19 Wild Facts About Old Hollywood And How Messed Up It Was

This whole process was discussed in the book Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud and was ultimately illustrated in Ryan Murphy’s miniseries Feud, where Jessica Lange starred as Joan Crawford. It was also rumored that Marlene Dietrich had her top molars removed for the same reasons as Crawford.

As an adult, Shirley Temple recalled the events, saying, “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche.”

Hedren was originally told that the birds would be fake, but there were mechanical issues, so real birds had to be swapped in. Upon visiting the set and seeing the filming circumstances, Cary Grant said to Hedren: “You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever seen.”

Reynolds only had a few months to learn what Gene Kelly had been doing his whole life, yet he “came to rehearsals and criticized everything I did and never gave me a word of encouragement.” She also worked so hard that her feet literally started bleeding.

One day she had enough and hid under a piano on the studio lot, crying, and Fred Astaire found her. He started working with her on the dance routines: “I watched in awe as Fred worked on his routines to the point of frustration and anger. I realized that if it was hard for Fred Astaire, dancing was hard for everyone.”

In the book Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit, Hepburn’s son revealed that her makeup artist Alberto de Rossi was in charge of maintaining this look: “Alberto is really the one who created the legendary ‘Audrey Hepburn eyes,’ in a slow process of applying mascara and then separating each eyelash with a safety pin.”

The film’s director, Norman Taurog, was also Cooper’s uncle. Cooper wrote in his autobiography that the whole exchange was traumatizing for him: “I could visualize my dog, bloody from that one awful shot. I began sobbing so hysterically that it was almost too much for the scene. [Taurog] had to quiet me down by saying perhaps my dog had survived the shot, that if I hurried and calmed down a little and did the scene the way he wanted, we would go see if my dog was still alive.”

Cooper earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for that role in 1931. He was nine years old. To this day, he’s still the youngest Best Actor nominee in the history of the Academy Awards.

Vincente Minelli (Judy Garland’s husband) wrote in his book that he got Margaret to cry by telling her that her dog died, but Margaret said that neither her mom nor Judy Garland would stand for that sort of thing.

Instead, she said: “The way they got me to cry is that June Allyson and I were in competition as the best criers on the MGM lot. So when I was having trouble crying, my mother would come over to me and say, ‘I’ll have the makeup man put the false tears down your face, but June is such a great, great actress – she always cries real tears.’ And then I started crying because I couldn’t let June win the competition.”

The movie was filmed near a nuclear weapons testing site in the Utah desert, and even though the government said it would be safe, the cast and crew were still exposed to radiation. It also didn’t help that 60 tons of dirt from the location was later shipped to Hollywood for reshoots.

There were about 220 cast and crew members on location. Nearly half of them developed some type of cancer within the next two decades, and 46 died from the disease, including John Wayne: “In a group this size, you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set would hold up even in a court of law.”

—Danielle Kilburn, Facebook

Jack Young, one of the movie’s makeup artists, revealed that the green paint that covered Hamilton’s body was actually toxic because it had copper in it: “Every night when I was taking off the Witch’s makeup, I would make sure that her face was thoroughly clean. Spotlessly clean. Because you don’t take chances with green.”

Ebsen, who you might recognize as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, was ultimately hospitalized and forced out of Oz‘s production. When Jack Haley replaced him, they started using a safer aluminum paste as makeup. Ebsen claimed to have breathing problems for the rest of his life because of “that damned movie.”

In interviews, Davis always praised Crawford’s work ethic, but at the end of the day they just weren’t a good fit together: “As far as making the film with her, she was on time, she knew her lines, and she basically was a pro. But we’re very different kinds of women.”

Years later, Davis got the last word. A reporter wanted a quote from her about Crawford’s recent death, and Davis nastily responded: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

Lloyd was posing for a shot on set, and “he remarked to the photographer that, for a fake, the bomb was producing an awful lot of smoke.” A few seconds later, the bomb actually exploded. It “blew the photographer clear across the room, injuring his assistant, and taking off the roof.” Lloyd lost two fingers on his right hand and was blinded for several months.

The 12th Academy Awards were held in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, which wasn’t officially integrated until 1959. There were two Gone with the Wind tables at the ceremony that year: one in the front for the cast, featuring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, and one in the very back for Hattie McDaniel, an escort, and her assistant. McDaniel ultimately won the Oscar that night, becoming the first black person to do so.

This happened with a lot of Old Hollywood actors, but most people associate it with Judy Garland. As her star power grew, the MGM studio doctors started prescribing her pills to “control both her weight and her energy levels.”

Garland told biographer Paul Donnelly that the studio gave her and Mickey Rooney the pills “to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted, then knock us out with sleeping pills, then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it was a way of life for us.”