TCM Schedule for Friday, April 30 -- TCM Primetime Feature -- George Raft

Today is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Eve Arden and we have a morning of her wise-cracking, best friend roles from the 1940s. Tonight turns more serious, with an evening with George Raft. Enjoy!


4:15am -- The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
War correspondent Ernie Pyle joins an Army platoon during World War II to learn what battle is really about.
Cast: Burgess Meredith, Robert Mitchum, Freddie Steele, Wally Cassell
Dir: William A. Wellman
BW-108 mins, TV-14

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Robert Mitchum, Best Music, Original Song -- Ann Ronell for the song "Linda", Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- Louis Applebaum and Ann Ronell, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson

The extras in the film were real American GIs, in the process of being transferred from the war in Europe to the Pacific. Many of them were killed in the fighting on Okinawa - the same battle in which Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper - never having seen the movie in which they appeared.


6:15am -- Obliging Young Lady (1941)
A lawyer's secretary tries to protect a controversial client from prying eyes at an over-crowded hotel.
Cast: Joan Carroll, Edmond O'Brien, Ruth Warrick, Eve Arden
Dir: Richard Wallace
BW-80 mins, TV-G

While appearing in a stage play, during one performance Eve Arden was about to launch into her big speech, as a wife berating her husband, when the prop telephone on the set rang. Correctly deducing that this was a practical joke arranged by the actor playing the husband, she grabbed up the phone, and without missing a beat ad-libbed along the lines of "Well, he's busy ... He really can't ... oh, very well ..." and then turned to her grinning cohort and wiped the smile off his face by snapping "It's for you!" and handing him the phone. She stood there tapping her foot while he ad-libbed a rather unconvincing conversation, and then, after he hung up, went on with the scene as if nothing had happened.


7:45am -- She Couldn't Say No (1941)
Opposing lawyers face off in court over a land deal only to wind up in each other's arms.
Cast: Roger Pryor, Eve Arden, Cliff Edwards, Clem Bevans
Dir: William Clemens
BW-62 mins, TV-G

Though the dialog tells us the film takes place in 1925 (a year before Benjamin Kaye wrote the play on which it is based), the cars, clothes and settings are those of 1940, when it was made.


9:00am -- Cover Girl (1944)
A nightclub dancer makes it big in modeling, leaving her dancer boyfriend behind.
Cast: Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly, Lee Bowman, Phil Silvers
Dir: Charles Vidor
C-107 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture -- Carmen Dragon and Morris Stoloff

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color -- Lionel Banks, Cary Odell and Fay Babcock, Best Cinematography, Color -- Rudolph Maté and Allen M. Davey, Best Music, Original Song -- Jerome Kern (music) and Ira Gershwin (lyrics) for the song "Long Ago and Far Away", and Best Sound, Recording -- John P. Livadary (Columbia SSD)

Columbia Pictures gave Gene Kelly almost complete control over the making of this film, and many of his ideas contributed to its lasting success. He removed several of the sound stage walls so that he, Rita Hayworth, and Phil Silvers could dance along an entire street in one take. He also used trick photography so that he could dance with himself in one sequence.


11:00am -- The Doughgirls (1944)
Honeymooners in Washington get caught up in wartime crowding, with disastrous results.
Cast: Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, Jack Carson, Jane Wyman
Dir: James V. Kern
BW-101 mins, TV-G

Eve Arden as a Russian Army sharpshooter?


12:45pm -- It Should Happen To You (1954)
A dizzy model in love with fame rents a billboard and puts her name on it.
Cast: Judy Holliday, Peter Lawford, Jack Lemmon, Michael O'Shea
Dir: George Cukor
BW-87 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- Jean Louis

This story was conceived when Garson Kanin, trying to cheer up his wife Ruth Gordon, was driving by Columbus Circle. He told her he was going to put her name on "that billboard there" in the biggest letters. He didn't. He wrote a screenplay instead. Gordon suggested that the lead should be Judy Holliday. Kanin had originally considered a male lead, Danny Kaye. When he finished the screenplay, the lead had been written for Holliday.


