In recent years, movie series have become a staple that we take for granted today: familiar characters and storylines taken from popular books, comics, and even original screenplays. For each of those their sequels are carried forward by many of the same artisans on both sides of the camera. But before Star Wars, before Harry Potter, before Marvel, before DC, there was Blondie, based on the long-running comic strip that was created in 1930 by Chic Young that still appears in daily newspapers to this day.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, the movie studios recognized the popularity of creating sequels to follow a big hit, such as The Thin Man. However, most were B movies and second features for what at the time were standard double bills. These series included Henry Aldrich, Mexican Spitfire, the Saint, Maisie, the Falcon, and Charlie Chan. In many of those series different actors would portray the main characters.
Blondie may not have been the longest-running series back in that era (the Chan movies hold that distinction), but it was the only one where the main characters were played by the same actors in all 28 movies between 1938 and 1950: Penny Singleton as Blondie Bumstead, Arthur Lake as her husband Dagwood, Larry Simms as their son Baby Dumpling (later Alexander)—even the Bumsteads’ dog Daisy was portrayed by a male named Spooks throughout the series.
In the mid-1960s King Features Syndicate released the entire Blondie series to television packaged for syndication, exposing those films to an entirely new audience. Before the advent of film preservation KFS did something that would be unthinkable today: the original opening and closing credits were removed, with the former replaced by a consistent sit-com-like sequence which for the most part included a new theme song with saccharine lyrics. In order to pad the movie to meet syndication length requirements (including allowing for commercials) a “preview” of sorts would appear prior to the start of the newly modified film credits.
American Movie Classics restored some of the original credits when it acquired the series in the 1980s but for whatever reason those didn’t survive, and in recent years Turner Classic Movies screened some of the early Blondie films with the KFS modifications because those were the only prints available to them (I learned this when I inquired about why the KFS versions were shown). You can view some of the original opening credits restored by AMC and the King Features Syndicate modified credits on TCM via YouTube.
Those original syndicated broadcasts resulted in the Blondie movies gaining a dedicated following from a new generation of viewers who became aware of Penny Singleton through the series’ title role. However Singleton—who began her career under her actual name Dorothy McNulty—not only made numerous movies outside of the series, her livelihood included appearances on the stage, on radio, and on television, and she became involved in leading union activities championing the rights of performers.
Who better to document Singleton’s biography than Steve Randisi, who became a good friend towards the latter part of her life. According to his own bio, Randisi is a longtime freelance writer who has contributed articles and celebrity interviews to a wide range of diverse publications along with numerous books by other authors pertaining to veteran movie and TV performers. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Randisi began corresponding with numerous veteran motion picture and television personnel including actors and producers, and over the years established himself as a “pop-culture” consultant, resulting in contributions to various projects. He has previously written published books about George Reeves (co-written with Jan Alan Henderson) and Merv Griffin.
Penny Singleton: A Biography (published by BearManor Media) is meticulously detailed, where Randisi outlines Singleton’s personal life in tandem with pertinent yet interesting details behind her professional output. Despite his being a huge fan Randisi never comes across as fawning, and he doesn’t sugarcoat any facts that may not be reverential; nor does he get bogged down in technical details or lose the reader by veering far from his captivating subject.
The narrative is thorough without becoming cumbersome: We learn about Singleton’s life away from the spotlight, along with the many ups and occasional downs of her professional journey. We get just enough data about the colorful people who populated her life along the way in front of the camera, behind it, and far from it, and how all of it impacted her life. Randisi reveals little-known specifics about Singleton’s tenure as the head of a performers’ union that was in turn fulfilling and consequential. In this interview, Steve Randisi mentions that he did not want to paint Singleton as a saint. While he succeeded there, Penny Singleton: A Biography nonetheless presents a compelling portrait of a compassionate, dedicated, and caring human being.
One doesn’t necessarily have to be a Blondie fan to become immersed in the book’s arc of Singleton’s life and career, as her story encompasses the many facets of a changing entertainment industry throughout the 20th Century. But if you consider yourself a follower then be prepared for an even more engrossing and entertaining read. You will not be disappointed.
Full disclosure: I am admin for a Facebook group dedicated to Blondie and Dagwood which mainly focuses on the movie series. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MIKE TIANO: Steve, thanks for joining with me today to talk about your book about Penny Singleton. When did you first become aware of Penny?
STEVE RANDISI: Through watching the Blondie movies on television as a kid, I grew up in Philadelphia, and a local TV station used to run them on the weekends. They were a very popular fixture on Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon television. I became a fan of the series by watching [them]. One day my grandmother and my great-grandmother happened to be in the room and they said, “Oh, Penny Singleton, we used to know her because we come from the same neighborhood.” And I said you’re kidding! They said, “No, no. She was very famous in Philadelphia as a child, as a girl.” She went to live in New York when she was around 12 years old, but she would come back to Philadelphia from time to time to see relatives and to perform.
