Fun Finds: Vintage Photoplay Magazine

Well, here we go again with another vintage movie magazine. I stumbled across this delicious May 1969 issue of Photoplay during one of my frequent scavenges. The cover price is $0.50, but thanks to inflation and collectability I was forced to fork over $3.00. Ha! Money well spent if you ask me (and when you consider what $3.00 will get you in terms of the currents show business rags.) As always in these cases, you may have to open in a new window or tab and magnify in order to read the print.


Articles about Elizabeth Taylor, Patty Duke and Mia Farrow didn't have very good accompanying photos, so I didn't scan them in. Basically, Liz was suffering from extreme back pain and upset that all the nursing care had led to a rumor of cancer, Patty entered a hospital for extreme fatigue, but it was really believed to be depression and/or drug-related (she later revealed a longtime battle with bipolar disorder) and Mia was in the throes of winning Andre Previn away from his wife Dory. The couple had merely been seen together in public.

We're barely inside the magazine before an interview pops up with young Swedish star Ewa Aulin. The winner of Miss Teen Sweden in 1965 when she was fifteen proceeded to take the even greater title Miss Teen International the following year. After this victory helped land her roles in a few Italian films, she was given the starring role in 1968's Candy, a picture that placed her with such personalities as John Huston, James Coburn, Ringo Starr, Richard Burton and Marlon Brando. She won decent reviews (though the film was a flop) and even was nominated for a Best Newcomer Golden Globe Award (the winner being Romeo & Juliet's Olivia Hussey), but was also seriously typecast as a blonde nymphet. Already married at eighteen, she wanted to have lots of children, but, as it turned out, she only had one son. After her 1972 divorce, she exited the world of acting in 1973 and then married again in 1974, eventually becoming a teacher.

Of course we always love the gossip sections of these old magazines. Speaking of Olivia Hussey, there's a blurb about Dino Martin Jr wooing her from afar, having fallen in love with her while watching Romeo & Juliet and then proceeding to call her long distance. This love match really came true as they began to date after finally meeting and then married in 1971. He soon changed his moniker to Dean Paul Martin. A son was born to them in 1974, but, sadly, the couple divorced in 1978. He later married Olympic skating champ Dorothy Hamill, but that only lasted from 1982 – 1984. A captain in the National Guard, he died in 1987 at only age thirty-five when his plane crashed into a mountain during a snowstorm.

There's also a fairly in-depth account of why Barbara Parkins didn't feel like Omar Sharif was the man for her. The news of Vanessa Redgrave's pregnancy is announced and there's even a picture of the (unwed) couple. Dig those whiskers on Mr. Nero! I didn't even recognize him at first. Other couples are discussed and speculated about as well. Country star Glen Campbell is shown with his latest wife and offspring. He'd been married once before and had a child (as well as one who died in infancy), had three with this wife Billie (though this one is noted here as “Wesley,” but his sons with her go by Travis and Kane), had one more with his third wife (who left Mac Davis for him) and then three more with his fourth and present wife! This earns him the Johnny Appleseed Award from a panel of Underworld adjudicators.

The next page gives us a glimpse of the aforementioned Parkins and Sharif (who I never even knew dated), a shot of those handsome singers Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck and a hint regarding some of the personal hell Sandra Dee was going through at the time (later revealed to be anorexia, alcoholism, drug dependency and severe depression.) There's also a blurb about Diahann Carroll and a ne'er do well she'd been dating. I don't know if the record album mentioned from Mia Farrow ever came to fruition and was released, but I'm kinda doubting it.

As the gossip continues, we have a fascinating account of an L.A. performance of the then-new rock musical Hair. Such diverse personalities as John and Michelle Phillips and Dick Martin mingled with Ann Miller, Liberace and Sonia Henie! Photos on this page include folks who have all been profiled here in The Underworld: Joe Namath, Michael Landon and Faye Dunaway.


At this point I have to reveal something very bizarre and tragic. The author of this column, Steve Brandt, was a costume assistant on several movies who eventually became a writer (for 16 Magazine and others) and was part of a particular Hollywood crowd (a drug scene, to be frank.) He was good friends with Sharon Tate and others in that circle, having been witness at her marriage to Roman Polanski. This magazine was published several months before her (and several of her friends') grisly murder by members of the Manson family on August 9th, 1969. Though he was not a suspect, he was grilled by police in order to glean as much information about the situation as he could provide. Brandt was, like everyone else in town, stunned and horrified by the crime, but he in particular couldn't escape the fear that he was next on their list of victims. About a month after Tate's murder, a despondent Brandt killed himself with an overdose of pills rather than risk a death like the previous folks had suffered.

