Victor Fleming

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

August 10, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 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

The Tragedy of Hollywood Star Lupe Velez

June 5, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 2 Comments

The lives of Hollywood stars are too frequently tragic tales of absent fathers, cruelly ambitious mothers, and madly dysfunctional families.

Mexican-American actress, Lupe Velez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) “The Mexican Spitfire” was a beautiful, passionate, emotionally fragile woman best known for a series of 1930’s B movies in which she plays a delightfully scatter-brained character who speaks broken English punctuated by rapid fire bursts of Spanish.

Hidden Hollywood: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Politically Incorrect in Hollywood

July 13, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

Patsy Ruth Miller in “Painting the Town,” 1927. Photo by Jack Freulich. Miller shot to stardom when she co starred opposite Lon Chaney as Esmerelda in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” ('23) — Patsy Ruth Miller in “Painting the Town,” 1927.
Photo by Jack Freulich.

In 1924 while shooting a film in New York, actress Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995) developed a close friendship with author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Frequently, Fitzgerald and Patsy Ruth would go out for dinner while Zelda remained home pleading fatigue. Patsy Ruth eventually realized that Zelda’s fatigue was acute alcoholism.

Observes Patsy Ruth:

It didn’t seem to me that Scott drank more than most of the men I knew. He seemed intoxicated on words, and sometimes we would sit, our after-dinner coffee growing cold, while Scott tried to make me see some fine point of writing, or understand why an emotion had been ill or well portrayed. But often I had the feeling that he was unsure of himself as a writer, that he was afraid of that one day he’d have nothing left to say, and I also had the impression that Zelda did little to build his confidence, even sometimes, in a perverse way, seemed to enjoy his battle with self-doubt.

Fitzgerald’s agonies of self-doubt are common among writers. The fear of having nothing left to say will, inevitably, be paralyzing. And a non-supportive spouse can act as a fatal poison to a vulnerable writer. Most witnesses observe that Fitzgerald was a heavy drinker as a student in Princeton. There is no doubt that by the time he landed in Hollywood he was a hopeless drunk. It’s a measure of how common was alcoholism in early Hollywood that Patsy Ruth didn’t think Fitzgerald’s intake was all that unusual.

Silent Star Esther Ralston: Why Do All My Husbands Want to Kill Me? Part I

July 3, 2014 by Robert J. Avrech 13 Comments

Esther Ralston, at the height of her Hollywood stardom in the 1920's. — Esther Ralston, at the height of her Hollywood stardom in the 1920’s.

They called her, the American Venus.

She lived in a Hollywood mansion with a staff of servants. Her chauffeur drove a limited edition limousine. But she ended her days in a trailer park in Ventura, California.

Friday Fashion: Hollywood Males It In

January 20, 2012 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

automotivator(82) — Charlie Chaplin, 1924, the image of effortless style.

The operative word is effortless.

In truth, Chaplin’s style was only achieved through the superlative tailoring of the English Savile Row firm, Anderson & Sheppard.

As the new book, Anderson & Sheppard: A Style is Born, edited by Graydon Carter and Cullen Murphy, makes clear, the venerable British tailors shunned actors and other show-biz types as vulgarians. But soon enough, the vast wealth of Hollywood’s elite broke down the walls of class snobbery and a who’s who of male Hollywood royalty—more apt to pay their bills than the increasingly impoverished British aristocracy—became life-long Anderson & Sheppard clients.

Here are just a few of the Hollywood males who beat a path to No. 30 Savile Row for the painstaking, detailed craftmanship of this exclusive firm.