Recent Articles – Page 114 – Old Magazine Articles

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.

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)

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’.

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.

New York’s Contributions to English
(Holiday, 1949)

New York City’s contributions to the American language go considerably further than the pronunciation of ‘avenyeh’ for avenue or ‘erl’ for lubricant. Peter Stuyvesant’s village has made rich entries into our spoken and written tongue. A handful, culled from Dr. Mitford M. Matthew’s A Dictionary of Americanisms
follows.

Click here to read more articles about American English.

A Census of Skyscrapers
(Literary Digest, 1929)

Egged on by the 1929 completion of the Chrysler building, the curious souls who ran the New York offices of THE LITERARY DIGEST were moved to learn more about skyscrapers, both in New York as well as other parts of the U.S. and We were surprised to learn that as of 1929

50 percent of the buildings in New York from 10 to 20 stories and 60 percent of those over 20 stories are located between 14th and 59th streets.

This article also presents statistical data concerning the number of tall buildings that could be found throughout the 1920s United States.

Advance of the Low-Priced Automobile
(Current Literature, 1912)

In answer to the cry for more affordable cars that can easily be purchased by working families, the French automobile industry of 1912 produced a line of long, narrow, boat-like cars, mounted on four wire wheels, carrying it’s passengers in tandem fashion. The production of these one and two cylinder air-cooled motors was based more upon the production lines of motorcycles rather than cars.

Paul Thevenaz: Rhythmatist Painter
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

A one page article regarding Swiss-born painter Paul Thevenaz (1891 – 1921) and his thoughts on the relationship between dance and modern painting. The article is accompanied by four of his portraits; the sitters were Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, the Comtesse E. De Beaumont and Comtesse Mathieu De Noailles.The profile was written by the novelist Marie Louise Van Saanen.

Read a 1937 article about another gay artist: Paul Cadmus.

The Four Social Zones of Fifth Avenue
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

This cartoon was drawn by the artist Reginald Marsh (1898 – 1954), who had a swell time comparing and contrasting the bio-diversity along 1922 Fifth Avenue; from the free-verse poets on Eighth Avenue up to the narrow-nosed society swanks on Sixty-Eighth Street -and everyone else in between.

William Orpen and the Portrait of Mrs. Oscar Lewisohn
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

Here is a petite notice that appeared in a 1915 issue of VANITY FAIR heralding a new portrait by the British painter William Orpen (1878 – 1931), which depicted the likeness of a popular American stage actress Mrs. Oscar Lewisohn (Edna May Pettie 1878 – 1948). The anonymous reviewer compared the portrait styles of Orpen with that of London’s reigning portrait painter, John Singer Sargent:

Sargent had a way of showing his sitters as they didn’t think they looked. On the other hand, Orpen has a trick of making his sitters look like what they would like to be.

Civilization: An Anti-War Film
(The Atlanta Georgian, 1917)

Attached is a brief review of Civilization, the silent anti-war film produced by Thomas Ince in 1917. Sadly, Ince underestimated the power of film as a means of persuasion; World War I raged on for another year and a half following it’s release.

Robert Henri
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

A VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE profile of the American painter Robert Henri (1865 – 1929):

Robert Henri does not sympathize with the artists who throw their work in the face of the public with a ‘There, take it or leave it.’ Indeed, he has an almost hieratic belief in the power of the fine arts, not merely to delight, but to improve, to uplift and to educate the masses.

Click here to read further about the 1913 Armory show.