A column by James Mason's wife Pamela reveals more couples I was never aware of. Diahann Carroll and Don Marshall and, more importantly, Tommy Smothers and Farrah Fawcett! There's also an account of Steve McQueen's wife Neile meeting Princess Grace and deliberately covering up a very revealing (in back, anyway) evening gown.

She goes on to discuss the possible reason why near-sighted stars hold a certain appeal. Positive speculation over the health of Jimmy Durante's second wife Marge proved to be correct. Not only did she outlive him when he passed away in 1980 at age eighty-six, but she lived on until 2009, dying at age ninety! Mason tunes into Jane Fonda's dieting habits. Fonda revealed years later that she was practicing bulemia at this time and beforehand. We also have a photo of Jack Jones and Jill St. John, who were on the cusp of a divorce. Jones was already St. John's third husband! It seems impossible to believe, but her 1990 marriage to Robert Wagner, which is still going strong, is by far the lengthiest of her previous marital unions, none of which exceeded three years. This was Jones' second marriage, but he would marry and divorce five times in all. His first and fifth marriages resulted in children, though St. John never gave birth to any children herself.

As if there wasn't already plenty of gossip in the prior pages, we next come to another whole section of it by a different columnist! This one refers to the hot love scenes between Sidney Poitier and Joanna Shimkus in what the article calls Privilege, but that was an entirely different film which neither star was in. Their movie was The Lost Man. Even though it sounds like she went back to her then-lover John Heyman, she and Poitier stayed in contact and eventually became a couple, marrying in 1976. They are together still today. There's a picture of Tony Curtis and then-wife Debbie. Apparently, they had to go to court to become legally wed following a prior ceremony elsewhere. This, Curtis' third marriage, would last until 1982 and yield two sons, though one of them died in 1994 of a heroin overdose at only age twenty-three.

Continuing on, there's a note about Here Come the Brides actor Robert Brown getting serious about girlfriend Anna Gonyow. He would indeed marry her in September of 1969, but they divorced in 1980. That was his third trip down the aisle. In 1986, he married for the fourth time and the couple remains wed today. There's also a blurb about Elvis Presley declaring that, despite some acting lessons, wife Priscilla would not be entering show business. After their divorce and his death, she did start hosting Those Amazing Animals in 1980, followed by a stint on Dallas from 1983 – 1988. Then there were the three The Naked Gun movies.

One amusing entry notes that Brenda Scott and Andrew Prine are headed to divorce court again for the second time. They married in 1965 and divorced in 1966. Then they remarried in 1968 and divorced again in 1969. They costarred on The Road West from 1966 to 1967 which was during the period they were divorced the first time! Are you ready for this?? They remarried again, for the THIRD TIME, in 1973 and, you guessed it, divorced for the third and final time in 1978. This is a definite “WTF?” Prine had already been married to Sharon Farrell for a year before Scott, but married for the fifth time in 1986 to an actress who he remains wed to now. Scott never married again. The couple pictured on this page, Stanley Livingston (of My Three Sons) and his wife Sandy had one child and were divorced in 1974. By the way, Livingston's TV dad Fred MacMurray was not in favor of the marriage to this “go-go dancer.” Livingston never remarried.

Plenty more is found on the next page. Mishaps befalling David Janssen during the filming of Marooned, a tidbit about something Ava Gardner once did at The Ritz Hotel in Madrid, a series of blurbs about the mudslides and flooding in the Hollywood hills and little snippets about John Wayne, Elizabeth Montgomery, Carol Burnett, Jane Wyman, Agnes Moorehead and others.

I must say I truly love the above picture of Barbra Streisand, but then I have an affinity for those over-the-top '60s hairdos such as this one. Even this up-do is dwarfed by the one Princess Margaret sports on the next page, though in that one Babs is decked out in a huge fur hat. The story concerns the crumbling of her marriage to Elliott Gould. They'd been wed since 1963 (and would remain so until 1971), but her stardom went hypersonic and put an enormous strain on their viability as a couple.

Dig this fun and very colorful layout of Miss Eva Gabor at her home. She was clearly quite fond of the color yellow! Though the article recounts her distrust of men and her deliberate stranglehold on their whereabouts, she was married at the time. Her first three marriages had lasted anywhere from one to six years, but this one, to a stockbroker-turned TV executive named Richard Brown, lasted from 1959 to 1972. She married a fifth and final time in 1973, but was divorced by 1983.

