Timelines for year 1932
Esther Ralston
After working in England in 1932, she returned to Hollywood the following year and was put under contract to MGM. Because she rejected Louis B. Mayer's advances, she was loaned out for "B" pictures and her film career declined.
Ian Keith
Married Fern Andra a second time because there was a question about the legality of the first ceremony in 1932.
E.G. Marshall
Biographical entries indicate that he attended Carleton College and the University of Minnesota. However, researchers after his death found that he was enrolled at Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul in September 1932 as Everett E. Grunz, but there is no record of his having graduated. Archivists at Carleton College say there is no record of his ever attending that institution.
Joan Bennett
Filming on She Wanted a Millionaire (1932) was interrupted for 6 months when Joan broke her leg in a fall from a horse.
Katherine Emery
First acting experience, while studying at Sweetbriar College. Later with the University Players at Cape Cod (they included James Stewart and Henry Fonda). First on Broadway in "Carrie Nation" (1932). Her greatest theatrical triumph was as one of the two head mistresses in Lillian Hellman's original production of "The Children's Hour" (1934-1936). Emery retired from acting in the early 1950's.
Josephine McKim
She was one of the four swimmers on the 4x100 freestyle relay that won a gold medal for the USA in the 1932 Olympics.
Mae West
She was with George Raft in both her first (Night After Night (1932)) and last (Sextette (1978)) film.
Died two days before her Night After Night (1932) and Sextette (1978) co-star George Raft.
There is a photo in fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday's autobiography (circa 1932) of Billy Sunday and Mae West pouring out a bottle of beer into the river.
Ken Maynard
From 1932 through 1940 nearly every character he played was named Ken; from 1943 through 1944 all the characters he played were named either Ken Maynard, Marshal Ken Maynard or U.S. Marshal Ken Maynard.
Helen Kane
In 1932 she filed suit against Max Fleischer, his studio and Paramount Pictures, charging unfair competition and wrongful appropriation for the Betty Boop cartoons. The trial dragged on for two years and, although the animated star was an obvious caricature of Helen, she lost the case.
She brought to life the Betty Boop character of Max Fleischer cartoons. The character was originally a dog with droopy ears and a similar squeaky voice. In 1932, the dog was transformed into the flapper we all adore.
Jean Parker
As the winner of an art poster competition celebrating the 1932 Olympic Games (to be held in Los Angeles), Jean was invited to be one of the models decorating the float in the Pasadena Tournament of Roses parade.
Milton Babbitt
He was a 16 year old student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1932. In 1933, he became a composition student at Marion Bauer and Philip James at New York University in New York City. He studied privately with Roger Sessions. In 1938, he was invited to join the Princeton Composition Faculty in Princeton, New Jersey. He succeeded Sessions as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music in 1965.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Many efforts were made to conceal Roosevelt's disability. When he was elected President in 1932 the general public had no knowledge of his ailment.
Shortly before he won the 1932 election, the Boston Braves lost their final pre-election football game. The Braves went on to become the Boston Redskins, and eventually the Washington Redskins. In all these incarnations, their fortune in the final pre-election game has always paralelled and predicted the fate of the incumbent party or nominee in the Presidential race. This pattern was unbroken until 2004, when President George W. Bush won the presidency, despite a Redskins loss.
Ira Gershwin
Won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the musical "Of Thee I Sing" collaborating with George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George Gershwin.
Dwain Esper
Once owned the rights to Tod Browning's big-budget MGM flop Freaks (1932). Esper turned a tidy profit by doing what he usually did: renting out theaters himself and sensationally exploiting the film in ways no conventional promoter would ever think of.
Esper initially eschewed the exchange system to distribute his films, the main problem being that he didn't understand how it worked (see "Trivia" of his sleazier contemporary Robert J. Horner for a description). Secondly, the topics he was drawn to were sex, drug addiction and general debauchery, things that rubbed many exchange owners the wrong way. Thirdly, although his later films improved--due to his hiring reasonably competent directors instead of doing the chore himself--his earliest films were terrible. This itself was normally no obstacle to the exchange system, but Esper would often splice in nude scenes to spice things up (this was a big problem after the 1934 Production Code kicked in). Esper's way of distributing his films was what is now called "four-walling", in which he and his wife would rent a theater and do targeted advertising (invariably plastering "Adults only" all over it) to create a buzz. He was run out of more than a few towns in his day after just one showing of his films. His real coup was obtaining the rights to MGM's Freaks (1932) cheaply, a production Louis B. Mayer disowned but one that fell in line with Esper's twisted tastes. He peddled it around towns across America for much of the 1930s. Strictly speaking, Esper virtually created the "four walling" system, which was used fairly extensively in the 1960s/'70s independent/exploitation film market (Tom Laughlin was an avid proponent of it). Back in the 1930s the system was called "roadshow presentation," but this usually referred to high-quality productions that warranted increased admissions prices, something Esper could never hope to pull off. The fact that he managed to maintain a career (of sorts) as an independent film producer--though way over on the "fringe" of the business--during the Depression was a remarkable achievement in itself.