{"id":130,"date":"2011-10-28T12:59:32","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T16:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=130"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:34:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:34:13","slug":"our-man-and-cavanna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=130","title":{"rendered":"Our Man and Cavanna"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I am frequently fascinated to discover the diversity of supporting players employed by WC Fields (\u201cour man\u201d in this title.)\u00a0 Fields liked to portray himself as a misanthrope of the highest order, but I think this is a great facade he put on to disguise the fact that he was a softhearted sentimentalist.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a lot written on Fields, much of it by people more qualified than I am, including Fields\u2019 grandson, Ron.<\/a>\u00a0 Simon Louvish has a theory that Fields became the characters he played.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say; I wasn\u2019t there.\u00a0 I can only look at some of the incidentals and comment on what they show me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the first one to notice that Fields used some supporting performers over and over again, and he was immensely loyal to them.\u00a0 Irving Bacon appears with him nine times!\u00a0 Lew Kelly seven times. Bill Wolfe seven times. Elise Cavanna five times.\u00a0 Jan Duggan five times. \u00a0 Alison Skipworth four times.\u00a0 Grady Sutton four times.\u00a0 Dell Henderson four times.\u00a0 Kathleen Howard three times.\u00a0 Oscar Apfel three times. Clarence Wilson three times. Franklin Pangborn three times.<\/p>\n

Some of this could easily be explained by the fact that Fields worked with contract players at studios.\u00a0 They might assign who would work with Fields on a particular picture.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t explain all of it, though.\u00a0 Irving Bacon worked with Fields in nine pictures by four studios.\u00a0 Elise Cavanna\u2019s meager five appearances with Fields are in both the silent and sound era and follow Fields from the Astoria studios in NY (where his silents were shot) to the Paramount Studios in Hollywood (where his talkies were shot).<\/p>\n

The only conclusion that I can reach is that WC considered these people great friends and he must have lobbied to get them work.\u00a0 Most of them did other picture work, but many will list a Fields picture as their first work.\u00a0 Ron Fields documents WC trying to get Grady Sutton for The Bank Dick<\/em> when Universal complained that there were other actors who would be just as good in the part.<\/p>\n

Some of these are brilliant, eclectic people, just as WC was himself.\u00a0 He seemed to attract genius-level people to him, and they stayed in his orbit for years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of these geniuses was Elise Cavanna.\u00a0 She was often seen hanging out in Fields pictures, but she\u2019s probably best remembered as the \u201clady rassler\u201d patient in The Dentist <\/em>(1932).\u00a0 As Fields attempts to pull her tooth, she recoils in pain and wraps her legs around Fields, getting her feet stuck in his pockets as he pulls her around the room.\u00a0 (This scene was censored when Raymond Rohauer reissued the film in 1949, but restored in subsequent prints.)<\/p>\n

Tall and lithe, Cavanna could never be described as beautiful, but she was certainly striking, with a memorable presence. She was one of those people who did a lot of different things in her life.\u00a0 Like Fields, she was born in Philadelphia, but it\u2019s likely they met when she was doing the\u00a0Ziegfeld Follies<\/a> with him. Many sources claim she studied dance with Isadora Duncan in the early 1920s. \u00a0I\u2019ve not been able to verify that she did, although apparently she did dance in the Follies for a while. \u00a0The popular story is that Cavanna studied with\u00a0Duncan in Germany, but it could also have been at Isadora’s school in Paris. We know that Cavanna spoke French, given the fact that she translated captions for a book of drawings by artist Jean Charlot.<\/p>\n

Cavanna was a strict vegetarian, and wrote a book about low-fat cooking.<\/a>\u00a0 Fields laughed at her about this, saying that that healthy living was useless since you were only going to die anyway.\u00a0 For those few who might not know, Fields\u2018 lifestyle was distinctly unhealthy.\u00a0 Ironically, he lived to be 66, while Cavanna only made it to the age of 61.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, however, Elise Cavanna was a major artist, mostly in abstracts, and she still has a large following.<\/a> She illustrated other books, including a hand-signed edition of Edward Bellamy\u2019s Looking Backward<\/em>, a volume called Have We an American Art?<\/em>, and a number of others.<\/p>\n

Her work is difficult to track down, and her complex personal life makes the task even more difficult.\u00a0 Married three times, she generally painted using her maiden name, Seeds, although sometimes she just used her first name.\u00a0 But she also worked under her married names: Elise Cavanna (first marriage), Elise Armitage (second marriage), and Elise Welton (third marriage).<\/p>\n

One of her most-seen paintings is not abstract at all: it is a mural at the post office in Oceanside, California.\u00a0 There is an entire website dedicated California New Deal projects.<\/a> I\u2019m going to reproduce the picture here because I fear that the original website may go away.\u00a0 The site is cool, so please visit it and have a look for yourself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The photo comes from this page: http:\/\/livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu\/map\/view.php?&l=615#pic819<\/a><\/p>\n

Like many of Fields\u2019 frequent co-stars, Cavanna stopped working with Fields after his illness in 1936-7.\u00a0 Most of them had regular work in other film series or had other interests.\u00a0 Cavanna\u2019s film work trickled down to almost nothing, and she focused more on her art.\u00a0 She closed out her acting career in the same way she\u2019d started it: with Ziegfeld.\u00a0 She appeared in an uncredited bit (like most of her other roles) in The Ziegfeld Follies<\/em> (1945).\u00a0 Cavanna was one of the few original Ziegfeld people to appear in the film.\u00a0 By the time it was made, the greats like Will Rogers and Bert Williams were gone.\u00a0 Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn were busy on the radio.\u00a0 And Fields was just plain too ill to do it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that there is more info out there on Cavanna waiting to be unearthed.\u00a0 She deserves her own web page and a good catalogue of her artworks. \u00a0 At least one more mural may still survive in Los Angeles, but I have been unable to find it.\u00a0 I\u2019d also love to see photos of her at art openings.\u00a0 She apparently dyed her hair purple during the 1940s, at a time when such things were not done, even in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned for more mini-bios of Fields\u2019 co-stars.<\/p>\n

(Thanks to Bruce Lawton and Glory-June Greiff for research help on this article.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am frequently fascinated to discover the diversity of supporting players employed by WC Fields (\u201cour man\u201d in this title.)\u00a0 Fields liked to portray himself as a misanthrope of the highest order, but I think this is a great facade he put on to disguise the fact that he was a softhearted sentimentalist. There\u2019s been … Continue reading “Our Man and Cavanna”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,4],"tags":[57,59,55,60,58,56],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-views-and-reviews","tag-art","tag-dance","tag-elise-cavanna","tag-isadora-duncan","tag-painting","tag-wc-fields"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}