(Mini) Fun Find: Movie Stars Magazine, April 1965

Why mini? Well, the Fun Find I brought to you a short while back was not the magazine I had intended. It was an extra one I had around. The featured rag was supposed to be this one, purchased out of town at an antique mall during one of my periodic jaunts. Thing is, I took it out of its protective sleeve only to find that the original owner had sliced it to bits! Panels, pictures and even full pages were missing... What pissed me off is that the tag on it wasn't marked "as is" or anything. Still, I was able to salvage enough content for a smaller than usual presentation, with apologies for the occasional MIA section or segment. There's still a little bit of entertainment to be had.

Connie Stevens has fun hair here. She and James Stacy wed in 1963 and did not wind up having (or adopting) any babies before their 1966 divorce. In 1967, Stevens married singer Eddie Fisher and they had two daughters, but that union was doomed from the start and ended in divorce by 1969. Stacy was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in 1973 that took one arm and one leg from him and Stevens rose to the occasion, hosting a fundraiser to help with his expenses. He even returned to acting with some success, but as he got older, the wheels came off and he was involved in more than one incident of sexual imposition.

It's actually been fifty-five years since this fun photo-op and Mr. Richard Chamberlain is still with us at age eighty-five! He still acts occasionally, too.

When this blurb about Bewitched's Elizabeth Montgomery being directed by her real life husband while acting with her on-screen husband was written, no one knew that she'd ultimately have still another husband! Dick York had to leave Bewitched due to excruciating back pain in 1969 and was replaced by Dick Sergeant.

This is practically all that's left of a page for a column called "Inside Whispers." What's neat about it is that almost every single gossip blurb has a corresponding picture to go with. And rare pictures are always welcome! George Hamilton's pilot was not picked up. His date is actually Inger Stratton, who was a TV guest star in the mid-to-late 1960s and landed a couple of supporting film roles. Judy Garland and the kids look pretty happy. I think most of us know that Debbie Reynolds' husband gambled away a lot of his own money and most of hers, leaving her in a real mess!

John Wayne's "licking" of cancer was not permanent. By 1979, he succumbed to the disease. Michael Callan and his then-wife Carlyn divorced in 1967. Sammy Jackson was a southern-fried actor who starred in the TV series No Time for Sergeants after personally appealing to Jack Warner for a shot at the part. Laurie Sibbald left screen acting for good in 1967. Gene Barry was wed to his wife Betty for nearly sixty years until her death! Jack Mullaney died of a stroke at only age fifty-two.

A couple of Hollywood veterans here, Greer Garson (who took in a cast party for Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte!, 1964!) and Miss Barbara Stanwyck.

Sue Lyon has a cute up-do going on here. She was married five times in all, one of them to a prison inmate convicted of murder! Joan Crawford looks happy with her teen castmates, both of whom were quite pedestrian and never went anywhere. Stuart Whitman and his first wife divorced in 1966. He has quietly lived on to be ninety-two as of this writing! Carolyn Jones married again in 1968 to a Broadway conductor, her third of four unions.

At this time, Donna Reed was still enjoying the success of The Donna Reed Show, which ended in 1966. She barely acted again until coaxed onto the hit soap Dallas, with dire results. Sammy Davis' mother looks pretty good for having a thirty-nine year-old son!

The cover story contains some rare pics of Jackie Kennedy and the kids.

I know the mystery of which three words they are referring to is burning a whole in your psyche, so I will reveal them to you. As a nation continued to mourn the loss of its President and she was left with two small children who now had no father, the three words that allegedly made her bloom again are: "We need you."

Jeanette MacDonald was only sixty-one years old when she passed away. I didn't know it, but she had endured a lifelong heart condition (suffering a heart attack at age twenty-six) and was the reason she couldn't carry a child to term. 

The backstory of MacDonald, screen partner Nelson Eddy and MacDonald's husband Gene Raymond could hardly be more scandalous. She reportedly had eight miscarriages of Eddy's babies (!) and the two led a secret, on-again/off-again affair for most of their lives. Meanwhile, Raymond was discovered in bed with fellow actor Buddy Rogers on their honeymoon! The marriage had been arranged by Louis B. Mayer, who forbid her from marrying Eddy. Nonetheless, the pair stayed together twenty-eight years (and he rewed in 1974 for another two decades.) Eddy died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1967 at age sixty-five.

A full-page portrait of Peyton Place's Mia Farrow. At the time she was denying any sort of relationship (including any pending marriage) with Frank Sinatra but they did marry in 1966 (divorcing in 1968.)

