Adventures of Robin Hood, the (1938)
The studio’s first choice to play Robin Hood in this film was James Cagney, believe it or not, but he withdrew over a dispute about money. And we are all truly grateful. Robert Donat was next but he was too ill to accept. Douglas Fairbanks Junior was also approached. ‘I felt that it would be sacrilege to copy my father’s kind of silent picture action’, he said, when he too declined.
The picture was shot entirely in southern California, which may surprise some people. In fact, David Niven, who was wanted for the role of Will Scarlet, was unavailable because he was off holidaying – in Britain. The site chosen as Sherwood Forest was Bidwell Park in Chico, California, famous for containing the world’s largest living oak tree, the Sir Joseph Hooker, a 92 foot giant with a branch-spread of 149 feet and a trunk that measured 28 feet in circumference.
Just why it was considered necessary to attach hanging vines to it and other trees in the movie is a mystery, as they are not normally found in England anyway. By the way, the palomino horse ridden by Olivia De Havilland later became Roy Rogers’ steed Trigger. Stuntmen were paid $150 per shot if they agreed to have arrows fired into them by expert bowman Howard Hill.
British character actor, chubby-faced Herbert Mundin, plays Much the Miller. Tragically, in less than twelve months of completing the picture he would die in a car crash at the age of forty.
Olivia De Havilland (1916 – )
Known relationships:
Aherne, Brian
Brent, George
Feldman, Charles
Hughes, Howard
Huston, John
Meredith, Burgess
Stewart, James
Stover, Frederick
Tone, Franchot
Tracy, Spencer
Aherne would later marry Olivia’s sister Joan Fontaine. I have not included Errol Flynn in her ‘Known relationships’ because she has steadfastly refused to acknowledge her co-star of all those films as being one of her intimates, even though she said many times that she had a crush on him back in the thirties and forties. Were they ever lovers? Who knows?
Clearly a much tougher lady than she appeared on screen, it was De Havilland who took on the studios’ dictatorial rules regarding breaches of contract and secured a Supreme Court ruling in her favor. Until then, studios deliberately gave actors assignments they knew would be rejected, enabling them to impose lengthy extensions to their contracts as punishment. Some performers found their seven-year contracts extended to as long as fifteen years because of this process. De Havilland changed all that and consequently incurred the wrath of the studios for the rest of her career.
The rivalry between Olivia and her sister Joan Fontaine was very real and appears to have been instigated and continued by Olivia, the older of the two siblings. Since childhood the outgoing, vibrant Olivia bullied and demeaned the more reserved and unsure Joan. Olivia was first to gain an acting contract and first to become a star, but Joan married first, had a child first and unforgivably won an Oscar first. She also died first – in 2013, aged 96. Olivia (as of May 2015) is still battling on.
Her first big break came in 1934 in the much-publicized Max Reinhardt production of The Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. It was without doubt the event of the season. She was involved initially as an ‘understudy to an understudy’ for the part of Hermia. Gloria Stuart (the same Gloria Stuart who would be nominated for Titanic 64 years later) was all set to play Hermia when both she and her understudy were called away to appear in movies.
This left the door ajar for Olivia. She went on and was instantly recognized as a real talent by Hal Wallis of Warner Brothers who signed her up at once. Stuart caught her first performance as Hermia and went back stage to offer congratulations. She claims Olivia turned her back on her and the two women did not speak to each other again for twenty years. Bette Davis had already been selected to play Hermia in the movie, but she was having one of her fights with the studio, so lady luck smiled again and, again, the part went to Olivia.
Flynn was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1909. His mother Marelle Young was directly descended from a midshipman aboard HMS Bounty named Richmond Young. Hollywood would typically claim Errol was descended from Fletcher Christian but that was not so. His father was a marine biologist, happy to pursue his vocation while Marelle led the high life with a string of wealthy lovers in Paris. Errol never forgave her for it. The man who literally had hundreds of affairs in his own lifetime could not condone any semblance of such behavior in his mother.
At seventeen Errol joined the Constabulary in New Guinea, but was soon dismissed because of his scandalous affairs with several married women.
He then tried his hand at gold prospecting in the interior, and when that failed, he ‘black birded’ for a slaving outfit. It was during these operations he shot and killed a native while his party was under attack. Charged with murder, he was released partly on the grounds of self-defense, but primarily because the victim’s body could not be produced.
