Mysteries of Old Hollywood

This is what I write about when I can't think of what to write about. This ghostly image, as seen through a shivering square of nitrate or a dark lapping curtain. I don't know who she is, but she has an awfully big head, which is the key to success in Hollywood. Name six small-headed actors.

The predatory female. Dead now. They're all dead, did you ever think of that? All. Like my grade school teachers, like too many of my friends. It's creepy. The hard-eyed look is sad and weary and ruthless. And I want that big fat jewel pasted in the middle of her forehead.

The patent-leather hair must have been a turnoff. Or not? Things were different then. People took one bath a week and wore natural fibres which must have stank to high heaven, and almost everyone smoked. So much for the mystery of Hollywood.

This picture is sweet in a misty sort of way, though very posed. "Now hold up that magazine and pretend to read it. That's it." At least it's not upside-down. And those furs they wore! Looks like a slice of ermine jellyroll.

Like a 3D cutout or one of those Stereoscopes my grandmother had. The dog fairly walks out of the frame.

Rory Calhoun? Rory Calhoun? I'd say it's Charlie Sheen and a very young Alec Baldwin, before all those fits on the airplane.

The shroud of Turin, Hollywood-style.

Was Hermann Goering a transvestite? You decide

It's waaaaaay too late, and I am waaaaaaay too sick with this flu-thingama-jiggy to even be out of bed right now. But just a short time ago, while looking for something else, I came across a couple of pages that fascinated me. In fact, it made my jaw drop. It was an account of someone who had special duties during World War II: to keep Hermann Goering supplied with lacy panties, silk stockings and all the latest Paris creations so he could dress his chubby frame in elegant satins and high heels and parade around in front of the mirror. Just for the sake of comfort: those stiff Nazi uniforms do chafe in some very private places, don't you see?

The only trouble is, though I remember parts of this information in excruciating detail, probably more detail than I want, I don't remember which book it was in! This is worse than Mary Astor's diary (which I finally found in a really filthy book called Hollywood Babylon, not that I actually have a copy). I went through both David Niven books (again, because I really did think it was in there: it's the sort of story he loved to tell in his memoirs, very Carry-On/Catch-22-ish military stuff).

It's not there. Not in the Babble-on book either. So what does that leave? What have I been reading lately? Is it in my book of medical myths (when you sneeze, does your heart stop? If you cross your eyes will they get stuck that way?) or somewhere in the Marion Meade biography of Dorothy Parker, one of my favorite books in the whole wide world? Doesn't seem too damn likely. Dorothy Parker liked men who were men (in spite of the fact that she repeatedly referred to her effeminate husband Alan Campbell as "a fawn's ass").

So I don't have the hard evidence I was hoping for, but these photos do offer compelling hints of those private passions which he practiced behind closed doors. So it's up to you to decide: WAS Hermann Goering a transvestite? Was one of the most vicious human beings who ever lived just a strutting, primping, mascara-slathering, boa-swishing drag queen?

(Does Bullwinkle wear green gloves?)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

My head is spinning (and yours will too)

"Ah, desert night": the world's dirtiest diary, Part II

Amazing what you can ferret out if you just keep trying. Turns out those lost excerpts from Mary Astor's infamous diary weren't in David Niven's books - any of them. There was mention of Mary being "a very busy girl indeed", but no explicit details.

Damn.

I'm sick as shit today and can't sit in my office chair because it hurts my butt, can't kneel in front of my computer because it hurts my knees, can't sit up in bed to read because it hurts everything, and am too bored and uncomfortable to sleep. So I went on sniffing the ground like a jowly old bloodhound for answers.

As it turned out, what I was looking for was right under my nose. The bookcase in my office is mainly for show, with nice-looking but basically boring hardcovers that were a mistake to purchase. But in with all this bumph (perhaps buried by guilt) was THE BOOK: Hollywood Babylon (which I only bought to research a paper on Cecil B. deMille, I swear!).

OK, so Mary's little diary isn't nearly as salacious as the things we see today, but by the standards of the 1930s it's pretty hot. It even drops the f-bomb a couple of times, so be warned, if that sort of thing bothers you. Her unlikely liaison with the married playwright George S. Kaufman, who looked a bit like Kramer in hornrims, generated all sorts of sparks and steam. The story continues. . .

"One morning about 4 we had a sandwich at Reuben's, and it was just getting daylight, so we drove through the park in an open cab, and the birds started singing , and it was a cool and dewy day and it was pretty heavenly to pet and French. . . right out in the open. . .

