Share true trivia you find interesting about famous people of your choosing

[tarragon918]

I saw the Elvis Mitchell interview with Laurence Fishburne on Turner Classic Movies this past Monday (7/21) and was surprised to hear Fishburne say that Bogie was the one responsible for “discovering” Sammy Davis Jr. and drawing him into the Rat Pack; I’d always thought that Sammy Davis Jr. was a pal of Sinatra, but it was Bogie who knew him first. Bogie died when I was still pretty young, though (1957, I think), so that’s probably why I never knew about Bogie’s link to the Rat Pack. I must need to check out those bio’s of Betty Bacall!

[Darryl_Lict]

Kate Spade of the fancy purse fame is David Spade’s sister-in-law.

@LA Times

That’s not to say Spade isn’t a family man; it was partly his investment in his brother and sister-in-law’s New York City fashion boutique that kept them afloat and enabled sister-in-law Kate Spade to become one of the biggest names in fashion accessories. He was warned not to lend money to relatives but, he quips, “It’s the first time I got my money back!”

[Sternvogel]

Today’s Final Jeopardy! category: CELEBRITIES IN JEOPARDY!

The answer is:

In 1965, his failure to correctly respond to the clue “Cathy loved him, but married Edgar Linton instead” cost this then-unknown man a chance to repeat as champion after winning the previous day

The correct question:

Who is John McCain?

[bonzer]

@t-bonham@scc.net

@Yumblie

Albert Einstein, after his second wife died and well into his 50s, began a relationship with a Russian woman. Around this time (right after WWII) he was under fire from the FBI for allegedly being a communist sympathizer, despite having been consistently outspoken against fascist Russia. However, unbeknownst to both him and the FBI, his Russian girlfriend was actually a soviet spy and was constantly trying to get him to travel to Moscow. Once he emigrated to the US in the 1930s though, he never left the country for the rest of his life.

Do you have a cite on this? It sounds interesting, and I’d like to read more about it.

It’s presumably a reference to the stories about Einstein and Margarita Konenkova that were pushed forward in the late 90s as her family and Sotheby’s unsuccessfully tried to sell a set of love letters from him to her. It had long been known that Einstein knew her and her husband and there was nothing terribly surprising about them having an affair.

However, the spying angle is much more dubious. The claim that she was a Soviet spy targeting Einstein originally derives from Pavel Sudoplatov, the ex-KGB man who caused controversy with his memoirs back in 1994, since he made all sorts of startling allegations like that he’d run Oppenheimer and Fermi, amongst many other prominent nuclear physicists, as Soviet agents during WWII. What Sudoplatov was claiming went way beyond any previous allegations about the extent of Soviet penetration of the Manhattan project. The book seemed to provide a mass of circumstantial detail, but little of this checked out - people weren’t where Sudoplatov said they were, etc. A few journalists still treat what Sudoplatov said as reliable, but historians now uniformly regard his book as an extremely suspicious source.
Since I’m not aware of any obviously independent source backing up his claim that Konenkova was a Soviet agent, its always been difficult to grant it much credence.

Einstein’s FBI file does record that she was the intermediary in setting up a meeting for him with the Soviet consul general in New York in the 1950s, but the FBI seem to have regarded this as routine.

[MadTheSwine]

@Sampiro

Assorted stuff about Civil War figures:

