“Fame, they've taken everything and just twisted it / Fame, you never could have resisted it / Fame, you went beyond the boundaries of your sanity / Every day in fame you defy the laws of gravity / You ain't got no shame, cuz you're just addicted to fame…” — Van Morrison
“Fame…what’s your name?” — David Bowie
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Let’s take our foot off the gas for a day or week or month or so, ‘kay? I’m nearing “looking into the abyss gets the abyss looking back” status and “a man’s got to know his limitations.”
One of the rare recent reading pleasures I’ve discovered during this endless American Apocalypse is the deft writing of Donald Jeffries, whose Substack “I Protest” was recently added to my extremely short list of “Recommendations.” It joined former Clinton White House advisor and renegade Establishment Democrat Dr. Naomi Wolf, balancing the sexes and political parties, which feels good and right. Have these two met? They should!
Donald Jeffries is a retired-by-force information technology guy who is now a full-time writer. He’s the author of the conspiratorial fantasy novel The Unreals, and a slew of de-occulting non-fiction books: Hidden History, Survival of the Richest, Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 and the one I’m going to cull from and even kinda outright plagiarize today, On Borrowed Fame.
On Borrowed Fame: Money, Mysteries & Corruption in the Entertainment World, is roughly 400 pages but a brisk and fascinating read, one I wish I’d written myself. It chronicles a century-plus of mixed fortunes of some people in the entertainment business you’ve heard of and many Many MANY more who everybody knew in their heyday yet nobody remembers now. It’s also a wild mix of secret histories and unsolved mysteries, money, sex, violence, crime, corruption, and the strange fateful twists that often seem to befall the famous and rich.
The book primarily focuses on Hollywood and the music business, with a bit of the stage. I’ve pilfered a few…just a few…of the most compelling stories from Mr. Jeffries’ book. I suggest you acquire it: I burned through it in two sprints, with a break about halfway through for a lousy novel I didn’t have the patience to finish (Silver Nitrate); the relentless weirdness, immorality, corruption, character collapses and unresolved enigmas were starting to weigh on me. But I polished it off easily after returning, because it’s a great read and Jeffries is a terrific writer. So Let’s Gooooooo….
The fall-from-fame that most jarred me was the career collapse of arguably the most significant and influential auteur of the silent film era, D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation, Intolerance), who pioneered closeups and fadeouts, who brought the tracking shot to American cinema, as well as film’s first orchestrated musical score. Griffith was once feted at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, and Birth of a Nation was the first film ever screened inside it.…yet he died in 1948 forgotten and alone after collapsing in the lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel (now a retirement home) in Los Angeles, where he had been living by himself. A decade after his death, in 1959, the distribution rights to 30 of Griffith’s best-known films were sold for $21,000. Griffith was so poor at the end of his life that he was buried in an unmarked Kentucky grave, though the Directors Guild of America sprung for a headstone years later.
Jeffries makes a note of how many once-famous people ended up in unmarked graves. Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson are buried in unmarked graves. Fred Gwynne, best known as Herman from The Munsters horror sitcom, is buried in an unmarked grave in Maryland. One of the biggest monster movie stars of all time, Lon Chaney, was interred in an unmarked crypt. Musicians Roy Orbison and Frank Zappa are buried in unmarked graves. Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott lies buried near Roy Orbison, and is also unmarked. The genius Occult Auteur Orson Welles’s remains lie in an unmarked covered water well in Spain, on the remote rural property of a famous bullfighter. There are many more; read the book and you’ll see.
Incidentally, not only is he in an unmarked grave, Frank Zappa was buried less than 24 hours after his death, which was not publicly revealed until the day after he was in the ground. Andy Griffith, too, was buried less than five hours after his death, and before his passing was made public. The head of the Funeral Directors Association told The Hollywood Reporter, “I’ve never heard of such a thing in my 32 years in the business.”
Many once-famous “stars” preferred to disappear through cremation. Now forgotten Kay Francis was the highest paid female movie star in the early era of “talkies” after silent pictures ended, the #1 box office actress from 1932-1936. Yet she wrote in her diaries, discovered after her death and now preserved in an academic collection at Wesleyan University: “When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can’t wait to be forgotten.” Jeffries calls Kay Francis “Hollywood’s biggest forgotten star.”
A more recent “biggest forgotten star” is beautiful Ali MacGraw, once the most famous actress in the world. Star of blockbuster films like Love Story, The Getaway and Goodbye, Columbus, she was a Best Actress Oscar nominee and voted the top box office movie star of 1972. MacGraw was honored with a hands and footprints ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre after having been in just three films, the speediest ascension of any actress ever.