Was any woman ever happier? It seems that George is just hard all the time. . . I don't see how he does it, he is perfect."



Such "perfection" had to be carefully hidden from her husband. But there were ways.

"Monday I went to the Beverly Wiltshire and was able to see George alone for the first time. He greeted me in pajamas, and we flew into each other's arms. He was rampant in an instant, and in a few moments it was just like old times. . . he tore out of his pajamas and I never was undressed by anyone so fast in all my life. . .

Later we went to Vendome for lunch, to a stationer's shop. . . then back to the hotel. It was raining and lovely. It was wonderful to fuck the entire sweet afternoon away. . . I left about 6 o'clock. . .

Sat around in the sun all day - lunch in the pool with Moss (presumably, playwright Moss Hart) and George and the Rogers - dinner at the Dunes  - a drink in the moonlight WITHOUT Moss and Rogers. Ah, desert night - with George's body plunging into mine, naked under the stars!

(Uh, OK. Sooner or later the starlit idyll ended: the jig was up and Mary's husband threw a fit, demanding she give up George immediately. But Mary was not quite ready to surrender her sweet desert nights beside the pool.)

"For the sake of peace and respite from all this emotionalism, I told him I would do nothing at the present. My main reason for saying that is, quite honestly, I want to be able to see George for the rest of his stay here without being all upset - looking like hell. I want to have the last few times of completely enjoying him."

Completely enjoy him she did, like prime rib or a fine piece of sirloin. Why she chose such a complete doofus still remains a mystery, especially in light of the rumors that he and his wife lived chastely separate lives.

I like the chick-a-boom at the end of this story.

"Kaufman had taken a powder during the courtroom proceedings: he sat them out in New York with Hart. He dodged queries concerning the case, but once, when cornered by reporters at the stage door of the Music Box, he allowed:

"You may say I did not keep a diary."



Go Ask Mary: the world's dirtiest diary

I don't what this is, must be flu or something, but it is evil.

I hardly ever get sick, and only got really sick on the plane home from San Francisco as it began to land (which takes about 35 minutes or so, during which someone took a drill-bit to each ear and cranked). None of the "methods" to clear my head worked, and I was in excruciating pain, like an icy wind whistling against your face when you have a bad tooth. When we landed, it did not go away, my ears never did "pop", and the next day, Oh Gawd.

I'm having trouble typing this and making about 150 errors per line, but I need some sort of distraction from this rotting feeling in the bones. So I will obsess about something else, something completely unrelated: Mary Astor's Diary.

You've heard about this? No? The first time I heard about it, I swear it was in one of David Niven's memoirs. He wrote three of them, and I have two  and I cannot find the reference to this ANYWHERE. I was sure it was in the first one, The Moon's a Balloon, then even more sure it was in the second one (which I ordered used from Amazon for one cent, smelling like a rotten pumpkin with the glue all cracked). Nothing! Then why did I remember specific lines like:

Mary Astor , a glamorous star from the 1940s, "looked like a beautiful and highly shockable nun," but "by her own admission she was at her best in bed". The book then quotes the diary she kept of her steamy affair with playwright George S. Kaufman, one of the Gonkers I wrote about in my post about Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley (which see):

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2012/06/be-my-be-my-be-my-robert-benchley.html

This diary created some sort of hoo-ha in the '40s, I think over a child custody case with her husband. (Need I say both she and George were married, but not to each other?) But do you think I can find it? Do you think I can quote that salacious material (now considered bogus, but wouldn't any lawyer say that?) which graced the pages of one of Niven's not-very-salacious books?

He wrote a third book that's described as a novel, and I'm so obsessed by this topic now that I spent another cent (yes, you CAN get books for one cent from Amazon, though no one believes me) to get a copy. If it's not in there, then I don't know how I could have remembered such specific things.  I can still find bits of the dirty diary here and there, but not the really good parts.  I had a book somewhere called Hollywood Babylon, but can't find it either. Perhaps during my last book-purge for painting, I chucked it out, ashamed of the sleazy peep-show side of me that makes my life worth living.

Maybe I missed it in the first two memoirs. I don't know. I  flipped through each book, skimmed every page. Most of the first book, The Moon's a Balloon, a huge bestseller, is mostly a dull account of his military service during World War II. It's sanitized, not mentioning his second wife's alcoholism or the fact that their courtship lasted six weeks, not ten days.

