Hollywood Stories, Vol. 3

By Ed Garea

Some of what you read below is true. Some is pure fantasy. But we include them all in this column, dedicated to a town unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Sam Goldwyn and Pete Smith

Garson Kanin, in his memoir Hollywood, said that Goldwyn’s famous malaprops were written by his publicity agent, Pete Smith. Years later Pete Smith would gain fame as the producer/narrator of a series of shorts titled A Pete Smith Speciality. One of the writers of those shorts was Arthur Marx, son of Groucho. In Arthur’s autobiography, Son of Groucho, he tells about his father meeting up with Dore Schary, then head of MGM, and his wife Miriam. Miriam made the mistake of chiding Groucho for his taste in young women, asking why he can’t stay away from the shiksas. Groucho told Miriam to mind her own business in no uncertain terms. Her husband, was still mad as hell over the matter when he returned to work the next Monday. He summoned Pete Smith into his office. Since he couldn’t fire Groucho, he did the next best thing – he had Smith fire Arthur.

James Whale and Jean Harlow

Before he came to Universal in 1931 and wrote his name into Hollywood history as one of the greatest directors to sit behind the camera, James Whale served as a dialogue director. While working on Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels (1930), he had to work with Jean Harlow, who he despised. The feeling was mutual on her part. This was her first big break, she was terrified, and Whale was of no help whatsoever. She came to him for help on her famous “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” scene. Whale starred at her and coldly replied, “My dear girl, I can tell you how to be an actress, but I cannot tell you how to be a woman.”

Rory Calhoun

To say that Rory liked the ladies was an understatement. When his wife, actress Lita Baron, sued him for divorce, she named 79 women with whom he had allegedly committed adultery. Calhoun’s response? "Heck, she didn't even include half of them.”

Joan Crawford

Ever since daughter Christina published Mommie Dearest, her hatchet job on life with her mother, Joan Crawford has been the butt of innumerable jokes. (“Christina! Your bath is ready! I’ve been boiling it for an hour!”) However, few people knew of Joan’s generosity. In his biography of the actress, Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford, Donald Spoto reveals that in 1934 Joan contacted surgeon Dr. William Branch and asked him to help her devise a program that would pay the hospital bills of any destitute patient who had worked in the movie business. The patients were to receive all necessary care at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where she had endowed several rooms and a surgical suite. All bills were sent to her and paid quickly. There was one caveat: her name was not to be used and she was to receive no credit or publicity whatsoever. Years later when a reporter learned of her actions she feigned ignorance. Spoto quotes a confidential memo from the hospital: “In the two years after 1937, more than 390 major surgeries were completed. Joan Crawford paid the bills, she never knew the people for whom she was passing, and she didn’t care.”

As for Christina, from all accounts she and brother Christopher were a handful for their mother. After spending an afternoon with Joan and Christina, Myrna Loy said that watching Joan put up with Christina made her thankful that she couldn’t have children. 

Carole Lombard

Lombard was noted for her down-to-earth attitude. She was not only popular with her fellow actors, but also with those who worked behind the camera. She was famous for remembering their birthdays and coming to their aid in emergencies. A famous story about Lombard happened when she was dating George Raft in the early ‘30s. They were both starring in Bolero (1934), and after filming George popped into her dressing room only to find her peroxiding her pubic hairs. As Raft stood there, perplexed, Lombard casually looked up and said, “Relax Georgie, I’m just making my cuffs match my collar.”

When Gable was filming Gone With the Wind, Lombard became suspicious of Vivien Leigh, thinking that she might have begins on Gable. But Clark laughed and said that Leigh only had eyes for her fiancee, Laurence Olivier. To prove it he invited the couple over for dinner. During the course of the dinner, Lombard asked her husband, who was deeply in conversation with Olivier, if he would pass the potatoes. No answer. She asked again. Still no answer. Finally, she shouted, “Will you please pass the f—ing potatoes!” Gable looked up and said, “What did you say?” To which Leigh replied in her English accent, “I believe she asked you to please pass the f—ing potatoes.” Lombard exploded in laughter and from that moment she and Leigh became good friends, especially after she learned that Leigh loved a dirty joke as much as she did.

Lombard once admitted to her good friend Garson Kanin that Gable wasn’t all that good in the sack. “Clark is a lousy lay,” she told Kanin. “A few inches shorter and he’d be the Queen of Hollywood.”

