Harpo Marx and the entire Algonquin Round Table crew. He was a regular and it always seemed out of character somewhat. In his autobiography he said he would just sit there playing cards and take their money, but others’ comments state that he was quite insightful.
Also Harpo Marx and George Bernard Shaw. They were quite good friends I am told.
Ron Asheton of The Stooges and Larry Fine of The Three Stooges had a short but interesting friendship.
If politicians count as celebrities, then Bill Clinton & George Bush Sr. became pretty good pals, which may have dismayed members on either side of the red / blue schizm.
Apparently Dick Cavitt, the archetypal cerebral intellectual, had a fairly substantive friendship (with benefits!) with Janis Joplin. I guess it could be argued that they were both entertainment figures in the same time period (and Joplin was a frequent guest on his show), but they still seem like such diametrically opposite personality types, it’s hard to think of them spending quality time together.
Groucho wrote a letter approving of the two albums that was used to promote A Day at the Races. It was mostly about the album titles, with no mention of the music.
Threadwinner. Significantly lowers my respect for Penn (not that I had a lot) and his claim to want to fight “Bullshit!” propagation.
Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt became kinda-sorta friends after all their legal battles. Flynt’s brother made a comment to the effect of ‘it shouldn’t surprise anybody, they’re both hillbillies who are obsessed with money and what people do in bed’.
James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio is a good friend of Loretta Lynn, which seems an odd pairing.
Elton John played at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding, and apparently they are, in fact, friends.
Brad Paisley and LL Cool J.
They’ve recently collaborated on a rather awkward song together. Here. Jeesh…
James Carville and Mary Matalin?
Going back in time more than a century, the widows of Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S Grant became very chummy, dining/going to theater/vacationing together.
It’s not that surprising really: both women were both very well educated women for their time, were both the daughters of Southern gentry, both had experienced roller coaster lives in which they’d been very rich and penniless at various times, both knew what it was like to host affairs at the White House (Varina Davis had often served as official hostess to President Franklin Pierce, whose wife was in mourning for their sons) and both knew what it was like to be poor relations (Julia Grant to her father and in-laws when Grant was broke before the war, Varina to Davis’s rich brother) and to have constant death wishes levied against their husband in the press, both loved theater and reading, and both were very self conscious about their appearance (Julia due to her crossed eyes and Varina due to a complexion so dark she was rumored to be mulatto), and both were seen as traitors to their birthplace for choosing to live in NYC rather than in the “homier” places they grew up and had their families.
There must have been some interesting conversations.
Ron Jeremy and Tammy Faye Bakker became friends during their stint in reality TV (The Surreal Life).
Barbara Walters and Fidel Castro had a very long friendship after she interviewed him in the 60s.
Tipper Gore and Gail Zappa
Dave Clark and Freddie Mercury (not weird, but I found it mildly surprising for a few moments)
Or the same person.
Are there any photos showing Rush dancing with his new wife during Sir Elton’s performance? Or did the groom “have to see a man about an elephant” right before the singer showed up?
These are my picks, plus they were super-adorable with one another. I saw an interview Ron did a short time ago, and he mentions Tammy Faye and you can hear in his voice how much he misses her.
Shia LaBoeuf and Marilyn Manson were friends for awhile until Shia had a meltdown at a nightclub. I’m just going to quote the incident here:
“Shia picked up a water bottle and shot a mouthful of water all over his date’s legs,” says the eyewitness. “Then he put more water in his mouth and started spitting it all over his tablemates, including Marilyn Manson.”
Although Manson tried to calm the actor down by offering him a fist bump, LaBeouf only grew more out of control.
“All of a sudden, Shia started shouting at his date and getting visibly angry,” adds the eyewitness.
He then decided it was time to leave and “lunged” through the very thick crowd. "They tried to hold him back, but he kept struggling through.
“Shia had to climb over people and tear himself out of the grasp of various strangers who were trying to keep him from going crazy.”
Once he broke free and bolted out the door, his panicked date chased after him. The two never returned.
“Marilyn looked shocked and annoyed, but stayed seated,” adds the eyewitness. – NYDailyNews.
I love the mental image of Marilyn Manson as the ~oasis of peace in this situation.
Harpo was witty in real life, as all the brothers were. (Zeppo gets named a lot as the wittiest in real life, although nobody put the lines on paper for us to judge.)
The best known Harpo line needs an introduction. Robert Benchley was the drama critic for Life magazine, then a humor mag. As such he wrote a capsule summary of each play that got held over. That wasn’t as big a deal in those days, when even a hit play would last no more than a full season. But Abie’s Irish Rose, a horrible bit of sentimental schmatlz about a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl, ran a record five years or so. Benchley prided himself on coming up with a new way to bash it each week ("Where do the people come from who keep this going? You don’t see them out in the daytime.) but eventually gave up and started a contest for best line. Harpo won. “No worse than a bad cold.”
Harpo and Shaw met on the French Riviara, when Harpo was visiting friends in the French ex-pat community. Everybody of any notoriety who had money went to France in those days and the cross-currents fill a dozen books. And Groucho had a correspondence with everybody, most proudly with T. S. Eliot - who wrote him first.
Bill Maher and Ann Coulter, he said they got along great so long as the topic wasn’t politics.
I saw Alice Cooper on Graham Norton’s UK chat show a few years ago. Graham asked him about that, and Alice’s explanation was that when he hit it big in the 1970s and moved to Hollywood, he deliberately befriended older stars like Groucho. (He might have mentioned other names, but I can’t remember who.) I think he mentioned playing golf with them.
Cher and Kathy Griffin appear to be pretty close friends.
J.
Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson are pretty close friends. Not that odd, really, given their past projects together (Maverick) but given the toxicity of Gibson in Hollywood over the last several years it’s been interesting to see that Foster has stuck by him.