Word: cohane
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...cavalcade of show business, So Help Me is much longer on names than faces. Jimmy Walker, John Barrymore, George M. Cohan and many another flit through the book as mere bit players; even Jessel's wives remain blurred as individuals. His mother, his mainstay on the stage, draws a blank. Next to Jessel in importance are Jessel's gags. The best are none too brilliant. Of a decrepit theater he played in: "I was sure there were wild deer in the balcony." Of quarters in a crowded hotel: "We were finally given a room overlooking a coat hanger...
America has songs for all kinds: let Mr. Pegler and his barbershop quartet amuse themselves with the truly American songs of George M. Cohan; let our soldiers march to the strains of Dixie and the Battle Hymn of the Republic; but let us reserve for our national anthem a composition which expresses the best we have in us-the Star-Spangled Banner...
George M. Cohan's life is a healthy base for any story, and Warner Bros. have used it healthy. Old-timers melt sentimentally at the song and dance routines, that bring them back to World War I days, and the picture may even manage to convince live agers that the old boys had something. Joan Leslie provides the artistic requirements neatly, and Walter Huston and Richard Wherf do nice jobs as well. Cagney even hurdles a cane a la Cohan, and gets over it safely...
During the '20s, Cohan produced and acted in The Tavern and The Song and Dance Man, a title which became Cohan's favorite description for himself. He shone again in the '30s as the father-in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and in I'd Rather Be Right, in which he impersonated Franklin Roosevelt. When he went to the White House in 1940 to receive a medal, the President greeted him with: "Well, how's my double...
...shiny was the Cohan professional image that few people realized how aloof was the human being behind it. Cohan left the limelight when he left the theater. When he wrote Twenty Years on Broadway, he never once mentioned either of his wives or any of his four children. Though he called everybody "kid," he confessed that he had just five friends, "and I'm a bit dubious about one of them." His greatest love, outside of his mother, whom he phoned every day no matter where he was, was the one other thing as American as himself-baseball...