Fun Finds: Movieland and TV Time Magazine, March, 1968

We're traipsing back into the late-1960s today with another Fun Find, this one a celebrity magazine with stories featuring a variety of cinematic and TV personalities and several great photos of people we tend to like here in The Underworld. With a cover date of March, 1968, this issue was likely on the stands a couple of months beforehand (and cost only $0.35 at the time!)

The way the text in this column is written is highly annoying to me. At times it becomes a glob of idiotic, vague word salad (that, like a lot of "insider" gossip, is wrong anyway. But it's neat to see photos of Christopher Jones (don't dare miss those pants!), Diane Varsi and, especially, the wondrous shot of The Burtons visiting Angela Lansbury after one of her legendary performances in Mame. Liz and Ange were child stars together at MGM.

More great photos (and idiotic text) on this page. Kirk Douglas' movie wound up being titled The Brotherhood (1968) and he and Lancaster would have to wait until 1986's Tough Guys to co-star together again! Neat to see a photo (albeit a slightly awkward one) of George Hamilton and Burt Reynolds together. Though it's true that Reynolds became a top box office star in the next decade, he nonetheless was back in a series (Dan August) by 1970. Look how tall Lyle Waggoner is! (6'4" to be precise.)

It's fun to see this happy photo of George Montgomery and Dinah Shore together five years AFTER their marriage ended. No one then could have guessed that within a couple of years, she'd be a major presence in Burt Reynolds' life. Love seeing happy, handsome Brian Kelly! Annette Funicello and her husband Jack would divorce in 1983. Eve Arden and her husband remained wed until his death in 1984, a 32-year union. (The movie Geraldine Chaplin was filming for Spanish director Carlos Saura is Stress Is Three, 1968.)

Here we see an ostensibly happy Brenda Benet and Paul Petersen (who'd costarred on The Donna Reed Show as a youth.) Benet's life contained more drama than most movies and if anyone ever decided to film it, it would surely be a hit! She left Petersen for Bill Bixby, won a plum villainess role on Days of Our Lives that enraged the series' fans, suffered the loss of a young son, left her husband and entered into a lesbian relationship and finally committed suicide!

We adored Dack Rambo from the moment we first laid eyes on him. But I bet he didn't truly reveal which fan letters he opened and answered FIRST! LOL

"A Psychiatrist Discusses..." !!!

Some neat photos here. We recently profiled Jacqueline Bisset and her taking over of Mia's role in The Detective (1968.) It's long been noted that overruns on Rosemary's Baby (1968) were what sent Frank off the deep end, cancelling Mia from The Detective and from his life, but it was likely just the final straw as she'd been in London filming A Dandy in Aspic (1968) prior to that and Frankie couldn't possibly have been pleased by such a lengthy separation capped off by her missing the start date of the project he'd had in mind for them together.

One can only imagine the pressures and stresses that were put upon Sammy Davis Jr. and May Britt when they opted to wed in 1960 (when 31 states still forbade interracial marriage by law.)

He remained a staggeringly busy performer throughout this period while she didn't act even once. After their divorce, she did a bit of TV and, later, one low-budget horror movie before concentrating on painting. She remarried in 1993 and is still with us today at age eighty-two.

Anyone who is familiar with I Dream of Jeannie and Barbara Eden's costar Hayden Rorke (misspelled in the magazine's caption) ought to find this desperate photo rather hilarious. Rorke was not only gay, but had a longtime, live-in partner who was a prolific TV director.

These are fun shots from the life of Michael Ansara and Barbara Eden who, sadly, could not keep their marriage intact.  It ended in 1974. One major trauma came when she became pregnant again and was forced to deliver a stillborn baby. This joyous woman (now eighty-five, if you can believe it!), who brought smiles to millions of faces, was also dealt a crushing blow when her only child Mike Jr. died from drug-related causes.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s David McCallum was freshly wed to Katherine Carpenter at the time of this magazine.

It's quite refreshing to note that these two are still married to one another today, nearly 50 years later! While not winding up with a "large family" as the prior page denotes, they did have a son and a daughter together (and McCallum had three sons with his prior spouse Jill Ireland.)

We truly adore the piano playing of Miss Jo Ann Castle. A wondrous child prodigy at age three, she married for the first time (to a cameraman) at age twenty-one.

