Today's Blind Items - Old Hollywood Blind Item
This one is out there for you to discover. I just thought you might have fun trying to dig this one up because it does have a holiday connection and it has some pseudo incest which I know is always intriguing.
What we have here is an actress who was definitely considered A list at the height of her fame. Academy Award nominated and in one of the most popular films of all time. Has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. Married to a director who, although, not as big as his actress wife, still happened to direct one of the most famous films of all time. Our director had been previously married and had children from that marriage. One of those children was a son. Well things happen as they say and the step mom actress and her step son just could not control what happened and eventually wound up in bed together. One day, the dad/husband/director came home to find his son and his wife having, umm relations. Well it turns out that the wife during the course of this marriage had children both from her director husband and also from her stepson.
Holy crap, my stomach just came up. Nasty.
ReplyDeleteCasablanca? Gone With the Wind? Wizard of Oz? None of the female stars of those movies fits.
ReplyDeleteEw.
ReplyDeleteInternets are leading me to believe it's Gloria Grahame (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002108/bio) - Violet from It's a Wonderful Life... ???
ReplyDeleteJulie Andrews/Blake Edwards, perhaps?
ReplyDeleteIt's not Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. I just looked them up and Gena did not have a stepson, so I thought I throw that out there.
ReplyDeleteKristen S - I was JUST gonna post that. Especially b/c Ent mentions Tiffany in the first pic below the blind.
ReplyDeleteLeslie, my first instinct was someone from It's A Wonderful Life but only looked at Donna Reed. Didn't think about Violet!!!!
ReplyDeleteWould just like to point out that Julie Andrews won an Oscar for Mary Poppins and was nominated 2 more times (The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria)
ReplyDeleteI second Gloria Grahame
ReplyDeletePer Wikipedia:
In 1960, even Hollywood was scandalized after her marriage to Tony Ray, Grahame's former stepson and son of her ex-husband Nicholas Ray whom she had divorced eight years previously. Gloria ended up having children by both father and son
Bingo, Leslie. It's even on her Wiki page, not that necessarily means much.
ReplyDeleteCan we get a decade? I am stumped. I am going to assume that they had alot of kids. Need to do research.
ReplyDeleteAlso Julie Andrews has two daughters Amy and Joanna. Geoffrey (her stepson) would have been 14 & 15 at conception. Of course it's still possible.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm not counting Emma from her first marriage since Geoffrey was 3 when she born.
amy irving was nominated for yentl.
ReplyDeleteshe had a son, max, with stephen s. and he was born in 1985.
i actually think it goes back further than this, but just sayin'...
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ReplyDeleteAwesome job Leslie! I think this might be the fastest solve.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAwesome Leslie - she does fit every criterion, doesn't she? Including the one movie on her husband's resume that would count as "one of the most famous films of all time"!
ReplyDeleteI think the mention of Tiffany under the Debbie Gibson photo solidified it for me. It can't be a coincidence that Breakfast at Tiffany's just HAPPENS to have a lesser known director married to one of the most famous actresses in the world who starred in some of the most famous movies of all time - Sound of Music, Mary Poppins - won and was nominated for Oscars...AND just happens to have a stepson from the husband's first marriage who could have been of age at any time during their almost 40 year marriage.
ReplyDeleteLeslie, you know your Old Hollywood, that's for sure! I was starting to think Sophia Loren, but when you posted, it jogged my memory about Gloria. I loved her in "Oklahoma!"
ReplyDeleteleslie - well done - and so fast!!!
ReplyDeleteSay no more; Leslie has nailed it.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely Gloria Grahme. Well done, Leslie.
ReplyDeleteJudy Garland and Vincent Minelli, she was in Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade, and Meet Me In St. Louis, all huge movies, He directed An American In Paris, meet me in St. Louis and Ziegfeld Follies, all acclaimed movies. I now he has children from a previous marriage not sure if they are girls or boys though.
ReplyDeleteWhoah! Great blind today, ent!
ReplyDeleteDid Gloria Grahame have a star on the walk of fame?
ReplyDeleteHe says the director husband was not as big as the wife, so I think that rules out Minelli/Garland and Edwards/Andrews as both directors have acclaim for many movies. I want to see what movie Grahame's husband directed. Seems like it has been solved.
ReplyDeleteJS - Rebel Without a Cause
ReplyDeleteLocal - yes
It is Gloria Graham. Her husband Nick Ray directed "Rebel Without a Cause" with James Dean. She's been Oscar nominated twice. She has a child with Nick Ray, then married his son, Tony Ray. She then had a child with him.
ReplyDeleteGloria Grahame seems like a good guess. But the last sentence makes me believe that during the first marriage they had at least two kids, one of which was fathered by the stepson. Grahame and Ray had one child during that marriage, AFAIK.
ReplyDeletelocal tourist - yes she has a star on the h'wood walk of fame...
ReplyDelete...although hers should have been on the walk of shame.
....and Tony Ray was 13 when dad discovered the affair. I just read Hollywood Babylon:It's Back. This one isn't much of a secret but it sure is scandalous.
ReplyDeleteIt is totally Gloria Grahame. Some guys I know have been trying to make a movie about Nicholas Ray for years & told us this story a while back.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised this is even a blind item. I've heard this story many times before. Check out this link, which also discusses the story: http://books.google.com/books?id=W63KwX1QtBAC&pg=PA65&dq=gloria+grahame#PPA71,M1
ReplyDeleteAfter the affair with her underage stepson, her husband divorced her and she married another man. After this man (her third husband) divorced her, she then married her ex-step-son in what would be her longest (14 years) marriage. She had four children, two of them being from her step-son and one from her step-son's father.
Oh, YEAH! I love these old H'Wood Blinds.
ReplyDeleteNo clue yet, of course, but thanks for a good one Enty.
Damn! Y'all are on it tonight! Good work.
ReplyDeleteI think I just threw up in my mouth...gross
ReplyDeleteI really, really hate to be the lone dissenter on this, especially since I think Leslie did an excellent job, but Gloria Grahame just seems a bit too obvious. I mean, why make it a blind item when the story is so well-known? Also, the blind mentions that the actress was "Academy nominated and in one of the most popular films of all time." Grahame won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful. Why wouldn't Enty say she was an Oscar winner?
ReplyDeleteAgain, I think she is an excellent guess (great work, Leslie), but these two things make me wonder if there was another cougar nympho in Hollywood.
This is indeed an old famous Hollywood blind, and Leslie is right: It's Gloria Grahame. She's also Violet Bick in It's a Wonderful Life.
ReplyDeletewhy would you put a blind item in that happened before we were born? i think at least the blind items should be more current.
ReplyDeleteMagenta, I agree. If it's Gloria, does that mean she gave a child up for adoption?
ReplyDeleteNot to threadjack, but is it time to revisit Timmy/Shimmy for the straight scoop now that Johnny Grant is dead? IIRC, the person who told the story was livid that ENT was going to out it and had to change parts of it. And we all concurred that the person who told the story was Johnny Grant.
ReplyDeleteenty did say this one was out there and we'd find it if we did some digging. so leslie did the fastest digging and came up with the answer. so, he did set it up as a blind that we'd be able to find.
ReplyDeletegossiphound, some people are such old crabs here - the ancient school marms rapping people's knuckles because of their own bitterness that it seems they're closing in on a hundred years of age and were probably around when this happened. enty can't gear them all toward us young readers. ;)
mabel, did enty say the person who told him was livid for sharing the story? i don't remember reading that, but i go on long breaks here when we go on vacations.
ReplyDeleteHere's a 2005 Vanity Fair article:
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/9mx2cj
My favorite paragraph:
Nicca thinks the affair between Grahame and Tony came about because "Tony and Gloria shared a mutual hatred toward my father. They had a common enemy, which was him." Nine years after Nick found Grahame in bed with his son, Tony and Grahame married and then had two children. As Nicca observes, "Some families are fucked up differently than others."
"...some people are such old crabs here - the ancient school marms rapping people's knuckles because of their own bitterness that it seems they're closing in on a hundred years of age and were probably around when this happened."
ReplyDeleteHey, I resemble that remark! I LOVE the classic stories, but then I also love the soap opera blinds, so I guess my judgment is questionable. :)
Katy,
ReplyDeleteYou're right, it does seem way too obvious. However, most of Enty's old Hollywood blinds are pretty obvious. Maybe he thinks because it's an old item and most of his fan base is younger than 60 that we'll have trouble guessing it (for example, in the Mae West blind, there were people guessing Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Ava Gardner, who were born about 30 years too late to be the subject of the blind).
Look at the Van & Evie Johnson/Keenan Wynn blind. That one was pretty much common knowledge, or at least to fans of old Hollywood, but Enty still made it a bline.
"If it's Gloria, does that mean she gave a child up for adoption?"
ReplyDeleteNo. She had an affair with her teenaged step-son. A decade later, she married him (no longer a teenager) and had two sons with him whom they did not give up for adoption.
Enty is not hinting that Grahame's step-son fathered a child with her while she was married to her father either. The only child she had with Nick Ray was born a few months after they married. The child was conceived when her step-son Tony would have only been 9, too young to father a child, and five years before their affair.
I think that Leslie nailed it. The Gloria Grahame thing is clinched by the "holiday connection" hint.
ReplyDeleteGloria's husband wasn't an angel either. He had an affair with Natalie Wood starting when she was 16!
ReplyDeleteFunny thing - or ironic maybe - Gloria Grahame was the one who sang "I'm just a girl who can't say no" in Oklahoma!.
ReplyDeletekanonymous, the blind says, "Well it turns out that the wife during the course of this marriage had children both from her director husband and also from her stepson."
ReplyDeleteDNfromMN, I think you're right. I went back and re-read the first paragraph, and It's a Wonderful Life is definitely a holiday connection.
ReplyDelete"Well it turns out that the wife during the course of this marriage had children both from her director husband and also from her stepson."
ReplyDeleteHer son with Nicholas Ray was born in 1948 and their marriage ended in 1952. Her sons with Tony Ray were born in the 1960's. Enty is either wrong, or Grahame had a secret child that we don't know about. I'm going to guess that Enty just doesn't have the facts straight, or that whoever told him the story embellished it. Grahame was in movies throughout her marriage to Nicholas Ray, so if she tried to hide a pregnancy it would have been noticeable.
I agree that it's Gloria Grahame.
ReplyDeleteIt is NOT Gloria Grahame. The BI states the actress had (multiple) childREN with the first husband, whereas Grahame only had one child during her marriage to Nicholas Ray.
ReplyDeleteCase closed. Or, rather, open.
If this is Gloria Grahame it is not a blind. This is common knowledge. I think it must be someone else.
ReplyDelete