One of the more gossiped about movies of this era was Blake Edwards' Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson. The beleaguered production (whose budget soared to three times what was projected thanks to delays and other issues) cast Andrews as a WWI German spy cavorting with American pilot Hudson. Everything from mutual hatred between the director/leading lady and the leading man to reports of a ménage à trois gone wrong has been bandied about.

Sadly, this article doesn't offer any real insight to anything, but is just a long stream of vague puff publicity, but at least it is frank enough to note that most of his dates during his career at Universal were studio-imposed and that there was no discernible relationship going on at present. It's not feasible for me to scan and present all 100 pages of a magazine here, so that's why most of the articles aren't shown in their entirety, but I went ahead and did Hudson's because of the historical value of knowing what sort of press treatment this gay, out in Hollywood-in to the rest of the world, star received at this time.

I know you are all dying to know about The Private Life of Goober! Despite George Lindsey's rural background and career that consisted primarily of portraying a corn pone bumpkin type, he actually had earned a BA in Bioscience was a science teacher prior to acting. After first serving in the U.S. Air Force, he went to college, then taught school (along with his wife) in order to save up money and then give acting a try in The Big Apple. It took a while (three years), but he finally landed a gig in the 1962 Broadway musical All American and that show's director, Joshua Logan, gave him a part in the movie Ensign Pulver. Eventually, he won a role on The Andy Griffith Show (as Goober, natch!)

One of the looniest stories to come about him in recent years was from Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy who reportedly claimed that Lindsey was George Roddenberry's first choice to play Mr. Spock! (Since Martin Landau was offered the role before Nimoy, that would make him at least third choice if this is true.) Lindsey and his wife Joy (who'd been wed since 1956) divorced in 1991. A devoted benefactor for The Special Olympics, he has raised over a million dollars with his charity golf tournament and has also set up academic scholarships at his alma mater, the The University of North Alabama.

This article on Connie Stevens and her ex-husband James Stacy comes with a nice photo of the two taken when they were still together. At the time of this article, Stevens was married to Eddie Fisher, a match that never gelled even though they wound up with two children. In his autobiography, Fisher wrote about the extreme sexual chemistry he and Stevens shared, but noted that that was just about all they had in common. When Stacy was severely injured in a motorcycle crash, Stevens arranged fundraisers to help get him back on track as well as he could be under the circumstances (he lost one arm and one leg in the smash-up.)

The cover story on Jackie Onassis offers up conjecture about how her father John Bouvier would have felt about her marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. I've found that, often, Jackie's face on the cover of one of these magazines has helped to ensure its survival when many other movie mags wound up in the garbage. People tended to hang onto things related to the Kennedys and also to Elvis and The Beatles. So her presence here actually helped keep this issue around until I could scoop it up!

Jackie was, of course, the widow of President John F. Kennedy and would also wind up the widow of Aristotle Onassis when he died in 1975. (They had wed not too awfully long before this magazine saw print in 1968.) Did they ever walk together?! She's so often several paces ahead of him.

Jerry Lewis and his brood are featured here. He and wife Patti (who he married in 1944) had six sons, one of which was adopted. They had been told after the first one that no more children were possible, so they adopted another son. Then, as happens in so many cases, they conceived again (and again and again!) The eldest, Gary (of the music group Gary Lewis and the Playboys), married and gave Lewis a granddaughter, shown here. Lewis and his wife divorced in 1980 and three years later he married a second time, to a Las Vegas dancer twenty-four years his junior. They adopted a girl in 1992.

I saw Ryan O'Neal on The View the other day, looking downright ghastly. He's written a book about his long relationship with Farrah Fawcett and was there to plug it, but they also got on the topic of his children, all of whom have been quite troubled. This spread is interesting because it shows him in court during a custody hearing with Tatum (and Griffin) O'Neal's mom Joanna Moore as well as with his then-wife Leigh Taylor-Young.

This whole story would proceed downhill from here. Moore had become addicted to pills and alcohol during the dog days of her separation and divorce from O'Neal. In 1970, she entered a hospital for treatment, but the very next year she was arrested for DUI. She lost custody of the children after that. She then had a one-year marriage before proceeding on to five more DUI arrests over the years (years in which she was supported financially by Tatum O'Neal.) A life-long heavy smoker, she died of lung cancer in 1997 at age sixty-three. O'Neal and Taylor-Young had a son together, but divorced in 1973 as well. Later, he had a fourth child with Farrah Fawcett, though they never married.

