Christopher 1 was reclaimed by his biological parents, clearing the way for Christopher 2. And the twins were Cynthia and Catherine (who, according to one source I’ve read, Joan bought shortly after Bette Davis gave birth to her daughter, to show Bette up and steal her thunder).
Joan had a lot of complexes; I am unsure if Mary was among them.
Doris Day? Say it isn’t so!
“Doris Day? I knew her before she was a virgin.”
– Oscar Levant
I know that homosexuality if off limits according to the OP, but in general, there were quite a few Hollywood stars who were gay – unabiguously – and whose orientation was kept quiet during their lives. Most obvious were Noel Coward and Charles Laughton (revealed by his wife, Elsa Lanchester, after his death; she decided to stay with him even after he admitted it).
But one reason why homosexuality in Hollywood is hard to prove is that it was always covered up. Often it was known within the Hollywood community, but not by the public at large.
A few stars, or almost stars, lived openly gay lives in Hollywood. Others were so deeply closeted that no good evidence exists even today since neither they nor anyone else would talk about their lives. Still others consorted with both men and women, so it can’t be said one way or the other whether their marriages were real or shams.
There are any number of serious books about gays and lesbians in Hollywood. There are also books by Boze Hadleigh, the modern Kenneth Anger, including Hollywood Gays, Hollywood Lesbians, Conversations With My Elders aka Celluloid Gaze (interviews with gay movie stars), the deliciously titled Hollywood Babble On: Stars Gossip About Other Stars, and Broadway Babylon. He’s also written The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World and Sing Out!: Gays and Lesbians in the Music World.
I know someone mentioned accidents up thread. I recall reading of an actor who did kill someone in a wreck and the studio got somebody to do the year or two sentence for him. Who was that? I keep thinking it was Gable, but maybe it wasn’t.
Sir Rhosis
According to the recent biography by David Michaelis, Charles Schulz’s daughter went to Japan to get an abortion after she became pregnant sometime in the late '60s or early '70s in order to keep it from the press.
Regarding the Gable story, Snopes has a very in-depth debunking which also shows the process they went to to find their answer.
Didn’t Busby Berkeley have a pretty major drunk driving crash and get off with a light or no sentence?
Yes, in fact he was acquited despite killing two people being killed.
There have been allegations that the death of Paul Bern, Jean Harlow’s husband, wasn’t suicide and that Irving Thalberg covered up the murder.
Well, if they were already being ki-
Nope, can’t do it.
I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this before … No names, this is still a current celebrity, although not my current job. But on my honor, this is true.
About eight-ten years ago, I was working for a wireless communication company, in the billing research department. We handled the situations where there was an escalated billing dispute that was too involved for a CSR to resolve it on the phone. One of my areas of responsibility was text messaging charge disputes. Procedure was to pull the customer’s contract to verify what they’d agreed to (x messages/month, y characters counts as a message, $z per message over the limit), then to pull the detail records of messages sent to/from their devices. (We used one of the systems that archives everything sent through it for a few months.) The latter was partly just to have something to show the customer, but partly because it wasn’t completely unheard of for the system to generate spurious counts. (Or so I was told–I never saw an example.) We’d skim through the lists of messages, making sure there weren’t long stretches of computer-generated gibberish.
So, I was working a dispute of this kind for a sports agency. Pulled their text messaging records, and on skimming through was intrigued to see that they were the agents for Big Sports Star. Not his real name–but I mean it when I say that this is a Big Sports Star. You may not follow sports, but you’ve almost certainly heard of this guy. He’s that Big. (Still is, hence the pseudonym. Not as Big as he once was, but still pretty damn Big.) Anyway, they had messages to each other reminding them to get such-and-such thing for Big Sports Star, or to pick up Big Sports Star’s mom at the airport at such-and-such a time. I thought that was very cool!
Then I found the messages from Crazy Girl. She was texting one of Big Sports Star’s agents, threatening to go to the media with the fact that he was her baby’s daddy, if she didn’t get paid off.
