St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 67

The Big Town Manhattan Murals, Broadway Confetti By Walter Winehell On the Flicker Front By Harold Heffernan That's What Memphis Says About Its Aged sor, Who Bans Films He Thinks Reflect on Dignity of South-Some Critics Call Him a "Cinema Boll Weevil" 9 SCRAMBLED EGGS: Ralph Forbes, the actor. Isn't acting In those love scenes with pretty Lynn Carter. Miriam Lavelle, the Copa's featured dancer, and Dick Wesson are yatti-tl-yatti-ti-tah. Mexicans report that correspondent Camille Cianfarra (of a New -8 '-41 -4 J7 aJ rr it A 1 HOLLYWOOD. Sept.

IF you were a. movie producer and had a story that would appeal directly to 2,500,000 prospective customers in the United States alone what would you Produce it, of course. And that's exactly what 20th Century-Fox is doing about a script called "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim." The canny producer-director-w 1 1 combination of William Perlberg and George Seaton is just about to launch this box-office-insured venture, fashioned to interest that number of feminine typists working In business offices throughout the country. And with rapidly opening world markets, there's no telling how many more lady stenos and typewriter pounders will be intrigued by a movie based on the origin of their profession. York ayem gazette) la betrothed to Jane Morgan (of an evening: paper Comic Jackie Gleason and Lillian Moore, the show gal, couldn't stand the distance apart, so she quit show business to join him.

His divorce Is practically signed. Lovely Betty Bruce's real heart Is a Detroit millionaire jeweler. Joe E. Lewis does a Pagliaccl after each performance In his dressing room. Martha Stewart, starlet on the coast, will be pained to know.

New applicants for night club licenses will find police regulations tougher than ever. Some of those gals who taka your picture in the B'way spots make nearly $300 weekly for themselves. t.M hi ii 1 A ARROW POINTS TO BINFORD IN A PICTURE TAKEN IN HIS YOUTH WHEN HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE DUCK HILL (MISS.) CORNET BAND. HE OUIT THE BAND WHEN IT BEGAN TO PLAY RAGTIME. STILL CONTENDS THAT RAGTIME AND JAZ7 ARE DEGRADING.

LBJlZ RALPH FORBES HE'S NOT ACTING IN THESE LOVE SCENES. I I (Ti I'l-nm W' Tins BAND OF A QUARTER of a million necessities to American Industry, together with an estimated 100,000 male typists, bang away today without knowing much about the typewriter's beginnings. We take it for granted, as we do most conveniences. But the history of the typewriter has so much humor, drama and informational interest, Perlberg and Seaton declared after their research job, that they wonder why no one ever thought befora of building a movie around it. P.

and S. tell us that In 1874 when the Remington Company finally achieved a practical typing machine, they had nobody who could operate it. So a unique deal was cooked up with the Packard Business College whereby a given number of men and women would be trained as typists. They were called "typewriters" in that day. Sift" 1 LLOYD T.

BINFORD A KINDLY OLD GENTLEMAN WHO TAKES SERIOUSLY THE JOB OF GUARDING THE MOVIE MORALS OF MEMPHIS. By Dick Terry A Staff Correspondent of the Post-Dispatch MEMPHIS, Sept. 22. WHEN a motion picture gets banned in Memphis and where else does a movie ever get banned anymore? the good people of this Southern town say the film was "Binfordized." The term is derived from the name of Lloyd T. Binford, who for 17 years has been among other things-chief censor of the Memphis Board of Censors and who has the somewhat archaic idea, for this day and age, that a censor is supposed to censor.

Most cities have censor boards, it is true, but few cities take them seriously, including the censors themselves, who look upon it as a harmless and somewhat lovable old custom in that it provides a means of seeing all the movies for free. It is doubtful if one person in 500, in any given city, could tell you the name of even one member of the local censor board. Which In itself makes Binford an extraordinary person. He is probably the only movie censor who is not only well known to the people of the town, but who is rapidly becoming well known over the nation for his activities in decreeing what movies shall and shall not be shown on Memphis screens. Binford and his board (which he pretty well controls) are to Memphis and the South what the Watch and Ward Society are to Boston and New England.

And just as powerful, if not more so. Binford found this out the first year he was on the board, back in 1928. His first job of censoring brought about a test case. The lation of about 400, of which 150 were white. At 13, he opened a roller-skating rink, and worked in the post office on the side for $3 a week.

