Who could have asked for anything better? I was cast in movies with great actors, with great leading men.
I did not want vocal groups. I was not interested in singing with a group because there's too much problem with groups in the first place.
My musical background in Tyler, Texas was quite outstanding. Uh, I grew up with, uh, with high school teachers who were in bands, they could play music. And we had a nine piece band there in Tyler, and I joined them when I was about, oh, 15 years old and traveled all over Texas in that band, playing for the elite oil people. Hah. And um, I was making about 50 bucks a night, and uh, it taught me, they taught me how to find my timing and to learn the songs that I wanted.
I was singing when I was five years old. My sister and I both had the talent from mom and dad, and she was in opera and I was into pop and uh, rhythm and blues, anything, I was about a four octave singer.
I knew when I left to go to start my career, you don't want to get in front of a band and say, uh, give me "Stardust" without saying D-flat.
The music I wanted to get into when I went to California, was to, uh, get into, uh, pop, mostly. And the big band era was on at that time. I was doing the "Mona Lisa"s, the "Stardust"s, "Stars Fell On Alabama," all this kind of stuff. And that was my thing that I wanted.
Being from Texas, I didn't know anything about gangsters and people like that, I had no fear of people.
For all forms, writing dialogue is almost like writing music. I pay close attention to rhythms and tones.
You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.
In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later. . . Let’s not go there.
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy. ’. . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.