It’s TUESDAY which means TCM’s showcase of Vivien Leigh films begins tonight! Three of Vivien Leigh’s earlier films will air on Turner Classic beginning at 9pm Eastern here in the USA: Dark Journey (a complicated espionage story), Storm in a Teacup (a silly comedy in which she costars with Rex Harrison), and St. Martin’s Lane (a lively film in which Vivien is a street performer dreaming of bigger things). Be sure to click on the links and read TCM’s articles on the films! And of course, set your DVR or schedule your evening around these films as Vivien Leigh is celebrated on Tuesdays! Robert Osborne said it correctly in his article: “A suggestion: make TCM a prime destination on Tuesdays throughout September. The view will stagger you. ”

A visitor to the Vivien-Leigh.com Blog directed me to these wonderful youtube videos. The person who uploaded them, Inspirecali, had this to say about this July 2010 Interview with Ms Conlon: “Cammie passed away Wednesday morning at her home in Fort Bragg after a short battle with cancer. Cammie gained early recognition as “Bonnie Blue Butler” in Gone with the Wind. We were lucky enough to speak with her last month at the Little River Inn in Mendocino where she served as PR Director. She was gracious, kind and giving. It was a pleasure to know her, if ever so briefly. Because, this was her last interview, we present the unedited version, where she spoke candidly on a variety of subjects.”

Everyone is remembering Ms Conlon in their own way….

For those of you who didn’t win the September TCM Booklet, you can check out the Vivien Leigh Highlights below. Not only was she featured on the front cover (in Waterloo Bridge) but Robert Osborne wrote an introductory article. And her image appears on 2 other pages. Finally the TV schedule appears in print but I’ll print it up for you below (for those that live in the USA and have TCM on their TV). TCM will air 2 documentaries and 13 of her films in September… but only on Tuesdays (though The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone is on tonight) so be sure to tune in!

Highlights from the booklet:

Cammie (left) pictured with her mother and sister

Below Cammie recalls some of her memories from GWTW:

I have a dozen or so snapshot memories of being on the set . . .  My strongest memory of being on set is the heat. All of my scenes were interiors (even Bonnie’s fatal jumping scene). Each setup was lit by dozens of huge klieg lights, lights hot enough to melt the actors’ heavy makeup and certainly hot enough to make us perspire under our weighty 1860s costumes.

The other memory I have is the smell. Over the years I’ve visited several movie and TV sets, and each time, the moment I enter the sound stage, it hits me– a pungent aroma created by the heat of the lights hitting wood and metal . . . Right up there with those memories of heat and smell is the day I forgot my lines. When mother recalled the scene for me, she told me she thought I was just rebelling, being a bit bratty. She said I hadn’t really been paying attention that morning when we went over my part in the script. Every day when we arrived at the studio, Mother and I went into our trailer where she washed and set my hair and ran my lines with me.

That day, whether I really forgot them or only pretended to, what I remember is that everything on the set got very quiet. The  cameras stopped, and the lights were turned off. Director Victor Fleming called “Cut” and everyone was silent. Fleming came over to me, knelt down, and looked me in the eye.

“Cammie” he said. “I have a little girl your age. The reason I come to work at the studio every day is so I can take care of her. Cammie, do you see all these men working with us?”

I looked around at the crew– all male in those days.

“Yes, Mr Fleming.”

“Well,  they all have little girls and boys at home to take care of, and that’s why they come to work every day. And Cammie, when you don’t know your lines, we can’t do our jobs and take care of our children.”

I can still feel the shame. I never blew my lines again.

One day my pony forgot his lines.

Congrats to:

Kathy W.
Karen B.
Corra M.
Nyos Y.
Martin

I will contact you all via email and collect your mailing addresses! I will mail your TCM Booklets by the end of the week. Thanks to all for participating

A Fun, Educational Celebration of The History of Gone With The Wind.

Sponsored by Saint Louis University Museum of Art, Saint Louis University, American Airlines, HEC-TV, Drury Hotels, CPR Packaging, The Lodge at Grant’s Trail B&B, M&P Graphics

Friday, November 5

TBA “St. Louis and Civil War Connection to Gone With The Wind”

7 p.m. “Blog With The Wind” Meet people behind the GWTW websites, Facebook pages, and blogs – Drury Inn, Forest Park.

8 p.m. Fiddle-de-dee Follies –Musical/ stage production saluting GWTW- Drury Inn, Forest Park

Saturday November 6

9:30-11:30 a.m. “Market Bazaar”- Drury Inn Forest Park. Meet The Actors and Authors!

• Features autograph session with three actors from GWTW, plus author book signings.