There's a feature on the marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward featuring a color photo of Mister Blue Eyes and his wife. The oft-told quote about the possibility of him cheating (“I've got steak at home. Why go out for hamburger?”) is recounted as well as the story of how Newman directed various actors such as James Olsen (in Rachel, Rachel) and Robert Wagner (in Winning) on how to do bedroom scenes with Woodward. The angle is that this make-believe “sin” helps to keep their relationship happy. That, and the fact they they had decided never to both work on location at the same time and if that ever did occur, to meet somewhere in the middle during their downtime. There's also an amusing anecdote about four people showing up to get Paul Newman's autograph and being horribly disappointed when a makeupless, curler-ridden Woodward answered the door instead. Whatever their story was as a couple, they did remain wed fifty years until his death in 2008.

Another custody battle taking place then was between actor Darren McGavin and his ex-wife Melanie. Married in 1944, they had four children together (with some unusual names including York, Bogart, Graemm and, the apparent black sheep of the lot due to the normalcy of her moniker, Megan.) In the article, McGavin's ex is accused of keeping the children in Massachusetts while she pursues acting classes and opportunities in New York. She is also accused of spending practically every dime of the support he'd been paying to her on herself (through clothes, etc...) while the kids saw no benefit. He also said she called him all sorts of foul names in front of the children.

For her own part, she claimed he inflicted emotional and physical suffering on her and even took the kids away without telling her. When she tracked them down in California, he allegedly struck her and sent her away bruised. She won a restraining order against him. She also said he left the children alone a lot so that he could go out with other women. Jesus! How do people go from happily creating four children to beating each other up and fighting continuously? In any case, McGavin, who had separated from Melanie back in '66, eventually married Kathie Browne (shown with him here.) They wed late in 1969 and remained together until her death in 2003 from natural causes.

How fun is this two-page spread on the women of Laugh-In? Thank goodness they went with color on this array of shots of the ladies in their 1960s clothes and hairstyles. JoAnne Worley, Chelsea Brown, Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi and Judy Carne allegedly had some secrets worth being told, but you can guess going in that these are going to be mild. Chelsea Brown discusses her life in this way: “My name is Brown, I'm black, my husband is white and we have two cockapoos, one white and one black and white.” Interestingly, her then-husband, music publicist and producer Gary Stromberg, isn't even noted as such at imdb.com! Only her later marriage from 1994 to Australian Vic Rooney is listed.

I did at least discover that Ruth Buzzi once played Agnes Gooch in a summer stock performance of Auntie Mame. I can see that. In her section, Judy Carne talks about her upcoming marriage to photographer (and Jew) Dean Goodhill, but that never happened. She didn't marry again until 1970 when she had a disastrous and short-lived nuptial to Robert Bergman. This magazine was the May issue, but it went to press in March, so a reference to Goldie Hawn's boyfriend Gus Trikonis (a dancer in such diverse films as West Side Story and Pajama Party) is minus the fact that they were married in May of 1969! This was just before she filmed Cactus Flower, which netted her an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. She and Trikonis divorced in 1974 and he never married again (but did go on to a very prolific drive-in movie and TV directing career.) She married again in 1976 to Bill Hudson, resulting in Oliver and Kate Hudson, but they divorced, too, in 1980. Since 1983, she's been in the arms of Kurt Russell. At the time of this article, JoAnne Worley was dating Roger Perry, but was hesitant to use the world love for fear of frightening him off. She needn't have worried. They stayed together, marrying in 1975 and remained together until 2000 when they split. She never married again, but two years later he wed Joyce Bulifant and they're together still!

Neile McQueen was probably one of Hollywood's most patient and supportive wives as she tried to tame her adventurous and explosive husband Steve McQueen. This article reflects on her amazement that their relationship has lasted a dozen years. Sadly, for her, the ride came to an end in 1972 when he left her for Ali MacGraw, though she remained a confidante and advisor to him for pretty much the rest of his life. A sparkling performer on Broadway when they met, she at first seemed to have more career potential than he did, but at his insistence, she all but retired while he rose to be a household name. She remarried in 1980 and that marriage lasted until her husband's death in 2005. As for Steve, his marriage to Ali fell apart in 1978 and he married again in January of 1980, but was dead of cancer by November of that same year at only age fifty.

I'll wind up this installment of Fun Finds with a few of the ads found throughout the magazine, nearly all of which are targeted at females. Some are glamorous (love the redhead in bedazzled pink!), some are corny (since when is a Phantom of the Opera mask a viable option for blackheads?!), some are campy (is that Eve in the breast enhancement ad?) and some are sort of icky, but they are all compelling on some level. The Tampax ad also has even more gossip attached on the right side about Rowan & Martin, William Shatner and Richard Harris, among others.