Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Betty Grable

Independence Day: Once Upon A Time Hollywood Loved America

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Betty Grable wishes America a happy and meaningful July 4th. G-d Bless America.

A long time ago, in a universe far far away, in a place called Hollywood, the movie studios and the actors who flourished in those dream factories, celebrated their love of America and enthusiastically indulged in overt displays of patriotism.

L.B. Mayer (b. Lazar Meir) the powerful head of MGM, was a pioneer of the motion-picture industry, and the man who invented the star system. Mayer adopted July 4th as his birthday. Scores of Hollywood historians get all snarky about Mayer’s birthday, claiming that he conveniently changed his birthday in order to cash in on a public identification with America.

What these historians fail to recognize is that Mayer probably did not know the date of his birth.

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Flashback: Hollywood Valentine

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Mary Pickford, 1920s

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Keaton had a great influence on me. A lot of his moves I intuitively copied in doing some numbers. I know I was thinking of him when I did a dance with a squeaky board and a newspaper. I didn’t look like him, but I often wish I did. He was a complete genius, and there was a lot of dance inherent in his movements.”
—Gene Kelly

Once again Friday Photos appears on Wednesday due to the last days of Sukkot which begin tonight and then run into Shabbat. Enjoy!

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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…the discussion of security prompted actress Ginger Rogers to tell the group and the President, “Oh, I get scared for him”, and turning to Reagan, she said “because I love you so much, and we who love you get scared for you.” “I think the press is terrible, she said. “They’ve not been very nice to our president.”
—Ginger Rogers
From a 1983 Washington Post article: “Reagan on the Press,” by Daniel Radcliffe.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.” —Greta Garbo, 1931
“There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”
—Greta Garbo, 1931

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