Search Results

The chapter on panic begins—as it must—with Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds, the panic it inspired, and the scholarly debate about panic that it also began. With War of the Worlds as a touchstone, the chapter turns to other supposed instances of panic in the decade: the stock market crash in 1929, the bank runs of 1933, and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which begins with Bigger Thomas’s panicked murder of Mary Dalton and ends with Wright’s depiction of the hysterical response to that crime on the part of white Chicagoans. Putting these texts together, the chapter argues that for as much as we remember the decade of the 1930s for its populism, it was also a decade in which people felt real fear about what individuals and crowds of people might be capable of when they panicked or otherwise lost control of their emotions.

As this chapter begins, Ziegfeld produces an unlikely hit—an operetta of The Three Musketeers. Discussed are playwright William Anthony McGuire’s unprofessional, drunken behavior; backstage feuds; and Patricia’s propensity to fall in love with the leading men in her father’s productions. Ziegfeld’s production of Whoopee with Eddie Cantor is a phenomenal success and the producer’s fourth successive hit in the course of one year. Next he coproduces a film with Jesse Lasky, Glorifying the American Girl, although he still does not consider Hollywood a worthy rival. Ziegfeld reopens the Frolic, despite the fact that Prohibition is still in full swing. He then goes on to produce Show Girl and Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet. The latter show gets a lukewarm reception, mainly because it opens the same week that the stock market crashes. Ziegfeld loses everything but continues to produce shows. His next one, Simple Simon, flops, and he seriously reconsiders his views on Hollywood. The chapter concludes with Ziegfeld planning to explore career possibilities on the West Coast. Thanks to talking films, musicals are booming in popularity.

Dolores gives birth to her first child, Dolores Ethel Mae Barrymore, nicknamed Dede. Helene gives into actor/director Lowell Sherman’s daily proposals and marries him in a lavish ceremony held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Though they have reconciled, Helene chooses not to ask Maurice to give her away. John Barrymore does the honors instead. Married life again goes awry for Helene. The couple fight constantly, with Sherman’s omnipresent mother, Julia, adding insult to injury. The small movie parts Maurice had been getting evaporate with the Crash of 1929, forcing him to return to vaudeville to make ends meet. While performing in a sketch in Stockton, California, he befriends a young woman named Vivienne Sengler. She sues him a year later on a bogus charge that he had backed out of his promise to marry her. Eventually, she drops the case, but not before dragging the Costello name through the mud.