While in New Guinea he contracted malaria and also suffered his first bout of gonorrhea. Malaria and a touch of tuberculosis would later keep him out of World War Two. While still in New Guinea he landed an acting job with an Australian crew making In the Wake of the Bounty in 1933. Errol’s performance was very ordinary and he was paid just six pounds for his three weeks on the film.
It was around this time that he became friends with a rather shady German of dubious political persuasion. Stories of Errol being a Nazi stem from this, but appear completely groundless. The FBI investigated him at length and found nothing solid. In fact, the head of British Intelligence, William Stephenson, dismissed the claims as well, as did Errol’s ex-wife Nora Eddington. She maintained he thoroughly detested Nazis, although he genuinely thought they would probably win the war.
But back to the 1930s. Irving Asher, the director of the British division of Warner Brothers, met Errol in London and was impressed by his looks.
He signed the young Australian to a contract without even checking to see if he could act or not, then booked him passage to America to try out for the movies. While crossing the Atlantic Errol introduced himself to film star Lily Damita, a bi-sexual fireball he would later marry. She was eight years his senior, but subtracted them on the wedding certificate, making both parties twenty-six years old at the time of the union.
She was a resident of the notorious Garden of Alla, a three and a half acre complex on Sunset Boulevard founded by the exotic Crimean-born artiste Alla Nazimova.
The Garden was a hotbed of lesbian activity and home to the ‘Sewing Circle’, a euphemism for the Hollywood lesbian fraternity. It was here Flynn first met David Niven, another recent arrival in the movie colony. The two men became close friends. Marlene Dietrich told writer David Bret she was sure they were lovers as well. ‘Carole Lombard was a very good friend of mine’, said Dietrich, ‘who spent much of her time with these twilight boys.
One morning, when she went over to Niven’s place, she found him in bed with Errol Flynn. They maintained they were not gay in the conventional sense, but just fooling around for fun. None of us thought it such a big deal, though. Lots of actors slept with each other if there were no women around’. Considering this was wartime, it is stretching credulity to the limit to have us believe there was a shortage of available women. Those young men who never made it into uniform must have felt like they were rabbits in a carrot patch.
Besides, we are talking about movie stars Flynn and Niven here. A shortage of women was a problem they never encountered, war or no war.
Lombard was the undisputed doyenne of the lavender set, and believed the two men shared many male lovers at Niven’s apartment, among them actor William Lundigan. Errol was certainly intimate with the young star, but there is no evidence that Niven was. When he was sober Flynn confided in Lombard that Lundigan was as good in bed ‘as any woman he had ever been with’.
With several of his anti-Semitic pals Flynn formed a carousing group dubbed ‘the Olympiads’.
Alan Hale Senior and Patrick Knowles were regulars, while John Barrymore, W C Fields, Bruce Cabot and assorted writers dropped in from time to time. Edward G Robinson was refused admission because he was Jewish. Errol’s known anti-Semitism has often been misinterpreted as pro-Nazism.
He once philosophized on his attitude to women in general. ‘From the time I began to have women on the assembly-line basis, I discovered that the only thing you need, want, or should have, is the absolutely physical. No mind at all.
A woman’s mind will get in the way’.
His home was installed with secret two-way mirrors to enable him and his cronies to observe the bedroom and bathroom antics of his invited guests. They were usually well known Hollywood couples. He would often hire a large group of prostitutes to entertain his single male guests. His own personal favorite arrangement was to have sex with a very young girl while observing two men copulating via his two-way mirrors.
The house was also furnished with lounge chairs from which erect rubber penises sprung as unwary victims sat in them. To open his liquor cabinet it was necessary for someone (preferably a female guest) to squeeze the testicles of a china bull that adorned it.
Errol once estimated he spent between 12,000 and 14,000 nights of his life indulging in sexual activities of some kind or other. Reliable sources number a four-year affair with Argentina’s Evita Peron as one of his exploits. He also regularly visited his Acapulco beach boy lover Apollonia Diaz.
It was far less dangerous, he said, to pursue under-age boys and girls in Mexico than risk exposure chasing them in Hollywood. Before arriving at that conclusion, however, he often indulged in the highly risky practice of picking up young girls at Hollywood high schools and taking them back to his home for sex.
