I have no cite, but I understand that Abraham Lincoln, and Emperor Dom Joao II (last emperor of Brazil) were good friends, so much so that Dom Joao offered to mediate between the North and South, in the Civil War.
As I recall, Burton told Brigham Young he wanted to convert to the Mormon faith, where Young laughed and remarked that he understood that Burton had tried a similar kind of thing before (Mecca/Medina)…
Oh hellacool! (It’d be embarassing to admit how much I LOVE little out-of-the-way offbeat local history things like that [as in I’m leaving for Chattanooga tomorrow so that I can stand on the side of a mule massacre on its anniversary). I’ve always wished that some action figure company would make scaled figures of Barnum’s stars (Tom Thumb, Chang-Eng, Bates-Swan, etc.)- I’d be embarassed to admit how much I’d probably be willing to pay for them ;).)
Re: the Dickens-Poe meeting- that must have been peculiar for the success disparity between them also. Poe was always famously a day late and a dollar short while Dickens was one of the first authors to get really rich from his writings (and he dressed it- wore jeweled rings and tailored silk clothes and the like). I wonder if he had an element of “ewww… workhouse flashback” with Poe.
Leon Askin, is mostly unknown by name, but unforgettable by face to a generation of baby boomers as Gen. Burkhalter–Col. Klink’s hapless, frustrated boss–from “Hogan’s Heroes,” in a role that while vastly beneath his talents, at least gave him a steady paycheck.
Anyway, at age 9, Leon Askin appeared before the Emperor Franz Joseph to recite a poem.
One of my favorite Brigham Young stories from the 1870s is not about a meeting but I’ll include it anyway. Supposedly some federal official or other sent a letter to Young thanking him for his graciousness and hospitality at a recent meeting they had, very nice and cordial letter; the same official sent another letter to an associate in Washington in which he referenced “met with the horny old billy goat and dfja ioafa afa”- very insulting tone (and horny old billy goat a direct quote). In true I LOVE LUCY {Decker} fashion he stuffed the envelopes with the wrong letters. Young sent his letter to D.C. with a little handwritten “I think this is supposed to be yours. Compliments, Brigham Young, H.O.B.G.” (horny old billy goat).
Young was a huge theatre lover who got all the great entertainers of the day to stop in SLC where they were surprised to find state-of-the-art theatrical facilities. He supposedly became very enamored of a famous actress of the time named Julia Dean, so much that he proposed to her and named his private sleigh and a train car for her. She declined for obvious reasons, but when she died in childbirth (much preached about by various ministers at the time as the wages of a sinful life [she was a wild sort of woman- divorced a couple of times and the like, big deal for 1868]) Brigham Young supposedly had his wife Amelia Folsom (the one who among dozens of wives you could still say “the queen bitch” and everyone would know who you meant) stand in for her and married posthumously by proxy.
There was also a supposed exchange twixt Young and Grant’s VP Schuyler Colfax in which Colfax urged Young to give up the practice of polygamy as an example to his people. Young told him “I have many wives and dozens of children, what would you propose I do with them? If I were President Grant I could just give them all government jobs and fat government contracts but I only have a territory and a state, and besides most of them are honest.” (Grant’s relatives and in-laws were much in the news at the time.)
More impressively, he got to work with Gary Coleman and Donny Most later in his career.
His life fascinates me. I had hoped to meet him because of his memories— the emperor, 1920s and 1930s cabaret stardom, parents who were acolytes of Freud, etc., but he died. I did exchange emails- basically fan letters- with his wife/widow a few times (she’s about 50 years younger) that she was kind enough to relay to him. For those unfamiliar with his story, his parents were intellectuals and artists- fairly well to do- and Jewish; his mother was also blind from birth. Leon was a young actor/singer/comedian and influential in the CABARET era cabarets, worked with a lot of the most famous German language directors and theater figures of the time (Jura Soyer, Fritz Lang, etc.), and of course got into no shortage of trouble with the Nazis. He was in Switzerland when he got word that a warrant was out for his arrest and so he never went home, which of course saved his life. His parents were made window dressing for Theresienstadt and later went to the gas chambers.
