This Day in History: Mitzi Gaynor loved Vancouver

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Mitzi Gaynor never became the big movie star many predicted after her role in South Pacific in 1958.
But she didn’t seem to have any regrets — she became one of the biggest nightclub acts in show business instead.

Vancouver was one of the keys to her success — for years she perfected her Vegas shows at the Cave nightclub on Hornby street before heading south.

Gaynor died Oct. 17 in Los Angeles at the age of 93.

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Born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago, on Sept. 4, 1931, she grew up in a musical family, and started performing in childhood.

Gaynor was in 19 films in the 1950s and 60s, and was one of the last stars from the heyday of the Hollywood musical. But the roles dried up in the early 1960s, and she switched to the stage, where her energy, talent and cheerful personality were a perfect fit.

In 1961, she got paid $40,000 a week to play the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and drew rave reviews from the get-go.

“There are plenty of entertainers — such as Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Russell, Mamie Van Doren and Ann Sothern — who have ‘names,’ but their talent, as displayed on supper-club stages here, may be called microscopic,” write Lloyd Shearer in Weekend magazine on Nov. 25, 1961.

“Mitzi Gaynor was paid $40,000 a week because she was new to Las Vegas and has genuine talent. She can sing, dance, quip, impersonate. She gives an audience its money’s worth.”

Her live prowess was a natural fit for television. When The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 16, 1964, Mitzi was the headliner.

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She made her first Vancouver appearance at the Cave on July 4, 1966.

“She is more enchanting onstage than she ever was on the screen,” wrote Lorne Parton in The Province. “An excellent dancer (one-time student of Vancouver’s Aida Broadbent), a passable singer and a pert performer, she has all the necessary attributes for selling production number — including a zingles figure.”

The Sun’s Jack Richards was just as impressed.

“If they could package Mitzi Gaynor’s personality they could sell it on the days the sun doesn’t shine,” Richards wrote. “At 35, she radiates the zest for life of a teenager. And the effervescent joy she exudes onstage at the Cave Theatre restaurant where she is currently appearing is her. It’s not something put on with the makeup and costumes.”

Gaynor came back in May 1969 and Parton was wowed by her “mini-musical version of Gone With The Wind that started off funny and went absolutely hysterical.”

“Scarlet doing bumps and grinds in a hoop skirt?” he wrote. “Four Southern suitors doing a strip?”

And so it went, every time she came here. A 1971 ad in The Province quoted two Sun writers, Jack Wasserman and Bob Smith.

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“Mitzi Gaynor gives the audience something that is so rare these days: A first-class entertaining show,” said Wasserman.

“I came away with eyes and ears popping, and a feeling that I had feasted to excess,” wrote Smith.

She seemed to love Vancouver as much as its audiences loved her. When she had foot surgery and had to cancel a series of dates here in 1991, she told the Sun “I’m very disappointed. Vancouver is my favourite city in the whole world.”

Part of the reason she loved it here was her good friend Hugh Pickett, who promoted her local shows. Pickett used to joke that the reason he was able to save the Orpheum Theatre from destruction in the 1970s was that Mayor Art Phillips got to dance with Mitzi, who did a Save The Orpheum benefit for free.

When Pickett died in 2006, his partner gave the Sun Gaynor’s home phone number in Beverly Hills for a comment. Gaynor said she fell in love with Pickett the first night she played the Cave.

“With his ebullience and his knowledge and his charm and his savvy, I’ve never known a man in the theatre like him,” she said.

“He was an entrepreneur of the first grade. He had that audience going crazy over me! From that time on for 20 years every single May or June we broke in our act at the Cave, and that was all because of Hugh Pickett.”

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jmackie@postmedia.com

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