I'm Ann Blyth For Hostess

[quote] Smart cookie or just embarrassing career choice?

Or maybe an irrelevant thread topic.

What comes after Eldergay? Ancientgay?

I just dont think the cupcake buying public was all that impressed.

Sad what actress are reduced to

r1

Go change your depends gramps

R4: “Hostess” and “reduced” are opposites. Trust me.

"With this twinkie money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls."

You think just because you made a little money you can buy Hostess Fruit Pies and a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing.

My mother - a common junk food spokeswoman!

Veda: [kissing check] Well, that's that! Mildred: I'm sorry this had to happen; sorry for the boy, he seemed very nice. Veda: Oh Ted's all right really. Did you see the look on his face when we told him he was going to be a father? [laughs] Mildred: I wish you wouldn't joke about it. Veda: Mother, you're a scream, really you are. The next thing I know you'll be buying HOSTESS CUPCAKES Mildred: I don't see anything so ridiculous about that. Veda: If I were you, I'd save myself the trouble.

[quote]Smart cookie or just embarrassing career choice?

Ann Blyth has never spoken of her people, where she came from, so perhaps it was natural for her to make embarrassing career choices.

Personally, Ann’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their cupcakes.

Smart!

I had no idea who she was as a child other than a snack cake pitchwoman, and I loved her for unwrapping the cakes and serving them on a platter!

R5 Wait, is this thread about Ann Blythe or June Allyson?

R6 My father told me Ann Sothern always had to wear black because she had gained so much weight, and now I’m gay!

Ann Blyth made my pussy as moist as a snack cake!

It could have been worse. She might have become the Hostess Ho-Ho woman.

Those commercials made me really see her for the first time in my life. And she’s cheap and horrible.

I had to look up Ann Sothern because while the name rang a bell, I couldn't remember much about her. On Google results they have the people also ask section...

[Quote]What happened to Ann Sothern?

[Quote]Death. On March 15, 2001, Sothern died from heart failure at her home in Ketchum at the age of 92. She was buried in Ketchum Cemetery. Sothern has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: for motion pictures, found on 1612 Vine Street; and television, on 1634 Vine Street.

Ann Southern got fat.

Joan kept her figure and died young. She was 68?...72?...77?...ETERNAL?

One on life’s many unsolved mysteries.

But I needed the money, dammit: Because maybe I was having a baby...and maybe I wasn't?!

R6 & R22 All this discussion about Ann Sothern suddenly reminded me that perhaps my first male crush on TV was an actor on The Ann Sothern Show named Jack Mullaney. The show ran from 1958 to 1961, so if I saw it only on the first run, let's just say I HAD to have been born that way. More likely, I saw the it on reruns but still in the 1960s. I thought he was handsome and likeable, and he gave me a warm feeling. Now I have to find the recent thread on first TV crushes, where this post really belongs!

Unless you marry the CEO, it's just an embarrassing career choice.

(Besides, how do you get the vodka into the Twinkies?)

[quote]R22 Ann Southern got fat. Joan kept her figure and died young.

The difference is, Ann S. could actually act. Unlike the Widow Trog.

Selling cheap cupcakes, you should be ashamed!

We sell fatburgers in this family!

How dare you make endorsement deals without me!

[quote]The difference is, Ann S. could actually act. Unlike the Widow Trog.

Quick! Name an Ann Sothern movie!

The Whales of August. Cry Havoc. A Lettter to Three Wives. The Maisie series.

And I think she was in a Tree Grows in Brooklyn… or was that Joan Blondel?

I figured you would know where to find the Ding Dongs and the Twinkies!

[quote] Quick! Name an Ann Sothern movie!

Name a successful Joan Crawford TV series.

Television series!?

Miss Joan Crawford is A MOVIE STAR!

Ann Sothern - mother of Tisha Sterling, a 60's/early 70's frequent guest star.

I'd rather cut off my hand than do commercials for Hostess cupcakes!

[quote]Name a successful Joan Crawford TV series.

Feud

Cheekbones and an overbite are nice, but they can’t pay the bills. A girl’s got to do what a girl has got to do.

Those kids are far less handsy than Mario!

Who the hell is Ann Blyth?? OP, why do assume we know who the fuck she is?

What does grandma Cher have to do with any of this?

Ignorance is not a good look on you, R37.

[quote] What does grandma Cher have to do with any of this?

It's the secret to that Lori Davis hairspray.

[quote]My father told me Ann Sothern always had to wear black because she had gained so much weight, and now I’m gay!