So I became keenly interested in her. Then right after I graduated from high school I was down in North Carolina visiting a cousin who was stationed in Fort Bragg, while my mother and my aunts and my grandmother went up to New York to see Penny in the Broadway revival of No No Nanette – she had filled in for Ruby Keeler, who was on vacation at the time – and I missed her. I had no interest in going to a Broadway show, but I would have liked to have seen her because of her connection, having played Blondie.
MIKE TIANO: How did you come into contact with her and become a trusted friend?
STEVE RANDISI: I got acquainted with her [after] I began writing her letters, and that evolved into telephone calls, so we took it from there. By 1981 I was in close contact with her from then on, and that evolved into a friendship that lasted until the end of her life. She died in 2003. It’s one of those things that just evolved step by step by step. You become a fan, and then you begin writing letters. In 1983 a friend of mine went to Philadelphia City Council and suggested that Penny be honored in some proclamation ceremony as one of the city’s illustrious daughters. I was involved in that. We brought her to Philadelphia in June of ’83. She didn’t stay with me at my house. She had relatives in Philadelphia. She spent 10 days [where] she was honored by various film groups. That’s when I really began to know her very well.
MIKE TIANO: You said that she was famous in Philadelphia as a child. You said this in the book, but how so?
STEVE RANDISI: She was in Vaudeville, and she got a lot of attention in the press. There were newspaper articles and columns about Little Dorothy – she was Dorothy McNulty, that’s her real name – and she got a lot of press coverage. Then she began singing songs in the movie theaters. They would have to “follow the bouncing ball”; they would show silent films and things like that. She would be up front in the theater next to the organ player or the pianist, and she would sing. She got a lot of publicity out of that. She first became known as Baby Dorothy, and then it was Little Dorothy. She was the talk of the neighborhood, the talk of Philadelphia, and eventually that led to the bigger Vaudeville kiddie troupes that were popular at the time. Then she went to New York and found success there.
MIKE TIANO: Penny had made 28 Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950, which means she was steadily employed, probably a great thing for an actress. But did she ever convey any misgivings about being typecast?
STEVE RANDISI: No, never. She embraced the role of Blondie. She enjoyed being Blondie, and so did Arthur Lake embracing the role of Dagwood. He loved being Dagwood. He signed every autograph Dagwood, and he would draw little Dagwood caricatures – and Penny did the same thing. They loved being identified as Blondie and Dagwood. She was in no way remorseful of being typecast. The other thing, you talk about being steadily employed. There was a radio show on CBS that ran concurrent with the film series. And Penny was on the radio as Blondie from 1939 to 1949. The [movie] series ran until 1950, but she left the Blondie radio program in ’49. She did other pictures. Hans Stromberg put her in The Young Widow, which was a very popular wartime hit, she got good reviews in that. She was also in Go West, Young Lady, which was a big hit. So she did other things besides Blondie.
MIKE TIANO: Did Penny ever audition for a particular role that she wanted outside of Blondie that she didn’t get, or was that not really what she was interested in doing?
STEVE RANDISI: Yes, there was one instance where I think it was a Columbia film, My Sister Eileen and it went to Janet Blair, and she decided that Janet Blair would have been better for it.
MIKE TIANO: So she was content to portray Blondie and to actually have that role for steady employment, as opposed to trying to stretch out and get out of that particular role.
STEVE RANDISI: Right. I think that she very much enjoyed being Blondie. She often said that Blondie was her best friend.
MIKE TIANO: What I found fascinating from your book was something I never knew, that in 1958 she was elected executive president for the American Guild of Variety Artists, which was a title that gave her the distinction of being the first female leader of an AFL-CIO Union. What do you believe was her lasting impact in that role?
STEVE RANDISI: Well, I think it was the verve that she demonstrated in fighting for actors’ rights. When Blondie ended, she went on the nightclub circuit where she would meet performers. She would meet nightclub comics, singers, dancers, and they would complain to her that they were not being treated properly, that they were not getting their sick benefits, they were not getting their back pay. So she became keenly aware of the deficiencies that were in some of them – not only AGVA, but a lot of the theatrical unions. She became an advocate for performance rights, so I think that set her apart. The fact that she was a woman functioning in a predominantly male dominated field made her a standout.
When you were with her in person she’d like to talk a great deal about her union years. This was something that was of intense interest to her. When people began courting her about writing a book, she wanted those years to be the main focus of the book. That’s really not that interesting to her fans. I said to her, “But, Penny, the people that are going to read your book want to know about what happened behind the scenes when you were making Blondie, when you were doing the radio show, when you were doing things early in your career. They want to know what it was like at Warner Brothers, what it was like to work in radio.” And she went, “Oh, yeah, that can be a chapter.” Now, it just so happens that her involvement with the union spans more than 20 years. So I could not sum that up in one brief chapter.
