Hooray for Hollywood? Volume 2

We're back with another selection of remarks from our recently-procured book "Hollywood on Hollywood." Rather than put the book's cover on another post, I've opted to use Miss Deborah Kerr and one of her apt quotes on Tinseltown. And there are some more selections to follow! 

"The name Hollywood is, to this day, a misnomer-one very small section of an enormous area where many people work in the movie business, but hardly any people who work in that business actually live in Hollywood, as such." -- Deborah Kerr, 1977. (And still true today...!)

"I have thought, since my tours, that we in Hollywood run a great danger of becoming too insular. I know I was near it when I left. Hollywood is such a tight unit in the American scene that a Hollywoodite's map of the world is apt to show one large eastern seaboard area labeled 'New York,' and one west coast section labeled 'Hollywood.' There are a few pin dots scattered over the map reading, 'Sun Valley,' 'Palm Springs,' 'Miami Beach,' 'Bermuda.' The space between is arid waste. There are no dots reading 'Cincinnati,' 'Sioux City,' 'Augusta,' 'Spokane.'" -- Jeanette MacDonald, 1947. (Wow... Very perceptive and prescient. And decades later people on the coasts were still referring to the "flyover country" in-between.)

"I brought Ruth Warrick out to play Mrs. [Citizen] Kane because the part called for a lady. I have not been able to find a lady in Hollywood." -- Orson Welles, 1947. (He certainly did his fair share of looking...!)

The aforementioned Ruth Warrick in Citizen Kane (1941)

"Hollywood is not an easy place for two people to work. When you leave your house, you're both sleepy, since it's the crack of dawn. When you come home, you're exhausted. All you want is an Old-Fashioned and some peace and quiet. The two of you, as a result, are so full of your own problems that you can't help each other at the time when you most should." -- Cornel Wilde, the 1940s. (Wilde was, at the time wed to actress and sometimes costar Patricia Knight - from 1937-1951. Just after their divorce, he wed Jean Wallace in a union that lasted 30 years and many joint projects, but that, too, wound up in divorce.)

"People outside Hollywood don't understand how it is here. It's a battle to maintain a basic integrity; a scrap against bull and baloney. You've got to fight all the time." -- Burt Lancaster, 1949. (Lancaster was already forming a production company in order to maintain more control of his projects and it eventually emerged as Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, a success venture that put forth several notable movies.)

"There's more pressure on you in Hollywood than in New York. On Broadway, you do your performance every night and that's it. Here you have to get up at five in the morning - which is tough on me - in order to get ready in time at the studio. Then you have to rehearse, do your scenes, and you get home late where you have a relaxing dinner and start studying till bedtime. There's no let-up. There's also so much fussing about costumes and makeup and hair all day on the set. That's plausible, I guess, since the camera is on you - if you're lucky enough to get a close-up. One the stage your audience is at least twenty-five feet away." -- Vera-Ellen, 1949. (Vera-Ellen, a spectacular dancer, receded from view in the late-'50s when her sort of musicals were on the wane and a variety of ailments began to affect her physicality. The sudden death of her only child - of SIDS - in 1963 cemented her retirement from public view.)

"Young love deserves a better break on the screen. The over-age stars get all the clinches, while the young actors in Hollywood today - if they're lucky - get the meaningless kiss or two." -- John Derek, 1951. (Derek more than made up for any slights when he presented film after film featuring wife after wife in anything from semi-nudity to outright nakedness on screen! Inset features his costar Jody Lawrance.)

"In Hollywood you do nothing for yourself. You don't even apply your own make-up. You are awakened, taken to the studio, made up. You play your roles in snips and driblets, harassed by delays, interruptions and stupidities. Over the proceedings hangs a pall of indecision, the fear of the studio swami that the work may in some fashion upset a coal miner in West Virginia, a lama in Tibet. Timidity was the screen's curse. It still is. - Tallulah Bankhead, 1952. (From one of the least timid souls on earth...! This did change in the 1960s and '70s, but it's since pendulumed back to focus groups, committees, "correctness," et al, with a few exceptions.)

