Gail Patrick & O.R. Cohen in 1933 Newspaper Ads

I've mentioned in several recent posts that I've been perusing numerous issues of the Gadsden Times newspaper from the 1930s and 1940s saved by my paternal grandmother Rosa Mae Wright. She also had some old issues of the Birmingham News mixed in the batch. I'm finding lots of fascinating articles and advertisements. The two items here are ads that focus on two people with strong Alabama connections and both appeared in the News on February 16, 1933. 

I've done a number of posts on this blog about both individuals. In 2015 I wrote one of the early "film actresses from Alabama" posts about Gail Patrick. Since then I've covered a couple of her early films, "The Preview Murder Mystery" and "Murder at the Vanities" and an appearance in a radio production of "The Maltese Falcon". I also wrote about her work as Executive Producer on the classic "Perry Mason" TV series. 

Octvaus Roy Cohen [1891-1959] was a very prolific author of novels and short stories who lived in Birmingham during much of the 1920s and 1930s. He founded a group of local writers called The Loafers that included novelists Jack Bethea, James Saxon Childers and others. During those decades and beyond he published numerous short stories set in the city and featuring black characters; those stories are considered racially insensitive at best today. Cohen also published stand-alone crime novels and a series of stories about private detective Jim Hanvey. Seven of those tales were published together in 2021 in the Library of Congress' Crime Classics collection. 

I've posted twice about Cohen's books and their covers, here and here. He also had various stories and novels adapted for films. I Love You Again, a 1940 picture starring Myrna Loy and William Powell, is one of those; The Big Gamble, which happens to star Birmingham native Dorothy Sebastian is another. 

You can read more about The Loafers in John W. Bloomer's article ""'The Loafers' in Birmingham in the Twenties", Alabama Review April 1977. 

Comments on the advertisements are below. 

Patrick, a Birmingham native, graduated from Howard College [now Samford University] and completed two years at the University of Alabama law school. In 1932 she entered a Paramount Pictures contest for the "Panther Woman" character in an upcoming film, Island of Lost Souls. She was picked as one of four finalists from the 60,000 applicants. Patrick did not win, but was offered a standard studio contract. She met with studio brass and negotiated a better contract for herself. That law school training came in handy. 

The Mysterious Rider was the second of four films she made that year, playing Mary Benton Foster. The star of the film was Kent Taylor, who made some 110 movies in his career. In one of the others in 1932 she played a secretary and the other two were uncredited bit parts, the last ones she had in a career of more than 60 films made between 1932 and 1948. She did not watch herself in a film until 1979, when she finally screened one of her most famous, My Man Godfrey [1936]. 

The Galax Theater opened on 2nd Avenue North in Birmingham before 1920, showing silent films. The theater operated until at least 1945 and was torn down in 1963; the BTNB building opened on the site the following year. 

Zane Grey published more than 90 books, most of them Western novels. The Mysterious Rider appeared in 1921. 

Here's the ad for Cohen's radio mystery. Westinghouse was once a radio and television production behemoth that merged with CBS in 2000. This page has a paragraph about The Townsend Murder Mystery, radio broadcast, information about two of Cohen's detective characters in other fiction, David Carroll and Jim Hanvey, and a bibliography of Cohen's novels. 

On that page author Jon Breen says, "In an unusual and unsuccessful experiment, Cohen’s radio serial The Townsend Murder Mystery (1933) was published in book form the same year it was broadcast coast to coast (from WJZ’s New York studios) on NBC.  However it played on the air, it doesn’t work as a print mystery."

Excerpt from the listing of radio programming in the Birmingham News for February 16, 1933. KDKA is considered the first commercially licensed radio station in the United States, beginning broadcast on November 2, 1920.

This broadcast description was included in the book, which was actually the  script. 

This radio script was published in 1933 by D. Appleton-Century. 

