Blind Items Revealed #33 - Old Hollywood
September 5, 2017
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.
Howard Hughes
Virgin- Loretta Young
Actress sold - Rita Hayworth
A+ list actress who had husband murdered - Jean Harlow
Actress with paid off husbands - Ava Gardner
A- list Oscar nominee actress - Gene Tierney
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.
Howard Hughes
Virgin- Loretta Young
Actress sold - Rita Hayworth
A+ list actress who had husband murdered - Jean Harlow
Actress with paid off husbands - Ava Gardner
A- list Oscar nominee actress - Gene Tierney
Why did no one seek treatment?
ReplyDeleteMaybe there wasn't a cure back then?
DeleteAlways loved Gene Tierney.
ReplyDeleteHopefully the syp is what drove him insane.
ReplyDeleteAnd he spent decades locked up in his hotel rooms. Maybe he was afraid someone was going to kill him if he went out?
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wiki, the story about why Teirney's 1st child had birth defects is that she got Rubella from a fan. Hughs paid all the med bills.
ReplyDeleteThis story is repeated in “City of Nets”, a great book about LA in the 1940s.
Delete@AndiF: that story inspired Agatha Christie’s “The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side”
DeleteThe story Tierney gave was that a soldier exposed her while she was in her first trimester.
ReplyDeleteLike you should have learned in your HS health class there is no cure, only treatments for syphillis. It can cause deaf, blindness, and insanity.
ReplyDeleteOh look another """"""philanthropist"""""" is secretly a total monster.
ReplyDeleteSyphilis has been treatable since the discovery of penicillin in the 1940s.
ReplyDeleteSo Oleg Cassini wasn’t the father of the child born with birth defects? I wonder if he knew?
ReplyDeleteJesus
ReplyDelete. A single intramuscular injection of long acting Benzathine penicillin G (2.4 million units administered intramuscularly) will cure a person who has primary, secondary or early latent syphilis. Three doses of long acting Benzathine penicillin G (2.4 million units administered intramuscularly) at weekly intervals is recommended for individuals with late latent syphilis or latent syphilis of unknown duration. Treatment will kill the syphilis bacterium and prevent further damage, but it will not repair damage already done.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/treatment.htm
OMG..Now THIS is the movie Warren Beatty should have made.
ReplyDeleteGawd was that movie boring
DeleteAnd alluded to a Love child produced
from an actress who had a screen test
but no movie
Gene Tierney's wiki says that Hughes paid for Daria's medical expenses and that Gene 'never forgot his kindness'. Right.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of this is likely bullshit given syph has been curable since antibiotics were invented and produced en masse in the war. Before that it was treated - painfully and not very well - with nasty mercury-based treatments. But since the 40s, penicillin was available, and would have been to Hughes and the rest.
ReplyDeleteThe Tierney/rubella/fan story is quite plausible and rubella being a vurus wasn't treatable at the time where as syph was. People now don't really get how widespread and serious certain diseases were before mass vaccination and how many children were damaged in-utero by something as 'mild' in outward symptoms as rubella. Mind you, they don't realize how bad STDs were either and how many kids were born blind, mentally retarded or profoundly disabled because someone had to have their fun. But hey, fun times are on their way back with antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea making headway in certain circles.
Actually I checked and per-penicillin there was an effective treatment for syph named Salvarsan aka 'Compound 606' available for use from 1910 onwards, replacing the mercury-based treatment. It was arsenic-based and the invention of penicillin resulted in its retirement.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine
Penicillin would have been available for use in 1947 for treatment, when Gene would have been 27 at the time. However, she had her daughter about 4 years earlier in 1943 so it adds up. I wonder who the current day actors and actresses going through stories like this now (replace syphilis with AIDS)? These stories are insane! How horrid! I think I need to go watch videos of cute puppies or something.
ReplyDelete@Liloleme.... no reason to believe Oleg wasn't the father, it was the syphilis (or Rubella) that Gene had contracted that caused the birth defects
ReplyDeleteIn 1935 Loretta Young had a healthy child with Clark Gable, after her first marriage was annulled. So she did not have syphilis or does it not affect every pregnancy?
ReplyDelete@moussemaker. From what I understand it can manifest itself in cycles, one that’s a symptomatic and another -lasting a few years sometimes that has symptoms up to and including infertility. In genealogy it helps explain large gaps between childbirth that don’t have other factors, especially if you know the male was a British Army soldier in India in the 18th/19th century for example
DeleteTo clarify, that’s not the only or even the main reason, but it did occasionally happen.
DeletePoor Loretta, she hadn’t realised until much later but she was actually/allegedly date-raped by that asshole Gable
@moussemaker In the book "Behind the Door - The Real Story of Loretta Young," by Ed Funk, there's a story about Loretta watching the Larry King Show about date rape. As she watched it and learned what date-rape was, she told Funk that it was what happened to her with Clark Gable.
ReplyDeleteUntreated syphilis can cause kidney failure, which is what killed Jean Harlow at the age of 26. They claimed it probably had to do with the Scarlet Fever at age 15, but if all of this is true, it could have been possibly syphilis.
ReplyDeleteUntreated syphilis can cause kidney failure, which is what killed Jean Harlow at the age of 26. They claimed it probably had to do with the Scarlet Fever at age 15, but if all of this is true, it could have been possibly syphilis.
ReplyDeletePoor Rita... never stood a chance
ReplyDeleteAnd here I'm horrified at the thought of how far Harvey would've gone beyond his ex-Mossad hirings against Rose McGowan. Jesus Christ, who actually knows who and to what degree!
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in nursing school, in the mid 1970's, I saw lots of tertiary syphillis in my Psych rotation. Men would ignore it until it was too late. I gave lots of those whopping injections of Penicillin you mentioned, Princess Pine. Unfortunately the cure came too late for many people. Their brains were destroyed. This explains the truly crazy looking pictures and stories about HH before he died.
ReplyDelete@ObservantOne: oh yes, “ paralysis of the insane” they used to call a particularly agressive and virulent end-stage. For those not in the know, it’s an early onset form of dementia that has the sufferer incredibly manic and talkative at the beginning but they deteriorate very rapidly, becoming mute and paralysed and dying within a few years.
ReplyDeleteI came across it in researching British Army soldiers, and it was commonplace among those who were long-timers, especially those with extended tours in India. And bear in mind, these were men who were always treated for it at an early enough stage as the Army considered it a serious problem. So it just goes to show how ineffective pre-1940s treatments could be for many (although not all).