The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall started their
relationship on the set of To Have and Have Not.

To Have and Have Not (1944, Warner Bros.)

Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan,
Dan Seymour, Marcel Dalio, Hoagy Carmichael,
Screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner,
from the Ernest Hemmingway novel

Directed by Howard Hawks

Seeing two people fall in love in a movie is so common that it’s completely unremarkable. But watching as their onscreen affair develops into an offscreen passion is much more rare. That’s what happens in To Have and Have Not, where veteran actor Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in her first movie role, strike sparks that ignite a relationship that would last until his death in 1957.

The film’s genesis lies in a challenge put down by director Howard Hawks in which he boasted to writer Ernest Hemmingway that he could make a movie from Hemmingway’s worst book. They both agreed To Have and Have Not, which is set in Cuba, possessed that dubious distinction. Hawks then put author William Faulkner, who later would win a Nobel Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes, and Warners staff writer Jules Furthman to work on the script.

They moved the setting to the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was controlled by the Nazi-friendly Vichy government in France. Faulkner and Furthman also created a story that closely resembles Casablanca, the now-legendary film that made Bogart a star and continues to make money for Warner Bros. The appearance of Marcel Dalio (Frenchy), who had a small part in Casablanca, cements the connection between the two films.

Again, resistance fighters ask Bogart (Harry Morgan) to aid their cause, but Morgan sticks his neck out for no one – until he does. He battles and bests the Surete’s slippery Capt. Menard (Seymour) to win one for the good guys. There’s even a lively cafe with a piano player – Cricket (Carmichael).

But unlike in Casablanca, Bogart gets the girl, who takes the form of the feisty Marie (Bacall). From the first time we see her, when she barges into Morgan’s room for matches, to the fade out at the end, Bacall grabs nearly every scene she’s in. Watching the two actors banter and spar as they fall in love in both the fictional and real worlds is a great treat. I also found it amazing that first-timer Bacall keeps up with Bogart, which makes it seem Morgan truly has met his match.

Without the heat provided by Bogie and Bacall, To Have and Have Not would be just a derivative knockoff of another movie. Instead, it’s a fine film containing performances – and a love affair – that stand the test of time.

Memorial for a Monumental Man

The Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park

Ruthless Gilded Age business tyrants, such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and the Mellons, built monuments and landmarks in Pittsburgh to display their wealth and power, and as a way to achieve immortality.

They had to bestow such honors upon themselves because the employees they squeezed to earn their large fortunes weren’t going to do it.

George Westinghouse was a different case.

The man who made complex transportation systems possible with the invention of the railroad air brake and who made the production and transmission of electricity over vast areas possible was beloved by the workforce that stretched from East Pittsburgh around the world.

The working population held Westinghouse in high esteem because he believed an employer could make huge profits while treating his employees in a humane fashion.

At Wilmerding, the company town created for the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the concern for living conditions, as well as the educational and cultural growth of employees and their families, was paramount.

George Westinghouse  

In 1869, WABCO became the first employer to implement nine-hour days, 55-hour work weeks and half-holidays on Sundays.

Although Westinghouse lost control of his companies after a financial downturn in 1907 and he died in 1914, the nearly 55,000 workers at his former firms decided they wanted to honor him.

To that end, the employees chipped in to erect a monument in Pittsburgh, the heart of Westinghouse’s industrial empire.

The Westinghouse Memorial is an elaborate sculpture that once faced a small pond and a fountain in a picturesque spot in Schenley Park, not far from what was the campus of Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University.

Architects Henry Hornbostel and Eric Fisher Wood designed the monument and the surrounding landscape, including the pond, trees, and location of black granite benches.

The organizers chose the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial statue, Daniel Chester French,  to design the sculptures, including a statue titled “The Spirit of American Youth,” a snapshot of a young man taking inspiration from the life of Westinghouse.

The center portion of the monument depicts Westinghouse between a mechanic and an engineer, with the surrounding panels (created by sculptor Paul Fjelde) illustrating Westinghouse’s achievements.

The Spirit of American Youth

At the monument's dedication Oct. 6, 1930, which was broadcast by KDKA and Westinghouse radio stations in Chicago and Boston, all the bronze figures and reliefs had been covered in gold leaf. After the festivities, Hornbostel said that finishing touch, “will be enhanced by the smoky atmosphere of the city, [and] will endure for thousands of years, as is shown by traces of gold still to be seen on the monuments of the Roman Caesars.”

However, the work of vandals forced the removal of the gold leaf in 1941.

