As usual, things are quite crazy in The Underworld with a bevy of work, household, family and personal issues and yet there's always time for vintage photos of the stars and bits of (way) leftover celebrity gossip! Thus, I present highlights from a early-'70s, smoke-damaged rag that includes what I hope will be some interesting doodads here and there. As is often the case, the cover makes garish, lurid allusions to things that won't actually be found in the stories within. (You may have to open photos in a new window to read the text, rather that use the blogger gallery feature.)
But first up, we see some Tinseltown happenings in a section called Hollywood Hotline (penned by notable gossip columnist Marilyn Beck.) A charity ball game, pictured on top, finds the highly unlikely combination of football pro-turned-action star Jim Brown, James Caan and The Carpenters! The column itself hashes out the love life of Liza Minnelli, who was at that time heading back to Desi Arnaz Jr. after a spell with Peter Sellers! Other names mentioned include Andy Williams, Redd Foxx, John Davidson and Sally Field. There's a photo of Barbara Stanwyck with James Stewart at the dawn of his short-lived series
Hawkins (1973-1974.) The show was something of a precursor to
Matlock with Andy Griffith, which was far more successful, running nine seasons! Interestingly, Stanwyck and Stewart never acted together during their lengthy careers.
The next page of this section has a shot of ubiquitous '70s teen idol David Cassidy and one of
Romeo & Juliet's (1968) Olivia Hussey with her husband "Dino" Martin (son of Dean Martin, later to go by Dean Paul Martin, his actual name.) Their rocky marriage was from 1971-1978 and he later married skating Olympian Dorothy Hamel from 1982-1984 before dying in a 1987 plane crash at only age thirty-five (something his father, quite understandably, never really got over.) Other blurbs concern Sammy and Altovise Davis taking porn star Linda Lovelace on vacation with them (!), Robert Young being put on a diet by his wife, Marlon Brando maintaining contact with relatives and Barbara Eden's marriage to Michael Ansara coming undone after about fifteen years. Other divorces include Joyce Bulifant from Ed Mallory, Goldie Hawn from actor-director Gus Trikonis (who never remarried) and Sean Connery from Diane Cilento.
Page three hands us
Days of Our Lives star Bill Hayes about to release an album of love songs and a candid shot of some of
The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) at a charity ball game. Also on deck, the passing of legendary director John Ford, marital squabbles for Dean Martin (sr) who was then still newly wed to his third and final wife. They would divorce in 1976. Other stories include preparation for Elizabeth Taylor's
Ash Wednesday (1973) and Susan George explaining why she turned down an offer to pose for Playboy magazine.
The fourth page of this section focuses on singer-songwriter Carole King and her unlikely friend Britt Ekland. According to this article, Britt's husband was off to Spain to canoodle with Faye Dunaway, who was filming
The Three Musketeers (1973) there! Also, Jim Guerico of the band Chicago discusses corruption in the music business. Photos include Woody Allen with Diane Keaton and Sonny and Cher (holding then-daughter, now-son Chastity/Chaz) with Lucille Ball.
Finally, page five notes the break-up of iconic '60s rock group Jefferson Airplane and spotlights Eva Gabor's voice-acting role in
The Rescuers. Astonishingly, this 1973 magazine mentions how long it will take for the hand-drawn animated feature to be made (three years) and, sure enough, the movie came out in 1977! Now, with computers, they seem to spit out "animated" movies every time you turn around... Game show host Larry Blyden is mentioned for his work on
What's My Line? (syndicated revival), which would end in 1975. Blyden died that same year under mysterious circumstances while vacationing in Mexico. (Allegedly a car wreck, it has also been suggested that he was carjacked.) Photos depict another surprising trio of Ethel Kennedy, Dustin Hoffman and Howard Cosell along with one of Michelle Phillips whose daughter Chynna would later grow up and form the vocal trio Wilson Phillips.
The cover story blurting out "THE
UNUSUAL WAYS ELVIS MADE LOVE TO HER!" consists of him coddling Priscilla like a little girl rather than treating her like the woman she had become over the course of his considerable absences while filming movies and touring all over the place. The article goes on and on about their courtship, the gifts, the wedding, etc... and there is, literally, a sentence about their love life together: "Priscilla was pampered, she was coddled - that was Elvis' love style and she admits she approved of it." I do like this un-posed photo of him, though.
Next up is a stop-off of the crazy train that was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's lives - together and apart for much of the 1960s and '70s. At this time, they were about to be divorced after close to a decade of marriage.
