Today's Blind Items - Old Hollywood - Mr. X

#1 - Up until a few years before he passed away, this foreign born A-list actor and entertainer had one of the longest showbiz careers ranging from vaudeville to movies to the concert stage.He also fabricated a lot of biographical info in his ghostwritten memoirs. The entertainer seemed like a suave, bon vivant ladies man onstage but offstage was a different matter. He had was what we would now nowadays bipolar disorder and he was prone to almost suicidal forms of depression. He was also a notorious cheapskate. To cope with that, early on in his career he became addicted to cocaine which only made his paranoia and distrust of others worse. After he served in WWI, he later turned to heroin to ease the pain of a battle injury. Along with speed, he always had a dealer on call to give him his fix.

#2 - One celebrity autobiography I was really disappointed in was this bio by a foreign born A-list actress known for starring opposite that A++ list western hero in a series of films and in that Christmas movie featuring that A-list child turned adult actress who died mysteriously. She, or her ghostwriter who wrote for her, comes across as quite the prude. She painted herself as a moral crusader against that original Hollywood tabloid not named the Enquirer when they published a story about her being caught in a theater having sex with another man. She sued the tabloid and won, but she wasn't the only star to do so. The actress also said she never used the casting couch like many starlets did. but it's alleged that she was one of the more frequent casting couch users in her early days of stardom. Some things she did not mention were that she slept with the head of the studio where she made some of her best known movies, and had a long term on again off again relationship with the aforementioned western hero when they were both very much married to other people.