The 1959 Oscars (for 1958 films)

[SWC75]

This is the legendary 1959 Oscar ceremony, which finished with a debacle they still talk about decades later. It opened very well with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster doing a sequel to their “It’s Great Not to be Nominated” number from the previous year. That ended with some gymnastics as Douglas climbed on top of Lancaster’s shoulders and they both did somersaults. Kirk and Burt were two of the most athletic actors ever. Kirk had been a wrestler in college and Burt had been a circus acrobat.

Later they had a female version of the “great Not to be Nominated” number with Dana Wynter, Angela Lansbury and Joan Collins. It was not as well received, especially by the tight-lipped Susan Hayward, who was very glad to be nominated and very determined to win.

There was supposed to be another singing number Tony Franciosa, Robert Wagner and Rock Hudson but producer Jerry Wald, worried about running over, cut it. He also cut a comic monologue by Tony Randall, one of six alternating MC’s, to Tony's very public disappointment. These cuts would come back to haunt Wald. At least Bette Davis, one of the first presenters, did not get cut in favor of Donald Duck, as had happened the previous year.

These Oscars featured a newly-minted ‘bad girl’ and a forgiven one. Elizabeth Taylor would have received a standing ovation the year before as a recent widow. By the time of this ceremony she had “stolen” Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds to a very negative public reaction. She did show and appeared briefly as presenter to no more than polite applause. The best picture Oscar was presented by Ingrid Bergman, her first appearance in Hollywood since she was ‘exiled’ a decade before for leaving her husband and child for an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. She was now very popular while Liz was not. Go figure.

The black list reared its ugly head at the Oscars for the last time. “The Defiant Ones” was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar. It had been written by Harold Jacob Smith and “Nathan E. Douglas”, a pseudonym for the blacklisted Ned Young. Under the Academy’s rule of excluding blacklisted people from their ballot, the script was attributed only to Smith. Then, on January 12, 1959, the Academy revoked that rule, because “experience has proven the bylaw to be unworkable and impractical to administer and enforce.” Not everybody approved of the change, including Hedda Hopper who announced that several former Oscar winners were planning to return theirs. The Academy didn’t get a single one of them. They did award the Oscar to Smith and “Douglas”.

There was the usual bevy of beauties, maybe even more than usual. The ones that stuck out to me were Barbara Rush, Janet Leigh, (in a gown that in black and white, looks very daring for the period but it’s just the color), Inger Stevens as one of “the girls” modeling the best costumes, Cyd Charisse and, of course Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. Shirley MacLaine looked cute in a short, blonde hairdo and did an equally cute number with Peter Ustinov in which they did the same scene over an over again with different sound effects they themselves created, (they were presenting the Oscar for Special Effects)

It was quite a collection of comedians: Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Ernie Kovacs, (with a van dyke beard and a long cigar), Mort Sahl, (inserting some political humor), and Jacques Tati, (who could barely speak English but did better than the others all the same), all in one show. The six MCs were Hope, David Niven, Tony Randall, Sahl, Lawrence Oliver and Lewis. Olivier joked that he was a change of pace: an MC with absolutely no sense of humor.

Hope did a pretty good monologue in which he went over the Best Actress nominees “ Shirley MacLaine played a “woman of easy virtue”. Elizabeth Taylor played a “frustrated cat” (on a hot tin roof). Deborah Kerr played a “neurotic discovering sex”. Rosalind Russell was a “screwball spinster” and Susan Hayward was “a narcotic addict who wound up in the gas chamber”. Then he summed it up: “In other words: Mom.”

One oddity of the ceremony was that all the Oscars were placed on a table in front of the podium. At the end of the show, about half of them were still sitting there. What were they for?

The whole thing felt apart in Lewis’ segment. His jokes fell flat. He decided Susan Hayward had not received enough applause for her Oscar and called her back out to take another, awkward bow. Then came the real disaster. Here is the description from “Inside Oscar” by Mason Wiley and Damion Bona:

“To close the show, Mitzi Gaynor strolled out and burst into “There’s No Business Like Show Business”. As Gaynor charged into the second chorus, a part of the stage behind her rose from below with all the winners and presenters standing side by side and singing along. After two more choruses, Jerry Wald signaled to Jerry Lewis that there were “Twenty minutes of air time left! Keep on singing!” Lewis yelled “Another twenty minutes!" Shirley MacLaine turned to look at him as if he were crazy but most of the stellar chorus just stood there as Lionel Newman’s orchestra kept playing. A few people decided they might as well dance. And soon the two lines of celebrities dissolved into dancing couples, among them: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, Dimitri Tiomkin and Angela Lansbury, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Tony Randall and Eva Marie Saint, Maurice Chevalier and Rosalind Russell and Bob Hope and Zsa Zsa Gabor. While dancing with Sophia Loren, Dean Martin waltzed past the podium and grabbed himself an Oscar. Loren, as usual, looked bewildered. “

“Lewis ad-libbed, “And they said Dean and I wouldn’t be on the same stage again!” Dean retorted “He needs me.” (They wouldn’t be on stage together again until Martin showed up on Lewis’ 1976 labor day telethon.) “Watching the spectacle on TV at home, absentee Spencer Tracy said “My God, have we fallen to this?” The minutes crawled by. Jerry took a microphone and extemporized. “We are very sorry about Danny Thomas, whose show must have a three rating tonight…We would like to sing three hundred choruses….We’re showing Three Stooges shorts to cheer up the losers…We’ll have a test pattern for the next hour and twenty minutes.”

“He turned to conductor Newman and asked, “May I have the baton?” Jerry then began conducting the orchestra, leaning over to Newman and adding, “We may get a bar mitzvah out of this.” Some of the dancing celebrities thought it best to disappear from the stage and many members of the audience were well on their way out by this time. As Jerry picked up a trumpet and began hitting flat notes, NBC turned its cameras off and filled the rest of the time slot with a short film about pistols.”

It was probably appropriate as the viewing audience was probably reaching for them at that point.

 

[Noexcuse]

Nice write up as usual. I found it interesting that Jacques Tati was one of the comedians that was featured. He only directed a handful of films, but they are all classics and several have made "Best of" Lists that I have seen. He was somewhat of an anachronism making black and white films with little dialogue in the 50's and 60's. His Monsieur Hulot character was kind of a cross between Charlie Chaplin and John Cleese. The actors in his films didn't just move through scenes as much as they danced through them. It's as if he was filming the rhythm of life.