2:15pm -- Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)
The surfing gang rescues a beautiful singer from evil bikers.
Cast: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, Harvey Lembeck
Dir: William Asher
C-97 mins, TV-G

Nancy Sinatra was the original choice to play Sugar Kane. However, she backed out just before production was supposed to begin because a few months earlier her brother Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped and when she found out that part of the plot involved a kidnapping she decided to back out. Interestingly, it would have been her motion picture debut.


4:15pm -- For Pete's Sake (1974)
A woman goes to outlandish extremes to make her husband rich.
Cast: Barbra Streisand, Michael Sarrazin, Estelle Parsons, William Redfield
Dir: Peter Yates
C-90 mins, TV-14

Barbra Streisand met longtime romantic partner Jon Peters on this film; he was the production's hairdresser and made and styled the wigs she used for this movie.


6:00pm -- Where Angels Go...Trouble Follows! (1968)
A young progressive nun creates headaches for the Mother Superior.
Cast: Rosalind Russell, Stella Stevens, Binnie Barnes, Mary Wickes
Dir: James Neilson
C-94 mins, TV-PG

TCM Star of the Month Robert Taylor's last film.


What's On Tonight: TCM PRIME TIME FEATURE: GEORGE RAFT


8:00pm -- Background To Danger (1943)
An American gets caught up in wartime action in Turkey.
Cast: George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre
Dir: Raoul Walsh
BW-80 mins, TV-G

The three photographs of possible Roumanian secret agents which McNamara shows Joe were those of the Warner Bros. contract players Paul Panzer, Glen Cavender and Stuart Holmes. Those three are not actually in the movie. The fourth photograph was that of Leo White who is seen in an early scene whispering in someone's ear.


9:30pm -- The House Across the Bay (1940)
An aircraft designer falls for an imprisoned gangster's wife.
Cast: George Raft, Joan Bennett, Lloyd Nolan, Walter Pidgeon
Dir: Archie Mayo
BW-87 mins

Hitchcock shot some scenes involving actors Pidgeon and Bennett in a plane. They state he did this as a favor to this film's producer Walter Wanger, with whom Hitchcock had worked on Foreign Correspondent (1940).


11:15pm -- Nocturne (1946)
A police detective refuses to believe a composer's death was suicide.
Cast: George Raft, Lynn Bari, Virginia Huston, Joseph Pevney
Dir: Edwin L. Marin
BW-87 mins, TV-PG

George Raft appeared with Mae West in both her first (Night After Night (1932)) and last (Sextette (1978)) films. He died two days after West's death.


12:45am -- Johnny Angel (1946)
A sailor sets out to solve his father's murder.
Cast: George Raft, Claire Trevor, Signe Hasso, Lowell Gilmore
Dir: Edwin L. Marin
BW-79 mins, TV-G

My favorite George Raft quote -- "I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."


2:15am -- Incubus (1965)
An evil spirit plots to snare the soul of a courageous and good man.
Cast: William Shatner, Milos Milos, Allyson Ames, Eloise Hardt
Dir: Leslie Stevens
BW-74 mins, TV-14

All the spoken dialogue is in Esperanto.


3:45am -- The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)
A vacationing family is trapped in the desert by aging devil worshippers.
Cast: Strother Martin, L. Q. Jones, Charles Bateman, Ahna Capri
Dir: Bernard McEveety
C-93 mins, TV-14

George Lucas' THX 1138 (1971) was shown as a double feature with this film.


5:30am -- Short Film: Wonderful World of Tupperware (1959)
Industrial film showing the making of Tupperware.
C-29 mins

I've a sneaking suspicion that Earl Tupper, inventor of Tupperware, would be a Freeper, were he alive today. Tupper founded the Tupperware Plastics Company in 1938, and sold his products in hardware and department stores. Around 1948, he joined forces with Brownie Wise who had extraordinary success selling Tupperware via home parties. Based on her marketing strategy, in the 1950s Tupperware was withdrawn from sale in retail stores and Tupperware "parties" soon became popular in homes within the United States and abroad, the first example of "party-plan" marketing. After a falling-out with Wise, resulting in her 1958 dismissal, Tupper sold The Tupperware Company for $16 million to Rexall. Shortly afterwards, he divorced his wife, gave up his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes, and bought himself an island in Central America. In 1984, the year after he died, his patent on Tupperware expired.

