Watching Sunday night’s Oscars will be a bittersweet experience for Janis Paige — these are probably the last Academy Awards for which the 93-year-old musical comedy star could vote.
Under new rules designed to make the academy’s membership more diverse, those who haven’t worked over the past 10 years will be moved to nonvoting status unless they’ve received an Oscar nomination or received at least one feature-film credit in three consecutive decades since they were inducted.
“I just paid my academy dues, but I think the time is coming very shortly when they will not have us if we haven’t [recently] done movies,’’ says Paige, who’s appeared in just one feature since 1967. She still performs the occasional club act and has a long list of TV credits from 1957 to 2001, including a short-lived sitcom produced by Lucille Ball.
“I don’t agree with it,’’ she says of her impending Oscar-voting disenfranchisement, “but I see the point. It’s progress. At least I’ll still be an academy member.’’
She still has the Oscar statuette awarded to her late husband, Ray Gilbert, for writing the lyrics to the classic song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’’ While the film it appeared in — “The Song of the South’’ — has been suppressed by Disney due to its depiction of African-Americans, the song is still performed regularly.
“I get paid $350 each time, which is a nice little annuity,’’ says Paige, who’s turned down offers to buy her Oscar. Once, when she appeared on “All in the Family,’’ she thanked Jean Stapleton for humming it in another episode, “because I get paid for it. She said she would do it more often.’’
Paige broke into Hollywood in 1944 and was under contract to Warner Bros. for the next five years. She appeared in several musical comedies with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan, promoted by the studio as their answer to Paramount’s hugely popular duo of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
Two of them — “Two Guys From Milwaukee’’ (1945) and “The Time, the Place and the Girl’’ (1946) were released on DVD recently by the Warner Archive Collection.
“When I came out there I was naive and dumb and inexperienced as I could be,’’ she recalled. “Jack was a great comedian and a wonderful teacher. I still use things that Jack taught me, like how to do a triple-take.’’
Carson and Morgan were also real-life friends, “and while they were setting up the lights, which could take hours, they would go out for a round of golf and martinis. They were very big stars, so they could do whatever they wanted.’’
Paige says there fierce competition for roles among the studio’s many female stars in the waning years of Hollywood’s Golden Era. She might have been billed right below Carson for “Romance on the High Seas’’ (1948), but it was fourth-billed Doris Day, making her screen debut, who ended up a full-fledged movie star.
“One day I was asked to come in and see Mr. Warner,’’ she recalled. “He said, ‘Janis, I just wanted to let you know we’re letting you go when your contract is up in May. We just don’t know what to do with you, because you’re so offbeat.’ I burst into tears.’’
Paige went on to score a hit in the Broadway play “Remains To Be Seen,’’ but the lead in the screen adaptation went to June Allyson. The musical “Pajama Game’’ was an even bigger hit, and Warner Bros. was interested in bringing her back to Hollywood to star — if a bigger box-office name could be found to replace her stage lead, John Raitt.
“I never knew why, but Frank Sinatra turned it down,” she says. So Raitt starred opposite Doris Day, who’d left Warner Bros. to freelance.
Her favorite film was a rare dramatic role as an institutionalized prostitute in “The Caretakers’ (1963) with Joan Crawford and Robert Stack. “The bank that was going to finance the movie didn’t want me,’’ she recalled. “But director-producer Hall Bartlett paid for the film out of his own pocket.’’
Many of Paige’s screen roles, even the musicals, cast her as sexually aggressive. In both “Two Guys From Milwaukee’’ and “The Time, the Place and the Girl,’’ she plays characters who try to seduce the ones played by much-older S.Z. Sakall, a Hungarian character actor whose billing often included his nickname, “Cuddles.’’
“He was just about the most adorable person I’ve ever met,’’ Paige says. “He was a very serious actor, but he looked like a teddy bear and he had those amazing cheeks. Strangers would come up to him on the set and pinch his cheeks. He didn’t like it.’’