Recent Articles – Page 227 – Old Magazine Articles

London Society, 1915
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

Five months into the general unpleasantness going on across the Channel had transformed London into a very different city, and sadly, it was the leisured classes that had to shoulder most of the burden:

London is well worth living in these troubled days if only for its contrasts…The gloom of the streets, the sinister play of the searchlights, the abnormal hour at which the theatres open and and the public houses close, the fact that half the male population is in khaki and the other half would like to be, that Society is wearing Noah’s Ark clothes and that to buy a new hat is a crime, that there are no dances, no dinners, no suppers, no premieres, no shooting, no no posing, no frivolity, nor idling, it’s rather quickening, you know. But the searchlights have absolutely killed all practical romance.

Lt. Colonel Fremantle at Gettysburg
(W.C. Storrick, 1951)

Lt. Colonel Frementle (1835 – 1901), a member of the Coldstream Guards, was a guest of the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg campaign. After the Battle of Gettysburg, he returned to England and published Three months in the Southern States. The following is a vivid extract, describing a part of the battle from the Southern lines:

The position into which the enemy had been driven was evidently a strong one. His right appeared to rest on a cemetery, on the top of a high ridge to the right of Gettysburg, as we looked at it.

General Hill now came up and told me he had been very unwell all day, and in fact he looks very delicate. He said he had had two of his divisions engaged, and had driven the enemy four miles into his present position, capturing a great many prisoners, some cannon, and some colors; he said, however, that the Yankees had fought with a determination unusual to them.

The Career of Lilian Gish
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

Attached is a decidedly pro Lilian Gish (1893 – 1993) article concerning the silent film actresses‘ meteoric rise under the direction of D.W. Griffith, her mediocrity when paired with other directors and her much appreciated march on Broadway.

Lilian Gish is the damozel of Arthurian legend, tendered in terms of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her heroines perpetually hover in filtered half-lights, linger in attitudes of romantical despair. They forever drift farther from reality than the dream, and no matter how humble their actual origins, the actress invariably weaves them of the dusk-blues, the dawn-golds of medieval tapestries.

Click here if you would like to read an article in which Lillian Gish recalls her part in Birth of a Nation.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

Sweet Words for Maestro Toscanini
(Stage Magazine, 1938)

Arturo Toscanini
(1867 – 1957) is believed to have been the greatest conductor of the Twentieth Century. He was bestowed with a ‘Palm Award’ by the well-meaning swells at the now defunct Stage Magazine during the summer of 1938. This article appeared during a time when a Palm Award, granted by such a crew was a reliable form of social currency and would actually serve the highly favored recipients in such a grand manner as to allow them brief respites at dining tables found at such watering holes as New York’s Stork Club. Nowadays, one Palm Award and one dollar and fifty cents will afford you a ride on the Los Angeles City subway system (one way).
The attached article explains why Maestro Toscanini had met all requirements for this award.

A Mosaic of Marilyn Monroe
(Coronet Magazine, 1961)

The editors of CORONET MAGAZINE approached the five male luminaries who were working alongside Marilyn Monroe during the making of The Misfits and asked each of them to comment on the Monroe character riddle as he alone had come to view it. These men, John Huston, Eli Wallach, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and her (soon to be estranged) husband, Arthur Miller, who had written the script, did indeed have unique insights as to who the actress was and what made her tick.

Men’s Clothing for the Spring of 1916
(Strauss Theater Magazine, 1916)

Twelvemonth ago, the war had sobered ‘le monde ou l’on s’amuse’ like an icy douche. Europe rang with the clump of tramping feet. Forked lightening seemed to lurk in the sky. In club cars of limited trains and smoke rooms of trans-Atlantic liners heads were put together and the air was as tense as a fiddle string… Fashion tipsters, with long ears and short sight, said that the world would put on black, and style was knocked in the head, and look for the deluge, and so on ‘ad nauseum’.

Men’s Clothing for the Spring of 1916
(Strauss Theater Magazine, 1916)

World War II in the Jungles of Burma
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

Written by correspondent Dave Richardson (1916 – 2005) behind Japanese lines in Northern Burma, this article was characterized as odds and ends from a battered diary of a footsore YANK correspondent after his first 500 miles of marching and Jap-hunting with Merrill’s Marauders.

One of the most highly decorated war correspondents of World War II, Richardson is remembered as the fearless reporter who tramped across 1,000 miles of Asian jungle in order to document the U.S. Army’s four-month campaign against entrenched Japanese forces – armed only with a camera, a typewriter and an M-1 carbine.

President Wilson Exonerates Mexico & Japan
(The Atlanta Georgian, 1917)

When the diplomatic leadership in Washington began to unravel the plot that was revealed behind the Zimmerman telegram, the Wilson administration wisely concluded that the governments of Japan and Mexico were not complicit in the scheme that had been cooked-up by the Germans.

The Pankhursts
(Life Magazine, 1912)

In the digital age, we are able to recognize civil disobedience and call it by name, but this was certainly not the case for this Old Boy writing in 1912; he read about the criminal past-times of Mrs. Pankhurst (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1850 – 1928) and her two daughters (Christobel Pankhurst, 1880 – 1960; Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, 1882 – 1960), and thought that no good could possibly come of such rabble-rousing.