It was about that time that the local druggist offered him $40 to stay out of school and help him during the Christmas rush. His father said no. Lloyd drew himself to his full height and told his father that if he would consent, he, Lloyd, would never depend upon him for support again. His father did and Lloyd didn't. Fritz Kuhn, who once threatened that FDR (and those on the team) would one day be deported 'to Madagascar, is en route (via deportation) to his home in Germany, which is located where those wonderful Russkys are in Tatty rakes: Stuart Foster's Sinatra-La Dee-Dah-Ing at The 400.

Bea Abbott's thrashing at the Park Central Lounge "Nick Carter," smooth sleuthing via Mutual on Sabbaths. Nancy Nolan at the Blue An gel. Max Lerner's commentating via WOR Sundays. The Zanzibar's zingy floor show. The most exciting essay In years, "Modern Man Is Obsolete," In a November mag digest.

Colbert and Welles in "Tomorrow Is Forever." Al Trace's hilarious band at the Greenwich Village Inn. The Bing Crosby-Andrews Sisters disc of "Along the Navajo Trail. VIGNETTE: Lady Luck, who had been smiling at her, suddenly laughed unsympathetically in her face two years ago. She was the victim of a gun shot which wrecked her film career just after she co-starred with Robert Taylor and other cinemadonises. The accident caused partial paralysis of her body and she retired.

Medicos said she'd never act again. But the spotlight she so richly deserved remained lit in her heart. The other night she returned to acting (via the air) in "Theater of Romance" performing from a wheel chair. Since then she has been bombarded with letters and wires mainly from returned war vets all telling her how she boosted their morale! Her name is Susan Peters. THE BROADWAY SHOW: Spencer Tracy telling newspapermen that his soon-due stage premiere has him scared stiff.

"That shows you're a good actor," he was told. "Hams are always so cocksure." John Carridine (before going -back to the Hollywoods), standing side-saddle in the center of Fifth avenue as the stampede of busses gave him a close shave. Frances Dee (Mrs. Joel McCrea), studying her new script, "The Secret Room," in which she'll bow on Broad- A SCENE FROM THE FILM. "THE SOUTHERNER." WHICH BINFORO BAMMED BECAUSE HE SAID IT DEPICTED THE SOUTHERN FARMERS AS POOR WHITE TRASH.

Tie first class of eighteen typewriters graduated from the business college had ten men and eight women," said Seaton. These girls were necessarily 1 the bold, adventurous type. They were women of character and Initiative. They blazed a trail In the world of business where no 'self-respecting woman had I yet set foot." "I OPERATING A TYPEWRITER was considered such a strenuous job that it was doubted if women could stand up to it. They'd been conditioned to the delicate task of hand scrubbing the household linens on the washboard and sweeping carpets with corn brooms.

So all female applicants plantations and perfumed magnolias." Loew employed a prominent firm of Memphis lawyers to fight the case, but there is little doubt that he had already become from previous cases in Memphis, that a ban by Binford is as good as a ban by Boston for making a movie or a book desirable, and that a lawsuit on the matter would be even better publicity for "The In the Duck Hill Cornet Band. So he got a horn, learned to play it. and became a member. But when ragtime came in, he resigned. Ragtime and jazz, he thinks, are degrading.

His rise in the insurance business was steady and rapid. He became known as one of the outstanding authorities on insurance in the south, and in time became president of the Columbian Mutual company, with headquarters in Atlanta. It was in 1921 that he displayed his talents as an organizer when he moved the Columbian company from Atlanta to Memphis. It was something of a masterpiece of organization. Engineers were sent ahead to make floor plans of the building in Memphis.

On an appointed Saturday, at noon, the employes of the company closed and locked their desks in Atlanta. On that Saturday morning executives of the company were instructed to dictate the letters they would want typed Monday morning. At noon Saturday desks and other equipment and personnel were placed aboard a special train, with an electric sign on the side saying, "Columbian Mutual Special," and taken to Memphis. The floors of the new quarters had been marked, showing where everything was to go. On Monday morning the office opened and operated like an Elgin watch.

