Speaking of Mia Farrow’s haircut . . . the man who invented it, Vidal Sassoon, was far from the stereotypical swishy hairstylist. He was actively involved in the 43 Group, a paramilitary organization founded in the UK by Jewish WW2 veterans to combat the rising post-war British Fascist movement. The group would engage the fascists in street fighting, infiltrate their groups, and break up their speeches.
Sassoon went on to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. More on Sassoon’s activities here.
Jackie Mason claims that his jokes about Sinatra and Gardner (such as “each night they go to bed, she takes out her retainer and he takes out his teeth”) got the hell beaten out of him by Frank’s “friends”.
I actually hadn’t placed the connection between Fort Bragg/Braxton Bragg… thanks! (I wonder what other U.S. military bases are named for Confederates.)
The show Roseanne had at least three Oscar winners in its cast in recurring roles: Estelle Parsons (BSA Bonnie & Clyde) played Roseanne’s mom Bev, initially as a recurring character but pretty much a regular in later seasons. Bev’s mom was played by Shelley Winters [Diary of Anne Frank, A Patch of Blue] in several episodes, and Red Buttons (Sayonara) had a brief recurring role as Bev’s boyfriend. Dan’s parents were played by Oscar nominees Ned Beatty and Debbie Reynolds (Anne Wedgeworth in earlier episodes).
The one I know off the top of my head is Fort A.P. Hill, in northern VA.
When it came out that Woody Allen had been sleeping with Mia’s daughter, Frank called Mia up and offered (no doubt for old times’ sake) to have Woody taken care of if she wanted it done. She politely declined. (But don’t you just know she thought about it for a good long minute?)
Engaged in what?
Didn’t Mason claim that Sinatra had saved his life once? '“Okay, boys, that’ll be enough,” Frank said.
Slight correction: according to Sean Flynn the teen actor’s Wikipedia entry, Sean Flynn the photographer is actually his half-uncle. His mother is a daughter from Errol’s second marriage to Nora Eddington.
Steve Jobs (of Apple) is adopted. He tracked down his birth-sister. She is a famous novelist.
The guy who played Father Guido Serduci on Saturday Night Live? His sister was the Surgeon General.
Yep, that one’s his. He also had some very choice words when Frank was awarded the Medal of Freedom.
When the Mia/Frank marriage happened Jackie was in a major professional lull as the famous “flipping the bird” incident on Ed Sullivan (which Mason claims was not intentional) had gut shot his career and cost him some major bookings, and the Sinatra blackballing made him even less bookable (“You want me to play your clubs then Mason don’t play nowhere you have dealings”). The Sinatra v. Mason feud was Rottweiler v. Chihuahua); for a while Mason’s career was so derailed he considered becoming a rabbi again or even going into some non-showbiz/non-religion work altogether.
By the time of the Medal of Freedom, Frank was still a living legend but his power and star had dimmed a tad and Mason was on the beginning of a major comeback (peaked in the late 80s/early 90s, but he’s still a lot bigger than he was in the late 60s/70s) so he was in a better position to fight, and that’s when he went forward with the story of Frank’s goon friends beating him up. (They beat him up again even when he toned down the act considerably, to the point of publicly envying Sinatra in his act, saying “don’t talk about Frank at all!”.)
Garry Trudeau’s lampooning of “Doctor Sinatra” (he was awarded an honorary doctorate around the same time) receiving the nation’s highest award for civilians (Trudeau included quotes from the award ceremonies with actual pictures in Doonesbury of Frank with known Mafia killers) appeared at the same time. It all helped to kind of mist on Frank’s parade. Of course he was still a living legend worth a gazillion dollars so he had a considerable umbrella.
Frank’s last wife, Barbara, was the ex-wife of Zeppo Marx (of the Marx Brothers).
Soon after Frank’s death she was mugged and some very expensive jewelry was taken. She actually made a comment to the effect of “if Frank were still alive I’d have had that jewelry back by nightfall and the guys would be very sorry”.
That takes care of three of Frank’s wives and one fiancee. First wife Nancy seems to be left out of the thread. :rolleyes:
One piece of Frank trivia I think’s interesting: he was famously furious over the character Johnny Fontanne from The Godfather, believing he was based on him. (Puzo said he wasn’t; Fontanne was more of a composite character based on lots of Italian crooners with mob ties that had gotten them out of contracts to band leaders and who later turned to acting when their voice gave out and made a stellar comeback in film and then after an experimental surgery restored their singing ability.) At one point he cornered Puzo in a restaurant and lambasted him for an hour (though Puzo said it was only verbal- Frank surprisingly never got physical.)
The Godfather of course became the most successful film in history to that point and had few bigger fans than the actual mob (who even took up hand kissing and calling their leaders “Don” again). The turnaround was so great that when GODFATHER 3 was announced Frank practically begged to be cast as Don Altobello. (The role went to Eli Wallach instead.)
Robert Duvall insists that his decision to sit out GF3 wasn’t due to how little he was offered (about $2.5 million) but due to how much more Pacino was offered ($9 million plus points). He said had they matched Pacino’s pay- even if it was by lowering it to Duvall’s- he’d have been happy to do it.
Duvall worked on the screenplay for The Apostle for more than 10 years but never could get funding. He finally bankrolled it himself, taking lucrative rolls just so he could spend the $5 million the film cost to make. Because he was the financier he received most of the profits and it earned him more than all of his film roles to that point combined, even though every major studio in Hollywood had turned it down. (It’s a great film, but he was lucky: John Wayne, Robert Conrad and Sherman Hemsley are but three of the actors who lost their shirts putting their own money into their projects.)
