"19" About "75"

I watched the hooty disaster classic Airport 1975 (released in 1974, natch!) the other day for what is probably the twentieth time in my life, if not more. I have to see my all-star '70s disaster flicks with some degree of regularity or else I suffer pangs of withdrawal. It amazes me that, after all these years (and this one I distinctly recall seeing in the theater as a pup of seven!) that I can still find new details with each viewing. I covered this movie (all about a jumbo jet that is struck by another plane during flight, leaving a sizable hole and a mostly empty cockpit behind) briefly once before, but I always like to keep my site dotted with posts from this genre and I thought it would be fun to share some of my most recent observations (or at least ones that I haven't droned on about yet!)

1.  How in God's name I could have seen this movie as much as I have and never once realized this first one is beyond me. Karen Black, as first stewardess Nancy Pryor, is wearing a wiglet (a fall) on her head! I always thought her hair was kind of fugly in the movie, even in 1974 (I never went in for those curled-under, bowl-style haircuts), but since you can see her hairline and part very clearly and her hair isn't particularly big or full, I never suspected that it was anything but her own tresses.

Now that I've seen the movie in 55” high-def, I can clearly spot the fall positioned just above her own hair, an inch or so back. It's a slightly lighter color than her own hair and you can no longer spot the part since the wig has been sewn together snugly at the center line. My big question is WHY?? Black's hair has no need at all to look coiffed after the first thirty minutes of the movie. She could have done a hundred things from a short 'do to a bun to a slicked-back look with a ponytail. Why was this straight, unspectacular mop attached to the crown of her head? I'd love for someone to tell me.

2.  I'm more than familiar with Charlton Heston's flab- revealing, lemon yellow turtleneck (often covered up for the most part by a more flattering, taupe cargo jacket), but in his initial scene in the movie, which takes place during the opening credits, he's dressed differently. He's wearing what was then “on trend,” a semi-loud, plaid dress suit made of rather drab, pukey colors.

Just when he turns his back to the camera to walk away and you wonder to yourself, “Who is responsible for this awful piece of clothing??”, the credit comes up “Costumes by Edith Head”!! Now, even though she and her work are not very popular in certain circles today, you won't find any Head bashing here. I typically love her smartly-tailored, clean-lined clothing in the movies, but even giants (and after half a century in the biz and eight Oscars, she does qualify as one!) occasionally trip up a bit.

3.  On the subject of costumes, surely Ms. Head had nothing to do with the air traffic controller at the Salt Lake City airfield choosing to wear a lavender dress shirt that is almost precisely the same color as the tinted sunshades that protect the employees from sun glare? Right?? I can't imagine that she bothered to have anything to do with that, but it's distractingly coincidental.

4.  Anyway, as the stewardesses and flight crew head towards the plane, you can spot various passengers behind them who will also be departing on Columbia 409. I appreciate the fact that someone thought to have the background extras in these scenes played in many cases by folks who will later be seen on the doomed aircraft. Among them are a young couple in love (presumably newlyweds) and a gaggle of middle-aged ladies (one of whom is played by the extraordinarily busy movie and TV actress Virginia Gregg.) Note, though, that the male half of the couple is in a different outfit!

5.  As the passengers embark, several Hare Krishna followers present their tickets without any sort of fanfare, humor or irony. It's likely that they were inserted into the mix in order to add some variety amongst the passengers and perhaps make it look as if the movie were relevant to a movement that was burgeoning at the time. Six years later in Airplane! (1980), a far more satiric approach would be taken as that movie presented members of a similar sect annoying patrons at the airport. (Within that span of time, the leader of the movement had died and a case of brainwashing had been filed which went all the way to The U.S. Supreme Court!) For whatever reason, the Krishnas are dead last to be evacuated from the plane, by the way!

6.  In the earlier post I did on this movie, I noted the presence of a lady seated near sickly Linda Blair who managed to carry on her own personal through-line during the course of the flight. She's clearly bothered by something, all stressed out and requesting drink after drink from the stewardess. She's completely a background character, but this chick is selling it for everything that it's worth!