11:30 a.m. Saint Louis University Museum of Art (SLUMA) 3663 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108

• Gone With The Wind Memorabilia Exhibit, featuring the collection of Novella Perrin, PhD.

• Special Musical Entertainment: Civil War Era Music- Laura Sleade, Ed Hawkes

12:30 p.m. “Margaret Mitchell Birthday Celebration”- SLUMA (Includes box lunch, ticket required)

• “The Atlanta Premiere of GWTW” Keynote Speaker: GWTW Expert Herb Bridges.

• Introduction of Dr. Novella Perrin about her Gone With The Wind Memorabilia Collection.

• “Beau Knows Gone With The Wind” Mickey Kuhn, Patrick Curtis, and Greg Giese, actors who played Beau Wilkes at various ages in Gone With The Wind. (No autographs at this event.*) Introduction by Patrisha Henson, GWTW Collector.

6:30 p.m. “Gateway To The Wind Charity Ball” Benefits Rainbows For Kids (www.RainbowsForKids.org)

• Bring your checkbook for the charity auction, including framed Yakovetic prints signed by Ann Rutherford and other GWTW actor
• Private VIP Reception, Open Bar, Appetizers,
• Dinner Buffet
• Souvenir Gift
• Live and Silent Auction
• Party combines “Then” and “Now”… Two bands, one is a Civil War era duo, the second one is a rock band. There will be Virginia Reel and other dancing.
• Antebellum “ball” wear or formal dress is encouraged but not required

Sunday, November 7

11:30 a.m. “Meet The Speakers And Artist Reception” with Warner Brothers artist, Yakovetic, and conference speakers.

• View Gone With The Wind art and special unveiling of Yakovetic’s newest painting: “Young Master Wilkes” (featuring Mickey Kuhn in his role of Beau Wilkes.) Kuhn will be on hand for the unveiling. Saint Louis Universtiy Cook Hall. 3674 Lindell Blv. (across from SLUMA).

12 p.m. “The Hollywood Connection”- Saint Louis University John Cook School of Business Anheuser Busch Auditorium. (Ticket Required. Refreshments/ snack lunch provided)

• Documentary Screening: “The Making Of A Masterpiece” featuring actors from the movie.

• “Gone With The Wind Memories From Our Mother, Marcella Rabwin” Mark and Paul Rabwin share stories told by their mother, Marcella Rabwin, executive assistant to Gone With The Wind producer David O. Selznick.

• “Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable” Leigh Mills, Vivien-Leigh.com

3 p.m. Gateway To The Wind Conference closes.

___________________________________________

Reservations are now being accepted! Three packages available.

Gateway to the Wind, P.O. Box 6934 St. Louis, MO 63123

(314) 849-7578

Reservation Form

$90 Weekend Windie Pass Includes:

• *Friday Afternoon Gone With The Wind St. Louis/Civil War Event

• Friday evening Blog With The Wind

• Access to Market Bazaar on Saturday. Morning

• Saturday Margaret Mitchell Birthday Lunch and Speakers at SLUMA

• Sunday Hollywood Connection, Speakers and Refreshments at Saint Louis University Cook Hall

• One Souvenir Program

PLUS

• Autographed copy of The Making Of A Masterpiece, by Sally Tippett Rains

• One Souvenir Poster

• One Souvenir Documentary.

$60 Weekend Windie Pass Includes:

• Friday Afternoon Gone With The Wind St. Louis/Civil War Event

• Friday evening Blog With The Wind

• Access to Market Bazaar on Saturday Morning

• Saturday Margaret Mitchell Birthday Lunch & Speakers at SLUMA

• Hollywood Connection, Speakers and Refreshments at Saint Louis University Cook Hall

• One Souvenir Event Program

A La Carte Package- Create your own (Start with $60 or $90 Weekend Pass & Add What You Want)

Additional Items:

___$20 each The Making Of A Masterpiece, The True Story Of Margaret Mitchell’s Classic Novel, Gone With The Wind, by Sally Tippett Rains. Autographed. (Book will be picked up when you check in.)

___ $10 each The Making Of A Masterpiece Documentary DVD. Features background on GWTW plus interviews with living actors from the movie including Ann Rutherford, Cammie King, Mickey Kuhn, Patrick Curtis, Greg Giese, and GWTW enthusiasts Dr. Christopher Sullivan and Robert Rosterman. this documentary was done through an educational grant and at this time there are no plans to sell it in the future.

___$10 Souvenir “Gateway To The Wind” Poster

———————–

You won’t want to miss the…

GATEWAY TO THE WIND CHARITY BALL!

Saturday November 6, 2010

6:30p.m.