MacGraw was married to superproducer and probable late 60s/early 70s “King of Hollywood” Robert Evans, then blew up the tabloids after leaving him for arguably Hollywood’s coolest actor ever, Steve McQueen (McQueen is another wild tale: In 1974, Steve McQueen became the highest-paid movie star in history, then promptly left Hollywood for half a decade to pursue motorcycle racing under the pseudonym Harvey Mushman, before finally returning to make two 1980 bounty hunter movies, one historic and one contemporary, then died in November of that year at age 50). After her divorce from McQueen and his death, MacGraw rarely worked; she did have the lead female role in the blockbuster 1983 ABC miniseries Winds of War, but was singled out as its weakest link and replaced by the equally gorgeous Jane Seymour in the sequel War & Remembrance. After her Malibu home burned down, MacGraw moved to New Mexico, where she still resides at 88, spending the majority of her public life as an animal welfare advocate.
Sorry for the swerve, but I always dug Ali MacGraw even though she’s not a very good actress. So beautiful she held the screen whether she was convincing you or not (“Love is never having to say you’re sorry” is one of the most dishonest and least convincing catch-phrases of all time). Now back to cremation.
Don Jeffries cites John Lennon biographer Albert Goldman when asserting the Beatles singer/songwriter “had a horror of cremation,” which he had repeatedly made known to his family. Despite that, Lennon’s wealthy widow Yoko “Yes, I’m a Witch” Ono had his body cremated less that 24 hours after his murder, did not hold a funeral, did not permit a spot for Lennon’s first wife Cynthia to attend his very small memorial service, and even tried to keep his first son Julian away as well (she rescinded that rejection at the last moment). Reporting that Lennon’s ashes were scattered at the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, near his residence at the Dakota Apartments, where he was killed, appears to be a media myth.
Brilliant writer Truman Capote’s ashes were bequeathed to Joanne Carson, widow of talk show host Johnny Carson. She held on to them until her death, after which they were auctioned off, just another commodity for a collector.
At least somebody wanted them. In Hollywood’s “Vaultage,” an off-limits spot in L.A.’s Pines crematorium and mausoleum, there is a large collection of ashes of The Town’s huge stars, now forgotten: Bronco Billy Anderson, Lionel Atwill, Thomas Mitchell, and H.B. Warner. Warner was the Jim Caviezel of his day, portraying Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 blockbuster King of Kings.
Thomas Mitchell is a great case of a hugely popular and highly respected actor nobody knows now. Mitchell was the first actor to win the “Triple Crown” of acting, earning cinema’s Oscar, television’s Emmy, and Broadway theater’s Tony awards. He was also a director, playwright, and screenwriter. Despite all that, you’d probably best know who he is, if you know him at all, for his small but critical role in Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life, where he was cast as the inept Uncle Billy, who loses all the bank’s money. As a footnote curio, Mitchell’s last role was starring as the iconic L.A. detective Columbo in the original 1962 stage play version of Prescription Murder, which was later adapted as the TV pilot starring Peter Falk that became the hit NBC TV series. Humble and allegedly well-liked, Mitchell quipped in his brief Oscar acceptance speech: ”I didn't know I was that good.”
Cremated and abandoned Lionel Atwill is another former Hollywood superstar forgotten today but once a horror film legend on par with Boris Karloff, Bela Legosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. Atwill was also a sex addict, throwing wild parties at his Hollywood mansion in the 1930s that featured screenings of early pornographic films. His property was guarded by a pet python and six fierce Dobermans. Atwill’s annual Christmas party was a legendary anti-Christ pagan extravaganza, each outrageous year seeking to top the last, before climaxing (so to speak) in 1941’s holiday sex orgy involving at least one under-aged yet pregnant girl participating as the “Virgin Mary,” which led to Atwill getting indicted for perjury during the cover-up. He was given a mere five years probation, but that was the end of his career; he was blacklisted and died five years later. Despite being married four times and having one son, no one claimed Atwill’s ashes after cremation.
Stories like Lionel Atwill’s Christmas orgies, if they were to break in corporate media today for a modern actor equivalent, would lead to endless hand-wringing about how Hollywood is a vipers’ pit of moral degenerates. But On Borrowed Fame is a great reminder Hollywood has always been a snake pit of moral degenerates.
The Lionel Atwill case study is only one of the book’s re-affirmations of the blessing/curse clichéd canard that “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same.” There are chapters devoted to the intelligence community and organized crime’s control of the entertainment business; corporate conspiracies meant to rip-off creatives; rampant pedophilia from beloved stars (Charlie Chaplin, holy shit — it makes you wonder: what’s the real reason he had to leave the country to live in France, the same nation that convicted pedo Roman Polanski fled to); and the massive gay underpinnings of pretty much everybody and everything in Hollywood (“Everyone’s gay once in a while in Hollywood,” as the joke-that’s-not-a-joke goes).
It’s remarkable how much stuff about Hollywood’s Secret History has been published over the years in memoirs, biographies and tell-alls, yet has still not busted through the fuzzy veneer of controlled corrupt corporate media myth. As Jeffries recounts, “Revelations from recent years would lead one to believe that everyone during the Golden Age of movies was gay or at least bisexual.”