George Raft was born George Ranft in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City on September 26, 1895, the oldest of nine boys by Conrad Ranft (a German immigrant) and Eva Glockner. Growing up in that tough district, Tenth Ave., (which he would proudly point out was the same block Ruby Keeler and Ray Bolger came from) he was a childhood friend of gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Owney Madden (the Irish crime boss of New York) and came close to having a life of crime himself. Raft was not highly educated, something which would cause him insecurities later in life, and pursued a career in entertainment after running away from home at 13. He tried his hand at being a baseball player, a boxer and an electrician, finally settled on dancing. “I was a dancer and for years worked in vaudeville, in every Broadway café. I didn’t want to be a big star, just a small dancer.” Raft worked as a “paid dancer” (a male escort for female patrons) in several clubs, including the Roseland Ballroom, where his dancing shoes were on display at the time of his death in 1980. He was the partner of Elsie Pilcer on the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, and was on the bill with the famous nightclub hostess Texas Guinan at her club, the El Fey speakeasy, where Fred Astaire and George Gershwin would come to watch him dance. Astaire recalled going there “several times to see George dance. He was a sensation in those days...the main attraction...George did the fastest and most exciting Charleston I ever saw. I thought he was an extraordinary dancer.”

His association with Guinan led to his first film appearance in Queen of the Night Clubs (1929). “A talent scout who saw my footwork asked me if I’d like to do a movie, and I agreed, on the understanding that if the results were satisfactory to them, and me, that they could make me another offer.” Loosely based on Texas Guinan, the movie starred Guinan and Eddie Foy, Jr. Raft’s dance act from the El Fey was included in the film but the movie was not a hit. Raft remained in Hollywood, but it would take him two more years before he appeared in another film, Quick Millions (1931), memorable as Spencer Tracy’s first starring role.

The following year Raft was preparing to go on a tour of Florida with the Primo Carnera traveling boxing show, run by Owney Madden, when he auditioned for a role in director Howard Hawks’ film Scarface (1932), loosely based on Al Capone. Hawks thought that Raft had a “unique look” and signed him to play Guino Rinaldo, “Scarface’s” best friend and a role that was based on Capone’s bodyguard Frank Rio. Raft asked for $500 to do the part, but Hawks increased his salary after fifty days of filming. Ironically, after signing his contract, Raft went to a Hollywood restaurant to celebrate and saw Paul Muni having dinner with his wife. Muni, who knew Raft from New York, invited him to dine with them and told Raft that he was in town to star in Scarface, and he thought that there was a role in the film that would be just right for Raft. Raft said, “That’s really funny of you to say that. I just saw Mr. Hawks and got the job.” Raft and Muni would become good friends during the making of the movie.

In the film, Raft falls in love with Scarface’s sister, played by Ann Dvorak. It was Raft who had suggested her for the role. She was eighteen and a chorus girl when Raft brought her to a party at the Hawks’ house where the director watched a tipsy Dvorak dance. “Ann asked him to dance with her but he said he’d rather not. She was a little high and right in front of him starts to do this sexy undulating dance, sort of trying to lure him on the floor to dance with her. She was a knockout. She wore a black silk gown almost cut down to her hips. I’m sure that’s all she had on. After a while George couldn’t resist her suggestive dance and in no time they were doing a sensational number which stopped the party.” Hawks had her do the dance in the film. “The scene played like a million dollars because it was something that really happened between George and Ann.” In real-life, though, it would be Hawks who had the affair with Dvorak.

The coin-flip that made Raft a star was credited to Hawks by Raft himself, “I spent most of my time on the set practicing flipping the nickel. ... I had to flip the nickel so that my hand was steady and firm and I even managed to do it while staring at someone.” It did cause a problem for Raft on the set during his death scene. Hawks had Raft flip the coin while being shot. Raft fell back and hit his head on the door while falling. “When I slid down the door, I was slightly unconscious and landed in a small pool of my own blood. My eyes sort of rolled up in my head, like people’s do when they are dying. The coin I had been tossing fell out of my hand. I heard Hawks say, “Print.” Everyone there said this was the greatest movie death scene they ever saw. Hawks filmed the coin rolling along the floor until it lost its motion and fell flat. Hawks told me, ‘The roll of the coin and then its falling still told the story of Guino’s death’.” Unfortunately none of it stayed in the final film. Hawks got the idea from a real-life killer who left a nickel in the fist of his victim as a sign of disrespect. “Having George flip the coin made him a character. The coin represented a hidden attitude – a kind of defiance, a held-back hostility, a coolness – which hadn’t been found in pictures up to the time; and it made George stand out.”

