Interesting tidbits you've read in biographies / autobiographies

Post them here, folks.

• Diane Keaton and Mary Tyler Moore dueled over Warren Beatty's affections & hated each other!

  Warren%20Beatty%27s%20bio

• Debbie Reynolds claims she has been visited by the ghost of Agnes Moorehead, who told her "Honor thy father." Debbie took that as an injunction to pray more.

• In any biographies/autobiographies of cute baseball or football players or sports figures in general (usually the white ones) I look for passages on how often they were spanked or paddled growing up, especially if they have nice asses today. There are passages in both Cal Ripken's and Pete Rose's bios that tell spanking stories. Although not a sports figure, Steve McQueen had a nice rear end and I think for a while he lived with his grandparents on a farm or something and his grandfather was strict with him and frequently spanked him. Before he went to Hollywood and became an actor he was a male prostitute and is reputed also to have had sex with his own mother who also earned her living at various points in her life as a prostitute. I don't know how much of that is true or hearsay.

  anon

• When I was a teenager I read some biography about Judy garland and it described Judy and Liza singing and dancing around the living room celebrating Liza's first period. It's the only thing I took from the biography as a teen. The book was large with a pink cover and b&w photo.

• Patty Duke autobiography never knew and I think most ppl didnt either what a terrible childhood she had behind the success we saw.

• In a biography of Leni Refenstahl, one of her female romantic competitors describing "that bitch Heemstra" (Baroness Heemstra, latterly Audrey Helburn's mother) as being a ruthless competitor for Hitler's affections & bed. The quote and insinuation has curiously never appeared in any Hepburn biography.

• Janis Joplin was obsessed with Zelda Fitzgerald.

• James Garner has been smoking pot for years (!!!) for arthritis.

  Frank

• Vladimir Nabokov was a big fan of the comic strip DENNIS THE MENACE, and worried to friends that Dennis' lack of physical similarity to his father must mean he was illegitimate.

• In his later years William Faulkner became a huge fan of the TV series "Car 54, Where Are You?", and would break dinner engagements so he could watch it at home.

  I%20swear%20I%27m%20not%20making%20this%20up

• James cagney was very conscious of how much water he used and tried to conserve water as he thought fresh water was precious and would be hard to come by in the future. Evelyn Keyes was frustrated with her director husband, john Huston, because he acquired a pet monkey he liked better than her and he allowed it to shit anywhere all over their house. Vivien Leigh had hands that were oversized for her body so she learned to position them carefully where they didn't draw attention. She was also a much better read person than Olivier and he acknowledged this fact. Olivier also thought Vivien's thighs were too thick. John Barrymore seduced a teenaged, IIRC 16 years old, Mary Astor in a room that her parents were seated just outside of. He was suppose to be giving her personal acting classes. Charlie Chaplin fell in love with a girl that he caught a glimpse of on the street when he was about 11 years old. For the rest of his life, he yearned and looked for her.

• Shelia Graham (she had a talk show in the 1960s IIRC and was also F. scott Fitzgerald's partner after Zelda) was at a very high class dinner party and had an accident with her period and blood seeped through her dress onto the seat. F. Scott was very sympathetic towards her after this embarrassment, which happened before they met but she told him about it. Clark Gable wore a set of dentures, this is why his breath stunk so bad. Larry Olivier hated that Joan Fontaine won the role of Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca over Vivien Leigh so he would very quietly swear and demean Joan in her ear during the filming of Rebecca.

• R@ Well, at least it wasn't Aggie appearing to Carrie Fisher, telling her to honor HER father!

• Clint Eastwood coerced Sondra Locke to get an abortion and not long after obtaining one she found out Frances Fisher was pregnant with his child.

• When President William McKinley could see that his beloved wife Ida, the First Lady, was about to have an epileptic seizure at official receptions or state dinners, he would casually drape a napkin or handkerchief over her face and wait until her seizure passed. Then he would remove it and go on speaking as if nothing had happened.

• Frank Sinatra fell for Mia Farrow after she showed up for a visit on his film set wearing a see-through dress with nothing on underneath.

• Liz Renay tried to have an affair with Jerry Lewis (he was married), but all he would do was make her parade around in high heels with her tits out while he jerked off onto a small piece of white shag carpet he carried in his pocket just for that use. When he finally came, he told her, solemnly, "This is the most honored piece of carpet in the world." Barbara Payton went from B-movie bombshell to a fat alcoholic who turned tricks on Hollywood Boulevard. Since black men had never been cruel to her, she boasted, "But I never charged a Negro" (to fuck her). On the morning her new trash best-sellers were being shipped to bookstores, Jackie Susann would show up at the book warehouse before dawn with coffee and doughnuts for the truck drivers. No one had ever done that, especially a "sexy" author in a fur coat and false eyelashes. She would autograph free books for them and say, "I'm depending on you to make this a success!"

• Shirley Temple remembered one time witnessing cruelty to animals on a film set. They nailed an ostrich's feet to the floor. Also, on a different subject, she knew her first marriage wouldn't work out shortly after marrying when her husband confided he really preferred tall leggy blonds.

• Priscilla Presley says Elvis had absolutely no interest in sleeping with her after she gave birth to Lisa Marie. Also, she said the women around Elvis at parties at Graceland would make her jealous as they would seemingly compete over who would dare to wear the shortest dress with the lowest cut cleavage.

