HOLLYWOOD URBAN LEGEND: ORSON WELLES

URBAN LEGEND: Does Hollywood icon Orson Welles still haunt his favorite restaurant?

STATUS: The people who work at the restaurant say it is 100% true!

This actor, producer, director and writer is still Hollywood royalty for his role in what was a brand new industry in his time. He is most well known for playing the lead role in film student must-see Citizen Kane. Orson Welles’ ghost is said to still frequent his favorite restaurant for a cigar and a bourbon. Many of the staff of Melrose Avenue restaurant Sweet Lady Jane’s have had encountered with Welles from beyond the grave.

In these accounts, Orson Welles is generally wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a dark cape. It is also said that someone interacting with his spirit will pick up the aromas of his favorite bourbon and cigars. Although the dark spirit is somewhat ominous not one restaurant employee has reported a malicious presence along with these paranormal experiences. Sweet Lady Jane’s is still running and diners still have the chance to sit with their favorite Hollywood legend...

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: STILL MORE ODD PAIRINGS

Hollywood is full of some of the most different people in the world - working in the entertainment business I think puts some different people together that you would never picture being together. Here is the 4th addition of this series showing more odd pairings...

Lou Costello, Elvis Presley, and Jane Russell

Eddie Murphy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Michael Jackson

Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney, and Orson Welles

Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee

Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson

Bono and Frank Sinatra

EVEN MORE ODD PAIRINGS-JULY 12, 2014

MORE ODD PAIRINGS-JULY 16, 2012

ODD PAIRINGS-APRIL 19, 2011

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST VS CITIZEN KANE

One of Hollywood’s most famous clashes of the titans--an upstart “boy genius” filmmaker versus a furious 76-year-old newspaper tycoon--heats up on this day in 1941, when William Randolph Hearst forbids any of his newspapers to run advertisements for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

Though Welles was only 24 years old when he began working in Hollywood, he had already made a name for himself on the New York theater scene and particularly with his controversial radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds in 1938. After scoring a lucrative contract with the struggling RKO studio, he was searching for an appropriately incendiary topic for his first film when his friend, the writer Herman Mankiewicz, suggested basing it on the life of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was a notoriously innovative, often tyrannical businessman who had built his own nationwide newspaper empire and owned eight homes, the most notable of which was San Simeon, his sprawling castle on a hill on the Central California coast.

After catching a preview screening of the unfinished Citizen Kane on January 3, 1941, the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wasted no time in passing along the news to Hearst and his associates. Her rival and Hearst’s chief movie columnist, Louella Parsons, was incensed about the film and its portrait of Charles Foster Kane, the Hearst-like character embodied in typically grandiose style by Welles himself. Even more loathsome to Hearst and his allies was the portrayal of Kane’s second wife, a young alcoholic singer with strong parallels to Hearst’s mistress, the showgirl-turned-actress Marion Davies. Hearst was said to have reacted to this aspect of the film more strongly than any other, and Welles himself later called the Davies-based character a “dirty trick” that he expected would provoke the mogul’s anger.

Only a few days after the screening, Hearst sent the word out to all his publications not to run advertisements for the film. Far from stopping there, he also threatened to make war against the Hollywood studio system in general, publicly condemning the number of “immigrants” and “refugees” working in the film industry instead of Americans, a none-too-subtle reference to the many Jewish members of the Hollywood establishment. Hearst’s newspapers also went after Welles, accusing him of Communist sympathies and questioning his patriotism.

Hollywood’s heavyweights, who were already resentful of Welles for his youth and his open contempt for Hollywood, soon rallied around Hearst. Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer even offered to pay RKO $842,000 in cash if the studio’s president, George Schaefer, would destroy the negative and all prints of Citizen Kane. Schaefer refused and in retaliation threatened to sue the Fox, Paramount and Loews theater chains for conspiracy after they refused to distribute the film. After Time and other publications protested, the theater chains relented slightly and permitted a few showings; in the end, the film barely broke even.


Nominated for nine Oscars, Citizen Kane won only one (a shared Best Screenplay award for Mankiewicz and Welles) and Welles and the film were actually booed at the 1942 Academy Awards ceremony. Schaefer was later pushed out at RKO, along with Welles, and the film was returned to the RKO archives. It would be 25 more years before Citizen Kane received its rightful share of attention, but it has since been heralded as one of the best movies of all time...

BORN ON THIS DAY: JOSEPH COTTEN

Joseph Cotten was one of those actors that was great in every role he starred in, but never got the recognition he deserved. It has been over twenty years since his death, and sadly only real movie fans remember the name Joseph Cotten. For me, Cotten starred in one of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies, Shadow Of A Doubt (1943), but he had some truly remarkable roles in his long Hollywood career.

Joseph Cotten was born on May 15, 1905 in Petersburg, Virginia, the son of Joseph Cheshire Cotten, Sr., an assistant postmaster and his wife, Sally Willson Cotten. He worked as an advertising agent after studying acting at the Hickman School of Speech and Expression in Washington, D.C. His work as a theatre critic inspired him to become involved in theatre productions, first in Virginia, then in New York City. Cotten made his Broadway debut in 1930.

In 1934 Cotten met and became friends with Orson Welles, a fellow cast member on CBS Radio's The American School of the Air. Cotten had his first starring role in Welles's second production for the Federal Theatre Project — the farce Horse Eats Hat, adapted by Welles and Edwin Denby from Eugène Marin Labiche's play Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie. The play was presented from September 26 to December 5, 1936, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, New York.

In 1937 Cotten became an inaugural member of Welles's Mercury Theatre company, starring in Broadway productions of Julius Caesar, The Shoemaker's Holiday and Danton's Death, and in radio dramas presented on The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse.

Cotten made his film debut in the Welles-directed short, Too Much Johnson, a comedy that was intended to complement an aborted 1938 Mercury stage production of William Gillette's 1890 play. The film was never screened in public; it was reported in 2013 that a print had been discovered in Prodenone, Italy.

Cotten returned to Broadway in 1939, creating the role of C. K. Dexter Haven opposite Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord in the original production of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. The play ran for a year at the Shubert Theatre, and in the months before its extensive national tour a film version was to be made by MGM. Cotten went to Hollywood, but discovered there that his stage success in The Philadelphia Story translated to, in the words of his agent Leland Hayward, "spending a solid year creating the Cary Grant role." Hayward suggested that they call Cotten's good pal, Orson Welles. "He's been making big waves out here," Hayward said. "Maybe nobody in Hollywood ever heard of the Shubert Theatre in New York, but everybody certainly knows about the Mercury Theatre in New York".

In mid-1940 filming began on Citizen Kane, portraying the life of a press magnate (played by Welles) who starts out as an idealist but eventually turns into a corrupt, lonely old man. The film featured Cotten prominently in the role of Kane's best friend Jedediah Leland, eventually a drama critic for one of Kane's papers. The rest would be movie history...

CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD NEWS: NOVEMBER 2013

Hard to believe another month has passed, and we are headed into the final innings of 2013. Here is some of the classic Hollywood news that has made its way on to my desk...

British actress Vivien Leigh had that undefinable star quality. For 30 years, the exquisitely beautiful Leigh captivated film and theater audiences with her well-crafted, magnetic performances. In fact, Leigh won lead actress Oscars for creating two of the most indelible characters in screen history — the strong-willed, manipulative Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara in the beloved 1939 Civil War epic, Gone With the Wind, and Tennessee Williams' fragile, faded Southern beauty Blanche DuBois in 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire. Her accomplishment is all the more remarkable because Leigh, who died at age 53, made only 19 movies. A new book is out on the interesting actress called "Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait" by film scholar Kendra Bean. The recently published, lavishly illustrated biography commemorating the actress' centenary combines historical material, including documents from the archives of her second husband, Laurence Olivier, as well as interviews with those who knew her.

 

 

 The eve before Halloween is known as Mischief Night. A few days ago it marked 75 years ago that on Oct. 30, 1938, a 23-year-old Orson Welles caused more than a bit of mischief with his landmark radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds." Most of the 6 million who tuned into Welles' "Mercury Theater on the Air" innovative adaptation of H.G. Wells' sci-fi classic about a Martian invasion realized it was drama. But because of its realistic news bulletin format, some believed aliens from the Red Planet had actually landed and overrun the small town of Grover's Mill, N.J., and were on the move through the rest of the country. Even in this pre-Twitter and Facebook era, the reaction was instantaneous. Listeners called into Chicago newspapers in a panic during the broadcast, while in San Francisco people fretted that the Martians were heading West. And in New Jersey, National Guardsmen were calling their armories to find out if they needed to report.

 

 Broadway legend Angela Lansbury has made a lot of movies, but she never won an Oscar. Lansbury has received three Academy Award nominations for her supporting performances in 1944's Gaslight, 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray and 1962's The Manchurian Candidate. Her other credits include Blue Hawaii, The World of Henry Orient and Mr. Popper’s Penguins. She also did voice work for the first animated feature to receive a best picture nomination, Beauty and the Beast. Finally though it was announced that Ms. Lansbury will receive an Honorary Oscar at next year's Academy Award ceremony. It is about time... ...and that's the classic Hollywood news for this month!

JACKIE GLEASON AND UFOS

Orson Welles coined the name "The Great One" for Jackie Gleason, and Welles had good reason to. During his career, Gleason not only was a television icon, but he also made his mark in movies and the recording industry as well. Anything Gleason is involved in, whether good or bad, was worth taking note of. In his personal life, Gleason tackled everything with the same gusto as he did in his career. Even his hobbies, he tackled with highly concentrated interest. One of those hobbies may be surprising to some and that is Gleason's interest in UFOs.

Gleason was an extremely serious armchair UFO researcher, and prided himself on his huge collection of UFO-related books, which numbered into the thousands. As soon as a new title came out, even in Europe or the UK, Jackie had a copy. Little did he suspect that his interest in that topic would one day gain him access to something that most people would never even believe, and would leave others who shared his interests either skeptical or forever jealous.

It was a chance conversation one afternoon, back in 1974 in Florida, while Jackie was playing golf with one of his regular partners, President Richard Nixon. Jackie had mentioned his interest in UFOs and his large collection of books, and the president admitted that he also shared Jackie's interest and had a sizeable collection of UFO-oriented materials of his own. At the time, the president said little about what he actually knew, but things were to change drastically later on that same night.

One can only imagine Gleason's surprise when President Nixon showed up at his house around midnight, completely alone and driving his own private car. When Jackie asked him why he was there, Nixon told him that he wanted to take him somewhere and show him something. He got into the president's car, and they ended up at the gates of Homestead Air Force Base. They passed through security and drove to the far end of the base, to a tightly-guarded building.

At this point, I will quote directly from Gleason himself, from an interview he gave to UFO researcher and author Larry Warren:

"We drove to the very far end of the base in a segregated area, finally stopping near a well-guarded building. The security police saw us coming and just sort of moved back as we passed them and entered the structure. There were a number of labs we passed through first before we entered a section where Nixon pointed out what he said was the wreckage from a flying saucer, enclosed in several large cases. Next, we went into an inner chamber and there were six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers. Inside them were the mangled remains of what I took to be children. Then - upon closer examination - I saw that some of the other figures looked quite old. Most of them were terribly mangled as if they had been in an accident."

Gleason was understandably excited by all of this, but also quite traumatized, and said he couldn't eat or sleep properly for weeks afterwards, and found himself drinking heavily until he was able to regain his composure. His wife at the time, Beverly, recalls him being out very late that night and speaking excitedly about what he had seen when he returned home. Later on, however, when she and Gleason were splitting up and she told the story to a writer at Esquire Magazine, which printed it in an article, relations between her and the entertainer deteriorated and Gleason became very upset and angry that the story had been made public. For this reason many people, including Beverly herself, have wondered at the truth of the story. However, in his interview with Larry Warren, who was invited to Jackie's house in person because Gleason wanted to hear firsthand about Warren's experience at Bentwaters Air Force Base in England, it was clear that Jackie was being honest and sincere:

"You could tell that he was very sincere - he took the whole affair very seriously, and I could tell that he wanted to get the matter off his chest, and that was why he was telling me all of this. Jackie felt just like I do, that the government needs to 'come clean,' and tell us all it knows about space visitors. It's time they stopped lying to the public and release all the evidence they have. When they do, then we'll all be able to see the same things the late Jackie Gleason did."

For a long time the incident affected Gleason. Looking back, his professional output in the mid 1970s suddenly slowed down, which would be the same time he visited the site with President Nixon. Whether or not aliens have visited this planet is another story for another blog, but what I find interesting is the interests of these classic Hollywood stars. Here is Jackie Gleason, The Great One, looking up in the sky and wondering what is out there. It shows that despite Gleason's involvement in show business, he was indeed a renaissance man with a lot of other fascinating interests...

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: ODD PAIRINGS

Hollywood is the stomping grounds for some of the most talented and yet unusual people in the world. These different personalities have paved the way for some unusual meet ups. Here are just a few of them caught on film:

EDWARD EVERETT HORTON AND BETTY GRABLE

ORSON WELLES AND RITA HAYWORTH

BEATRICE LILLIE AND GLORIA SWANSON

ELVIS PRESLEY, FRANK SINATRA, AND FRED ASTAIRE

KATE SMITH AND THE OSMONDS