Apart from his well-publicized trial for the statutory rape of two teenage girls aboard his yacht during the Second World War, he was also charged with ’libidinous behavior’ with a seventeen year-old girl in Monaco a few years later.
He wriggled out of both charges. He met Nora Eddington when she was serving behind a counter selling chewing gum and cigarettes in the lobby of City Hall during his trial for statutory rape. He arranged to see her during the trial, although he was careful to treat her with kid gloves until its outcome was decided. After all, she was the daughter of a captain in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office! When nineteen year-old Nora refused to sleep with him he filled himself with cocaine and alcohol and summarily raped her. She was a devout Catholic and would not abort the resultant pregnancy, so he reluctantly agreed to marry her.
Friends aboard his yacht the Sirocco were awarded silver lapel pins depicting an erect penis and testicles and emblazoned with the letters ‘FFF’. The initials stood for ‘Flynn’s Flying Fuckers’. The yacht was the scene of regular sex contests as he and his buddies seduced the numerous young women brought aboard. On one notorious occasion he invited the cast and crew of a film he was making to a ‘feast’ aboard Sirocco. Such an invitation coming from Flynn usually meant an orgy, so his guests were greatly surprised to find no women when they arrived. At a signal from their host, however, a number of girls hidden under the large banquet table undid the men’s flies and fellated them.
Incidentally, the tall tale that Errol was possessed of an outrageously huge penis is not true. Earl Conrad, his biographer, described it as in no way special or out of the ordinary, and he saw it many times as did any friend of the actor. Errol was always walking about naked (especially around the pool) and cared nothing about it. Over the years he became addicted to morphine and suffered regularly from gonorrhea, brittle bones and piles.
On the set he would suck on oranges injected with vodka, a trick taught him by actress Ann Sheridan. He put cocaine in his water bottle and used an eyedropper to insert it in his sinuses. He was also known to put a pinch of cocaine on the end of his penis as an aphrodisiac.
When he married Patrice Wymore, the bride was doubtless unaware that all four of her bridesmaids had slept with the groom while they were extras on one of his movies Adventures of Captain Fabian. Even in his final years he remained obsessed with sex. Spending his time in Jamaica, he would arrange for a half a dozen or more prostitutes to be presented each day at noon for his inspection. He would then select one or more for a brief twenty-minute interlude. Generally they were very young, sometimes only thirteen or fourteen years old. His ‘secretary’ at that time was a thirteen year-old girl named Dhondi whom he would also service each day.
In the marketplace he would pay young girls to lift their tops and reveal their breasts to him, and then offer those he fancied extra money to come to his bed.
In those final years creditors came after him from all directions as he sunk farther into debt. None of this overly bothered him until Bruce Cabot, the man he once described as ‘my brother in all but name’, sued him for $17,000 salary owing on a Flynn-produced movie he had worked in. Cabot, who had dined with Flynn just hours before, also threatened to expose details of Errol’s sex-life to the media unless he was paid. ‘I could have killed the bastard!’ said Errol. ‘I should have killed him”.
But in the end he rang Cabot and forgave him, as was often his way.
When Errol died in Toronto, Canada, he was with Beverly Aadland, a girl of fifteen who had been his lover for more than a year. His body was so ravaged by alcohol and drugs it resembled that of a man of sixty-five or seventy years of age. It is believed he intended to marry the girl as soon as she came of age. Her parents attempted to sue his estate for $5 million dollars, claiming the actor had corrupted their daughter – but there was nothing left to get. He had spent nearly everything. Six bottles of whiskey went into his coffin with him. When a reporter once asked him what he would like written on his tombstone the typical but unpublished reply was, ‘If it moved, Flynn fucked it!’
African Queen, The (1951)
Although this film was made on location in the Congo, the classic scene where Humphrey Bogart drags the boat through the reeds was shot in a huge water tank at Pinewood Studios in London. Robert Morley who plays Hepburn’s brother never even left England during the entire shoot. All his scenes were completed in the London studio. In some long shots you can detect an unconvincing stand-in waddling about in his place.
Bogart did not think much of Katharine Hepburn as a person. ‘How affected can you get in the middle of Africa?’ he complained. ‘Katharine Hepburn used to say everything was ‘divine’. The god-dam stinking natives were ‘divine’. Oh, what a divine native, she would say.
Oh, what a divine pile of manure’.