The marriage resulted in a child, a daughter who had cerebral palsy. What readers didn't know at the time of this article (but surely Castle must have!) is that she would soon marry again, in January of 1968! This union resulted in a son and a daughter, but the marriage was over by 1971. Hubby #3 came along from 1978 to 1986. She's with the fourth (and final?!) husband now since 2011. Castle is seventy-seven. (By the way, little Deana passed away in 1978.)

Can you imagine being on a double-date that involved both Don Grady and Dack Rambo?! The gals involved were Francesca Hilton (Zsa Zsa Gabor's daughter) and Christina Ferrare, a teen model for Max Factor and with the Eileen Ford agency, who'd just done The Impossible Years (1968) opposite David Niven as her father. Surely, anyone who was around back then recalls all the hubbub of First Daughter Lynda Bird Johnson's wedding.

Who do we think was more Warren Beatty's type, Virna Lisi or Anna Magnani? As for Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland (who'd left the aforementioned David McCallum for Bronson years before), they did wed this year, but I find her positively unrecognizable in this picture! She looks awesome, though. Robert Culp swung from wife to wife to wife from 1951 to 1976 (France Nuyen and he were done by 1970.) His fifth marriage was the longest (at 26 years), but it, too ended in divorce. Nuyen never married again and is currently seventy-seven. I truly thought the bottom photo was of Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate, who costarred in Don't Make Waves (1967), but it's actually his second wife Christine Kaufmann. They divorced this year. He wed four more times. She three more (apparently?) Kaufmann is now seventy-one.

Bobby Rydell must have truly loved Camille because they did marry in 1968 and remained wed until her death in 2003. He married a second time in 2009 and is currently seventy-one. Sadly, Petticoat Junction's Bea Benaderet did pass away from lung cancer in October of 1968 at age sixty-two.

I couldn't help chuckling at the headline "Brando's New Girl" next to a convalescing Margaret Rutherford!! LOL  But the blurb was meant for his costar Pamela Franklin. The headline "Tough Lady!" was for Rutherford. (She was in a Brando movie, too, though! A Countess from Hong Kong, 1967.) Emily McLaughlin and Robert Lansing did divorce in 1968 and she promptly married dreamy Jeffrey Hunter, though he was dead and gone within three months, sadly.

Ryan O'Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young did at least manage to stay together until 1973, despite this photo caption's despair over their new marriage. Raymond Burr's alleged dream of appearing in a Broadway musical did not come to fruition. Kim Novak's then-boyfriend caught my eye and required me to look into him further. Joel Thomas was a Carmel, California restauranteur and photographer who she dated for a while. He was with her at the premiere of The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) when she wore THIS get-up!

This article was in anticipation of The Beverly Hillbillies star Buddy Ebsen's Walt Disney musical The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968), which costarred Walter Brennan, Lesley Ann Warren and John Davidson. Ebsen had at one time been cast as The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939) before an allergic reaction to the makeup led him to drop out and had a considerable background in song & dance, in contrast to his TV roles on Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones.

Here's a shot you don't see very often! Jane Fonda in full Barbarella (1968) drag looking over a pot of boiling spaghetti!

This behind the scenes photo shoot reinforces just how UN-glamorous movie-making can be when one is not before the cameras. And this was probably considered a rather comfortable dressing room compared to where people other than the star were shunted between takes.

Singer Eddie Fisher, reportedly looking over newborn daughter Joely Fisher (later a cast member of Ellen.)

Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens were only wed for two years and had two children (another girl, Tricia Leigh Fisher.) I was no pavement-pounding fan of Fisher to begin with, but after reading his second autobiography I downright disliked him. He married twice more after this, but Stevens (now seventy-eight) never wed again.

Perhaps because when I was a kid in the mid-'70s NOTHING was nerdier than The Lawrence Welk Show, I'm always a bit surprised to see how popular the stars from it were in mainstream periodicals. (Now, of course, I adore the show for its candied-coated camp qualities!)

I had no clue that Bobby & Cissy were ever a couple in real life. He wed Kristin Floren (Myron Floren's daughter) in 1971 and had four children with her. Of course, my own guilty pleasure memory comes courtesy of one of my old theatre buddies who was in a musical just prior to the Tennessee venue being occupied by Welk & Co. My curmudgeonly pal left a note on the men's dressing room mirror that read: "Welcome Bobby and Cissy. Which one's the Cissy?"  Ha! He is seventy-five now while Cissy is seventy.