Joe Wheeler was born in Augusta, Georgia. Both of his parents were New England Yankees (complete with Puritan pedigrees) who moved to Georgia a few years before his birth, and from the time he was 6 (when his mother died) he was raised in Connecticut, then Massachusetts, then moving to Brooklyn in his teens and remaing there until going to West Point. After West Point (where he graduated near the bottom of his class, in part because he flunked his cavalry courses) he taught at a school in Pennsylvania for a while, then was commissioned a lieutenant guarding freight shipments to and from Kansas/New Mexico. So… by 1861 he was 25 years old, had lived 19 years in the north and the west, had no southern ancestry, owned no slaves, and had only been to Georgia on occasional visits to his father, yet he resigned his commission and joined the Confederate infantry. Because he was a Westpointer (about which fellow WP man Jeff Davis was very snobbish) he was raised to major, then colonel, and then (in spite of failing cavalry tactics and being only a so-so rider) he was given command of a cavalry brigade, and eventually raised to head of all cavalry in the Army of Tennessee. (How good he was is a matter of some debate, but it’s safe to say he wasn’t the best cavalry general of the war but neither was he a gross incompetent- technically he wasn’t cavalry at all but dragoon as he preferred to fight dismounted, but Wheeler’s Cavalry Corps was how his unit was referred to always.)
Wheeler’s most famous feat during the war may be his escape from certain Union capture at the evacuation of Shelbyville, TN, when- during a terrible rainstorm- surrounded on three sides and with the Duck River behind- he charged his horse into the flooding River, jumping about 15 feet from the bank. By the time he got to the other side of the river, holding onto his horse’s tail and almost drowned (he was a tiny man- about 5’2 or 5’3 and under 100 lbs) the Union soldiers had stopped shooting at him and were shooting salutes into the air at what they considered one hell of an impressive feat. (Several members of his cavalry also jumped into the river that night- some were killed, some captured, some drowned, and a minority made it to the rebel side along with Wheeler.)
After the war Wheeler married an Alabama heiress/widow he met during the war (long story there), settled on her plantation, and entered politics.During the Spanish War Teddy Roosevelt, a lifelong admirer of Wheeler’s (he’d met him several times) convinced him to come to Cuba where Wheeler became the only Confederate general to be commissioned a general in the postwar U.S. armed forces (Brigadier General/U.S. Volunteer Cavalry). He suffered from disease in Cuba but, reverting to his wartime “do or die” training (when he saw battle for 40 days straight and none of it with a full stomach) he came off his sickbed to charge up San Juan Hill. Perhaps it was the fever or perhaps it was age or perhaps it was just force of habit, but firsthand accounts attest that when the Spanish were routed Wheeler yelled out to his men “C’mon boys! We got the damned Yankees on the run!”

Thanks for this…I was excited to see it and showed it to my Dad and Aunt.

You say he entered politics…he was elected to congress in 1884 and served til 1898.(Alabama)
“Fightin” Joe is also buried at Arlington National Cemetary and is my grandfathers great great uncle.Dunno what that makes him to me exactly.

http://ameddregiment.amedd.army.mil/fshmuse/wheeler.htm A poem about Joe Wheeler and his sickbed charge at Santigo.(at 62 years old)

[MadTheSwine]

Rock legend and Queen guitarist,Dr.Brian May, has a PhD in astrophysics,an asteroid named after him http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=52665 and is currently the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University taking over the position from Cherie Blair(Booth),wife of former british PM,Tony Blair.

[Sampiro]

@Sternvogel

Today’s Final Jeopardy! category: CELEBRITIES IN JEOPARDY!

The answer is:

The correct question:

Who is John McCain?

McCain was on Jeopardy!? I wonder if the episode still exists. (The guy was hot back then.)

Another famous Jeopardy! contestant was Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton. He was from NJ but lived all over the country (Texas, Chicago, NYC, etc.). He was a 5 day champion, won $4,680, and used it to move his family (pregnant wife and 9 kids) to…

Ireland. (His wife was Irish and they lived with her family.)

Australia came a few months later, after he received a $100,000+ settlement for a work related injury while working the NY Railroad. His move has been attributed to racism and other causes (he’s an unapologetic anti-semitic and Holocaust denier) but he states, believably, that he did not want his sons drafted for Vietnam, thus claimed them as Irish citizens (by virtue of their mother) for purpose of the draft. To this day Mel is a citizen of the US and of Ireland.

[Morbo]

Erin Daniels, probably most well-known for being the tennis instructor that died in The L Word, and also starred as the mistress in One Hour Photo, had a role as the annoying neighbor with the barky dog in Dexter, and can now be seen on Swingtown, was…my girlfriend in High School.

What? It’s true trivia that I find interesting about a famous person.