Actress from Alabama: Katherine Emery

Stage and screen actress Katherine Emery was born in Birmingham on October 11, 1906. By the time of the 1910 U.S. Census, she and her parents and two sisters were living on West 139th Street in Manhattan. How did that happen? Let's investigate.

The parents, James A. Emery and Annie Eliza Comer, married in Midway, a small town in Bullock County, in late November 1903 at the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. Fletcher Comer. The engagement had been announced in the Montgomery Advertiser issue of October 25. 

Emery graduated from MIT in 1893 and began a long career in engineering, utility and railroad businesses. In the early period he ran street railways in New Orleans and Atlanta and served as Vice-President and general manager of the Birmingham Railway Light and Power Company. The couple remained in the state until at least 1909; Katherine and her two sisters were all born in Alabama. However, they were all in Manhattan by the time the 1910 census enumerator came around to their address.

How James and Annie met is unknown. She was his second wife. When he died on February 23, 1943, he was Vice-President of Ford, Bacon, and Davis, Inc., a prominent firm in utility and railroad work. Annie did not outlive him that long; she died on February 9, 1951. As noted below, they are both buried in Eufaula. While in Alabama James had started the Emery Steel Company in Gadsden. I also read that Annie was a cousin of Alabama Governor B.B. Comer, but I've yet to confirm that item.

Thus the subject of this post did not live in the state for too many years. In 1928 Emery graduated from Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she began her stage acting career. She continued with the University Players of Cape Cod alongside Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. By 1932 Emery had made it to Broadway. 

She appeared in several productions there over the next twelve years, but one appearance stood out. From November 1934 until July 1936, Emery starred in one of the lead roles in the first Broadway production of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour. Another state native, Tallulah Bankhead, starred in the original 1939 stage production of Hellman's The Little Foxes, set in a small town in the state in 1900 and based on her mother's family in Demopolis. 

Since she retired from acting in the early 1950s, Emery's film career was about the same length as her stage one. Her dozen movies ranged from crime dramas such as Eyes in the Night [1942] and Strange Bargain [1949] to a Boris Karloff thriller, Isle of the Dead [1945]. 

Emery married Paul Conant Eaton, a literature professor, on September 23, 1944, and they had two children. Daughter Rebecca Eaton has been Executive Producer of PBS' "Masterpiece" since 1985.

Emery died on February 7, 1980, and is buried in Maine. 

Cast members, from left: Robert Keith, Anne Revere, Florence McGee, Katherine Emery, Katherine Emmet

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Katherine Emery [1906-1980] in her first film role, the 1942  Eyes in the Night. The film is available at the Internet Archive.

Boris Karloff and Emery in Isle of the Dead [1945]

Both of Emery's parents are buried in Fairview Cemetery in Eufaula. Perhaps Emery returned to her native state for their funerals. The third stone is for Emery's sister Anne, who died in 1921 at the age of 12 while the family was visiting Eufaula. Her Find-A-Grave entry says she was a granddaughter of B.B. Comer.

Source: Find-A-Grave

Melinda Dillon Once Lived in Cullman

Among her many other acting roles, Melinda Dillon played the mother in two very well known American films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A Christmas Story. As these things work out, Alabama connections abound. Close Encounters did lots of filming in the Mobile area, and A Christmas Story was directed by Bob Clark, who spent some of his childhood in the state. "Where I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, we were lower middle class, but we actually had a maid.  I used to go with the maid on weekends to what would have been called 'Coloured Town' to play with the kids there—I loved them," he noted in a phone interview not long before his 2007 death in a car crash. Finally, Dillon herself spent some of her childhood in Cullman. Let's investigate.

According to her entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Dillon was born October 13, 1939, in the town of Hope. "Information about her early life is sparse, and Dillon remains an intensely private person." The IMDB and Wikipedia repeat this information about her birth. I'll come back to all this later in the post.

Her career began on stage. She was a member of the improvisational troupe The  Second City in Chicago in 1961. Alumni of that group include a roster of stars such as Alan Alda, Bill Murray and John Belushi. The following year she made her Broadway debut in the original production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? alongside Uta Hagan, Arthur Hill and George Grizzard. Dillon was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Tony award for her performance. By 1971 she had made a few more appearances on Broadway. 

