Tall, lanky George Mann played center on the Venice Union Polytechnic High High School basketball team. He also served as vice president of the school’s drama club… and that was his true calling. He starred in a production of the farce What Happened to Jones?, along with classmate, future actress (and future mother of singer Jack Jones) Irene Hervey.

After high school, he teamed up with another classmate to perform as a dance team in the Los Angeles area. He split with his partner and signed on with a talent agency, at first as a single. Soon he partnered with dancer Dewey Barto (future father of comedic actress Nancy Walker). The duo played their pronounced height difference to humorous effect. George stood at six feet six inches and Dewey was just under five feet. They were offered a ten-year contract with notable show business representatives Fanchon and Marco Enterprises.

The team of Barto and Mann took vaudeville stages by storm, appearing the rave reviews across the country. They played packed houses in huge theaters, including Earl Carroll‘s Hollywood showplace. They even toured Europe in the summers before World War II. In the waning days of vaudeville, the pair joined the popular Hellzapoppin‘ musical revue. George and Dewey finally parted ways in 1943 when George began working for Douglas Aircraft Company providing entertainment for employees.

After World War II, George took fewer entertainment jobs, deciding to devote his efforts to photography. During his time in vaudeville, he took thousands of photographs, developing his artful technique and his composition skills. He tinkered with photographic equipment, eventually developing a looping playback device that became the forerunner to the 8-track tape machine. He also invented a 3-D viewer that would display the 3-D photographs he was taking with his 35mm Stereo Realist cameras. He photographed various scenes around Southern California. George was able to lease viewers to assorted business where people would wait for services, like restaurants and doctors offices. Every few weeks, he would switch out the images for a new set, including 3-D shots of Catalina Island, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Pacific Ocean Park, Watts Towers, Palm Springs and Las Vegas. Always enterprising, George supplied a regular rotation of nude photos to the viewers he placed in bars.

In the 1970s, George returned to an acting job of sorts. He signed with the Quaker Oats company to portray the mascot for their new cereal “King Vitaman.” For nearly a decade, George’s royal, though friendly, face appeared on cereal boxes, as well as in commercials for the product. After George’s death in 1977 at the age of 71, the company switched to a cartoon version of the mascot.

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By the time I was a junior in high school, I had amassed a pretty sizeable record collection. I began my collection way back in elementary school, when I purchased my first album with my own money. As an eleven year-old, I proudly selected a copy of Carole King’s “Tapestry” from the “Best Sellers” section of a local Sam Goody record store. I watched Carole’s efforts be rewarded when she was honored by a windfall of Grammy Awards and constant play on AM radio. From that point forward, I was buying albums at a fairly regular clip. At any spare moment, I could be found thumbing thought the offerings at any one of a number of record stores near my house.

In 1978, while perusing the racks at the same Sam Goody where my record collection was born, I spotted an album cover that held me transfixed. I instantly recognized the artwork of Richard Corben, the celebrated artist whose impossibly-muscular males and impossibly-endowed females graced the pages of one of my favorite publications – Heavy Metal magazine (the American counterpart to the popular French magazine Métal hurlant). I had been reading Heavy Metal for about a year and Corben’s work was a particular favorite and inspiration. The album was entitled “Bat Out of Hell” and was credited to “Meat Loaf.” I didn’t know if that was a singer or the name of a band. I had never heard of Meat Loaf before I held this angry red album — depicting a dark and demonic figure on a motorcycle blasting through a cemetery from the depths of Hades in a hail of white hot flame — in my hands. But, this illustration was awesome. The music contained within must be just as cool to warrant such packaging, I thought. As I carried the album up to the cashier, I noticed an unusual line of text in thin white letters at the bottom of the front cover. It read “Songs by Jim Steinman.” I had only seen this appear on some of my parents’ Broadway soundtrack albums, where credit was given to non-performing folks like Oscar Hammerstein or Lorenz Hart for composing the songs. The only songwriting acknowledgment on any of the albums I owned were in tiny letters under the song tiles on the record label — and who reads those?

When I got home, I played “Bat Out of Hell” relentlessly! For weeks… even months! It was like nothing I owned. My mom hated it, requesting that I lower the volume on “that greaser music.” But, I just couldn’t! The intricate, word-heavy lyrics were punctuated by bombastic, layered musical arrangements featuring multiple guitars and keyboards (and tons of other musical instruments) as well as the occasional rough motorcycle engine and rapid-fire baseball play-by-play. It was magical and theatric and sexy and heartbreaking and rebellious — and funny. Yep… it was funny. It was meant to be funny. Jim Steinman — the guy who pompously got his name on the front cover of an album on which he doesn’t even sing — set out to write mini Wagnerian-style operettas for the rock and roll era… with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. And – BOY! – did he succeed. “Bat Out of Hell” went on to become one of the best selling albums of all time. It still sells well today.