That's a lie. I just stood behind things.

Vivian Vance and Ann Sothern were the only two people to stand up to my mother

Charlene, from Designing Women, on Ann Blyth

R42 I remember this episode. That scene was hysterical. Charlene was my favorite.

About 10 years ago, Ann Blyth came to the Castro Theater in SF for a screening of Mildred Pierce. She was very nice and genuine and seemed like a decent person.

They showed one of her Hostess commercials and all the queens in the audience erupted in applause.

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.

.

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Ann Blyth being interviewed about "Mildred Pierce" at the Castro Theatre screening in 2006. She looked great.

r50 That's TCM's King of Noir--Eddie Muller.

The pies in those commercials look enormous. They’ve shrunk.

[quote]The pies in those commercials look enormous.

So do the people who made a steady diet of them.

R52 As many DLers can tell you, Hostess cakes aren't the only things that have shrunk over the years.

r24 Jack Mullaney was a gay character actor who was often seen on TV in the late 50s through the early 70s. He had roles on the Ann Sothern Show, Ensign O'Toole, It's About Time and My Living Doll (with Julie Newmar). He usually played a bumbling young man reminiscent of Jerry Lewis but better looking and not as manic. He also worked on two Elvis movies, Spinout and Tickle Me, and other movies of the 60s.

He died from a stroke in Hollywood in 1982 at age 51. He was survived by a sister.

Ann is still around. One time my stepmother implied one of her old society-lady friends knew Ann, so I have this fantasy of one day meeting her. You never know!

Ann Blyth also had a beautiful soprano singing voice, featured in "Kismet" and a remake of "Rose Marie", but movie musicals were on the way out by the time her studio starting putting her in them. She toured in musicals, and a friend of mine said she was excellent as Maria in "The Sound of Music".

She more or less put her career on hold when she married and had five kids in nine years.

I guess she took whatever she was offered after that point.

Creepy right winger who thought Jane Fonda shouldn't have won the Oscar because of her politics.

Carol Burnett parodied her commercials at 1:35

R55 I hadn't realized that Jack Mullaney was gay. Maybe I had prepubescent gayling gaydar.

[quote]Who the hell is Ann Blyth?? OP, why do assume we know who the fuck she is?

We just had a thread with SIX-HUNDRED replies about BETTY HUTTON!

I think it's safe to assume we know who Ann Blyth is!

The strange thing about Ann Blyth's career was that she gave a sensational performance for Warner Bros. in MILDRED PIERCE as a raging and oversexed teenaged bitch in 1946 but then more or less disappeared until she resurfaced in the early 1950s at MGM as a sweet and virginal ingenue in musicals like ROSE MARIE and KISMET.

I never understood what happened in the intervening years. Why wasn't she typecast after playing Veda?

For the Ann Sothern fans (and I'm the biggest), check her out on youtube singing "The Last Time I Saw Paris" in MGM's LADY BE GOOD. The song won the Oscar that year and her rendition is flawless and heartbreaking. She's also fun in Technicolor singing and dancing with a lot of chorus boys to "Where's That Rainbow?" in MGM's TIL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY.

When Ann Blyth appeared at the Castro, she was so beautiful. Her lovely smile lit up the room. She was so warm and gracious, too.

Seems she was really cast against type as Veda. Interesting!

I'm sure she felt right at home among all of the cream-filled Twinkies.

#7, I love her 1970s mom look and harvest gold kitchen. Are those her real kids? The youngest looks like Veda: The Early Years.

At one point, Ann Blyth was in a terrible toboggan accident which broke her back, so she was out of commission for over a year at one point. Fortunately, she recovered.

Ann Sothern is superb in the tv version of "Lady in the Dark" with DL fave Carleton Carpenter in the Danny Kaye role.

[quote] Fortunately, she recovered.

Spoiler alert!

Ann Sothern put on a lot of weight also because she had a bad reaction to a tainted blood transfusion at one point, and she was hospitalized for a quite a while.

Susan Peters, unfortunately, was shot in an hunting accident, was paralyzed, made one more film, did some theater and tv and died young and then starved herself to death. Very sad, talented lady.

oops: starved herself and then died.

required viewing for an Ann Blyth thread /

Jack Mullaney appears in the movie version of "South Pacific" as a character known as "the Professor." In this scene, he's the only actor wearing a shirt.

R74 As did I. Maybe because, in addition to being cute, he didn't seem the type to beat the shit out of me, like the GIs, because of the feelings I had. Of course, I couldn't have known way back then that many of the other actors playing GIs may have been gay.