In the 1960's she also had guest roles on such TV shows as The Defenders, East Side/West Side and Bonanza. Since then she has alternated television work with  films including Bound for Glory (1976), Slap Shot (1977), Absence of Malice (1981), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), The Prince of Tides (1991) and Magnolia (1999). Her final work seems to be three episodes in the Treat Williams TV medical drama Heartland in 2007. The Wikipedia entry for the recent sequel A Christmas Story Christmas noted that she retired in that year and thus did not participate in the film. 

OK, let's dig a little deeper into her family background for that Alabama connection. Her parents were Floyd Cardy, Jr. [March 22, 1912-August 14, 1978] and Essie Norine Barnett [April 15, 1915-February 16, 2006]. Floyd was a Jonesboro, Arkansas, native; Norine was born in Cullman. The two were married in Alabama City, Etowah County, on July 1, 1937. I found this information in U.S. Census and marriage records at Ancestry.com 

Dillon gave a rare interview with Robert Wahls in conjunction with her Broadway debut that was published in the New York Daily News on October 28, 1962 [Sec. 1, p. 16]: "90-Day Wonder: An Unknown Only Three Months Ago, 23-year-old Actress Melinda Dillon Shot to Stardom in Broadway Debut" In it she notes that her father Fred Clardy was an oil company representative working out of Cullman, where her mother ran a beauty shop.  

In the Wahls interview Dillon claims the Hope, Arkansas, birthplace because "daddy knew a doctor there and mother had lost one baby." Her parents divorced when she was five, and her mother did not remarry until May 17, 1947, in the town of Lipscomb in Jefferson County. Dillon's stepfather was Wilbur Samuel Dillon, whom she described as a provost marshal in the military police. The family spent 1948-1951 in Nurnberg, Germany, and moved often after that posting. At some point they settled in Chicago, where Melinda graduated from Hyde Park High School. She decided to remain in the Windy City when her parents moved again. 

We find a few more details about Dillon's father Fred Clardy, Jr., at his Find-A-Grave page. That source notes he was a World War II vet who worked as district manager for Alabama for the AMOCO company. Presumably after his divorce from Norine he returned to Arkansas, where he owned the Clardy Oil Company in Hot Springs, and where he is buried. 

The Clardy family appears in Cullman in the 1940 U.S. census. Presumably Fred and Norine [spelled Norene on the census sheet] had moved there sometime after their 1937 marriage in Etowah County. Perhaps as a district manager Floyd could live where he wanted in that area, and after all Cullman was Norine's home town. Why they were married in Alabama City also remains a mystery.

Other mysteries appear. The census enumerator, who questioned the family on May 2, 1940, listed Melinda Ruth as being seven months old, which fits her October 13, 1939, birth date. However, the birthplace is listed as "Alabama". So we are left to wonder about Dillon's actual birthplace.

Norine and daughter Melinda did live in the state until Norine's second marriage in 1947. Why the nuptials took place in Lipscomb, a town near Bessemer, is unknown. Norine died in 2006 in Leavenworth, Kansas. I have been unable to find any more information so far about Dillon's stepfather. 

UPDATE 5 February 2023

Dillon passed away on January 9, 2023. An article reviewing her career from The Hollywood Reporter can be found here. 

Source: Encyclopedia of Arkansas 

Dillon in Close Encounters. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this performance. 

Dillon in A Christmas Story. She should have won an Oscar for this one. 

Kate Jackson in "Night of Dark Shadows" [1971]

I've done quite a few posts on this blog about actresses from Alabama, so I guess it's Kate Jackson's turn. This piece is similar in focus to the one I did on Cathy O'Donnell's Perry Mason appearance in the 1961 episode "The Case of the Fickle Fortune." 

Jackson was born in Birmingham on October 29, 1948. The family lived in Mountain Brook, and she attended the Brooke Hill School for Girls before leaving for college. She spent freshman and half her sophomore years at the University of Mississippi and finished that year at Birmingham-Southern College. After that she left the south for a theater apprenticeship in Vermont and then moved to NYC to enroll in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. 