Hollywood gatecrasher and conman Sam Spiegel produced The African Queen. To avoid having to pay several outstanding debts he used the name S P Eagle, which appears in the credits. When he wrote a letter to Darryl Zanuck, asking if he would be interested in distributing the picture he even signed it, ‘S P Eagle’. Zanuck responded in the negative, signing his reply, ‘Z. A. Nuck’.
For most of his career Bogart made fun of the Oscars – until he won one himself for this picture. During a heated debate about acting with Richard Burton, he suddenly got up and stormed out of his lounge-room. A moment later he returned and thumped down his Oscar on the table and growled, ‘you were saying…?
Agony & the Ecstasy, The (1965)
Historically, the casting of one of the leads in this movie leaves a lot to be desired. The real Michelangelo was a homosexual dwarf, yet he is portrayed by, of all people, the statuesque and utterly heterosexual Charlton Heston. Truman Capote would have been the perfect choice, but then, who’s going to pay good money to watch him in anything?
A Guy Named Joe (1943)
Spencer Tracy (1900-1967)
Known relationships with women:
Bennett, Joan
Bergman, Ingrid
Crawford, Joan
Davis, Nancy
De Havilland, Olivia
Fontaine, Joan
Goddard, Paulette
Hepburn, Katharine
Kelly, Grace
Lamarr, Hedy
Landis, Carole
Loy, Myrna
Luce, Claire
Tierney, Gene
Young, Loretta
Known relationships with men:
Derek, John
Tracy was a sour alcoholic much of the time with an eye for the ladies, although away from the public eye he was known to be bi-sexual, as mentioned previously here. During love scenes in this film with Irene Dunne he would whisper graphic details in her ear of his intentions, should he ever get her alone.
The prim and proper Miss Dunne threatened to walk off the picture unless he desisted. After Van Johnson was badly disfigured in a car crash during the production, L B Mayer agreed to put the picture on hold until he recovered, but only if Tracy would lay off his leading lady. Tracy deigned to put Johnson’s needs before his own and the problem was resolved. The picture made Van a star. Incidentally, Keenan Wynne, who was reputedly Johnson’s lover, received superficial injuries in the same crash.
Hollywood Warts ‘N’ All Description:
On the set clashes, feuds and insults, romances and affairs, marriages and divorces are all depicted as they happened. Editing and continuity gaffs, humorous exchanges, mishaps and technical problems, tricks of the trade and casting anomalies are also featured. For movies based on actual events, the author has drawn comparisons between Hollywood’s, quite often, ludicrous interpretations and historical fact.
Over five hundred films are featured alphabetically, from A Bill of Divorcement to Zulu, from the industry’s humble beginnings in 1905 to the present day. This book is for movie buffs intrigued by the unusual and seamier side of the business, for those more interested in what makes their idols tick than in their actual performances on the screen.
When we were kids back in the early fifties, before the advent of television in Western Australia, the cinema was the best place to learn about the outside world, about values and about right and wrong. Every Friday night or Saturday morning we absorbed it all and believed it all. Heroic fanfares for the US cavalry and menacing drums for the Indians told us, unequivocally, that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. We watched America single-handedly win the war a hundred times. And we believed it all. Such was the influence of the movies on the average Aussie kid in the decade after World War ll.
Now, we know differently. For the most part, the cavalry were anything but heroes, and Amerindians got a raw deal and are probably still getting it. And if any nation can lay claim to winning the war it should probably be Russia since ninety-three out of every hundred Germans who died in that conflict did so on Russian soil. But in those halcyon days John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper and Audie Murphy were our idols. Between them they managed to save the frontier or the world at least once a week, twice if you counted Saturday matinees.
‘Coops’ was our first movie hero, but he had some stiff competition. Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys and we even liked The Durango Kid, although none of us could figure out just what the hell a ‘Durango’ was. Of course, life wasn’t all westerns and war. We loved Jerry Lewis and couldn’t stand Dean Martin because he always brought the fun to a screeching halt by singing one of his tuneless love songs to some girl who had no right to be in the picture in the first place. Audie Murphy was cool because he was about our size and even more baby-faced than we were. Let’s face it, if Audie could become a movie star so could we. We thought the Three Stooges were hilarious and Laurel and Hardy were boring. When you’re under ten you like your comedy up-front and obvious. The only female we could barely tolerate was Roy’s wife Dale Evans because she could ride a horse.