Welcome to DL Therapy, where stream-of-consciousness posts take threads all over the place!

Mullaney had a hot career throughout the 60s and then it suddenly stopped cold in the early 70s. His friends said he was bewildered about why casting agents just stopped calling. Apparently his Gilligan-type image didn't fit in anywhere. He spent the last 10 years of his life scrounging for work in Hollywood until he was hit with two strokes, the second killing him.

Blyth's Baubles...

[quote]Ann Blyth also had a beautiful soprano singing voice, featured in "Kismet" and a remake of "Rose Marie", but movie musicals were on the way out by the time her studio starting putting her in them.

Ann Blyth's final movie appearance was the starring role in "The Helen Morgan Story." Although Blyth was a talented singer, Morgan was remembered for her torch songs, so Blyth's singing was dubbed by Gogi Grant (remembered mostly for her hit song "The Wayward Wind"). But anyone who has seen the real Helen Morgan in the 1936 movie version of "Show Boat" knows she was more of a soprano herself and sounded nothing like Gogi Grant.

Polly Bergen did a far more convincing portrayal of Helen Morgan in an early (1950s) TV version of her life. Polly did her own singing.

Ann Sothern's first sitcom PRIVATE SECRETARY was required viewing for young gaylings of the 1950s.

She played Susie McNamara, private secretary to handsome Peter Sands, played by Don Porter, who ran a Manhattan talent agency. I learned how to dial a phone with a pencil as well as how to eavesdrop by holding a drinking glass between my ear and a door.

I loved Ann Sothern as The Countess on The Lucy Show

Polly

^ That's just too much dress for that song, Polly.

It's also too much Polly for that song.

Go to L

Perfect response, R85.

Ann Blyth's "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" is superb, her voice is fantastic.

It is surprising she didn't have a longer, starrier career. Not that she didn't work, but...

Ann Blyth got to MGM too late. Dore Schary was in charge and not interested in frothy musicals.

Carol Burnett on Ann Blyth

Gawd, a little Carol Burnett sure goes a long way...

I really liked Carol Burnett's show as a kid. When I finally saw some reruns many years later on ME TV, I found most of her sketches unwatchable. The business of all of them breaking up during sketches was beyond tiresome and very unprofessional. They certainly seemed to be having a much better time doing those sketches than I had watching them.

I agree R91. That TV show was dire.

I had thought Burnett was supposed to be talented because she did that show 'Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall' half a century ago.

Burnett was talented, I suppose, but she certainly had her blind spots. To this day, she still talks about what a comedic genius Tim Conway was. I thought he was an unfunny hack in every show he ever did.

She dragged Conway on the Tonight Show to show him off. His stupid tricks had Carol screaming in laughter, while Johnny Carson just looked puzzled.

[quote] What comes after Eldergay? Ancientgay?

Death

[quote] Tim Conway was … an unfunny hack

Whenever he was on 'McHales Navy' my mother would say that it's cruel to mock the mentally-retarded.

I stopped watching Carol's show about the same time as she introduced Tim and Carol's "Boss Tudball and Mrs. Wiggins" sketches, which I found painful to sit through. I realized at that point that the show's best days were long gone and never coming back.

[quote] Ann Sothern always had to wear black because she had gained so much weight

Look at fat Ann with the always elegant Margaret Leighton.

(Margaret is arching her eyebrows after delivering a cutting remark to the clueless, dumpy woman)

I think about Ms Blythe everytime I'm plowing through a box of Devil's Food Zingers chased by a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars.

Ann Sothern was so matronly from the 50s on, but her face was especially pretty still.

Whenever I see Ann Blyth, I think of the Old Queens Joke:

Who played Helen Morgan in "The Helen Morgan Story"?

No one.

Dang, I didn't know Polly Bergen could even sing.

[quote] Whenever I see Ann Blyth

Whenever I see Ann Blyth I think of a short Vietnamese woman wearing a ton of white make-up.

^ Watch Ann (unconvincingly) portray an Asian in this episode of Kraft Suspense Theater!

New here, r102?

[quote]I think about Ms Blythe everytime I'm plowing through a box of Devil's Food Zingers chased by a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars.

So--on a daily basis, then?

R106 pretty much.

She's the patron saint of fat whores!

Not quite, r108...

I'm an actress, I want to work, more importantly I like to shop. This is TV money for radio. I can't sit around waiting for a better part that probably will never come around.