• Queen Mary, the wife of George V, was something of a kleptomaniac. She would often take small valuable objects from store in plain sight of everyone, and no one could stop her from doing it since she was the queen of England. Also, she had a notorious habit for admiring beautiful objets d'art in people's homes and making it very clear she expected they give it to her on the spot, which they almost always did... though after a while so many people knew about this that the wealthy and titled would hide rare valuable small things in their homes before a royal visit. She and her husband came to dislike her eldest son, the future Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor, because he had an obsessive and jealous nanny who would secretly pinch him very hard when he was a very small boy right before his parents visited the nursery. They would always retreat in disgust when he'd cry and squall so much, and then the nanny would have him all to herself. Eventually the king and queen found out what was going on and dismissed the crazy nanny, but they had by that time grown very cold towards their eldest son, and he never forgot it nor could forgive them as he grew older. Her first fiance was Albert Victor ("Eddy"), the Duke of Clarence and eldest son of then then-Prince of Wales (and this heir to the throne), Bertie (the future Edward VII). When Eddy died suddenly in the 1890s, she was thought so perfect a prospect as a future queen of England that Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales all begged her to marry the next eldest son, the future George V, nearly immediately. She did what they asked, but then she and the brother (then the Duke of York) discovered they really liked each other. They were both very strange people--very rigid and proper.

• Before undergoing surgery, Liberace tried to insist on wearing his wig during the operation.

• Phyllis Diller is an outspoken and eloquent advocate for atheism in a world full of celebrity biographies that emphasize how "spiritual" the subject might be. Her autobiography was surprisingly shrewd and honest; she came off as a cultured and intelligent woman who reinvented herself in mid-life, leaving behind bad husbands and knowing exactly what she was doing. Plus she seemed to have all her marbles even as she passed 90.

• Babara Hutton, the dime store heiress, swallowed a tape worm in order to be very skinny.

• Nabokov was good friends with William F Buckley. Buckley apparently included a character named Vladimir Nabokov in one of his books(that no one ever read, he wasn't successful as an author of fiction). Barbara Payton didn't write her autobiography. A lot of it is made up.

• Larry Hagman loathed his gay, alcoholic step-father, Richard Halliday, who was Mary Martin's second husband. While living with them in NYC, Hagman once pointed a loaded rifle out a window, aiming it directly at his step-father's head as the older man stood on the sidewalk below. Hagman seriously debated pulling the trigger, reasoning that even if the bullet were traced back to him, his young age would prevent him from doing serious prison time. In any case, he would be free of the hated step-father. Ultimately, Larry Hagman would not develop a close relationship with his famous mother until after she was widowed in 1973.

• Natalie Wood had a deformed wrist and hid it with large bracelets or cuffs.

• One Sunday on Cape Cod, President Kennedy skipped Mass. When he heard his father angrily coming up the stairs to get him out of bed and over to the church, JFK escaped out the bedroom window.

• Bette Davis drank from morning until night when she wasn't working on a film or tv show. She was sober when she worked but when she wasn't working she began drinking screwdrivers at breakfast, then switched to straight vodka in the afternoons, and then scotch at cocktail hour, which she drank for the rest of the evening. Her drinking capacity was astounding, and she drank like a fish well into her old age.

• George Harrison liked to play the ukelele while getting a blowjob. James Caan likes to eat pussy for hours. John Ritter was an amazing (het) fuck. From: You'll Never Make Love in the Town Again.

• Zelda Fitzgerald's sister had the majority of her paintings burned after her death.

• Got any more, r29?

• Carole King was married four times. She had to get married at age 17 when she was pregnant to her first husband and song writing partner. she left him because he suffered from manic depression, but not before she started an affair with Charlie Larkey, a handsome musician. she had two daughters with her first husband (when she was only 18 and 20) and two children with her second husband about 10 years later. She moved to rural Idaho. She had a third husband, who was abusive to her. then she had a fourth husband, Rick Sorensen, who was a younger, handsome carpenter type. Then after her divorce from Rick, when she was age 48, she embarked on a 7 year affair with an actor who was only age 27, younger than her first two daughters. Anyhow, she really got around. I read her memoir and Carly Simon's. Carly also got around. CArole King's memoir is very well written and she is very likeable.

• About to lead his men into action, David Niven eased their nervousness by telling them, "Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I'll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!" Asked by suspicious American sentries during the Battle of the Bulge who had won the World Series in 1943, he answered "Haven't the foggiest idea . . . But I did co-star with Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother!"

• [r32], and here I was thinking she had a foot in the closet all these years.

• more please!

• R32, you don't mention that Carole King's third husband was a Tea Party-type freak who embroiled Carole in gun-drawn land disputes with neighbors and the federal government. He insisted on putting his own picture on the cover of one of her albums. I think her fourth husband OD'd on drugs. Lady has outstandingly lousy taste in men!

• Elizabeth Taylor aborted hers and Sinatra's embryo.

  Della

• Sinatra delivered Marilyn Monroe to the Cal Neva lodge for his friend Sam Giancana. They kept her drugged out for several days, and shared her. It was despicable.

• I'm reading Frnak Langella's memoir, which is, overall, rather disappointing, and there is one chapoter devoted to Rita Hayworth. I am not sure if he was implying he had a physical affair with her or if they were very close. Since she was befuddled and obviously showing signs of Alzeimer disease, I hope he didn't go there.

• Based in r38's post alone, Taylor made a good decision, r37. If Sinatra was as cruel as he's been reported to have been, why did women like him? Did Marilyn know what had happened to her at the hands of Sinatra?

• I dropped Robert Hilburn a note asking if, back when trying to write an autobiography with Michael Jackson, he got the chance to meet Jackie O., who first pitched the idea. He wrote back: Absolutely.....I talk about it in "Corn Flakes with John Lennon." including the day Jackie O flew to Los Angeles for a showdown with Michael over the content of the book (she wanted an actual autobiography and he wanted a picture book with a few captions)....anyway, Michael raced upstairs when she arrived at the house in Encino because he didn't want to face her (he hated confrontation). so I had to meet with her .....finally michael came down at the end to say hi...