It's interesting to see that she later turns up with a more substantial role in Airplane! (1980) as the passenger who becomes sick from food poisoning and exclaims, “I haven't felt this awful since we saw that Ronald Reagan film.” Then Leslie Nielsen, with sleight of hand, begins extracting whole eggs from her mouth! This isn't a new observation here, but this time I at least have some photos to share regarding it.

7.  Also on board Columbia 409 is character actress Alice Nunn as a lady who's sneaked her little Yorkshire terrier onto the flight in a basket. He's on his way to breed with another dog named Fifi! She's shown animatedly chatting away to it as she files her nails. Once calamity strikes, she doesn't even pretend to hide the pooch anymore and clings to it in fear.

Nunn, a Broadway bit player who'd only been working in television since 1965, holds a special place in my heart because apart from this role, she also portrayed Joan Crawford's maid Helga in Mommie Dearest (1981) - “Helga... when you polish the floor you have to MOVE the tree.” - and more importantly gave the world the utterly unforgettable figure Large Marge in 1985's Pee Wee's Big Adventure! "On this very night... ten years ago... on this same stretch of road..." She also popped up in other hooty “classics” such as Lucille Ball's Mame (1974) and the Madonna debacle Who's That Girl? (1987) before passing away of a heart attack at only age sixty in 1988.

8.  Another passenger is played by character actor Ray Ballard. He's the one who gets all nervous and agitated when George Kennedy's young son proclaims that his dad practically runs the airline. Kennedy's wife Susan Clark clarifies that he is vice-president of operations and Ballard exclaims, “Some operations!” Ballard's character might have very good reason to be upset since, according to imdb.com, the actor also played a passenger in 1970's Airport! (It's rare for anyone not named George Kennedy to have been in more than one of the four films in the franchise.) That time, a mad bomber blew a hole in the back of the airplane, so by now he'd seen the worst of both worlds.

9.  Some stunt casting of a sort comes in the form of two pro football players seen on board the airplane. New England Patriots quarterback Jim Plunkett and San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Gene Washington are briefly chatted up by the male steward. Why these two men from different teams are flying together from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles is a mystery. And while they seem to be in first class, they are in the back of first class, smushed into a corner.

At first glance, it would seem that they filmed this insert over the course of a couple of hours or so, but Plunkett does show up again, peering around the corner as Helen Reddy sings and when Black makes a bullhorn announcement, and is even seen sliding down the inflatable emergency flumes near the end of the picture with Blair in his arms. Washington proceeded to do a little bit more acting while Plunkett mostly steered clear of that arena (in his primary scene, he looks directly into the camera. A no-no), but enjoyed greater success as a player (notably leading the Oakland Raiders into two Super Bowl wins.)

10.  While we're on the subject of football, Sid Caesar is seated near a slim, casual woman who is working intently on a needlepoint project. His overly demonstrative, faux-ingratiating character can't help himself from commenting on it. He tells her he hears that “Rosey Grier does that.” Grier was a mammoth, 6' 5” former tackle for the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams who turned to an acting career (he was in 1972's Skyjacked with Heston) and might seem an unlikely candidate for the art of needlepoint. However, he really was into both needlepoint and macrame and released a book called “Needlepoint for Men.” Groovy, baby!

Incidentally, the needlepoint woman Caesar accosts is an actress billed as Joyce Cunning who slept with the director in order to win her part. You see, she was actually Joyce Smight, director Jack Smight's wife, who acted on TV in the 1950s, then retired, only to come back in the '70s with this new moniker and take bit parts in her husband's films and TV-movies. Their son Alec Smight went on to a successful career as a TV editor, working on shows such as L.A. Law, Chicago Hope and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

11.  Most devotees of Airport 1975 recall the snippet that shows two elderly women snickering over one of the passages in a (fake?) book called “Epicurean Sexual Delights.” One of them is Susan French, a supporting player who remarkably went from this movie to an uncredited role in the 1975 disaster drama The Hindenburg. She's also known to many folks as the elderly version of Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time (1980), who beckons Christopher Reeve to “Come back to me...”

