Now that James Doohan is dead, I suppose the most famous D-Day veteran would be rotund character actor Charles Durning.
This is one of those weird but well documented pieces of trivia: in The Wizard of Oz the actor Frank Morgan (who played the wizard) wore a ratty out of fashion frock coat that the wardrobe department had acquired from a thrift store in L.A… The coat turned out to have once been the property of L. Frank Baum, author of Wizard of Oz. (Snopes)
Helen Keller’s income for many years was mostly from public appearances in Vaudeville and on speaking engagements around the world. Though blind she had a sited woman’s vanity and she knew that her blind eyes looked awkward, so she had them removed and replaced with beautiful blue prosthetic ones. Her eyes as well as her papers were destroyed on September 11 as they were housed in a vault at the WTC.
Sarah Bernhardt’s son was almost certainly fathered by a petty nobleman named Henri, Prince de Ligne, but in various interviews and conversations she claimed he was fathered by everybody from Pope Pius IX to Victor Hugo to Napoleon III to Buffalo Bill Cody. Her mother and aunts were all prostitutes (or courtesans, to be precise).
Robert Guillaume of SOAP was born to a 16 year old prostitute. Richard Pryor was the son of a prostitute and pimp; his mother’s mother was a madam. He grew up largely in his grandmother’s whorehouse and as an adolescent (about 15) a baby was born that might have been his child or might have been his half-sibling (his father was sleeping with the same girl).
Nobody knows what happened to Albert Einstein’s oldest child. It is known that he fathered a daughter, Lieserl, by his girlfriend Mileva Maric in 1902, but even though he later married Mileva and had two sons with her it is not known what became of Lieserl. Best evidence is that she was privately adopted, though she may have died. His sons did not know they had had a sister; it was discovered by a grandchild going through Einstein’s German language papers. (I think a fictional account of Lieserl’s fate could be a really interesting Little Big Manish novel.)
Liberace was also born with a dead twin brother. Liberace weighed more than 10 lbs. and his brother weighed about 2. Til his last years he always had latent guilt that he had killed his brother in the womb.
Johnny Cash and June Carter were on tour and stopped in the little town of Great Falls Montana. Being that my grandmother was the daughter of country music legendary songwriter Elsie McWilliams… June wanted to meet her. So my grandfather and grandmother went back stage and met June Carter and she was a wonderfully sweet… Johnny Cash on the other hand was a drunken drugged up jerk.
My grandfather told my grandmother; “I don’t like that Cash fella anymore.”
These were told to me by a friend years ago, so I have no citations, but:
Mike Nesmith of the Monkees learned to play the guitar as physical therapy after a firecracker blew up in his hand.
His mother invented Liquid Paper.
And, last but not least, he fought with Don Kirschnerr over creative control of the Monkees. He absolutely refused to record “Sugar, Sugar” and put his fist through a wall as part of the argument, pointing out that “That could have been your face!”
I’ll add a nitpick that’s actually also possibly another twist. The “grandchild” involved in the discovery of Lieserl was Evelyn Einstein, the adopted daughter of Hans Albert, who was one of the two sons. Strictly speaking, I don’t think she uncovered the story of Lieserl herself. She’d been rummaging through the papers she inherited from Hans Albert, on behalf of the editors of the ongoing project to publish Einstein’s collected writings, when she came across copies of the key original letters between Albert and Mileva. Evelyn Einstein does read German, but I believe she passed the copies on to the project and it was only then that the story of Lieserl emerged from them.
The twist? There’s been the suggestion for some years that Evelyn may actually be another daughter of Albert’s. The idea goes that as the illegitimate product of one of his affairs, she was then raised by the childless Hans Albert and his wife with a cover story of her being adopted. No proof has been forthcoming, not least because, for her own reasons, she’s declined DNA testing.
My related trivia derives from the fact that Albert’s other son was institutionalised in Switzerland for most of his life. Both him and James Joyce’s daughter Lucia were treated by Jung at similar times and, while I can’t quite prove it, I strongly suspect they overlapped in the same hospital during their treatments with him. One envisages a play involving Eduard Einstein, Lucia Joyce and Jung, set in the asylum.
The actress that played Jerry’s mother on Seinfeld was engaged to James Dean.
(I know many people are going to roll their eyes at this next one, but I swear everytime I bring this up, it comes as a surprise to somebody):
Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.
I was going to mention some of Christopher Lee’s more interesting bits of trivia, but there’s so much fascinating stuff that I think I’ll just link to his Bio.
Peter Graves and James Arness (brothers- the family name is Aurness)
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Vic Morrow (daughter/father)
Ione Skye and “Mellow Yellow” pop-star Donovan (daughter-father)
Robert Conrad and Larry Manetti (most famous for Magnum PI)- half-brothers
John Hillerman and Tony Hillerman- first cousins
Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley (first cousins)
The twins who played Adam on Bewitched were adopted. When they became adults they found their birth mother and learned that their biological father is Tony Curtis. They look just like him. Pics
Peter Graves and James Arness (brothers- the family name is Aurness)
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Vic Morrow (daughter/father)
Ione Skye and “Mellow Yellow” pop-star Donovan (daughter-father)
Robert Conrad and Larry Manetti (most famous for Magnum PI)- half-brothers
John Hillerman and Tony Hillerman- first cousins
Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley (first cousins)
The twins who played Adam on Bewitched were adopted. When they became adults they found their birth mother and learned that their biological father is Tony Curtis. They look just like him. Pics
Here’s a pretty obscure one that I just sussed out last night while I couldn’t sleep:
The Canadian rock group “April Wine” has a song called “I Like To Rock” (1979), the climax of which has one guitarist start the riff from the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, then the other guitarist overlaps it with the riff from The Beatles’ “Day Tripper.” It’s neat, it works, and they and we may have thought they did it first.
Uh-uh.
I was listening the other day to some oldies, and heard Mac Davis’ “One Hell Of A Woman” (1974). The intro starts with the bassist playing harmony on the riff from “Satisfaction”, then the first melody that comes in is played by the keyboardist on the clavinet: “Day Tripper.”
The guy who played Father Guido Sarduchi (The Vatican’s Rock Critic and Gossip Columnist) was once arrested at the Vatican for impersonating a Priest. His sister was Surgeon General of the United States.
Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) was the great-nephew of Anna Owens (aka Anna Leonowens), the writer whose (mostly overstated to the point of fiction) books and biography inspired Anna and the King of Siam and The King & I.
When Bela Lugosi was old and broke and drug addicted and a total has-been in America he was offered a generous salary and the use of a mansion to return to his native Hungary to be Minister of Culture. He declined.
So well known that I hesitate to mention it, but I will just in case anybody doesn’t know it: Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died of natural causes on the same day that JFK was assassinated. Their obituaries were so buried in the back of the paper because of Kennedy/Oswald/Ruby, etc., that they continued to receive mail and offers for speaking engagements for years after they died.
Ben Kingsley and Harrison Ford have something in common with the guy who played Pedro Cerrano. But Alec Baldwin isn’t part of this group - although he would have been, had he continued playing a character played by one of the other actors I’ve mentioned, and they’d kept making a few more movies about that character.
Paul Lynde once got drunk and threw a whisky bottle at Dick Van Dyke’s head. I know this is at the sub atomic level of trivia, but if there was any event in the history of show business I would like to have witnessed, this would be it. It would have been timeless comedy.
