BOB HOPE WAS ALSO A HUMEROUS AUTHOR

FAITH'S COMPETITION? AVA GARDNER!

The following excerpts are from the book
HOWARD HUGHES THE UNTOLD STORY
by PETER HARRY BROWN and PAT H.BROESKE and are copyright 1996 by the authors.

Howard Hughes told Faith Domergue that she was the child he should have had but also that he wanted to marry her.  The huge emerald ring he gave her as an engagement ring was spotted on the Warner Brother's studio lot and by day's end Louella Parson's had printed it in her column. Hughes declined requests for interviews.  He also went through a lot of maneuvers to purchase her 7 year contract from Jack Warner who charged him $50,000.  Hughes himself also acquired her representation from Henry Willson, then at the Zeppo Marx agency.

"Suddenly my professional and emotional future were completely in his hands," Domergue recalled.  Sometimes I wasn't afraid.  I had complete confidence that my blue prince had arrived."

pages 151 - 152 -159

But then...

page 158

But then 21 year old Ava Gardner "blew into Howard's arms in January 1943."   She "kept his life in turmoil for more than a decade."  He told Ava he wanted to marry her and gave her four proposals, each with lavish gifts - diamonds, rubies, opals, Cartier, even a shoe box with $250,000 cash, and flew a plane to get her wish - orange ice cream.

page 160 - 163

"All that he had cruelly denied FAITH DOMERGUE, he showered on Gardner."  Weekends in Palm Springs Racket Club, formal dinners at Darryl Zanucks and Samuel Goldwyns (two Hollywood movie company heads), shopping in Mexico City and Manhattan.  He set Ava up in a lavish apartment just off Sunset where she lived with her sister. Then Howard put Ava under surveillance and discovered her ex husband Mickey Rooney was still sleeping with her.  When Ava confronted him and they had a fight that turned physically abusive, Howard disappeared on Faith and then he lied and claimed he'd been in a car accident.  He was addicted to psychodrama and danger.  Finally Faith overheard him making love with another woman and using the "Little Baby" endearment on this someone else!  She was 17 and had five more years on her contract with Hughes and no film rolls.

She caught sight of Howard driving Ava Gardner in a Cadillac.  Driving her red roadster, Faith gave chase.  When Hughes stopped the Cadillac, faith bumped into it with her car.

page 164

"Faith deliberately backed up her roadster and floored the gas pedal, crashing repeatedly into the passenger's door.  Gardner screamed.  Poor Ava bounced up and down in her seat."  The front of the roadster crumbled and steamed."  Howard took Faith by the hand and took her home where he made more promises, apologies, swore he'd give her father a business and make her a star.  Someone else drove Ava home."  By this time Faith noticed Howard's germ phobias and rituals and that he periodically went into a fog.

page 180

October 1944, still with Faith, he made a demonstration of burning some of his past away by tossing letters from his parents , especially his mother, into the roaring fireplace as well as the legal documents of his fight for his father's company.

page 209

In 1946 Faith finally got the courage to leave Howard and then married another playboy, Teddy Stauffer.  She later starred in Hughes produced film "Vendetta."  Ava married Artie Shaw.

page 210

Hughes continued to romance stars like Lana Turner, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Linda Darnell, and eventually Jean Peters, who eventually became Mrs. Howard Hughes Jr., his second wife.  Peters would stick by him for years even though he was rarely with her.

LOUISE BROOKS SPEAKING OF THE LIFE SHE LEAD IN 1948 and 1953 AS A KEPT WOMAN

Kenneth Tynan writing in the introduction of the book "Lulu in Hollywood".  This is what LOUISE BROOKS told him, printed on page xxxiv.

"Between 1948 and 1953, I suppose you could call me a kept woman," she said.  "Three decent rich men looked after me.  But then I was always a kept woman.  Even when I was making a thousand dollars a week, I would always be paid for by George Marshall or someone like that.  But I never had anything to show for it - no cash, no trinkets, nothing.  I didn't even like jewelry - can you imagine?  Pabst once called me a born whore, but if he was right I was a failure, with no pile of money and no comfortable mansion.  I just wasn't equipped to spoil millionaires in a practical, farsighted way.  I could live in the present, but otherwise everything has always been a hundred percent wrong about me.  Anyway, the three decent men took care of me.  One of them owned a sheet-metal manufacturing  company, and the result of that affair is that I am now the owner of the only handmade aluminum waste basket in the world.  He designed it, and it's in the living room, my solitary trophy.  Then a time came, early in 1953, when me three men independently decided that they wanted to marry me.  I had to escape, because I wasn't in love with them.  As a matter of fact, I've never been in love.  And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him?  Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it.  It was clever of Pabst to know even before he met me that I posses the tramp essence of Lulu."


