Former monthly contribution by late TCM host Robert Osborne to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in March, 2003.
This is the year Oscar celebrates his landmark 75th birthday–a remarkable achievement–particularly in Hollywood where longevity has never been one of the town's famed traditions. (Quite the opposite, actually.) But out of those 75 Oscar birthday soirees have come hundreds of long remembered, hard-to-forget and enduring moments, including one involving the lady pictured on our cover with Clark Gable, and here with a five-year-old Shirley Temple. When Claudette Colbert won her Best Actress award for 1934's It Happened One Night, no one–including C.C. herself–felt she had the slightest chance of taking home the booty. It Happened One Night was a delightful but extremely lightweight comedy, made at a studio very low on the industry totem pole, but its biggest hurdle with Oscar was that no comedy or comedy performance had ever won a top Academy Award prize before.
Further, when the 1934 Oscar nominees were announced, the competition for Best Actress consisted of only three nominees: Colbert in this comedy, Grace Moore in the operatic musical One Night of Love and Norma Shearer in the romantic drama The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Conspicuously missing was the name of Bette Davis, who'd given a most startling and bravura performance that year in Of Human Bondage. La Scandal! Suddenly, the Academy switchboard lit up with angry calls while stacks of livid letters poured into the mailroom, everyone apparently furious that Davis had been ignored. The hysteria grew so intense, the Academy's Board of Governors held an emergency meeting and agreed that, for the first time ever, write-in votes would be allowed. All seemed headed toward such a shoo-in victory for Bette that Claudette decided to take a brief vacation to New York.
The train was coincidentally scheduled to depart from L.A.'s Union Station on the same date (and at approximately the same time) the award ceremony would be going on a few blocks away at the downtown Biltmore Hotel. Colbert was on board that train, prepping for her cross-country trip when, aided by sirens and a police escort, Academy honchos suddenly arrived at the station and began pounding on her stateroom door. The ballots had just been counted, they said, all atwitter, explaining Colbert was the overwhelming winner, followed, it was announced later, by Shearer, then Moore–and then Bette Davis. (It's also worth noting that in those early Academy days, the names of winners weren't kept as secret as they soon after would be.)
Promised the train would be held for her for 20 minutes, Colbert was whisked off to the Biltmore where she was, she said years later, "Thrilled, but terribly embarrassed because there I was, dressed in an ordinary, tailored traveling suit while every other woman present was looking magnificent in an evening gown." She happily accepted her golden statuette, quickly posed for pictures, including the one above with special Academy Award winner Ms. Temple and she was back on the train–all within seven minutes! And, soon after, the Academy made a terse announcement: no write-in votes would ever again be counted on any final ballot.
There are hundreds of fascinating incidents indelibly associated with Oscar and we'll be sharing as many this month as time will allow. Best of all, we'll also be sharing the largest collection of Oscar-winning and nominated films ever shown in one spot before within a single 31-day period. Movie-watching simply does not get better than this.