Bisexual screen legend Greta Garbo — a rare movie star who successfully transitioned from silent to sound film before deciding “I want to be alone” (which she never actually said) — “had numerous physical flaws yet was somehow marketed as the ultimate sex symbol for at least a decade,” Jeffries writes. One of Garbo’s first celebrity lovers was the ditzy dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan. As her career blossomed, the free-spirited Garbo was rumored to have bedded nearly all the notable members of Hollywood’s “Sewing Circle,” as The Town’s secret but substantial lesbian/bisexual contingent was referred to: Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Agnes Moorehead, Claudette Colbert, Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich, and on and on, at least a couple covens worth, ahem. Sister actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish were also rumored to be lovers of Garbo — and each other.
Jeffries briefly cites Hollywood pimp Scotty Bowers’ 2012 tell-all book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, which I’ve read and “contains numerous shocking claims” that are so damning that Jeffries doesn’t recount them in specific detail, but “portrays the Golden Age of Hollywood as utterly, undeniably gay.” (The more things change, etc., etc.) I’m not sure I buy the Bowers book as 100% true (even though Gore Vidal claimed it was), but even if it’s half true, it’s twice as telling as the Official Story™. I recommend Full Service as much as On Borrowed Fame, though you’ll never look at the leading male icons of classic Hollywood the same. “A trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat,” as the Hollywood screenwriter Wilson Mizner once said (and is quoted in Jeffries’ book).
Hollywood’s major studios worked to make or break politicians with puffery and dishonesty a near-century ago as much as they do now, creating fake events to spin a false narrative. For example, Tinseltown moguls were heavily involved in sabotaging populist author Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for Governor of California as the Democratic Party candidate. Actors were hired to portray ersatz dirty, disheveled and drunken Sinclair supporters, causing scenes and instigating public conflict, to discredit the candidate. It worked; Sinclair was soundly defeated by Republican Frank Merriam. According to Wikipedia, “political experts” cite that 1934 California general election as the first “modern election”: One that utilized various pop culture media, propaganda and rhetoric to both popularize and demonize candidates.
According to multiple citations dug up by Jeffries, Hollywood’s nastiest living celebrity is Billy Crystal. He also cites a late-1960s article that pegged future Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as “the most disliked young man in Hollywood. He treats members of the crew and extras as though less than human.” Creator of “reality TV” in America, John Barbour, says that Lauren Bacall was one of the few “real cunts” he ever met in Hollywood.
One of the most interesting tales is that of multiple Oscar-winning Hollywood luminary Jack Nicholson. As Jeffries points out, Jack Nicholson “is a literal enigma.” Citing the research of the late great Dave McGowan — who, it’s worth mentioning, wrote about Nicholson’s mysterious life in a segment of his blog “INSIDE THE L.C.: The Strange But Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation” but not the must-read book that resulted from it, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon — Jeffries (re-)writes:
“It is said that Jack Nicholson was born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City, but there is no record of such a birth in either the hospital nor the city’s archives. As it turns out , Jack Nicholson has no birth certificate. Until 1954, by which time he was nearly an adult, he did not officially exist. Even today, the closet thing he has to a birth certificate is a ‘Certificate of a Delayed Report of Birth’ that was filed on May 24, 1954. It appears there is no way to determine who Jack Nicholson really is.”
Everybody should read Donald Jeffries’ book, but Hollywood talent should read it most of all, as a reminder of how transitory all their fame is, and how meaningless. There are very Very VERY few people whose renown lasts a decade, much less a century, particularly in entertainment. As Jeffries darkly but adeptly points out, the most famous actor or actress of the 19th Century is John Wilkes Booth.
Couple examples: One of the biggest international stage stars of the entire 19th Century was the sensual and scandalous Spanish dancer Lola Montez. Her creation of the “Spider Dance” instigated a provocative and notorious 1850s dance craze. She had an affair with King Ludwig of Bavaria, before leaving Europe and moving to the United States. She wrote a book about beauty called “Secrets of a Ladies Toilet,” which was a shocking and titillating bestseller in its day. No one knows her now. Thomas Cooper was arguably the biggest star of the early American stage, moving in such elite circles that his daughter married the son of President John Taylor. His roles, performances and personal life captivated the public and news media. He’s completely obscure in the 21st Century.
This has already gone longer than I intended, and I could double its length and still barely make a dent in revealing all the fascinating material in Donald Jeffries’ opus. Both a research-deep historical chronicle and cautionary tale, On Borrowed Fame is very much the book our narcissistic nation needs to read to remember, in the words of actor Nick Mancuso, who married into royalty: “Fame sucks. It’s a glamorous car wreck.”
I very much appreciate the writeup about my book, Tom. You certainly made it soound interesting! Thank you so much for the kind words, my friend.
How many of the unmarked graves point to fake deaths? Nothing from Hollywood can be taken at face value.