In this instance, the "discrimination" is that Robert Vaughn was highly drawn to blonde, Marilyn Monroe types rather than brunettes or redheads. He claimed to be waiting until he'd achieved movie stardom before marrying, focusing mostly on his career in the meantime.

Vaughn waited until 1974 (when he was forty-two!) to finally wed for the first time. He married long-haired brunette actress Linda Staab, who he met while filming his TV show The Protectors in England. She became a blonde for periods of their marriage, which lasted until his death in 2016. They had two adopted children.

The grey block is a piece missing from the opposite page. If you know anything at all about The Fugitive, then you know that this whole "story" is nothing but a bit of fluff in which the plotline of the show is being used as headline bait for the star, David Janssen.

Janssen's show was very popular, with his unjustly-accused character endlessly on the run from town to town, encountering all new people with every episode.  The two-part finale, in which he finally comes face to face with the elusive one-armed man (who had killed his wife) still holds the #3 spot today for all time household television viewers with a 72% share!

Fans of Miss Annette Funicello ought to enjoy this photo-filled spread on her marriage to Jack Gilardi.

Of some interest in the Frankenstein-ish assembly of her wedding gown with bits of Marlene Dietrich's and Elizabeth Taylor's (who hated one another!) old costumes being absorbed into it! LOL

The gargantuan affair (check out that cake!) didn't mean the marriage was to last till death parted them. They split in 1981 after three children were born. She married again in 1986, which lasted until her death in 2013.

If you can tear your eyes away from the ad in the upper-left corner, this feature tells of various goings on in the month of December 1964 (despite the April 1965 cover date. Those were always far flung in the future to keep magazines on the stand for as long as possible.) Nat King Cole was gone by February 1965 having experienced weight loss and back pain from a sizable tumor in his lung, which was ultimately removed to little avail. He was forty-five when he died. (Lesser known is that he'd been "seeing" future Petticoat Junction and Hee Haw actress Gunilla Hutton, who pleaded with his wife and the mother of his five children to divorce him!) Lance Reventlow (the only child of Barbara Hutton) died in a 1972 plane crash. James Stacy's "series" And Baby Makes Three only saw light of day as a TV-movie in 1966.

The questions that these fans ask are so hooty (and sometimes nervy!) I always love seeing Chad Everett's face. Maureen from Portland, Oregon... hopefully she got a life. LOL

David Hedison is another man who waited a while to marry. He was forty-one when he wed in 1968, but it lasted until her 2016 death. He passed away three years later at ninety-two.

Jill Ireland did do a few more episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E but in 1967 she took off her wedding band from David McCallum for real and married her husband's friend Charles Bronson. "Grand Hotel" was going to star Jack Lord, Barry Fitzgerald, Barry Sullivan and Chad Everett, but wasn't picked up. Neither was "The Mayor," which costarred Robert Colbert.

Ann-Margret and Roger Smith had a successful union from 1967 until his death of a neuromuscular disease in 2017 at age eighty-four.

The "trouble" mentioned in the blurb about Richard Crenna is a defamation lawsuit (and injunction) that Notre Dame filed against 20th Century Fox over the way their football team and school in general was portrayed in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (1965.) Remarkably, the studio won the case rather than the school, but the movie was not a financial success.

Ernest Borgnine did wed Donna Ranscourt in 1965, but they were through by 1972. Brett Halsey's marriage to Heidi Bruhl lasted for a dozen years. Tommy Kirk's drug arrest was the beginning of the end of his Disney career, though there was more to it than that. He was also accused of a sexual relationship with a fifteen year-old boy (when Kirk was twenty-one) and Walt Disney fired him after receiving a complaint from the boy's mother.

The Hollywood Calendar continues on this final page. Elvis Presley's movie title was changed to Harem Scarum (1965.) I recently read Jim Brown's auto-bio and in it he says that singer Trini Lopez (who was experiencing a hot streak at the time) began making a lot of story-line and screen-time demands during The Dirty Dozen (1967) so Robert Aldrich had his character die in the initial parachute descent and wrote him out of the rest of the movie! (Other sources say Lopez walked out at Frank Sinatra's suggestion.) Some of the stories missing from this defaced issue include ones on Mia Farrow, Elvis Presley, Nick Adams and Yvette Mimieux.

For the sake of some color, I give you this "hooty" back cover.

BONUS PICS

After seeing Richard Chamberlain applying his Santa disguise, I thought maybe some of you might like to see more Dick Pics. LOL  Here are some more shots of Mr. C. as a young man during and shortly after his Dr. Kildare heyday.

"Now hold still... I'm just going to give you a little prick."

I figured y'all would just flip over this one...!