Share a bit of cultural trivia

Cafe Society
41

By marriage, not by blood. Rita’s uncle married Ginger’s aunt, if I’m not mistaken.

Glenn Close and Brooke Shields are cousins a couple degrees removed. Brooke’s paternal grandmother was an Italian aristocrat – Marina Torlonia – and she’s related thusly to the Princes of Monaco and the Spanish Royal Family. The Marquis de Sade is an ancestral cousin of Brooke’s.

Gregory Peck was partly Armenian by ancestry. So is Prince William of Wales for that matter; Princess Diana’s furthest traced matrilineal ancestress was an Armenian woman named Eliza Kevark who resided in India with her Scottish lover.

The famous author Pushkin was 1/8th Ethiopian, and was also a distant relative of Tolstoy. Alexandre Dumas and Colette were also both part African in ancestry.

42

Kirstie Alley was once a contestant on Match Game

The TV and Music Geeks from Comedy Central’s Beat the Geeks had both been contestants on Greed

and because others have given their star connections…

My wife’s ex-boss’s neighbor’s nephew is Justin Timberlake

and

My wife’s brother’s wife’s cousin is Johnny Knoxville from Jackass and Men in Black II.

43

In case anyone was curious about this connection, I did a little more research and found the link between Pushkin and Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s great-great-grandmother was the sister of Pushkin’s great-grandmother, making them second cousins once removed.

Prince Ivan Golovin was their common ancestor:

  1. Eudoxia Ivanova Golovina
    1.1. Lev Pushkin
    1.1.1. Sergei Pushkin
    1.1.1.1. Alexander Pushkin, author (1799-1837)
  2. Olga Ivanova Golovina
    1.1. Dmitri Troubetskoy
    1.1.1. Ekaterina Troubetskaya
    1.1.1.1. Maria Volkonskaya
    1.1.1.1.1. Lev Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)
44

Although credited as Prince Charming, the Prince in Disney’s ***Cinderella * ** is never called by name. And IIRC, he only sings part of one song otherwise speaks no dialog.

In The Sound of Music, Maria never calls her boss/husband by his name, but instead calls him Captain or Darling.

45

A very good friend of mine was a paparazzi, working for his uncle Ron Galella. (Galella was noted for his stalking of Jackie Kennedy, and had a court order to stay 500’ away from her at all times) My friend, through his work, hooked up with Brooke Shields, and dated her a half a dozen times. Her mother, Teri. was THE BOSS when Brooke lived at home, and she split them up.

46

Francis Ford Coppola won his first Academy Award in 1970 for Patton’s original screenplay (with Edmund North). Not trivia exactly, but most people are surprised he won an Oscar pre-Godfather.

His father, musician and composer Carmine Coppola, was playing flute on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio show at the time of Francis’ birth. This is the origin of the middle name “Ford.”

47

If you remember watching Twilight Zone The Movie back in 1983 your sure to remember the last segment with the boy that can “wish people into the cornfield”. If you remember his nervous “Sister Ethel” but can’t place the voice it’s none other than Nancy Cartwright who is the voice of Bart Simpson.

48

Speaking of Prince William’s ancestry, he can also trace it to Satan. He is a direct descendant of Henry II (of Lion in Winter and Becket fame), whose great-great-grandmother by his father, Geoffrey of Angou, was Melusine. She was a beautiful wanderer when she married his ancestor and she always found an excuse not to attend mass. After a few years of this her husband became annoyed and had her physically compelled; when the host was raised she turned into a winged serpentine beast, grabbed her youngest children, and flew away for she was, you see, the daughter of Satan. The child she didn’t grab was Henry II’s great-grandfather. (Google Melusine Angou for more info.)

More pointless but interesting & true trivia:

Dr. Ruth Westheimer was trained as a sniper and as a paratrooper during her service in the Israeli army. Her parents managed to send her to Switzerland before WW2 which saved her life; they and the rest of her family were killed in the Holocaust.

