Too Good for Hollywood

1. I first laid eyes on Aline MacMahon seventy years ago, when I was five and my parents took me to Brooklyn’s Marboro Theatre to see Alfred E. Green’s schmaltzy 1953 musical biopic The Eddie Cantor Story. MacMahon, who was then fifty-four but looked far older, played little Eddie’s Grandma Esther, a kindly ur-Yiddishe bubbe […]