Orlando Gardens Banquet Center

The Gateway To The Wind Ball is the theme of the annual charity gala for

Rainbows For Kids, a 501 (c) (3) charity. (www.RainbowsForKids.org)

Rainbows For Kids works with families of children with cancer, providing fun activities (including an annual baseball team, parties, trips to the theater, bowling parties, etc.), as well as support material, sponsorship for a free camp for kids with cancer, and much more. Author Sally Tippett Rains, whose family started the charity, is the volunteer Executive Director. There are no paid employees, everyone is a volunteer. We appreciate your support for these families who are going though such a tough time.

$100 Ticket Includes:

* Private VIP Reception, Open Bar, Appetizers

* Dinner Buffet

* Souvenir Gift

* Live and Silent Auction

NOTE: Separate check required for the ball, tax deductible as determined by the law.

Make check to Rainbows For Kids, and add $35 each for your copy (or copies) of The Filming of Gone With the Wind, by Herb Bridges, who will be at the ball signing books. Proceeds from the sales of this book will go to Rainbows For Kids.

I’m here to announce a new CONTEST! This contest is open to everyone and you will have 2 chances to enter, see details below. As I announced in May on the Vivien Leigh.com Facebook page, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has chosen to feature Vivien Leigh as their Star of the Month in September. Every Tuesday evening in September, Vivien Leigh films and documentaries will air! In total, 15 events and 2 documentaries are scheduled.  Thanks to TCM, I have 5 beautiful Viewer Guide booklets to giveaway to you! The 33 page booklet features Vivien Leigh on the cover, an article about Vivien Leigh written by Robert Osborne, and listings of the films, documentaries scheduled to air on TCM in the month of September!

Films & Documentaries To-Be Shown:

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Dark Journey

Sidewalks of London

Storm in a Teacup

Streetcar Named Desire

Gone with the Wind

Yank at Oxford

Waterloo Bridge

Fire Over England

That Hamilton Woman

Ship of Fools

Anna Karenina

Caesar & Cleopatra

The Making of Gone with the Wind Documentary

Scarlett & Beyond Documentary

Eligibility to win a TCM Viewer Program:

1)  Simply leave a comment and tell me which of  the Vivien Leigh films TCM has chosen to play in September is your favorite.

2) For a second chance to win, either link to this giveaway on Facebook or write about this contest on your blog (and leave a second comment telling where you linked, FB or your blog)

Giveaway ends Tuesday August 31st 2010 at 8 p.m. EST.  Five winners chosen by Random.org.

CONTEST CLOSED!

GOOD LUCK !

As a Vivien Leigh & Gone with the Wind, you may be interested in this upcoming event to be held at Kent State University Museum (located in Ohio) in September honoring a fellow classic film star. Below you will find the link to the invitation that has just been released for the gala event the evening of Sept. 25, honoring their 25th anniversary, as well as the opening of the Katharine Hepburn Collection. The Hepburn estate bequeathed to KSU her entire personal collection of her performance costumes and many personal garments Hepburn amassed over her amazing career.

Robert Osborne, from Turner Classic Movies will emcee the evening, and Ann Rutherford (one of Scarlett’s sisters in Gone with the Wind), who was a contract star at MGM in the 1930′s and 1940′s, when Hepburn was there, will be attending.

Trivia: Ms. Hepburn witnessed the marriage of Vivien Leigh & Laurence Olivier!

Download the Invitation by clicking HERE

In continuation from yesterday’s salute to Vivien Leigh and her untimely death, here is additional information about Vivien’s death. Specifically, how Laurence Olivier found out and his reaction to the news. It’s hard not to romanticize it! The following is from Laurence Olivier A Biography by Donald Spato.

” While Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was visiting Olivier in his hospital room on the evening of Saturday, July 8, a telephone call was put through from John Merivale. Alone in her flat at 54 Eaton Square, Vivien had died; the coroner certified the cause of death as chronic pulmonary tuberculosis. ‘There was a long, sad moment,’ Fairbanks recalled, ‘and then he said ‘Poor, dear little Vivien.’ It seemed to me that their life together was running like a film through his mind.’

” Especially since 1963, Vivien’s life had been unsettled and unhappy. With Merivale she had traveled to India; she had appeared in the American film Ship of Fools as an anxiously aging and faded matron, and she appeared twice on Broadway, once becoming so deranged backstage that she was taken forcibly to London for treatment. But an odd kind of calm had come over her in the months before her death. She spoke of returning to the stage and even entertained a few friends, and on June 27 Coward had found her ‘pale but lovely, and smoking, which she shouldn’t have been doing.’

