Source: Mr. X via http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

The Harvey Of Old Hollywood

Back in the day, there was a de facto studio head that was the Harvey Weinstein of his day.

There was no female actress it seems that he didn’t assault.

It was a who’s who of A list actresses that he assaulted, impregnated, and got abortions for.

This permanent A lister who has a celebrity offspring who is a permanent A lister was raped by him when she was underage but fought him off as she got older. During a sex party gone wrong, he is suspected of being the killer of this at the time A list mostly television actor.

The actor was also having sex with the our Harvey’s wife, so that also contributed to it.

Our old time Harvey tried to pin the murder on an actress who co-starred with the A lister.

Apparently she kicked our Harvey in the balls once when he tried to assault her.

He said he destroyed this stag film that the mean actress who was a permanent A lister made before she was famous.

He didn’t though and would blackmail her with it whenever he wanted to have sex with her.

Reporters should ask the aging actress who has been in the news this week about her being assaulted by him too.

She was, multiple times.

Harvey Of Old Hollywood: Eddie Mannix

Wife: Toni Mannix

Permanent A lister, celebrity offspring who is a permanent A: Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli

A list mostly television actor: George Reeves
(He is best known for his role as Superman in the 1950s television program Adventures of Superman)

Co-starred with the murdered A lister: Phyllis Coates

Mean actress: Joan Crawford

Aging actress: Angela Lansbury

Who killed Superman?

Was it suicide? Was it a hit? Nobody knows for sure, but the death of George Reeves, the original Superman, has all the elements of a classic Hollywood mystery, as a new movie shows. John Patterson reports

Before any of the baby-boom martyrs – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis – there was George Reeves, TV’s first Superman, dead by his own hand in June 1959. To a generation of children raised on his exploits, leaping tall buildings and out running speeding bullets, the notion that Superman should have killed himself was inconceivable – and perhaps it was.

The house where Reeves died stands a short distance up Benedict Canyon Drive, in the dense hills and narrow, meandering lanes north of Sunset Boulevard. The canyon’s denizens have included Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and Pia Zadora. Within a mile is Cielo Drive, where Charles Manson’s robots massacred Sharon Tate and friends in August 1969. In the mid-1990s, Heidi Fleiss ran her string of escorts from a well-concealed house some way to the north. And up on secluded Beverly Crest Drive, Rock Hudson for decades enjoyed his exclusively gay off-screen private life, hosting allmale Sunday parties around his pool, until Aids caught hold of him and he was forced to endure his last few days on earth beneath the thunderous churning blades of news helicopters circling overhead.

An open-and-shut case of suicide, said the LA police and the coroner, before closing the investigation with what some considered indecent haste. The news papers were in a frenzy for a week, then dropped the story flat. But among the dead man’s friends there were many who called it murder, and there was no shortage of suspects or motives. The case has never been reopened, but the doubts have never been satisfactorily laid to rest.

Hollywoodland, a new film directed by Allen Coulter, attempts to unravel the many skeins of suspicion and uncertainty surrounding Reeves’ death, and does a good job of sketching in the three or four principal theories. Unlike Brian De Palma’s superficially similar The Black Dahlia, set a decade earlier than Hollywoodland, Coulter’s movie has a remarkably confi dent feel for Los Angeles of the 1950s as a living era and a vivid locale. Reeves was a has-been seeking a comeback, so there is piquancy to the choice of Ben Affleck, a movie star with a career in crisis, to play the stumbling superhero .

As with the many theories that swirl around the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short – the tortured and mutilated Black Dahlia – there are too many contradictory pieces to assemble a single coherent jigsaw puzzle of Reeves’ death/murder. Or rather, there are perhaps three jigsaws with not enough pieces to complete any of them. On the night Reeves died, he and Lemmon, the woman for whom he’d dumped Mannix, had gone out to dinner and many drinks, leaving Condon in the house; they returned at about 11pm. Reeves went to bed alone around midnight, but came down in an irritable mood an hour later when Condon’s lover, Carol Van Ronkel, a married neighbour, showed up with one William Bliss, who lived nearby but was hardly known to the others. Condon later said that Reeves apologised for his bad mood and returned upstairs. Then, according to the police report, Lemmon said, “He is going to shoot himself,” whereupon, through the thin ceiling, they heard a bedside drawer open. “He is getting the gun out now and he is going to shoot himself,” Lemmon continued and, sure enough, a shot rang out. Bliss ran upstairs and found Reeves dead on the bed.

At least, this is how the four very drunk witnesses said it went down in perfunctory police interviews conducted before they scattered into the night. In the week-long investigation that followed, the evidence seal on the property was broken, apparently by Lemmon, who absconded to New York, never to return, with $4,000 in travellers’ cheques. Reeves had supposedly bought the cheques for a “honeymoon” that only Lemmon seemed to know about. The coroner’s autopsy took place only after the corpse had been thoroughly washed. It failed to test for powder traces on Reeves’ hand and, even though the top of Reeves’ skull was removed, no one checked the head wound for gunpowder traces, which would have been present if he’d shot himself at close range. Nothing explained the bruises on the corpse’s face and chest. Reeves showed no signs of a suicidal demeanour, left no note and died naked – extremely unusual for a suicide. – Source

The Real-Life Hollywood Scandals Covered Up By Eddie Mannix, Leading Figure Of ‘Hail Caesar!