Unfortunately for Raft, it stereotyped him as a gangster in movies. Like James Cagney, Raft came from the mean streets, unlike Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart who had attended college. The tough guy was an image that Bogart tried to cultivate at one point in his career, with his public fights and tough-guy persona (often brought on, as actress/author Louise Brooks noted, by alcohol); but it was an image that George Raft tried to erase. In his personal life, he was extremely well-liked in the Hollywood community. He was soft-spoken, exquisitely dressed and had excellent manners. He was also said to be generous to children and friends in need. His fights were few, but unfortunately made headlines.

Mae West appeared with Raft in her first film Night After Night (1932), which was his first starring film. “Working with George Raft was a real inducement, if you know what I mean. There was a thing between me and him after Night After Night. We stayed friends for life. We had a kind of bond. George Raft gave up being a gangster in real life for being a movie gangster. Good trade. I thought he’d be a big star. Well, he didn’t make that, but he had a swell career. I think it was because he didn’t have enough drive. He settled for what came easy, and was easily satisfied, where his career was concerned. There were people who called him a lowlife, and they said he wasn’t good for me personally or professionally. What did they know? I had my intuition, and he had a good heart – and more.” Raft, for his part, revealed in 1978 that he spoke to Mae every day on the phone, something he’d done for years. She was his favorite co-star and Raft appeared in her final film, Sextette (1978). The life-long friends would pass away within two days of each other in 1980.

The 1930s was George Raft’s decade. He co-starred with Carole Lombard in Bolero (1934), which he called his favorite because, “It was my idea, and I created the dance in it." He also starred in the “sequel” Rumba (1935); the adventure films Souls at Sea (1937) with Gary Cooper and a gangster film Each Dawn I Die (1939), with James Cagney. Ironically, it was George Raft’s gangster connections that saved Cagney’s life. In his autobiography, Cagney claimed that while President of the Screen Actors Guild, his life was threatened. It was only through Raft’s intervention with his gangland associates that got the hit order rescinded.

Raft’s personal life was less successful than his career. In 1923, he had married his dancing partner, Grayce Mulrooney, who was several years his senior and a devout Catholic, whose mother would not allow her to tour with Raft unless they were married. Raft agreed, believing it to be a temporary solution, but his wife refused to divorce him. They separated after only a few months but she remained married to him until her death in 1970. It was estimated that over her lifetime she received over $1 million, 10% of his earnings. Despite his unfortunate marriage, Raft had several affairs with famous women, including Carole Lombard, Betty Grable and Norma Shearer. When once asked who was the greatest lover in Hollywood, Lombard said, “George Raft – or did you mean on the screen?” Betty Grable agreed. Lombard enjoyed her affair with Raft because “When George gives me a smile or a present I don’t hear wedding bells behind the thought.” Raft was deeply in love with Lombard and kept a large photograph of her over his bed for many years. Shearer met Raft at a party given for her in New York and fell in love. A few months later they sailed to Europe together on the Normandie with Charles Boyer and his wife. The relationship deepened, her children liked him and he proposed. The problem was getting a divorce. Grayce asked for $500,000 and 20% of his earnings, something Raft could not afford. Friends wondered why Shearer, who was incredibly wealthy in her own right (from the estate of her late husband, producer Irving Thalberg), didn’t pay for it herself; the speculation was that she was too tight with a buck. The relationship ended with Raft saying, “We had a wonderful romance. She is the swellest person I have ever known, and I wish I could tell you that we are going to be married soon.” They never did.