A photo of Octavus Roy Cohen at Getty Images includes this original caption:

"The famous writer of Negro stories has just completed an original drama for
radio. The Townsend murder mystery, an 18 week mystery serial, begins on
February 14, on a coast to coast NBC network. The drama, which will require
a cast of 40 actors will be heard three times a week."

I've seen this work described as the "First radio play published in book form" and as the "first mystery novel to revolve around radio."

Jim Reed's wonderful Reed Books & Museum of Fond Memories in Birmingham recently had this item for sale on ABE Books: 

1933: Westinghouse Brochure Promoting Radio Show THE TOWNSEND MURDER MYSTERY By Octavus Roy Cohen (creator of Amos 'n' Andy series) with Illustration of Characters from Show Plus Photos of Westinghouse Products

Apparently Cohen did work briefly on the Amos 'n' Andy radio series but he was most certainly not the "creator". 

Alabama Book Covers: Octavus Roy Cohen [2]

For the latest entry in this blog series I decided to again discuss the prolific author Octavus Roy Cohen [1891-1959]. I've done a previous post of this type on him, but I wanted to expand that one to include more covers and more about his life and work. 

Cohen had a long writing career that stretched from newspaper work in Birmingham and other cities, 1910-1912 until the last of his many novels appeared in 1956. He also published numerous short stories in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Redbook, Liberty, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and many others. Between 1915 and 1960 many of his novels and stories were adapted for films. 

Cohen's writing career was not only long but much of it controversial now and in his own time. The middle third was dominated by numerous stories about Florian Slappy, a black man featured in Cohen's "Negro tales", many set in Birmingham, and full of condescending dialect and "humor." These stories, published between 1919 and 1950, often appeared in major magazines of the day, and the NAACP complained about them at the time. After World War II such humor disappeared from the "slick" magazines, and Cohen returned to the detective and mystery thrillers he had written earlier. 

Cohen lived in Alabama briefly before World War I when he worked for the Birmingham Ledger around 1911. By 1914 he was back; he married Inez Lopez in Bessemer in October of that year. He had also begun to write fiction including some of the more than 250 short stories he produced and his first novel The Other Woman published in 1917 and written with John Ulrich Giesy, a physician and author.  

The Cohens and their only child remained in Birmingham until 1935, when they moved to New York and finally Los Angeles. While living in the city, Cohen was a member of The Loafers, a group of journalists and authors whose other participants included local novelists Jack Bethea and James Saxon Childers. For at least some of the time the group met at the Cohens' residence in the Diane Apartments on 21st Street South. Travis Bryant has written a useful blog post on the Loafers largely based on John W. Bloomers' article in the April 1977 issue of the Alabama Review. 

An author who often writes about mysteries and detective thrillers, Jon Breen, has explored the work of Cohen that features his three detective characters. Florian Slappy was a detective on occasion, but as mentioned his numerous stories are too offensive for modern tastes. That's too bad, since many are set in Birmingham--others in Harlem. He's considered an early black detective in fiction.

Another of Cohen's detectives was David Carroll, who appeared in four cases. The second was The Crimson Alibi [1919, cover below] and the last was Midnight [1922], which is online at the Internet Archive. Finally, Jim Hanvey was the private eye in various stories and two novels, The Backstage Mystery [1930, set in the theater world] and Star of Earth [1932, et in the Hollywood film world]. A collection of seven stories has been issued recently, as noted below.

Other than his publications and TV adaptations of his work, little is known about Cohen's time in New York and Los Angeles after he left Alabama. He died January 6, 1959, at the age of 67, and is buried in Forrest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Glendale, California. Wife Inez had died on February 6, 1953, age 60, and was buried in the same cemetery. 

Their only child, Octavus Roy Cohen, Jr., was born January 21, 1916, in Bessemer like his mother. He died October 14, 1974, in British Columbia, Canada, age 58. The Decatur Daily for April 18, 1944, notes he took out a marriage license for April 24 to wed Katherine Van Allen Tallman at the Church of the Convent in New York City. Cohen, Jr.'s profession was listed as writer. Details about his career and the marriage will have to wait for further research. 