The stars always seemed larger than life then, so much better than we mere mortals. But were they? Odd rumors began circulating at school that Rock Hudson, for instance, preferred boys to girls. Ridiculous. Someone said Errol Flynn preyed upon teenagers. Others said Coops was as thick as a brick, and Audie a gun freak who ran with gangsters. The most disturbing rumor of all accused John Wayne of avoiding fighting in the war. Well, we weren’t buying that one for a minute.
We were very young, you see.
As more and more tales surfaced, however, it gradually dawned on us that these people we idolized might not be perfect after all. With that in mind, I began to read whatever I could about the industry and its people, to find out for myself what was fact and what was fiction. For decades I devoured hundreds of biographies, authorized and unauthorized, fan magazines, annuals, critiques and reviews. In short, any book I could find on films and film stars. And, of course, I watched a truckload of movies. And that brings me to this volume.
Here you will find the distilled product of all that paraphernalia I digested over three decades. If I read something that surprised me or roused my curiosity I put it into a temporary file. There it remained until I had uncovered at least two corroborating, reliable sources to support it. Then I moved it into the ‘facts substantiated’ file, from which I drew the data for this and my second book, Movies Based on True Stories (2015).
Hollywood Warts ‘n’ All contains anecdotes going as far back as 1905. You will read about production problems and censorship, devious producers and directors, behind the scenes studio conniving, dubious and contrived publicity, outlandish salaries and ‘perks’, and so on. But above all the focus is on the movie stars themselves, their private lives, the scandals, gossip, war records and more. Everything I discovered about the business and its people that might interest the average movie buff is contained within the pages of this book. Movie stars pay a hefty price for their celebrity status.
Being rich and famous sounds great, but living their lives in the public eye is the price they pay for all that glamour and glory. It must be very difficult to exist like that, when every look or word is captured, analyzed and regurgitated in the tabloids, more often than not from a viewpoint that is anything but compassionate or understanding.
I have chosen to present the information in the form of an alphabetical list of movies, rather than as a list of the stars themselves. When the reader sits down to watch a film, he or she can quickly glance through to see if there is any data on the picture in question. I have used the titles to introduce anecdotes about the players in that movie, as well as any tales related to the production itself. I have also taken the liberty of including the occasional personal comment here and there. No doubt, it will quickly become apparent to the reader that I am no theatre critic and know next to nothing about the technical side of filmmaking. I plead guilty on both counts. This work is not about the techniques of filmmaking.
Neither is it about acting or directing. It is about the people involved in these processes. I am old-fashioned when it comes to movies and their purpose. I prefer to be enchanted, thrilled, saddened or amazed, than have some political or social message pounded into my brain. Neither do I relish being served up a ‘kitchen sink’ portion of reality. There is enough of that outside the theatre. And I especially do not want to be splattered with blood, drowned in violence or buried in expletives. All these exist in abundance outside as well. Having said that, I make no apologies for the use of expletives in this volume, albeit only in the context of direct quotes. Most movie stars, for reasons known only to them, seem to find it fashionable to use the same group of adjectives as a matter of course, and have done so since the industry began. The only difference between today’s stars and those of yesteryear is that, now, they get to use them on-screen as well as off.
In this book I have tried to remain as objective as possible, but it is a ‘warts and all’ account of life in Hollywood, so I have spared no one from the truth. For the most part I have let their own words and deeds, their own recollections, depict them as they really are, multifarious personalities in an extraordinary business unlike any other. We need our heroes to be fallible, if for no other reason than to enable us to live with our own deficiencies, our own limitations. This book will illustrate that nothing and nobody is perfect, least of all those imbued with the aura of perfection.
At the end of this book you will find lists of all those performers who have died from other than natural causes.
Considering we are dealing with a peaceable industry here and not espionage or formula one racing, the lists are surprisingly long. On a less morbid note, I have also thrown in my fifty personal favorite movies of all time. (The wonderful thing about writing a book is you can do things like that if you want to). I always enjoy reading other writers’ ‘favorites’ lists, just so I can compare them with mine. You might care to do the same. Theatre critics can simply skip that bit. Citizen Kane, for instance, does not rate with me, so there goes my credibility in the eyes of the ‘experts’. Nevertheless, these are the films I most enjoy because they entertain me the most. And after all, that is why most of us go to the cinema in the first place.
