Claire McCardell introduced her first commercial success, the “monastic
dress.”
Lilly Dache opened a design house in New York City with a room
decorated in gold for her brunette customers and one in silver for the
blondes. What about the redheads?
Popular films
included:
The Adventures of Robin Hood
starring Errol Flynn
Bringing Up Baby directed by
Howard Hawks
and starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant
Holiday directed
by George Cukor and starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant
In
Old Chicago
starring Tyrone Power and Alice Faye
Jezebel
directed by William Wyler and starring Bette Davis
Pygmalion
directed
by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard and starring Howard and Wendy
Hiller
Sing You Sinners directed by
Wesley Ruggles and
starring Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray and Donald O’Connor
A Slight
Case of Murder directed by Lloyd
Bacon and starring Edward G.
Robinson
You Can’t Take It With You directed by Frank
Capra and starring Jean Arthur, James Stewart and Lionel Barrymore.
October 31: On his
Mercury Theater
on the Air radio show, Orson Welles broadcasted “Invasion from Mars.”
Fiction included Taylor Caldwell’s Dynasty of Death, John Dos
Passos’s U.S.A., James T. Farrell’s No Star is Lost,
Albert Maltz’s
The Way Things Are and Other Stories, Kenneth Robeson (Lester
Dent)’s
The Man of Bronze, Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy
Mountain,
Allen Tate’s The Fathers, Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s
Children,
and Leane Zugsmith’s The Summer Children.
Popular songs included: “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” by Ella Fitzgerald
and Al Feldman, “F.D.R. Jones” by Harold Rome, “The Flat Foot Floogie”
by Slim Gaillard, Slam Stewart and Bud Green, “I Let a Song Go Out of
My Heart”
by Duke Ellington, “Jeepers Creepers” by Harry Warren and Johnny
Mercer,
“Love Walked In” by George and Ira Gershwin, “One O'clock Jump” by
William
“Count” Basie, “Thanks For the Memory” by Ralph Raigner and Leo Robin
and
“That Old Feeling” by Sammy Fain and Lew Brown.
Thomas Hart Benton exhibited his Cradling Wheat.
The first live and unscheduled news event, a fire at a barracks in New
York, was televised by NBC’s mobile television “news” van.
Woody Guthrie went on the road.
Congress established the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
January: Architectural Record
devoted an edition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia house designs.
February 4: Our Town by Thronton
Wilder opened at Henry Miller’s Theater in New York.
July 3: President Franklin D.
Roosevelt dedicated the Gettysburg memorial.
July 30: Henry Ford was presented
with Germany’s highest honor given to foreigners, the Grand Cross of
the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
Du Pont introduced rayon, synthetic silk, and early nylon.