Book
Lulu In Hollywood
by Louise Brooks, with Introduction by Kenneth Tynan.
C 1974 and 1982 by Louise Brooks
University of Minnesota Press

LOUISE BROOKS IN PANDORA'S BOX 1929

 UPDATE JUNE 2021  STOP!  Due to a copyright claim to YouTube the film has been taken down.

I'm linking to the full film on YouTube  YOUTUBE LOUISE BROOKS IN PANDORAS BOX 1929

Check YouTube for trailers and clips.  So Sorry!

LOUISE BROOKS ON BECOMING SOPHISTICATED

page 10  Excerpted from LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by LOUISE BROOKS

..."Culture, I was to learn, was not a prerequisite for becoming a sophisticate New Yorker.  It was, in fact, a handicap.  The rich men who before long were exhibiting me in fashionable restaurants, theatres, and nightclubs shrank like truant schoolboys from the name of Shakespeare, and they looked upon an evening spent at the Metropolitan Opera or at a concert in Carnegie Hall as unthinkable misery.  Since I could not gossip about these socialites' families and friends, did not feel secure discussing the theatre and movies, and detested the vulgar game of dirty jokes and sexual innuendos, I talked scarcely at all.  Years later, the dress designer Travis Banton told me that in 1925, at the Colony - the grandest restaurant in town - he watched from another table and put me in the category of "beautiful but dumb," where I remained to the end of my film career.

In 1922, then, if I was to create my dream woman, I had to get rid of my Kansas accent, to learn the etiquette of the social elite, and to learn to dress beautifully.  I could not correct my speech at a fashionable girls' school.  I could not learn table manner from escorts embarrassed by my social inferiority.  I could not afford Fifth Avenue couturiers.  Therefore, I went for my education directly to the unknown people who were experts in such matters - the people at the bottom whose services supported the enchantment at the top of New York..."

Note: Louise Brooks grew up in a household where there were piles of books everywhere, and in her mid -life became a writer of articles about the Silent Film era.

LOUISE BROOKS TO KENNETH TYNAN ON BEING MOLESTED AS A GIRL

To Kenneth Tynan in the Introduction of  of LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by LOUISE BROOKS.

"Having paused to light a cigarette, which provoked a mild coughing spasm, Brooks resumed her story.  "I almost forgot a strange incident that happened in 1952.  Out of the blue, I got a letter from a woman who had been a Cherryvale neighbor of ours.  She enclosed some snapshots.  One of them showed a nice-looking neighbor of ours.  She enclosed some snapshots.  One of them showed a nice looking gay haired man of about fifty, holding the hand of a little girl - me.  On the back she'd written, 'This is Mr. Feathers, an old bachelor who loved kids.  He was always taking you to the picture show and buying you toys and candy.'  That picture brought back something I'd blacked out of my mind for - what? - thirty-seven years.  When I was nine years old,. Mr. Feathers molested me sexually.  Which forged another link between me and Lulu: when she had her first lover, she was very young, and Schigolch, the man in questions, was middle -aged.  I've often wondered what effect Mr. Feathers had on my life.  He must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude towards sexual pleasure.  For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough - there had to be an element of domination - and I'm sure that's all tied up with Mr. Feathers.  The pleasure of kissing and being kissed comes from somewhere entirely different, psychologically as well as physically.  Incidentally, I told my mother about Mr. Feathers, and - would you believe it? (Peal of laughter.) She blamed me!  She said I must have led him on.  It's always the same, isn't it?"  And Brooks ran on in this vein, discussing her sex life openly and jauntily, unbuckling one more notch of the Bible Belt with every sentence she uttered."

Excerpted from LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by Louise Brooks

WAS PATRICIA LAKE MARION DAVIES DAUGHTER?

Obituary Revives Rumor of Hearst Daughter : Hollywood: Gossips in the 1920s speculated that William Randolph Hearst and mistress Marion Davies had a child. Patricia Lake, long introduced as Davies' niece, asks on death bed that record be set straight. LA TIMES ARTICLE  link here!

