Mary Livingstone, Jack Benny’s wife, was not liked by contemporaries George Burns, Gracie Allen or Lucille. Her adopted daughter Joan argued with her a lot and says she can’t understand with all she had going for her, she couldn’t enjoy life more.
Nobody from the original cast / crew of Saturday Night Live ever had anything nice to say about Chevy Chase.
And he also got sued by Cary Grant for making homophobic jokes about him when Tom Snyder commented that Chase may be the new Cary Grant. People said some strange things in 1980.
I’ve heard Tom Arnold on a bunch of podcasts over the last few years. His fellow comedians seem to like him quite a bit. Back in the Roseanne days he was out of control because of his substance abuse and being married to Roseanne. Since then he has mellowed out considerably.
Buddy Rich was apparently a first-class asshole.
Yeah. He was so abusive toward his band members that one of them secretly recorded some of his rants to make a case with the musicians’ union. Here they are.
I know that, but wtf Jackie Mason???
Like every other comic in existence suddenly said “Hell no, I don’t want to be associated with a franchise that resurrected Rodney Dangerfield!”?
A lot of his baseball teammates found Doyle Alexander to be a miserable person. Alexander also negotiated his own contracts and had a habit of getting long term deals that looked good initially but quickly became underpaying. Alexander was left to complain about how many other players were making more.
And then there is Mel Hall, currently doing 45 years for sexual assault of 12 and 14 year old girls.
Most people who worked with Jackie Gleason seemed to regard him as a tyrant and an egomaniac. Neil Simon supposedly said he became a playwright so that he’d never have to work for Gleason or anyone like him again.
That’s what I was going to write.
He seems like the type of person who would literally give you the shirt off his back.
And for that matter, I don’t think I know of anyone saying anything bad about him.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of Andy Griffith as being ‘despised.’ There’s pretty good consensus that he was not a social person on the set to cast and crew, and when the cameras weren’t rolling he pretty much kept to himself, but ‘despised’ is a little harsh.
I’ve also heard the same thing about Redd Foxx on “Sanford and Son,” too. For all his humor, he pretty much kept to himself on the set. And completely unlike Tim Moore (Kingfish on "Amos ‘n’ Andy). His co-workers said that the stuff he said when the cameras weren’t rolling was funnier than his scripted lines.
“Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
Re: Joan Crawford, the other day I saw this quote–
From what I’ve read and heard, Gleason was simultaneously a control freak (“Entire production supervised by Jackie Gleason”) and a huge party animal. He may have aggravated a lot of people, but you can bet they all had fun at the same time.
I remember one story where he was throwing a big bash that went into the wee hours. Audrey Meadows (“Alice” on The Honeymooners) showed up and was immediately assigned to kitchen duty, basting an ovenful of chickens! Another time, Jackie and his entourage were traveling across the country by train, and there was unlimited booze and a hired band to provide music on demand.
Gleason’s partying often put the show behind its production schedule, but the cast was so good at improvising you would never know it. Whenever you saw Ralph Kramden pat his stomach, it was the signal that Gleason had forgotten his lines. At least one entire episode was filmed without a script; they went into it after discussing only the basic premise (Art Carney: “You come home and start arguing about something with Alice, I’ll come in after a few minutes and help you settle it!”). And one of Alice’s best lines ever, “You get any bigger, Gasbag, and you’ll float away!” was made up on the spot.
Mason was a hot property back then. He had a comeback with his Broadway show “The World According to Me” with all kinds of stories about the “finger-pointing” incident on Ed Sullivan. Then again a lot of people associated with the first turned it down (Dangerfield, Murray), later wished they had (Chase) or were dead (Knight).