He meanwhile came to America, served in the U.S. Army during the war, and gradually resumed his acting career in NYC. He was a favorite character actor of Billy Wilder, who became one of his best friends (Wilder was also the son of Holocaust victims incidentally) and of course became General Burkhalter and “that old fat Nazi guy”. (He said that kids would give him the Nazi salute on the street, having no idea it was insulting, so while he couldn’t bring himself to return it he’d glare at them and screech “Out of zee vay Klink!” to them in character, which they could giggle at.) He worked constantly- The Monkees, Happy Days, Diff’rent Strokes, and a thousand other sitcoms, movies, soap operas, but was mainly a stage actor. Most surprising was that he was always obese and looked on the verge of a heart attack, yet he kept showing up in everything and always looked healthy, just older.
In his 80s he decided to return to his native Vienna. His wife of 40 years didn’t want to go and they split up, which he said was hard but… c’est la vie. He got back to Austria, found the neo-Nazi movement was making many Jews afraid again, and he founded a retirement home for elderly Jews- particularly elderly Jews in the arts- patrolled by Uzi carrying Israeli mercenaries (with full government clearance of course). He became- no pun intended- huge in Austria, appearing in stage and TV and movies constantly, busier than he’d been in years, won all manner of awards and recognitions, and realized a lifelong dream of playing King Lear in German in his 90s (albeit in a wheelchair). He married his last wife- many years his junior (a “caretaker with benefits” I’m guessing) and the last decade of his very long life was one of the busiest. The morbidly obese Nazi surviving guy lived into his late 90s, recording a documentary a few days before he died.
Sorry, got off on a tangent, but he’s one of those “Damn I wish I’d met him” guys. And he connects Gary Coleman to the Austrian Emperor.
Winston Churchill and Mohandas K. Gandhi – whose lives were intertwined in many ways as time went on – met only once, in 1906, when Churchill was the Colonial undersecretary and Gandhi was lobbying on behalf of Indians in South Africa. The meeting was fairly inconsequential – Churchill was not about to give in on any of Gandhi’s points – but they developed an impression of each other that colored their thinking for 40 years.
Isaac Asimov wrote about the time he was introduced to F. Murray Abraham. Asimov had been so impressed by Abraham in Amadeus that he spend the entire time complimenting him.
Frances Perkins, the first woman in the cabinet, had a lot of encounters and meetings when she was young. Author Sinclair Lewis, who was just starting out, actually proposed to her. She pretended he was joking, and they remained friends.
At a different time, Perkins joined a bunch of people on a boat excursion around Manhattan. She struck up a conversation with a man about her age who pointed at the west side of lower Manhattan and started extolling how he’d love to turn it all into parkland. He was Robert Moses.
Favorite post I have read all week!!!
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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, who though ideologically opposed were still the two most famous and influential black leaders of the 1960s, met only once in their life, and it was only for a few minutes. I don’t know why but I’ve always found this surprising but I have.
Another surprising “barely knew each other” was Johnny Carson and Jack Paar. The first time they met was when Johnny had been host of The Tonight Show and it had been in L.A. for years. Both knew Steve Allen but neither could stand him (in which I think they were in good and considerable company).
Didn’t Malcolm X say to MLK something like, “you know we do have one thing in common, we’re both dead men.”?
Not a meeting per se, but I believe I’ve seen a photograph of Lincoln’s funeral procession, with a young Teddy Roosevelt observing (just a silhouette in a window, but someone apparently knew who it was).
None of that actually surprises me except for Cronkite liking their music.
He actually tried to present a petition for the freedom of Vietnam to the Allied powers at the WWI peace negotiations that ended up as the Treaty of Versailles, unsuccessfully as it turned out.
Interesting people who were also present at some part of those negotiations and may well have met include Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, T. E. Lawrence, Jan Smuts, and no doubt others I can’t recall right now.
Well, there was the famous 1973 Monday Night Football game where Ronald Reagan and John Lennon both dropped by as guests. For a few minutes, at least, the two hit it off, and Reagan patiently explained the finer points of American football to Lennon
The Chevalier d’Eon, the famous cross-dressing French captain-of-dragoons cum spy, knew Pierre Augustin-Caron de Beaumarchais (author of the three Figaro plays, a fellow spy, and a player in the American Revolution) and the two were even rumored to be engaged, a rumor encouraged by Beaumarchais himself, but certainly not by d’Eon. D’Eon also met Casanova at a dinner party, if I’m not mistaken, and Casanova discusses the strange case of him/her in his memoirs. Casanova also met Frederick the Great, who told him he was “a fine figure of a man”, something Casanova took as a come-on (knowing Frederick, it may have been).
