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Peter Bogdanovich produced an album called “Cybill Does It ... To Cole Porter” — a collection of unexpurgated Porter tunes.
For liner notes, he was able to secure submissions from four Porter pals — two of the greatest interpreters of Porter on stage/film, the star of the first Porter biopic, and America’s greatest director, who’d created a Broadway show with Porter.

What may have escaped the attention of Cybill and Pete - perhaps overly grateful for having gathered such celebrated blurbists — is the subtly amusing faint praise damning-

Astaire finds the album “intriguing” and Cybill “sensational” — but not at singing
Grant comments on neither the quality of the album nor the singer
Kelly calls Cybill a “beauty of a singer” — which is not quite the same as saying she’s a beautiful singer.
And Welles offers no verdict — even as to the singer’s ability to spell her own name.

THE BLURBS


This is really an intriguing album. It’s different—and I’m sure that’s one of the things Cole would have liked about it. The girl is sensational and the boy is O.K. too.
— Fred Astaire
I only wish Cole could have heard it.
— Cary Grant
I used to think Cybill was a beauty but now I know she’s a beauty of a singer, too.
— Gene Kelly
Way back yonder, when some of the great songs in this album were censored and even banned on the radio, I was living it up as The Shadow (‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’). Week after week, just before the closing commercial, I solved another mystery. What I failed to do, year after year, was to solve the commercial. Why should the sponsor wish his product to be known as ‘Blue Coal’? Roses are red, but not of necessity, and except at Valentine’s, violets are violet. Of coal, it seemed to be even more fundamentally true that it simply had to be black. It might be beautiful, but how could it be blue? A blonde beauty — who appears to know even better than he does what evil lurks in the hearts of men — may now have come up with a clue to the mystery which for so long has baffled even The Shadow. Has Cybill Shepherd cleared herself of the charge that she doesn’t know how to spell her own name? She doesn’t need to. What she has most triumphantly spelled out for us is ... Blue Cole — in the most delicious sense of both those words. And all of his.”
— Orson Welles

”The first actual contact I ever had with Sinatra was a nasty telegram he sent me. Cybill Shepherd and I were living together then, and I had just produced a Cole Porter album for her and sent copies to several performers we both admired, hoping for some endorsements we could use as liner notes. We got two or three, and then came Frank’s wire: ‘Heard the record. It’s marvelous what some guys will do for a dame. Better luck next time. Sinatra.’ Well, Cybill and I tried to pretend to each other that there was a missing period after ‘marvelous,’ and let it go. I finally met him not too long afterward, when he hosted the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement tribute to Orson Welles. I actually thanked him for his telegram, and he looked slightly bewildered; but when I added that we thought it was funny, he smiled a bit uncomfortably and said, ‘Yeah, I thought you’d get a kick out of it.’ The subject never came up again.”

As a drama critic, {Heywood} Broun once characterized Geoffrey Steyne {Stein} as the worst actor on the American stage. Steyne sued Broun, but a judge threw the case out. The next time Broun reviewed a production with Steyne in the cast, he left the actor out of the review. His final sentence was "Mr. Steyne's performance was not up to its usual standard."

Dave Pitts wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 03, 2020 2:24 pm

Halliwell's film guide sums up each actor in the opening phrase. When he had no characteristic phrase for a performer, he fell back on "general-purpose actor". Thus, Wallace Ford's entry starts with: "British general-purpose actor who went to Hollywood in the early 30s..." In its way, it's accurate, as Ford was sometimes a tough guy, sometimes a good guy, sometimes a comic palooka. But think how much nicer 'versatile' sounds! I wonder how many actors looked up their entry in Halliwell and saw that he called them general-purpose, which is how I describe cleansers or whisk brooms.