevelt to serve under him, enlisting into the U.S. Army Air Corps on August 12, 1942, in an event strikingly captured by the LA Times.

Joining the First Motion Picture Unit, Clark Gable went to Britain to film Combat America, a promotional documentary about air gunners. Veterans who remember Gable believe he was on many more than the five combat missions that records suggest, and both essays mention a German bounty for Gable's capture.

Quite a bit of footage for Gable's military service can be found online, including a newsreel story, embedded below, on Gable's earning his air gunner wings, and a digitally color-corrected copy of that one-hour, 1943 documentary, Combat America.



Clark Gable returned home safely and passed away in peacetime, in 1960.  Not every celebrity soldier was that lucky, and on Facebook I saw that this day marks the 71st anniversary of Glenn Miller's disappearance over the English Channel -- a reminder of the truth of what John Steinbeck wrote, quoted in the America in WWII story we mentioned Saturday:  "From the ranks of show business have sprung heroes and even martyrs."

71 years ago today, Glenn Miller disappeared over the English Channel. Let's take a moment to remember a legend.
Posted by Glenn Miller on Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Bandleader and then founder of the Army Air Force Band, Major Glenn Miller's death should be remembered, but his life should now and always be celebrated:  his music will outlive all of the Greatest Generation and will surely outlive us as well, and we close tonight with perhaps the greatest song produced by The Glenn Miller Orchestra, the joyful "In the Mood."

30 Days of The Fade Out: Sinatra at 100 Years and 1 Day.

The Fade Out #4 briefly mentions Frank Sinatra -- Ol' Blue Eyes, The Chairman of the Board, The Voice -- and yesterday happens to be the centenary of Sinatra's birth, December 12th, 1915.  In the fictional world of the comic, actress Ava Gardner had just broken up with Victory Pictures' young heartthrob (and closeted homosexual) Tyler Graves, to start "running around with Sinatra."

In real life, Gardner was already twice divorced by 1948, from actor Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw, the latter of whom had previously divorced Lana Turner.  (It's not too different than high school, is it?)  She was later married to Frank Sinatra from 1951 to 1957, who ended his first marriage for her, but -- while his earlier adulterous behavior had become common knowledge -- I'm not actually sure if he was having an affair with Gardner as early as 1948, the year of his third child's birth.

I trust Ed Brubaker's research, and, even as early as 1948, their affair might have been a poorly hidden secret in Hollywood circles.

Still, Sinatra wasn't known primarily for his affairs.  All year, the prolific Mark Steyn has been posting fascinating essays about 100 songs that Sinatra made his own, and he celebrates the centenary with a wide-ranging look at Sinatra with reprinted essays and audio specials.

Having parted with Tommy Dorsey's band in 1942, Sinatra's first two solo albums, released through Columbia Records, reached #1 and #2 in the US, and by the end of 1948, he had already released more than 50(!) top-forty singles just as a solo artist.

To set the mood for The Fade Out, one could do worse than listen to "All of Me," and the audio below was evidently recorded in 1947.  Less familiar than the Nelson Riddle arrangement for 1954's album Swing Easy!, the arrangement by George Siravo  evidently reached #21 in 1948, and Steyn goes into some detail documenting Sinatra's takes on the jazz standard, including this recording.

"The band's great, particularly Clyde Hurley's trumpet. And the second chorus is a kind of duet between Sinatra and Babe Russin, whose tenor sax seems to be egging Frank on to really let rip. And it dawns on you that it's the perfect Sinatra song: he was cocksure and swaggering, but also the first male singer to project, seriously, vulnerability and loneliness and heartache. Hence, 'All Of Me': a song for the swaggeringly vulnerable, for cocksuredness as a defense against heartache."

Swaggering vulnerability:  it's an attitude you're sure to find in the backlots and nightclubs of The Fade Out.

30 Days of The Fade Out: The Invisible Man.

In issue #2 of The Fade Out, we're introduced to a disguise of bandages that are part of Shadow of the Valley, the film that the main characters are producing.  The character under the bandages is primarily played by the heartthrob Earl Rath, but we quickly learn that an actor named Morty plays the role for most of the scenes in bandages -- and we learn that Charlie daydreams about disappearing under the disguise, being "made-up like the Invisible Man."

As a them in the noir comic, invisibility may be worth discussing some other time, but before that, we're taking another look at The Invisible Man.  Produced in 1933 and starring Claude Rains, the adaptation of H.G. Welles' novel was famous for its groundbreaking visual effects.  Along with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy, the film established Universal Pictures as the granddaddy of horror films and monster movies.

Turner Classic Movies has a few clips of the movie, and the clip below -- in case the embedding doesn't work, it's titled "He's homicidal!" -- shows the first reveal of the man under the bandages, present but not at all visible.



The effects remain remarkable.  It's no wonder that the movie would still be memorable at the time of The Fade Out, 15 years later.

30 Days of The Fade Out: On The Road.

At the end of the debut issue of The Fade Out, we learn why Gil Mason was pestering Bob Hope at The Brown Derby:  he was pitching a "road movie" to him.

Knowing that Gil had been blacklisted but was secretly Charlie Parish's ghostwriter, I wonder why he bothered.  Was this just part of a ruse, accounting for why he stuck around Hollywood when he supposedly couldn't get work?  Or did he convince himself that that was the reason, while he was genuinely seeking some sort of significance, with the same drive that would lead to his crusade against the studio apparatus that covered up the murder of Val Sommers?

Either way, it's worthwhile to take a closer look at what Gil was actually proposing.

He mentioned a story of Bob Hope barely escaping the Germans in Africa, an event that USA Today described as "stranger-than-fiction" in an August, 2014, feature on The Fade Out.  While I haven't been able to find more information about that particular story, I've found that Hope did survive an intense bombing raid, both he and his troupe, dubbed the Hope Gypsies.

The Gypsies did their first USO combat zone shows that summer in North Africa, Italy, and Sicily. Palermo offered them both their largest audience—19,000—and a narrow escape with their lives when 100 Nazi Junker JU-88s with a fighter escort dive-bombed the docks, destroying the area around the troupe’s hotel a few blocks away. Hope said that returning safely to the States that fall “was something of a letdown. Hollywood was tinsel and make-believe and happy endings. Where we had been was mud and reality and horror.”

(The entire article linked above, from the October 2007 issue of the magazine America in WWII, is definitely worth reading, with mentions of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, John Steinbeck and General George Patton.)

Inspired by the comedian's narrow escape, Gil pitched an addition to the "road movies" series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.  Between 1940 and 1947, the pair had released the first five entries in what would be a seven-film series.  Highlighting Bing and Bob's musical and comedic talents, the films were quite popular in their time, so it's not unreasonable that a seemingly out-of-work actor would try his hand at pitching a "road movie."

The movie series continues to influence pop culture, most recently with Family Guy's pastiches featuring Brian and Stewie:  if a movie musical was prominent, Seth MacFarlane will riff on it, sooner or later.  One of the episodes comes very close to Gil's proposal, being titled "Road to Germany," just as They Might Be Giants had a song called "Road Movie to Berlin" on their 1990 album Flood.

And the films remain quite entertaining to this day.  As a sample, here's the title song to 1942's Road to Morocco.


We can't help but wonder, was that camel on a treadmill?