"Hollywood is full of these watching, waiting helpers, who look for pretty girls in distress. Mostly what they want is to help take your clothes off in their apartments. Many of them do have valuable connections, and will use them-but the asking price is rather high." -- Mamie Van Doren - 1964. (This quote was from her auto-bio "My Naughty, Naughty Life" [likely a play on Errol Flynn's "My Wicked, Wicked Ways."] She would later pen an even more frank book, "Playing the Field.")

"When I first arrived in Hollywood, they told me to get a new name, so I thought back to the best times I had as a kid playing on the tidal land [in Wales]. There was a tannery and old mills. It was really mill land. So I called myself Jack Milland but they said, 'In Hollywood, only dogs are called Jack,' so I looked down a list and picked the shortest name I could find - Ray." -- Ray Milland, 1972. (Milland was born Alfred Jones, January 3rd 1907, in Neath, Glamoran, Wales. Regardless of his desire for "Ray" he was nonetheless billed early on as "Raymond!")

"They treat you so great in Hollywood, make you feel important even if you really aren't. The technician there, you could have them in your home. They're bright they're alert, they're intelligent, they're trying to help you." -- Paul Lynde, 1973. (I wonder if ol' Paul ever had a Key Grip or a Best Boy over for tea and cookies? Ha ha!)

"There's a dismal swamp out there in Hollywood where the money goes and it's never accounted for. I had 5% of Patton (1970), which cost $10 million to make and grossed $40 million, and I've never made a dime." -- George C. Scott, 1974. (Movie accountants have long been noted by many people for their "creativity" with the numbers...!)

"There I was on the screen, a pancaked, lacquered Hollywood purse made out of a Cincinnati sow's ear." -- Doris Day, 1975. (I'm drawn to quotes that include Cincinnati, as that's where I reside. Day was raised not far from my area and the aforementioned Vera-Ellen just blocks from my house! By the way, popular as she was, I think she really blossomed most when they allowed her more natural - often comedic - attributes to come more to light than all the "lacquer.")

"In Hollywood they like you until you're standing on a pedestal and they hand you an Oscar. Then they say, 'How did he get up there? Let's knock him down.'" -- Yul Brynner, 1975. (True as this may be, Yul had it better than many others... And it doesn't seem to have applied to people like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, to name more recent recipients.)

"Certainly, there are good marriages in Hollywood, but to imagine that people who are beautiful, and glorified by the camera and publicity, wardrobe and make-up departments and who are thrown together in close proximity day after day; to imagine they don't get involved with each other, especially when the emotional requirements of their scenes are that they be in love with each other- I mean it's not human to believe they don't!" -- Shelley Winters, 1980. (Shelley did know of what she spoke...!)

"I've always enjoyed working in Hollywood. They are so efficient. And it's so exhilarating." -- Vivien Leigh, 1964. "I loathe Hollywood, and for no other part [Scarlett O'Hara] would I have dreamed of signing a contract. All their standards are financial ones. The more I see of Hollywood, the less possible it becomes." -- Vivien Leigh, quoted posthumously in the 1969 book "Vivien Leigh: A Bouquet." (So who knows what to believe....?!)

Come Back, Little Diva

Today, we're taking note of a dozen film actresses (most of who could probably be considered divas, others perhaps not!) who once reigned supreme on the big screen, but then took an extended hike from the movies, whether they liked it or not, only to come back again years later (sometimes - but not always - with dire results.) We don't care whether the movies were any good or not, though. We just love to see the old mares back in action again! More on our cover girl shown on the left in a moment...
 

First we find Miss Janet Gaynor, the first actress ever to receive an Oscar (for Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans! Soon after, the award would be dedicated to a single performance instead of a whole season of them.) In movies from the mid-1920s, she enjoyed considerable popularity through 1938 (with 1937's A Star is Born gleaning her another Oscar nom, though she lost to Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.) She married famed costume designer Adrian in 1939 and retired from the screen.

Though she made a rare, but occasional, appearance on TV, she was coaxed out of retirement in 1959 (the same year Adrian died) to anchor the film debut of Pat Boone in Bernardine. She played the mother of costar Dick Sergeant and was the caring den mother of his college cronies including Boone. The guys had created a fictional female (Bernardine) and entered "her" in a contest, which "she" won! Most folks considered the movie "cute" or "nice" and it was Gaynor's last, though she did pop up for a requisite trip on The Love Boat in 1981 (passing away three years later from complications of a nasty taxi accident she'd suffered along with Mary Martin. She was seventy-seven.)
 