‘The film ‘Hail Caesar!’ looks back to the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, when stars looked like untouchable icons up on the screen, and what access their fans had to them was rare and fleeting.

Behind the gates of the gilted community, however, these glamorous beings were leading lives that were anything but impeccable, and it was down to real-life fixer Eddie Mannix to clean up the mess they often left behind.

As the general manager and later vice president of MGM studios during the period, Mannix had people all over Los Angeles on his payroll, from members of the police, to doctors and even coroners, which meant he could spin a story whichever way he needed to.

He worked very closely with MGM’s head of publicity, Howard Strickling, who influenced how the press reported on the studio’s films and stars. While Strickling distracted the media, it was Mannix’s job to make the scandalous stories disappear…

Mannix kept megastar Clark Gable out of trouble so often he considered Eddie one of his closest friends. In 1933 Gable was reported to have run over and killed actress Tosca Roulien, and it is alleged that Mannix paid off MGM screenwriter John Huston to take the blame. Luckily, Huston was never charged due to lack of evidence. One year later, Gable allegedly sexually assaulted Loretta Young, his co-star in ‘Call of the Wild’, and she fell pregnant. To prevent a scandal – and echoing a plotline of ‘Hail, Caesar!’ – Mannix helped Loretta to ‘adopt’ her own daughter publicly before her second birthday.

Joan Crawford was constantly surrounded by rumours and scandal; that she lied about her date of birth to make herself appear older to join MGM Studios, that her freckles and red hair were masked by makeup and she even changed her name from Lucille Fay LeSueur. Nothing was more scandalous, however, than the pornographic film Joan starred in during her pre-fame years. Mannix allegedly tracked down every last copy, and paid $100,000 of the studio’s money to buy the original negative.

George Reeves played the eponymous hero in the 1950s TV series ‘Adventures of Superman’ and was believed to have committed suicide in 1959 by shooting himself in the head. However, rumours persist that Mannix allegedly ordered a hit on Reeves when he found out his wife, Toni, was having an affair with the actor. This mystery surrounding Reeves’ death made it to the big screen in 2006’s ‘Hollywoodland’ where Reeves was portrayed by Ben Affleck. The rumour was never confirmed – but it’s also never been dismissed. – Source

Angela Lansbury says women must ‘sometimes take blame’ for sexual harassment

(CNN)Renowned actress Angela Lansbury is facing criticism after saying women “must sometimes take blame” for sexual harassment because of the way they dress.
In an interview Monday with British entertainment media company RadioTimes, Lansbury said women “have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive. And unfortunately it has backfired on us … Although it’s awful to say we can’t make ourselves look as attractive as possible without being knocked down and raped.”

Lansbury was speaking about the wave of sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations made recently against such powerful men as Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Her comments went viral, and not in a good way.

Some people said they thought the beloved “Murder, She Wrote” actress, 92, was trending because she was deceased but were mortified to hear what she said.

On Wednesday, Lansbury released the following statement about the reaction to her earlier comments:

“I am troubled by how quickly and brutishly some have taken my comments out of context and attempted to blame my generation, my age, or my mindset, without having read the entirety of what I said. There is no excuse whatsoever for men to harass women in an abusive sexual manner. And, I am devastated that anyone should deem me capable of thinking otherwise.

“Those who have known the quality of my work and the many public statements I have made over the course of my life, must know, that I am a strong supporter of women’s rights.” – Source

Classic Hollywood’s Secret: Studios Wanted Their Stars to Have Abortions

“Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. While patriarchal political powers connive to block women’s legal access to abortion in 21st century America, in Old Hollywood, abortions were far more standard and far more accessible than they often are today—more like aspirin, or appendectomies. How and why did a procedure that was taboo and illegal at the time become so ordinary—at least, among a certain set?

Much like today, in Old Hollywood, the decisions being made about women’s bodies were made in the interests of men—the powerful heads of motion pictures studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and RKO. As Aubrey Malone writes in Hollywood’s Second Sex: The Treatment of Women in the Film Industry, 1900-1999, “If you want to play in this business, you play like a man or you’re out. And if you happen to be a woman, better not mention it to anybody.”

From the very infancy of America’s film industry, abortions were necessary body maintenance for women in the spotlight. Birth control, including prophylactics, were about as new as “stars” themselves—movie performers who went overnight from being “Little Mary” or “The Vitagraph Girl” to “America’s Sweetheart” or “Sex Goddess.”

“These newly wealthy men and women didn’t know how to control their money, their bodies, or their lives, spending, cavorting, and reveling in excess,” writes Anne Helen Petersen in Scandals of Classic Hollywood. In the working environment of the Hollywood studio system, society’s 19th-century sexual segregation had fallen away. Women—flappers, It girls, sirens and seductresses—were spared their destiny in the kitchen, and for the first time, they earned large incomes they could spend on whatever and whomever they wished. Many believed the publicity they read about their own erotic powers, and they went toe-to-toe professionally with men. Sparks were bound to fly. – Source


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