• Charles Schulz was an unhappy and emotionally distant man. The themes he used in "Peanuts" reflected what was going on in his personal life. In his later, happier years, he let Snoopy take over the comic strip.

• Leo Lerman's diaries published a few years ago... He was at a gathering and there was an exceptionally handsome young man there whom Steve McQueen gave a blowjob to behind a tree.

• Lerman's book is incredible. He was good friends with Maria Callas and interacted with Jackie, at the same time. In it, we learn that Jackie would not let Ari fuck her in the ass, and on the night Kennedy was shot, Maria was screaming out her window at a fleeing Ari and accusing him of liking little boys. So good! It should be the official autobiography of DL.

• President Teddy Roosevelt's Mother and wife died on the same day in the same house. He spent the day running back and forth from one deathbed to the other until they both finally died. Mother went first, then the wife. His wife died from complications of childbirth. The child was to become the infamous Alice Roosevelt Longworth who would one day have a child with another man when she was still married to her husband. She is also alleged to have originated the saying: "If you can't say something nice about somebody...come sit by me."

• Gore Vidal secretly had contempt for every so-called friends in his life. Oh wait a minute, maybe it wasn't so secret.

• Tommy Tune uses his own jizz for facial masques.

• The official story was that Sinatra had his dear friend Marilyn come out to Cal Neva for some R&R after some crisis in her life, and she "became ill" then they started the whisper campaign/leaks that she'd attempted suicide. There were even some outdoor photos taken of her in a very drugged state that "leaked." Of course everyone focused n Marilyn's instability, and went with the popular tabloid theories. No one ever talked about Sinatra's patronizing, contemptible attitude or his "whore/madonna" complex, or the fact that he had no problem slapping his women around. I wish I could remember which Monroe biography I read this in. It was a well done credible biography. I was sickened by the story. Sinatra hated Kitty Kelly with a passion. But she also wote a very accurate bio of him. He was a pig.

• I read in one Judy Garland bio that her assistants kept a supply of amyl nitrate for her backstage. During her thunderous curtain calls she would walk off stage, take a huge hit, then return all giddy and gay drinking in t he applause.

• In the 60s or 70s, Ben Stein had a threesome with 2 women.

• Meant to say that a private ambulance was called, and Marilyn did indeed suffer a drug overdose, but whether it was self-administered was seriously in question. Her reputation for getting drunk and self medicating was firmly established, tho. When people met her informally, they aften expressed surprise at how sweet she was. I have long suspected that she was used in a disgusting way as some cum receptacle by any man with real or percieved power. Because I need to change the subject, I will share that I've just started reading Arthur Laurents' memoir on Directing.

• Edna St Vincent Millay, once the most famous woman writer in America, had affairs with both men and women. She also was addicted to morphine for a long time, and she was an alcoholic. She died of a broken neck when she fell down her own staircase with a glass of wine nearby.

  anonymous

• For reply 20- that's just false gossip. What Queen Mary did do was track down items from the royal collection that had been "borrowed" by various people and never returned. Some of the children or grandchildren of the original borrower were abit embarrased and responded with the klepto story.

• The one that suprised me was that Jayme Mansfield was an honor student in college.

• Although Gypsy Rose Lee loved telling her son stories about growing up on the fringes of show biz, there was one entire year of her young life she simply refused to discuss. He later surmised that for a brief, desperate period before she made a name for herself in burlesque, she was forced to resort to prostitution.

• When Esther Williams was married to Fernando Lamas she wasn't allowed to live with her children because he would't allow it. She was allowed to visit them in the afternoon.

• Mick Jagger's mother was the British equivalent of an Avon lady.

• "If Sinatra was as cruel as he's been reported to have been, why did women like him" Because he was FRANK SINATRA, that's why. He was a thug who called women "broads" and treated them like second-class citizens, but evidently he had another side to him that made women find him attractive. He was crushed by Ava Gardner though; he tried to commit suicide when she left him. Later in life, he supported her financially, which was evidence of his supposed "nice" side. Here's something I remember from Barry Paris's biography of super-slutty Louise Brooks. When she was 18 she had a two month affair ("our joyful summer", she called it) with the married, 36 year old Charlie Chaplin. In New York during a break in filming, he wanted to do the town and needed a woman to fuck and party with while he was there. Brooks was his "date" when they went out and his sperm receptable when they stayed in. They frequently partied with a financier, A.C. "Blumie" Blumenthal and his girlfriend, a bi-sexual former Follies girl named Peggy Fears. On one memorable weekend the foursome holed up in their hotel room ordering up room service and lying around naked and having group sex. The impish Charlie, who believed, that idodine prevented VD, painted his horse-dick with the stuff and chased the squealing bimbos Peggy and Louise around the hotel room with a bright red boner. What fun! Anyway, after their "joyful summer" ended Chaplin paid Brooks off by sending her a check in the mail, which would imply that he considered her little more than a prostitute. He never contacted her again, and in his autobiography doesn't mention her at all. Was she offended? Of course not! In fact she lamented not sending Chaplin a thank you note for the check. She's the recipient of a "wham, bam, thank you, ma'am" kiss off and she wants to send Chaplin a thank you note? Louise Brooks was VERY weird.

• Rupert Everett said he saw Peter O'Toole's tool while he was napping at a friend's house and it was huge.

• "Babara Hutton, the dime store heiress, swallowed a tape worm in order to be very skinny." According to the biography I read: She married her first husband in her teens, and was a virgin on her wedding night. She was plump as a teen, and when her husband saw her naked for the very first time... he said "Barbara, you are just too fat". She was crushed, and spent weeks living on coffee to get thin. She was anorectic for the rest of her life.

• That James Lipton (Inside the Actors Studio) was a pimp in Paris as a young man. (From one of Gore Vidal's memoirs).

• Jane Fonda broke some vertebrate in her neck and back as a teenager and her father ignored it until she begged for help. The doctor said that if she had waited any longer she would have been paralyzed for life. This is from her autobiography, btw.

• r62, maybe Henry was too involved with admiring himself (or James Stewart) to care.

  anon

• Jacqueline Susann and Ethel Merman were lesbian lovers, complete with drama. One of them ended up pounding on the other one's door in the middle of the night. (I think it was Jackie doing the pounding, read this in LOVELY ME). Sinatra, that pig, ate ham and eggs off the breasts of a prostitute. His mother was a well knwon abortionist back in Hoboken known as "Hat Pin Dolly."

• Hemingway liked to wander through zooz.

• That bit about James Lipton is definitely true. He admitted it when he was interviewing Chris Rock.

• Coretta Scott King paid the hospital bill for Julia Roberts' birth.

• "Babara Hutton, the dime store heiress, swallowed a tape worm in order to be very skinny." I don't know about that, but in her biography "Poor Little Rich Girl" the author quotes a woman who was kind of a nurse/assistant to Hutton towards the end of her life. By then Hutton was a shriveled, toothless, bedridden wreck. The nurse assistant claimed that Hutton loved having her butt wiped by someone else after she pooped and that she appeared to get sexual enjoyment from it. The book also claimed that Hutton had a brief fling with James Dean.

• r62, was it a symbiont with bones?

• Sorry R31, that's all I remember, apart from Timothy Hutton also using call girls - there were chapters on Don Simpson & Charlie Sheen, but that's old news. John Ritter would wear the girls out - legendary sexual stamina. Marianne Faithfull says that Mick Jagger used to talk about Keith Richards in bed. Carole King says that John Lennon insulted her in the most humiliating way when they first met. When she met him years later, she asked him why he did it & he said he was intimidated by her. Don Felder of the Eagles says that Don Henley would pitch tantrums and write multi-page missives to hotel managers if his toiler paper wasn't draped correctly.

• The Tafts were close friends of Teddy Roosevelt, but daughter Alice hated the Tafts. On the day the Roosevelts moved out, Alice buried a voodoo doll on the front lawn of the White House to jinx President and Mrs. Taft.

• In Patty Duke's autobiography she wrote that she dated Frank Sinatra and even slept with him but didn't have sex. She wrote that they didn't b/c Patty had once been involved with Frank Jr. Sounds very strange???

• Thanks, r70. Anyone know who John Ritter's lovers were? Please dont say Joyce Dewitt.

• r73 Suzanne Somers LOL

• R23, I read that Maria Callas did that, too. She swallowed a capsule containing a tapeworm egg, dropped a lot of weight and emerged a svelte and glamorous opera star.

• I read that book r70, and the call girl's story is that Timothy Hutton was pretty juvenile acting and, during one encounter, when he went to crap in the bathroom, he came out with toilet paper stuck between his ass cheeks. Also in that book was Sylvester Stallone hired girls to shit on glass tables while he lay underneath watching, Another part they described about John Ritter is that he was a great lay but a mess otherwise, as he couldn't stop talking about guilt he felt regarding cheating on his wife and his longtime mistress...lots of drama. However, the girl said he didn't know she was a call girl by profession but that they hooked up naturally. Other things I remember...Olivia Newton John's husband (the famous one) was this one girl's most favorite romantic lay. He made love to her on his and Olivia's bed over and over all night long. Oh, and Vanna White was introduced to almost daily coffee enemas by some longterm boyfriend (foreign guy can't remember his name). The jerks listed, IIRC, were Glen Frey, Don Simpson. Oh yeah, and Jack Nicholson hired this one girl and he just asked her for permission to piss all over her. And after doing so, he thanked her very graciously.

  There%20was%20also%20a%20followup%20book%2C%20same%20name%20part%202

• I thought Vanna White was a lesbian.

• In that book she wasn't.

  Oh%20well

• R76, your stories are a little shopworn and inaccurate.

• I read Jackie Cooper's autobiography a long time ago and he had nothing good to say about Alan Alda. Cooper directed several episodes of M*A*S*H in the early seasons. Some things I recall are that Alda angrily took him aside one day and berated him mercilessly for chatting and joking with the crew in between scenes, and was a major cheapskate who wouldnt participate when it was his turn to pay for the Friday night wrap party dinner for the cast and crew. He said on every other show he worked on, at Christmas-time it was customary for the lead actor on a hit show to give the cast and crew gifts, but Alda would just stand up and say "Merry Christmas."

• Arthur Laurents had a huge chip on his shoulder about being a victim of homophobia in OLD Hollywood (when, of course, every known gay person was a pariah, sort of). He hated Katharine Hepburn for dissing him at a big party when she was introducing someone to various people and when she got to him she allegedly said that "he's one of those boys" in a haughty dismissive manner.

• Oh, and Vanna White was introduced to almost daily coffee enemas by some long term boyfriend (foreign guy can't remember his name). I read that book too. That wasn't her boyfriend ,but her husband who was a porn star. He was a extremely sick straight porn star who got off sexually by opening up his mouth at the end of the enema tube that flushed all of the crap from the prostitute's bodies and he drank what ever came out! This occurred during their marriage and I think this is what led to a divorce. Also, in that same book, before Vanna White got married, she lived with her boyfriend who walked in on Vanna and a female prostitute having sex. The prostitute said he acted like it was no big deal. They asked him if he would like to join them ,and he casually said no, and went into the other room. He was the boyfriend who eventually got killed in an airplane crash. This is isn't in the book ,but a gossip columnist said that Vanna was Wayne Newton's mistress when she was starting out in Hollywood.