Total loss of time: four hours. It wasn't long until Binford was one of Memphis' leading citizens. He built the Columbian Towers which has 22 floors and was then the tallest office building in the south, east of the Mississippi. He became a director in three Memphis banks, a trustee of Union University, president of the Mid-South Fair, director and vice president of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, member of the board of Baptist Memorial Hospital, member of the board of Associated Charities, member of the National Council of Y.M.CA... president of the Good Fellows Santa Claus Club, which annually distributes gifts to some 15.000 Memphis youngsters, and superintendent of Central Baptist Sunday School.

on a strive-and-sucreed basis. The name of the book was "Bound in Honor." He remembers it well today because, he says, it gave him his first major ambition in life, namely, to be able to put on a pair of ice skates and nonchalantly engrave his sweetheart's name in the ice before her admiring eyes. While "Bound In Honor" may have given him this ambition-still unfulfilled it would seem to have affected his life in broader and deeper terms. "I remember the story," he says, as he closes his eyes and leans back in his chair in what he calls his office. The office merits a word of mention.

Although he buiJt the 22-story Columbian Towers building, he now has his offices in another office building and it takes a little detective work for a stranger in town to find him. He isn't listed in the telephone directory. His name isn't on the office directory in the lobby of the building. The elevator girl will tell you he has an office on the tenth floor, but once you reach the tenth floor you can find no door with the name Binford on it. But if you inquire at one of the other officer, they will point it out to you.

It has the name of a dentist on it. Between the waiting room and the dentist's workroom is a little anteroom not much big-Ker than a telephone booth. There, at a little desk, the founder and former president (and now chairman of the board) of the biggest life insurance company in the South, conducts his affairs. (i A 'I' "A I Bsl i iff -a i MiiwMfliidTlrtrtw THE ROOM ROSALIND RUSSELL AND JIMMY STEWART REEKED WITH FAME. IETTY GRABLE PLAYS THE SHOCKING MISS PILGRIM.

EVERY time the people of Duck Hill saw him, he was selling something new. He sold celluloid collars when they first hit the market. "I wore one," he recalls, "and I'd rub some dirt on it. Then when there was a group of men around, I'd take it off, rub the dirt off with a little damp cloth I carried for the purpose, and put it back on again." When he was 16. he felt the lure of the railroad.

He wanted to be a railway mail clerk, who were looked upon as pretty romantic figures in those days. His age was a handicap, but Binford found a way. When a train was wrecked up the line, he jumped on the relief train. At the scene, he busied himself helping the mail clerks find the mail and re-sort it. Back in Duck Hill he brought them hot coffee and sandwiches, and then, to do it up in ribbons, he persuaded his parents to let him have the mail clerks to the house for dinner.

His idea was to get in solid, and he did. One of the clerks taught him the ropes and after a few months he got a job, at $66.66 a month. But it wasn't for him to be satisfied with that. On the side he sold business cards, watches and diamonds. And he bought oysters in New Orleans and delivered them to hotel and restaurant men in Jackson, Miss.

He gave the oysters to them at the price he paid, and in return they gave him his meals for 17 cents each. One day, it was 1883, he heard an insurance man talking to one of the clerks. Binford became interested. Not because he wanted insurance. But as a means of making money.

"How much will you give me," he asked the man. "for every prospect I line up for you to sell?" The man said 10 per cent and a deal was made. In the tradition of the success story he came home about this time with enough money to pay off the mortgage on his father's plantation. Meantime he found romance and excitement a-plenty on the railroad. In 18S5 he was in a train wreck and suffered a dislocated shoulder which put him out of commission for two months.

Then in 1891 his train plunged into a freight train near New Orleans, killing the crews of both trains and injuring 15 passengers. He was scalded and injured internally. He was in bed a year, walked with a cane for the next seven years and wore a brace on his spine. By this time his Insurance business was reaching the point where it looked like a better proposition than railroading, so In 1894 he resigned and devoted all his time to insurance. He prospered to the point where he could indulge a fancy for raising and racing thoroughbred horses.

In time he became known as "the sporting deacon of Duck Hill." He was a deacon in the Baptist church, and he raced purely for the sport of it. "I never gambled," he makes clear. He doesn't smoke or drink either, and he has some very strong views on the subject of jazz. In fact, he gave up one of his chief pleasures because of picture was. of all things, "The King of Kings." Certain citizens objected to the film on the grounds that it showed the Jews in an unfavorable light.

He had the picture run off, ordered certain deletions. The manager of the theater sought but was denied a Chancery Court injunction against the censor board. He went to circuit court where he was upheld, but the court of appeals at Jackson reversed the decision, pointing out that the state legislature, in setting up the Memphis Board of Censors, gave it absolute authority to censor, supervise, regulate or prohibit any entertainment of immoral, lewd or lascivious character, or "performances inimical to the public safety, health, morals or welfare or denouncing government." In short, the court ruled, the censor board is something of a supreme court in itself, from which there is no appeal. FOR a good many years the board, headed and influenced by Binford, banned pictures mostly on a purely moral basis. Pictures such as "The Girl Said No," "Honky-Tonk and "Cock-Eyed World," along with a few burlesque shows.