Indeed, the skeptics have a point. All the proof Lake had to offer were countless stories and a suspiciously familiar nose and long face. Whatever the truth, Lake undeniably led a glamorous life at the center of one of Hollywood's most enduring rumors, at a time when the star system flourished, the incomes were fabulous and the lifestyles opulent and uninhibited.

"She lived her life on a satin pillow," Lake said fondly after his mother's death. "They took away her name, but they gave her everything else."

MARION DAVIES STAR : HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME

MARION DAVIES : 1928 THE PATSY : SILENT FILM

MARION "ROSEBUD" DAVIES : MISTRESS OF NEWSPAPER MAN AND HEARST CASTLE BUILDER WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

MARION DAVIES is one of the most known mistresses in the world.

That's because when his wife would not go through a divorce, William Randolph Hearst chose to live with her anyway and she him, in California.

According to her memoir, written in 1961, ten years after he died, and which was not published until 1975, more than ten years after she died in 1963, W.R. wanted to get a divorce but couldn't convince his wife to allow it.  So they gave up trying but he did not see or speak to his wife, though they had grown sons, for 25 years.

Marion and W.R. met when she was about 14 years old, maybe 16; she is known to have lied about her age as an adult taking about 7 years off the January 3rd 1897 date when she was born Marion Cecilia Douras, claiming to be born in 1905.  At the time they met she was on stage at the Ziegfield Follies in New York City where so many of the dancers had "Back Stage Johnnys, " Patrons," "Mentors," and became mistresses.  She and her sisters all had entertainment ambitions and the family together changed their surname to Davies.

The family was respectable and so was the early courtship of Marion and W.R.  He gave expensive presents to impress her. He came around the house, was friendly with her parents, who liked him, and Marion and W.R. were fast friends for some time before becoming more involved.

At the time they met W. R., as she called him, was a fifty eight year old mega-successful newspaper man who began building his personal fortune during the Spanish Civil War.  If there is any criticism of Marion's acting or movie success, it is that some say if it were not for Hearst's promotions and involvements in her career, she would not have made it so far. When Marion "retired" into mistresshood sometime before World War II, she was a movie star, a major star of the 1920's and 1930's, who had made 45 films in those early days of Silent Pictures and then Talkies. 

Their relationship is called "a 32 year affair." 

His pet name for her was "Rosebud."

He built her a "beach house" in Santa Monica that was a manor house.  Together they held lively parties at San Simeon, known today as Hearst Castle, because of all the parts of castles he bought in Europe and installed inside, but which he called "The Ranch."  (San Simeon is a major tourist attraction on the Central Coast of California today.) They flew Hollywood stars and supporting casts up the California Coast from Hollywood to be part of the weekend parties.  Charlie Chaplin was one of many regular visitors. Marion had a bubbly personality and kept things lively for their guests.

They sailed with their guests off the coast too.  There was one big scandal when a film producer was accidentally shot and killed on the boat, but generally their relationship was not considered scandalous. 

They lived across the country from W.R.'s wife, they traveled with an entourage to Europe every year for many years, and were accepted as a couple by many of the most elite. 

Marion was ambitious, though she hardly sounds it when you read her story as she wrote it.

She also used the money she earned to invest in real estate and is said to have turned her personal fortune into 20 million dollars.  She became a charitable giver and amassed a precious jewelry collection that was sold in 1963 after her death for about half a million dollars. (The beach house was sold at great loss.)

While Marion was not a secret mistress, there is a story that came out years later,  that she had a secret child. 

The rumor was leaked after the the death of  Marion's "niece" Patricia Van Cleve Lake, who was married to Arthur Lake, an actor, successfully, for her entire adult life.  The rumor was that Patricia was actually Marion's child with Hearst.  Patricia was raised by Marion sister and they spent many a summer and much of their European travel with Marion and W.R.  According to Patricia Lake herself, who made recordings on her death bed, at her wedding to Arthur at San Simeon, Hearst called her into his office and said "I'm your father." 

In her memoir Marion denied ever having had any children.

Missy

DID TONI MANNIX OR HER HUSBAND OR SOMEONE ELSE HAVE GEORGE REEVES MURDERED?

