The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger is 80 years old today
Photo by Jane Bown
Mick Jagger is 80 years old today.
Jagger is the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones. His career has spanned more than 50 years and he is one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll.
His distinctive voice and performance, along with Keith Richards' guitar style, have been the trademark of The Rolling Stones throughout the career of the band. Jagger gained much press notoriety for admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a countercultural figure.
In the late 1960s, Jagger began acting in films (starting with Performance and Ned Kelly), to mixed reception. In 1985, he released his first solo album, She's the Boss. He was knighted in 2003.
Born into a middle-class family in Dartford, Kent, England, Jagger’s father and grandfather were both teachers. His mother was a hairdresser and an active member of the Conservative Party. From September, 1950, Keith Richards and Jagger were classmates at Wentworth Primary School in Dartford, Kent.
In 1954, Jagger passed the eleven-plus, and went to Dartford Grammar School, where there is now the Mick Jagger Centre, as part of the school.
Having lost contact with each other when they went to different schools, Richards and Jagger resumed their friendship in July, 1960 after a chance encounter and discovered that they had both developed a love for rhythm and blues music, which began for Jagger with Little Richard.
Jagger left school in 1961. He and Richards moved into a flat in Edith Grove in Chelsea with a guitarist they had encountered named Brian Jones. While Richards and Jones were making plans to start their own rhythm and blues group, Jagger continued his business courses at the London School of Economics. He had seriously considered becoming either a journalist or a politician.
In their earliest days, the group played for no money and had very little equipment and needed to borrow gear to play. This was before Andrew Loog Oldham became their manager.
Their first appearance under the name the Rollin' Stones (after one of their favorite Muddy Waters tunes) was at the Marquee Club, a jazz club, on July 12, 1962. They would later change their name to the Rolling Stones, as it seemed more formal.
Here, Jagger performs “Miss You.”
Aldous Huxley was born 129 years ago.
An English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays. He also edited the magazine, Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
Huxley was a humanist, pacifist and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism — in particular Vivekanda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism. He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.
Born in Godalming, Surrey, England, he was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster, Leonard Huxley, and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. His mother, Julia, was the niece of poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog").
Huxley began his education in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14.
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921).
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm laborer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921), he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle.
In 1919, he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he met at Garsington. They had one son. The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend, D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933).
Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza).
In Brave New World, Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in Gaza.
Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism and Pacifism and Philosophy. He was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife, Maria, son Matthew and friend, Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S. until his death. Mainly he resided in California, but he also lived for a while in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means, which was published in 1937.
In this work, he examined the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love," they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it.
Gerald Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa.
In 1938, Huxley befriended, J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.
His experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word.” Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.
Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these apprehensions, he made warnings in his writings and talks.
In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency toward distinctly hierarchical social organization and the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to wily persuasion. He lamented the tendency to promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities.
In October, 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumors persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, on May 5, 1953.
Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire, Alfred Matthew Hubbard, who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis. On December 24, 1955, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment," famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying.
His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays, The Doors of Perception. The title comes from some lines in the book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake.
In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God," translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.
In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel, Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife, Laura, for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 a.m. and a second one a few hours later.
Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. on November 22, 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the British author, C. S. Lewis, who also died on November 22.
This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book, Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley.
Here is a clip on Aldous Huxley’s use of mescaline on “Doors of Perception.”
Stanley Kubrick behind the camera on The Shining, 1980
Stanley Kubrick was born 94 years ago today.
A film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and still photographer, Kubrick is regarded as one of America's greatest filmmakers. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, were noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to details to achieve realism and an inspired use of music scores.
Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, black comedy, horror and science fiction. He was a perfectionist in his work — using painstaking care with scene staging and working closely with his actors.
Starting out as a photographer in New York City, he taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. His earliest films were made on a shoestring budget, followed by one Hollywood blockbuster, Spartacus, after which he spent most of the rest of his career living and filming in the United Kingdom.
His home became his workplace where he did his writing, research, editing and management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios.
Several of his films broke new cinematic ground. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was a science-fiction film noted for innovative visual effects and scientific realism. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick used specially-designed lenses to film scenes lit by natural candlelight. Kubrick's The Shining (1980) was among the first feature films to make use of a Steadicam to allow stabilized and fluid tracking shots.
As with his earlier shorts, Kubrick was the cinematographer and editor on the first two of his thirteen feature films. He directed, produced and wrote all or part of the screenplays for nearly all his films.
Some of his films were controversial, including A Clockwork Orange (1971), Lolita (1962) and Paths of Glory (1957).
Many of Kubrick's films were met with initial mixed reviews, although they were acclaimed years later as masterpieces. There was an old saying that a Kubrick film took at least five years to be appreciated.
Kubrick was widely admired by other prominent filmmakers, including Orson Welles, who considered him a "giant" and a "great director.” From the mid-1950s onward, all of Kubrick's films except The Shining were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes or BAFTAs. His one personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Film critic and historian Michel Ciment considers his films to be "among the most important contributions to world cinema in the twentieth century.”
Kubrick suffered a heart attack and died on March 7, 1999 at age 70.
Woman Reading, 1946
Photo by Stanley Kubrick, then 17 years old
George Burns and Gracie Allen with Ronnie and Sandy in 1952
Photo by John Springer
Gracie Allen, comedienne who became internationally known as the zany partner and comic foil of husband, George Burns, was born 128 years ago today.
Allen was born in San Francisco, making her first appearance with Eddie Cantor at age three. She was educated at the Star of the Sea Convent School and during that time became a talented dancer.
She soon began performing Irish folk dances with her three sisters, who were billed as "The Four Colleens." Allen joined her sister, Bessie, in 1909 as a vaudeville performer. At a performance in 1922, Allen met George Burns and the two formed a comedy act. The two were married on January 7, 1926, in Cleveland.
