Links and Photographs

A Google Image search on “Dennis King” reveals a photograph (and others) from a New York stage performance of The Searching Wind in 1944:

http://www.life.com/image/50491195

Searching on “Dennis King Jr” reveals a photograph (and others) from a stage performance of Kiss Them For Me in 1945:

http://www.life.com/image/50496208

My favourite, however, is this photograph of Dennis King Jr as Dr Hanover in Perry Mason in 1958 (from The Digital Deli website):

I have copied the image from the Digital Deli website into this blog entry only because it requires a lot of page scrolling to find it. I don’t want anyone to miss it!

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has Dennis King Jr’s birth details as 6th June 1921 in Birmingham, England. I must admit that I did not know that, suspecting that he was born in the States. He is recorded as having died on 24th August 1986 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Dennis King – This & That

There are two other interesting items amongst the material sent to me by the New York Public Library (see previous entry).

One of them shows a copy of a portrait of Dennis by an English artist called Miss F. Enid Stoddard. Evidently she also painted the Prince of Wales and Mussolini! The item mentions that “Mr King has been in Chicago since Labor day of 1926 in the part of Villon in ‘The Vagabond King’.” so that dates it. Where is that portrait now, I wonder?

The other, an undated fragment entitled “Notes from luncheon with Dennis King” says:

“King played four weeks of ‘Benjamin Franklin’ through Pennsylvania, down as far as West Virginia. The one and a half hour dramatic lecture is called ‘Go Fly A Kite’ and is based on an enormous amount of research personally done on Franklin by King, who believes him to have been one of the most brilliant men in the history of the U.S.A.”

Dennis King, Player

In 1999 I contacted the New York Public Library via email, having seen that they had material on Dennis. Obligingly, they posted me a bundle of relevant photocopies, all of which was of interest but one document stood out. It was a Players’ Bulletin  from the autumn of 1971 that gives a selection of tributes from the Dennis King Memorial Service that took place on May 27th 1971.

Evidently Dennis was the 6th President of the Players from 1965 to 1970. When he stepped down due to ill health he became President Emeritus.

Perhaps it is in the way people talk about someone who has died that you learn things about them that you would not otherwise have known. The account of the Memorial Service for Dennis includes the following:

The Players Club was closed to allow members and staff to attend with friends of the family and the theatre.

Dennis joined the Players in 1943.

The Church was full and that would have pleased Dennis as he abhorred a half-empty house!

George Cooper spoke, Dennis’s oldest friend, who was at the Birmingham Rep. with him.

Dennis’s son, John Michael, sang “Abide With Me”.

Alfred Drake spoke of Dennis as a good companion, the expert pool player, the unique bridge player, the raconteur and the private man.

For Drake, Dennis was associated with elegance.

It is worth reproducing George Melville Cooper’s tribute in full:

I first met Dennis in England in 1914 when we both made our first appearances on the stage as two Footmen in The Return of the Prodigal. We carried on the leading man deposited him on the sofa and then left. We were both at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre – he was the call boy and I was a very junior member of the company.

One night he came to call me for my entrance and, looking over my shoulder into the mirror, he said: “Dennis King, you are going to be a star one day.” We all know how true that statement came to be.

He was a great man who did a wonderful job with his life.

It is comforting to know that there was someone to speak for  Dennis from his days in Birmingham before he went to the States.

Calling him ‘Denny’, Peter Turgeon said the following:

He delighted in telling the story of his wife who was living in their home in the country. It was late at night and Dennis was away on tour. Mrs King heard prowlers down by the garage. She leapt out of bed, flung up the window and yelled, “Quick, George … get your gun and let out the dogs!!” The prowlers quickly fled. Later upon his return she recounted the experience to Dennis who in turn asked, “Why did you call out for George?” Mrs King answered, “Why, I never could have frightened anyone away by calling out for Dennis!”

On the opening night of Patriot for Me his son Mike made his way to Dennis’ dressing room after the performance and, in an amazed tone said, “Dad, you didn’t tell me you were going to play it straight!!” (Dennis had just given the best display of transvestism since Julian Eltinge minced across a stage).

In 1969 we were both in a picture written and directed by Gar Kanin. At a bachelor dinner at Jim Cagney’s someone asked Dennis what the part was like. He thought a moment and then answered, “You might liken it to the fart of a medium-sized mosquito!”

I particularly like to hear that Dennis was at James Cagney's!

From the Players present day website I notice the following interesting fact:

Three British actors have served as President of The Players: Dennis King, Lynn Redgrave and Michael Allinson.

Also, with some excitement I see there is a photograph on the Players website of Dennis, with other Presidents (top right), here.

Dennis King on YouTube

It pays to keep an eye on newly posted items on YouTube. In October 2009 these two songs by Adrienne Brune & Dennis King  from Rudolf Friml's "The Three Musketeers" in 1930 appeared:

1. “Your Eyes”

2. “One Kiss”

For a remix, how about this! …

Fra Diavolo

This is the only fragment in my father’s scrapbook relating to Fra Diavolo, the film that Dennis appeared in with Laurel & Hardy.

There is a rumour in the family that a cousin has a specially taken photograph of Dennis with Laurel & Hardy on the set of the film during a break. He is having an English high tea with them, by all accounts. It was a photograph Dennis sent home to his family in the UK. Perhaps I will never see it!

As a result of putting some photographs of Uncle Dennis on flickr I have been in touch with someone who has a website dedicated to Fra Diavolo. You can find it at:

http://fradiavolo.heliohost.org/ 

You won’t be able to get straight in but you can easily apply for access (saying where you heard about it). The website has a very comprehensive list of Dennis’s film, stage and TV performances which relieves me of the need to do anything similar.

The creator of the Laurel & Hardy website has been following this blog and you will recognise some of his content from here. Via email he made the point to me that Dennis’s performance in Fra Diavolo is the main one he will be remembered for given the enduring popularity of Laurel & Hardy. I have no reason to question that given the evidence from this Youtube video:

Petticoat Fever 1936

Evidently Dennis was back in the UK in 1936 at Daly’s Theatre to appear in Petticoat Fever alongside Jill Esmond, as the cutting above shows. Previously running in New York for 8 months, according to the Daily Mail write-up, Dennis had proved to be “a novelty in the realms of farce”.

Jill Esmond was married to Laurence Olivier at the time. She had met him in 1928 and married him in 1930. Perhaps Dennis and Laurence met. They did have the Birmingham Rep in common, after all, Laurence having joined the company in 1926.

For Dennis, Petticoat Fever was a change from romantic musical comedy.

Of a production in the States, on March 5th 1935, The New York Times said:

Having worn the handsome tights of Richard Bordeaux last year, Dennis King is now wearing the cap and bells in an excellent farce by Mark Reed, "Petticoat Fever," which was played with great agility at the Ritz last evening.

I recall reading that Dennis acquired the UK rights for Petticoat Fever hence the London production but I’ve forgotten the source of this.

The only problem with this account is verifying it. It has proved difficult to find the London engagement in either Dennis’s or Jill Esmond’s biographic material. Could it be that it had a very short run, I wonder? I will continue to search for a separate record of it.

1940s onwards

Although my father’s scrapbook was a great source of interest for me, it did not contain much beyond the 1930s. What was there was undated. I could see that Uncle Dennis got older in the photographs and cuttings but I had no grasp of the nature of his continuing career.

It was only with access to the internet that it became apparent that he continued to work on the stage, on radio and on TV until just before his death in 1971.

The only promotional photograph tucked into the scrapbook was the one displayed above. It must have been sent to the UK by Dennis. On the back it has “Company of ‘Blithe Spirit’” and “Received April 21/42” handwritten on the back.

At sometime in the past I managed to establish that Dennis appeared in Blithe Spirit in 1942 in Chicago playing Charles Condamine. But it has proved difficult to identify the rest of the cast.

A modern day production of Blithe Spirit in Yorkshire describes it thus:

“Sharply witty and savagely funny, Blithe Spirit was Coward’s own favourite play, emerging from his imagination in just five days, and quickly becoming one of his most popular plays setting all manner of British box-office records.”