Toni Mannix and George Reeves were lovers for near a decade and had the blessing of her husband, but according to the book "Hollywood Kryptonite" for about the last 6 months of his life, during his engagement to Lenore, someone killed his dog and he received 20-30 harassing phone calls day and night - to annoy and disturb him.  Did Toni (or her husband) have him killed?

HOLLYWOOD KRYPTONITE : THE BOOK BY SAM KASHNER and NANCY SCHOENBERGER

The subtitle is "THE BULLDOG, THE LADY, and THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN."

Saint Martin's Press Published the book in 1996.

The Bulldog was Eddie Mannix, an MGM executive who was considered to be a "fixer" and the Lady was his wife Toni.

 

IMBD ON GEORGE REEVES : HE WAS ACTIVE AS AN ACTOR LONG BEFORE HE MET MRS. MANNIX

IMBd on GEORGE REEVES link to his acting resume.  George tried to move his career to directing after so much frustration playing Superman!

From "Hollywood Kryptonite,: by  Sam Kushner and Nancy Schoenberger C 1996

page 20

"More than 200 actors were considered for the role of early TV's Superman show, which began filming in 1951.  George was ambivilant about the role and took it thinking it would be short term.  It was his worst nightmare that he became so known as Superman that he would never be in another movie.  His role in 1953's "From Here to Eternity" was cut out.

HOLLYWOODLAND : THE MOVIE ABOUT GEORGE AND TONI AND EDDIE AND MOM

GEORGE REEVES : SUPERMAN AND KEPT MAN : SO WHAT? HIS LADY'S HUSBAND HAD A MISTRESS TOO!

(Hey, he looks even better with Clark Kent glasses on!)

Before my time, but the SUPERMAN television show had quite the following in it's time which was the 1950's. GEORGE REEVES (born George Brewer - Bessolo), the actor who played Superman, which was also a comic book series and which has inspired more than one movie about the good deeds of the Super Hero! including a new movie that will be out any day, ended up either a suicide or a murder. 

A movie called HOLLYWOODLAND, was all about him and the lady, Camille "Toni" Lanier Mannix who kept him.  Toni was the wife of a movie studio mogul who also kept a mistress. 

Like many female mistresses who did (and do) work for a living, George may've been into it in part because Toni Mannix could make life better for him.  The wife of Eddie Mannix, Toni was an ex Broadway actor who came to Hollywood to be in a movie.  Instead she got a husband who retired her.  He provided well.  She was aware that her husband kept a mistress, a beautiful Japanese woman,  and they had a deal, or so it seems, because his money was also hers.  She gave George the down payment for a house in the canyon, a nice car, good interior design and furnishings... a better life. 

Toni was an older woman to George.  And according to the movie she helped him get the role of Superman.  The book "Hollywood Krptonite, which I'll be quoting from, suggests otherwise.  Over 200 actors tried for the role.  George thought it would be a temporary gig but soon enough he was sick and tired of what Superman had done to his career as well as older dominating women, such as his mother (and Toni?).  George had the nerve to get himself engaged to another woman. 

He was shot and killed soon before he was to marry Lenore.  In his will he left everything to Toni and nothing to his fiancee. 

But who pulled the trigger?

Who doesn't love a mystery?

C 2013 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

BOOK REVIEW : FIFTH AVENUE 5 A.M. BY SAM WASSON on the making of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S STARING AUDREY HEPBURN

AUDREY HEPBURN, the actress who became famous for charity work before her death, starred in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in the early 1960's. Sam Wasson's new book "FIFTH AVENUE 5 a.m." isn't just about the making of the movie - though that is certainly covered - but also the way the film had impact on notions of modern womanhood.

Was the character Holly Golightly really based on TRUMAN CAPOTE'S real mother in her search for a husband? Was Audrey Hepburn the person, in her role as Holly Golightly, who made the color BLACK as in Little Black Dress, the garment of sophistication?

Page 127 says that Centuries ago, black dye was affordable only to the very rich. Black had been the color of death and worn in mourning. A woman wearing black was trying NOT to be noticed. Then CoCo Chanel designed the little black dress as a must have for sophisticated women.

In "Breakfast at Tiffany's" the character Audrey played was a woman who has had lovers, does not regret it, and does not come to a bad end because of it. So it was the beginning of the sexual revolution when it came out.

It was the time of Helen Gurly Brown's book "Sex and The Single Girl."

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