Maria was a two year-old German girl that Taylor adopted with Eddie Fisher, though by the time the adoption was official, Fisher was already ousted for Burton! Burton then adopted her himself. Taylor and Burton would remarry one another in 1975 for less than a year before splitting again for good.
Another page of the article focuses on her baby granddaughter Leyla, who was her son Michael Wilding Jr.'s child. He and his wife Beth had already divorced with her attempting a career as a photographer while he emerged as a long-haired hippie until later embarking on a short-lived acting career of his own. Taylor was a grandmother at age thirty-nine, by the way!
Somehow, through all the marriages, deaths and divorces, La Liz did manage to keep the whole brood of children and grandchildren accounted for and together, at least every so often! At the time of her death she had four children, ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren (but, alas, by that time, no husband.)
Next is another of those lurid headlines with no meat to it in the actual story. It's about Burt Reynolds' relationship with the two-decades-older Dinah Shore. Supposedly, his ex-girlfriends were offering advice to her on how to keep him satisfied. (How would they know?! They were his exes! LOL) I do love these pictures of hunky young Burt, though, and his assortment of gal pals.
This romance was a HUGE deal at the time as it was then (and, really, still is) unusual to see a December-May relationship (with the female older?) than the standard May-December type. Though "cougars" have become something of a key word, it still raised eyebrows even fairly recently when Demi Moore married Ashton Kutcher, who was fifteen years younger than her. (The union lasted from 2005 to 2013.) Burt's relationship with Dinah petered out just as he was about to embark on one with Sally Field that lasted through the end of the decade.
This next article makes it sound like Sonny & Cher had a secret baby that they kept stashed away somewhere. In reality, the article, which is mostly a recap of their lives and successes to that point, refers to a child Bono had fathered in 1958 with his first wife.
The child, Christy, lived with her mother and, in a way, was secret since she was never publicly trotted out the way Chastity was, but she wasn't Cher's as the headline implies. Bono had fathered an illegitimate boy in 1964 and then with his fourth wife had two more kids for a grand total of five prior to his death in 1998 from a skiing accident. He was sixty-two.
George Peppard was an actor who seemed to generate controversy among his costars. Various tangles and disputes dotted his career and his personal life was apparently rocky at times, too. This article concerns his parenting skills, which, according to this, were more worthy of applause than some of his other areas in life.
Starring in
Banacek (1972-1974) at the time, he declined to proceed with a third season, despite its being renewed, because to do so would mean that his newly-divorced wife Elizabeth Ashley would receive part of his income from it due to their marriage at the time of its inception. He had a total of three children at the time of this article and no more afterwards, though he did proceed to marry three more times! The fifth and last wife wed him in 1992, but he died of pneumonia in 1994 at the age of sixty-five.
I had never even heard of the guy profiled on these next pages, but it's always nice to run across someone new. Yale Summers was a TV actor who was busy from the early-1960s to the late-1970s. His best-known role was surely that of the young man working at an African animal study center in
Daktari (1966-1978), a show I have simply never seen except for a few snippets caught in reruns as a child.
At the time of this feature, Summers was working on the daytime soap
Return to Peyton Place (1972-1974) and had replaced the handsome blonde Lawrence Casey as male lead Rodney Harrington. The show limped along for just those two years before being cancelled.
This article says that he didn't work for four years after departing Daktari, though in truth he did appear as a guest on the occasional series, including
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors,
Land of the Giants,
My Three Sons and
McMillan and Wife.
One amusing thing about this article is that by way of his marriage to wife Suzanne, she became Suzanne Summers! Though she had been an actress herself, mostly in small TV roles, under her name Suzanne Reid, so perhaps there was no considerable confusion with the soon-to-come Suzanne Somers.
Summers became an integral part of both the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA. One happy note: Unlike so many Hollywood couples, these two remained wed right up until his death in 2012 of pulmonary disease at age seventy-eight.
You don't tend to see a great deal about Sally Field's first husband, Steve Craig, but here is a picture of them. They were married from 1968-1975 and their two sons Peter and Eli are in the business, too, be it writing, directing and occasional acting (though I don't believe Steve Craig was in show business himself?) After a spell with Burt Reynolds, Field married again in 1984 and had another son, Sam, though that marriage ended in 1993 as well.
