Today's Blind Items - Old Hollywood - The Syphilis King
Plenty of studio heads in Old Hollywood basically forced actresses to have sex with them for roles. It wasn't so much a casting couch as it was sexual assault. One of the most famous studio heads, is still famous today, many years after his death. He is so famous that multiple movies have been made about his life. Funny though, most of those movies fail to discuss the horrors of working for him or being an actress under contract at his studio.
If you didn't agree to have sex with him, he would rape you. If you did agree to have sex with him then the odds were high you would contract syphilis. There was one actress who told her husband she was a virgin when they married. She wasn't. The husband figured it out when he contracted syphilis from her and divorced her almost immediately after marrying her. There was another actress who was set to marry our executive but suddenly didn't. Reason? Our executive basically sold her to a very rich man.
One of the women he really wanted but couldn't pressure because of her A+ list fame got secretly married. This enraged our executive who had the husband murdered. It was always portrayed as something else, but the executive did the killing and then had a torrid fling with the actress who was afraid she would be killed if she didn't.
Another actress who our executive loved kept putting off the executive by getting married. What did the executive do about it? Paid off the husbands to divorce the actress until she finally gave in and started sleeping with the executive. She also contracted syphilis from the executive and refused to have children for fear of passing it to them through birth.
There was an actress who was probably A- list. Academy Award nominee. There was always a fiction that she never slept with the executive. The story was he pursued but she declined. No such thing. He pursued and she slept with him and contracted syphilis. When she gave birth to a child with severe defects there was a story concocted as to why.
