ABSTRACT
When George M. Cohan got an advance peek at the Warner Bros, movie about his life, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), he exclaimed, “My God, what an act to follow!” As if daunted by the very notion, he died two months later, on 29 May 1942. His astonishment at what Hollywood had wrought was disingenuous. He had conspired with the filmmakers to unleash upon the viewing public not his life, but the life that could have been, or should have been—the kind of life, as his daughter Georgette declared, “Daddy would like to have lived!” 1