Other famous people who lost their parents in the Holocaust include Billy Wilder (Sunset Blvd, Some Like it Hot, etc.), an actor he worked with named Leon Askin who is best remembered today for playing General Burkhalter on Hogan’s Heroes (he looked old and morbidly obese 35 years ago but in fact he is not only still alive [at 97] but still working, recently remarried and the star of his own web site), his fellow Hogan stars John “Sgt. Schulz” Banner (who was a bodybuilder and a romantic lead on the German & Austrian stage before refugeeing to America) and Robert Clary (who unlike his fellow Hogan stars was a concentration camp survivor himself and remarked upon the oddity of having to cover up his Dachau tattoo when doing makeup to portray a POW). Roman Polanski’s mother died at Auschwitz as did Sigmund Freud’s octagenarian sisters. (Werner “Col. Klink” Klemperer’s family, also Jewish, refugeed to America before the war; more trivia about him- his widow was an actress and was the sister of the actress who played Donna on Sanford & Son and Gertie on The Waltons.)

Everybody knows that Tony Randall became a first-time father when he was 209, but a few of the many other celebrity members of the “Pampers & Depends” club include (number in parentheses is their age at the birth of their youngest child):

George “James Bond” Lazenby, 65
Kenny Rogers, 66 (he recently had twins)
Luciano Pavoratti, 67 (fathered twins, one stillborn and the other healthy)
Jacques Cousteau, 67 (he had two late-in-life illegitimate children with his mistress)
Charles Lindhberg, 68 (he had three late-in-life illegitimate children with his German mistress)
Marlon Brando, 70
Charlie Chaplin, 74
James “Scotty” Doohan, 80
Ernest Lehman [screenwriter for North by Northwest, Sabrina, others], 86
Saul Bellow, 86

Though not quite as wizened or as famous as a few of the others on the list, props for late-in-life-lifestyle change goes to Ron Moody, the character actor best known as Fagin in Oliver. He was a bachelor until his 62nd birthday, whereupon he married and had six children in ten years. He’s now 80 and when not acting (which is usually, though he was recently on EastEnders, teaches Pilates courses with his wife.

49

Speaking of the Coppola family:

Not only is Nicolas Cage Francis’s nephew, but so is Jason Schwartzman (of “Rushmore” fame). He is Talia Shire’s (Connie in “The Godfather” movies) son.

Billy Crystal was originally going to appear on the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” in October of 1975, and possibly become a regular cast member. His only segment was dropped in favor of Andy Kaufman’s “Mighty Mouse” routine.

50

Both author Michael Crichton and Monty Python member Graham Chapman graduated from medical school.

Chapman and Cheech Marin were both the sons of policemen.

Joey Levine, lead singer of the Ohio Express (best known for “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy”) also sang the Gorton’s fish sticks jingle (“trust the Gorton’s fisherman… from Gorton’s of Gloucester”).

Clint Eastwood was the pilot who bombed the giant spider to death at the end of the B-movie “Tarantula.” As an in-joke, Eastwood included a snippet from “Tarantula” in his lame cop flick, “The Rookie.”

According to Frank McCourt, when Alan Parker, cast and crew went to Limerick, Ireland to film “Angela’s Ashes,” they found to their chagrin that Limerick was now a prosperous town with no slums or tenements. Parker hired set dressers who spent weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars building a slum to shoot the movie in.

The real Jim Garrison appeared in Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” He played Chief Justice Earl Warren.

51

Joey Levine was also the singer on “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)” by Reunion, as well as on many of the Buddah / Kama Sutra bubblegum records which were all by many of the same people recording under different names. Since the 1970s, he has been a record producer and jingle writer/singer. One of his best known works is the jingle for Mounds / Almond Joy chocolate bars: “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.”

52

Jimmy Davis, who served two terms as Governor of Louisiana, co-wrote You Are My Sunshine.

Charles G. Dawes, who composed the tune of It’s All in the Game, later was Calvin Coolidge’s Vice-President.

One of my great-grandfathers was playing in the band at the Temple of Music when President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

53

one of al gores daughters slept over at my brothers house about six months ago and he didnt know who she was until she had left.

54

Victor Borge, pianist and comedian (born Borge Rosenbaum, Jan 3, 1909), began his long musical career in Denmark. He studied piano at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, and with several esteemed masters. He became one of Denmark’s most popular entertainers during the 1930s as a classical pianist. It was his ability to make the audiences laugh that made him stand out. In 1940, he escaped the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War II and fled to the US, where he learned to speak English, and soon had a large following there. Borge made his American radio debut on The Bing Crosby Show in 1941. His one-man show, “Comedy In Music” ran from 1953 to 1956 at The Golden Theatre in New York, however, he had been performing many of those classic routines up until his death in 2000.