Miss Alice Faye morphed from a Jean Harlow-esque copycat to one of the most popular singing movie actresses of her time. Her deep, alto voice was featured in hit after hit musical, often alongside Don Ameche or Tyrone Power. Her song-filled movies had made money hand over fist for her home studio 20th Century Fox (which she nicknamed "Penitentiary Fox") and she eventually longed to try out a dramatic career, finally getting a shot at it with Fallen Angel in 1945, but when she discovered that studio head Darryl F. Zanuck had mercilessly edited her performance down to a shadow of what she'd shot, she got in her car, drove off the lot without any of her possessions and ended her career in movies on the spot.

She'd married comedian Phil Harris in 1941 and didn't need the hassle any more. She and Harris enjoyed a popular radio program together and raised their two children. In 1962, she was enlisted to portray Pat Boone's mother (what is it with Pat Boone?!) in a remake of State Fair. Cast opposite Tom Ewell, who she found less handsome than some of her costars of old, she was shocked at the demise of the business as she'd known it during the intervening 16 years and said so. She occasionally took on tiny parts in movies (including The Magic of Lassie in 1978) and like most other folks rode The Love Boat (in 1980), but stayed mostly retired until her death in 1998 of stomach cancer at age eighty-three.

Miss Claudette Colbert began acting in films in the late-1920s and started to make a name for herself in Cecil B. DeMille epics like The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934) while also proving to be highly adept at the soap operatics of Imitation of Life (1934) and romantic comedy such as It Happened One Night (1934), for which she won an Oscar. She was a considerable leading lady of the movies, but by 1955 was finding it hard to maintain her status. She did a bit of TV here and there, but was absent from movie screens.

In 1961, she returned to feature films with top-billing, but secondary publicity and promotion, as the mother of Troy Donahue in Parrish. Gone were costars like Clark Gable, Ronald Colman and Charles Boyer and in their place was... Karl Malden. Colbert still looked fit and lovely in the movie, but disappeared from screens again for a quarter of a century, popping up as Ann-Margret's nemesis in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987), a well-heeled TV-movie in which she still looked great. Colbert lived to be ninety-two until a series of strokes claimed her in 1996.

Polish siren Miss Pola Negri began making films in 1914 when she was but a teenager. One 1919 silent Madame Du Barry, in which she was the title character, caused a sensation in Europe as well as in the U.S. when it was released in 1922 as "Passion." She and its director Ernst Lubitsch were drawn to America where he prospered and she became a vamp akin to Theda Bara. A highly-public romance with Rudolph Valentino was also in the cards, but her intense overreaction to his death (complete with public fainting spells) put a bad taste in the public's mouth. The one-two punch of film censorship regarding sinful behavior on-screen and the advent of sound, in which her heavy accent was a handicap, helped lead to the end of her career in the early-1930s, though she worked in German and European films until 1943.
 

In 1964, she burst out of obscurity to take on the role of a glamorous woman of mystery in The Moonspinners (1964), starring Hayley Mills. Walt Disney himself approached Negri about taking on the part in this "Hitchcock for Kids"-style thriller. Her character had a pet cheetah (as suggested by her versus the everyday house cat the script called for!) Just prior to this movie, she'd been living with a female oil heiress for six years until the woman's death and had never remarried after her second divorce in 1931. Negri never acted on-screen again, but lived until 1987 when she died of pneumonia and the effects of an untreated brain tumor at age ninety.
 

One of many highly-flamboyant and at times scandalous silent film actresses was Alla Nazimova, who also went as simply Nazimova. A student of Konstantin Stanislovski and his "Method" acting, she in time broke away from that practice and developed her own ways of conveying extraordinary tragedy, a specialty of hers. On film from 1916, her career was hampered by the Production Code, which was dampening the type of sexually charged roles she'd perfected. She also suffered bad publicity when one of her marriages was revealed to have been a sham from the start. (She was a lesbian who, despite one earlier "real" marriage, had always maintained relationships with women. By 1925, it was all over in Hollywood.

After fifteen years away from the movies, she returned in 1940 to play Robert Taylor's mother in Escape. Her character was in a Nazi internment camp awaiting extermination with Taylor and his glamorous friend Norma Sheared struggling to get her freed. She followed this up with Blood and Sand (1941) as Tyrone Power's mother and continued to act until her death from coronary thrombosis in 1945. She was sixty-six and had been living with a woman since 1929 at The Garden of Allah, which had once long before been her own estate The Garden of Alla!
 

Hedy Lamarr was (and still is) considered to be one of the cinema's most beautiful and photogenic actresses of all time. The Austrian beauty had made a splash, literally, in 1933 at age eighteen when she filmed a nude bathing sequence in Ecstasy. (She was also shown in an implied orgasm sequence!) Marriage to what turned out to be a Nazi caused her to flee to Paris where MGM's Louis B. Mayer spotted and hired her. She became a hot property thanks to her glamorous looks, though her roles tended to be thin on character depth and dialogue. As the 1950s dawned, things career-wise became dire and she was finished in Hollywood after 1951's Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Spy.

Lamarr did a few projects in Italy and filmed a scene in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957) which was cut before release, but was finally seen again briefly (along with a raft of other stars) in the 1957 Irwin Allen debacle The Story of Mankind as Joan of Arc. (That's her at the top of this page with a pre-toupee Allen!) In 1958, she played Jane Powell's adoptive mother, a glamorous actress, who is romantically involved with the same man (scantily-clad George Nader) as Powell! The movie was The Female Animal. It was the last movie she'd make. She intended to work in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), but an eyebrow-raising autobiography and an arrest for shoplifting led to her being replaced by Zsa Zsa Gabor. No dummy she, Lamarr patented a sound spectrum/frequency-hopping method that laid the groundwork for today's wi-fi signals! Her colorful, roller-coaster life ended in 2000 when a myriad of heart problems claimed her at age eighty-five.
 

You could search the world and the annals of history and be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly candid, outrageous or sexually-voracious actress of talent than Miss Tallulah Bankhead. Chiefly a contributor to Broadway theatre, she had a stop & start career in movies beginning in 1918 (when she was but sixteen years old!) After establishing herself more significantly on The Great White Way, she had another round of film work, but often had to stand and watch as Bette Davis recreated her stage successes on celluloid. (Many folks felt that Davis also channeled Bankhead in 1950's All About Eve.) Already a bit of a comeback kid the time she made Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) after twelve years without a role in the cinema, she was again absent from the big screen by 1953.

In 1965, after a long stretch away from the movies (and some significantly hard living, dallying in vices of all sorts), Bankhead startled the world by traveling to England and portraying a staggeringly devout, careworn, plain-faced old bat named Mrs. Trefoyle in The Fanatic (called Die! Die! My Darling! in the U.S.) The deranged character was holding her deceased son's fiancee Stefanie Powers captive in order to keep his soul pure. She threw herself into the juicy part full throttle and knocked it out of the park, though most audiences at the time wrote the enterprise off as just another excursion into hag horror. By 1968, Bankhead was dead from the triple whammy of pneumonia, the flu and emphysema, aged sixty-six, but appearing older. The year before she died, she managed to turn in a two-part Batman episode playing the campy villainess The Black Widow.

Another comeback queen with more than one instance was the ultra-glamorous silent movie legend Gloria Swanson. After nine years away from movie screens, she took a starring role that many other old-timers turned down in Sunset Blvd (1950), playing a washed-up, out-of touch actress craving a comeback. Swanson earned an Oscar nom (losing to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday), but was unable to parlay her regained fame into many more movie roles. By 1956 she was all gone again except for the occasional guest role on television.
 

She swept back onto movie screens in 1974 with Airport 1975, the first sequel to the blockbuster hit Airport (1970.) The role of a famous actress traveling on a red eye flight was initially offered to long-absent Greta Garbo, who unsurprisingly turned it down. Swanson opted to play the part but make it a version of herself instead of a fictional role! She wrote all of her own hooty dialogue and even managed to work in publicity for her mammoth autobiography "Swanson on Swanson." This proved to be her final acting role on-screen, though she lived to be eighty-four, passing from a heart ailment in 1983 (after having led a life of extremely careful nutrition.)
 

Sleek, eye-poppingly stylish, German actress Miss Marlene Dietrich was another unique persona who rarely, if ever, held back her thoughts on life and on other people she encountered. Having kicked around in German movies for the better part of a decade, she scored big in 1930 with The Blue Angel and the film's director Josef Von Sternberg guided her to Hollywood and considerable success there in a string of films. A top female star during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, she in time began taking glamorous cameo roles, though 1957's Witness for the Prosecution allowed her a pretty meaty leading part. After 1961, she concentrated more heavily on her career as a nightclub entertainer than as a movie actress.

Seventeen years after having last been featured in a movie, Dietrich popped up for a sequence in the 1978 David Bowie film Just a Gigolo. She shared a scene with the star and then proceeded to sing a song (the title number.) Seventy-seven years old, she managed to appear far younger than that, but the image-conscious actress (who'd once allowed her skintight bodysuits to cut into her wrists and ankles until they bled!) was done. She offered her voice to the documentary Marlene (1984), but wouldn't appear on camera. She died of kidney failure at age ninety in 1992, having been bedridden for a dozen years in the wake of a fractured leg. Dietrich, who was known for her open sexuality (with men and women) was married only once (for fifty-two years!), but had only lived with the man for five years.

America's favorite "good girl" in musicals and as the wife of assorted heroes, June Allyson recovered from four years of rehabilitation from a childhood accident to become a Broadway chorus singer and dancer. Catching a break when Betty Hutton developed the measles, Allyson parlayed her understudy appearance into a role in a subsequent show and when that second show was filmed as a movie (Best Foot Forward, 1943), she was on her way. Many starring roles followed through the late-1950s whereupon she turned to the stage and TV for work. A tumultuous off-screen life (including alcohol abuse, an affair with Alan Ladd and the death of her husband Dick Powell) was at odds with her movie persona.
 

In 1972, Allyson returned to the big screen in a role that was utterly at odds with her usual array of portrayals! True, she'd made one attempt at being a villain (in 1955's The Shrike, a box office bust), but this time she jumped off the cliff as a dour, tough, lesbian murderess in They Only Kill Their Masters. The film starred James Garner and Katharine Ross, but also featured an array of veteran players in supporting roles (one of whom was a dissipated Peter Lawford, who'd costarred with Allyson in far sunnier pictures like Good News, 1947, and Little Women, 1949.) Allyson worked through 2001 (becoming a highly visible spokesperson for Depends undergarments), but died of respiratory failure in 2006 at age eighty-eight.
  

Easily one of the most exotic and striking actresses of 1920s and '30s cinema was Miss Anna May Wong, who cut a dazzling figure in beautiful costumes and had talent to spare. She, however, was only ever able to rise to a certain point in fame because it was then the practice to cast Caucasians in Asian roles even when a capable, in this case Chinese, one was on hand! Thus she found herself in supporting parts or with leads in lower-budget fare and without the ability to perform love scenes against a white costar. Having maintained a film career through 1942, she made only one more motion picture in 1949 before departing for television and radio.
  

In 1960, Wong was brought back to movie screens to play the imperious, possibly nefarious housekeeper of Lana Turner in the glossy Ross Hunter-produced mystery Portrait in Black. She next appeared as a guest on The Barbara Stanwyck Show and with a role set for her in Hunter's upcoming production of Flower Drum Song (1961) seemed primed for a prolific comeback, but illness followed by a massive heart attack claimed her before she could work on the musical (Juanita Hall played her part.) She was fifty-six.
  

A lifelong pusher of the sexual envelope, first on stage and then on screen, Miss Mae West was a curvaceous, wise-cracking pistol who always seemed to be generating controversy and public unrest whenever she performed. In the early-1930s, she embarked on a film career that, while successful, was consistently hamstrung by the moral codes of the day. She did her best to allow her famed double entendres to slip through the censors' eyes, but rarely without difficulty. By 1943, she had retreated from the movies and returned to her spicy and flavorful stage extravaganzas which often featured a bevy of musclemen at attention.
  