Maybe it's being sick and this bone-rotting ache and the sneezing and horrible hacking cough - I cannot believe how red the back of my throat is - but I feel like I HAVE to track down this third Niven book . Fiction or not, it may well expand on my knowledge, like George S. Kaufman expanding on (in?) the highly-shockable Mary.

(Note. This is the only excerpt I have been able to find, but I KNOW it is not complete. I won't tell you the other parts unless and until I can find that David Niven book. This is from Hollywood Babbling On or something like that. Except for that one f-bomb, it strikes me as pretty mild by today's standards.)

Mary Astor's Diary: 1936

"His first initial is G, and I fell like a ton of bricks. I met him Friday. Saturday he called for me at the Ambassador and we went to the Casino for lunch and had a very gay time! Monday—we ducked out of the boring party. It was very hot so we got a cab and drove around the park a few times and the park was, well, the park, and he held my hand and said he’d like to kiss me but didn’t.


Tuesday night we had a dinner at ‘21’ and on the way to see Run Little Chillun he did kiss me—and I don’t think either of us remember much what the show was about. We played kneesies during the first two acts, my hand wasn’t in my own lap during the third. It’s been years since I’ve felt up a man in public, but I just got carried away.


Afterwards we had a drink someplace and then went to a little flat in 73rd Street where we could be alone, and it was all very thrilling and beautiful. Once George lays down his glasses, he is quite a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long. It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. I didn’t see much of anybody else the rest of the time—we saw every show in town, had grand fun together and went frequently to 73rd Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me."


—Excerpts published in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, from the diary of actress Mary Astor, whose affair with the playwright and critic George S. Kaufman was exposed during her 1936 custody battle. She claimed the snippets leaked to the tabloids were inaccurate. We’ll never know: A judge in 1952 had it burned.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

San Fransiskie?

"San Fransiskie? So how did you came, you drove'n did you flew?"

Be-in at Golden Gate Park: you had to be there!

Cable cars, squirrels and me

San Francisco: I left my heart (and my wallet)

No, seriously, it was beautiful, even though I came home with some wretched bug that must be the flu. My ears were assaulted with hacksaw blades for the last 35 minutes of the flight, and are still recovering. But it was good to be there, and eve better to be home.

This is my almost-first attempt at posting on YouTube. I apologize for the jerky camera work in this one, but hey, IT WASN'T ME, but my husband trying frantically to find the legendary crossroads with glaring sun in his eyes. Still and all, the Land of Rice-a-Roni was fairly magical, with faint traces of the Summer of Love wafting (along with the pot smoke) down Ashbury Street where, I think, the Grateful Dead once lived.

The Golden Gate Bridge was sighingly beautiful, truly worthy of that song (and the tour guide blasted it over the PA system as we crossed it on the bus). The cablecars, well, I'm going to devote a whole blog post to the cablecars. Ding, ding, ding! It's Rice-a-roni, gang!

Walking for the cure: a family affair

As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday we took part in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation annual walk for the cure. This has become an event we look forward to, and this year we noticed that Erica and Lauren seemed to be getting a lot of attention from photographers for the local papers.  They were snapped several times in the course of the day.

Oh, those papparazzi! Perhaps it's something about golden curls and blue eyes (or elaborate face-paint with ladybugs entwined in it) that attracted all that attention.

Then this morning, we saw this in the Abbotsford News!  We never expected all of us to show up in a photo.

At the front of the procession pulling the wagon is my daughter-in-law Crystal. Erica (7) rides in the wagon, while Lauren (4) pushes it (go figure).  At the far left in jeans and shades is my son Jeff. But get this, Nanny and Papa ended up in there somewhere (blessedly semi-hidden by the crowd). Dead-centre you'll see a man in a Tilley hat (Bill), then another guy to the left, then Nanny in a green striped top.  Glad it wasn't taken from the rear.

Stay tuned for more. . .

And now, for something completely different

Yesterday's rant stirred up some mixed feelings in me. It was one of those posts I usually delete because it comes from so far out in left field. But I decided to leave it up.  Please take it as irony of the most iron kind.

And in case you're wondering, my own marriage is nothing like that! Even as I write, I hear the vacuum cleaner running downstairs, and it ain't the cleaning lady. Later on he will put a meat loaf in the oven. Oh yes.