I asked friends of mine who are writers who are more proficient, who are more prolific authors than I am, “How would you do this? Should I assemble all of this, compile it into one chapter, or should I spread it out along the book as it happened?” And they said to spread it out as it happened, because there came a time in the late 1950s and the ’60s when she was doing both performing and serving as a union activist; when she led the Rockettes on their strike in 1966, ’67, whenever it was. And when she was doing the cartoon voices for The Jetsons, doing TV commercials, she did a Twilight Zone episode. She did regional theater. She did Call Me Madam and she did a couple of stage things in the mid ’60s. Never Too Late is the popular stage play about a woman who becomes pregnant when she’s in late middle age. Penny did that, very good reviews for that. They made it into a film, but with a different cast.
MIKE TIANO: For Penny, Blondie was a role, but for Arthur Lake, who portrayed Dagwood, it sounds like he pretty much personified his movie persona in real life. Can you tell me one of the stories that solidified that in your mind that Arthur was Dagwood?
STEVE RANDISI: He was a very jovial guy, and he was a big jokester. He was very quick with the one-liners. He was different from Dagwood in that he was very witty, very bright, and very artistic. He was inclined to music. There was one instance where I was only with him for one day, but it was a glorious day. I spent an entire day with him. He asked me to take him shopping at the supermarket; he was busy telling me a story, and he wasn’t paying attention to the direction that he was walking in. He almost crashed into another shopping cart and to avoid the crash he backed up. And when he backed up, he knocked over some canned goods. It was like a Dagwood routine. We’re in the supermarket and a lot of the local neighborhood children recognized him. They knew who he was, and they were saying, “Hi, Dagwood. Hi, Dagwood.” He loved being recognized by the kids. Other roles that he played in other films, 16 Fathoms Deep and other films that he was in, he was always like a bumbling character that was very Dagwood-like.
Even when he did a sitcom, Head of the Family, he was very much like Dagwood, right down to the bow tie. Even Penny made a comment: “My God, he does everything except knock the mailman town.” [Laughs] I’m looking at a list of Arthur’s movies that he made during the Blondie years. The titles include The Ghost That Walks Alone, Three is a Family, The Big Show-Off, and the one we mentioned for Monogram, 16 Fathoms Deep. So he kept busy. The kid who played Alvin Fuddle [in the Blondie films], Danny Mummert, was yanked away from the Blondie series at one point in the mid ’40s. When Frank Strayer left the series, he produced movies at other studios, and he liked working with Danny Mummert. [When] Frank Capra did It’s a Wonderful Life, he hired Larry Simms and Danny Mummert. They were favorites with a lot of people at these studios, and they would use them. A lot of directors and producers like to use the same people over and over again.
MIKE TIANO: In the Blondie films Dagwood was just barely scraping by for the family, but in real life he was associated with [newspaper magnate] William Randolph Hearst. Can you talk a little bit about that?
STEVE RANDISI: Marion Davies was associated with Hearst and they were all friends. [Davies was Hearst’s “partner”, as they never officially married]. They went on a cruise, I think, right before the Blondie series began. I think it was 1937 or so, [Lake] was very good friends with them. William Randolph Hearst [had] the Hearst Empire, owned King Features, which in turn owned the Blondie and Dagwood comic strip. So [Lake] knew that he had people like Marion Davies at first rooting for him. But when you come right down to it, he was perfect for the part anyway, because if you look at some of the other actors that were runners up for the role of Dagwood, you can’t picture anybody else playing that role except Arthur Lake. As Penny pointed out many times years later, he was born to play Dagwood.
MIKE TIANO: You never had a chance to spend time with both of them together, did you?
STEVE RANDISI: No, I was never with both of them together. I would have been but here’s what happened. After Penny did her appearances for us here in Philadelphia in June of ’83, I made plans to go out to California and visit with Arthur, and Penny arranged that. What happened was the week that I was out there Penny got a job in Milwaukee. She was doing the play Little Me at the Melody Top Theater with Arte Johnson. You know Arte Johnson?
MIKE TIANO: [Rowan & Martin’s] Laugh-In. Yes.
STEVE RANDISI: Right. So obviously she couldn’t be in two places at once. I tried to get Larry Simms to visit with Penny, and that didn’t work out. He was sort of embarrassed. He said, “My gosh, I wouldn’t know what to say to them after so many years.” So that didn’t pan out. I was with all three of them, but never together. It would have been great to be with Penny and Arthur together. In the 1970s and in the ’80s, up until Arthur died in 1987, there were many instances where Penny and Arthur were together at family functions, birthday parties, etc. They worked together. They went to film premieres together. They made a splashy appearance. I think it was in 1980 when Neil Simon made a film called It Seems Like Old Times. They had all these vintage stars that were at the premiere, and among them were Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, and they were greeted like royalty. They were still recognized as Blondie and Dagwood. and it was in all the tabloid papers. The press picked it up. So the rumors of them not getting along or not speaking to each other are completely unfounded.
MIKE TIANO: Did you ever watch any of the Blondie movies with Penny, and if so, what was that experience like?
