Looking Back With Mostly Fond Memories Of Old Hollywood -- I Was There

Starting more than 50 years ago, your humble blogmeister spent many a day and night prowling the dark and mysterious canyons of the urban jungle called Hollywood. It was, and is, a mighty curious place, inhabited by natives who range from Neanderthal to super sophisticated and the Neanderthals seem to keep getting the upper hand. Have you seen any movies made lately? Sophisticated, mostly, -- if you're in possession of a 12-year-old mentality. A mentally-challenged 12-year-old.

One observer pointed out that Hollywood is a factory town -- they manufacture a product and ship it out of town in cans. Like pickled pigs' feet. Except the cans are film cans.

Basil Rathbone, who with his elegant wife was on the top of the Cinema City food chain, said that Old Hollywood was a factory town. The managers lived in the hills and the workers lived in the flats. If you were on the "A" list, you might have been invited to Basil's home in the hills as he and his wife threw parties for some of the very finest of the elite of Hollywood Gone By.

Alan Ladd, Robert Redford and Sally Field all grew up in El Lay's flats, (in the San Fernando Valley) but when they got going, they could easily afford fine homes in the hills.

But, what glorious parties the folks in the hills could throw. Your blogster-to-be attended one soiree in Bel Aire in the early 1970s. It was a pip. Frank Sinatra sang some tunes. So did Andy Williams. Groucho Marx and Alice Cooper did a comedy bit together.

The "do" was at Sinatra's banker's house and the banker filled his nine-acre spread with over 400 guests, including many top stars. Neighbor Dean Martin walked down to the party from his big home on the hill catty-corner across the street. George Raft was signing copies of his new book.

We've partied with starlets, beauty queens, world famous actors of both genders, porno queens and just plain queens. We've tossed back drinks and munched jumbo shrimp and other goodies, or just generally partied, with Rita Hayworth, Liz Taylor, Natalie Wood, Joni Mitchell, Marlon Brando, Inger Stevens, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Jean Seberg, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and on and on and on.

We have been to the Academy Awards, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Tony (Broadway) Awards, the Hollywood Deb Star Ball, the Grammys and a zillion other awards shows. Plus more film premieres than we can ever remember. And post-premiere parties. Who can forget the party at a Moroccan restaurant (fabulous food!) for the 1976 camel corps film "Hawmps" where a still-not-yet-fugitive Roman Polanski stuffed $50 bills into a belly dancer's harem pants? And where terminally gorgeous Wonder Woman Lynda Carter flashed those huge eyes and killer smile of hers and devastated every male within a 12-block area?

We partied in Manhattan with Groucho and his lady (pictured), Danny Kaye, Joan Crawford, Muhammed Ali, and went backstage to see Lauren Bacall ("Applause"), James Stewart ("Harvey") and many others. We saw (free to the press!) "Applause," "Harvey," and "Hello Dolly" on Broadway, the latter three times with headliners Carol Channing, Ethel Merman and then Betty Grable. (We also saw it (for free) in San Diego with a all-Black cast, including legendary Louie Armstrong.)

Your blogmeister spent a day with screen legend Jayne Mansfield in her fabled pink palace on Sunset Boulevard. We were there at Rick Nelson's marriage to Kristin Harmon, 50 year ago. And funerals for Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby and Mamma Cass, to mention a few.

Speaking of Groucho Marx, shown pictured above with his good friend Erin Fleming, it was an extreme pleasure to meet and be able to chat with this Old Hollywood legend both in Hollywood and Manhattan. There are other stars that we would just as soon never have gotten to know.

We wouldn't have missed it all for the world, though.

" A delusion, a mockery, and a snare."

--Thomas, Lord Denman

PHOTO BY HOWARD DECKER

Bob Hope's Run-In With a "Hot-To-Trot" Starlet With An Angel's Face

Poor Bob Hope. All he ever wanted was zillions of bucks, adulation from an adoring public, the best tables in the best restaurants and to kiss all the pretty girls.

Hope, who was big in real estate, bought an apartment building near his home in Toluca Lake, California and stashed it full of pretty starlets, all in a row. A horizontal row.

Hope, shown in 1975 hailing his limo driver outside Chasen's posh restaurant in El Lay, found one little honey who was a lot more than he could handle.