To provide some counterweight, I hope, I hereby display the rest of the stuffies I knitted for Lauren and Erica's joint birthday party on Saturday. I'm proud of these. They were fun to make, but also a lot of work. They are, top to bottom, the Ugly Ducking all grown up, plus his girl friend (and later, wife) Melinda Mallard;

A grizzly bear, unnamed (yes, I know there isn't a grizzly bear in The Ugly Duckling, but there was in my version; this one was so hard to make he was in and out of the garbage pail several times);

A penguin, definitely NOT in the story (one of the hits of the evening, though it was the easiest to make);

A dolphin, likewise, who looks like a girl dolphin (dolphinette?) to me;

And some ladybugs. Lauren loves them, and it's the name of her team for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure, which convened on Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa included. The five-kilometer walk was a bit of a stretch for us old people, but hey, it was for the best cause ever!

The good wife: legs open, mouth shut

After all these years, I think I've figured it out: a “good” wife keeps her legs open and her mouth shut. She is placid, obedient, trots around willingly and cheerfully doing all the little tasks around the house, is grateful for her “position” and to have a roof over her head, and ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS defers to “her man”, grateful that he’ll even have her, put up with her annoying little habits like getting a cold and having her period and talking to her mother on the phone.  But since her position is fragile and she could be turfed out at any whim, she tiptoes a lot, constantly walks on eggshells and placates, placates, placates. If she has feelings of her own, they are so deeply buried that she can’t even find them any more.

The ideal woman. The ideal woman doesn't have much to say because she's too busy serving. Serving up meals, serving up sex, serving up herself. The direction is all outward, except for that little inward thing she needs to do now and then to keep everything running placidly forward.

Some of it she plain does not like, but has learned to do it mechanically, not thinking, then washing her mouth out with Listerine afterwards, hoping no one can guess what her breath smells of.


Like an old-time vaudeville act, she is adept at spinning a lot of plates at one time. She isn't perfect at this, but she tries. Though she quietly but diligently takes care of little things like paying the mortgage on time because he always seems to forget, he really would like a woman who defers to him in every matter, including paying the mortgage, though the very suggestion that he would prefer her to be like this flips him into a rage, or at least a sense of indignation that she thinks he could be such a louse. But she knows he IS such a louse, and doesn't want to be reminded of it.

 

She knows a lot of things, secrets. Masses of them, but she never tells, because it is her only power. She knows who slept with him last year and knows she showed up at their twins' birthday party with her kid who has no Dad. She knows he has no Dad because the kid told her. But why doesn't she say anything?

When she came back from that little trip to Vegas, that one fling with her friends that resulted in exactly nothing except weight gain and money loss, she came home a little early. As she walked in the door, she heard voices.

 

His voice, then hers. Hers? Who was this? Then she recognized it. They were in the bedroom, probably in a state of undress. He laughed in a slightly drunken way.

She backed out the door, called a cab and went to stay in a hotel, pretending not to be home for a few more days.

So nothing happened, nothing was disturbed. She did catch hell from her friend, the one who thought maybe she should say something once in a while. But her friend was divorced. That was what came of "saying something". Her friend said, "For God's sake, that's YOUR bedroom in YOUR home! Why did YOU have to go stay in a hotel? You should've thrown the bastard out, along with that cheap slut he's sleeping with!"

"Maybe he's bored," she said. And it was true, she wondered if this placid bit was getting just a little bit boring for him. So maybe she should just make allowances and look the other way.

It was like an army drill, really, and if you practiced it often enough you got good at it, or at least didn't object to it any more, or (for that matter) notice it was happening at all. Legs open, mouth shut. And on command: reverse! For a woman should always be ready, willing and able to swallow whatever a man has to offer.

Golden girls

Sisters, sisters. . . one seven, one not quite five. . .


. . . and being with them is golden time, proving Tom Robbins was so right when he wrote:


It's never too late to have a happy childhood.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.

OK, boys and girls. . . compare and contrast!

This is your homework assignment for Friday: compare this recording of Eva Taylor singing Chloe (also charmingly nicknamed Song of the Swamp) to the Spike Jones parody. Damn, it's close, except for all the cowbells, interjections ("where are you, you old bat?") and starting pistols going off. Jones had a sort of perfection about him - everything was perfectly timed, perfectly insane, and beautifully played because he had a hell of a band.

I was hard-pressed to find a favorite (very nearly chose Laura for the fact that fully half of it is played straight, and beautifully) and of course the tracks brought back floods of memories which I didn't particularly want to experience, but there you are.

As a confused child, I often thought parody was straight - I was, like, four years old, right? - and tried to take Spike Jones and Songs of the Pogo literally. It was my fault that I couldn't understand it, because it was obvious that the adults did or they wouldn't have kept on listening to it. My sister was thirteen years older than me, but I figured I should be able to keep up.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.