The Marquis de Sade was a contemporary of all three and active at this time, but I’m not sure if any of them ever met him; d’Eon certainly would’ve refused to be in the same room with him, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Beaumarchais crossed paths with him at some point at court. The Marquis was also a distant cousin of Mirabeau, but IIRC the two hated each other.
Also, the phenomenon of tangled webs of celebrity love affairs is nothing new. One of the longer and more impressive ones I can find goes:
Frederic Chopin, the famous composer and George Sand, the author
George Sand and Alfred de Musset, the poet
Alfred de Musset and Rachel Felix, the great actress
Rachel Felix and a whole lost of gentlemen, including Prince Louis Napoleon, Emile de Girardin, and Alexandre Walewski (Napoleon’s illegitimate son, to whom she bore a son). She also knew both Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (*pere *and fils) but so far as I know she didn’t have affairs with them, although Dumas fils pursued her madly.
Wasn’t that Nixon and Lennon?
Albert Einstein met with the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion. Although Einstein is now mostly famous for his work in physics, he was also very politically active late in life, especially in regards to the state of Israel. He was even offered the position of prime minister, but declined.
There’s also the night where Einstein and his wife joined Charlie Chaplin on a red carpet walk for the premiere of one of Chaplin’s films.
Aw, this one was going to be mine. This is probably my favorite “famous people who knew each other” anecdote, and I like to mention it if the subject of Wilde or Stoker comes up.
When Florence Balcombe ditched Wilde in favor of Stoker, Wilde swore he’d never return to Ireland. He did, but only for a couple of short visits. Everything I’ve heard about the Stoker marriage indicates that it was not particularly happy, and it amused me to imagine that during an argument Florence might once have pointed out that she didn’t have to marry him – she could have been MRS. OSCAR WILDE! But considering the very public embarrassment the real Mrs. Oscar Wilde (nee Constance Lloyd) suffered, I agree that Florence probably was better off with the man she actually did marry.
This is the opposite of what you’re asking for, but I spent some time trying and failing to find evidence that philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had met my favorite 19th century monarch, King Ludwig II of Bavaria (“Mad King Ludwig”). I’d be very curious to know what they thought of each other. Both men were close friends of composer Richard Wagner and both visited Wagner at his home in Switzerland on multiple occasions, but as far as I can tell never at the same time. Both Nietzsche and Ludwig were at the first Bayreuth opera festival, but Ludwig had become pretty reclusive by that time and did little or no socializing at the festival.
Speaking of Wagner and Ludwig II, many Bavarians disliked the influence the composer had over their young king. Some even made jokes comparing Wagner to the notorious Lola Montez, mistress of Ludwig II’s grandfather, King Ludwig I. Prior to her relationship with Ludwig I, Montez had an affair with composer Franz Liszt. Since Liszt’s daughter Cosima later married Wagner, this means that Wagner’s father-in-law and Ludwig II’s grandfather had shared a mistress.
There’s a famous photo of Rosalynn Carter with John Wayne Gacy when he was active in the local Democratic party near the home where he had bodies buried in the basement.
Helen Keller, Scott Joplin, and Thomas Edison were among those who met Geronimo at the 1904 World’s Fair in (Meet Me in) St. Louis. Technically a prisoner for 18 years by the time, he was something like a turn of the century American Caractacus at the time, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s prized inherited possessions, and he was there selling autographs (written in all caps- he was illiterate and old) at TR’s request in hopes he’d be given permission to go home to the Apache lands. He never was allowed, but he did get to ride in a limo in Roosevelt’s second inauguration. (Geronimo and relatives in a Cadillac he owned and actually drove himself, though not at the inauguration obviously.)
Gore Vidal has met pretty much everybody, but one I only learned about recently that he was very close to was Amelia Earhart. While I take any of Vidal’s claims with a grain of salt (even by the standards of 9-11 conspiracists his theories are particularly loopy), other biographers and primary sources pretty much confirm that his father, aeronautics exec Eugene Vidal (who made 9 year old Gore one of the youngest solo pilots in history) and Earhart were lovers for several years.
Robert E. Lee’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee (a woman who had been arrested in 1902 for sitting in a black only train car when her maid was evicted from the white car) was in London when World War I began but continued with her plans to visit Germany. She was basically caught behind lines when the war began but was treated with great hospitality and housed in castles and was a dinner guest of Hindenberg and of various members of the imperial family. She died of natural causes (she was 83) a few days after Armistice.