Allen was born with heterochromia, giving her two different color eyes; one blue and one green. The Burns and Allen act began with Allen as the straight man, setting up Burns to deliver the punchlines — and get the laughs.
In his book, Gracie: A Love Story, Burns later explained that he noticed Allen's straight lines were getting more laughs than his punchlines, so he flipped the act over, making himself the straight man and letting her get the laughs.
Audiences immediately fell in love with Allen's character, who combined the traits of stupidity, zaniness and total innocence. As is often the case with performers who play dumb, Gracie was, in reality, highly intelligent. The reformulated team, focusing on Allen, toured the country, eventually headlining in major vaudeville houses.
Many of their famous routines were preserved in one- and two-reeler short films, including "Lambchops" (1929), which were made while the couple was still performing on the stage. The couple performed on NBC radio. Around 1948, Burns and Allen became part of the CBS talent raid.
Their good friend and frequent guest star, Jack Benny, had decided to jump from NBC over to CBS. William S. Paley, the mastermind of CBS, had recently made it openly clear that he believed talent and not the network made the difference, which was not the case at NBC.
Benny convinced Burns and Allen (among others) to join him in the move to CBS. The Burns and Allen radio show became part of the CBS lineup and a year later they also brought their show to television. They continued to use the formula which had kept them longtime radio stars, playing themselves only now as television stars, still living next door to Harry and Blanche Morton.
They concluded each show with a brief dialogue performance in the style of their classic vaudeville and earlier radio routines.
In the 1930s, Burns and Allen adopted two children, Sandra Jean and Ronald Jon, after discovering they could not conceive on their own. They agreed to raise the children, Ronnie and Sandy, as Catholics and then let them make their own religious choice as adults.
Ronnie eventually joined the cast of his parents' television show playing George and Gracie's son, a serious drama student who disdained comedy. Sandy, by contrast, made only occasional appearances on the show (usually as a telephone operator, waitress, secretary or clerk). She left show business to become a teacher.
Gracie Allen fought a long battle with heart disease, ultimately dying of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1964. Burns' remains were interred at her side when he died at the age of 100 in 1996, 32 years later; "Gracie Allen and George Burns — Together Again," reads the engraving on the marker.
Within the entertainment industry itself, George Burns' love for Gracie was legend. After her passing, Burns made arrangements for flowers to be brought to her grave site daily, and made weekly visits in person, without fail, for the rest of his life.
Darleen Love and Phil Spector
Photo by Ray Avery
Darlene Love is 82 years old today.
Love, a singer and actress, gained prominence in the 1960s for the song "He's a Rebel," a #1 American single in 1962. She was one of the Phil Spector artists who produced a celebrated Christmas album in 1963.
Love appears in the documentary film, Twenty Feet From Stardom (2013), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Born as Darlene Wright, she began singing with her local church choir in Hawthorne, California. While still in high school (1959), she was invited to join a little-known girl group called The Blossoms, who in 1962 began working with producer Phil Spector.
With her powerful voice, she was soon a highly sought-after vocalist and worked with many of the legends of 1950s and 1960s rock and soul, including Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones and Sonny and Cher.
Darlene and the Blossoms sang back-up vocals on the Shelley Fabares hit, "Johnny Angel," Sharon Marie (Esparza) (a Brian Wilson act), as well as John Phillips' solo album John, Wolfking of L.A., recorded in 1969. They also appeared on Johnny Rivers' hits, including "Poor Side of Town" and Motown covers, "Baby I Need Your Loving" and "The Tracks of My Tears."
With The Blossoms, Love also sang backing vocals on many of the biggest hits of the 1960s, including Spector's own "Da Doo Ron Ron" (allegedly recorded with her lead, which was later erased by Spector and re-recorded using Crystals' lead, Dolores "LaLa" Brooks).
Though credited by Spector as singles recorded by The Crystals, "He's A Rebel" and "He's Sure The Boy I Love," actually featured Love singing lead, backed by The Blossoms.
"Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" was released as a single by Spector, and featured Love's name as the artist. She said that Spector offered $3,000 for her rights to the song. And though he said it was going to be a hit, she took the money.
The Blossoms landed a weekly part on Shindig!, one of the top music shows of the era. They were part of the highly acclaimed Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special, which aired on NBC.
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" is a song by Darlene Love from the 1963 holiday compilation album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. The song was written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, along with Phil Spector, with the intention of being sung by Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes.
According to Love, Ronnie Spector was not able to put as much emotion into the song as needed. Instead, Love was brought into the studio to record the song, which became a big success over time and one of Love's signature tunes.
Into the 1970s, Love continued to work as a back-up singer, before taking a break in order to raise a family. She returned to music in the early 1980s and to an appreciative audience she thought might have long since forgotten her.
She had been performing at venues like the Roxy in L.A., and it was a conversation with Steven Van Zandt that greased the wheels for her to come to New York and begin performing there in 1982 at places like The Bottom Line.
Love performed the song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" every year from 1986 to the end on the last episode before Christmas of Late Night with David Letterman (NBC 1986 - 1992) and the Late Show with David Letterman (CBS 1993 to 2015).
The song was always performed with Paul Shaffer and the show's house band, with the band being augmented over the years by additional strings and other instruments, as well as a choir. Letterman always said Love’s annual performance was his favorite part of Christmas.
George Bernard Shaw on a visit in Los Angeles answering questions from journalists around him
George Bernard Shaw was born 167 years ago today.
An Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics, Shaw wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable.
Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care and class privilege in his work. He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society.
He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time, he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.
In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder.
He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively.
Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest. She considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books into English.
American Locomotive, 1944
Painting by Edward Hopper