Seraphic Secret

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

Lana Turner

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Another thing I had to cure myself of was the desire for adulation, and the approbation of my fellow man. It started when I was a small boy and played football at school. If I did well they cheered me. If I fumbled I was booed. It became very important to me to be liked. It’s the same in the theater, the applause and the laughter give you courage and the excitement to go on. I thought it was absolutely necessary in order to be happy. Now I know how it can change, just like that. They can be applauding you one moment, and booing you the next. The thing to know is that you have done a good job, then it doesn’t hurt to be criticized.”
—Cary Grant

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I loathe acting. I loathe what it does to my life. It cancels it out; you cannot live while you are working. You are a person completely surrounded by unbreachable walls.”
—Margaret Sullavan, via Haywire, one of the finest, if most depressing Hollywood memoirs I have ever read

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Acting is like sex: you either do it and don’t talk about it, or you talk about it and don’t do it. That’s why I’m always suspicious of people who talk too much about either.“
—Humphrey Bogart

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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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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood’s rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.”
—Gene Tierney

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