Her name was Barbara Payton, a "hot-to-trot" honey who took her loving like a man. She wanted it, she went for it. No muss, no fuss, no morals. For youse guys who are keeping score, this was a fairly big deal before 1950.

A natural beauty, Barbara learned at a very tender age she could get what she wanted out of men, and she wanted plenty.

She ran into Hope in Dallas in 1949 and before you could say "screen test" he had a nice pad for her to live in and love in there in Old Hollywood, complete with an industrial-quality bed.

She was a pistol and soon turned out to be more wham-bam-thank-you-ma'm than Hope could handle.

Hope springs eternal, they say, and Hope sprung on her loins like a kid in a candy store. But Barbara was looking for more than the mattress rumble. She needed cash to finance her big-time partying with the kind of gentlemen around town who were no gentlemen. One dude claimed Barbara got him into bed and wouldn't let him out for three days, and he had to crawl out on his hands and knees. Not that he was complaining.

Hope didn't mind spending a few bucks on Barbara but her demands were incessant and he paid her to go away, far away.

She went about as far as the hoity-toity Mocombo nightclub where she dallied with another GotBucks, Howard Hughes, and some lesser wallets like Old Hollywood's favorite mobster, Mickey Cohen, and actors George Raft, Gary Cooper and John Ireland.

Barbara got hot on screen, as well, and starred with James Cagney in the movie that defines her to this day, "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye." One top flight Old Hollywood producer allowed as how Barbara "never had an itch she didn't scratch."

She got involved with Ivy League-educated high class actor Franchot Tone, who was quite a bit older than her, and hunka-hunka ex-boxer and actor Tom Neal. Neal beat the snot out of Tone in Barbara's front yard over her affections and all three careers went down the toilet. Somewhere in all this she got caught in the sack with cowboy actor Guy Madison, who was married to troubled, alcoholic beauty Gail Russell at the time.

Tone got his face reconstructed after the beating, Neal became a landscape guy in Palm Springs, CA and later went to the slammer for killing his wife.

Barbara screwed herself out of a Hollywood career and ended up as a $5 per throw hooker, hanging out in bars along Sunset Boulevard, with dirt under her fingernails. She got the crap beaten out of her many times, and had to have over 30 stitches once, due to a nasty knife wound. Barbara got very fat and very gross-looking and died in 1967.

PHOTO OF BOB HOPE BY HOWARD DECKER

"Cock of the Air" Was Not About Aviator Howard Hughes But He Produced The Censor-Wrecked 1932 Film

"Cock of the Air" was virtually destroyed by the movies' censors and one can only imagine how that title survived.

Howard Hughes, well known collector of beautiful actresses and pioneer aviator, produced the film but let the censor tear it to shreds so he could salvage hotso parts of some of his other films. Hughes salvaged some of "Scarface" and gave up on a film called "Queer People" by letting the censors trash "Cock of the Air."

Chester Morris, who looked like a mug but was a very talented Broadway and Old Hollywood actor, romances nubile Billie Dove in the picture. In real life Dove, who started turning big shot men's heads when she was but 14 years of age, and had Broadway experience as well, was going bumpty-bumpty-bump with old Howard himself. They lived together for three years.

They say that there are parts of the film that ended up on the cutting room floor that showed Morris and Dove at their very best.

Morris worked in radio, films, television, Broadway and regional theater until his death in 1970. Billie Dove said the heck with films after her part in a movie was cut by William Randolph Hearst because Dove was better than Willie's Sweet Patootie Marion Davies. She died in 1997.

Did The Cold War Kill John Wayne And 90 Others From His Film "The Conqueror?"

John Wayne.

Super Star. Larger than life. In fact, he wore lifts on his cowboy boots despite his 6' 4" height, because he wanted to be sure he would tower over everybody.

He died in 1979 of stomach and lung cancer. Was is cigarettes -- he was a heavy smoker -- or was it the Cold War?

In 1954, Wayne and a film crew of over 100 traveled to a site 11 miles outside St. George, Utah, for location shooting for the film "The Conqueror." The year before the government had exploded an atom bomb, above ground, nearby and the Utah site was covered by radioactive dust. Not only did the cast and crew work and play in the contaminated sands, but Producer Howard Hughes shipped truckload after truckload of the sand from the location to Hollywood to make the studio shots look realistic. So everybody had to live with the contamination for even longer.

