Seraphic Secret

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

Elvis Presley

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I didn’t want to be just another blond in the movie world, brought out to be slapped into a bathing suit, perched in a cherry tree to be photographed and then sent back to New York.”
— Jan Sterling (1921-2004). Sterling’s best role was as the hard boiled Lorraine in Billy Wildrer’s Ace in the Hole, 1951, in which she delivers one of the greatest lines of dialogue ever written for motion pictures: “I don’t go the church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” In contrast to her movie image as a street-wise femme fatale, Sterling was a refined and educated woman who came from a wealthy Manhattan family. She attended posh private schools, and traveled widely in South America, London and Paris.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Being an actress is like living in a show window. It’s the price you pay.”
—Madeleine Carroll

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Having to work hard never had any real appeal for me, and that may have some connection with me being in the movies.“
—Gary Cooper

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Jennifer Jones with her third husband, Norton Simon
“I met Jennifer Jones when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven I traveled everywhere with her. I spent more time with her than anyone, even Norton … It would take four hours to do her hair and makeup. And it was all for Norton: hair, makeup, beautiful dresses. The point was not to go out and show other people. Everything was for Norton.  ‘Norton deserves for me to be beautiful.’ And he was paying. I did her hair and makeup every day, an incredible cost. For the cost of a whole year, you could buy a house in the Valley.
And I did it for more than thirty years, every day, sometimes morning and night. And she didn’t take off her makeup at night. She’d leave it on until I arrived. When she went to bed, she was all made up. Do you know why? This was not for Norton, this was for herself. She said it was ‘in case I get sick at night and have to go to the hospital. Somebody’s going to take a picture of me, and I don’t want to be without makeup.’ She did this every night.”
—Tomoyuki “Yuki” Takei, West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

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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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