STEVE RANDISI: Well, absolutely. Not only did I watch them with her, she came to dinner at my house in 1990 with her daughter Dee-Gee, [aka Dorothy Grace] and her cousin Edith. The three ladies came and my mom cooked dinner. After dinner was over we set up the projector and we watched Blondie Plays Cupid and Blondie Goes Latin. It was a remarkable experience. Of course, people were leaning over and asking her questions during the film. That was 1990. Prior to that, I think it was 1983 or ’84, Penny’s dance school teacher [Florence Cowanova] was a friend of mine and she wanted to see a Blondie movie. She could have watched them on Saturday morning television, but she wanted to see one in her living home. So we set the projector up and we watched Blondie Goes Latin in her very spacious home in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia and there were a group of people there [Steve brought Penny], she invited some people to watch it. And it was interesting to watch that film because Penny dances up a storm in it and here’s her dance school teacher in the room watching the film. She was not critiquing [Penny] so much; she was amazed. And when it was over, she said, “Oh my God, Penny, those dance lessons you took as a child really paid off. Look at you. You’re wonderful. Now, we just have to get you back on Broadway.”
MIKE TIANO: Blondie Goes Latin must have been a wonderful film for you to watch with her for that reason, because she got to dance – and sing, right?
STEVE RANDISI: Yes. She sings “Querida,” the duet that she does with Tito Guizar – and she sings the lullaby to Baby Dumpling as he’s sleeping.
MIKE TIANO: Tito Guizar was a big star at the time.
STEVE RANDISI: If you look at Blondie Goes Latin, it’s got some very, very nice camera work when she’s on the dance floor there. You get some overhead shots and then the camera switches down to the floor and we see close ups of her feet as she’s dancing. The only thing that I think they did wrong in that scene is she’s wearing a long dress that comes all the way down to her ankles and she’s lifting up the dress so that we could see her footwork. They might have done better if they had her in something that was a little more conducive to that type of number. But it’s a fascinating thing to watch because she’s got all kinds of [dances]: She’s doing the rumba, and she’s got a little bit of jive, and she’s got a little bit of this and that. She’s wonderful in it. She puts a lot into it. That was one film that she would frequently talk about, that one and Blondie, the first one in 1938. She would definitely mention those two films.
MIKE TIANO: I’m sure you read dozens if not hundreds of reviews for her movies. Do you think that Blondie Goes Latin might have been the best reviewed one? Or if it wasn’t, which one was?
STEVE RANDISI: I think Blondie Goes Latin is generally picked out as the creme de la creme of the series. That is usually selected as a top favorite because of the musical numbers, and because of the fact that it’s an atypical Blondie movie. There’s no shenanigans at the office. In fact, almost all of the action takes place aboard the ship. Only the first few scenes at the beginning of the film take place in the Bumstead house. And it also establishes a close relationship between Mr. Dithers and Blondie & Dagwood, which is something that was unusual for the time. A lot of the ones that you would think would have generated a lot of publicity really didn’t get good reviews. A good example of that is Blondie on a Budget, the one with Rita Hayworth. Surprisingly enough, a lot of critics were remarkably lukewarm toward that film. And yet it’s got a lot going for it.
Another one that didn’t do too well with critics was Blondie for Victory, and that is the one that is the most overtly patriotic entry in the series – it’s wartime 1942. The film did very well in small town cities across the country, but it didn’t do as well in the big cities for one reason or another. That was the last film that was produced by Robert Sparks, who was Penny’s husband. He produced the series from the beginning. He started out as associate producer in ’38, and then he progressed to producer. And then he was called back into the military: he was a Marine officer during the war, and that was his last film as producer. After the war he came back and [only] produced for RKO. He was closely associated with Howard Hughes, who owned RKO at the time.
MIKE TIANO: Closing on Blondie Girls Latin, you mentioned earlier that Arthur was a musician as well. Just as it gave Penny a chance to sing and dance it gave Arthur a chance to actually play the drums.
STEVE RANDISI: Yes, he was a very avid drummer. And I interviewed his granddaughter about that. And she said, “Oh, yeah, he loved to play the drums.” He would play them at parties. The Lakes had a piano in their house. They had a very large house in Indian Wells, where I visited him. There was a piano there, and he would play, and he liked magic tricks, and he was a very avid golfer. He loved to golf. He wrote stories, too. Like I said, he was a very creative guy, very bright guy, and he produced films, too. He also produced 16 Fathoms Deep, the Monogram film which was shot in Ansco Color. (Ansco was a format that rivaled Technicolor where the camera would print directly to a positive, eliminating the need for the standard negative to positive conversion. Read more about one example here.)
MIKE TIANO: I was a big Blondie fan and I saw Blondie Goes Latin back in the day when they had the films in syndication – and I remember 16 Fathoms Deep. I was always watching out that for that film, and when it came on one of the Los Angeles stations I was just so excited to see that. But as far as the drumming goes, he actually played the drums live in Blondie Goes Latin, right?
STEVE RANDISI: I think it was him all the way. I don’t think there were any retakes or anything like that, because I asked Penny at one time, how long did it take to make a Blondie movie? She said typically they were generally three week shoots, and then occasionally, they would have to go back and maybe pick something up or dub a line or something like that. But there was none of that with the Blondie Goes Latin. So my guess would be that that was done straight through without any stopping.