12.  One of my favorite background passengers is the lady shown here who, immediately upon realizing that there has been a collision, proceeds to stand up, grip the seat in front of her and scream her head off non-stop, in a single, sustained bleat! (For years I was convinced this was gossip columnist Marilyn Beck, but it's not.) What's really funny is that action moves away from her to the cockpit, but then later she's shown again, still standing there in place screaming!

As the immediate terror subsides, she hunkers down into her seat and, hilariously, keeps her ears covered with the sides of a purple blanket until practically the end of the movie. Many others barely register any demonstration of being cold after the initial collision as the plane careens across the Rocky Mountains (though Gloria Swanson does break out a fur coat), but this lady acts like she's sitting in Doctor Zhivago's ice-encrusted holiday bungalow.

It gets better, though. Now I want every single one of you people who is familiar with Hollywood movie-making, billing, star-power and the like to really think about this... Airport 1975 featured a downright plethora of stars.  Some big, some small, but nevertheless a name actor in practically every part.  But for the belated release of this movie in Turkey (Dubbed "Airport 2" or "Airport 80," depending on your language and released there in 1980), this dress extra, an unbilled bit actress won a showcasing spot directly in the center of the poster, her head generally the same size as the six stars shown below!!!  Talk about a score!  Take my advice folks, if you are ever an extra in a movie, do NOT phone it in.  Stardom awaits you in a foreign country!

13.  Back to Swanson, who pontificates on the benefits of health food while being referred to repeatedly by everyone, to her face and elsewhere, as looking amazing; she is seated in first class, but brings her own tea to the airplane, apparently not even trusting that Columbia airlines would have the type of leaves that could meet her stringent approval. Her assistant Linda Harrison (billed here as Augusta Summerland in an unsuccessful attempt to steer her career in a new direction) orders “a martini.” Is it really so that there was a time when one could order “a martini” and not have there be any other description? I assume she got a gin martini, served up with an olive? Now, there are vodka martinis, martinis on the rocks, martinis with flavored liquor and hundreds of ingredients and variations.

14.  Like Harrison, most of the stars on board (and there are plenty!) get only a few lines here and there in order to try to establish some sort of pat, cliched charac- terization. Some, like Susan Clark, Myrna Loy and Sid Caesar, are afforded a smidge more screen time, but most often, the actors are given scant dialogue to be certain. Linda Blair, then a major name thanks to The Exorcist just a year prior, has only a handful of lines. Martha Scott, an Oscar nominee for 1941's Our Town and a costar in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), both of which had her playing Heston's mother by the way, is left to rot in a seat by herself once fellow nun Helen Reddy (who somehow landed sixth billing in her film debut over a host of other stars) goes to play the guitar and sing for ailing Blair.

15.  Nancy Malone, as Blair's fretful mother, is another one who gets short shrift in the dialogue department. She also has one of the movies very strangest moments. During the flight, the camera closes in on the hole of Blair's acoustic guitar and weirdly ominous music strums. Then Malone, who's seen reading quietly, removes her glasses and stares at Blair with grave concern and alarm even though nothing untoward, or even remarkable, is happening (except bizarre, disembodied guitar strumming on the soundtrack.)

It looks like something almost supernatural or extrasensory is about to happen, but, in fact, it's absolutely nothing. In one of many lunatic circumstances in the film, Blair is headed for Los Angeles for a kidney transplant, but when the accident diverts Columbia 409 to Salt Lake City, Utah, they miraculously "have a kidney waiting at the hospital" there, too, because, you know, organs, especially in 1974, were always just lying around ready to be transplanted regardless of tissue typing or any other such concerns! No line, no waiting!

16.  The big point of impact between Dana Andrews' private plane and Efrem Zimbalist Jr's jet has long been considered a miss thanks to some quest- ionable rear-projection work. We never really see anything much beyond footage of a plane through the jet's windshield, followed by smoke, sparks and a big hole in the side with the co-pilot (who'd been standing up to investigate a noise) being yanked out.

