Two posts in one day—I know, I know!  Exciting, huh?  Well, I thought I ought to explain in a separate post as to why I haven’t had the time I thought I was going to have to restore ReelJewels.com.  Unfortunately, my grandmother’s health went on a steep decline in the following months and she passed on April 5th.  She had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).  She was a dancer all of her life and although her legs were strong up until the end, she lost the ability to speak.  She communicated with an iPad for a year and a half and physically, as is the case with ALS, she progressively got worse.

I made the following video as a tribute to her in her memorial service.  I thought long and hard this morning about whether or not I should share it publicly, but I think she would have liked to be celebrated and she touched so many with her talent.  Plus, as film fans, the early footage from her childhood is priceless.  Yes, that is technicolor film from the early 40s at the beginning.

I also wrote her obituary, which you can find here:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?pid=164152379

If you want to see relief for those suffering for this horrendous disease, please consider making a donation to the ALS Association.  Veterans are twice as likely to get the disease.  We’ve got to respect those that have served our country along with our loved ones and try to, as my grandma said, “Find a cure for this darn thing.”

http://web.alsa.org/site/TR/Events/GoldenWest?pxfid=248812&fr_id=1641&pg=fund

Ginny

I’ve had several comments to the blog lately where people have asked for certain articles.  They’re all backed up on archive.org, I believe, so you just needed to look at the post two down from this one and click on the link.

On that note, I do want to say that this is a labor of love and I don’t get paid a dime for this.  I maintain the website because I love to share.  There seems to be a sense of entitlement to information on the Internet.  People forget how much work goes into research, scanning pictures, and uploading articles.  I’ve invested in collections for certain ReelJewels that I wouldn’t have collected so extensively up to my own wiles because people requested said stars long ago.  I love them all dearly, don’t get me wrong, but I want to point that out as it is so much work and I’m not always going to be able to keep it up as much as I’d love to—it’s been 12 and a half years, folks!  That’s a long time to be around on the Interwebs.

Well, we may be down and out—didn’t realize that until today, but we’re still fighting. Hopefully the website will be able to stave off viruses (has for months until at least the last week—grrrrrrr!).

Thanks to everyone who has visited in our downtime. Things will look up soon. I promise. I’ve been working as hard as possible behind the scenes when I can to get things back up to snuff! It’s a little more daunting with thousands of pages to be cleaned staring back at me, but I’ll make it.

Hello, kind visitor!

Something was attacking the code on all the sites I run, so I had to take drastic measures and delete everything of mine off the server. So, ReelJewels has been down for a little over two weeks.

Good news:

ReelCast is still up even though there hasn’t been an episode for some time (I’m still hoping that will change and I can get my ducks in a row here…).

You can still visit sister sites jeanetteandnelson.net (not quite back up to par) and nelsoneddysociety.org.

You can also visit the ReelJewels Collective.

Taking this as an opportunity to rebuild the site a bit. We’ll see what form it takes here.

Thanks for visiting! If you’re looking for something specific, please visit ReelJewels.com through archive.org.

THE POSTMAN—At Twentieth Century-Fox Studios reported that Don Ameche’s fan mail was running only slightly behind Shirley Temple’s and Production Chief Darryl F. Zanack realized that the moment of Ameche’s stardom was at hand.

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How The Lane Sisters Rose to Fame
Their devoted mother tells all. A blithe, moving saga of struggle and success.
by Cora B. Lane
March 15, 1939
Liberty

At seventeen, when I was working on my brother’s newspaper in Indiana, I had one ambition: To become a big-city reporter. So I married and became a small-town housewife. In the course of time, mother of five girls: Leota, Martha, Lola, Rosemary, and Priscilla.

“If you’d just adopt four children,” Rosemary suggested hopefully once, very hopefully, “we’d have a baseball team!”

But we had plenty of problems without worrying about full-sized teams. Indianoia, Iowa, where we lived, was the typical insular American town. Thirty-five hundred inhabitants in the heart of the corn belt. We had our county fairs, church bazaars, our rigid moral principles and even more rigid prejudices. (I’ll never forget the furor it created when I first put the girls in basketball bloomers!)

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By HOWARD SHARPE
January 1937 – Movie Mirror

NELSON EDDY and I sat in the living room of his house in Beverly Hills chatting lazily of vague matters. There was a fire and there was rain outside the windows and the air was pale with cigarette smoke.