MIKE TIANO: Did Penny ever convey which Blondie movie she liked the best?
STEVE RANDISI: She would get asked that question frequently. Her answer was always, “I really don’t have a favorite among the films.” But she would invariably talk about Blondie, the first film from 1938, and then Blondie Goes Latin. Those were the two that really she talked about the most. So that led me to believe that those were her favorites, even though she didn’t acknowledge them as such.
MIKE TIANO: What’s great about the Blondie series is that it was the longest-running movie series at the time. There [were other series] like The Saint and Henry Aldrich, but most of those films only amounted to a handful compared to the 28 Blondie movies, and they covered every genre: the haunted house film, the musical …
STEVE RANDISI: There’s also the obligatory army comedy. Blondie’s Hero delves into the army comedy, which is always a popular staple for comedians. And the domestic film like Blondie Brings Up Baby, which has a lot of sentimentality in it.
MIKE TIANO: Blondie Takes a Vacation is pretty dramatic in that Baby Dumpling’s life is put at risk.
STEVE RANDISI: Right. I don’t know what they were going for when they did Blondie Takes a Vacation and Baby Dumpling is trapped in the building that’s been set ablaze by the arsonist. I watched that movie one time with Larry Simms when I was out in Hawaii, and somebody asked him, “Were you frightened?” And he said, “No, not at all. I knew I was making a movie.” [Both laugh] When I went out to Hawaii to see Larry I took some cassettes with me, and the one that I watched with him was also Blondie Goes Latin, where he’s doing the rumba at the end, and oh my God, he just cringed. He said, “I look ridiculous.” And this lady who was in the room said, “Oh, no, you were cute.” He went, “Oh, ridiculous.”
MIKE TIANO: Do you think he was embarrassed by the Blondie movies?
STEVE RANDISI: I think that movie making was not something that turned him on or off. It was just something that he did. And he was happy to do it. He was complacent with it. Alan Dinehart, the other actor who was in Blondie’s Big Deal, told me that he’d be on the set and they would yell, “Larry Simms, where’s Larry Simms? We need him.” And he would be hanging out with the crew, hanging out with the sound people, or the carpenters, or the electricians. He was more interested in the mechanics rather than the artistic side of filmmaking. So acting was not something that turned him on and off. He did only one film after Blondie, and that was a movie where he plays a military cadet. It’s called Her First Romance. That was 1951. Right after that he went in the Navy and then never acted in a film again.
MIKE TIANO: Were there any stories that didn’t make the book that you’d like to tell?
STEVE RANDISI: Yes, there are a couple of stories, personal things that I did not put in, and it wasn’t intentional. It was just that I was under the gun. See, this book was written during the pandemic. I started it in the early part of 2020, after I got the okay from Penny’s daughter to do it, because I wasn’t going to do this unless I had her blessing. Because I don’t like people who get friendly with a celebrity, and then they write about it and capitalize on it. I don’t think that’s right. So I sent some emails to Penny’s daughter, and we’ve known each other for 40 years. We go way back. And I said, Look, the publisher is interested in a book about your mom, and would you be interested? And she said, “Oh, I would love for mother’s story to be told and I think you’re the right person to do it.” So I did it.
There were a couple of things that did not make it into the book. One of them is Penny’s strong inclination towards protecting her children. When she was away at the studio working these long hours she had to hire a nanny for her kids, and one of these ladies looking after her children was abusive to the younger daughter, Susie. Penny was aghast and fired her immediately. I just thought that speaks volumes of Penny’s attentiveness, her dedication to the safety and welfare of her children. This is a very close-knit Irish Catholic family, very family-oriented.
Penny’s brother, Barney McNulty, was the man who was generally acknowledged for using cue cards in television and radio. I hung out with [Penny and Barney] many, many times, went to dinner with them on both coasts, both in California and here on the East Coast. And they were very close knit. Penny was close to her nieces and nephews, her grandchildren, her great grandchildren. I was out in California at some function where Penny was being honored and she said, “You really don’t want to be here tonight for this banquet” or whatever it was. “Why don’t you come by and spend the evening with me? We’ll have pizza and we’ll talk.” She was babysitting for one of her grandchildren [which is why she didn’t attend the event] – it might have been one of her great-grandchildren, I’m really not sure. And she was just so loving, a loving grandmother, towards her kids and her grandkids, and even kids that she wasn’t related to. She was wonderful with children. My little nephew met her when he was a little boy, and she was great with him.
MIKE TIANO: Her own personality infused Blondie because if she was a disaffected parent I don’t think she would have played Blondie at all or be able to carry it for that long. It really says a lot about Penny Singleton as a person.
