February 6, 2014
The last Tonight Show with Jay Leno… again.
February 7,
2014
The Last Late
Night with Jimmy Fallon
February
7, 1964
Beatles arrive in New York. On February 7, 1964, Pan Am Yankee Clipper flight 101 from London Heathrow lands at New York's Kennedy Airport--and "Beatlemania" arrives.
Two days later, Paul McCartney, age 21, Ringo Starr,
23, John Lennon, 23, and George Harrison, 20, made their first appearance on
the Ed Sullivan Show, a popular television variety show. Although it was
difficult to hear the performance over the screams of teenage girls in the
studio audience, an estimated 73 million U.S. television viewers, or about 40
percent of the U.S. population, tuned in to watch. Sullivan immediately booked
the Beatles for two more appearances that month. The group made their first public
concert appearance in the United States on February 11 at the Coliseum in Washington, D.C., and 20,000
fans attended. The next day, they gave two back-to-back performances at New
York's Carnegie Hall, and police were forced to close off the streets around
the venerable music hall because of fan hysteria. On February 22, the Beatles
returned to England.
The Beatles' first American tour left a major imprint
in the nation's cultural memory. With American youth poised to break away from
the culturally rigid landscape of the 1950s, the Beatles, with their
exuberant music and good-natured rebellion, were the perfect catalyst for the
shift. Their singles and albums sold millions of records, and at one point in
April 1964 all five best-selling U.S. singles were Beatles songs. By the time
the Beatles first feature-film, A Hard Day's Night, was released in
August, Beatlemania was epidemic the world over. Later that month, the four
boys from Liverpool returned to the United States for their second tour and
played to sold-out arenas across the country.
Later, the Beatles gave up touring to concentrate on
their innovative studio recordings, such as 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Heart's Club Band, a psychedelic concept album that is regarded as a
masterpiece of popular music. The Beatles' music remained relevant to youth
throughout the great cultural shifts of the 1960s, and critics of all ages
acknowledged the songwriting genius of the Lennon-McCartney team. In 1970, the
Beatles disbanded, leaving a legacy of 18 albums and 30 Top 10 U.S. singles.
During the next decade, all four Beatles pursued solo
careers, with varying success. Lennon, the most outspoken and controversial
Beatle, was shot to death by a deranged fan outside his New York apartment
building in 1980. McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his
contribution to British culture. In November 2001, George Harrison succumbed to
cancer.
February
8, 1974
Good
Times first aired on CBS.
The series stars Esther Rolle as Florida Evans and John Amos as her husband, James Evans, Sr. The characters originated on the sitcom Maude as Florida and Henry Evans, with Florida employed as Maude
Findlay's housekeeper in Tuckahoe, New York and
Henry employed as a firefighter. When producers decided to feature the Florida
character in her own show, they applied retroactive changes
to the characters' history. Henry's name became James, there is no mention of
Maude, and the couple now live in Chicago.
Florida and James Evans and their three children live
in a rented project apartment, 17C, at 963 N. Gilbert Ave., in a housing project (implicitly the infamous Cabrini–Green projects, shown in the opening and closing credits but never
mentioned by name on the show) in a poor, black neighborhood in inner-city
Chicago. Florida's and James's children are James, Jr., also known as "J.J." (Jimmie Walker), Thelma (Bern
Nadette Stanis), and Michael (Ralph Carter). When the series begins, J.J. and Thelma are
seventeen and sixteen years old, respectively, and Michael, called "the
militant midget" by his father due to his passionate activism, is eleven years old. Their exuberant neighbor, and Florida's best
friend, is Willona Woods (played by Ja'net Dubois), a recent divorcée who works at a boutique. Their building
superintendent is Nathan Bookman (Johnny Brown), to whom James, Willona and later J.J. refer as
"Buffalo Butt", or, even more derisively, "Booger".
February 9, 1964
America meets the Beatles on The Ed
Sullivan Show.
For
the record, Fred Kaps proceeded to be quite charming and funny over the next
five minutes. In fact, Fred Kaps is revered to this day by magicians around the
world as the only three-time Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques
Grand Prix winner. But Fred Kaps had the horrific bad luck on this day in 1964
to be the guest that followed the Beatles on Ed Sullivan—possibly
the hardest act to follow in the history of show business.
It
is estimated that 73 million Americans were watching that night as the Beatles
made their live U.S. television debut. Roughly eight minutes before Fred Kaps
took the stage, Sullivan gave his now-famous intro, "Ladies and
gentlemen...the Beatles!" and after a few seconds of rapturous cheering
from the audience, the band kicked into "All My Lovin'." Fifty
seconds in, the first audience-reaction shot of the performance shows a teenage
girl beaming and possibly hyperventilating. Two minutes later, Paul is singing
another pretty, mid-tempo number: "Til There Was You," from the
Broadway musicalMusic Man. There's screaming at the end of
every phrase in the lyrics, of course, but to view the broadcast today, it
seems driven more by anticipation than by the relatively low-key performance
itself. And then came "She Loves You," and the place seems to
explode. What followed was perhaps the most important two minutes and 16
seconds of music ever broadcast on American television—a sequence that still
sends chills down the spine almost half a century later.