Nelson’s secretary had a terrifying stack of neatly opened mail on his desk. At my quizzical look, because I know the very heavy schedule under which he works, he smiled and she looked unperturbed and pleasantly cool in the face of this volume of work.

“It’s really not that much of a burden on me,” he laughed, and I noted that each letter was lined and checked; some sort of code was obviously in work.

“Any new requests this time?”

“Basically, no,” she replied. “But on these,” indicating a lesser pile of letters, “you will want to give extra time.”

“This evening, after dinner?”

“Right.”

“And the fate of that awesome balance?” I intruded.

“We do it this way because I like to keep my mail directly in hand. But,” he smiled, “broadly speaking, the public has exactly forty-six questions that they ask over and over. To date, not a single one has been asked less than a hundred times and some of them have turned up thousands of times—I answer the ones that require individual thought or counsel, that’s all.”

I said, “If thousands of people write you, all asking the same questions, then apparently they want to know the answers and there’s nothing egocentric about giving them at all. Now then supposing you scribble out the whole lot and dictate your honest replies to each and we’ll not only give the public what it wants but we’ll have a good portrait of your personal character as well.”
And it was so.

Question: Why didn’t you marry Jeanette MacDonald?

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Photoplay
August 1941

Days to remember from an ace director about a redhead the marquees call Rita Hayworth and whom he calls “all emotion”

RITA HAYWORTH has to work with other directors. I have to work with other stars. Therefore it is, I suppose, very indiscreet of me to say that she is my favorite star—and I hope I am her favorite director. But that is what she is and that is what I hope I am.

I regard Rita as one of the most beautiful, one of the most talented, and one of the sweetest of human beings. We have made three pictures together so far—her first essay into real acting, “The Lady in Question” in 1940, and her two top hits, “Cover Girl” and “Gilda.” Personally, I wish we were going to make another thirty together.

There’s a lot of articles coming your way.  I’ve added 16 more articles over the past couple days.  Look for more to come.  I’m making up for being bad about not updating as intended every single day––So, here’s hoping I can catch up and keep with it.

Judy Garland
A Garland for Beauty
This Is What I Believe
Let’s Get Personal

Dorothy Lamour
How to Spoil a Romantic Moment

Alice Faye
Baby of the Family
Million Dollar Baby

Eleanor Powell
Dancing Lady

Ginger Rogers
Ginger’s Mama Speaks Her Piece
A Tribute to Ginger

Bing Crosby
Why Girls Can’t Resist Him

John Payne
The Best Son A Mother Ever Had

Rita Hayworth
Why Vic Will Never Forget Rita Hayworth

Jeanette MacDonald
Is Jeanette MacDonald Outgrowing Hollywood?

Dick Powell
And Father is Doing Well

Dick Haymes
Who Said Divorce?
It’s a Joke, Son

By Barbara Hayes
Photoplay, September 1937

AM still agape over the revelation of the most daring piece of deception ever perpetrated in Hollywood.

The author of it is Gene Raymond, the last person in the world I would have suspected of any such conniving. Yet for ten months—nearly a year, mind you!—Gene actually lived a double life as the mysterious ” Mr. John Morgan.”

In this audacious masquerade he succeeded not only in duping a town where nobody has ever been able to keep things under cover, but in hoodwinking his bride-to-be.

It was at eight o’clock one night that Gene first donned his disguise and so began the amazing series of events which were to launch him on his precarious Jekyll-Hyde career. That he got away with it, through elaborate lies and deepest subterfuge, gives evidence that he is not only a remarkable actor, but a man of daring and infinite resource.

On this evening, a few hours earlier, Gene had driven his fiancee to her home in Hollywood. Now, as he appeared before a deserted house among the winding hills of Bel-Air, no one would have recognized him. A hat was pulled down over his telltale blond hair, a muffler swathed his chin, and he carried a handkerchief ready to press to his face should any strangers pass. Gene Raymond had become Mr. John Morgan.

He walked briskly across the yard to the dark house. It was a large and rather rambling place, weeds grew along the walk, and a cold wind rustled through the gables.

The murky moonlight faintly revealed three people waiting in the shadows for Mr. Morgan. One of them was a lady who was, for a time, to be known only as “Mrs. Shux.”  She was to become a guiding genius in the conspiracy that was afoot, through all its astonishing ramifications. The other two were men intimately known to Gene Raymond.

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