• Was Vanna's autobiography really a hell of a book?

  Cousin%20Magda

• [quote]Jacqueline Susann and Ethel Merman were lesbian lovers, complete with drama. One of them ended up pounding on the other one's door in the middle of the night. (I think it was Jackie doing the pounding, read this in LOVELY ME). That was indeed LOVELY ME. I would have to find it again to be sure, but as I remember, Susann was kicked out or ran out of a boozy party at Merman's apartment, then ended up coming back and pounding on the door in the wee hours, shrieking "I LOVE YOU, ETHEL!" Merman turned to her guests and snapped, "That woman is a dyke." Later, when she wrote the Merman/Lawson character in VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, she made the character a redhead; in real life, Merman had brown hair. Just before the book was published, Merman dyed her hair red, infuriating Jackie ("She's trying to sabotage my book!"). A quick rewrite and Helen Lawson became a jet-black brunette, and Jackie mentioned in the book that it was a terrible dye job.

• R82, [quote]He was the boyfriend who eventually got killed in an airplane crash. That boyfriend was former Chippendale dancer, Playgirl model, and soap actor ("Young and the Restless") John Gibson.

  http://blackdogue.net/Playgirl/JohnGibson/JohnGibson.html

• Vanna White sounds like trash.

• Is the little elf, Pat Sajak bisexual?

• The "Lovely Me" biography is actually pretty incredible. At times it has the depth and research that you typically only see for "high brow" subjects. The party where Hepburn pissed off Laurents was one of George Cukor's Sunday pool parties, where once most of the guests left he released the twinks into the place. No doubt Hepburn went off to golf, or to the 1940's equivalent of Michfest.

• Ingmar Bergman was a huge fan of [italic]Dallas[/italic]. Bergman also loved the Muppets as well as [italic]Sex and the City[/italic].

• yes, and Pippi, and mashed peas, nappies and a little scotch in milk. Happens to us later.

• Regine Crespin was incredibly sexual, enjoyed threesomes and got into bumping doughnuts.

• It was, Magda at R83.

  Dorothy

• So far I have gone to Amazon and picked up two of the bios mentioned. Good poolside reading.

• "Lovely Me" is fantastic. Jacqueline Susann had quite an eventful life, and her life story reads like one of her novels. She was often criticized as being frivolous and superficial, but if you read this bio you learn that she was actually a highly intelligent and business-savvy woman, and she also had a great wit and humor about herself. I really recommend this this book.

• I've read Alan Alda's autobiography R80 and I can see why Jackie Cooper disliked him.He is very full of himself. For someone who was so funny on MASH, he takes himself very seriously. I can imagine that he was a complete pain in the ass to work with, although that's not how he tells it.

• Before she was in showbiz, Myrna Loy posed semi-nude for the statue call "Spiritual" that was erected in 1921 at the old Venice High School. The statue makes a brief appearance in "Grease." As Fah Lo See, Boris Karloff's evil daughter in "The Mask of Fu Manchu," Loy was supposed to flog the hapless Charles Starrett. She refused, thinking that kinky scene would follow her around forever. She might have been right. Her great friend, Roddy McDowall, called her Fu for the rest of their lives. Loy's autobiography, "Being and Becoming," is one of the better ones out there.

  http://www.seeing-stars.com/Immortalized/MyrnaLoy.shtml

• That is why Alda is so believable when he "plays against type" -- he isn't.

• More please...

  TIA

• Oldie Hawn lived in a single room occupancy hotel on the Upper West and on her way to go-go dancing gigs in Jersey had to step over junkies in her hallway.

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• Re: Alda, plainly Woody Allen had his number in 'Crimes & Misdemeanors'.

• Bump for more.

• Lucille Ball confronted Patty Duke and demanded to know if Sean was her grandson.

• I read the Tony Perkins biography a long time ago, but the one thing I remember was his behavior on the set of "Crimes of Passion" with Kathleen Turner. He played a nutty, sexually-repressed preacher, and before every scene or line-reading crazy old Tony would take a huge hit of poppers to get into character.

• Diana Ross once commanded a woman in a steamroom, "Hey, you. Get me a glass of water," thinking the woman was a spa employee. To which the woman, in reality a wealthy spa patron, replied "What? Get it yourself, you BLACK BITCH!"

• Ava Gardner was confronted by Lana Turner in the ladies room in some swank Hollywood nightclub. Lana had heard that Ava was fucking Sinatra and tried to warn her, "There isn't a woman in Hollywood who hasn't cried on his cock."

• r102 and the fun fact about that, it wasn't Desi Jr's, it was a man she married for about a month and claimed that they didn't even have sex. But DNA proved that he was the Father of Sean Astin

• I read that Tony Perkins was pretty blatant about wanting to have man on man sex with guys he found attractive. I think it was in one of Andy Warhol's books that there is mention of Tony and other guys sitting in a room as their wives were out in the kitchen getting coffee or something. Tony pointedly checked out one of the guy's crotches and made a motion to his own and then licked his lips while leering at the other guy. He did in front of the other people in the room and wasn't shy or embarrassed about it. He did not score with the guy.