Co-pilot Roy Thinnes probably wasn't even on the set the day they shot his stunt dummy being sucked out of the cockpit. This is also very poorly handled with a straight up and down figure suddenly soaring horizontally out. At a speed of almost 200 miles per hour, wouldn't he go more to the side of the plane? I'm no physicist, but even gum goes sideways out a car window going 45 (do not ask me how I know this.) Also, I could swear that an alternate take of this shot is featured in the trailer for the film (shown above left) and that it's a better one because the legs of the body look more realistic! (They seem to have more bend to them.) NOTE: Upon repeat viewing, I've discovered that the shot in the trailer is framed wider and goes on a tad longer (and may be different altogether.)

17.  During a rescue attempt, U.S. Naval major Ed Nelson tried to deposit himself into the cockpit of the partially disabled jetliner via an umbilical cord dangling from a helicopter. He clanks up against the plane as stewardess Black flounders around trying to guide him in. Once inside, he is supposed to release the tether line he is connected to by pulling on a silver handle, but as fate would have it, the handle gets caught on a gnarled piece of metal skin before he's inside.

Of course, what's really ridiculous about it is that the entire right side of the co-pilot's area has been ripped away by the collision with a small craft, but the remaining shard of aluminum skin happens to be not only in just the right location and just the right size to activate his toggle pull, but even juts up and back to create a perfect grabber that it would almost take precision in order to hit! (And, hysterically, he keeps bobbing up and down and around it. One can almost envision the riggers off to the side of the set desperately trying to ensure that Nelson somehow manages to make this connection which is akin to having a man with swollen, calloused hands undo the clasp on a woman's delicate necklace!)

18.  Much has been made over the years regarding the hilarity of (then seventy- five) Gloria Swanson's stunt double whizzing down the escape slide while trying to obscure her face. Her concentration on the cowl of her hood was so great that she neglected to shield the audience from a shot of her white panties. Unknowing viewers may have been duped into thinking that they saw up Miss Swanson's skirt, but I assure you it wasn't her.

However, seventy-one year-old Myrna Loy really did fly down the inflatable chute and, believe it or not, there is a brief flash of her drawers, too! She flashes her undies and a garter belt, revealing the fact that her hose are not "panty-hose." One would probably have to go all the way back to 1933's The Barbarian to see this much of Miss Loy! Kudos to her, though, for having the guts to jettison herself down this slide for the cameras.

19.  This is a Universal film and that studio had its hand in quite a few of the disaster epics of the day, so it's common to see the same actors here and there in the various movies. For their own part, Heston and Kennedy ran long on the filming of Airport 1975 and had to sometimes hop from set to set as they were beginning Earthquake! (Shown at right.) They played close comrades in that one as well.

Kip Niven (the ex-Mr. Linda Lavin), who plays a rather snooty naval secretary here also popped up in Earth- quake as the fledgling seismologist who can't seem to make anyone believe his theory that “the big one” is about to hit Los Angeles. Likewise, Dana Andrews' friends at the airport (both seen below) turn up in other disaster flicks as well. Bob Hastings had portrayed the New Years Eve emcee in 1972's The Poseidon Adventure (a 20th Century Fox movie) while Gene Dynarski would, like several aforementioned folks, proceed to Earthquake. He played a dam worker who gets caught in an elevator and drowns.

There we have 19 tidbits about Airport 1975. I probably could have even coughed up more, but does anyone besides me even give a care?! It didn't take long at all for this flick to be parodied (long before Airplane!)  Take this installment of The Carol Burnett Show.  This is part one.  If you enjoy it, part two is available to the side at the link!

As a P.S., I give you this hilarious publicity photo featuring Miss Gloria Swanson, who was returning to the screen after a twenty-two year absence and convinced the producers to allow her to play, not just a fictional actress of a certain age, but HERSELF! Always ready for her close-up, she posed inside the cockpit of a 747 as part of the hype. Can you imagine this movie if something had felled Karen Black and Glo had to take the wheel?? That would really have been something.

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!