STEVE RANDISI: The first actress who was cast as Blondie, Shirley Dean, didn’t have that quality. She didn’t have that wholesomeness that Penny had, Shirley was lacking in that: after they did a few scenes with her, they let her go. Now, the story that was issued at the time was that she became ill, and the studio had to recast the role. But in fact what Arthur Lake told me, and what Penny told me, is that when they looked at the rushes they didn’t like the way she came off on screen with Arthur and with Larry Simms. They thought she was too harsh.
In the book, I have a quote where Penny says she thought that Shirley Dean was too glamorous to be playing the role of a simple housewife and mother. So when they auditioned Penny for the part they didn’t tell her that she was auditioning for Blondie. They just told her that she was auditioning for the part of an ordinary housewife and mother. And she did a screen test with Eddie Quillen, another famous actor from Philadelphia. [According to Randisi’s book, Quillen was one of the actors considered for the part of Dagwood.]
MIKE TIANO: It would have been easy to make it about “Penny and me,” but that’s not what it was, so I think you did a really great job as far as that goes [keeping himself out of the narrative].
STEVE RANDISI: Yes, I didn’t want to infuse my personality into it all because it’s a book about Penny Singleton. I did want to point out in the acknowledgement that, because I knew her, I was with her by her side for many of the events that are detailed in the book. I was very close to her the last 20 years of her life, from 1983 to 2003. But I didn’t want to make it about me. I wanted the focus to remain on her because she’s the star. It’s a biography.
MIKE TIANO: After Penny passed away, were there any questions you would have liked to have asked her or never thought of while she was alive?
STEVE RANDISI: In a hindsight, there’s always when you look back at things – especially after having written the book – I said, gee, I wish I could talk to her one more time to ask her about this or to ask her about that. I would have asked her more questions about her early stage work, because she worked with some really fantastic people. I did ask her about people she worked with in some of her early films like Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Jack Oakey, Elissa Landi [who appeared in After the Thin Man with Penny, who was still using her real name Dorothy McNulty].
Surprisingly, she had very little to say, and when you come right down to it she was only on those pictures for maybe a couple of days. Those were B movies, early Warner Brothers films that she was in, like Swing Your Lady [where] she gives Humphrey Bogart his first screen kiss. These things were done so rapidly that she really didn’t get that much time alone with them to form an impression as to what these people were like. So I did, over the years, keep copious notes of little things that she told me here and there, and those became invaluable when I wrote the book.
MIKE TIANO: I remember when I first saw a filmography where Penny did that small part in The Best Man (1964), and I was so eager to see it. And then I watch the film: where is she? I learned later that her scenes were cut. That could have been an opportunity to revitalize her career. Hopefully, one day that footage will surface somewhere. Did she ever express her feelings about being excised from that film?
STEVE RANDISI: No, not at all. She just moved on to the next thing. You’ve got to understand one thing about Penny: she was more in favor of doing stage work in front of a live audience than film. And I have a quote from her in the book where I said, “Penny, what was it about film?” She goes, “Well, with film it’s a director’s medium. You’re up all night learning your lines, and then you get there in the morning and you find out that they hand you these pages and they’ve changed the lines. And you sit around all day until they get ready. And then they shoot a little bit here, a little piece here, and a little piece there – and then it’s all put together. The director puts it all together and you don’t get an immediate reaction from the audience. Whereas when you go out on the stage, you’re pumping with adrenaline, and there’s the excitement of being under the lights in front of a thousand people, and you get that immediate reaction.” She liked that. She was content to do these stage shows that she did in the mid-’60s: Never Too Late, No No Nannette, Auntie Mame, Guys and Dolls, Call Me Madam – and that kept her busy. But she had done these other shows from ’65 up to ’71, when she filled in for Ruby Keeler. She said, “I’ve been on the stage since I’m eight years old, and I like performing in front of a live audience.”
MIKE TIANO: What details about Penny did you learn from Dee-Gee and Susie, or from any other relatives, that Penny didn’t divulge to you personally?
STEVE RANDISI: Well, I knew that she had had a troubled pregnancy, that the first baby that she had died. And I never pressed her about that because I knew it was an unpleasant topic, and it was personal. And I didn’t probe that subject too much. But from Penny’s daughter, I gleaned certain facts about it. The reason why it happened, because Penny’s abdominal muscles were damaged from years of being an acrobat, doing all those flip flops on the stage damaged her pelvic muscles. So it was a very, very difficult delivery. Another thing that I learned: I didn’t know the circumstances of her marriage to Fred Ferguson, husband number two. I knew Penny had been married once before. She was very reticent to discuss that, and she didn’t like talking about it, so I didn’t press her on that.
But husband number two is Dee-Gee’s father, and I didn’t know the circumstances as to why they separated. There was an element of infidelity there on the part of the husband, not Penny. So that broke up, and it was an amicable thing. I learned stories from Dee-Gee about what happened with the marriage to Dr. Singleton. A lot of people who have written about Penny Singleton write erroneously that Singleton was the father of both her daughters, and that’s not true. Ferguson was the father of daughter number one, the one that died, and then daughter number two, who was Dee-Gee. Bob Sparks, her husband who was the producer of the Blondies series, is the father of Penny’s youngest daughter, Susie, who passed away during the COVID crisis. She was living in Paris at the time, she was a dance instructor. She died during the epidemic, but I don’t know that COVID was the cause of her passing.
