A Little Festive Treat – Hermoine Gingold Sings “Cocaine” and Vincent Price Does Opium

What better at this surreal time of year than the great Hermione Gingold singing Cocaine with visuals added from the 1962 Vincent Price movie Confessions of an Opium Eater. Click here for some entertainment.

Some background – Hermoine Gingold was the great and much loved entertainer and actress who’s cabaret shows were legendary – Cocaine is featured on two of her cabaret albums – La Gingold (1955 but this song probably record in 1953) and Live at the Cafe de Paris ( a couple of years later in the 1950s). As an actress most people know her from Gigi and The Music Man. Who exactly wrote the words for Cocaine is somewhat of a mystery (to me at least) – nobody I can find is credited indicating that it was Gingold herself (she was a very funny writer – just try her autobiography if you don’t believe me). Interestingly, and also adding a hand in the song, might have been Eric Maschwitz who was Gingold’s husband at the time – Maschwitz had worked as a lyricist in the 1930s and 40’s and the two were married between 1926 and 1945. Here two China Rhyming interest overlap – during this time Maschwitz worked in Hollywood for MGM and while there had an affair with Anna May Wong and reputedly wrote the song These Foolish Things for her when they separated and he returned to London (see my blog post on Maschwitz and Wong here).

Now to Confessions of an Opium Eater from 1962, based rather loosely on the Thomas de Qincey book (giving de Quincey, who wrote the book in 1821, a rather deserved IMDB entry!). A Vincent Price vehicle, it was rather poor. It was known in the US – where apparently de Qincey’s book was thought to not be well known as Souls for Sale and Evils of Chinatown.