1970, however, twenty-seven years after her previous movie, found her back in action again. Myra Breckinridge featured her as a lascivious talent agent, bedecked in Edith Head costumes (the same designer who'd created many of her earlier looks at Paramount) and spouting a lot of the same sort of one-liners that had gleaned her attention decades earlier. The movie was quite a mess, but she reveled in the newfound attention it afforded her. She might have quit while she was ahead, but instead came back again eight years later for Sextette (1978), a dazzlingly bad musical that tarnished her reputation (with the 73 people who happened to see it, that is!) Within two years she was dead from complications of a series of strokes at age eighty-seven.

The title of this post is, of course, a play on Come Back, Little Sheba (1953), but it turns out that quite a few of these gals were little in stature if not in fame. Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong were tallest at reportedly 5'7" and 5'6," but no one else went above 5'5" and four of the gals were 5' even! There may be some others who didn't get singled out this time, but if there are enough of them, perhaps I'll revisit the subject again in the future.

Here's the Story...

As a voracious reader, mostly nonfiction books related to show business, naturally, I often have two or three of them going at once. As for fiction, I tend to tackle a long novel during my days at the pool in the summer time. (This past summer, I conquered Harold Robbins' “The Carpetbaggers,” but a few years prior was Margaret Mitchell's “Gone with the Wind” – an instant favorite – along with Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca” – also wonderful -- and the year after that, James Jones' “From Here to Eternity” – sheer agony to get through for the most part...) Most often, my nose is buried in the biographies and autobiographies of stars of all sorts. Early posts at The Underworld touched on this subject here and here.

In the interest of coming up with fun, interesting and different types of posts (I do try not to fall into the category of predictable), I'm going to share a few incidents today from a book called Movie Anecdotes, assembled by Peter Hay. It's chock full of stories concerning the cinema and its participants. To be honest, I doubt the veracity of some of them, but they're amusing nonetheless. As you can guess, I like the ones that involve snarkiness.

Take this one about Orson Welles working on a scene (from 1944's Jane Eyre) in which he was about to be broiled to death in a fire. He yelped, “I now know what Joan of Arc endured!” and fellow actress Joan Fontaine shot back, “Keep your spirits up, we'll let you know if we get the odor of burning ham.”

During 1932's Night After Night, there was a competitive atmosphere between Mae West and female costar Alison Skipworth, an older, British stage veteran of some note. After their various attempts to steal scenes from one another, an annoyed Skipworth looked at West and said, “I'll have you know—I'm an actress.” West's amusing response was, “It's all right, dearie. Your secret is safe with me.”

There's also the famous bit of repartee between the complicated and flamboyant star John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn, then a Broadway star making her film debut in A Bill of Divorcement. The two didn't hit it off in the slightest and at the end of filming, she told the legendary, but testy and troubled, star, “Thank God I don't have to act with you anymore!,” to which he replied, “Oh, I didn't realize you ever had, darling.”

Even with a more amenable costar like Spencer Tracy, with whom she made many movies, there was the occasional barb. Upon first meeting him, she said, “Oh, Mr. Tracy, I'm really too tall for you,” but he countered with, “That's all right, dear. I'll soon cut you down to size.” When asked why he always insisted on billing above Hepburn and Garson Kanin suggested “ladies first,” Tracy responded, “This is a movie, not a lifeboat.”

There is an instance of a gushing fan, a writer in her own right, who raced up to the luncheon table of the famously private and reclusive Greta Garbo who greeted the horrified star with, “Oh, Miss Garbo, I always wanted to meet you, and now at last, I can tell all my friends that I finally met the great Garbo!” Garbo's frosty reply: “You can also tell all your friends that it was an accident.” Incidentally, Garbo's movies almost invariably flopped in Ireland. One critic wrote, “If Miss Garbo really wants to be alone, she should come to a performance of one of her films in Dublin.”

Reams of stories have come about regarding producer Samuel Goldwyn and his “Goldwynisms,” wherein his lack of grasp on the English language resulted in amusingly discombobulated statements such as, “Our comedies are not to be laughed at.” (One of his alleged compliments to an employee was congratulations for “taking the bull by the teeth!” Another remark was, “Keep a stiff upper chin.” Then there was his purported response to a colleague: “In two words: im-possible!”) He had purchased the rights to a novel called “The Well of Loneliness,” a pioneering, but scandalous and controversial, work about a pants-wearing Victorian lady who falls for a female ambulance driver. When alerted that the story couldn't be filmed because it dealt with lesbians, Goldwyn said, “So all right, where they got lesbians, we'll use Austrians.

