Has anyone on this board ever received an honest-to-goodness telegram? I haven't, though I once, in the pre-internet days, sent one. I don't think I've ever seen an actual one outside of movies except for an old one sent during WWII by my father to his parents after his ship was attacked by a U-boat, telling them he was fine. Although I suspect Uncle Sam picked up the tab for this one, Uncle didn't get too extravagant: the whole thing, including Dad's name, comes to four words.
I've always noticed in movies the telegrams appear to be genuine, i.e. there's an actual date, place of origin, etc. if you see one in close-up, and they're printed on standard Western Union forms. Was this an early type of product placement, did Western Union require that real telegrams be used as props? For example, at the end of Laurel and Hardy's ME AND MY PAL, a telegram arrives for Ollie, and after some byplay with the telegram boy (who's crosseyed) and suitable delays, we finally see a closeup of the message. At the top you can plainly see place of origin (Los Angeles, CA) and the date (March 22, 1933, which would've corresponded with the film's shooting dates), even though the message is about a nonexistent Great International Horsecollar Corp. stock Ollie supposedly owns (Ollie's name is spelled out in full, too: Oliver Norvel Hardy). Needless to say, the telegram is read just in time for Ollie to hear that the stock has plunged on the market, bankrupting him....
Here's a telegram story that's true:
The writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, at the time she was working on THE YEARLING, received an inquiry from Cosmopolitan magazine (which published real writing in those days) about serializing this new book. Rawlings went down to the nearest Western Union office in her part of rural Florida and sent Cosmo a message back saying she didn't think they'd be interested as the book was about a deer, and conclusing "Sorry stop all characters past menopause."
The Western Union clerk started counting up the words, then slid his spectacles down hos nose and looked at Mrs. Rawlings. "This word here - this menopause."
Damn the Western Union anyway, Mrs. Rawlings thought, I suppose you can't say "menopause" in a telegram.
"This menopause," the clerk said, "is that all one word?"
Verified in Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, ed. Gordon Bigelow, U. of Florida Press, 1983. She enjoyed telling this story on herself many times - Mrs. Rawlings may have written about boys and fawns, but she had a decidedly ribald sense of humor.
If you want to read a really blistering telegram Ernest Hemingway sent off one reprinted in The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway - Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. In it, Hemingway accuses Scribners, his publisher, of charging him with costs that ought to have been shared equally between author and publisher. He compares this to cutting steaks out of a racehorse at less than the going price of horse meat, then expecting said horse to run, and concludes by saying that in the future, if Scribners planned to cheat him, he ought to be notified because he would just give Scribners the money they demanded and in the end Scribners would have more money as well as friends. It runs nearly a full page and I can only guess how much Western Union charged Hem for this diatribe.
