Art Linkletter was one of the richest men in show business (his mini-warehouse interests alone would have made him very very comfortable), but I will never understand how Ed managed to go broke. There’s no way he didn’t earn at least $100 million his his lifetime: The Tonight Show, Star Search, Bloopers and Practical Jokes, Og knows how many lesser forgotten well paying vehicles, commercials for absolutely everything, all of them featuring trucks filled with money. He got $50,000+ for emceeing appearance and was one of the most in-demand emcees in Hollywood. Plus just the his military retirement/Social Security in later years would have been more than most Americans earn and add in his SAG pension it would probably have been in the low six figures. Incredible that he was facing foreclosure in his late 80s.
With such a slim chance at success, people don’t choose to become actors for the money. Once you’ve got the acting bug, you’ll always have the need to act . . . even if you don’t need the money, and even if it’s just a commercial.
I don’t think there’s anything that can top the strange story of Ric Flair Finance, the lending company that banked on its founder’s image and referred to its business model as the “figure-four process”.
Tragically, 2007 turned out to be a bad time to go into investment banking.
I’m always surprised to see Michael Jordan, who has more money than God, still doing what seem to be otherwise pretty low-rent underwear commercials.
Alec Baldwin does TV ads for the Wegman’s supermarket chain in New York State because his mother likes the stores so much.
I have no cite, but recall reading somewhere that he also donates everything he makes from TV ads (all of them, not just Wegman’s) to charity.
So bully for him.
It’s a gift to the women of the world.
Fred Astaire appeared on an episode of the original “Battlestar Galactica” because one of his grandchildren was a fan of a show.
And even though you have money, you may want more. In the late 1970s Laurence Olivier was upfront about appearing in as many films, trashy or not (“The Betsy”) so he could leave a large estate to his heirs.
James Cagney appeared in a couple films in the early 1980s after a 20 year retirement to a farm in upstate New York because he felt he needed to “get the blood moving again”. There were also stories about a domineering housekeeper also a factor.
James Franco joining the cast of “General Hospital” has got to be up there.
Jordan played basketball at University of North Carolina, and Hanes is a big deal in the state. They gave him and the university bucketloads of cash and prizes. He’s majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats basketball team and they’re probably still stuffing dollars into his pockets.
The way I see it, he’s a celebrity and people are going to offer him huge money to do their commercials. he used to do:
MCI - went down in flames while executives stuffed money in their pockets
Nike - has made a business of getting ghetto kids to pay hundreds for a pair of shoes
McDonalds - not the most healthy food out there
Coca-Cola - ditto
Gatorade - the original exorbitantly-priced water
Everybody needs underwear. If you’re going to make forty million a year (reportedly) on endorsements, you may as well have some integrity.
Anyone heard about how Roger Daltrey’s finances are? Or were? Because about the biggest “Why?” I’ve ever felt about this sort of thing was a late-night infomercial he appeared in several years ago, hawking yet another collection of classic rock tunes to aging Baby Boomers. The main spokesperson was some photogenic woman blathering on about all these great songs from such a special time in history, blah blah blah. Roger occasionally looked into the camera and recited his couple of lines, but it seemed they mostly just wanted him to sit there in heavy studio makeup with the fakest smile you’ve ever seen plastered on his face, just looking at the spokeschick as she talked.
It was really sad. Not that he was doing advertisements at all- I remember he was in print ads for some expensive wristwatch once and wasn’t bothered- more that he was doing something so completely cheesy. Maybe it was a Michael Caine-Jaws 4 situation or something.
Why did Sir Laurence Olivier play Zeus in Clash of the Titans? He was one of the better actors EVER, and he took this stupid role.
God, I loved him in Spartacus, as Marcus Licinius Crassus. Plus, of course, whole lot of other roles as well. You know, Henry V, Hamlet etc, etc, and so forth.
I always though it was for continued eligibility in the union health plans. The senior premium used to be around $25 bucks a month.
Maybe Ed McMahon had some secret vices like gambling. Michael Jordan is an infamous gambler. Maybe a little extra money allows him some gambling funds.
I don’t mean to disparage any of these famous people but drugs, women, gambling, etc add up real quick.
Considering all the the godawful Sci-Fi channel horror movies he’s been in, John Rhys-Davies probably looks at any cheesy commercial he’s offered and thinks, "The money’s good, and God knows, it’s less embarrassing than Attack of the Giant Mutant Iguanas."
One of the biggest “wtf?” infomercial hosts was Cher’s hair care product infomercials for Lori Davis (I think that’s right) back in the 1990s. Per Cher, and I think she was probably telling the truth, she did it as a favor for a friend and had no idea it would be on all the damned time for the next two years.
I’ve heard this as well.
This was how Raul Julia ended up with his last movie being Street Fighter. He knew he was dying and took a few last big paychecks for his kids. His last would have been Desparado, but he got sick and had to be replaced.
[Montgomery Burns] I would give everything I own for just a little more! [/Montgomery Burns]
I was always under the impression that he was pretty level headed. Townshend could get into financial trouble by doing things like building a Meher Baba center that got overpriced as more and more expenses got added in the construction. Entwhistle liked to buy collections of things like knight’s armor and cars (he couldn’t drive). Daltrey, who was a jerk as a youth (I remember him saying he probably would have been a criminal if he didn’t get involved in music), really straightened out when the others threatened to kick him out in the mid 1960s (as singer, he did not like like the guitar player getting a lot of publicity).
Howard Stern once commented in the 1980s that some rich people, like Daltrey, do not give a lot of money to their children. Apparently Daltrey told his son that he would have to make his own way into life and his kid was an ordinary working stiff.He was also the first choice by a mile to play Juan Peron in Evita, but his health declined and he died before the movie was even really in pre-production.