1) God bless whoever was programming the Eight O’Clock Movie on KHTV Houston Channel 39 back in the 1970s, because that’s how I ended up getting introduced to every Shirley Temple movie, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and so many other Golden Age Hollywood Movies - all interspersed with commercials and News Before the Hour.
1a) Some of those movies I saw on the TV in Granny and Grampa’s living room next door, especially after the two times that Daddy cut the cord to our TV because he thought we were watching too much!
2) “The things you remember, and the things you don’t.” Vague memories of one of these old black-and-white movies: a body discovered in a dressing room, with a message in lipstick across a mirror and women screaming; a singer walking into her old abandoned nightclub and, suddenly, applause, the lights come up, and everyone is there. And everyone is there. What could be better than that?! I always hoped I’d figure out what movie that was.
3) Tonight, at last, I rediscovered it: The Helen Morgan Story of 1957, with Ann Blyth, Paul Newman, Richard Carlson (so wonderful in These Glamour Girls), Leonid Kinskey, Juanita Moore, my beloved Corinna Mura from Casablanca (and her guitar!), and Iris Adrian from Lady in Burlesque as the secretary. I’d had a hunch for awhile that this might be it, watching the trailer on the Yewtybbe, and it turns out I was right. There was the suicide; it wasn’t in a dressing room, but a bathroom during a rent party (the actress is Virginia Vincent, also in the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Shattered Dream*.”)
3a) And there, at the end, just as I’d hoped, is Ann Blyth (fresh out of detox) being brought back to her empty nightclub by Paul Newman (fresh out of prison). “Whatever made you think I’d want to come here again?” “I don’t know. Old time’s sake, maybe.” “It scares me. Maybe because I’ve never seen it so empty before.” And then the applause starts, in the dark, and the lights come up and you see the whole room filled with friends. And everybody is there. Isn’t that what we all want right now, for everybody to be there?
3b) “I don’t know how many lights it takes to spell out the name Helen Morgan. But the number must be very great, because even now that they have stopped shining for her, they still leave a bright glow over the Great White Way.”
3c) Insert Tears Here.
*What would I do without IMDB?!