Vincent Price Estate LP: His Son Read by VP 1973 (New)

$

47

Vincent Price was justly famous for his mellifluous voice--and he frequently made recordings in all genres.

This is a very rare recording made by Price in 1973, Entitled His Son: The Life and Times of Jesus, it is a blending of Scriptural readings and music, put together by Robert H. Schuller in 1973 (now of Crystal Cathedral fame) and distributed by Harper & Row.

It is still shrink-wrapped, but it appears to be a double album by the weight of it.

This is a double vinyl record of Vincent Price narrating the story of Jesus.

About Robert H. Schuller:

Robert Harold Schuller was born in Alton, Iowa. He was raised on his parent’s farm nearby, in a small, close-knit community of Dutch Americans. The Schuller family was adherent to the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest Protestant denomination in North America. Robert knew from the age of four that he wanted to be a minister of the church.

After graduating from the tiny high school of nearby Newkirk, Iowa, he entered Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. While home for the summer he saw his parents home and farm utterly destroyed by a tornado. Eight other farms in the neighborhood were destroyed, but the Schullers' were the only family to rebuild. Robert and his father bought a nearby farmhouse and dismantled it piece by piece, rebuilding it on their own property. At summer's end they were once again at home on the farm, and Robert was ready to return to Michigan to pursue his religious studies at Western Theological Seminary. In 1950 he received his Masters of Divinity.

The young Rev. Schuller married Arvella DeHaan of Newkirk, and the newlyweds moved to Chicago, where the newly ordained minister took up his first assignment, as pastor of the Ivanhoe Reformed Church. During his ministry, the congregation grew from 38 to over 400.

In 1955, Schuller's denomination, the Reformed Church in America, called on him to build a new congregation in Garden Grove, California. With only $500 in assets, the minister found it difficult to find a building for the new congregation. At last, he decided to rent a drive-in movie theater, the Orange Drive-In. On the first Sunday, 100 persons attended services seated in their cars, while Rev. Schuller preached from the tarpaper roof of the snack bar.

Many in the Reformed Church considered this an undignified setting for divine services, but Rev. Schuller loved preaching under the open sky. The Garden Grove congregation grew rapidly. In 1961, Rev. Schuller opened his first permanent church building, the world's first walk-in/drive-in church designed by the distinguished architect Richard Neutra.

In 1968, Dr. Schuller founded New Hope, the world's first live, church-sponsored 24-hour counseling and suicide prevention hotline. Since its inception, it is estimated that over a million people have dialed this hotline and received immediate counseling.

The Robert H. Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership opened in 1970. More than 20,000 students from different Christian denominations, Catholic and Protestant, have graduated from the Institute. The same year Dr. Schuller began regular television broadcasts from his church. This program, The Hour of Power, is broadcast on hundreds of stations around the world, and can be seen on 200 stations in the U.S. and Canada alone. An estimated 30 million people watch the broadcast every week.

The Garden Grove congregation continued to grow; when a larger building was needed, Rev. Schuller commissioned the renowned architect Philip Johnson to build a new building, all of glass: the Crystal Cathedral. After almost insurmountable difficulties, this 2,736-seat architectural marvel was dedicated in 1980, "To the Glory of Man for the Greater Glory of God." Today, one million people visit the Cathedral annually, for regular Sunday worship, for conferences, seminars, workshops, and for two annual pageants, The Glory of Christmas and The Glory of Easter.

In 1992, Dr. Schuller fulfilled one of his lifelong dreams with the opening of the Fuqua International School of Christian Communications, funded by the generous donation of Mr. J.B. Fuqua, of Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Schuller serves as Chancellor of the school, where ministers from all over the world hone their preaching skills.

Dr. Schuller is the author of over 30 books, six of which have found a place on the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists. Robert and Arvella Schuller have five children, all very active in Christian ministry. Dr. Schuller's son Robert A. Schuller is also an ordained minister of the Reformed Church in America.

About the beloved, Vincent Price:

Vincent Price is best remembered for his roles in horror movies, specifically the Roger Corman adaptations from Edger Allan Poe. Although these gave him a wide variety of characters to play and were striking enough, they type cast him for the remainder of his career. Price did not start out with the intentions of becoming an      actor but rather an art historian. He obtained degrees in Art History and English at Yale and then taught school for a year. He felt that he needed to further his education though as the students seemed to know more than he did! Price returned to college to take his Masters in Fine Arts at the Courtauld Institute in London, he also studied briefly in Vienna.

It was while in London In 1934 that the theatre bug hit him, theatre tickets were relatively cheap and Price took advantage of this. He first appeared as an actor at the Gate Theatre, at the time a private experimental theater, as the judge and a policeman in the play "Chicago'. He also appeared here as Albert in 'Victoria Regina', the role that was to bring him to Broadway and the public's attention. The show's producer Gilbert Miller, decided to take the play to New York and open with Helen Hayes (the number one actress in America at the time), in the leading role. Miller also decided to take Vincent Price to New York to play opposite her. The play opened on the 26th December 1935 and ran for three years.

The program notes in the original 1936 playbill give an interesting insight into Vincent Price's entrance to the theatrical profession....

"Vincent Price's appearance as leading man to Helen Hayes marks his professional as well as his American debut on the stage. This extraordinary circumstance is due to the fact that although Mr. Price has had stage aspirations since he was ten years old, he was forced to earn his living as a schoolmaster until mere chance decreed otherwise.

