Last Remaining Seats<\/a> series where Blyth’s daughter and grandchildren were in attendance. I accosted the poor woman in her seat and begged her to have mom get in touch with me. Had the aisles at the Million Dollar Theatre not been so narrow, I would have gladly gotten on my knees to emphasize my desperation. The daughter was lovely and receptive, but I still never heard from Blyth.<\/p>\nEven if Ann Blyth had contacted me, I probably would not have gotten much out of her. I am a fantastic researcher and a decent writer, which I feel confident in saying are two strengths of the book. However, I am a lousy\u00c2\u00a0interviewer, which was my main failing during this process. Locating people who were still alive and worked with Ann was hard enough, but trying to extract information about a person they worked with 50+ years ago in an insignificant film with minimal screen time – damn near impossible, for me at least.<\/p>\n
I did get in contact with a handful of people, including Virginia Mayo, Hugh O’Brien, and Jane Wyatt. They didn’t have much to say other than Ann was lovely and very professional. It never occurred to me to send them a copy of the film to refresh their memory. \u00c2\u00a0Had I done that, Joan Leslie may not have looked at me like an idiot when I asked her about Flowers for John<\/em>, the teleplay she an Ann appeared in sometime in the early 1950s.<\/p>\nIn all honesty, I just flat out hate contacting people for interviews. I always felt like I was being intrusive and people were not always receptive. I tracked down the daughter of a couple who were caretakers on Ann and Leslie Fenton’s ranch. I figured she would be thrilled to hear from me. Instead, she had her husband email me to say she knew nothing about it and wasn’t interested. It didn’t help that I contacted her while she was planning her own daughter’s traditional Chinese wedding. You see? Intrusive.<\/p>\n
Still, I sucked it up and tried to get a hold of people. Angela Lansbury never responded. \u00c2\u00a0Neither did one of Igor Dega’s (husband #2) dance partners. I was thrilled to find Herbert Rawlinson’s 90-something-year-old daughter was still around, as he seemed to be a friend of Ann and her mother. No response. I became so desperate to find people who knew Ann that I placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times<\/em>. That resulted in a bunch of collect calls from county jail inmates, and one repeat caller whose messages were so obscene they made our unflappable friend Tony blush.<\/p>\nThe best recollections I was able to pull out of people were actually from non-actors, including a gentleman who corresponded with Ann in the 1960s and spent an *interesting* evening with Ann and her mother, and another who knew Ann in Hawaii at the end of her life.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, the book still turned out great and the primary source documents I was able to access are, in my opinion, \u00c2\u00a0far more valuable than vague, decades old recollections. But this aspect of biography writing is why I’ll probably never undertake a project of this nature again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Year of Ann Dvorak: Day 228 Today is Ann Blyth’s Summer Under the Stars day over at Turner Classic Movies. As many of you are aware, Ms. Blyth is alive and well and even made an appearance at the TCM Film Festival back in April. Before you ask – no, she is not interviewed in\u00c2\u00a0Ann […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t