Seriously. She was blackmailing BSS via text message. :eek:
My favorite quote (redacted, of course): “Bill Cosby wouldn’t pay, but BSS will.” 
Now, here’s the thing. This was many years ago. And over that time period, BSS has apparently been happily married, and I have never heard any whiff of scandal from the media about Crazy Girl or anybody else being in his life. He is by all accounts a good, faithful family man. So Crazy Girl must have either been:
So one way or another, this was successfully covered up. 
Even if Crazy Girl was even crazier than she obviously was, and was making the whole thing up, it would still be a newsworthy story, right?
(No, I won’t tell you who BSS is. He’s not only Big in the sense of being a big celebrity with lots of money to hire good lawyers, but also Big in the sense of being able to crush my skull like a grape. So you’re on your own.)
You single out Rob Schneider for your suspicions of Satanic influence? I put it to you that he’s got a lot of help.
Yeah, before the Internet and Access Hollywood and the paparazzi, things were easier to cover up.
When I lived in LA, one guy I knew had been a cop for many years, retired and then became my boss at a school. He used to tell me stories about famous celebrities getting stopped for drunk driving, and the police would get in the celebrity’s car and drive them home. No tickets or press, but some nice “perks” after the fact. He also said it was common when a famous actor was picked up in a homosexual cruising area, they would just tell him to go home and not ticket them, unlike the other guys who were hauled down to the station and booked for lewd behavior. He also told me about some famous couples who would have knock-down domestic fights, with broken windows and neighbors calling the police, and those incidents were also never officially reported. He had some great stories.
Yes You Can!
Do it, do it, do it!!!
I saw Girl 27 on netflix… amazing. She was still alive at the time and they interviewed her.
The whole mess just totally fucked up her life, and even affected her family decades afterwards.
It is cases like that that make me wish there was some way to bypass the whole statute of limitations and get some sort of recompense for the whole issue no matter how late the evidence was found.
Liberace winning lawsuits against media who claimed he was “fruit-flavored” has to be the ultimate in chutpaz.
This thread prompted me to Netflix the documentary and I watched it last night. I am still astounded that the scandal was so successfully buried, especially when it’s prime movie subject fodder. She doesn’t even have a Wikipedia listing! Unbelievable.
After I watched it, I ran it again with the commentary. I really felt that David Stenn cared deeply for her and am glad that she had someone taking care of her before she died.
Heartbreaking.
Why? Lawsuits of this sort aren’t predicated on the truth or falsehood of the rumor, but on the malice pf publishing it and on the monetary cost to the rumor subject’s career as a direct result of said publication.
Doesn’t truth rule out libel? I can print anything about you as long as I can prove it is true?
I never heard of her until I was skimming through the documentaries available on Netflix, myself. But it certainly stood out in my mind, once I did see it.
IANAL, but I did study journalism. I even practice it now and then.
“Malice” is the key word here. Truth doesn’t rule out libel if malice is present. If I took an upskirt photo of (a clearly recognizable) you without your knowledge and splashed it across the web, “Those are provably Annie Xmas’s panties” would not cut it as a defense. There’s no legitimate way I could get that particular photo, and posting it on the web is a clearly malicious act.
Same thing with Liberace. What he does with fabulous, swarthy young (consenting adult) tradesmen in the privacy of his home involves a different standard than what he does with them onstage or on a public sidewalk, or what he does with someone who’s not a consenting adult. If you get the story on his sexual antics through less-than-legitimate means, and maliciously publish it knowing it would have a negative impact on his livelihood, you can be sued. Your defense isn’t “It happened, it’s true.” Your defense could be “The public needs to know about this,” but the public’s need to know (Was Liberace in a position of public trust? Did he offer himself as a role model to the nation’s youth? I don’t think so, but an argument could be made either way) has to be demonstrated to a greater degree than your obvious and demonstrated malice in publishing the story.