Because Paul and Brenda appeared earlier, I've already covered them.

As it turned out, they were divorced by 1970 and didn't have any children together. Paul Petersen is seventy-one at present.

Photos of singer and TV variety star Andy Williams and his wife Claudine Longet. At this time they had two children, but a third would come along in 1969. That third child would be named Robert ("Bobby") after their friend Robert Kennedy. Williams and Longet were on site the day of Kennedy's assassination and even in his hospital room with Ethel prior to his demise.

The author of this article - about how Longet's singing career might wreck her marriage - couldn't have dreamed of the drama to eventually unfold. The Williams divorced in 1975. The following year she was on trial for the shooting death of her lover (Olympic skier Spider Sabich) with Williaams at her side, but she wound up marrying her defense attorney! They're together still. Longet is seventy-four. (Williams died in 2012 at age eighty-four.)

Here was have behind-the-scenes shots from The Mothers-In-Law, a two season sitcom that starred Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. It was a rather garish, loud, slapsticky show somewhat in the vein of Lucille Ball's later efforts (which made sense since Desi Arnaz was the producer!) One's tolerance for broad comedy would indicate how much a person could enjoy the antics of the two comediennes.

The writer Joyce Becker seems fond of appearing on camera herself. She's in all six photos from the spread! Roger C. Carmel was fired after season one for reasons that remain in debate even now (salary dispute or drug issues.)

This spread showcases That Girl's Marlo Thomas and how the time constraints of starring on her own show kept her from finding love.

Both Thomas and her costar Ted Bessell remained unmarried at least another decade. Thomas (now seventy-eight) wed Phil Donahue in 1980 and they're together today. Bessell married in 1982 and remained so until his untimely death in 1996 at only sixty-one of an aortic aneurysm.

Hello and welcome to the showbiz twilight zone, where the nuptials between Sally Field and Davy Jones (!) are predicted and there is rumor of romance between Sir Laurence Olivier and Diana Ross! It's interesting, though, to note that Ross (now seventy-two) might have been in contention for Paula Kelly's role in Sweet Charity (1969.) I suspect that the heavy dance element did her in on that one. Fun to see a 1968 candid shot of Rosalind Russell and Claudette Colbert together!

Hayley Mills (who I didn't recognize from the photo) did end up marrying Ray Boulting, but not until 1971! They divorced in 1977. Mills is now seventy. At close to the 30th Anniversary of Gone with the Wind (1939), Olivia de Havilland poses with Clark Gable's widow Kay. What a neat photo. This columnist really likes to have her say! She picks at Katharine Houghton and slams Mia Farrow and Sammy Davis Jr.

Some fun pics on this page of Dyan Cannon, Ryan O'Neal and Carol Lynley, among others. The son of Agnes Moorehead's that Victoria Cole refers to in her column was a boy named Sean that she adopted. He later ran away from home and they were apparently never reunited!

I ALWAYS forget that Jack Jones was once married to Jill St. John! I can be forgiven since the union only lasted from 1967-1969. Her first marriage (when she was sixteen) lasted less than a year and her second (to multi-millionairess Barbara Hutton's only child!) only three, though they were separated for a whole year. Her 1990 union with Robert Wagner has far outlasted all the rest at 26 years and counting. She is currently seventy-six. (Jack Jones is seventy-eight.) Don't miss the photo of Tippi Hedren in Japanese garb!

And that brings a close to this installment of Fun Finds! There's sure to be more since I am ever rooting through flea markets, antique stores and thrift shops for rare and unusual finds. One thing that recently happened for me was shocking indeed, but in a good way. I was in a Goodwill store, sifting through the books, and saw Raquel Welch's autobiography, in mint condition, sitting there for $2.00. I had been curious to read it, but didn't buy it new when it was published. So I grabbed it only to discover that it was 50%, so $1.00...  Good enough. But when I opened it, there was an Amazon.com gift card in it for $25.00 that was activated! Some schmuck tossed their unwanted gift of Miss W's book into the giveaway pile and also left his or her gift card in it, too! Did they even bother to notice it was there in the first place?  So I definitely scored on this unintentional "Pay It Forward!"  :-)