Prior to about 1955, the studio system told enormous whoppers about virtually ALL of their stars either to (1) make them the darlings of the public, or (2) keep their REAL activities out of the public eye.
The studios concocted war records, relationships, marriages, educational backgrounds, birthplaces, religeous preference, medical histories, hobbies, friendships, cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
There was no lie a studio publicist wouldn’t tell, and any star who contradicted the official line would quite literally “never work in this town again”.
The very first line of Marion Davies’s autobiography, The Times We Had, was a lie: I was born in 1905. In fact she was born in, at the latest, 1897 (some accounts back it up three more years).
She claims she was 15 when she began her affair with Hearst, who was 57, and it was totally innocent. The affair more likely began when she was about 18 and he was around 52. Her date also makes her a film star when she was 12 and on B’way (as a showgirl) when she was about 9.
She doesn’t lie about the Ince/Chaplin/Hearst affair (whatever happened) but just doesn’t mention it at all. She generally comes across as not particularly deep and at times dummer-than-a-bag-of-hair, though a generally very nice person who truly did grow to deeply love her Sugar Daddy. (The story of her hocking her jewels and other possessions to bail him out of a financial bind is famous.) Timothy Leary’s autobiographies (particularly Flashbacks) are all (undeniably very well written) masterpieces of self-exoneration in which, among other things, he claims never to have had a bad trip (which he contradicted in several other sources) and neglects to point out the many flaws in his Harvard studies on the benefits of LSD (not the least of which being that psychologists researching chemical use don’t generally trip/imbibe/get stoned with their test groups).
Didn’t Steven Seagal also go on Letterman and try to pass off the “dead dog replaced by live one at airport” urban legend as something that he did? Letterman called him on it, IIRC.
I do know that **Buffalo Bill Cody ** personally invented enough bullstuff about his past to fill a book, which he then hawked copies of at his Wild West Show.
Another type of closeted star: Jews. It’s almost hard to believe that believe that being Jewish was once something studios wanted to cover up, but famous “I didn’t know s/he was Jewish” stars included *Leslie Howard *[b. L.H. Stainer] who was fairly devout himself and whose parents were very conservative and observant Hungarian Jews, Judy Holliday (b. Judith Tuvin), Eddie Albert (b. E.A. Heimberger) and Lorne Greene (b. Lorne Hyman Greene and named in honor of his two grandfathers, both of whom were rabbis).
I wonder (especially since so many studio execs were Jewish) if the knowledge that some of these actors were actually Jewish really would have hurt their career. I can’t imagine Eddie Heimberger being any less funny on Green Acres than Eddie Albert, and Eva Gabor was pretty “openly Hungarian” even though most of middle-America couldn’t relate to that.
OTOH, the sad thing is that if you do a google of the names “Leslie Howard Stainer” and “Edward Albert Heimberger”, you come up with several white-supremacist, neo-Nazi and Islamic supremacist sites. What sick sick sad sad f*cks.
River Phoenix - There were a lot of different stories going around about his family life and how he grew up, a few versions from River himself. And he also claimed in a Vogue Magazine interview in 1990 that he’d never done drugs, and never would do drugs. His quote: “Like Nancy says - Just Say No.” He OD’d the next year.
Two of the biggest tale-spinners were Pearl White and Mae Murray—White because she had a great sense of humor and loved playing games with the press; and Murray because she was nuttier than a Stuckey’s log. She was born in 1886, but always referred to her good friend Rudolph Valentino (born in 1895) as “being just like an older brother to me.”
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Michael Landon did the same thing on Johnny Carson with the closely related blow dried dead rabbit story (also used in the godawful Dickie Roberts).
I remember William Shatner attempting to tell the same story on Letterman. But he totally screwed up the punchline. Nobody laughed. I remember yelling “That’s not how the story goes! You screwed it up! That’s not even funny!”
River Phoenix spoke of this in an interview. He said he use to tell totally inconsistent stories in press interviews and had wondered if had ever anyone compared the different vresion of events, because if so they’d think he “was schizophrenic.”
The basics of his family and biographical background is right. But some well-known stories were fabricated and/or contradictory (e.g./ It was widely publicized that he’d lost his virginity at the age of four, do just “dumb kid stuff”, other times they make a big deal about how his hippie parents decorated a tent so he could have his first time with an older girl whio was a friend fo the family’s).