So many Goldwynisms have been relayed over the years and many of them are believed to have sprung from the minds of others who had fun replicating his (wrong) way with words. Consider these:

“I can't make it, but I hope you'll give me a raincoat.”
“Gentlemen, do not underestimate the danger of the atom bomb. It's dynamite!”
“You are partly one hundred percent right.”
“I don't care if it makes a nickel, so long as everyone in the United States sees it.”
“It will create an excitement that will sweep the country like wildflowers.”
“They always bite the hand that lays the golden egg.”
“He's living beyond his means, but he can afford it.”

Hungarian director Michael Curtiz (Seen here with Joan Crawford during the filming of Flamingo Road in 1949) wasn't far behind in his broken English phrases:

“If I told you the truth, I'd be a hypocrite.”
“Don't talk to me while I'm interrupting.”
“You can't do it that way, you spoil the anticlimax.”
“I want this house overfurnished in perfect taste.”
“The next time I send a dope I'll go myself.”
“It's dull from beginning to end, but it's loaded with entertainment.”
(to a group of extras) “Separate together in a bunch!”

Director Cecil B. DeMille, known for his epic films, was asked why he returned so often to the well of The Bible. “Why let two thousand years of publicity go to waste?”, he responded. When his mammoth 1923 movie The Ten Commandments was costing so much it couldn't possibly recoup it's costs and he was prodded about it, he said, “What do they want me to do? Stop now and release it as 'The Five Commandments?'”

In the mid-1940s when Ingrid Bergman was frequently working for Alfred Hitchcock, she ran into a brick wall when it came to one of her scenes. She said to him, “I don't think I can do this naturally,” then proceeded to give a long list of her reasons why. (She was searching for her motivation.) Hitch listened with apparent interest, nodding occasionally, and then retorted, “All right, if you can't do it naturally, then fake it.” Bergman came to consider this one of the greatest bits of advice she had ever been given about acting! Amazingly, I was having this same trouble once in a production of “Where's Charley?” and the director took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled to me, “It's musical comedy theatre... just fake it!” (And I, too, found it to be good advice!)

Studio head Jack Warner, upon meeting the esteemed scientist Albert Einstein, greeted him with the fact that he, too, had a theory of relativity: “Don't hire 'em!” He and his brother Harry could rarely see eye to eye. In fact, in 1958 when Warner had a collision with a truck all the way over in the French Riviera, word facetiously spread that Harry must have been driving the other vehicle! Harry is at the far left, below, with jack in front of him, followed by Sam and Albert – all four of the famous Warner Brothers in presumably happier times.

Most of us have at least seen a shot of silent star Francis X. Bushman as Messala in the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur. I mean, how could you ever forget those eyes once you've seen them? Bushman had been a stage actor and a nude sculptor's model in New York City as well as an actor in some films. Wanting to win the potentially rewarding role (which did turn out to be an iconic one), he and his agent devised a scheme that worked.

They arrived at Grand Central Station and on their way to the Metro Films office dropped pennies from a large bag that had a hole in it. Upon arrival at the office, they'd amassed a crowd of followers that movie representatives took to be clamoring fans of the actor! He won the role and a place in film history. His meteoric success was short-lived due to the great stock market crash of 1929, which practically wiped him out, and a clash with Louis B. Mayer, who was insulted when Bushman's butler didn't recognize him upon a visit. He had to make due with bit parts in films and TV guest roles until his death of a heart attack in 1966 at eighty-three.

Assistant director Rudolph Seiber went to his employer, director Alexander Korda, and asked if his wife might be afforded a teensy bot role in the film they were working on. Korda reportedly told Seiber that his wife didn't possess even the slightest bit of potential as a screen actress. The wife? She went by her maiden name of Marlene Dietrich and later went blonde and found staggering success in the cinema.

When Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors came to Hollywood, she began to wonder about the bathing and cleaning habits of the city's inhabitants. She'd repeatedly heard about this person or that one being “washed up!”