• r107 - That's in his diaries. I have a copy I haven't opened in many years, and I just opened it to that very page! [quote]THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 1983 [quote]And Chris said that he visited Tony Perkins and Berry. . . He said that when Berry went into the other room Tony started pointing to Chris's crotch and saying, "I'd like to see you," and all Chris could say was, "All right, Norman." I never really liked Tony because he treated me badly once when he was with Tab Hunter. The 'Chris' referred to is Christopher Makos, a photographer who was part of Andy's circle for a while. Link to what he looked like then.

  http://www.zwirnerandwirth.com/exhibitions/2006/0406AW/images/Christopher%20Makos.jpg

• Both John and Abigail Adams' families were cursed with alcoholism and financial instability. Abigail's sister, Elizabeth, was a young widow when she instantly accepted the offer of marriage from a strapping country parson as a way of relieving her family of her support. Just as she did so, a short, fat Bostonian with a large fortune arrived, also intent on proposing matrimony. Elizabeth realized to her chagrin that her hasty reply to the poor minister had cost her a life of comfort and ease that arrived but minutes too late. On the bright side, she and her new husband were co-founders (with moneyed assistance) of a boys' academy in Atkinson NH that is now the oldest continuously operating co-ed school in the USA. John and Abigail lost most of their life savings in a bad investment just as they entered their retirement years.

• Bump for insatiable

• Looks like I let my imagination run away with me, r108. In my defense it was years and years since I read that about Tony and I went kind of fanfic with the details. Thanks for the input.

  r107

• Diana Ross would stay thin by taking bites of freshly made pastries then spitting them out. The private chef who prepared them was fired after he was caught eating leftover pastry. Frank Sinatra would eat steak and eggs off the stomach of a nude hooker. In another incident he threw a pool cue at a topless hooker and wound up permanently withering one of her breasts.

• I learned from reading the latest Warren Beatty unauthorized biography that, while making the film, "The Parallax View", Warren Beatty hit on Paula Prentiss but she turned him down flat. Paula Prentiss is therefore one of the few ladies who turned down Warren's advances.

  The%20Paula%20Prentiss%20Troll

• R112, the pool cue incident was Elvis, not Sinatra, nor was the woman a hooker or naked. Here's what happened: Elvis was throwing one of his notorious "100 women and 6 guys" parties up in the Hollywood Hills in the 60s. A girl who was dating one of Elvis's bodyguards was trying to leave but her car was blocked. She made the mistake of interrupting Elvis's pool game to ask the bodyguard to move his car. She and Elvis exchanged words, and the girl made mistake number two by telling Elvis, "Go to hell, you sonofabitch!" He threw the pool cue in his hand like a javelin and hit the woman in one of her breasts, permanently disfiguring her. He paid her off, of course. In another Elvis party incident, he and none other than CHRISTINA CRAWFORD got into it. Tina had a small role in one of Elvis's latest pieces of shit, and she was also fucking one of his (married) bodyguards. She got pissed because Elvis expected his men to jump and light his cigar, and she kept smacking the cigar out of his mouth. Finally, Elvis lost it, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her toward the front door. He bodily threw her out, giving her a vigorous kick in the ass for good measure.

  Your%20welcome

• Dionne Warwick has an honorary degree from the American Bar Association. She could practice law if she wanted to. Joyce Hyser (Just one of the guys) dated Nicholson, Beatty, Springsteen, Stallone. She could have had Annette Bening's career if she played her cards right.

• Tanaquil LeClercq, the ballerina and then wife of Balanchine, contracted polio by drinking water from a canal in Venice the summer of 1956.

  Anonymous

• R116, those canals must have been deadly. Katharine Hepburn got an eye infection (that apparently stayed in her system the rest of her life) when she fell in and swam in a Venice canal while filming Summertime in 1955. It was a scene from the movie and she insisted on doing the stunt, herself. Or David Lean did. Not sure.

• [quote]she knew her first marriage wouldn't work out shortly after marrying when her husband confided he really preferred tall leggy blonds. Kind of odd for Shirley Temple to say that when you see the women Agar has dated.

  http://www.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_17696/john-agar/

• [quote]I read that Tony Perkins was pretty blatant about wanting to have man on man sex with guys he found attractive. Frank Langella, in his autobiography, mentions Perkins coming on to him backstage after one of Langella's performances in the '60s by asking "how big is your cock?" Perkins then invited him to another actor's tent where all sorts of hijinks were happening. Langella never mentions whether he accepted the invitation though. The bastard leaves us readers hanging!

• Frank Langella's book is filled with attempted seduction stories with no endings.

• [117]: Hepburn was one tough dyke. I also heard that during the filming of Summertime she would regularly swim in canals. She needed her exercise. She was also swimming in the Long Island Sound in her 80s. The canals of Venice have always been cesspools.

  Anonymous

• Got my copy of Leo Lerman's auto bio. Thank you Amazon. Thank you DL.

• [quote]Frank Langella's book is filled with attempted seduction stories with no endings. Like Mr. Blackwell, Langella wrote his memoir when he could tell all kinds of stories about dead famous people trying to seduce him when none of them could contradict them or say it never happened. I do not doubt Langella was very attractive when he was young (all you have to do is see THE TWELVE CHAIRS to understand that), but I thought he really peaked in the early 70s--he was certainly in his decline when he did DRACULA.

• I was at a film festival in LA a couple of years back and Jason Reitman had a showing of Ferris Bueller's Day Off with a Q&A with Jennifer Grey. She said she and Matthew Broderick were fucking every night after the day's shoots and she told him every critique John Hughes had of his performance of that day. She said that Hughes did not care for Broderick's early performances and Broderick didn't care for Hughes bossing him around but eventually they got along.

• This is probably my favorite Datalounge topic ever! Interesting trivia from biographies I don't have the time or attention to read, and all the postings pack a punch. I was surprised/grossed out by Christopher Ciccone writing that he had a threesome with his sister Madonna and a Latin dude.

  Captain Stubing

• While her fellow classmates were protesting the Vietnam war, co-ed Kathie Lee Gifford (then Epstein) was spinning Barbra Streisand albums. She also miscarried her baby with Frank while on the toilet and Frank had to fish the fetus out of the murky depths.