Anecdotal but I promise it’s true: my cousin’s husband was a chef and my cousin a waitress at The Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among their members were Sissy Spacek, Muhammad Ali, and Anna Anderson (aka Mrs. Jack Manahan, aka “Her Serene Highness the Grand Dutchess Anastasia Nicholoevna Romanova” according to her supporters [pretty much disproven with DNA since but she had her believers in her time]) and they said they saw the three mingle not once but several times in groups of two (Anna with Muhammad, Muhammad with Sissy, Sissy with Anna, etc.) which I always thought was an odd image, though I thought it odder when I believed Anna Anderson might really be Anastasia. (She and her husband- a much younger history prof who she married for resident alien status- were two very weird characters far in excess of her royal claims; they were compulsive hoarders who lived in a once beautiful but run down and filthy plantation house [that had belonged to one of Thomas Jefferson’s grandchildren] and kept a pack of stray dogs they wouldn’t leash or fence or vaccinate which caused constant legal problems and drove around town in a station wagon my cousin described as “so full of shit that you couldn’t put a Tic-Tac in it”, but they had many friends.)
Speaking of Anna Anderson and of this, while not exactly a meeting but an odd lay-line whose truth I can’t verify but it was definitely claimed in her book:
Marfyana Grigorioevna Novyka, the legitimate daughter of Rasputin, fled Russia and became- quite famously- a circus performer with Ringling Brothers in a lion act and was billed as “Maria Rasputina, daughter of the Mad Monk!” She wrote three autobiographies; this is from the third (though not directly quoted as I don’t have a copy anymore).
Maria (one of the supporters of Anna Anderson’s claims, though this isn’t relevant) had a daughter who hung with an avante garde crowd in Paris and for a time was in an open relationship with a bisexual actor who occasionally worked as a gigolo. Her daughter knew this, had no problem with it, but had never told him her “secret identity” as the Mad Monk’s granddaughter until it came out during one of her mother’s visits. When it happened the bisexual gigolo (what mother doesn’t dream of her daughter bringing one home) went into hysterical laughter and said “I can’t believe this I can’t believe this” and ran for the telephone. He said “Darling, you are not going to believe who’s here and who else I’ve been screwing!”
On the other end of the phone was Prince Feliks Yussupov, the Tsar’s nephew-in-law and the world famous murderer of Rasputin. He had published books about Rasputin, exaggerating several aspects (we’ll probably never know how much of the “impossible to kill” story was true) and Maria had sued him for years (court ruled in his favor) and so he was the archenemy, but the openly gay [save for a marriage to the Tsar’s niece that he consummated enough to get a daughter] Yussupov was sleeping with the same young man as his victim’s granddaughter. (Later Rasputin’s granddaughter married a French diplomat and politician and became close friends with Yussupov’s family.)
Yussupov’s (or however you spell it- I’ve seen it several different ways) has a slight bit of a gay Russian Schindler’s List quality. In Russia he redefined the word decadence and was the world’s richest transvestite; his family had the kind of wealth that not even Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could compare with (one of their private estates was 300 miles from end to end and had its own railroad with peasants for whom the serfs need never have been freed; by our standards they were billionaires many many times over with palaces and mansions all over Russia and more money than they could ever spend had the Revolution never happened.
The Tsar tolerated him because he was married to his niece, but the Empress had him banished for his role in Rasputin’s death, which saved his life and that of his wife and daughter since they surely would have been killed in the Revolution. All of his estates and most of his family’s money was in Russia; he escaped with her jewels, his jewels, about a million dollars in cash ($15 million or so in today’s money) and some Rembrandt’s and other valuable artworks, so let’s say something like $25 million all in all; this may sound like an amount most of us would pluck out an eye for, but when your wealth was literally unspendable before it’s not so much; you could spend $25 million pretty easily, plus there was no source of income.
What was incredible though is that as reduced as he was financially he spent the majority of his fortune helping other refugees of all social classes after the Revolution, even selling most of his art collection when his funds ran low after the Depression. He didn’t die indigent by any means (beautiful house in Paris made from the converted stables of a former mansion) but was only a fraction as wealthy as he would have been without supporting so many Russian refugee charities, and not even comparable to what he’d once been heir to. Just something I think’s interesting.