Baby Margo Enters the Picture

According to English essayist Charles Lamb (1817-1834), everyone has two birthdays:  the day on which they were born and New Year's Day. Well, if this is true, then I have three birthdays.  November 17th, the day on which I was born, New Year's Day, and February 27, the day on which I was adopted by Marjorie and James Melton from The Cradle in Illinois.  In my book, that is certainly a day to be celebrated!

After seventeen years of marriage (my mother was 36 and my father 42), they embarked on the adoption process.  Considered by many agencies to be too old to adopt a child, they found a sympathetic reception at The Cradle in Evanston, Illinois.  Other celebrities had "Cradle Babies," among them most notably Bob Hope, Pat O'Brien and George Burns.  I wonder if my parents' friendship with the O'Briens (during my father's short movie career) had anything to do with my advent.  The process, once initiated, took almost a year.  But then, suddenly on February 16, 1946, they got the call to come to Chicago.   My father was on a concert tour, my mother on vacation with her mother at Hot Springs, Virginia.

Here's what my mother wrote in her journal:

"We couldn't meet - Jimmie and I - until February 27th.  Ten days - of dreaming, hoping, wondering what she was like.  Ten days of labor pains! As real as real ones, for I thought of nothing else, and was so tense as to be almost ill.  Jimmie and I talked daily by phone, conjecturing, naming her, planning.  I thought of that little life beginning and the momentous decision that would decide her future.  Was she ours or wasn't she?  I needed her so much that I knew she had to be."

They hadn't told anyone, not even family, that the adoption was imminent.  Imagine the relatives' surprise when my father sang a lullaby on his radio program a few days later, and then announced that it was for his new baby daughter named Marjorie Linda, to be called Margo.

"Hizzoner"

Thanks to one of my faithful friends, I discovered a 1933 movie my father made with Bert Lahr.  The strangest thing is that nowhere in my voluminous press clippings going back to the early 1920s, do I find any mention of "Hizzoner."  I'd always believed that "Stars Over Broadway"  (1935) was my father's first film until my friend Don Peak in Hollywood clued me in and sent me a videotape.  This 20-minute movie's plot is pretty silly, as befits Lahr.  It's the handsome young "singing mayor" for whom all the women swoon (and vote) versus the inept policeman (Lahr) whom the backroom pols pit against him. Let me say, a little bit of Bert goes a long way, but my father at age twenty-nine looks pretty good!

If you're really interested, there's a videotape available at www.a-1video.com/talking.htm for $16.98 (plus shipping).  It's part of a tape called "Talking Comedy Rarities Vol. 1."

Wish I had a photo from this movie!

The MM&J Railroad

Among the playthings in our Weston, Connecticut backyard was a miniature steam locomotive attached to half a dozen open flatcars with seats for ten children (or five adults), which traveled on a quarter-mile of track meandering through the apple orchard. My father got the idea from Walt Disney, who had a similar setup at his Hollywood home. Both ours and his were large enough for the engineer to ride just behind the engine (on the tender) while taking passengers around the track.

Walt Disney's comfortable but not ostentatious house in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, had a backyard steam train, 1/8 scale, the Carolwood-Pacific RR.  It stemmed from Disney's lifelong fascination with trains, which began when he was a teenager selling newspapers and candy on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.  My father's fascination was with anything mechanical, trains included.

James Melton, Marjorie Melton & Shirley Temple

in 1910 Locomobile

Hollywood 1944

I am constantly amazed at where and when bits of Melton material turn up. I was perusing the biography shelf at the library when Shirley Temple Black's autobiography Child Star (published in 1988) caught my eye.  Checking the index, I found reference to James Melton on page 359.  In it, Shirley describes a "flirtation" she had with my father (more than twice her age) in 1944, when he was in Hollywood filming a segment for "Ziegfeld Follies," MGM's 20th anniversary extravaganza. She writes: "My first clue to his presence came one morning while brushing my teeth. Suddenly a love song came belting across from his open window.  Looking across from my basin I saw both his arms extended in a romantic finale."

The Meltons were renting Zasu Pitts' house. The Temple family lived next door, and Shirley went for rides in my father's old cars.  (My father couldn't bear to be separated from his cars for even a month or two, so he shipped half a dozen cars to California, including his modern Mercedes and my mother's new Cadillac.)  As it happens, I have a publicity photo of my parents and Shirley Temple riding in his 1910 Locomobile.  Anyone know how I can contact former Ambassador Shirley Temple Black?

(I'll say more about "Ziegfeld Follies in a later post.)

Legendary Irish Tenors

Various Artists

2-CD Set  on Amazon.com for $5.00!

"Macushla" and "She Moved Through the Fair" sung by James Melton

It's interesting to me that whoever produced this CD set used my father's recording of "Macushla" rather than that of John McCormack, who made the song famous. Here's an amusing story from my files. There's a clipping from an unidentified  newspaper dated August 1, 1931: "Melton vs McCormack:  Most listeners didn't know it, but there was quite a battle on the air recently.  The contestants, one in New York and the other in the Hollywood Bowl, were James Melton, top tenor of The Revelers, and John McCormack...we mean the John McCormack.  It was bloodless but interesting.  Melton knew he had to precede McCormack on the air by an hour.  He knew, too, that his program would attract an audience almost as large as McCormack's.  Melton went on the air and stepped out of the quartet to do a solo.  He selected the song McCormack made famous, "Macushla," and did a beautiful job.  When the great Irish singer's broadcast came along later, "Macushla" was conspicuous by its absence from his program.  Plenty of talk about the Melton stunt for several days after and a lot of the radio folks quite frank in picking Melton as the better tenor."

The Green Goddess

Marjorie, Margo and James Melton with Daimler "Green Goddess"

in New York City around 1951

In the Spring of 2007, I was contacted by John Sweeney, then director of the Larz Anderson Automotive Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, about my father's 1950 "Green Goddess" Daimler.  John owned one too, and wondered what I could tell him about the Daimler in my father's collection. I don't have any details about how or when my father acquired one, but a little research revealed that this outrageously oversized vehicle (it was 20 feet long) got 6-8 miles to the gallon, and cost $25,000 new.

As for John's car, an on-line update reveals that it was sold at a Bonham's auction in California last August for $249,000, following his untimely death in February 2009 at age sixty-four.

In the winter of 1951, Henry Ford II admired the James Melton Green Goddess when it was parked on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, chatted with my father, and ended up taking a cruise on our yacht. He and my father made a handshake deal for a television variety show to be sponsored by the Ford Motor Company and hosted by James Melton. The show (Ford Festival) debuted in April 1951 and went off the air in July 1952.  So that car was instrumental in launching my father's TV career.

In 1951, James Melton's cars appeared in a children's book A Song for Arabella, by Marguerite Leslie (illustrations by Lumen Martin Winter).  The book was inspired by an 1899 Locomobile at the Melton Museum.  Although the car, named Arabella, is imaginary, there was a an actual steam car that performed the feats described in the book-climbing a steep chute at county fairs, and ascending the Capitol steps in Lansing, Michigan.

In August of 1901, Charles Yont and W.B. Felker completed the first automobile trip to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado in an 1899 Locomobile. Climbing 14,110 feet was quite a feat for this little car.

Marguerite Leslie was the nom de plume of Marguerite Kilmarx. She and her husband, Leslie, were friends of my parents in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Lumen Martin Winter (1908-1982) was a well known muralist. (One of his murals "Titans" is at United Nations Headquarters in NYC.) He also designed the medallion for the Apollo 13 space flight.

You can find a used copy of A Song for Arabella on Amazon.com for anywhere from $1.00 to $25.00.