Kathryn Grayson in latter days

It was about 1980. I was living in Los Angeles. In those days, before DVDs or even widespread availability of videotape, there were still movie theaters that showed old movies. That and commercial TV were the only way you could see old movies in those days. There was a theater on Sunset Blvd. that had a special showing of two Kathryn Grayson movies: "The Desert Song" and "So This is Love," which was the biography of opera star Grace Moore and featured a very young Merv Griffin, who has just died as I am writing this. The showing was personally attended by Kathryn Grayson herself. It was a bit discouraging to see the change the years had wrought in Kathryn Grayson. In her prime, she was gorgeous: Buxon (to say the least), with big beautiful eyes and finely chiseled features. In 1980, she was a somewhat frumpy woman in her late fifties wearing a rather worn-looking blue sweater. Nevertheless, the audience was full of adoring fans who crowded around her asking for her autograph. She clearly did not take herself or her movie work too seriously. Her funniest comment was that she always thought her Desert Song character, Margot Birabeau, was "pretty dumb" because all Paul Bonnard (Gordon Macrae) had to do to keep her from recognizing him as El Khobar, the "Arab" leader fighting the French, was draw a sort of veil across his lower face, all the time standing right next to her singing.