Blind Items Revealed #17 - Old Hollywood
March 13, 2018
The Club actually has a name, but if I gave you the name of the club, this would be much easier to solve. Part of the fun with this is discovering the club and everything it has done and everything it owns. Many members of the club donate their entire estate to the club. This can include all their personal films and photos from sets. There are diaries and scripts. They are a treasure trove of many of the early days of Hollywood right through and including the studio years and on in to the 70's. The club has faded over time. No longer active as a social club, it is just a person or two keeping alive the memory of what was one of the building blocks for the acting profession we see today. Without this club, the business of acting would be completely different.
Now, the name of the club is all well and good, but what the club received about five or six years ago in an estate has finally been unearthed. With just a couple volunteers and not much time to work on this stuff each week, it can take months or even years to go through everything left by an actor or actress to the club. Such is the case with this estate. It was massive in size in the sense of the artifacts. Included in the artifacts were many reels of film from the early 40's. Volunteers assumed they were home movies or something similar. Until very recently, they were pushed to the side as other items were easier to mark and catalog. Sitting through all that film and figuring out the who and what and where and when was going to take forever.
The artifacts were from an agent who also produced theatre. He produced two of the biggest Broadway musicals of the time and at least one of them all of you know and have seen it, but probably not on stage. He did some great television and award winning movies. He also liked to get married. A lot. He also produced some children from those marriages who basically seemed to have been involved with a who's who of Hollywood and a book has been made about just how crazy this entire family dynamic was and who was involved and the offspring.
Anyway, our agent/producer fell in love with a married woman. That married woman was known by everyone in society at the time. One of her divorces occurred because she hooked up with that permanent A list crooner that so many other women hooked up with too. She was the muse of several permanent A list authors, including one of the most famous authors of all time. It was that relationship that produced these films. They were apparently shot on a Caribbean island. They featured the author and the socialite having sex. Yes, basically X rated films of two very important people, including arguably one of the top ten authors in the history of the US. The films also feature them as a couple with much much younger women. The films are old and it is tough to make out ages. This was decades ago with no thought to preservation. So, the club faces a quandary. They have hours of footage of one of the most famous people in the history of the country, but 95% of the film is him having sex with a socialite or with other teens and the socialite.
The Masquers Club/Leland Hayward/Margaret Sullavan/Nancy Keith/Frank Sinatra/Ernest Hemmingway
The Club actually has a name, but if I gave you the name of the club, this would be much easier to solve. Part of the fun with this is discovering the club and everything it has done and everything it owns. Many members of the club donate their entire estate to the club. This can include all their personal films and photos from sets. There are diaries and scripts. They are a treasure trove of many of the early days of Hollywood right through and including the studio years and on in to the 70's. The club has faded over time. No longer active as a social club, it is just a person or two keeping alive the memory of what was one of the building blocks for the acting profession we see today. Without this club, the business of acting would be completely different.
Now, the name of the club is all well and good, but what the club received about five or six years ago in an estate has finally been unearthed. With just a couple volunteers and not much time to work on this stuff each week, it can take months or even years to go through everything left by an actor or actress to the club. Such is the case with this estate. It was massive in size in the sense of the artifacts. Included in the artifacts were many reels of film from the early 40's. Volunteers assumed they were home movies or something similar. Until very recently, they were pushed to the side as other items were easier to mark and catalog. Sitting through all that film and figuring out the who and what and where and when was going to take forever.
The artifacts were from an agent who also produced theatre. He produced two of the biggest Broadway musicals of the time and at least one of them all of you know and have seen it, but probably not on stage. He did some great television and award winning movies. He also liked to get married. A lot. He also produced some children from those marriages who basically seemed to have been involved with a who's who of Hollywood and a book has been made about just how crazy this entire family dynamic was and who was involved and the offspring.
Anyway, our agent/producer fell in love with a married woman. That married woman was known by everyone in society at the time. One of her divorces occurred because she hooked up with that permanent A list crooner that so many other women hooked up with too. She was the muse of several permanent A list authors, including one of the most famous authors of all time. It was that relationship that produced these films. They were apparently shot on a Caribbean island. They featured the author and the socialite having sex. Yes, basically X rated films of two very important people, including arguably one of the top ten authors in the history of the US. The films also feature them as a couple with much much younger women. The films are old and it is tough to make out ages. This was decades ago with no thought to preservation. So, the club faces a quandary. They have hours of footage of one of the most famous people in the history of the country, but 95% of the film is him having sex with a socialite or with other teens and the socialite.
The Masquers Club/Leland Hayward/Margaret Sullavan/Nancy Keith/Frank Sinatra/Ernest Hemmingway
Well then...
ReplyDeleteYikes, pedo island before pedo island basically
ReplyDeleteLegend has it ernest was hung like a baby carrot which explains a lot.
ReplyDeleteI'm more interested in what show this:
ReplyDelete"He produced two of the biggest Broadway musicals of the time and at least one of them all of you know and have seen it, but probably not on stage."
is referring to..Chicago? Les Mis? Annie?
@Do The Sound of Music, produced by Leland Hayward
ReplyDeleteLeland's daughter wrote a book, sortof like the movie "Stories We Tell", but her family and family friends were all rich and famous.
ReplyDelete“Hemingway” is misspelled.
ReplyDeleteRead the biography of the Hayward daughter. Very sad how the dad screwed up the whole family.
ReplyDeleteOMG
ReplyDeleteTY @OB
ReplyDeleteFrom things I've read over the years, Nancy Slim Keith was a yachter but she did end up marrying 3 of her "sponsors".
ReplyDeleteHayward had a house in the town where I grew up.
ReplyDeleteIt was a lovely house and property but not Hollywoodish,
a small estate back east, near people like Lillian Hellman
and Dash Hammett, Alexander Calder, James Thurber.
Serious people, theater, the arts.
@Do Tell, it was The Sound of Music (as @OB mentioned) and South Pacific.
ReplyDeleteI guess that by stressing "socialite" as the person banging Papa on the beach, they mean Slim Keith as the ho in the film's, and not Margaret Sullavan.( Both were wives of Hayward) If this is true, and these film's exist, I find it funny that in her autobiography, Slim Keith wrote about spurning Hemingway's advances when he came on to her by "dropping trou", and she merely continued to read her newspaper. Talk about revisionist history on her part.
ReplyDelete