I just heard the story of how the actress Gene Tierney contracted German measles during her only appearance at a nightcluc called the Hollywood canteen. She was pregnant at the time, and her daughter was born prematurely, deaf, blind, and with severe mental retardation. She was devastated.
Some time later, Tierney was approached for an autograph by a woman at a tennis party, who, gushing over how big a fan she was of the actress, told Tierney that she had met her once before. She was such a big fan, she explained, that she had snuck out of quarantine, sick with rubella, just so she could see Tierney at the Hollywood Canteen.
Holy cow, I’d never heard this but just read the Wiki on it. According to it she just stared at the woman then, silently, walked away. I’d have been hard pressed to keep from saying “Come here… there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Thanks for telling this. She had an ‘interesting’ life, one I’m not inclined to trade for. Admittedly, at first I thought this is who you were talking about.
Wow, I never heard that story - that is just awful.
I have always felt that Gene Tierney was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen (link to a photo where she has a stern expression on her face, but you can see she has the facial structure of Nefertiti…).
ETA: Now that I think about it, you can see where Megan Foxhas a similar appeal (if framed in a far more skanky way…)
Wow, and I just read The Mirror Crack’d for the first time not three months ago. I thought it was all a product of Dame Christie’s great imagination. Who knew? I wonder if the fan ever found out what she had done?
A woman who is a big fan of Gene Tierney breaks rubella quarantine to meet her idol at a nightclub. Tierney subsequently contracts rubella and gives birth to a daughter with all sorts of problems. The birth of this child, the circumstances surrounding it, and the effect it had on Tierney must have been widely publicised at the time. Any fan of the actress will have known about the matter, for sure.
Years later, the fan goes to a tennis party and tells Tierney that she herself had rubella when the two women originally met at the Hollywood Canteen.
This is at best insensitive and at worst downright sadistic.
Well, in the book, which of course had some poetic license so may or may not match reality, the child’s condition was kept very hush-hush and out of the public eye, which didn’t seem inconsistent with treatment of the mentally disabled at the time.
Yes but vaccines are bad. You can survive rubella. Anyway the alternative would have been autism and there is no cure for autism and it’s the worse disease on the planet. And just think the lucky baby and mommy wound up with natural immunity. Because vaccines have terrible side effects whereas diseases are fun! You get to stay home and eat good foods and home someone fuss over you. This woman actually did Tierney a favor here.