On dedication day, nearly 15,000 people crowded the memorial site to hear the speakers and bands that were part of the festivities. A lavish banquet for the movers and shakers who came to honor Westinghouse was held the night before at the William Penn Hotel.

Reporters and photographers from Pittsburgh newspapers were on hand to record the ceremony for their readers and posterity.

Honor is Paid Westinghouse By Big Throng
Genius of Manufacturer is Eulogized
at Schenley Park Celebration, Banquet

Here is how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s reporter described the scene for a Page 1 story in the Oct. 7, 1930, issue:

On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the inventor's birth, the nations of the world joined hands in extolling the character of the man who had rendered an “inestimable service to mankind and whose contributions to industry played so large a part in the progress of civilization.”

An admiring crowd that began to gather in the park during the early afternoon grew to immense proportions before the program was started and stretched far out over the adjoining hillsides, with thousands content to stand through the proceedings.

The keynote speaker was James Frances Burke, general counsel of the Republican National Committee:

“It was he who first made safety the handmaiden of speed. It was he who was a leader in multiplying the world's motive power on land and sea. It was he who brightened the pathway and lightened the burden of God’s children as they toiled and traveled on their never-ending journey down the ages.”

After Burke’s address, the unveiling took place to the accompaniment of the combined Westinghouse bands, with the industrialist's nephew, Herman Westinghouse Fletcher, in charge. Westinghouse’s brother, H.H. Westinghouse, also was in attendance.

Westinghouse and Union Switch and Signal Company employee choruses sang the “Star Spangled Banner” and “America.” The Right Reverend Alexander Mann, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, gave the invocation.

Labor, Capital Pay Honor to Westinghouse

The Pittsburgh Press also set the scene in a Page 2 feature:

Men from workshops which rest their foundations on the inventive genius of Westinghouse joined with leaders assembled from throughout the nation in dedicating the George Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park yesterday.

Representing the employees who funded the memorial, George Munro, a foreman at Westinghouse Air Brake Company, said, “Those who knew him best loved him most. … This memorial, in its beauty, symbolism, and strength, typifies the character of Westinghouse.”

U.S. Rep. James M. Beck of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh mayor Charles H. Kline also weighed in on the industrialist’s legacy.

“George Westinghouse was a master builder of this economic nation, which is more truly represented by the genius ability of this country than the documents of all its lawyers,”  Beck said.

Kline told the crowd, “Time may cause this memorial to decay, but when a thousand years have passed, the readers of history will find still brilliant the name of George Westinghouse.”

In a statement sent by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to be read at the ceremony, he wrote, “George Westinghouse earned an important and permanent place in history by his many contributions to the advancement of civilization.”

Nations Honor Westinghouse

This was the lead of the story that was buried inside the Hearst-owned Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph:

Industrial giants of many nations paid tribute yesterday to the memory of a boy who toyed with trinkets — to George Westinghouse, who gave the world 400 inventions and almost single-handedly revolutionized modern mechanics.

In a supposedly exclusive column for the Sun-Tribune, but which bears the name of the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, former president Calvin Coolidge wrote from Boston:

“George Westinghouse had that combination which is so rare of both inventive and business genius. ... Because he lived, industrial life is more human, more safe and more productive. He ranks as one of the great benefactors of mankind.”

All in all, it was a fitting day of tribute for a giant who had changed the world.

The memorial's centerpiece

Saluting Soldiers and Sailors

Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum

In an effort to honor the dwindling number of Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization comprised of Union Army vets, conceived the idea of a memorial hall in the 1890s.

In 1907, architect Henry Hornbostel, who designed many buildings in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, created a Beaux Arts masterpiece on a heroic scale for the GAR, Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

The hall, which is the largest structure in the United States dedicated solely to saluting those who have served in all branches of the nation's military, contains a museum with rare artifacts from the Civil War to present conflicts.

It also has a 2,500-seat auditorium, a banquet hall and meeting rooms. The building also served as the setting for the Memphis courthouse scenes in the film "Silence of the Lambs."

The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, which is its formal name, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Cat People: Low Budget, High Quality

Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) confides her fears 

about an ancient Serbian curse to Oliver Reed (Kent Smith)

in "Cat People," the first in a series of inexpensive,

but high quality, horror films producer Val Lewton

created for RKO Radio Pictures in the 1940s.

Cat People (1942, RKO Radio Pictures)

Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith,

Tom Conway, Joyce Randolph
Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen; Produced by Val Lewton

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

While classic films often feature legendary stars and boast large budgets to help famous directors tell timeless stories, they aren’t a requirement. The above credits for "Cat People" are a great example. When the movie hit the screen 71 years ago, the participants were far from household names. After this collaboration, however, they forever will be connected with a masterpiece.

Financially troubled RKO ordered Lewton to create inexpensive and quickly made horror films to cash in on moviegoers’ fascination with the genre. What Lewton gave them in "Cat People" and eight other titles he produced for the studio went above and beyond the typical horror fare. They were thoughtful, sometimes beautiful, minor works of art.

"Cat People" tells the tale of Serbian immigrant Irena Dubrovna (Simon), who fears she suffers a curse in which she would transform into a dangerous cat if she feels jealousy, anger or sexual desire. Irena meets happy-go-lucky Oliver Reed (Smith) while she sketches a leopard at the Central Park Zoo. Later in her apartment, after she confides, “I like the darkness. It’s friendly,” Irena reveals her deepest fear to Oliver, who dismisses it as a fairy tale.

In spite of all this, they marry, but Irena keeps Oliver at a distance to reduce the chances of fulfilling the curse. After hearing this from Oliver, colleague Alice Moore (Randolph) recommends psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Conway), who tells Irena her fears have a more mundane source. Eventually, Irena’s treatment of Oliver pushes him toward Alice.

After seeing the pair together, Irena is overcome by jealousy and later stalks Alice down a dark street. Consisting of nothing more than the sight of some rustling foliage, the interplay of light and darkness as Alice walks under streetlights and the clicking sounds of women’s shoes as they continue down the street, an overwhelming sense of impeding menace is generated. When it seems that menace will appear, the hissing sound of a bus door is what we get instead. This device can be found in the thousands of horror films that followed.

In the end,  Oliver and Alice finally discover, “She never lied to us.”

With a budget of less than $150,000, Tourneur and Lewton knew plausible special effects were out of the question. Instead, they filled "Cat People" with shadows, sounds and an atmosphere of foreboding and melancholy that fire the viewer’s imagination, where the best special effects always are created.

Alice Moore (Joyce Randolph) isn't
sure if she's being followed
in "Cat People.

100 Years on Highland Avenue

One hundred years later, Highland Towers, which was
designed by architect Frederick G. Scheibler Jr.,remains
 a unique and pleasant resident of Shadyside.

When it opened on South Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood in 1913, Highland Towers Apartments was the height of modernity.

The building, which originally contained four 10-room flats, featured such mod cons as electrical connections in every room, clothes dryers, a central vacuum cleaning system and a room for servants in each unit.
 

This interesting architectural
detail can be found on the
facade of Highland Towers.

But architect Frederick G. Scheibler Jr., who designed many houses and apartments in the East End during his career, created an early modern gem that remains a delight to the eyes of passersby.

Scheibler, who was influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan while he was designing the structure, used four different colors of brick in patterns that impart a pleasing texture to the exterior.

Inside, he employed Rookwood tile, Carerra glass in the bathrooms and art glass windows.

“The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler Jr.” by Martin Aurand, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, contains a chapter about Highland Towers that features floor plans and promotional materials used to sell the apartments when they opened in 1913.

The Pitt Press posted a digital edition of the book at www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=34290

One hundred years later, Highland Towers still is the best-looking apartment block in that section of Shadyside.

It's a Wonderful (and Dark) Life

George Bailey (James Stewart) finds himself in the
film noir world of Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."

It’s a Wonderful Life (1947, Liberty Films)

Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore,

Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Gloria Grahame;

Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra;

Directed by Frank Capra

This is one of the few films that you safely can assume most Americans have seen. When the copyright for this Christmas staple mistakenly wasn’t renewed in the 1970s, any TV station could broadcast “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and it seemed like all of them did.

That said, here’s a rundown of the basics: George Bailey (James Stewart) has a great wife, Mary (Donna Reed), several cute kids and the respect of nearly every citizen of Bedford Falls. But an $8,000 blunder by his Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) gives greedy bad guy Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) the opportunity to shut down Bailey Bros. Building and Loan and to have George arrested. This unhinges George, who gets drunk before plowing his car into a tree. He then heads for a bridge, where he plans to end it all because he thinks everyone would be better off without him.

Violet (Gloria Grahame) tries
to get George Bailey's attention.

But the townsfolk’s prayers are answered and Angel Second Class Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers) is dispatched to convince George he is valued by showing him how charming Bedford Falls would have become nasty Pottersville if he’d never been born. Having done that, George runs home to find friends and family chipping in to raise the money needed to keep him out of jail, which provides the tear-producing happy ending.

The story’s demonstration of how one person matters in the greater scheme of things is what keeps viewers coming back each Christmas. However, all isn’t sweetness and light. During the majority of the film’s final 30 minutes, George is thrown into the film noir world that Pottersville represents.

This section of the movie has many features that mark the film noir genre and style. It spotlights a tortured protagonist plunged into a universe where nightmares come true and where fate always finds him. It shows scenes of a neon-lit city at night, and its pool halls and drinking joints crowded with a sketchy clientele.

Adding to the film noir feel is a cast populated by actors who made their marks in the genre. At the top of the list is Stewart, who later shoved his good-guy persona aside when he went over to the dark side in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.” Barrymore (“Key Largo”) and Ward Bond (Bert the cop, “The Maltese Falcon”) appeared with Humphrey Bogart in a pair of film noir classics.

Another element of film noir evident here is the concept of the good woman contrasted with the not-so-good woman. In this case, Mary is held up as a paragon of virtue while flirty Violet (Gloria Grahame) is portrayed as easy in Bedford Falls and worse in Pottersville. Grahame strengthens the film’s noir credentials because she later became one of the quintessential femmes fatale in such classics as “Human Desire” and “The Big Heat.”

The trip to Pottersville was the flip side of the feel-good story that dominates the film and was the reality of the world forming outside the little town. Unlike in film noir, however, this protagonist escapes and discovers how wonderful life is, which also is a great Christmas present for us all. 

Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell, far left) and citizens of Bedford Falls
 join Mary (Donna Reed) and George for the heartwarming ending of "It's a Wonderful Life."

A House of Luxury Reborn

Lawyer and business executive Willis McCook wanted a new home for his large family, and $300,000 got him the above Jacobean mansion on Fifth Avenue in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh in 1906.

Located on Pittsburgh’s “Millionaires Row,” the mansion contained plenty of handcrafted woodwork, stained glass windows and even its own chapel.

Born in Ohio in 1856, McCook graduated from Yale, where he was captain of the university’s first football team, and studied law with a Pittsburgh firm and at Columbia University before joining the Allegheny County Bar in 1876.

McCook was a pioneer in corporate law and the personal attorney for industrialist Henry Clay Frick. McCook helped form coke companies for Frick and served as his attorney in a protracted lawsuit against Andrew Carnegie. The legal fees the attorney collected from that grudge match helped to pay for McCook’s mansion.

Scandal touched the McCook family in early 1911 when Willis Jr., one of McCook’s 10 children, ignored his parents’ objections and eloped with Margaret Norris, the daughter of a poor carpenter, and married her in Cumberland, MD.

The Catholic McCooks’ objections were centered on the bride’s Presbyterian faith. Both families initially disowned the couple, and young Willis was forced to find employment at the Pittsburgh Steel Company in Glassport.

The elder McCook eventually relented and offered his forgiveness – and his financial support – in exchange for Margaret’s conversion to Catholicism. She complied in February 1911.

The measure of McCook’s national fame was displayed by the coverage the New York Times gave to this episode.

McCook had a happier time when his daughter, Bessie, became engaged and he built a Tudor mansion for the young couple on Amberson Avenue, around the corner from his mansion. The house, now known as the McCook-Reed Mansion, was completed in 1905, a year before the main house.

The family lived in the house until the late 1930s, but the Great Depression took its toll on the McCook fortune and the city of Pittsburgh took possession in lieu of  $65,000 in back taxes.

Emil and Margaret Bonavita bought the property in 1949 and for 50 years it housed Carnegie Mellon University students. Residents included Shirley Jones, George Peppard and Andy Warhol. A February 2004 fire on the third floor ended the house’s time as student housing.

Richard Pearson, his wife Mary Del Brady and a group of investors bought the McCook Mansion for $1.4 million in 2005 with the intent of turning the mansion and the adjoining McCook-Reed Mansion into a boutique hotel.

After six years and about $8 million were spent bringing historic McCook Mansion back to its original condition when possible, the Mansions on Fifth opened in 2011. It has 13 rooms, including two suites; a 1,000-square-foot presidential suite; a small bar; a fitness room; a spa and a wine cellar.

The McCook-Reed Mansion is still undergoing renovations.

The Mansions on Fifth was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 2011.

Visit Mansions on Fifth for information. Click HERE for photos taken before renovations began.

The McCook-Reed Mansion in 2011