May 3, 1935 -
The seventh and final collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, The Devil Is A Woman, co-starring Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, and Edward Everett Horton, premiered in NYC on this date.
Joel McCrea left the cast after one day's work because of a disagreement with director Josef von Sternberg. Cesar Romero replaced McCrea after a day of filming.
May 3, 1944 -
Leo McCarey's popular comedy-drama, Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald premiered in NYC on this date.
Barry Fitzgerald was nominated by the Academy for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards for the same performance, for the same film, the only time this has happened. (Al Pacino received a Best Supporting Actor nomination and a Best Actor nomination for his role as Michael Corleone, but his nominations were for the first and second Godfather films, respectively.). Fitzgerald won the Oscar in the supporting category but lost in the lead category to co-star Bing Crosby. (This is no longer possible under Academy guidelines.)
May 3, 1947 -
Sylvester tried to have Tweety Bird for lunch for the first time in the Looney Tunes cartoon, Tweety Pie, which premiered on this date (Yeah, yeah, I know Sylvester is called Thomas but it's Sylvester just the same. In 1948, with the cartoon Scaredy Cat, his name was changed to Sylvester, to avoid a lawsuit from MGM, the producer of Tom and Jerry cartoons.)
This is the first Warner Bros. cartoon to win the Academy Award. After this cartoon, Tweety and Sylvester would be permanently paired up until 1964.
May 3, 1964 -
Gerry and the Pacemakers make their US TV debut, performing Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying on The Ed Sullivan Show on this date.
Gerry & the Pacemakers were the second group be signed by manager Brian Epstein (after The Beatles). They were part of the Merseybeat sound emanating from Liverpool, England.
May 3, 1966 -
Johnny Carson played the new party game Twister with Eva Gabor on the Tonight Show on this date.
Gabor and Carson got tied up in knots, the studio audience went hysterical and Twister went on to sell more than three million copies over the next year.
May 3, 1980 -
The Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band single Against The Wind began a six week run at No.1 on the Billboard charts on this date.
Bob Seger won the 1980 Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal Grammy award for this song.
May 3, 1986 –
Robert Palmer, blue-eyed soul crooner, had his first No. #1 hit on the Billboard Charts with Addicted to Love, on this date.
The video featured Palmer singing in front of a "band" of beautiful women who looked exactly alike. They wore lots of makeup and identical clothing as they pretended to play the instruments. Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin makes a pretty good case that the models in the video were influenced by the song Bennie And The Jets, where he wrote about a futuristic rock band of androgynous beauties. Said Taupin: "I can't help but believe that that Robert Palmer video with all the identical models somehow paid a little lip service to The Jets."
Word of the Day
Today in History:
Niccolo Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469.
Machiavelli proved that the yen justifies the beans, and is therefore reviled.
May 3, 1494 -
Columbus first sighted the island of Jamaica on this date.
May 3, 1903 -
Harry Lillis Crosby, singer, actor, reformed alcoholic, pot smoker and child beater was born on this date.
Hey, maybe Bing wasn't such an awful father. Maybe it's just coincidentally all of the stuff in his private life.
May 3, 1928 (or 1933, you can't expect the hardest working man in show business to keep track of small details like which year he was born.) -
James Brown, The Godfather of Soul, was born in Augusta, Georgia on this date.
In 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards.
May 3, 1937 -
A short little southern lady wrote a novel for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, she kept her literary efforts a secret from all her friends. She would hide the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, or hide pages in her closets or under her bed. She wrote in a haphazard fashion, writing the last chapter first, and skipping around from chapter to chapter.
In a nutshell, her novel was about a young woman who spend nearly 400 pages chasing after a man that she realizes in the end that she never really loved and (possibly) loses the man that she really does.
It was a great surprise to Ms. Mitchell that on June 30, 1936 when her voluminous novel was published. Even more shocking, on May 3, 1937, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind.
May 3, 1942 -
Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, was put into effect by Lt. General John DeWitt from his headquarters in the SF Presidio on this date.
Soon after, the War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange, a photographer already well-known for her striking Depression-era photos of migrant workers, to document the internment process.
Lange's poignant photos reflected her disagreement with government policy and brought her into conflict with her employers.
May 3 1945 -
British torpedo bombers attack the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek in the Baltic Sea. Both vessels are flying white flags, as there are almost 7,000 concentration camp prisoners aboard. In the process of abandoning ship, the German captain of the Arcona uses a machete to hack his way through the mass of people.
When the ships sank, virtually all of the prisoners drown, making this the single largest loss of life in the history of ocean travel.
You have to marvel at the honorable naval tradition of Germany.
May 3, 1952 -
The first airplane landed at geographic North Pole on this date. It was a ski-modified U.S. Air Force C-47, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict of California and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma.
May 3, 1963 -
Eugene "Bull" Connor directed security forces in Birmingham, Alabama to unleash police dogs on civil rights protesters, and then blast them with high-pressure fire hoses. Unfortunately for segregationists, television networks brought the footage to a shocked national audience on this date.
In the wake of the overwhelming public response, President Kennedy quips that Connor "has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else."
May 3, 1971 -
All Things Considered premiered on 112 National Public Radio stations on this date and marked the emergence of National Public Radio (NPR), the US national, non-commercial radio network.
Follow me, if you will - you know the joke they make about old men yelling at kids to get off of his lawn,
Well, when you start listening to NPR, you might as well start yelling at the kids.
May 3, 1973 -
Construction commenced on the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower) in Chicago in August 1970 and the building reached its originally anticipated maximum height on this date. When completed on this date, the Sears Tower had overtaken the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as the world's tallest building.
The tower has 108 stories as counted by standard methods, though the building owners count the main roof as 109 and the mechanical penthouse roof as 110. The distance to the roof is 1,450 feet, 7 inches. The Willis Tower was the second tallest building in the United States and the sixth-tallest freestanding structure in the world, as well as the fifth tallest building in the world to the roof. One World Trade Center is now currently the tallest building in the US.
May 3, 1991 -
Jerzy Kosinski was not having a good day. The award-winning novelist decided to end his day with a fatal dose of barbiturates and his usual rum-and-Coke. Kosinski then placed a plastic bag over his head and taped it shut around his neck, a method of suicide suggested by the Hemlock Society.
And so it goes.
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