After she was tragically killed in a plane crash, Paramount had to excise a line from her last movie, To Be or Not to Be before release. The line? “What can happen in a plane?”

All About Eve

The part of Margo Channing was first offered to Barbara Stanwyck, who turned it down, possibly because playing an aging star was a little to close to home. Claudette Colbert accepted the part and was set to go when she injured her back in an accident. Scratch Colbert. Geraldine Fitzgerald was next offered the part, but the producers withdrew the offer because of her demands, one of which was her instance that the scene where Margo gets drunk be taken out of the script. That left Bette Davis. She readily accepted and not only got a badly needed career boost from her performance, but also gained a husband in co-star Gary Merrill.

Celeste Holm, who played the role of Karen Richards, the wife of playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and the confidant of Margo Channing, used to greet everyone each morning on the set with a “Cheery good morning.” When she wished it to Bette Davis, Davis snarled and said, “Oh shit, good manners.” Holm never spoke to Davis for the rest of her life.

Marilyn Monroe, just beginning on her career, had a small part in the film. She was an hour late for the first of her two scenes and took 25 takes to get it right. Holm noted that “she was scared to death.” Zsa Zsa Gabor, who visited the set daily to keep an eye on husband George Sanders with Monroe there, observed four different crew members go into Monroe’s dressing room for sex on one evening alone.

Sanders, who won the Best Supporting Actor for his role as acerbic critic Addison DeWitt, was an indifferent actor, not really in love with his profession. In fact, he only went into it on the advice of a co-worker in a London advertising agency. That co-worker? Greer Garson.

Norma Shearer

When her husband, Irving Thalberg, died from a bout of pneumonia, Norma went off the rails. Her family was always mentally fragile. Sister Athole, who was married to Howard Hawks, spent many years in a mental hospital, where she died in 1985. 

At any rate, while filming Marie Antoinette in 1938, the 36-year-old Shearer carried on an affair with 18-year-old Mickey Rooney. Their trysts took place in her dressing room and their antics were so loud that it wasn’t long before management was informed and Shearer and Rooney found themselves on the carpet in Louis Mayer’s office. “You’re twice his age,” Mayer yelled at Shearer. “Act yours!” He then turned to Rooney, “And you . . . how could you? You’re Andy Hardy!” In 1942, after she retired, Shearer married ski instructor Martin Arrouge, who was 11 years her junior.

She never removed her wedding ring during filming, instead covering it with a piece of flesh-colored tape.

She was offered the past of Mrs. Miniver, but refused it, as she didn’t want to play a woman with grown children. The part made a star out of Greer Garson.

After retirement, while staying at a ski lodge, Shearer noticed a photo of the receptionist’s daughter and recommended her to MGM. That young lady became a big star under the name Janet Leigh.

Robert Taylor

In his early days in Hollywood, Taylor was quite timid and finally worked up enough courage to ask his boss at MGM, Louis Mayer, for a raise. Mayer, who had heard it all before, pulled his usual shtick, telling Taylor how he had developed his talent, trained and encouraged him though thick and thin, etc. As they were leaving his office Mayer put his arm on Taylor’s shoulder and told him, “If God had blessed me with a son, I can think of nobody I’d rather have wanted than a son like you.” When asked later if he had gotten the raise, Taylor said, “No, but I gained a father.”

His marriage to Barbara Stanwyck was at the insistence of MGM in response to magazine articles about Hollywood couples “living in sin.” Taylor was a mama’s boy and Mama did not like his intended bride one bit, skipping the ceremony. Astonishingly, Taylor refused to kiss the bride for photographers and actually spent his wedding night at his mother’s while Stanwyck fumed in the honeymoon suite.

Gloria Grahame

Gloria married director Nicholas Ray in 1948, when she was 28. The groom was 12 years her senior. The marriage unraveled four years later when Ray discovered his wife in bed with his 13-year old son, Tony. In 1960, after a disastrous second marriage to writer-producer Cy Howard, she married Tony.

Basil Rathbone

Rathbone was a genuine hero during World War I, awarded the Military Cross for heroism on the battlefield. When later asked how he won the award, Rathbone, a modest man by nature, replied, “All I did was disguise me self as a tree – that’s correct, a tree – and cried no man’s land to gather a bit of information from the German lines. I have not since been called upon to play a tree.”