Canadian-born Florence Lawrence became the first movie star to be identified by name. Before that she was simply ‘The Biograph Girl’, and that suited her just fine, as it did all the other featured players in other companies. Nobody wanted to be named because it might jeopardize their stage […]
Not many superstars begin their careers with an out and out ‘lemon’, but Paul Newman certainly did. After popping up in a dozen or so TV series between 1949 and 1954, when the television industry was still finding its feet, he landed the romantic lead in a sandals and […]
RJ & Natalie, marriage #1 ‘RJ’, as Robert Wagner is known to most of his friends, was always destined to end up acting. As a boy he attended schools and Military Colleges with the offspring of movie stars and other celebrities. These included Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney, Irving Thalberg […]
A British actor in the fifties named Steve Hayes probably summed up the studio bosses as well as anyone, not that he said so when he was under contract, of course. To do so would have been career suicide, as well he knew. ‘All these guys were ruthless bastards’, […]
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. […]
Joan Collins was born in London in 1933. Her father was a Jewish man from South African, a moderately successful agent whose later clients would briefly include The Beatles, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey. Joan signed a contract in England with J. Arthur Rank at the age […]
A lady named Franz Dorfler was responsible for getting Clark Gable his first acting job, but he soon ditched her for acting teacher Josephine Dillon. Jo was 41, plain and matronly, but she took the 23 year-old aspiring young actor to Hollywood, and in 1924 they married. It was […]
When it came to questions about her sexuality, Barbara Stanwyck was the old studio days’ equivalent of today’s Tom Cruise. Any mention of her sexual preferences would immediately bring forth veiled threats of litigation should the subject be pursued. Cruise does the same thing today. Mention his name in connection […]
Clark Gable befriended people he thought could benefit his career. He even married a couple of them. When he arrived in Hollywood in the mid 1920’s he brought with him his much older wife, his acting tutor Josephine Dillon. He quickly ditched her for the equally older (but […]
Of all the movie stars that have come and gone down the decades, none strove so hard, or for so long, as Joan Crawford did, to get to the top of the pile and remain there. In effect, there was almost nothing she would not do to become […]
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