- from Hollywood:
 Those sly dogs at Script Magazine! They printed the smiling mug of the twenty-five-year-old Angela Lansbury (1925 - 2022) on the cover of their rag, briefly praising her for being the youngest performer to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award (she soon won the 1944 Best Supporting Actress statue for Gaslight), and ran a "profile" of the lass on a page eight article that was misleadingly titled "Our Cover Girl", only to devote 85% of the columns to her socialist uncle.
The attached magazine article is a profile of Veronica Lake (1922 – 1973) who was characterized in this column as "an artist at making enemies.":
"One of the most acute problems in Hollywood is Veronica Lake. Where, and at what precise moment her time-bomb mind will explode with some deviation from what studio bosses consider normal is an ever-present question. Hence, the grapevine of the movie industry always hums with rumors that unless Miss Lake 'behaves', she will no longer be tolerated, but cast into oblivion."
Her response was eloquent.
The attached profile of actor William Holden (1918 – 1981) appeared in print when his stock was about to peak.
When the summer of 1956 rolled around, Holden was already a double nominee for a BAFTA ("Picnic"), an Oscar ("Sunset Boulevard") and was the grateful recipient of an Academy Award for Best Actor one year earlier ("Stalag 17"). In 1957 his performance in the "Bridge on the River Kwai" would bring even more pats on the back (although the Best Actor statue would go to Alec Guinness).
This five page interview tells the story of Holden's initial discovery in Hollywood, his devotion to both the Screen Actor's Guild and Paramount Pictures. His Hollywood peers held him in especially high-regard:
"In a poll of Hollywood reporters recently he was designated 'the best adjusted and happiest actor around'"; by contrast, the same poll identified Humphrey Bogart as a total pain in the keister - click here to read that article.
In this six page essay Harpo Marx tells the tale of Groucho (1890 – 1977) as only an older brother could see it. From the Marx family's earliest days in the slums of New York and Groucho's first entertainment job (he was 13), Harpo (1888 – 1964) briefly recounts his brother's wins and losses leading up to the team's first popular show on Broadway ("I'll Say She Is", 1923) and the man's travails on his T.V. game show, "You Bet Your Life".
"Groucho's infatuation with the language has been the backbone of his entire life and has, undoubtedly, played the largest single part in shaping him into one of the greatest wits of our time. Groucho doesn't regard words the way the rest of us do. He looks at a word in the usual fashion. Then he looks at it upside down, backwards, from the middle out to the ends, and from the ends back to the middle...Groucho doesn't look for double meanings. He looks for quadruple meanings. And usually finds them."
Click here to read about the manner in which the Marx Brothers would test their jokes.
Adorned with photos of the famous movie-monster-actor mowing his lawn and kissing his wife, this COLLIER'S MAGAZINE article tells the tale of how an English boy named William Henry Pratt became a famous Hollywood actor named Boris Karloff (1887 – 1969). This piece was originally conceived in order to promote the actor's appearance on Broadway in the roll of "Jonathan" in "Arsenic and Old Lace". The writer makes it quite clear to all that the show-biz career did not in any way come easily to Karloff and involved years of truck driving and traveling about performing in summer-stock theaters throughout the whole of North America before he was able to make a name for himself as a bit actor in the silent films of Hollywood.
Click here to read about the vulgar side of Erroll Flynn. Back in the day, some wise old sage once remarked: "It's Frank Sinatra's world; we only live in it." -in 1951, Nancy Sinatra certainly thought these words were double-dipped in truth; married to "The Voice" since 1939, she tended to their three children devotedly, yet she was served with divorce papers nonetheless in order that "Ol' Blue Eyes" could go keep house with the twice-married starlet Ava Gardner (1922 – 1990). The attached article will tell you all about it; it's a juicy one - filled hearsay, innuendo and the knowing words of a Vegas odds maker as to whether the marriage will last: "Will Frank turn out to be a better husband than Mickey Rooney or Artie Shaw? Will Ava have more luck with him than Nancy had?" (they divorced in 1957) | 
