If they were still alive....

...these notables would be celebrating their birthday:



Bette Davis's favorite leading man, George Brent, would be 112.  Handsome, stolid, debonair...Brent made his career supporting many of the greatest actresses of the 1930's.  He never quite "broke out" and became a major star.  No one was known to go see "a George Brent movie".  But he was reliably sturdy and proved himself on many occasions to be quite a fine actor, too.  Here he is with the fantastic, wholly-underrated actor, Warren William, in a little 30's film called Living On Velvet:



Our seventh U.S. president (and one of the more colorful), Andrew Jackson was born in South Carolina 244 years ago today.  Did you know....that Andrew Jackson was the first president who was the target of an attempted assasination?  I didn't.  On January 30, 1835, a crazed English house painter named Richard Lawrence lay in wait behind a pillar at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington.  As Jackson was exiting the building, Lawrence leapt out and fired a pistol, aimed at the president.  The gun misfired....so he pulled out a second pistol...which also misfired!  Wonder if this is where the term "dodged a bullet" came from?  Lawrence was deemed insane and was never punished for the attack (a precursor to the Reagan/Hinckley assasination attempt?).



Beautiful, glamourous, generous...and insanely rich, Marjorie Merriweather Post would be 124.  The only child of C.W. Post (of the Battle Creek cereal Posts), she inherited a pot, married E.F. Hutton, and lived a life of almost unparalleled glamour and extravagance.  One of her homes "Mar-a-Lago" in Palm Beach, Florida, is one of America's truly great residences (it's now a private hotel, owned by Donald Trump).  One of her daughters is the beautiful actress, Dina Merrill (as a child, in the portrait above).  Below, a brief video view of her "Hillwood" estate, outside Washington D.C.:




Hattie Carnegie would be 125.  The ne plus ultra of glamourous haute couture in the 1930's-50's, Hattie (born Henrietta Kanengeiser in Vienna) became the designer to the stars, with her feminine, form-flattering fashions.  Below, a few examples of her work: