I get the idea that Lon Chaney didn’t have any friends. He did his make-up, showed up for work, then went home.
Those Centauri suns are just dim bulbs, bragging and hoping for attention.
And then there’s old Barnard’s, even more of a loner than the Sun. He’s just zipping by as fast as he can, not even waving hello.
Warren Zevon was famously hard to get along with. He managed a few quasi-friendships with literary types like Stephen King, and pther musicians who respected him, but I don’t think he had any really close friendships. Billy Bob Thornton was a sort-of-friend, who shared pretty bad OCD which gave them something in common.
It seems that every time someone got close to him, he’d do something to alienate them. Especially when he wad a raging drunk. He spent most of his time in his apartment, reading. Apparently he had rows of bookshelves like a library.
It’s possible that the person who didn’t have visitors requested that people not visit them there.
From what I understand, she attributed her difficulty forming relationships to laziness and a predeliction for staying home and watching TV.
I believe Shatner has alienated all of his Star Trek costars. Even Leonard Nimoy, his closest friend on the cast, had stopped speaking to him the last five years of his life.
Well played!
After seeing some of the recent documentaries about Britney Spears, not only does she have no friends but the conservatorship wouldn’t allow her to make any. All of her boyfriends (including her ex-husband) were either back-up dancers or managers.
Garbo – “I want to be alone.”
Almost - he had TWO categories, family and employees. He talked about loving his family, but does indeed to seem to have been an occasionally standoffish dad and his extracurricular activities with groupies seems to have been a constant gnawing pain on his wife. To the point where she arguably sublimated that into conflict with her own children. I pretty much agree with you that he was dysfunctional in his own self-contained way. Oddly he doesn’t seem to have been a huge prick - few people hated him. Rather he just did what he wanted and devil take the hindmost.
David Crosby had friends because he was charismatic, but burned through them because by his own account he was a gigantic asshole.
Judging by the recent documentary on him James Brown had zero friends. A couple of mentors/people he respected early in life and plenty of sycophants at all times. But no friends. He seems to have been as difficult as he was talented.
Reading the Wiki page of Miro’s band, The Nuns, it struck me that the band’s founding member and co-vocalist Jeff Olener also died alone, “after many years of seclusion”, in 2014, or a few years after Miro.
Francis Bavier retired from acting in 1972 after her run as Aunt Bee in The Andy Griffith Show. She lived the rest of her life as a recluse in Siler City NC until her death in 1989.
That was very well put, especially as regards Gail. I would say that while few people may have hated him, I suspect that very few liked him. In my utterly unqualified opinion he was a narcissist and misanthrope.
And yet I love nearly all of his recordings from 1966 through 1974.
Just yesterday, I watched a documentary on the Five-0 reunion a few years back. All of the cast members who were interviewed had nothing but nice things to say about Jack. He may have been a very private person in real life, but he certainly had friends who loved him.
On the other hand, judging from Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin, it would seem the singer could never reveal his true self to anyone—not his drinking buddies, not his partners in comedy, and not even his wives and many girlfriends. Other than his parents, whom he loved deeply, the only people he really cared about were his children, and he was devastated when his son was killed while flying an F-4 Phantom. From that, Dean never recovered.
I don’t know how true it is, but in the HBO production of The Rat Pack (1998), Dean Martin is portrayed as a lonely individual. Oh, he may be a friendly piano player in the piano bar, or a host joking on the stage of The Sands with Sinatra and the rest, but after the show, he’s back in his hotel room, alone, and getting some sleep; while Sinatra and the rest of the Pack are drinking and carousing all night. Like I said, I don’t know how true the HBO film is, but if true, it was a side of Dean Martin that I could never have imagined existed.
At one point in the book, Dean is being interviewed in his hotel room (which he seldom left) during a long gig. He looks out the window and says “Is that rain? I haven’t seen rain in six months!”.
Is that more of a commentary on how rare rain is in Las Vegas than a comment on how reclusive Dean Martin is?
It’s a sad commentary on American society that somebody who wishes to take care of himself by getting proper sleep is portrayed as a lonely person.