Seraphic Secret

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

Jean Harlow

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 2 Comments

“I like courage. I hope I have it. I want and I try to be honest. Perhaps I don’t always succeed. But I try… I am like that.”
—Jean Harlow

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 7 Comments

“I was not a born actress. No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out.”
—Jean Harlow

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 12 Comments

“While we’re looking at people, let’s look at Betty. She and Bogie seemed to have the most enormous opinion of each other’s charms, and when they fought it was with the utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage.”
—Katharine Hepburn

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 8 Comments

Not long before she died in 1981 at age 57, Gloria Grahame, who had acted in films signed by Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and Fred Zinnemann, demolished them all in one sweeping statement. “Those men never directed me,” she told an English stage director with whom she was currently working. “I’d go home and work on it with my mother, then come in and shoot it, and that would be that.”
—Donald Chase, “Gloria Grahame In Praise of the Naughty Mind,” Film Comment, 1997

[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Independence Day: Once Upon A Time Hollywood Loved America

by 4 Comments

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.

[Read more…] about Independence Day: Once Upon A Time Hollywood Loved America