RITA HAYWORTH (1918-87) As a teenager Margarita Cansino (Rita Hayworth) was sexually abused by her abominable father, a Latin dancer named Eduardo Cansino, who not only abused her himself, but rented her out to his cronies. When she confided this to her husband Orson Welles he was rightly appalled. […]
Any resemblance in this movie to actual fact is pretty much accidental. The storyline is complete Hollywood hokum, and it is a good thing that Libbie Custer, George Armstrong’s widow, did not live to see it. She died eight years earlier in 1933. Even she would have shaken her […]
RUBY KEELER I recently watched 42nd Street (1933) in its entirety, having only seen excerpts until then. The acting was very ordinary, the sound quality (as expected) was inferior, and the highlighted singers were mostly awful. And that includes Ruby Keeler. In fact, she not only couldn’t sing, she […]
Arlene DAHL Lex BARKER (1951 – 52) divorced Fernando LAMAS (1954 – […]
Movie-making has cost the lives of quite a few of those involved in the process. Stuntmen, cameramen, assistants, extras, plus the occasional director and actor have lost their lives down the decades. This is not a definitive list, not by a long shot, but it does demonstrate the perils that […]
John Barrymore John Barrymore became famous for playing sympathetic drunks on film, no great stretch for him given he was a fully-fledged, dedicated alcoholic off-camera all his life. As a Shakespearian stage actor he was brilliant in his youth, able to memorize and deliver extraordinarily long speeches effortlessly and […]
When British actor Benedict Cumberbatch used the term ‘coloured people’ on American television in January 2015, he inadvertently opened up a can of racist worms. It almost defies belief that this young man was attacked for using the term whilst in the middle of personally condemning the inequality that […]
New York crime boss Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano initially sent Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel out to California in 1937 to set up a horse-racing wire service on the West Coast for the National Crime Syndicate. Once in Los Angeles, however, Bugsy set to work infiltrating the movie unions. He also controlled […]
Scott Bowers at 88 In 2012 a Hollywood man named Scott Bowers wrote a book called Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars’ that was published by the reputable Grove Press. It is not a very well written book, but several gay […]
I read recently that ‘gay-gossip is the newest and most clever form of homophobia’. Nice try, but I’m not buying it. I am neither homosexual nor homophobic, but I am interested in subterfuge and in exposing old-time movie studios that made an art form out of gulling the public. […]
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