Raft’s career peaked in 1940 and 1941 when he made They Drive by Night (1940) and Manpower (1941). With the new decade came a new attitude. Another problem was that Raft seemed to have a talent for turning down films which would become classics. He didn’t want to do High Sierra (1941) (which became a hit for Bogart) because, as Raoul Walsh said, “Raft wouldn’t die in the picture.” Walsh was ready to change the ending but the censors insisted the character die. As Jerome Charyn wrote, “Raft is the bigger star. He’s seen all the time with Betty Grable. He’d been in Scarface, Madame Racketeer (1932), Rumba, Each Dawn I Die. He gets top billing over Bogart in They Drive by Night. The fan magazines are in love with his dark suspenders, his dark shirts. Everybody wants him to marry Grable. He’s offered the role of Rick in Casablanca (1942). Raft turns it down. He becomes the ghost of Humphrey Bogart’s rising career (he’d turned down Dead End (1937) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)). And we wonder, would he have remained a star if he’d been the love of Ingrid Bergman’s life in Casablanca? He’d have romanced her in his elevator shoes, sat with Dooley Wilson, gone off into the fog with Claude Rains, and Casablanca, with all its noble sentiments, would have been forgotten in six months.”

Despite making over 100 films, George Raft was accused by many of being a bad actor, although Elia Kazan, in his autobiography, told of the acting advice he got from Raft. When Kazan was newly arrived on the Warner Bros. lot straight from his success on the New York stage, Jack Warner’s assistant, Steve Trilling, told Kazan that film acting is different from acting on the stage. “’There’s a guy on this lot today who’s got acting for films down cold. Want to talk to him?’ ‘Yes, sure. Please.’ I said. He told me where to go, ‘Introduce yourself and tell him your problem.’ Trilling said. At the edge of a working set, waiting at ease in a director’s chair for the next scene to be prepared for photography, sat George Raft. I told him Trilling’s concern about me and that he’d said that he, Raft, knew how to act for films better than anybody and particularly how it was different from stage acting. I must have played it pretty humble, because Raft spouted advice. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘on the stage you have to talk, right?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘generally’. ‘Here’ – and Raft pointed to the camera – ‘it’s pictures. The less you say the better. Get rid of as many lines as you can. Give them to the other guy. Let him tell the story and so on. You just look at him, like this’ – he showed me – ‘sort of doubting, you understand? And find something like I have, this coin I flip up and down in my hand; it gives them something to photograph while you’re saying nothing. Everybody in the audience will be wondering what you’re thinking, which is not a damned thing, but they don’t know that. In the picture business, wondering is better than knowing.’”

When the United States entered World War II, Raft was one of the first stars to go entertain the troops with his Cavalcade of Sports which toured the country. “I was too old for the service so the Cavalcade was my contribution to the kids who were fighting for me. The Cavalcade consisted mostly of a traveling team of fighters who put on bouts at Army and Navy bases. I’d referee the fights, unless such ring greats as ex-heavyweight champ Jim Jeffries or Henry Armstrong were scheduled to officiate. Then I’d entertain.”

As the 1940s went on, Raft’s pictures became less and less distinguished such as Nob Hill (1945) and Johnny Angel (1945). At the start of the new decade, he moved into TV with the 1953 series I’m the Law in which he played a hard-bitten police lieutenant, as well as narrated the series. It lasted 26 episodes and then work seemed to dry up. A big spender, generous with other people and a notorious soft-touch, Raft ran out of money but he never asked anyone for help. He went back to dancing, as he explained in a 1953 article, “Look – I’ve always been a frank sort of a guy. As far as pictures are concerned I’m dead. Nobody has been breaking their necks trying to hire me. There’s no money in pictures anymore, so I’m going back to being a dancer.” He blamed his declining career on “lots of things. For one thing, I think I made a mistake when I stopped appearing with big names. My biggest successes were with people like Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich and so forth. Maybe they made me look good; maybe I was better with them. When I started appearing with then unknowns like Ava Gardner or Janet Blair, they rose but I slipped.”

Raft appeared occasionally on his old friends’ TV shows like Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante. He also began working as a host at gambling clubs in the United States, Cuba and London. In 1959 he had been operating a club called “George Raft’s Capri” in Havana (although he did not own the club, he allowed them to use his name), but had to leave when the Castro revolution took place. By 1967, Raft’s underworld connections caught up with him again and he was banned from England. He had been there in association with the George Raft’s Colony Sports Club (a gambling establishment) in London as the club’s host, although it was supposedly owned by mobster Meyer Lansky. When Raft left for a brief trip back to California, he was informed that he would not be allowed back into the country. He did not fight the ban, but called it a “surprising body blow.” It was not the first time Raft had been in trouble for gambling; in 1944 he had been investigated by the LA district attorney over a dice game with an airplane parts manufacturer in which he supposedly won $10,000. Raft always maintained that the underworld connections were just acquaintances. “I’ve never been locked up, I’ve never taken a drink, I never hurt anybody, and I gave all my money away. So how come I got this bum reputation?”