While planning an appropriate follow-up to the wildly successful “Bat Out of Hell,” Meat Loaf was sidelined with vocal chord problems, silencing the singer indefinitely. Jim felt bad for his friend and collaborator, but he felt worse for himself. Now, he had no-one to sing his album’s worth of equally-epic compositions. He decided to attempt the vocals himself. However, Jim was decidedly not a singer. Despite his previous experience of only contributing a few background vocals to a couple of songs on the “Bat Out of Hell” album, Jim was ready to record as a solo. He didn’t posses the power or range of Meat Loaf. As a matter of fact, his voice can be described as “thin” and “strained.” But, Jim was determined. He assembled the same band from “Bat Out of Hell,” including members of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and members of Bruce Springsteen’s famed E Street Band. He recruited some of the backup singers from “Bat Out of Hell,” including Rory Dodd, who was moved front and center on several songs that Jim couldn’t quite handle. He even tapped Karla DeVito, Meat Loaf’s touring featured vocalist, to tackle the female counter vocal of the duet “Dance in My Pants” — a not-so-veiled homage to the hit “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.” The result of Jim’s drive and persistence was the menacing yet plaintive “Bad for Good,” a 1981 release with every bit of the passion and bravado — and humor — that made “Bat Out of Hell” an instant classic. From its sprawling, nine-minute opening track to its gut-wrenching closer “Left in the Dark” (later covered by Barbra Streisand), “Bad for Good” is the Jim Steinman magnum opus that you never heard of.

Jim went on to a very successful career, writing and producing songs for a wide variety of artists from Sisters of Mercy and Bonnie Tyler to Barry Manilow and Celine Dion. He wrote a long running musical that played for years in Europe, but did not fare as well in the United States. And he worked on and off with Meat Loaf — even duplicating their initial success sixteen years after the release of “Bat Out of Hell.”

After some earlier health issues, Jim Steinman passed away on April 19, 2021 from sudden kidney failure. He was 73.

“Bad for Good” remains one of my favorite albums.

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Born in Australia to vaudeville performer parents, Mae Busch traveled to the United States in 1896. As a child, she stayed in a New Jersey convent while her parents toured the country. But, at the age of 12, Mae joined the act. Soon she was getting roles on her own, including a spot in Over the River with star Eddie Foy.

She was cast in film roles beginning in 1912. Mae was featured in the drama The Grim Game alongside Harry Houdini. She moved on to two-reelers at Keystone Studios. Mae began a secret affair with studio head Mack Sennett. The couple was caught by Mack’s fiancé, actress Mabel Normand. Normand, a one-time friend of Mae’s, was furious. In the heat of the confrontation, Mae threw a heavy vase at Normand, inflicting minimal, but some, physical damage. Normand ended her engagement to Sennett and Mae was dismissed.

Signing with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mae blossomed on the silver screen. She gained popularity as “The Versatile Vamp.” She was featured in films directed by Erich Von Stroheim, as well as the thriller The Unholy Three with Lon Chaney. In 1926, at the height of her popularity, Mae suffered a nervous breakdown and walked out on her Metro contract. Later, she was able to get work with smaller studios, but only in supporting roles.

Producer Hal Roach reignited Mae’s career with a leading role in Love ’em and Weep with Laurel and Hardy. She would go on to appear in 13 of the comedy duo’s films, alternating between sympathetic characters and gold-digging floozies. In 1936, she parted ways with Laurel and Hardy after the release of The Bohemian Girl, in which she played Oliver Hardy’s argumentative wife. She took small, mostly uncredited roles for the remaining ten years of her career.

Mae entered a Los Angeles sanitarium in 1946. She passed away from colon cancer after suffering for five months. Mae was 54 years old. Her cremated remains went unclaimed for nearly thirty years, until a local chapter of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, had them permanently interred at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.

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At eighteen, pretty blond Nita Pike made her acting debut in the “Goldwyn Girls” chorus of the 1931 Eddie Cantor musical romp Palmy Days. This kicked off a succession of non-credited roles that ran throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1940, film comic and impresario Charles Chaplin cast Nita in the role of a secretary in the satirical The Great Dictator. Afterwards, she continued to take additional roles for which she received no screen credit.

In 1935, Nita was injured in a car accident and she sued the driver for $25,000. (Her brother James had been killed in a similar accident just one year earlier.)

Nita met and married actor Allen Edwards in 1939. Despite Allen being twenty years her senior, Nita was happy. Tired of the small roles she was offered, Nita ended her acting career in 1951, content with being a housewife. She was living her little American dream in a Hollywood apartment with her husband and her dog, Toddy.

Allan passed away suddenly from natural causes in 1954, leaving Nita devastated. Three days after her husband’s death, a distraught Nita committed suicide with an overdose of prescription pills. She left note that read: “Please give Toddy to [friends] Dot and Harry Bloomfield. Please cremate me in this nightgown with my darling Allen at the same time.” Her wishes were honored and the couple were interred together at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Nita was forty years old.

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