the Prairie Schooner blog

What are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures?

by Timothy Schaffert

With the Oscars approaching, we salute Col. Barney Oldfield (pictured here with Clark Gable), who wrote about his career as a movie reviewer in a 1937 edition of Prairie Schooner. “Since 1930,” Oldfield writes in “I Go For Free,” his PS essay, “my records show that the old eyes have scanned 2800 of the Hollywood feature-length pictures, not to mention in excess of 4880 shorts, 76 dramatic stock performances, 117 tent rep performances, 17 circuses, 22 carnival midways, 18 legit shows (in N.Y.C., Chi., Hollywood, and hinterlanding through my home town), and 216 vaudeville bills (units and standard vaude acts). Last year Film Daily said I was the busiest look-see in the country, having ‘caught’ 413 of the 427 eligible films for their critics’ poll within the prescribed year. I have since seen the other 14.”

This commitment earned Oldfield a place in the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” comic, for having seen every movie released in 1936 and 1937, as a reviewer for the Nebraska State Journal.

Oldfield also proved notorious for his attire, which he describes in his PS essay as “a definite mixture of the deuce turn in a standard vaudeville bill and the movie idea of a song plugger. My coat is usually the type to startle the biblical Joseph, the trousers come fully four inches above the waist, and the shirts are so bad that even O. O. McIntyre once wrote that they were the loudest in the country.”

(In Peekaboo: The Story of Veronica Lake, author Jeff Lenberg writes of a visit Oldfield made to the set of Bring on the Girls in 1945, and Lake’s appraisal of Oldfield’s flashy sports coat:“My God, did you lose a bet to make you wear that damn thing?”)

Oldfield (who was born in Tecumseh, Neb., in 1909) would later host a radio show about the movies, serve in World War II, train war correspondents, appear on game shows, and start a major scholarship fund with his wife Vada Kinman-Oldfield (which includes an award at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to promote innovations in Alzheimer’s research, named for Oldfield’s friends, Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Oldfield repped Ronald Reagan as a publicity agent for Warner’s.) For more photos of Oldfield, with Lucille Ball, Gary Cooper, and other film stars, visit his page at IMDB.com.

Here’s more from the 1937 Prairie Schooner essay:

In one day as many as a score of people buttonhole me to ask if Eddie Cantor gets all that money for the show himself or does he buy the rest of the talent, if Mae West weighs only 115 pounds, what are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures, who does the double somersault from horse to horse with the Al G. Barnes circus, how much  money can the guy who runs the weight-guessing machine pick off in a good day…

… Into the office come good-looking blondes, fond mamas with small daughters, soda squirts who have learned the first three lessons in a local tap-dancing school and wonder if there’s a chance for them in the new Connolly picture at Warners, and hasbeen legit actors with scrapbooks which they use to panhandle. Some want to get into the business, some want autographs of actors or actresses, and don’t know how to do it by long distance, and others just want to do you out of photos in the files. A photo of Robert Taylor once made them happy, but it takes Tyrone Power now…

… Grift boys from the circuses that caught up with them, or pitchmen who want the lay of the land, or carney press agents who want to know where to put a fix locally, all come in for tips and favors. Some are swell fellows; others are dopes and strictly on the gouge…

… But to John Public I go for free and get paid a salary for it (the biggest little joke of all). “Yeh, I get in for nothing.” Like hell!

Another Loss

We learned this week that Rynn Williams, the winner of the second Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, has died. The circumstances of her death are still not clear. She leaves behind a family, though I don't know much about them, even as I've been thinking a lot about who they might be and what they might be going through.

I have had her book, Adonis Garage, here on the desk in front of me for most of this week. It's full of life, desire, of New York, of looking back that's neither nostalgia nor regret but not quite celebration either of a time of glam and costume that rarely gets revisted, at least in verse.

And I want to post a piece that Rynn published in Prairie Schooner and read when she visited us a couple of years ago:

Chicken

was crucial to the Scarsdale Diet--and despite Miss Trevor,
staunch vegetarian, appalled--I sucked down whole birds.
Intricate ribs, dense gray thighbones, the way
dark tendons fell away--who cares if the diet was useless?
I was fourteen, I'd just lost my innocence.
Giddy from grease, protein and hormones,
the heat of the city playground in August
and the thrill of Miss Trevor's frank disdain,

I was tossing gristle on a pile, licking my fingertips,
nothing but chicken and boys to devour:
Robert and Frankie, Skip and McVey--
seeing the world through a haze of roast meat--
all those boys, all that warm flesh, sinew and fat,
juice on my lips, those piles of shiny bones.