It has been only in the last few years that Binford has seen fit to inject a sociological angle into his censorship, invoking, no doubt, that phrase in the court's ruling which refers to public welfare. During recent months he has banned "Dillinger" and the reissue of "Dead End" on the grounds that both were conducive to crime. Then he banned a reissue of "Imitation of Life," a picture in which a white woman and a Negro woman went into business together; "Brewster's Millions" because, he felt, it gave too much prominence and the wrong kind of prominence to a Negro actor, Eddie "Rochester," Anderson. He received his greatest national publicity when he banned a recent picture, "The Southerner" because it presented the south in a bad and, he says, false light. Through the years the Mem-phians have accepted Binford's bans without question, but in the case of "The Southerner" they felt he was going too far.

The newspapers protested and David M. Loew, producer of the picture, protested most loudly and vigorously of all, even though his motives may have been slightly suspect. Said Elnford of "The "It pictures the southern farmer as squalid, ignorant, white trash. It will give the nation the wrong idea about the south." Said Loew of Binford: "His opinion is a monstrous distortion that he is inflicting on the people of Memphis with his dictatorial actions. He wants people to think of the south in terms of luxurious AT any rate, before the lawyers squared off, the ban was withdrawn.

Binford himself issued a statement to the press explaining that in view of the fact people could very easily see the picture in neighborhood houses outside the Memphis city limits, it would be unfair to deprive the downtown exhibitors of that revenue. When the picture opened in downtown Memphis, crowds jammed the theater. The Memphis Press-Scimitar took a poll among people leaving the theater and reported that 30 people out of 31 interviewed had expressed approval of the film and the opinion that it was quite all right to show it. Binford has been referred to variously, both in and out of the newspapers, as "the cinema boll weevil." "a dictatorial old dad." and "a decrepit old fogey." One might get the impression that he is a sour-faced reformer with a dictatorial complex. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As a matter of fact he is a kind-hearted, likeable old gentleman who is convinced that what he is doing is for the best interest of all concerned. It just happens that he is a product of heredity and environment: The South with all that the word implies. While he may not picture it altogether in terms, as Loew said, of luxurious plantations and perfumed magnolias, he has very strong ideas on how it should be pictured, as the southerner prefers to have it look to others. His approach to the racial question is both simple and typical: "The northern people pretend to love the Negro race, but hate the Negro. The southern people like the Negro, but dislike the social equality doctrine of the Negro race." As a' man who is retired and wealthy, and who is now 79 years old, it is possible that he feels more than the normal urge to reform.

He takes his job as censor seriously, not only from the moralistic standpoint, but as a matter of conscientious duty. Every week he spends from a day and a half to two days in the screening room, looking at pictures which have been booked for showing in Memphis. "I want to make a success of everything I go after," he says. "In my life there are two mottoes: The city of happiness is in the state of and "whatever you are trying to be be a good There is no doubt that the mottoes, particularly the last one. have been assiduously practiced by Binford, who might be described as a man who was exposed to an Alger book and never quite recovered.

His whole life has been like an Alger story, and his attitude toward life and things today might well spring from the fact that he sees no reason why all lives shouldn't be worked out for the class had to undergo a thorough physical examination, All but rugged girls were ruth- lessly rejected. These eight perfect physical specimens had jobs waiting for them. Remington, who attended their graduation, had them draw lots. At this point fiction blends i with fact. Betty Grable, the Miss Pilgrim of the story, draws Bos- 1 ton for her first job.

i ay. Jane Pickens giving Her All for Skinny Wainwright when he ringsided at the Waldorf's Starlight Roof. Rosalind Russell, Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart, Sophie Tucker, Mary Martin, Mencken, Nathan, Wilson, Gunther and so forth all in the Stork cub-room. It reminded us of Dorothy Parker's crack: "Won't someone open a window? The room simply reeks with fame!" Manhattan Murals: "Ol' Dan Boone, the frustrated mathematician. Garbed in fur hat and coonskln cloak, he makes fancy chalkings in arithmetic on Broadway corners in the gutters.