The
Beatles would return later in the show to perform "I Saw Her Standing
There" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" as the audience remained at
the same fever pitch it had reached during "She Loves You." This time
it was Wells & the Four Fays, a troupe of comic acrobats, who had to suffer
what Fred Kaps had after the Beatles' first set. Perhaps the only non-Beatle on
Sullivan's stage that night who did not consider the evening a total loss was
the young man from the Broadway cast of Oliver! who sang
"I'd Do Anything" as the Artful Dodger midway through the show. His
name was Davy Jones, and less than three years later, he'd star in a TV show of
his own that owed a rather significant debt to the hysteria that began on this
night in 1964: The Monkees.
February 11, 1934
Tina Louise is born Tina Blacker in New York City.
In 1957, she and Julie Newmar appeared on Broadway in the hit musical Li'l Abner. Her album It's Time for Tina was also
released that year, with songs such as "Embraceable You" and "I'm
in the Mood for Love".
Louise made her Hollywood film debut in 1958 in God's
Little Acre. That same year the
National Art Council named her the "World's Most Beautiful Red Head."
She became an in-demand leading lady for major stars like Robert
Taylor, Richard Widmark and Robert Ryan, often playing somber roles quite unlike the
glamorous pinup photographs and Playboy pictorials she had become famous for in the late
1950s. She turned down roles in Li'l
Abner and Operation
Petticoat taking roles on
Broadway and in Italian
cinema and Hollywood. Among her more notable Italian film credits was the
historical epic Garibaldi (1960), directed by Roberto
Rossellini, that concerned
Garibaldi's efforts to unify the Italian states in 1860. When Louise returned
to the United States, she began studying with Lee Strasberg and eventually became a member of the Actors Studio. She appeared in the 1964 beach party film For Those Who Think Young, with Bob Denver, prior to the development of Gilligan's Island.
In 1964, she left the Broadway musical Fade
Out – Fade In to portray movie
star Ginger
Grant on the situation comedy Gilligan's Island, after the part was turned
down by Jayne
Mansfield. However, she was unhappy
with the role and worried that it would typecast her. The role did make Louise a pop icon of the era, and in 2005 an episode of TV Land Top
Ten ranked her as second only to Heather Locklear as the greatest of television's all-time sex symbols.
After the series ended in 1967, Louise continued to
work in film and made numerous guest appearances in various television series.
She appeared in the Matt Helm spy spoof The Wrecking Crew
(1969) with Dean Martin. Louise played a doomed suburban housewife in the
original The Stepford Wives
(1975), and both the film and her performance were well received.
She attempted to shed her comedic image by essaying
grittier roles, including a guest appearance as a pathetic heroin addict in a
1974 Kojak episode, as well as a co-starring role as an evil
Southern prison guard in the 1976 ABC
TV Movie Nightmare
in Badham County. Her other
television films of the period included Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976), SST: Death Flight (1977), Friendships, Secrets and Lies (1979),
and in the prime-time soap opera Dallas, during the 1978-79 seasons. as J.R.'s secretary,
Julie Gray, a semi-regular character.
The question "Ginger
or Mary Ann?" is regarded to be
a classic pop-psychological question when given to American men of a certain age as an insight into their
characters, or at least their desires as regarding certain female stereotypes.
Despite successes on her own, she declined to
participate in any of three reunion television films for Gilligan's Island
and the role of Ginger was recast with Judith Baldwin and Constance
Forslund. Although she did not appear
in these television movies, she made brief walk-on appearances on a few talk
shows and specials for Gilligan's Island reunions, including Good
Morning America (1982), The Late Show
(1988) and the 2004 TV Land award show with the other surviving cast members.
In the 1990s, she was reunited with costars Bob Denver, Dawn Wells, and Russell Johnson in an episode of Roseanne. She did not reunite with them for the television
film Surviving Gilligan's Island: The Incredible True Story of the Longest
Three-Hour Tour in History (2001), co-produced by Wells. She was portrayed
by Kristen
Dalton in the television film. Her
relations with series star Denver were rumored to be strained, but in 2005, she
wrote a brief, affectionate memorial to him in the year-end
"farewell" issue of Entertainment
Weekly.
In 1985, Louise played the second and final Taylor
Chapin on the syndicated soap opera Rituals. Later film roles included a co-starring appearance
in the Robert
Altman comedy O.C. and Stiggs (1987) as well as the independently made satire Johnny Suede (1992) starring Brad Pitt. She appeared in Married...
with Children as Miss Beck in
episode Kelly Bounces Back (1990).
From 1966 to 1974, Louise was married to radio and TV
announcer/interviewer Les Crane, with whom she has one daughter, Caprice Crane (born 1974), who became an MTV producer and a
novelist. Crane's first novel, Stupid and Contagious, was published in
2006, and was warmly dedicated to her mother. Louise now resides in New York
City. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a
lifetime member of the Actors Studio. As a literacy and academic advocate, she became
a volunteer teacher at Learning Leaders, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing
tutoring to New York City school children. It has been her passion to help
young students gain not only literary skills, but also confidence,
self-determination and proof of their own potential. She has written two books:
Sunday: A Memoir (1997) and When I Grow Up (2007). The latter is
a children's book that inspires children to believe they can become whatever
they choose through creative and humorous comparisons of animal kingdom
achievements. She published a second children's book named "What Does A
Bee Do?".
Louise made four record albums, two for Concert Hall, and two for Urania Record (1958 and 1959 respectively). By far the most sought-after of these is the 1957 album It's Time For Tina (Concert Hall 1521). With arrangements by Jim Timmens and Buddy Weed's Orchestra, 12 tracks include "Tonight Is The Night" and "I'm in the Mood for Love". Coleman Hawkins is featured on tenor sax. A version of this album is planned by UK label Harkit Records.
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