In amid the Hollywood stars who fudged their backgrounds, there was Erich von Stroheim, who claimed to be from German nobility, while his parents were actually Jewish shopkeepers. He kept up the facade most of his life.
Josef von Sternberg did the same thing, though he gladly admitted the “von” was just a pose.
Oh, just remembered. Stephanie Romanov, Angel’s ever-sexy “Lilah”, says she is the granddaughter of Grand Duchess Xenia, claiming she to be a direct descendent of the Russina Tsars. This is denied by the Imperial Family.
Whether she is “lying” or just “mistaken” is unclear.
Anton LaVey (aka Anthony “Tony” Levey) claims- descent from European (I think Gypsy) aristocracy, a circus organist (no circus could verify that tho it’s not impossible, he was a good organist), had an affair with Marilyn Monroe in her Norma Jean days when she stripped at the sideshow, worked as a crime photographer for a police dept (I think he claimed San Francisco), inadvertently cursed to death irreverent disciple Jayne Mansfield. The circus organist part is the only one that is even probably.
On the other side- there are the Christian “ex-occultist” hoaxsters-
Mike Warnke- Satanist High Priest in charge a coven of 1500 & half the area’s
drug traffic
John “Lance Collins” Todd- Grand Druid Illuminist in charge of “demonizing” rock
albums
Lauren Stratford- Satanic ritual abuse victim & breeder (I won’t count “Michelle” of
MICHELLE REMEMBERS because I never saw her on every talk show in the late
1980s)
Alberto Rivera- ex-Jesuit infiltrator of Evangelical churches, Jack Chick’s albatross
Dr. Rebecca Brown- rescuer of ex-Witch/Bride of Satan “Elaine”, fought Satanic
conspiracy against her in the hospital where she worked, also attacked by astral
projecting Satanists & threatened by a werewolf, married to Daniel Yoder- who
was ritually abused by Kabbalistic Rabbis while a child, even Jack Chick doesn’t
publish her stuff any more
William Schnoebelin (or Schoenbelin?) (aka Christopher Syn) ex-Wiccan,
Voodooist, LaVeyan Satanist, Catholic priest, Mormon, Illuminist, Vampire (I think
he wins the prize!)
I read an exegesis of A Moveable Feast which argued pretty convincibly that most of Hemingway’s stories about being a poor, starving writer in Paris were bullshit: his wife at the time, Hadley, had a comfortable inheritance and it seems likely that the Hemingways lived a nice middle class lifestyle in Paris. Of course, spinning tall tales about starving for his art is probably the least of Hemingway’s sins in that department (eg., the slander perpetrated on Scott Fitzgerald with the famous “the rich are different from you and me” anecdote).
Another poster mentioned Charlie Chaplin’s claim to be Jewish; in fact, Chaplin really didn’t know what his ancestry was (I’ve even heard it suggested that Charles Chaplin, Sr. wasn’t his real father), and I’m sure that at least some of his claims to Jewish ancestry were made to rankle Nazi sympathizers and other xenophobes. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t lie about plenty of other things, most notably the role other comics had on his art. He consistently downplayed the influence of both his predecessors (such as Max Linder) and his contemporaries (including Arbuckle and Keaton). He took credit for composing the scores for his films when much of the actual work was done by hired composers (credited as “arrangers” when they were credited at all).
Jim Morrison used to tell the press that his parents were dead, when in fact they were not. (His father was a Navy admiral—not a very cool association in the counterculture in the 60s, to be sure.)
More or less correct; Patrick O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ. While he claimed to be an Irish Catholic, his family was English of German descent, and not Catholic. He essentially abandoned his family around the beginning of WWII, worked (though perhaps only peripherally) in British intelligence during the war, took up with the English ex-wife of Count Dmitri Tolstoy, Mary Wicksteed Tolstoy. He formally changed his name to Patrick O’Brian two weeks after they were married. Tolstoy’s son, Nikolai, has written a brief memoir in which he defends O’Brian from many of the alleged lies and character flaws with which he’s been charged since his death.
Related links: New York Times obit, including information about O’Brian’s deceptions regarding his personal history (note that this article contains at least one factual error I’m aware of: Master and Commander, the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, was published in 1970, not 1959 as stated in the article): http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/pob/times-unabridged.html
On the other hand there is Paul Henreid, born Paul Georg Julius Henreid Ritter Von Wassel-Waldingau, who WAS Austro-Hungarian nobility but didn’t make a big thing of it.