MIKE TIANO: In compiling the book, what are the one or two facts that you had not known that surprised you?
STEVE RANDISI: Well, a lot of the union stuff. I got into the intricacies of the union business. I knew that she had been suspended. I didn’t know that there were death threats, that some of the people in that business are so cutthroat, that there were death threats. I mentioned that to Dee-Gee [who said], “Oh, yes. Mother was advised that she shouldn’t walk anywhere alone at night because her life might be in danger.” This is when she was battling the bigwigs. A lot of it was a matter of politics. There were a couple of other things career-wise that I learned. For example I didn’t know that she had done radio with George Jessel, and he was the Toastmaster General of the United States; I didn’t know that she performed on his radio program. She sang with him. And she had done a lot of other radio shows, too, before Blondie. She did Kraft Music Hall and then there was another radio show called Hollywood Hotel where she was a regular. Little things like that here and there. The Blondie films are easy because they speak for themselves.
My favorite story in the book, and one that Penny was very fond of telling, was her run-in with Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures. When he came on the set and somebody was smoking he yelled and hollered at everybody, and then she made a comment: “If he’s a fire chief, he should be wearing his uniform.” Mr. Cohn didn’t like that; he sent for her and she said, “Tell him I’m busy, we’re filming a scene. We have to get this done by the end of the day,” because [Larry Simms] could only work so many hours under California child labor laws, and they wanted to get the last scene of the day. When she went up to his office, he yelled at her, he berated her. She wasn’t unnerved by that. She was tough enough to stand up to him, but she figured, “I’ll never work at this studio again after this picture is finished, I’ll never work at this studio again.” But the film was so successful, and it helped save Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy, that Harry Cohn was so grateful that he bought her a Rolls Royce, if I’m not mistaken. She declined it. She said, “No, no, I don’t need it. Thanks, but no, thanks. I’ll keep my little Ford.” They went on to make 27 more films.
MIKE TIANO: She was modest about the trappings of fame. This book, I have to say, was a quintessential labor of love. In fact, I’d be surprised if you don’t get one or two movie deals out of that. I mean, there’s some great stories there, like you say, the Union stuff or just making the Blondie movies. I think somebody should make a Penny Singleton movie biography. But that aside, what are the one or two things about the book of which you would say you are the proudest?
STEVE RANDISI: Well, the fact that I was able to get it out there. I talk to a lot of people who say, “Oh, yes, I want to write a book. I’m writing a book.” They think that they’re writing a book but what they really mean is that they are enamored with the idea of writing a book. But when you sit down and actually begin to do the work and your hair begins to fall out, you’re, oh, my God, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So the fact that I was able to complete it. Now, one thing about the pandemic that worked in my favor is because we were not allowed out, we were under quarantine, I needed something to occupy my time and to occupy my mind. So I’m grateful for the fact that a) I was able to get it done to completion, b) I was able to get it published, and c) I’ll be totally thrilled if people tell me that they enjoy it and that they like it.
As far as making it into a movie, could you picture a scene where Penny is out on the streets of New York, picketing with the Rockettes [saying] “Unfair to the Rockettes!” You could just picture Blondie because in the films she’s always the quintessential dealmaker. At the end of the film, she’s always the one who rescues Dagwood from whatever mess he’s gotten himself into. And she’s trying to negotiate the deal between the client, Mr. Dithers, and Dagwood, and brings everything to a very happy solution. And that was her in real life. She was the quintessential dealmaker and the negotiator, and I could just picture her doing that. As a teenager I remember reading these things in the newspaper, “Blondie did this” or “Blondie did that.” They would refer to her as “Blondie” instead of her real name, but she was a wonderful lady – and the other thing that I had to do, I had this discussion with her daughter. I said, “I don’t want to make her a saint. I don’t want to paint. I don’t want to put too much.” It’s icing on the cake. But everything that’s in that book is absolutely true. That’s exactly the way I knew her, and that’s exactly the way I saw her. She had two faults, and one is that she was overly generous. I mentioned towards the end of the book, that in her life, she lent money to people, and she helped people out. She helped anybody that needed it. She was a champion for the underdog.
And the other thing is, if people were late or they were unprofessional, if they were actors or even in any other field of endeavor for that matter, she could become feisty if people were not acting in a professional manner. Because she was a pro from when she was a small child. She was on the stage from when she was eight years old, beginning in singing in school and singing in the neighborhood and at neighborhood functions and dance recitals and things like that. And by the time she was eight or nine years old, she was a professional. She was earning money. And by the time she was twelve, she was in New York. She went to a professional children’s school. She went to school with Milton Berle and Ruby Keeler and some of the other people that are named in the book. So that’s why when Arthur Lake would show up late, she would occasionally get a little annoyed, but she loved him. There was a lot of love there, and in no way was there any antipathy between them. It was a happy set. The only thing is after the war production costs at the Hollywood studios were rising, and they went from making three or four Blondie films a year down to two.