For those who have never heard his material, he played classical music in ways you wouldn’t expect. He played popular songs, for instance, “Happy Birthday” in the styles of different composers, took requests and wove a number of melodies together in a very funny medley, cracking jokes all through it. He’s perhaps best known for his routine “Phonetic Punctuation”, in which he invents audio for punctuation, and reads a story to a hysterical audience. Rarely, he would perform a whole piece without joking, but mostly he poked fun at the absurdities and conventions of music.

Borge won many prestigious honors and awards during his career, and played as guest pianist with the world’s renowned orchestras. He toured right up into his old age with his solo act, expanded to include guest artists.

My mother (who introduced me to his albums when I was very young) and I saw him in Hamilton, Ontario in the late '80s or early '90s. I knew he was coming and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to get something special. I called the theatre, who referred me to his management. I asked if, when Victor came to town, I could possibly get him to autograph my copy of his first US recording, an album on 4 78 RPM records, in a heavy cardboard jacket. So my mom and I got to go backstage after the show and stand in the reception line to meet him. We chatted a bit, and he autographed my record jacket and had his picture taken with us. He was a very gracious and likable man.

His first two 12" albums, “Comedy In Music” and “Caught In The Act” are now available on one CD called “Live!”, although it is missing “Warsaw Concerto” and one of the comedy bits from “Caught In The Act”, which would not fit on the CD.
Can you tell I like Victor Borge a bit?

55

[QUOTE=fishbicycle]
Victor Borge, pianist and comedian (born Borge Rosenbaum, Jan 3, 1909), began his long musical career in Denmark. He studied piano at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, and with several esteemed masters. He became one of Denmark’s most popular entertainers during the 1930s as a classical pianist. It was his ability to make the audiences laugh that made him stand out. In 1940, he escaped the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War II and fled to the US, where he learned to speak English, and soon had a large following there. Borge made his American radio debut on The Bing Crosby Show in 1941. His one-man show, “Comedy In Music” ran from 1953 to 1956 at The Golden Theatre in New York, however, he had been performing many of those classic routines up until his death in 2000.

[QUOTE]

He also raised Cornish hens for many years and left $250,000 in his will to the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. I use one of his lines all the time in my lectures: “I hope you enjoy it… you might as well.”

56

I just wanted to point out that this so explains Suddenly Susan.

57

Childrens author Shel Silverstien wrote several songs for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. Most were about doing drugs and prostitutes and such. You know, the usual childrens stuff.

Wayne Preston who lives in Aiken SC and performs there was the bass player in the church band when the Blues Brothers “saw the light”.

Singer / songwriter Steve Earle has a daughter who lives across the street from me.

58

While filming the infamous shower scene in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock became frustrated when Janet Leigh, after numerous takes, failed to produce a facial expression that satisfied him. So he had the technicians turn off the hot water just as the curtain was pulled aside. That’s the take the ended up in the final film. And Janet Leigh (RIP) swore off of showers from that day forward.

The blood seen swirling down the drain at the end of the shower scene was actually Hershey’s chocolate syrup. A knife hacking at a watermelon produced the knife-in-flesh sound effect.

59

I heard it was a casaba melon. Anybody with lots of melon- or person-hacking experience feel free to chime in. :wink:

60

More of Mr. Hitchcock’s nasty behavior:

  1. Hitchcock became so enamored of Tippi Hedren (his leading lady in “the Birds” and “Marnie”) that he propositioned her to be his mistress. She refused. Soon afterwords, Melanie Griffith (Hedren’s daughter, and a very young girl at the time) received an unusual birthday present from Hitch - a doll dressed up to resemble Hedren’s character in “the Birds”, in a tiny coffiin.

  2. While filming on location in England (for, I think, “Frenzy”) Hitch & crew learned that the house they were filming in was reputed to be haunted. A crewmember scoffed, and Hitch bet the man he wouldn’t have the courage to stay all night in the house alone. The crewman accepted the bet. Hitch insisted that, to prove he spent the entire night there (and didn’t sneak out), the crewman had to handcuff himself to a heavy, immobile camera. He accepted. As everyone was leaving the set, and the crewman had cuffed himself to the camera, Hitch gave the man a snifter of brandy “to get his courage up.” What he didn’t tell the crewman was that he had dissolved some extra-strength laxatives into the brandy. So there that crewman was, all alone, handcuffed to an immovable object, and…well, just imagine. :eek: