PHOTOS OF THE DAY: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD AND THEIR VINYL

I still have some vinyl. No a lot of vinyl but some vinyl. I love looking at the classic Hollywood stars as they listened to their record collections. Some great picures here...

Rita Hayworth

Marlene Dietrich 

James Stewart

Gene Tierney

Marlon Brando

Carmen Miranda    

PHOTO OF THE DAY: CANDID EDDIE CANTOR

Eddie Cantor has been gone now for over 55 years, but his the memory of his talent and personality should not be diminished. Not only was he a great entertainer, but he was an even better human being. Here are six candid photos of Eddie through the years...

With Eddie Fisher & Sammy Davis Jr

With Laurel & Hardy

With Jane Wyatt

                                         

With Marlene Dietrich

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: ODD PAIRINGS - 6TH EDITION

Here is the sixth edition of odd Hollywood/celebrity pairings. This feature has become an annual thing almost. I love seeing the different pairings of famous people...

Sammy Davis Jr & Clint Eastwood

Elvis Presley & Liberace

Hugh Hefner & Ella Fitzgerald

Danny Devito & Christopher Reeve

Marlene Dietrich and The Beatles

Martin Luther King Jr and Marlon Brando

MARLENE DIETRICH: THE EARLY YEARS

Screen legend Marlene Dietrich created a mysterious image of herself that not many people were able to break through. Like every human being, Dietrich was born to a regular normal family, but as Dietrich became famous, she changed many facts about her early years. She was a family history revisionist (I wonder if she knew my mom!), but here are some of the facts of her early years.

Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901 at Leberstraße 65 in the neighborhood of Rote Insel in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine (née Felsing), was from an affluent Berlin family who owned a jewelry and clock-making firm. Her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant. Dietrich had one sibling, Elisabeth, who was one year older. Dietrich's father died in 1907.His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic first lieutenant in the Grenadiers, courted Wilhelmina and married her in 1916, but he died soon afterwards from injuries sustained during the First World War.Von Losch never officially adopted the Dietrich girls, so Dietrich's surname was never von Losch, as has sometimes been claimed.

Her earliest professional stage appearances were as a chorus girl on tour with Guido Thielscher's Girl-Kabarett vaudeville-style entertainments, and in Rudolf Nelson revues in Berlin. In 1922, Dietrich auditioned unsuccessfully for theatrical director and impresario Max Reinhardt's drama academy; however, she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. She did not attract any special attention at first. She made her film debut playing a bit part in the film The Little Napoleon (1923).

It was in musicals and revues such as Broadway, Es Liegt in der Luft, and Zwei Krawatten, however, that she attracted the most attention. By the late 1920s, Dietrich was also playing sizable parts on screen, including roles in Café Elektric (1927), Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (1928), and Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (1929).

In 1929, Dietrich landed the breakthrough role of Lola Lola, a cabaret singer who caused the downfall of a hitherto respectable schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings), in the UFA-Paramount co-production of The Blue Angel (1930). Josef von Sternberg directed the film and thereafter took credit for having "discovered" Dietrich. The film is also noteworthy for having introduced Dietrich's signature song "Falling in Love Again", which she recorded for Electrola and later made further recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records.

In 1930, on the strength of The Blue Angel's international success, and with encouragement and promotion from Josef von Sternberg, who was already established in Hollywood, Dietrich moved to the United States under contract to Paramount Pictures. The studio sought to market Dietrich as a German answer to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Swedish sensation, Greta Garbo. Sternberg welcomed her with gifts, including a green Rolls-Royce Phantom II. The car later appeared in their first US film Morocco. In Morocco (1930), Dietrich was again cast as a cabaret singer. The film is best remembered for the sequence in which she performs a song dressed in a man's white tie and kisses another woman, both provocative for the era. The film earned Dietrich her only Academy Award nomination. The rest as they say...is movie history...

MARLENE DIETRICH AND THE UNISEX TUXEDO

Marlene Dietrich made the tux luxe for all.

Born in Berlin as Marie Magdalene Dietrich, she became a star during Hollywood’s Golden Age. The image she’s best remembered is her turn in a man’s tux with top hat and white tie in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film Morocco. Google even remembered Marlene Dietrich’s 116th birthday—and her gender-defying tuxedo—with a December 27th doodle.

Her boundary-pushing performance—Dietrich, playing a cabaret singer, kisses a woman in the audience—stunned and titillated audiences, according to the BBC. Dietrich’s big-screen appropriation of the men’s tuxedo was a long leap at a time when women wearing trousers was still far from accepted.

The era of her widest fame included the World War II years when women stepped into factories and manufacturing to support the US war effort, events that helped set in motion the ongoing struggle for greater equality between the sexes. As the Costume Society  wrote last year of her wardrobe, “at times, Dietrich looked far better in suits than men themselves.”

She was also a bisexual star when homosexuality was a crime in many jurisdictions, and elevated drag to a new level. Today’s doodle was illustrated by Sasha Steinberg, who was a winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, performing as Sasha Velour. “Despite the pressures of the time, she followed her own course, especially in terms of politics and gender,” Velour said.

Her film career extended into the 1970s, as did her international cabaret appearances. Decades after Dietrich’s pioneered her signature look, Yves Saint Laurent designed “le smoking,” the first tuxedo for women. It came to symbolize “female liberation,” according to a statement for the 2005 exhibition Yves Saint Laurent Smoking Forever.

Dietrich, who died in 1992, is remembered as a symbol of liberation in various forms. After Hitler’s Nazi regime took control of Germany, she became an exile, went to war zones to encourage American troops and traveled widely to promote the sale of war bonds. She resisted repeated attempts by the Third Reich to lure her back and instead became an emblem of a free Germany...

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THE LAST DAYS OF MARLENE DIETRICH

The great Marlene Dietrich was a cinema icon for decades. She also tried to create an illusion of being young even as she entered her 70s. Her final years were marked with sadness but also is showed how mentally active she stayed until the end. Dietrich's show business career largely ended on September 29, 1975, when she fell off the stage and broke her thigh during a performance in Sydney, Australia. The following year, her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer on June 24, 1976 Dietrich's final on-camera film appearance was a cameo role in Just a Gigolo (1979), starring David Bowie and directed by David Hemmings, in which she sang the title song.

An alcoholic dependent on painkillers, Dietrich withdrew to her apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. She spent the final 11 years of her life mostly bedridden, allowing only a select few—including family and employees—to enter the apartment. During this time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben (Take Just My Life), was published in 1979.

In 1982, Dietrich agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was allowed only to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star".

In 1988, Dietrich recorded spoken introductions to songs for a nostalgia album by Udo Lindenberg. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2005, Dietrich's daughter and grandson claim that Dietrich was politically active during these years. She kept in contact with world leaders by telephone, including Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, running up a monthly bill of over US$3,000. In 1989, her appeal to save the Babelsberg studios from closure was broadcast on BBC Radio, and she spoke on television via telephone on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year.

On 6 May 1992, Dietrich died of renal failure at her flat in Paris at age 90. Her funeral ceremony was conducted at La Madeleine in Paris, a Roman Catholic church on 14 May 1992. Dietrich's funeral service was attended by approximately 1,500 mourners in the church itself—including several ambassadors from Germany, Russia, the US, the UK and other countries—with thousands more outside. Her closed coffin rested beneath the altar draped in the French flag and adorned with a simple bouquet of white wildflowers and roses from the French President, François Mitterrand. Three medals, including France's Legion of Honour and the US Medal of Freedom, were displayed at the foot of the coffin, military style, for a ceremony symbolising the sense of duty Dietrich embodied in her career as an actress, and in her personal fight against Nazism. The officiating priest remarked: "Everyone knew her life as an artist of film and song, and everyone knew her tough stands... She lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier". By a coincidence of fate her picture was used in the Cannes Film Festival poster that year which was currently pasted up all over Paris.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dietrich instructed in her will that she was to be buried in her birthplace, Berlin, near her family; on 16 May her body was flown there to fulfill her wish. Dietrich was interred at the Städtischer Friedhof III, Berlin-Schöneberg, next to the grave of her mother, Josefine von Losch, and near the house where she was born.

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD AND THEIR SWIMMING POOLS

With the heat of July opon us, I figured we could use a dip to cool down. Here are some great pictures of classic Hollywood stars and their swimming pools. Some of them looked afraid to get wet...

MARY PICKFORD (1892-1979) and DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS SR. (1883-1939)

AUDREY HEPBURN (1929-1993)

RONALD REAGAN (1911-2004)

PRESTON STURGES (1898-1959) and JOEL MCCREA (1905-1990)

MARLENE DIETRICH (1901-1992) and her daughter

BETTY GRABLE (1916-1973)

BEAUTY SECRETS OF OLD HOLLYWOOD

Today's celebrities are maintained by Botox, hair extensions, straightening irons and spray tans galore ... and that's just Justin Bieber. But before we start going cray-cray about the good ol' days when men looked like Cary Grant, let's not forget that the movie stars of Old Hollywood weren't exactly "natural beauties" either. In fact, as this little trip down memory lane will attest, many of these bizarre old-school beauty tricks would make even Joan Rivers wince. If she could.

Marilyn Monroe was as famed for her radiant Hollywood glow as she was for her flirtatious on-screen presence. However, she used an odd technique to maintain her glowing complextion – hormone cream. The actress would layer Active pHelityl Cream and a powder foundation on top of each other to create a radiant base that shimmered and shined on camera. The downside was that she grew a fine layer of peachy-blonde hair over her face due to the active hormones in the face cream. She was encouraged to shave it off, but refused because of the glow it gave her in photographs.
 

Audrey Hepburn was an incredibly dainty Hollywood beauty, who pioneered the baby doll look with a slick of liquid kohl and a super-fine layer of mascara on the upper lashes. Rumour has it that she got her lashes so plush and natural-looking by pain-stakingly separating them with a pin after each layer of mascara she applied.

Joan Crawford didn’t use fancy products to keep her legendary face smooth and taut – She chewed gum in the belief that it firmed up her jaw and helped to drain the toxins out from under her chin. She was also religious about her cleansing regime, and would splash her face 25 times with ice cold water after every wash.

German actress Marlene Dietrich is considered to be one of the greatest actresses of all time, but was also highly prized for her sculptured glamour. She believed in accentuating the natural lines of her face with shading, shaping and contouring. One of her most startling features were her perfectly shaped brows. She achieved this look by shaving them off and drawing them on with a brow pencil, as was the fashion in the 1930s. She also never used mascara on her lower lashes, as she believed it cast a shadow below the eyes and made her look tired.
 

 

Ever wondered where the phrase ‘blonde bombshell’ originated from? Look no further than platinum-haired 1930s starlet, Jean Harlow. Although, she had a rather unorthodox method of obtaining her baby blonde locks – she lightened her hair with a potent mixture of peroxide, ammonia and Lux Flakes (an old fashioned washing powder).

Italian screen siren Sophia Lorenwas stunningly beautiful in her 1960s hay-day, and still is now. Her secret? Olive oil. Sophia’s Mediterranean diet ensured that she was able to include at least two tablespoons of the stuff in her food every day, while routinely rubbing a small amount into her skin kept her complexion glossy and moisturized. She even added a few capfuls into a hot bath.
 

 

These Hollywood stars of today could save a lot of money on plastic surgery if they tried some of the interesting remedies their predecessors used to fight off old father time...

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PHOTOS OF THE DAY: MORE FINAL PICTURES OF THE STARS

Back in March of 2012, I featured the final pictures of famous stars. I was afraid that the post would be ghouslish and inappropriate, but I received positive feedback and over 300 people looked at the photos, so here are more final pictures of the stars. Some of the pictures are sad - and they just show you that no matter how much money or power you have, you can not stop the passage of time...

You can see the original photo post: HERE.

SOUPY SALES FROM 2008 - DIED 2009



JONATHAN WINTERS FROM APRIL 7, 2013 - HE DIED APRIL 11, 2013

LUCILLE BALL FROM MARCH 1989 - SHE DIED APRIL 1989



MARLENE DIETRICH - FOUR MONTHS BEFORE DEATH IN 1992



LARRY FINE AND MOE HOWARD FROM 1974 - BOTH WOULD DIE IN 1975

DEAN MARTIN ON SINATRA'S 80TH BIRTHDAY - DECEMBER 12, 1995. DINO WOULD DIE ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1995

GREAT MOMENTS IN BAD FILMS

Is there any such thing as a truly bad movie? I guess there is, but even with the worst movies Hollywood has produced, there are often moments in the films worth remembering. I wanted to take a look at some of the great moments from movies that I think are bad overall...

STREISAND MEETS SATCMO
Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly (1969) was one of the worst casting jobs Hollywood ever did. In 1969, Streisand was one of the biggest rising stars in the business. However, despite her being a hot property - she should not have been cast as the older widow Levi. Walter Matthau, who I love as an actor, spent the whole movie with a puss on his face. It was his character in the movie, but he also had a strong dislike for Streisand. The one moment in the movie was the main musical number "Hello Dolly". Barbra Streisand took control of the song and made it her own, and her version of that song almost makes you forget that Carol Channing should have been cast as Dolly Levi. The best part of the number was Streisand's pairing with Louis Armstrong. It was Armstrong's last movie role, and Streisand showed a jazzy side by joining Satchmo in some scat singing. The movie is horrible to sit through, but the seven minute musical number makes the movie almost watchable.

DER BINGLE SLAPS CAROLE LOMBARD
Bing Crosby helped to keep Paramount Studios out of bankruptcy in the early 30s, and he was one of the studios most populars stars from 1932 to 1956. Many of Bing's first movies for the studio showcased his singing and not his acting ability. As a result many of those early movies had pretty corny plots. One of those movies was We're Not Dressing (1934). The film cast Bing as a sailor and the great Carole Lombard as a millionaire stranded with Crosby on an island. The film is worth seeing for Bing's singing alone, and he sang some great songs like "May I", "Love Thy Neighbor", and "Once In A Blue Moon". In those terms the movie was good, but at one point Bing even had so sing with a bear (a man in a suit). Do not ask - it was 1934! The best part of the movie was not the singing, but the one scene when Bing slaps Carole Lombard. Remember, it was 1934. Singing Bing strike a woman was the most shocking part of the movie, and it has always stuck with me. In reality Bing and Carole were good friends, and Bing was a pallbearer later in 1934 when Lombard's boyfriend Russ Columbo died tragically.

DIETRICH'S BOOZY LAST MOVIE APPEARANCE
Marlene Dietrich was one of Hollywood's most stunningly beautiful women. From her breakthrough film "The Blue Angel" (1930) through her occasional film roles in the 1950s, she was not only a great beauty but a pretty good actress. Dietrich made one more screen appearance before she disappeared from the screen forever. It was a little role and a pretty awful film called "Just A Gigalo"(1978). Also appearing in the film was David Bowie, Kim Novak, and Curd Jurgens. It was a bizarre cast to say the least. Marlene Dietrich was filmed in Paris but editing makes her seem to be in Berlin with David Bowie. German press reports claimed she was paid $250,000 for two days' work. It was also widely reported that Dietrich was drunk the whole time her scenes were being filmed. Dietrich's show business career largely ended in late 1975, when she fell off the stage and broke her thigh during a performance in Sydney, Australia. The following year, her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer. By the time she signed on to film "Just A Gigalo", she was dependent on alcohol and painkillers. However, the saving grace in this awful film was Dietrich singing the title song. She looked sick and depressed in the film, and when she sings "there will come a day, when youth will pass away..." it never fails to give me chills. It's another great moment in a bad film.

Do you have any favorite moments in bad movies? Email me at dlobo74@gmail.com with your picks and I will incorporate it into a future blog article...

