In her autobiography My Way of Life, she wrote about her beauty routines. Once a week, she’d steam her face, apply a mask, and soak her eyes in boric acid, casually instructing, “While the masque is working, place pads soaked in witch hazel and boric acid over your eyelids and put on your favorite music.”
It should go without saying, but please don’t do this.
20th Century Fox, MGM
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.”
Universal Pictures
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.”
MGM
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.”
ABC
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.”
Paramount Pictures
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.”
Wikipedia / Public Domain / en.wikipedia.org, 20th Century Fox
The studio thought that having a child would ruin an actresses’ reputation: they wouldn’t be perceived as glamorous – for example, a child would “compromise Dorothy Dandridge’s image while portraying the sexy Carmen Jones” – and box office numbers would subsequently suffer.
Stars like Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Jeanette McDonald were sent to hospitals for abortions under the guise of things like appendectomies and ear infections. It was also rumored that this morality clause prevented Jean Harlow from marrying William Powell.
Warner Bros., Wikipedia / Creative Commons / en.wikipedia.org
This part of the clause revolved around not “forfeiting the respect of the public.” A breach of the contract meant that an actor would lose his or her salary. Even worse, being outed almost certainly marked the end of your career.
For example, according to Rock Hudson’s biography All That Heaven Allows, Confident Magazine, a tabloid paper, had planned on outing him: “Henry Wilson (Hudson’s agent) knew that there was only one way to silence all of the rumors about Hudson’s homosexuality. It was time for Rock to get married. And fast.” Hudson immediately married Phyllis Gates, but they divorced a couple of years later. Hudson’s sexuality remained a secret for the most part until the end of his life when he was diagnosed with AIDS. He died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 59.
RKO Radio Pictures
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
MGM
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.”
Wikipedia / Fair Use / en.wikipedia.org / CBS
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.”
Warner Bros. Pictures
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.”
Warner Bros. Pictures
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.”
Wikipedia / Public Domain / en.wikipedia.org / Pathé Exchange
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.
MGM
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.”