If you look at the roster of films, you have only two films in 1943, two films in 1945, two films in 1946. And then for some reason – I get asked this a lot and I really don’t know the answer – they released four films in 1947. So they were very, very busy that year. But then after that, from ’48 to ’50, there’s only two pictures per year, two in ’48, two in ’49, and two in 1950. But they did very well. I think the fact that it’s 2024 and these are still shown on a national TV forum every week on the Movies channel speaks volumes about the success of the series that they’re still showing these things. If you look at the TV listings on Saturday, you see that Laurel and Hardy are listed, Blondie is listed, the Three Stooges are listed, and these films are over 80-years-old in many instances, and they’re still playing. That says a lot about its longevity.
MIKE TIANO: Let’s wrap this up with just a couple of questions. What is your favorite Blondie movie, and why?
STEVE RANDISI: I have two favorites: Blondie Plays Cupid and Blondie Goes Latin. I like those. And there are two films that I like a lot towards the end of the run: those are Blondie’s Big Deal, the one about the fireproof paint, and Blondie Hits the Jackpot, the one about the radio contest, that’s the one where Alexander has grown up and he’s going on his first date. I like those two films – I mean, you have a series that spans 12 years, so naturally, there’s a lot of changes along the way. So you really can’t compare the early entries with the late entries because things change over the course of time. The kids are grown up. In the early films, when everything is fresh, there’s a certain energy. And towards the end, they’re becoming more and more like what we’re about to see on the weekly TV sitcoms. So the dynamic is the same, but it plays a little bit differently. So I have favorites among the early group, and I have two favorites among the later group. There are only really one or two films that I’m really not too crazy about that I don’t think are good. But even the ones that are average are good and worth watching. I watch them over and over again, and I enjoy them.
MIKE TIANO: Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot here: What is your favorite non-Blondie movie of Penny’s and why?
STEVE RANDISI: I would say definitely Go West Young Lady, because of the dance number that she does that is remarkable to look at, and the remarkable performance that she gives in that film;. She is really at her apex in that. 1941, she sings up a storm, she dances up a storm, she does her acrobatics stuff. She’s very good in that. She’s got some dramatic moments. She doesn’t completely divorce herself from the Blondie characterization, but there’s enough of her talent that rises through the surface that makes it an enjoyable experience to watch. I would say that one is like a tour de force for her, that’s a really good performance. Her husband, Bob Sparks, produced that film based on the success of the musical performances that she did in Blondie in Society and Blondie Goes Latin. He said, “We really need to show audiences that she’s a musical comedy star, that she’s more than just a housewife playing the Blondie role.” So he created this film, I detailed the history of that in the book. As far as a non-Blondie film that one is really good because it really presents her at her stylish best. She’s awfully good in that film, and it’s an enjoyable film. It’s fast moving, it’s fast paced, and you got a lot of wonderful people in there [including] Charlie Ruggles, Alan Jenkins, young Glenn Ford, Ann Miller.
Penny told me a wonderful story: There’s a cat fight scene where Penny’s character and Ann Miller duke it out. And Penny said, “Watch out for my teeth because I lost a cap once doing a scene like this at Warner Brothers.” And the crew applauded when that scene was completed. A lot of film historians have written that that scene may have served as the blueprint for later films like Fancy Pants, and then Doris Day made one that was in that genre where she was a rough tomboy type person [Calamity Jane]. So to answer your question, I would say Go West Young Lady is my favorite of her non-Blondie films with Swing Your Lady being a close second. I was with Penny when she was reunited with Joan Bennett. Do you remember Joan Bennett?
MIKE TIANO: Joan Bennett. Yes.
STEVE RANDISI: I interviewed Joan Bennett in the ’80s, years after she was on [the goth soap opera] Dark Shadows. I was with Penny when she was reunited with Joan right before Joan passed away. They were in a film together called Vogues of 1938 and neither one of the two of them remembered a whole lot about it so they didn’t talk about having worked together or the film, they talked about what was happening in their lives at the time. This was around the late ’80s. [Later] I looked at the film and I said, “Well, no wonder why they didn’t remember a whole lot about it. Penny’s only in it sporadically.” She’s only in it very, very briefly. She’s subservient to Joan Bennett in that film.
MIKE TIANO: A last question here. You have written about icons, including George Reeves, Merv Griffin, and now Penny Singleton. I’m going to put on my narrator voice: “Now, what’s next for Steve Randisi?”
STEVE RANDISI: I don’t have any plans to do anything else at the moment. But you never know when a good project might pop up. For me to write a book–anybody who’s ever written a book surely knows this: you put a lot into it, it takes several years of your life when you sit down to do a book. And for me, it has to be a subject of what I have an intense interest in.
MIKE TIANO: And passion.
STEVE RANDISI: Yes, you have to have a passion for it.
© 2024 Mike Tiano. All Rights Reserved. Photos courtesy of Steve Randisi.
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