• Sartre went through a period of hallucinating that lobsters were following him. Marlene Dietrich douched obsessively.

• Ann and Nancy have written a book that's supposed to be a "tell-all." It's to be released on Sept. 18th. I wonder if Ann will finally come out. Maybe this needs its own thread. Perhaps someone could start one.

  http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Dreaming-Story-Heart-Soul/dp/0062101676

• Oops. Meant to use this link to an interview, not the one to Amazon.

  http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/music/heart-s-rock-and-roll-is-still-beating/article_5997df4e-bb56-11e1-95e6-001a4bcf6878.html

  R128

• Carly Simon aborted her love child with Jeremy Irons. He directed the video for "Tired of Being Blonde" and they had a torrid affair, even though he was married.

• This thread is FANTASTIC! Moar please.

• James Stewart supposedly lost his virginity to Ginger Rodgers. That's pretty amazing.

• r132 No, he lost it to Richard Rodgers!

  Ginger

• I could write a whole other thread on the revelations about Marlene Dietrich in her daughter's fantastic book. Dietrich had a deliciously bitchy sense of humor and disliked almost all of her peers in Hollywood. The book is full of her hilariously catty remarks about other stars of her era.

• After the 1960 election, JFK spent a day in Palm Springs with Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Tennessee told Gore that JFK had a great ass. When Vidal relayed that info to the president-elect, JFK replied, "How exciting!"

• Moar please. Oh...never mind....

• One day, Carly Simon was sunning naked by her pool, not feeling attractive because her much younger boyfriend had just dumped her. Along came her even younger son . . .

• Scotty Bowers “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” has a DISGUSTING anecdote about Charles Laughton. You have to read it, I can't even type it....

  Scotty%20Bowers

• Marlene Dietrich douched obsessively. Yes, I have read about that R127. Apparently she believed she would not get pregnant if she used ice water and vinegar douches. Apparently she had sex so much that she bought Heinz vinegar by the case! I once watched an interview on Eddie Fisher done by his daughter, Carrie Fisher. He mentioned one of his many, many sexual conquests was Marlene Dietrich. Carrie said, dad! you had sex with a Nazi?!! Was Marlene pro Nazi?

• When English playwright John Osborne found out that his partner Penelope Gilliatt was involved with Mike Nichols, he sent Nichols a present. Osborne sent him a doll in a shoebox, the doll having had all its hair obviously ripped out. This was an unsubtle reference to the childhood condition that left Nichols totally hairless.

• R139, absolutely not and it seriously broke Hitler's heart. She performed for the Allies under very damgerous conditions. Her husband however is thought to have been a triple agent. Carrie Fisher lost her virginity to Roger Ebert.

• Sarah Miles claims that Christopher Jones was impossible to work with - but he told her later he was mourning Sharon Tate, with whom he'd been having an affair.

• Kay "Think Pink/Eloise" Thompson was a meth addict for 40 years.

• r139 Marlene despised the Nazis with a passion. She hated them for what they did to Germany.

• This thread is about INTERESTING tidbits R144...

• Faye Dunaway was born in a goat barn just like Jesus.

• Jesus was a Capricorn, just like Faye Dunaway.

• Buddy Rich once fingered Frank Sinatra's anus while the two of them were in bed together with a hooker, and got beaten by two henchmen for his trouble. This from Darwin Porter's book on Sinatra (barely a biography -- barely a book). Darwin Porter has never lied to my face.

• Jesus ruined his career with an over the top performance just like Faye Dunaway.

• Marvin Gaye was gay

• r150 Deets, please.

  Tony%20Washington

• Lee Majors kept a young chorus boy for years, even while married to Farrah, and afterwards. The kid said that Majors had a "drowning boy" fantasy where the kid would play dead and Majors would perform mouth-to-mouth. It went on so long sometimes that the kid wished Majors would just "let me drown."

• Don't you mean Henry Fonda, R132?

• Glen Campbell & Tanya Tucker had a fight at his place in Malibu and he hit her in the face knocking her front teeth out, she smashed through a glass door to get away from him and ran down the beach to Johnny Carson's house for help and he wouldn't let her in!

  "Nickel Dreams" Patsy Bale Cox (why hasn't it been movie-ized?)

• George Cukor used to like to watch Three Stooges movies on TV The story that Christina Crawford wrote Mommie Dearest as revenge for being written out of her mother's will is not true. She actually began writing the book while her mother was still alive. Joan got word of her daughter's plan and knew it was going to be bad news as the two had been estranged for a few years by that point. At a party following the Mary Poppins premier, PL Travers approached Walt Disney and began to list what she wanted removed from the picture. Disney sort of laughed in her face, told her, "the ship has sailed" and walked away.

• what universe was she in, once a film has premiered, it's never re-edited. And did she expect a company like Disney to keep in the darker elements of her book? She sounds like an idiot. If she wanted it to remain true, sell it to another movie studio.

• r156 If only.

  A%20Star%20Is%20Born%20%281954%29%2C%20sent%20back%20to%20the%20cutting%20room.

• JFK's day with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams was in Palm Beach, not Palm Springs.

• Mae West had a daily enema, which was administered by her male assistant. She claimed it was good for the skin, because it flushed out a lot of toxins.

• Oh, I forgot to add - Mae West actually had two daily enemas, one in the morning and one at night and each enema was ONE GALLON! No shit.

  r159

• I believe everything that was written in Mommy Dearest.

• Susan Sontag was an ardent Tawny Kitaen fan and never missed one of her films.