Although Raft played smaller roles in films, he was not above spoofing his own image in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959). Tony Curtis, who starred in the film with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe wrote, “I’ve heard it said that George Raft never gave a convincing line reading in his entire career. Maybe. Maybe not. But people wanted to watch him. And that’s what makes a star. I’ll say this for him. He was gracious all during the shooting. Billy (Wilder) and Izzy (Wilder’s co-writer I.A.L. Diamond) put an inside joke into the script. Edward G. Robinson, Jr. is flipping a coin in front of George Raft, who asks him, ‘Where’d you pick up that stupid trick?’ ... George Raft couldn’t do a scene the way Billy wanted it. An old character actor named George E. Stone was lying on the ground with a toothpick in his mouth. This was the scene where George has him rubbed out in a re-creation of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Billy wanted George to kick the toothpick out of George E.’s mouth. George E. was small, and sorry to say, he was blind. George was uncomfortable about doing it. He didn’t think it was necessary or funny. It went against his nature. Billy kept after George, “Please, please, George! Kick the toothpick!” Finally George walked off. So Billy changed his pants to match George’s and kicked George E. Stone himself. He kicked him too close and too hard. They had to call an ambulance. ... The third and fourth weeks of shooting didn’t involve Marilyn. Jack Lemmon and I had to do the scenes that open the film. There was the scene in the speakeasy, the scene in the booking agent’s office and the scenes with Pat O’Brien and George Raft. Working with men like O’Brien and Raft was a great experience for me. These were kings in their own right. They carried so much history with them. But they were down to earth. They were such good guys.”

Raft also spoofed his image in commercials. As Nina DiSesa wrote, “The most brilliant Alka-Seltzer commercial of all time was the simplest: it aired in 1969 and featured George Raft, the actor famous for his bad-guy roles in forties film noir movies. It was called “The Unfinished Lunch”. In the spot, George Raft and about a hundred other convicts are in a prison lunchroom. He takes a bite of the terrible prison food and, recoiling in disgust, takes his metal cup and starts banging it slowly and deliberately on the metal lunchroom table while chanting “Alka-Seltzer”. Then the convict next to him does the same thing. Then another and another, until the whole room of inmates is banging cups and joining Raft in his chant of “Alka-Seltzer”.

In the 1970s, Raft worked as a goodwill ambassador at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas and helped run the reservations office in Los Angeles, where he lived in a large apartment in Century City, while emphysema began to take its toll. When he died on November 24, 1980 in Los Angeles at the age of 85, the man who made an estimated $10 million throughout his life left no will, no living relatives, a $10,000 life insurance policy and some furniture. “I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.” Ironically, his final role was a bit part in the 1980 film The Man with Bogart’s Face. In 1978, he was asked what changes he would make if he could live his life over again. Raft replied, “None. Given a second chance, I’d devil it – I’d do it all exactly the same, except I’d do it twice as hard and twice as good. The world – and life – has been very kind to me. I have no complaints.”

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Bloomfield, Gary L., Shain, Stacie, L, with Davidson, Arlen C. Duty, Honor, Applause: America’s Entertainers in World War II
Brooks, Tim and Marsh, Earle The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present
Chandler, Charlotte She Always Knew How: Mae West, a Personal Biography
Cullen, Frank, Hackman, Florence, McNeilly, and Donald Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America Vol. 1
Curtis, Tony and Viera, Mark The Making of Some Like it Hot: My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie
DiSesa, Nina Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics From a Woman at the Top
“George Raft, Dapper Tough of the Silver Screen is Now Official Glad-Handler for a Vegas Hotel” Herald-Journal 12 Nov 78
Kazan, Elia Elia Kazan: A Life
McCarthy, Todd Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood
Milwaukee Journal 25 Nov 80
“George Raft Tells How He Turned Mob from Casino Schenectady Gazelle 12 Jan 59
Wayne, Jane Ellen The Golden Girls of MGM: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and Others