Macmillan hardback, 1950; this Popular Library paperback 1952. One of 14 crime thrillers Cohen published between 1940 and 1956. Between 1942 and the early 1970's Popular Library issued hundreds of titles, mostly mysteries. 

This Dodd, Mead hardback 1920; Longman, Green, 1927 edition had the subtitle  "A Negro Farce-Comedy in Three Acts". Contains seven short stories; is dedicated "To My Father", Octavus Cohen. The full text is at the Internet Archive. Birmingham is mentioned numerous times. Opelika appears on the first page of the first story. 

Dodd, Mead, 1919. This Grosset & Dunlap later edition has scene photos from the performance of the play written by George Broadhurst [1866-1952], a theater owner, producer, director and playwright. 

Macmillan hardback, 1945; this Popular Library paperback, 1948

This Macmillan hardback, 1946; Popular Library paperback, 1950

Published by Dodd, Mead, 1922; in London by Hodder & Stoughton, 1925; in Moscow in Russian in 1926

Little, Brown, 1925

Macmillan hardback, 1948; this Popular Library paperback, 1952. The cover is by Rudolph Belarski, an artist who illustrated numerous magazine and novel covers from the 1930's until 1960.

Macmillan hardback, 1948; this Popular Library paperback, 1951

Little, Brown, 1927; also an edition from Grosset & Dunlap

Macmillan, 1944; this Popular Library edition, 1946

This Popular Library paperback, 1949. "Murder in the Deep South" of all places

D. Appleton, 1927. Filmed in 1930 with Billie Dove, directed by Lloyd Bacon; a lost film

Published 2021. First published in 1923, the volume includes seven stories, all originally published in the Saturday Evening Post. 

Movies with Alabama Connections (8): The Big Gamble

This 1931 film actually has two Alabama connections. The female lead is Birmingham native Dorothy Sebastian. The film is based on a novel by Octavus Roy Cohen, a prolific author who spent a number of years in Birmingham and who set many short stories in the city. I've posted about Sebastian in my "Film Actresses from Alabama before 1960" series and Cohen in my "Alabama Book Covers" series. 

Sebastian's male co-star in the film was her husband at the time, Bill Boyd. Sebastian and Boyd were married in December 1930 in Las Vegas. They had met the previous year while making the film His First Command. The couple divorced in 1936. By that time Boyd was just beginning to play the character that would make him even more famous, Hopalong Cassidy.

Some other interesting actors show up in The Big Gamble. Warner Oland played the villain; he was well known for his roles in other films as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. ZaZu Pitts had a long career in both dramatic and comedic roles stretching from silent films into the early 1960's. 

Below is the New York Times original review of the film from September 1931. The story is pretty contrived and ends as you would expect, but the Alabama connections kept me watching to the end. The Big Gamble is the first film with Birmingham native Dorothy Sebastian that I've seen, and I'll have to look for more. 

The Big Gamble poster

Source: Wikipedia

Cohen's novel was published in 1925.

On the film's release in 1931, the New York Times ran this review: 

The man with a year to live is stalking heroically and a bit sadly across the Hippodrome screen this week in "The Big Gamble," which started its public career as a novel by Octavus Roy Cohen called "The Iron Chalice." The situation is a reliable standby for the amusement-hunter who likes an hour of honest suspense between the sinister beginning and the happy ending. With James Gleason and ZaSu Pitts on hand to make funny faces at the plot, after those scenes in which Warner Oland has sent out a new ultimatum to the doomed man and lured the spectators to the tense edges of their seats, "The Big Gamble" fits without a jar into the Hippodrome program between the acrobats and the newsreel.

Alan Beckwith, gambler, is at the end of his rope, but before quitting life he wants to square his debts. Mr. North, who has a proposition for every occasion, agrees to take care of the debts if Beckwith will marry a certain woman, who shall be named beneficiary in a $100,000 insurance policy. At the end of a year, the policy being ripe for payment, Beckwith will die in an "accident" and Mr. North will be richer by his death.

Naturally the inscrutable Mr. North had not counted on his pawns falling in love. A year is a short time and love is stronger than Mr. North and all his paid gunmen. Beckwith and his wife work furiously against the deadline and manage to scrape enough money together to pay back Mr. North. Then, on Dec. 31, Mr. North announces that he wants $100,000 or nothing. In the last five minutes before Beckwith and his wife pose for the happy fadeout, "The Big Gamble" offers a wild midnight automobile chase and a final dash of the gangster car down an embankment that was exciting enough to whip yesterday's spectators into scattered applause.

Bill Boyd and Dorothy Sebastian officiate as the gambler Beckwith and his wife. Warner Oland compounds his usual expert villainies in the rôle of North. As a small-time tout who aspires to a gunman's career, James Gleason is amusing, and as his bickering wife ZaSu Pitts again exhibits her talent as a comedienne.

One Year to Live.
THE BIG GAMBLE, based on Octavus Roy Cohen's story, "The Iron Chalice"; directed by Fred Niblo; an RKO Pathe production. At the Hippodrome.
Alan Beckwith . . . . . Bill Boyd
Beverly . . . . . Dorothy Sebastian
Mr. North . . . . . Warner Oland
Johnny . . . . . William Collier Jr.
Squint . . . . . James Gleason
Nora . . . . . ZaSu Pitts
May . . . . . June MacCloy
Trixie . . . . . Geneva Mitchell
Webb . . . . . Ralph Ince
Butler . . . . . Fred Walton

SOURCE: This review appeared in the New York Times on 21 September 1931.

Movies with Alabama Connections (6): I Love You Again

I recently watched the 1940 film I Love You Again on Turner Classic Movies, drawn by one of the many delightful pairings of William Powell and the ever lovely Myrna Loy. As the credits rolled I realized the film was based on the 1937 novel of the same name by Octavus Roy Cohen.

Cohen, who died in 1959, was an extremely prolific writer of novels and short stories. Many of the tales he wrote prior to 1940 are set in Birmingham; he lived in the city two different times. His first stint as a newspaper reporter came prior to World War I. He also spent most of the 1920's in Birmingham as the most successful member of the city's literary community. You can read his Encyclopedia of Alabama entry here. Before 1960 many of Cohen's novels and short stories were adapted for films and television.

The story is a light-hearted one involving a criminal played by William Powell who is turned into an upstanding citizen after a blow to the head, and then back again nine years later after another blow. The crook soon discovers he's married to Myrna Loy, who's divorcing him because he's such a cheapskate, and she's in love with another. Hilarity and much sparkling conversation ensues before Powell and Loy are together again. You can read the details at the film's Wikipedia entry. The film was directed by the prolific W.S. Van Dyke, whose career had begun in the silent era.

The story appeared several times on radio. The first was a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation in 1941 featuring Myrna Loy and Cary Grant. The next version premiered on January 17, 1944, on the Screen Guild Theater; you can listen to it here. The third production came in 1948, also on the Lux Radio Theatre, and featured William Powell and Ann Southern.

All illustrations are from Wikipedia unless otherwise noted.

Myrna Loy

William Powell

Octavus Roy Cohen

Source: BhamWiki

Alabama Book Covers (1): Novels by Octavus Roy Cohen

Octavus Roy Cohen was an extremely prolific author of dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. He lived in Birmingham before World War I and during the 1920's; many of his stories are set in the city. During his time in Birmingham he was a member of a group of writers and journalists known as The Loafers. 

Many of Cohen's stories and novels feature detectives and criminals. Covers of paperback editions of three of his novels are below. Follow the BhamWiki link for more information about Cohen. During his lifetime many films were made based on his stories and novels. 

Octavus Roy Cohen [1891-1959]
Source: BhamWiki