• 155, Travers had script approval. Basically, she was kept out of the loop and given dummy scripts. Legally, she could have stopped the release of the film; however, there is no way she could have afforded a lawsuit against Disney. It is like the heirs to A.A.Milne proved that Disney was under reporting royalties, but Disney got the case thrown out on a technicality.

• oh,,obviously I didn't read the book.

• [quote]Disney sort of laughed in her face, told her, "the ship has sailed" and walked away. His exact quote, from the afterparty for the world premiere of "Mary Poppins" after she said, "Well, we've still got loads more work to do on it to get it right!": "Pamela, that ship has sailed." And then he walked away and never spoke to her ever again. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall and witnessed that. She was apparently a real bitch.

• R160, "no shit"? Then I hardly see the point.

• Shortly after 'Valley of the Dolls' was released, Barbara Parkins posed for Playboy. Upon seeing Parkins' pictorial, Jacqueline Susann's only comment was "Jesus Christ, she's got a purple bird!" Love that Jackie!

• purple bird?

• Pussy, R168.

  r167

• R168 = moron

• r170 FU honey!!!

• R171 you're allowed to say "fuck" here, this isn't like the mommy boards you frequent and will hopefully return to.

• r172 I have two words for u and they are not Happy Birthday!!!

• It hasn't arrived in the mail, yet, but, apparently in Wolfgang Flur's, "Tell-All" about Kraftwerk, there are pictures of the robots/showroom dummies in gay sexual positions. This is why Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider sued him. Most people sue over sex tapes..

  mensch%20maschine

• In Leo Lerman's auto bio, Leo states that Tchaikovsky killed himself because it appears that Pete had a huge cock and fucked a sailor so hard that the boy later died of the posterior injuries. Tsar Alexander III was mentioned as saying "I have hundreds of sailors, but one Tchaikovsky." The suicide was covered up as him succumbing to a then current outbreak of cholera

• r141/146/149/170/172 is the same troll flinging all kinds of shit over at the "Greatest female author?" thread. Someone suggested there she/it sounds just like misshelenbedd posting anonymously.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein loved Carmen Miranda movies.

• Marlene Dietrich drank heavily in her senior years and had several slip-and-fall accidents as a result. In order to keep drinking without breaking any more bones, she took to her bed and lived there almost exclusively for the last several years of her life. She quickly descended into a state of permanent squalor, seldom washing herself or her bed linens. This was at her own insistence even though she had servants who could have kept her clean had she allowed them to. She spent the last years of her glamorous life lying amid stained and smelly sheets in an angry, alcoholic haze.

• [quote]Dionne Warwick has an honorary degree from the American Bar Association. She could practice law if she wanted to. R115, no, Dionne could not practice law if she wanted to. She'd have to pass a bar exam in order to do that, and with an honorary degree, no way in hell she'd pass.

• R176 has no idea who or what helen bedd is.

• In Gus Van Sant's book PINK, he said he had a longterm secretive affair with Keanu Reeves. No one could figure that out, they always thought he was in love with River but in his book, he said he was in love with Swifty.

• Who's Swifty?

• Swifty is Keanu. Van Sant described Keanu completely, right down to the scar around his ankle but the few people who read the book, didn't have a clue.

• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a heavy smoker for her entire adult life who went through up to two packs of cigs per day. In spite of smoking like a chimney, there are only a small handful of photos of Jackie smoking, because when she was in public she went to great lengths to hide her cig habit, because she was embarrassed by it.

• Apparently everyone working on Bram Stoker's Dracula was made miserable by Gary Oldman and his disagreements with Coppola. I got that from reading With Nails, by Richard E. Grant.

• sounds good

• I read about a film called WUSA, Paul Newman, JoAnn Woodward and Anthony Perkins and no one here has seen it. I read that Anthony Perkins loved pot and that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were a lot of fun when they weren't fighting. I read it in the book, Bring in the Peacocks. I think it's named that because they nailed a peacocks feet to the floor...or something like that.

• Ann Wilson reveals that she got sober in the end of 2009.

  http://ultimateclassicrock.com/heart-ann-wilson-sober/

  Ann Wilson Biography Troll

• R175, it should be noted that the Lerman book was not an autobiography (which would hardly include information about dead composers' penises), but a posthumously edited version of notes for a memoir. Leo's obsession with big penises (yes, I did know him) was partially because his own was quite small. And no; I didn't see it -- but this is confirmed elsewhere in the same book by his surprise that other penises he saw during his draft physical were actually smaller than his.

• I believe it started as an autobiography and continued after he died prior to completion. The statement about Tchaikovsky was taken from a letter he wrote rather than dictated notes. It bears more than conversational weight. As the title of this thread states, it was as interesting a tidbit as the recount of the Steve McQueen given blow job.

  r175

• "Corn? I don't remember eating corn!"

  Carol Channing in the Loo

• [quote]The statement about Tchaikovsky was taken from a letter he wrote rather than dictated notes. It bears more than conversational weight. Thanks for the follow-up.

• Shelley Winters spread her legs for any man in Hollywood that could get it up.

• Yes I read Shelley Winters autobio. She seems like one of the few who actually told the truth.

• From Gay.com: "It was during this early period in his career that Cooper was reported to have had a long affair with fellow Paramount player Anderson Lawler. In his excellent biography Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life (Patricia Neal was Cooper's last major affair), author Stephen Shearer states, "Cooper had a three year affair with a man, the young Alabama born Anderson Lawler, an aspiring film actor. Their letters indicated they had a deep infatuation with one another. They lived together at Cooper's apartment for a time. Through Lawler Cooper gained entrance into Hollywood society." Lawler would later be one of the regulars at gay director George Cukor's infamous Sunday "boy" pool parties."

  http://www.gay.net/vintage-hunk/2011/10/03/vintage-hunk-gary-cooper