Over 90 members of the cast and crew including Wayne, co-star Susan Hayward, featured players Agnes Moorhead and Pedro Armendariz, all subsequently died of cancer.

This flick is one of the worst big budget films ever made. Wayne wears a wig that makes him look like he got his haircut under a bowl, and sports a silly-looking drooping moustache. A lot of the dialogue is painful to the ear.

All in all, everyone should have passed on this one. But in Old Hollywood, who could resist an "Eastern Western" with the Duke, luscious Susan Hayward, a great supporting cast and Producer Howard Hughes?

Anyway, some say it was one of the best yurt films every made.

Old Hollywood Stars and Their Cars -- Eastwood, Cagney, Cooper and Disney

Old Hollywood and cars, classic film actors and their classic cars. Like Laurel & Hardy and Mutt and Jeff they go together.

We have for you today an oddball collection of Hollywood Elite with some swell wheels.

First there is the pink Cadillac from the 1989 film "Pink Cadillac." Clint is shown here with his co-star, luscious Bernadette Peters. In the flicker Good Ol' Boy Clint is a skip tracer for a bail bondsman and finds skipper-outer Peters in her flaming pink Caddy and soon they're off to the races.

There's Super Star Gary Cooper -- not in a Dusie or a Caddy, but with a 1950 Mercury. I am here to tell you that Mercs of that era were very fine cars, and fast and cool. Very cool. Remember the Mercs in "Rebel Without A Cause?"
Then there's Walt Disney with a Moon car. Yep, there was such a car and it was known to be pretty good. It was reasonable in price (Walt always kept a tight hold on his wallet) but a fine car. It was produced from 1905 to 1930.

And, we have tough guy James Cagney in a Dusenberg. Some think the Dusie was the best car ever built. Cooper had one, and so did Clark Gable and they fought it out as to whose was longer. Boys will be boys, after all. The 1931 model shown with Cagney was loaned to him, he didn't own it. But nobody told the public that.

A star has gotta have wheels and in Old Hollywood, they were spectacular. No hybrids for these dudes.

Ann Savage, Famed Cult Film Noir Actress, Dies At 87 On Christmas Day

Ann Savage, who tore into her role as a blackmailing femme fatale in the cult film "Detour," died Christmas Day according to press reports out of Los Angeles. Savage was 87.

She was the ultimate cigarette-smoking bad girl in a number of cheap films in the 1940s. In "Detour" she pushed around a passive hitchhiking piano player, portrayed by Old Hollywood bad boy Tom Neal.

In real life, Savage was a rather genteel soul and Neal was a nogoodnick who loved to sucker punch people when they weren't looking. A former boxer, he put actor Franchot Tone in the hospital after giving him a terrible beating over an actress they very reluctantly shared, Barbara Payton. The 1951 episode killed all their careers. Neal ended up in Palm Springs working as a gardener. He killed his third wife, Gail, and spent seven years in the slammer.

During the making of "Detour" Savage had a rather unhappy relationship with her moody costar.

She made a number of forgettable films including "Two Man Submarine" and "Saddles and Sagebrush," and got into TV work in the early 1950s. Savage was a popular attraction at film nostalgia shows for a number of years.

The OTHER "Twilight" -- Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, A Topless Reese Witherspoon, How Can You Beat It, Guys?

This flicker, made in 1998, is what some have called a "post noir," a film noir in color, not black and white.

Paul Newman -- with only a half a dozen on-screen roles left before his death -- portrays a broken down ex-cop cum private eye living in the house of his rich, successful actor buddy Gene Hackman.

Paulie is sponging off Hackman and porks his wife, Susan Sarandon. James Garner is a rich ex-cop with lots of secrets.

Nubile Reese Witherspoon (who was in her very early 20s when the flick was made) is Sarandon's daughter. She runs off to Mexico with a hot stud and Newman brings her back home but not before collaring her in a casita with her top off. This scene is worth the price of the DVD. The girl accidentally shoots Newman in the leg.

This being noir, there is a body to be found and a lot of strumg und drang. If it were not for the Old Hollywood actors who we will never be seen together again and Reese's scenery, it would have been a poor film, indeed.
Now I ask you, dudes, ain't this a lot better than a bunch of old bloodsuckers like in the new "Twilight?" Old Hollywood legends emoting together and a pair of very fine somewhat newly-minted casabas.