Acerbic author and poetess Dorothy Parker did some screen-writing for a time in Hollywood and during her long hours on the lot, she found herself lonely in her tiny office. After too long a stretch of this, she impishly removed her name from the door and replaced it with a sign that said “MEN.” After this, she never wanted for company again! One of the producers asked her why she had missed the deadline for a script she was working on and her pithy response in memo form was, “Because I've been too fucking busy – and vice versa.”

Groucho Marx was once asked over the radio what he thought about the upcoming film Samson and Delilah (1949), which starred Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. His response: “No picture can hold my interest when the leading man's bust measurement is bigger than the leading lady's.”

The power columnists of the golden era are also given some space. One segment on Hedda Hopper (an actress who morphed into a gossip columnist famous for her hats) and Louella Parsons (a doctor's wife who rose to a position of importance as a gossip monger) quotes Louella describing the (rather apt) difference between them: “Louella Parsons is a reporter trying to be a ham; Hedda Hopper is a ham trying to be a reporter.” That's a young Sophia Loren at the far left with Louella next to her and Hedda hovering above. See below an early instance of “photo-bombing.”

Allegedly, one Hollywood couple planning to elope had to call the nuptials off because they had mislaid Parsons' phone number and feared her wrath if they didn't alert her to it right away. Then there's a bit about Parsons printing that an actress was pregnant when she wasn't, so the husband had to get busy to make the item a truthful one! Joan Bennett was so incensed by something Hopper had printed about her that she had a live skunk (de-scented) delivered to her house. Hopper one-upped her by announcing that the beast was well-behaved and that she'd named it Joan!

Joan's sister, a perturbed Constance Bennett, once strode up to young columnist Sheilah Graham and said, “It's hard to believe that a girl as pretty as you could be the biggest bitch in Hollywood.” Graham rebounded with, “Not the biggest, the second biggest.”

Errol Flynn had it out with columnist Jimmy Fidler over the death of his beloved dog, Arno. The dog had leapt to his death from the Flynn yacht and the Coast Guard found the body. Flynn was asked if he wanted it, but he could only stand to accept the dog's collar and didn't want to be confronted with his faithful friend's corpse. Fidler wrongly interpreted this act as Flynn not caring enough to collect the body and printed such. Flynn soon saw him in a restaurant and whalloped him to the floor, but was soon stabbed in the ear by Fidler's wife! A lawsuit came soon after, but it was settled out of court and the men later became friends. Flynn remarked to Fidler, “Your wife has good table manners. She used the right fork.” (I adore Errol Flynn and think he looks divine - not to mention contemporary - here with often-combative wife Lili Damita!)

I've always enjoyed this oft-told howler about Tallulah Bankhead, using the ladies room at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. She really had to go and the only unoccupied stall had no toilet paper, so she went from stall to stall knocking on each door, a monetary note wafting in her hand, with the entreaty, “Can anyone break a ten?”

When Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (longtime rivals, filled with varying degrees of disdain for one another) were filming What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a reporter asked Crawford about their on-set relationship. She responded, “Bette and I work differently. Bette screams and I knit. While she screamed, I knitted a scarf that stretched clear to Malibu!”

People have long applauded the work of Marlon Brando, but at least one costar had different ideas. When Joanne Woodward worked with him in 1959's The Fugitive Kind, she said, “He was not there. He was somewhere else.” She added that the only way she would ever work with him again was if he were shown in rear projection! Presumably she got on better with Anna Magnani, shown holding her hand here. Marlon looks happy nonetheless!

During the production of 1958's Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis became miffed over the way he was billed in a prospective ad campaign and went to director Billy Wilder to complain. Wilder volleyed, “The trouble with you, Tony is that you're interested only in tight pants and wide billing.” The subject was never broached again.

This infamous exchange came in 1959 when Oscar-winning actor Edmund Gwenn (for 1947's Miracle on 34th Street) was on his deathbed. Newfound friend Jack Lemmon asked the veteran actor how hard it was to be facing death after a stroke, compounded with pneumonia. Gwenn managed to whisper, “Oh, it's hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy.”

This is but a smidgen of the (sometimes lengthy) tales featured in the book, but hopefully these examples, along with the always-important photos, piqued your interest today!