The coin contributions he gets from pedestrians, they say, net him twice what any college mathematics professor gets! The Mid- nighters hailing a cabbie on Madison and offering $15 to take them to Rockaway. "Nothin' doln'," was the retort, "I got a date!" BROADWAY CONFETTI: His radio earnings have made Bob Burns one of the richest real estate operators in the nation. Margot Morgan is Rudy Vallee's arm decoration. Joan Davis' new radio and flicker contracts will gross her $1,560,000 a year. A mag editor, just out of Sing Sing, will demand a probe of New York State prisons, Billy Rose says he has a new joke which he plans producing in London.

The planes are flying too low again! At about 8 o'clock the other night, one heading for LaGuardia Airport skirted the tops of the hotel skyscrapers on Fifth avenue. SALLIES IN OUR ALLEY: Some of us were discussing Tallulah Bankhead and her current leading man, John Emery, her former husband An intimate of both recalled Talu's retort when she was asked why she married him. "Because' he becaused, 'he was the only man who ever asked me!" Dolores Moran is on a diet and suffering awf'ly. Eyeing a bowl of nuts (on a counter), she asked: "Are nuts fattening?" a. "No," was the reply, "only if you eat them." HE wears a palm beach suit which has seen several summers, a panama hat with the brim turned down all around, and nose glasses which, when not in use, hang by a chain from a little black button pinned to his shirt.

"The story," he says with a reminiscent smile, "was about a poor boy who went to New York to seek his fortune. He began by selling newspapers and he worked hard and saved his money. Then he became acquainted with a rich little girl. One day he saved her and several of her companions from drowning when they fell through thin ice while skating. Then, on an impulse, he borrowed the girl's skates and before startled and admiring eyes, he expertly engraved her name on the ice." The censor started out to make his fortune in Duck Hill, where he was born.

His father, a merchant and planter, was just back from the Civil War, in which he had served as a colonel in the confederate army. A few years later he was to further distinguish himself when, as a state senator, he authored the state car law forbidding Negroes to ride in the same coaches as whites. When he was 11 years old, little Lloyd gave an indication of the promise which was his. On the Fourth of July he went around and bought up all the fireworks in Duck Hill and, having cornered the market, proceeded to sell them for a profit of 10 bucks. When he was 12, he started selling the New Testament and made $35 before he exhausted the financial and religious possibilities of Duck Hill, which boasted of four SINCE BOSTON HAD a slightly stiffer upper lip than many other large American cities, Seaton tells us Miss Pilgrim's lot was not a happy oae.

A "typewriter," in good old Boston, was considered a daughter of joy. Bostonians countenanced only nursing and schoolteaching for women. Seaton further mingles fact with fiction, since research on business methods of the time revealed tha business office of the late seventies to be a pigsty. A FEW years ago his doctor told him he would have to retire, because the strain was too much for his nerves and constitution. So he resigned every office he held with the exception of chief of the board of censors.

Toward this job he feels a sort of moral obligation. "Only pays $25 a week," he says. "Not even carfare. I've tried to resign two or three times, but the mayor won't let me. There are three members on the board, and I'm chairman.

We look at a picture and then I say what I think. I've been voted down two or three times for instance, on Tobacco Road. "Now take this picture, "The Southerner. Just a common, cheap picture no actors in it. There's a young fella and his family who try to raise cotton on a piece of ground.

They don't have any well, so they go to a neighbor, a dirty, unshaven cuss, who won't give them water and cuts the rope in the well. The neighbor has two cows, but he won't sell them any milk for their child, who has pellagra, because he says he has to feed it to his hogs. When the other fella tries to catch some fish in the river, the neighbor even cuts his trot-line. "And that's what they call Southern hospitality. Why, that's Northern hospitality! Of course the advertising I gave it was worth a hundred thousand dollars to Dave Loew.

It just made people want to go see it. It was curiosity, you know, that made "This place where women never set foot was littered with papers, ashes and match ends," the writer-director said. "And the cuspidor central item of all office decoration was a hit-and-miss affair with the score high on the miss side. Our research showed that women in business gradually persuaded men to make their offices first sanitary, later even decorative. After the word typewriter was changed to stenographer, plants and pictures crept in.

And by the time a stenographer graduated to a secretary, big business offices got to look like theatrical sets." jazz. During his youth he was saloons and six stores and a popu stricken with the ambition to play Eve eat the arple." EVERYDAY MAGAZINE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SEPTEMBER 23 PAGE 3H.