One marriage I never even knew about was between Broadway and TV actor Ken Howard and TV guest star and soap opera diva Louise Sorel! Perhaps that is because it was a brief union, lasting only from 1973-1975. (Another shocker was discovering that Sorel's prior husband was Herb Edelman, best known as Stanley Zbornak of
The Golden Girls!) Howard married again after Sorel in 1977 to Ann Landers' daughter (I wonder how much advice he got from his mother-in-law!) and that marriage lasted until 1991. In 1992, he married his present wife.
This page depicts him with his TV wife Blythe Danner of the short-lived show
Adam's Rib (1973.) It's interesting that they played a married couple in the series since they had just the year before played Thomas and Martha Jefferson in
1776 (1972.) Her real husband, Bruce Paltrow, was the creator of
The White Shadow (1978-1981), which was a success for Howard. Danner and Howard worked on a couple of other projects as well including two episodes of
Huff, though I don't know if they appeared together in them.
Lastly, we come to another column - this one called The Inside Story by Dick Kleiner. These sections are nearly always my favorites in old periodicals like this because they let me know what people were thinking about or working on (or sleeping with) at that time in showbiz history and contain lesser-known photos. This first page mentions Peter Falk's desire to stop doing
Columbo, which he did not do until later (the intermittent series ran from 1971 to 1978 and then came back again in 1989 with occasional installments up to 2003! Others mentioned include Harry Guardino, Rock Hudson and Jackie Gleason, whose "happy" marriage noted in the text only lasted from 1970-1975. Richard Thomas and Sian Barbara Allen must not have been together too long after this because he married wife Alma in 1975 and proceeded to have four children with her. David Niven mentions "Vampira," which saw release later under the title
Old Dracula (1974) - a play on the title of the hit
Young Frankenstein (1974.)
Audrey Meadows, married to airline exec Robert Six, claimed to have done interior decoration on DC-10 airliners! They were wed from 1960 to his death in 1986. (Six' prior wife was Ethel Merman, so I doubt he ever led a very dull marital existence.) Other blurbs focus on, among others, Richard Roundtree, Francois Truffaut, Doris Day's son Terry Melcher (about a wedding that did not in fact occur) and a recent Supreme Court ruling about pornography. This scuttled some plans of Arthur Hiller's to make a movie of Last Exit to Brooklyn (which did finally get made by someone else in 1989.) Also included is a story about Anthony Perkins wedding to Berry Berenson, one about Raymond Burr's faltering health and photos of Mia Farrow a handsomely-bearded Clint Eastwood.
Page three announces a new series for John Amos (which would be
Good Times, a
Maude spin-off, which ran from 1974-1979, though Amos opted out in 1976), Susan Oliver's apparent retirement from piloting planes, Paul Winfield's arrest for marijuana possession and the death of Peggie Castle. The once-beautiful Castle had become an alcoholic and was only forty-five when she died of cirrhosis. Another death was that of Douglas Kennedy, a busy character actor and the Sheriff of Stockton on
The Big Valley (1965-1969) who was taken by cancer at age fifty-five. Photos show Johnny Crawford (who'd recently appeared in
The Naked Ape, 1973) and Judy Strangis (who would later costar on
Electra Woman and Dyna Girl in 1976!) Her sister did indeed have a brief career in acting as Cindy Malone, but it was over by this point.
The last page concerns the possible casting of Bonnie Bedelia in the 1973 TV-movie
Sunshine (Cristina Raines got the part), ESP-ish activity for Joanne Worley, John Beradino's new baby, the death of dwarf actor Michael Dunn, a puff piece about Richard Chamberlain sending for a lady love while filming in Spain and some more of the endless Kennedy shenanigans. Other bits involve Eddie Fisher, Roger Moore, Richard Thomas and Barbara Feldon. In photos, we glimpse Princess Grace and daughter Caroline as well as Myron Floren and Bobby Burgess of
The Lawrence Welk Show (1955-1982.)
Sometimes the ads in these magazines can be a real hoot. I only found one that really caught my eye in this one and it's for some caftans and other clothes. I am not a caftfan (fan of caftans!), but I do love the lower right model's big hairdo!
The back page has a full-color ad for a rather vomitous series of eye-shadow colors that guarantee 300 ways to look hideous! LOL I hope you enjoyed leafing through this magazine. I'll be back soon with more kitschy material.
Today's photo essay will be examining that cinematic staple of the loincloth. In some ways it will be "brief" yet in others it will "hang on" as I've been known to do! While its certainly not an inclusive collection, it contains most of the examples that have hit my own consciousness over the years along with other discoveries. See if any of them happen to be favorites of your own. Our cover boy today is the most famous movie Tarzan, Mr. Johnny Weissmuller.