In 1971 she was working as a page and tour guide at NBC's Rockefeller Center when she landed her first TV acting role, the non-speaking ghost Daphne Harridge in 70 episodes of Dark Shadows, the popular daytime soap opera. Over the next few years she appeared in some other TV shows, as well as a string of made-for-television movies such as The New Healers, Satan's School for Girls, Killer Bees, Death Cruise, Death Scream, and Death at Love House. She also began her run as a regular on three successful TV series, The Rookies [1972-76], Charlie's Angels [1976-79] and then The Scarecrow and Mrs. King [1983-87]. In the 1990's Jackson appeared in another string of TV movies and some shows; her final acting credit on IMDB is a 2007 episode of Criminal Minds. 

In this piece I want to spend a bit of time on her very first film role, Night of Dark Shadows in 1971. This movie was the second theatrical release based on the popular TV series. Kate has a different role, and gets to speak! She is Tracy Collins, young bride of Quentin Collins who has inherited Collinwood, the family estate. The movie tracks Quentin's slow descent into the past as Angelique, a powerful time-travelling witch, draws him further into the centuries-long turmoil of the Collins family. 

Night was released August 4, 1971, and filmed at the Lyndhurst Estate, Tarrytown, NY. Director Dan Curtis delivered a cut of the film, and MGM studio head James Aubrey demanded 40 minutes be edited out in the next 24 hours. Curtis complied but an additional four minutes were cut without his participation. The resulting 93 minutes of the released version are pretty incoherent and probably contributed to its box office failure. The first Dark Shadows theatrical release the previous year, House of Dark Shadows, had been more successful.  

I enjoyed this film despite its narrative problems and general hokeyness. We get to see a lot of early Kate Jackson. 

Tracy is awed at the beginning; Collinwood is massive. 

Early on, Tracy is happy at being mistress of the vast house and its estate. 

The good times don't last, however, as Quentin's family past begins to haunt him and pull him back. Tracy has a long scene wandering the halls in her nightgown as she tries to figure out what's going on. 

Jackson has a lot of reaction shots to the ghostly goings on. 

There's just something not right about hanged blonde witches dragging your husband back into the past. Lara Parker repeated her series role as Angelique; David Selby his role as Quentin Collins. Like Jackson, Parker was from the South, born in Knoxville and growing up in Memphis. Selby was from West Virginia.

Jackson has several opportunities to express fear in the film. 

She also has time to ponder what is happening to her husband as he sinks further into the past and the spell of the dead Angelique. 

The film ends with Tracy's scream of pure horror as she realizes the past has recalled Quentin for a final time. 

Kate was given third billing in the closing credits. 

Actress Bonnie Bolding from Joppa

 On this blog I've written a number of posts about actresses with Alabama connections, mostly those whose careers began before 1960. These have included Lois Wilson, Gail Patrick, Dorothy Sebastian, Boots Mallory, Lottice Howell, Cathy O'Donnell, Wanda McKay, Viola Allen, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford, Frances Bergen, and women with more recent credits such as Gail Strickland and Kim Dickens. Next up is Bonnie Bolding, who had only seven acting credits from 1956 until 1958, four of them uncredited, but whose subsequent life was even more fascinating. 

According to her BhamWiki entry, she was born February 22, 1933, in Joppa, a small town in Morgan County. I've written about Joppa in a previous post. In his later years my uncle John Shores, mom's older brother, had a goat farm there, and I remember visiting a couple of times. 

Her parents were Aron T. [Oran? Orin?] and Gertha Earwood Bolding. In 1920 they were living in Ryan's Cross Roads in Morgan County according to that year's U.S. Census. He was 20 year's old, a farmer and could read and write. The same census says Gertha was 17 and also able to read and write. 

The Find-A-Grave site tells us more about Gertha. She was born in Hulaco in Morgan County on April 14, 1902 and died December 25, 1973; she is buried in Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery. The site has an Earwood family photo in which Gertha can be seen. Find-A-Grave also says she married preacher Orin Thomas Bolding in June 1946; he was born in Joppa. His World War I draft registration card has the spelling of his first name as "Oran", and lists Gertha as his wife. 

I don't think I'm going to try and sort out this mess; I'll leave it to a family genealogist. See the map below to locate Ryan Crossroads, Hulaco and Joppa in Morgan County. 