MARLENE DIETRICH'S LOST SISTER

Maximillian Schell specifically asked Dietrich in his documentary “Marlene” if she had any siblings and she tersely replied “no, none”, immediately after which they showed a close-up of a photo of Marlene and her sister as children. Her butler then informed Schell that she kept the photo on display in her apartment, but had it moved out of sight before Schell and his crew arrived.

The cinema that her sister Elisabeth ran with her husband Georg, according to Marlene’s grandson David Riva, was just 400 feet away from the infamous concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. "All the troops went there. In Marlene's logical point of view, there was no way on Earth that this family could not have been aware of what was happening in Bergen-Belsen."

The Allies' favourite German of the Second World War - the actress Marlene Dietrich - spent the last 47 years of her life denying the existence of a "secret sister" who had worked with Nazi troops at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, according to new evidence.
The story of how Elisabeth Will was erased from history by the legendary Berlin-born star of stage and screen has come to light, thanks to an 86-year-old former British Army officer. Arnold Horwell, now living in London, was part of a British force responsible for clearing up the horrifying carnage left at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Among Allied troops who occupied the camp, it soon became well known that a woman who had worked in a troop canteen used by Nazis throughout the period of Bergen-Belsen's worst atrocities, and who was still living in a flat there, was claiming to be Dietrich's elder sister.

Mrs Will and her husband, Georg, had run the canteen in a troop cinema where German soldiers and SS officers went to relax and watch films approved by Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.

Dietrich, who was on the staff of the American General Omar Bradley and had been entertaining troops for a year in Europe, heard talk of Mrs Will being on the site and wanted to find her. One day, she stunned Mr Horwell by flinging open the door of his office in search of her sister.

Mr Horwell said: "I was sitting at my desk and there appeared a very glamorous officer in an American uniform with a stream of blonde hair coming down from one side of her helmet. It was extraordinary to see a beautiful woman dressed like that. She introduced herself as Capt Marlene Dietrich of General Omar Bradley's staff. I remember it word for word. It has stuck with me all these years. She asked about her sister.

"I then drove her off in a Jeep to see her. The sister had worked peeling potatoes in a canteen. I introduced her and they embraced. They were very pleased to see each other. All the details are recorded because I sent letters to my wife about everything that happened and these are now in the Imperial War Museum in London."

The story has been reported in the latest edition of Der Spiegel magazine, which says that Dietrich, who left Germany in 1930 and became an American citizen in 1937 as Hollywood catapulted her to world-wide fame, subsequently denied her sister's existence. Her claim to be an only child had been accepted by biographers but mystified Mr Horwell.

He said: "I knew she had a sister. I introduced them to each other." Der Spiegel makes clear that Dietrich, who was profoundly anti-Nazi, became deeply ashamed of Mrs Will's association with Bergen-Belsen. She also realised that her reputation could have been ruined if word got out that she had a sister who had worked with Nazis at the camp.

Immediately after the meeting at Bergen-Belsen, Dietrich appears to have tried to paint her sister as a victim of the Nazis, rather than a willing helper. She also requested that the Allies, including Mr Horwell, made no mention of the family connection to the press.

Soon after the war, however, Dietrich had to change strategy when it became evident that Mrs Will regarded the Nazis as people of "moral integrity". Instead she began merely to deny having had a sister at all.

Of Elisabeth and Georg Will, Der Spiegel wrote: "The proximity [of the canteen] to the death camp, the permanent contact with SS concentration camp overseers and the financial rewards they received from the canteen put them, morally, close to the Nazis. This relationship could damage Marlene's fame."

Before and during the war Goebbels had tried to persuade Dietrich to return to Germany, thereby preventing her from entertaining the Allies. Hitler also tried to lure her back with an offer that she could make films of her choice in Germany. After the war Mrs Will carried on living in Belsen, where she died in 1973. Privately, despite the fact that Dietrich kept her sister's existence a secret, Der Spiegel claims the two still made occasional private contact. Dietrich died in 1992...

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