Spike Jones' Chloe: Through the black of night. . .

Things to do with a dead cat

Angoraphobia!

Just watch this. If you haven't seen it before, you'll have to put your jaw back on. If you HAVE seen it before, you'll have to put your jaw back on.

It's called Glen or Glenda (or: I Changed My Sex, or:  I Made an Unbelievably Bad Movie), and purports to explain to the audience why some men just can't help borrowing from their girl friends' wardrobes. Especially pink angora sweaters (the climactic moment at 54:25).

Though there are lots of other memorable moments. For reasons no one understands, director Ed Wood (the subject of a biopic called Ed Wood, starring. . . no, not Ed Wood, who died of alcoholism in the '70s, but the far-dishier Johnny Depp) liked to insert several elements into his films:

- stock footage (there are at least 15 minutes of shots of busy streets, hospitals, war zones, munitions factories and stuff like that);

-  long, pointless monologues by washed-up actors like Bela Lugosi (who, inexplicably, gives a running commentary from a haunted house);

-  and, the thing he did best, soft-core sleaze.

It definitely isn't porn, not even Dairy Queen soft-serve-style porn. There aren't even any bare titties or anything like that, just women wearing tight or filmy clothing writhing around on sofas.  At a few points (42:15, 43:00 - not that I'm counting) there is some even-more-inexplicable, mild S+M  (i. e. a woman ties another woman to a large stick) that leads nowhere.

This has nothing to do with the main topic of transvestites and transsexuals, here conflated into the same thing, though they insist Glen is NOT a homosexual: dear God, who would want to be one of THOSE? The film can't decide if it's fer it or agin it: i.e. tolerant of men who like to cross-dress, or harshly judgemental. Glen (played by Wood, whose own florid cross-dressing habit went back to wearing lacy red panties under his Air Force uniform during World War II) seems to be going through the tortures of the damned, all caused by being teased as a boy for being a "sissy". Bela keeps drivelling on and on about "puppy dog tails and BIG FAT SNAILS" (not that I dislike snails: see my post of May 16/12).

Fifty Shades of Snails

But it's all so confusing.

This is I guess what this thing is all about, gender confusion and how it can drive a poor soul to suicide. Ed Wood is much better-known for Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is worth seeing just for Maila Nurmi lurching along with a waist the size of a drainpipe. I think Glen or Glenda was his first, however, made on a shoestring budget in a couple of weeks and featuring friends who'd appear on-screen if he bought them a couple of drinks.

Bela Lugosi was such a wreck by then that he'd take any work to feed his drug habit, and died during the filming of Plan 9, to be replaced by Ed Wood's chiropractor covering his face with a cape.

Oh, that's enough now, just watch it already, or at least the good parts I've told you about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.

Dancing Queens

They may look a bit like they've been in a production of The Mikado, but guess again - these little girls, Gunnings of my Gunnings, have just performed in a dance extravaganza in which each of them had two numbers in different genres.

Erica does not need those eyelashes. Already she creates a breeze when she blinks, but it was all part of the costume.

Grandma is proud!

OK, it may look like Lauren is about to swat her sister with her congratulatory flowers. But she behaved herself, and took her bows gracefully. Both girls did exceptionally well, excelling (of course!) at tap, acro (believe me, you couldn't do this) and ballet.

Try to imagine a four-year-old girl tap-dancing to Jailhouse Rock and you'll get the idea. The "awwwwwwwww" factor was very high throughout. This isn't high school gym stuff, but a real dance school that performs in a real theatre. Missed steps and the odd slip are all part of the path to professionalism, and a lesson in one of life's most crucial skills: getting back up again and carrying on.

Mummy is proud. Mummy is also tired, having supervised much of the performing, organizing the delightful chaos of little bunheads in tutus darting all over the place backstage.

Unfortunately I was not able to get shots of the girls in their various costumes because cameras aren't allowed in the theatre. (Can you imagine what the performance would be like with hordes of parents and grandparents holding up their phones and clicking away so nobody could see anything?) In spite of the attempt to keep the view clear, many an elderly person was heard to say, "Is that her? Is that her? No? Which one is her, then?"

Eventually we'll get to see the whole show on a professional video and experience the "awwwwwwww" all over again.

Mummy is proud, Daddy is proud, two little girls have danced their hearts out. My heart has wings!



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.