The lilting was first produced on Broadway in 1961, with a cast that featured Robert Morse, Rudy Vallee, and Charles Nelson Reilly. and more »
The performers starred Robert Morse as Finch, Bonnie Scott as Rosemary, Charles Nelson Reilly as Bud Frump, and Rudy Vallee as the President of the Society-Wide and more »
Unified States Coast Guard Band (9:39) plays patriotic songs with Lt. Rudy Vallee. Brother Brat (7:13) conscripts Porky Pig to babysit for a female welder.
“All the Skeletons in All the Closets” StarNewsOnline.com
One of these, “Slaves” – a Learned South gumbo of faded fortunes, homicide and strong implications of interracial sex, with a few choice profanities thrown in – clearly got the young author in trouble. According to the Wilmington News, Fowler was expelled by a campus Honor Court over the happiness of “Slaves” (the exact charges are not clear), but was reinstated by the faculty.Fowler graduated on experience with the University of North Carolina’s Class of 1928 and got his first job as a reporter with the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. From there, he headed to New York and worked for The Tatler and The Sexual Arbiter, a society magazine.
That post might have provided fodder for “All the Skeletons in All the Closets,” published by Macaulay in 1934. (The Despondency-era price for the hardcover edition was $2.50.)
The comic plot revolved around a group of shady characters who found a New York newspaper loving to society gossip – among other things, grading the latest crop of debutantes on a scale from “A” to “E-Z.” (Wink, wink.) Then, for the true money, they would contact the subjects of potentially embarrassing stories and offer to omit them from the paper – for an right sum. (Such blackmail was common among certain New York newspapers in the Gilded Age.