No one had expected Vivien to die so suddenly, and Olivier–still in the throes of his own confrontation with mortality–was visibly shaken. She was fifty-three years old, and though frail she had seemed somehow indestructible by the sheer force of her indomitable will. Olivier never denied the excitement Vivien had so long infused into his life, nor the social, cultural and intellectual education she had provided. In almost every way, she had raised him–except with the respect to his superior talent, which she always acknowledged. She had met Olivier at a time in their lives when they both seemed almost desperate for the redemption they thought love could provide, and as true, an although they seemed to relish an image they and millions accepted as true, that image had at last played them false. Their passion for one another had been so fierce it had become part of the myth, but finally it could sustain neither the inevitable encroachment of reality nor the best effects of precisely what they had offered each other–a certain freedom from their prior limitations.

” ‘It is,’ Oliver wrote later, ‘inhuman, immoral, to love a thing more than people, work, intellect, art, my dead.’ His dead–his precious dead, as he stressed–were always preeminently his mother and Vivien. That July night, he left his hospital bed at once and went directly to Eaton Square. ‘I stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us…[for] it has always been impossible for me not to believe that I was somehow the cause of Vivien’s disturbances.’

” To the end of her life, still insisting she was rightfully Lady Olivier, Vivien kept his photograph at her bedside, with his old letters that she read and reread. A few friends told her she was obsessive and unrealistic, living in an illusory past; it was the only issue over which she never argued. She simply smiled at the speaker as if to dismiss the statement as unimaginable juvenile or at least imperceptive. Among her bequests were some treasured items of jewelry and art from her former life at Durham Cottage and Notley Abbey, which were to be delivered with all haste from Vivien Mary, the Lady Olivier, to Sir Laurence, ever her knight, her best beloved, her Larry-boy. “

I was sitting in the Patio Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, having lunch with Olivia De Havilland. Most of our conversation revolved around the Civil War Centennial celebrations in Atlanta, Georgia for Gone with the Wind. It was set for October, and I had planned to go with Vivien Leigh again, as I had seven years earlier for the centennial premiere…

“Vivien’s gone!” I sobbed. “It can’t be true.” I had just spoken to her in London the day before, when she told me she had only a few more days in bed before her doctors would allow her to get up and spend the rest of her recuperation at Tickerage until rehearsals for A Delicate Balance started. We had even talked about my coming over for the opening in November. How could it have happened so suddenly? And why? Why? No one dies of tuberculosis these days. Millions of her fans all over the world must have been asking themselves the same question. They had lost a great star. But my grief was an overwhelming personal one. Vivien had been an integral part of my life for 33 uninterrupted years. She was my most cherished friend, my other sister, my wise counselor and my intimate confidante. We had shared each other’s laughter and tears, and there were many of both.” - Radie Harris, journalist

On July 7, 1967 Vivien Leigh died.  Gwen Robyns, author of a Vivien Leigh biography titled Light of a Star, describes Vivien’s farewell to the world in the book:

 ”This exhausted, fragile little body had been unable to fight to live any longer. It seems ironic that one of the world’s great beauties who spent a lifetime surrounding herself with people should be alone when she died.

Vivien had always loved her rose-filled bedroom which she had transformed into a bower. The walls were entirely hung with white chintz splashed with bright pink old-fashioned roses.

Over the large bed flowed canopied curtains of the same chintz, with filmy linings of white and pale pink nylon. Her favourite pictures hung on silk cords against the folds of chintz on the walls – the small Berthe Moreset, a sketch by Augustus John, a tiny Cellini drawing and a vase of roses which Sir Winston Churchill had painted specially for her.

All the last week Vivien filled her life with people. The day before she died she was rehearsing her part with Michael Redgrave in the Edward Albee play A Delicate Balance scheduled to open in August. She was convinced that she would be well enough for the opening night and that the play would not have to be postponed again.”

Vivien Leigh was 53 when she died from complications of tuberculosis. She was alone with her beloved cat Poo Jones when she passed away in her Eaton Square bedroom. Her boyfriend, Jack Merivale, was home and was the one who discovered her. Laurence Olivier, her ex-husband, was called immediately. He came over to Eaton Square, the London flat he once shared with Vivien, to see the body and to say his goodbye. Five funeral services were held in Vivien Leigh’s honor but her body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the lake near her country home Tickerage Mill.

Today we celebrate Vivien Leigh, the actress, the woman, the legend. Rest in Peace!

For more information on Vivien Leigh’s untimely death, please see the links below.

• Death Information
• “An Appreciation of Vivien Leigh”
• John Gielgud’s eulogy
• New York Times Obituary