 He was studying the history of German art at the Courtauld Institute in London when a friend took him to London's Gate Theater, where casting of Maurine Watkins' "Chicago" was in process. American accents being at a premium, Mr. Price was thrust into the production and found himself doubling as a burly policeman and a venerable judge. His remarkable resemblance to Prince Albert led to his being offered the important role of the Price Consort in the ensuing production of "Victoria Regina".

He received glowing notices and was subsequently signed by Gilbert Miller for the American production."

How accurate that "he was forced to earn his living as a schoolmaster until mere chance decreed otherwise." is probably an exaggeration, his father did own the National Candy Company in St Louis.

Price's love of art never left him and he used his education to good advantage. He was responsible, in 1951, of founding the Vincent Price Gallery, with his then wife Mary Grant Price on the campus of East Los Angeles Collage. Price had been invited to lecture on the ''Aesthetic Responsibilities of the Citizen,'' he arrived to find he was, ''speaking in a Quonset hut on a mud flat.''

He was so struck by the students' spirits and the need for the community to have the opportunity to experience original art works first hand, Price donated some ninety pieces which established the first ''teaching art collection'' owned by a community college in the United States. Over the decades, Price and other patrons continued to contribute art with the goal of illustrating diverse periods, styles, mediums, and techniques: from Egyptian sculpture circa 600 BC to 1990s serigraphs. He continued to maintain a hands-on interest in the gallery with selecting exhibits and developing a fund raising program to which he leant his name and support. In 1991, he was quoted,

''We just wanted it to serve the community. We didn't want to make publicity out of it since everything actors do is suspect! We just shut up and let it grow.''

Price's love of American Indian Art led to another little known side of him, his work for Native Americans, he worked for 15 years with the Department of the Interior and was quoted as saying in an interview:

"I have an enormous respect for the American Indian. I think we shut them off, at a period when they might have become the most creative people on the face of the earth. But we killed them off."

Prior to his movie career Price joined Orson Wells' Mercury Theatre for a brief spell, here he claimed, everyone in the company had a disagreement with Wells at some point or another. Price's first movie was "Service DeLuxe" in 1938 and he went on to play such diverse historical characters as Raleigh, Clarence, Richelieu, Charles II and the Mormon Joseph Smith. He was also cast in several films as a charming but effete young man, notably in 'Laura' (1944) and 'The Fly' (1958). The occasional horror role came his way too at this time, he reveled in the old Lionel Atwell part of the demented sculptor in "The House of Wax" (1953). Price's niche in the horror movie genre was carved in 1960 with the classic movie "The Fall of the House of Usher".

Price did return to the stage in later years. He toured his one-man show of Oscar Wilde throughout America for many years to great acclaim. It was a demonstration of the excellence performing skills of Vincent Price and an escape from the type casting.

In his later years, Price became involved with the rock & roll industry, he was involved in music videos with performers including Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, and Michael Jackson. Price had his own ideas why he was chosen for this honor.

 "I have great admiration for rock `n roll, but not when it's done badly. My God! You know, I have a theory about how I get selected for these things. I think they've based a lot of their stuff on my movies. They go out and do the rock `n roll, and they're all high, and making the noise and flying around, and then they go back to their hotel room, turn on the TV, and there I am! Alice and I met a couple of times, and I liked him, then he asked me to do 'Welcome to My Nightmare'. Then one time I got a call and they said would you come and do a recording with Michael Jackson, called 'Thriller'. I said, "Sure, I'll do anything." So I went and did it, and I didn't think anything would happen with it, than it came out and sold 40 million copies! I didn't do it for the money, because I didn't have a percentage of it. It was just fun to do.

You know to be identified with the most popular record ever made is not just chopped liver! It has really done me a lot of good, because it has given me a new audience. "

As if Price didn't have enough to occupy himself during his career as an actor, he began another career as a TV chef, which ran for several series. He had a reputation as an outstanding cook and collector of recipes. He also found time to write a book , “Joe".

Towards the end of his life, he was struck with a great personal loss. His beloved third wife, Coral Browne, succumbed to breast cancer two days after Vincent Price's 80th birthday on May 29th, 1991. In the Autumn of that year a memorial service was held at London's Farmers Church, many of Coral Browne's friends from the Theater and Film attended. Price's own frail health made it impossible for him to be at the memorial in person.  A letter written by Price was read out by director John Schlesinger --
         
"Dear John:

When I was courting Coral, the first gift she gave me was a photo of herself simply signed, "Remember Coral" -- not really a challenge as the problem was, how could you forget her? I've come to believe remembering someone is not the highest compliment -- it is missing them. I find I miss every hour of Coral's life -- I miss her morning cloudiness, noon mellowness, evening brightness. I miss her in every corner of our house, every crevice of my life. In missing her, I feel I'm missing much of life itself. Over her long illness, as I held her hand or stroked her brow, or just lay still beside her, it was not the affectionate contact we'd known as we wandered down the glamorous paths we'd been privileged to share in our few years together; we were marching towards the end of our time and we both knew it. But, in our looks, our smiles, the private, few, soft-spoken word, there was hope of other places, other ways, perhaps, to meet again.

One fact of Coral I'll always miss, her many, many devoted friends -- many here, today, in this beautiful church, celebrating her life more than mourning her death, and missing the liveliness of her wit, her personal beauty, her outgoing self. I love them all for loving her. Many of you have shared more of her life than I have, but that very private and intense passion for her is mine alone.

She survived that last long year on the love of her friends, their caring and concern -- and very especially yours, dear John. I miss you all, and though we may not meet as often, nor in the great good company of my wife, you are in my memory locked.

All my love,

Vincent