C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien were close friends and Tolkien even parodied Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet with something called Out of the Screaming Planet.
However, eventually the two drifted away due to religious difference and were not close in their later years.
The main character in Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Elwin Ransom, is partly based on Tolkien (Ransom is a philologist, fought at the Battle of the Somme in WWI, and is a professor at Cambridge). Also, Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien.
As far as their religions differences…where did you hear that they drifted apart? Tolkien was, at least partly, responsible for Lewis’ return to Christianity (although he was admittedly disappointed that Lewis joined the Church of England and didn’t become Catholic).
Mona Simpson, if anyone’s curious.
I can’t rightly remember - I think it’s from one of the books I read about J.R.R Tolkien and Middle-Earth, or from one of the Making of the films movies on J.R.R Tolkien.
Some indications that this might be true
http://www.thestonetable.com/articles/220,1.html
Edit: It might not be religious differences though it seems Tolkien disliked Lewis’ analogies in his stories. It seems that Lewis’ wife was the main cause.
Another note on Tolkien - for his wife’s gravestone, he has Lúthien inscribed on it, and Beren on his, in reference to The Tale of Beren and Lúthien
In his custody papers against Mia Farrow, Woody Allen stated:
His only biological child Satchell was born on September 19 (he was born on December 19)
Mia had acused him of sexually molesting Satchell (Stachell was not sexually molested, and nobody ever claimed he was).
Mia was going to adoption two more blind children (At the time, Mia had not made any applications to adopt any more children).
Allen justified his affair with Soon-Yi by stating “She was an adopted child.” He stated that Mia treated her adopted children different from her biological children, and that she was basically running an “international foster home.”
This is from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien:
This previously cited article http://www.thestonetable.com/articles/220,1.html has a couple of suspect statements.
"In CS Lewis, Beyond Narnia, Lewis and Tolkien are shown having a violent argument about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lewis wrote afterwards: ‘No harm in him, only needs a smack or so.’ " In fact, that statement was from Lewis’ diary entry after he first met Tolkien in 1929, long before Narnia.
“A friend of both writers, Brian Sibley”. Sibley was born in 1949, which would make him 14 when C.S. Lewis died in 1963. It’s possible they were friends, but IMO unlikely. His own bio page says nothing about friendships with Lewis and Tolkien. BRIAN SIBLEY : The Works
Wow. You don’t mess with the Sassoon.
George Washington Carver (who did not invent peanut butter or ever claim to and whose work with the soybean was actually far more important than his work with peanuts) was the youngest of 12 children and probably the only one to survive childhood. When he was a baby in the last days of the Civil War he, his mother, and a sister were abducted by raiders (possibly Quantrill’s Raiders) from the Missouri plantation where they lived. Only G.W. was ever found and the fates of his mother and sister are unknown (though it’s generally believed they died before he was found).
Carver turned down what would in today’s currency be the equivalent of multi-million dollar offers to work for Henry Ford, the Dupont company, and other industrialists in order to remain at Tuskegee for a tiny fraction of that. He had a longterm relationship with his male research assistant and his homosexuality was a fairly open secret; there were rumors in his own lifetime that he was a eunuch due to childhood illness but there’s no proof of this (certainly his facial hair wasn’t affected) and they may have begun to explain his sometimes effeminate behavior (which could of course be embarrassing in early 20th century Alabama especially).
A man who was definitely a eunuch was Boston Corbett, the deranged soldier who killed (allegedly on orders from God) John Wilkes Booth. In the 1850s during a period of religious mania and repentance he castrated himself as punishment for using prostitutes. Corbett was imprisoned at Andersonville for several months and disobeyed direct orders from his commanding officer in killing Booth, who had wanted him alive if at all possible. He later served as doorman for the Kansas Legislature until his obvious mental illness cost him the job. By some accounts he later believed he was John Wilkes Booth, but the claims are not proven (in fact the time and place of his death are not certain).
John Wilkes Booth and his many siblings were illegitimate due to the fact his famous father, Junius Brutus Booth, had a wife in England when he “married” Booth’s mother. Junius’s brother, also an actor, is an ancestor of Tony Blair’s wife Connie Booth. In the 1930s a bestselling novelist, Izola Forrester , wrote a memoir/family history entitled This One Mad Act in which she not only claimed she was the illegitimate granddaughter of Booth but that her family had kept touch with him long after his “death” (which according to her book he had faked- another man was killed in the barn and it was covered up); no historians that I’ve encountered take her story at all seriously but one does read the “Booth didn’t really die at Garrett’s Farm that night” claim once in a while. (Jesse James also had claimants, but DNA testing proved the remains in his grave are his [or at least those of a very very close relative]).
Booth’s exact burial place is unknown other than in the Booth family cemetery in Maryland (his brothers interred him after his body was exhumed and did not tell anybody exactly where they buried him lest the grave be desecrated.) The remains of his fellow conspirator Lewis Paine (aka Lewis Powell) were originally buried where he was hanged (he, Surratt, Atzerodt, and Herold walked past their coffins and graves en route to the gallows) but later moved to a family plot in Florida— all but the skull. It was kept in a box at the Smithsonian and not rediscovered until 1992, when it rejoined the rest of his remains.
You’re thinking of John Cleese there, Tony’s wife is Cherie.
:smack:
Cherie is the descendant of J.B.B.'s brother (although, I’ve never seen her and Connie together…).