Bonnie attended what is now Samford University, where she was a cheerleader, drum majorette and drama student. She was first runner-up in the Miss Alabama contest on her fourth try, which may have led her to Hollywood. She received a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse, but didn't remain in the business long. By 1969 she had been through two marriages--both to oil tycoons--and then become a stockbroker in New York City. She met  and married John Swearingen, CEO of the company that is now BP America. Her third oil man was the charm.

For three decades she was a major figure in American high society, making frequent appearances in newspapers and various magazines as the couple mingled with the likes of Prince Charles and Pierre Cardin, Bob Hope and Kirk Douglas, and Presidents--or former ones--Johnson, Nixon and Ford. They also engaged in major philanthropic efforts. Samford University received almost $3.5 million, much of it in support of the arts; and a campus building was named after her. 

Bonnie Bolding Swearingen died in Birmingham on August 2, 2020. Husband John had died in 2007. She is also buried in Elmwood Cemetery. Read more about her in the Chicago Sun-Times obituary. You can read a piece on the couple's generosity to Samford here. You can see some of the items at her estate sale held in early December 2020 here.

A very long piece from 2015 about the "John and Bonnie Show" is here. 

Bolding in the "Incident at Indian Springs" episode of the Cheyenne TV series first broadcast 24 September 1957

Source: BhamNow

Bonnie and John Swearingen

Source: Samford University 

On this map we see Ryan Crossroads, Hulaco, and Joppa [not to mention Egypt and Arab!] in Morgan County.

Source: Google Maps

Wanda McKay & the 1938 Birmingham Air Show

I first encountered Wanda McKay in one of her three appearances on The Lone Ranger TV show in the early 1950's. Some of us do such things in these days of modern times. I thought she looked familiar, so I consulted Wikipedia and found an entry for her. She wasn't the actress I was thinking about, but lo and behold what did I find--an Alabama connection. See how these things work?

McKay was born on June 22, 1915, in Portland, Oregon, under the name of Dorothy Quackenbush. The family moved to Texas where she finished growing up, and after high school graduation moved to New York City. She did some modeling that included magazine covers and advertisements and billboards for Chesterfield cigarettes before finding a job with Trans World Airlines as a clerk in the Kansas City office as well as occasional model for TWA.

According to that Wikipedia entry and her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, TWA sent her to an air show in Birmingham in 1938 as its entry in the Miss American Aviation contest. She won and by the following year had a contract with Paramount Studios in Hollywood. From 1939 until 1957 she appeared in more than forty films and TV episodes. From 1977 until his death in 1981, McKay was married to the great singer and songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. She died April 11, 1996.

So far I've discovered little else about McKay's visit to Birmingham. The air show was apparently the National Air Carnival which was held in the city in September 1938. Further research awaits!

UPDATE 22 March 2021

A bit of research for me by an archivist at one fo the Smithsonian Institution's museums in Washington, D.C. has produced a windfall. These air show images are courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum's Archives Department. Further comments are below. 

Source: Wikipedia

This photo shows an unidentified stewardess sitting on the boarding stairs of a TWA Douglas DC-3. Based on the known photograph of Dorothy Quackenbush below in which she models a stewardess uniform, I think we can conclude this one is also her. 

See the caption below for information about this photograph.

Source: Listal

Source: FamousFix

Source: Pinterest

Source: Wikipedia

Lois Wilson's "Deluge"

I've written a couple of blog posts about Lois Wilson, an actress born in Pittsburgh who grew up in Alabama. She won the first contest of what became the Miss Alabama pageant before heading to Hollywood. Wilson had a long career in both silent and sound films between 1915 and 1949. She also had roles on several television soap operas in the 1950's. Wilson never married and died in 1988. 

In the first post I covered her life and career in some detail. In the second one I wrote about Birmingham sculptor George Bridges and the work he created inspired by her 1934 film No Greater Glory. 

In one of her 1926 roles she played Daisy Buchanan in the first film version of The Great Gatsby. That film is currently lost; in this post I'm discussing one of her sound films believed lost for many years, the 1933 work Deluge. A copy was discovered in a film archive in Italy in 1981. This Italian-dubbed copy was issued with English subtitles. In 2016 a 35mm negative with an English soundtrack was located and restored by Lobster Films. 

Deluge is perhaps the first in a genre familiar to us today--the natural disaster film that focuses on small groups of survivors. We get the buildup as scientists follow the signs of coming events, the disaster itself, and two romances in the ruins. Special effects footage from this film were used in at least three other movies in the 1930's and 1940's. 

The film's source is a 1928 novel of the same name by English author S. Fowler Wright. He wrote a number of science fiction novels, as well as historical fiction  and mysteries. Deluge: A Romance became a best-seller in both the United States and the United Kingdom. A sequel, Dawn, was published the following year but was not as successful.  

Deluge the film was made in what is known as "pre-code Hollywood". This period lasted from the beginning of widespread use of sound in 1929 until mid-1934, when the "Hays Code" of censorship accepted by the studios went into effect. Many films addressed topics later to be banned: infidelity, abortion, illegal drug use, sexual relationships between blacks and whites, promiscuity, prostitution and more. Oh, and what passed at the time for an abundant exposure of female flesh. Most of these films seem tame compared with today's movies and television, but were bold and groundbreaking for sound films in the early 1930's. Deluge manages to include some infidelity and a few glimpses of ladies in their underwear and such. 

A lot of the same subjects had been explored in silent films, however. An over the top example is The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, a Sherlock Holmes parody in which Douglas Fairbanks plays Coke Ennyday, who injects you-know-what. The short comedy film is a riotous depiction of cocaine use that seems shocking even now. 

All topic drifting aside, I enjoyed watching Deluge. The film holds up remarkably well; the flooding of New York City is especially impressive. Contemporary audiences, not jaded by CGI effects in so many films, could watch in awe as a model Big Apple was swept away. The scene in which the city if totally flooded and most inhabitants drown would be recreated in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow. Deluge, which cost $171,000 to make and filmed entirely in Los Angeles, is only 70 minutes long and moves quickly. You can watch Deluge on YouTube. 

Wilson made a number of other films after Deluge; her final one was The Girl from Jones Beach in 1949. In the early 1950's she appeared in three different television soap operas. She never married and died at age 93 in 1988.

Actress Peggy Shannon, who plays Claire, died in 1941 at the age of 34. In May of that year her husband Albert Roberts returned to their apartment to find Peggy dead in a chair at the kitchen table. She had died of a heart attacked resulting from alcoholism. Three weeks later Albert committed suicide sitting in the same chair. 

The cover of Wright's 1928 novel 

Source: Wikipedia

Cover of a 1998 VHS release

Source: Amazon

Early in the film we meet Claire [Peggy Shannon] getting a rubdown and displaying some skin. 

Scientists all over the world are watching the signs of impending apocalypse. 

Just before the apocalyptic events reach them, there is a touching family scene with Helen [Lois Wilson], Martin and their two children. They soon have to evacuate their home for higher ground.

Some four minutes of the film are devoted to the destruction of New York City. 

After the deluge, Martin awakens in a devastated landscape. Helen and the children are nowhere to be found.

Helen is rescued by two lowlifes who do no have the best intentions toward her. We get another bit of Pre-Code female flesh in this scene. At this point we have no idea what's happened to the children. 

The two men soon fight over Helen, and the big one, Jephson, survives. In order to escape, Helen heads to the water and swims off. 

Pre-Code films got away with this sort of thing. 

Meanwhile, Martin has found a cabin and nearby mineshaft to live in. Guess who washes up on his beach--Claire, of course.

Claire and Tom quickly develop feelings for each other in this almost-bucolic Adam-and-Eve situation. 

Meanwhile, in the ruins of a seaside town, Helen is reunited with her children and living with a man named Tom.

Some of the men with Jephson have entered the cavern to search for Claire and Martin. 

Claire and Martin are ready for them. 

Some townspeople happen to be in the area and rescue the pair. The group returns to town, and Martin and Helen are reunited.

 Needless to say, Claire and Tom are devastated by this development.  

Helen visits Claire and they discuss their mutual love, Martin. Claire is determined not to give him up. 

However, when Claire sees Helen and Martin at a town meeting, she realizes they are a happy couple. She heads to the beach.

In a scene that mirrors Helen's earlier in the film, a distraught Claire swims away, presumably to her death. Martin has followed her and watches her go.

The End