Birthdays: Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Heinz the Ketchup king, Jerome Robbins, Carl Hubbard, Ron Leibman, John Candy, Omar Shariff, Ben Vereen, Art Blakey, Luke Perry, Joan Cusak, Sig Ruman– the fat actor with the goatee and the over-the-top German accent in the Marx Brothers comedies.
1944-“ To Have and to Have Not,” written by Ernest Hemingway premiered. The movie paired Humphrey Bogart with a sultry Harpers model turned actress Betty-Lou Persky, now renamed Lauren Bacall. Bacall originally had a higher voice, but director Howard Hawks told her every day to go behind the soundstage and scream for an hour, to bring her voice down to a dusky, sexy alto. It worked on Bogart, who fell in love and married her despite his being 44 and she 20 years old. They called each other Slim and Steve after the characters in the film. “If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”
1956- The Muppets first appeared on national TV, on the Steve Allen Show.
1960- The Bugs Bunny Show premiered on TV. “Overture, Curtain, lights! This is it, we’ll hit the heights, and oh what heights we’ll hit…..etc..”
1967- The NY Times printed an image of a nude by Bell Lab artists-in-residence Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton. Titled Study in Perception I, It was done on a computer as a digital mosaic of thousands of numbers. It was an early breakthrough image in CGI.
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1975- NBC needed a Saturday replacement for the Best Of Carson reruns, so Lorne Michaels’ TV show SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE premiered. Featuring the Not-Yet-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players: John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, Chevy Chase, Lorraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and Mike O’Donaghue. First guest host George Carlin did his opening monologue while stoned.
Albert Brooks did a short film and Andy Kaufman did his Mighty Mouse lip sync bit.
Paul Shaefer conducted the music and the show was held in NBC’s Studio 8H, which was built originally for Maestro Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony of the Air. At the last moment a sketch by young Billy Crystal was cut from the show.
The show also revived the career of announcer Don Pardo, who had trouble finding work since the original Jeopardy quiz show was canceled. He was the announcer for the show until his death in 2014 at age 96.
1987- The AIDS Quilt was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington.
1991- Comedian Redd Foxx was famous for doing bits like faking a heart attack. This day on the set of his new TV series the Royal Family, while joking with Della Reese, he clutched his chest and fell over. Everyone thought he was faking and laughed. He died at the hospital an hour later.
2001- V.S. Naipul won the Nobel Prize for literature.
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