Word: jolson
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...lurching pushmi-pullyus. Over there, a gang of pink-lipsticked, sunglassed young blonds, in matching scarlet outfits, have gathered in a circle around a giant radio and are joining together in a chorus of banshee wails. And all about, twirling, swirling, waving their hands in the air Al Jolson-style or vaulting on top of one another's shoulders are girls with turquoise streaks in their tresses, girls with gold stars stuck on their cheeks, girls with tiger tails pinned to their backs...
...mirrors with nothing behind them. You can't quite like him--there's not enough of him there to like--but you can't look away. The book ends with a heart-stopping photo of Sammy at age 5, blacked up, ready for his killer impression, his Al Jolson: a black kid impersonating a white guy in blackface. Can you blame him for being screwed up? Race, money, love, applause--for little Sammy they were all mixed up from the start. As hard as he worked, and nobody worked harder, he never got them straight. --By Lev Grossman
...Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" cried Al Jolson halfway through The Jazz Singer. Jolson's urgent, boastful bray--an ad-libbed intro to his rendition of Toot Toot Tootsie--cut through the opening-night audience at the Warner Theatre near Times Square like an obstetrician's scissors severing the umbilical cord to silent films, for 30 years the dominant screen language. But the movies had to talk. Thomas Edison thought so. He and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson had devised a talking-movie machine as early as 1889. In the early '20s short sound...
...seemingly an impossible dream. A year earlier Warner Bros. had released the first (partial) talkie, The Jazz Singer, and the movie biz was in a tizzy. The Al Jolson movie was awful, but the man sang and spoke. A long-sought miracle had arrived. Unfortunately, the camera, heavily blimped to prevent its whirrings from being recorded, was immobilized. Movies could talk but could no longer move gracefully...
...Jerry Lee often said that pop music had produced only four supreme stylists: Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and himself. (Al Jolson??) On that incendiary night at the Brooklyn Paramount - March 28, 1958 - JLL could reasonably expect he might soon be the most popular of the four. "Breathless," his follow-up to "Great Balls of Fire," was chugging up the charts. His next single would be the theme song to a (minor) Hollywood film, "High School Confidential." And in May he would begin a headlining tour of Great Britain. A star was born. A star prevails...