Old Hollywood Gossip

[esoterica]

As far as fixers go, I always thought Otash was more interesting than Eddie Mannix. He's the one who bugged Rock Hudson and heard him confessing his homosexuality to his wife.

[famvir]

Jan 31, 2021 7:28:52 GMT -4 esoterica said:

I'd also never heard of the Gloria Grahame scandal. Apparently she was caught in bed with her 13-year-old stepson whom she later married.

I never heard of Gloria Grahame, then just yesterday I was watching on Tubi some noir soapy doctor flick with Robert Mitchum and Olivia de Havilland (and Frank Sinatra for Pete’s sake) with the head scratcher and impossible to remember title of Not As A Stranger.

Gloria Graham was the rich drunk sexy widow seducing the hard-working ass wipe expressionless newly minted doctor. Her upper lip never moved. Seriously, that was the most memorable thing in the movie. She would talk and lust and sex all over the place and her face would not move. And her hair was great!

It’s free on Tubi. It’s a truly a WTF of a movie, with a lot of famous people in it.

[divasahm]

Feb 6, 2021 11:27:05 GMT -4 famvir said:

Jan 31, 2021 7:28:52 GMT -4 esoterica said:

I'd also never heard of the Gloria Grahame scandal. Apparently she was caught in bed with her 13-year-old stepson whom she later married.

I never heard of Gloria Grahame, then just yesterday I was watching on Tubi some noir soapy doctor flick with Robert Mitchum and Olivia de Havilland (and Frank Sinatra for Pete’s sake) with the head scratcher and impossible to remember title of Not As A Stranger.

Gloria Graham was the rich drunk sexy widow seducing the hard-working ass wipe expressionless newly minted doctor. Her upper lip never moved. Seriously, that was the most memorable thing in the movie. She would talk and lust and sex all over the place and her face would not move. And her hair was great!

It’s free on Tubi. It’s a truly a WTF of a movie, with a lot of famous people in it.

She really was one of Hollywood's most versatile actresses--but after learning about all the outrageous scandal she was involved in, I'm realizing that I Cain't Say No really was the soundtrack of her life...

[esoterica]

I always loved this thread for the cheeky Carole Lombard stories. Here's one I'd never heard:

"According to a Hollywood anecdote book, Carole was once stranded and managed to be picked up by a truck. After talking for a bit, the driver told her that she looked like that Carole Lombard from the films. Carole replied, 'Don't you dare compare me to that hussy!'"

[Auroranorth]

I think this photo is classic Carole.

Fixed the link, @fitz!

[Deleted]

Auroranorth the link just comes back to this page.

[missjennifer]

Christina Crawford's allegations and the truth thereof have been debated in this thread. I can't say whether they're true or not, but at least one story told in Mommie Dearest has to be untrue.

It was a pretty neat one, too...Christina alleges that when she was a tween, she'd fix drinks for Joan's dates while Joan was getting ready upstairs. (At Joan's request, I might add...which is a little creepy to ask your kid to play hostess for your suitors, and to mess with alcohol to boot. And to call them "Uncle" even if she'd only just met them.) One night, she told Christina that "Mr. Brenner" was taking her out to dinner. Christina went down and opened the door...to find a bald, half-naked, fierce-looking man in Asian costume standing there. Christina panicked, ran upstairs and told her mother that a vicious-looking savage was at the door. Joan calmed her down and explained that Mr. Yul Brynner was filming The King And I and simply came over in costume. It's a cool story...

...except that by the time the movie The King And I was being made (mid-fifties, came out in 1956), Christina was no longer a young tween, but a teenager in boarding school. Joan married Al Steele in 1955 and would have been living with him in New York by this time, not in Brentwood, CA. The only way this would've fit the fact is if Christina were talking about the stage production instead, which started in 1951--but this would have been in New York, not California, and since Christina went to boarding school at ten (1949-50) she still wouldn't have been around.

And even if any of this weren't the case--costumes are the studio's property, not the actor's, and do you really think a film studio would just allow an actor to walk off the set in a valuable costume where anything could have happened to it?

So whatever else in Christina's story may or may not be true, this, at least, was almost certainly false.

[Mugsy]

Maybe Yul Brynner loved the costume so much, he had his own version for the ladies or for cosplay or whatever. One thing I've learned with celebrities is that many are not what they seem.

[missjennifer]

Well, the thing is, the timelines still don't seem to match up. Christina was already in boarding school by the time the Broadway production came into being, and by the the movie was being filmed, Joan was either courting or already married to Al Steele, Christina was still away in boarding school (may even have been in the strict Catholic one by this time) and even if it had happened on a summer break or something, by that time she wouldn't have been a young kid who thinks "OH MY GOD, A SAVAGE!" but a teenager who'd have thought, "Oh, great, a weirdo in a costume." Or recognized Yul Brynner from the get-go. Joan's biographer Donald Spoto also caught the inconsistency.

My guess is that Joan had dated Yul at one point in the late forties and Christina thought this would make a cool story, without really thinking about how the timelines matched up.

[seat6]

Lana Wood’s autobiography is set to be published this week and she has named Kirk Douglas as the man who raped Natalie Wood when she was 15.