Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  Two years after Grant’s arrest, Eddie Murphy’s car was stopped in LA in the middle of the night. His passenger was a 20-year-old male prostitute, Atisone Seiuli, who was dressed as a woman. Murphy had been in LA filming Dr Doolittle while his wife and young children were away. Unable to sleep, he explained to People Magazine, he went out at night to find something to read and bought a couple of magazines at a newsstand. Shortly after, while driving, he saw what he said he thought was a Hawaiian-looking woman on the street and stopped his car to ask what she was doing. ‘Working,’ Atisone Seiuli replied. Murphy offered Seiuli a lift home, but undercover police had had Seiuli under observation and soon pulled Murphy over.

  Eddie Murphy’s car was stopped in LA in the middle of the night. His passenger was a 20-year-old male prostitute, Atisone Seiuli, who was dressed as a woman.

  Murphy wasn’t charged with anything. When asked by the Press what he was doing, he protested that for years he’d driven around Manhattan handing out money to the homeless, but hadn’t sought any publicity for it. ‘It was an act of kindness that got turned into a horror show,’ said Murphy. Not everyone believed his Good Samaritan story. The area in which he picked up Seiuli was well known for male prostitutes and by the time the car was stopped, they were some distance beyond Seiuli’s supposed home.

  PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR

  WHEN DOROTHY STRATTEN was 17 and working in a fast-food restaurant in Vancouver, she met 26-year-old Paul Snider, a club promoter and pimp. He had nude photographs of her taken and submitted them to Playboy magazine, thus starting her modelling career. In 1979, the couple (pictured together on her 20th birthday) moved to LA, where she posed as Miss August, and, still only 19, became a bunny at the Century City Playboy Club.

  Hollywood came next, and, during the filming of her only movie, They All Laughed, she began an affair with its director, Peter Bogdanovich. Snider tried to hang on to their relationship, even having a private detective follow her, but soon Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich.

  Then one day Stratten returned to the apartment she had shared with Snider to talk through the terms of their divorce. Hours later, Stratten’s and Snider’s naked bodies were found at the property, dead from shotgun wounds. It’s believed that Snider raped Stratten, shot her and abused the body, before shooting himself.

  Bogdanovich subsequently paid for the private education and modelling classes of Louise Stratten, Dorothy’s younger sister by eight years. When she was 20, Louise married the 48-year-old director, divorcing in 2001 after 13 years together.

  Not only were the public unaware of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, his wife, Maria Shriver, did not have her suspicions confirmed until 2011 when the boy was 14 years old.

  Four years before Hugh Grant’s arrest, Paul Reubens, better known as his screen character Pee-Wee Herman, was arrested in Florida for masturbating publicly in a porn cinema. He had to pay a $50 fine, but, much worse for him, his children’s TV show was dropped by the network. ‘In the old studio system he could easily have been banished,’ said veteran agent ‘Swifty’ Lazar. Yes, if the story had reached the public, but the old studio system was good at hushing things up. It was seven years before re-runs of his TV shows were first broadcast and 15 years before Reubens began to revive the Pee-Wee Herman character.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger

  The day after Arnold Schwarzenegger left office as Governor of California in January 2011, he and his wife, Maria Shriver, attended a marriage-guidance session. He believed it was to help smooth the passage from public to private life, but the counsellor asked the question Maria Shriver had requested. Was Joseph, the 14-year-old son of their housekeeper, Schwarzenegger’s son? Schwarzenegger, according to his autobiography, immediately confirmed her suspicion and said: ‘It was my screw up.’

  Was Joseph, the 14-year-old son of their housekeeper, Schwarzenegger’s son?

  Joseph had been conceived with the Guatemalan-born housekeeper Mildred Patricia Baena while Shriver was away. Born in 1997, Joseph was a month older than the youngest of Schwarzenegger’s four children with Shriver. Mildred’s husband had left her shortly after Joseph’s birth, but claimed that he’d thought he was the child’s father until the story appeared in newspapers. Baena had remained working for Schwarzenegger and Shriver until 2011, when the story appeared. Years earlier, Shriver had asked Schwarzenegger if Joseph was his son. He’d denied it, though she subsequently had it confirmed by Mildred before confronting Schwarzenegger. Later in 2011, Shriver and Schwarzenegger separated.

  Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in 2001’s Monster’s Ball, which showed that more risqué inter-racial love stories featuring Hollywood names could be made, albeit as independent productions rather than by major studios.

  Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington in 1993’s The Pelican Brief. Although a love scene was filmed, Washington requested that it be cut from the finished film.

  A Question of Colour

  Hollywood cinema may be more liberal today than under the Production Code, but, beyond the scissors of the censors (always stricter on sexual content than violence), other forms of self-censorship continue. The Production Code ruled against showing inter-racial relationships, but cinema hasn’t moved on very far. In 1993’s The Pelican Brief, Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts filmed a sex scene, but later Washington asked for the scene to be cut from the finished movie. Some suggest that was because he felt it might upset his female African-American fans.

  Black leading men are seldom cast with a white love interest. The thinking goes that if a black Hollywood star such as Denzel Washington or Will Smith has a relationship with a black woman in a movie, the film will be regarded as targeted at a black audience. If he has a relationship with a white woman, it’ll be too controversial. So Latino actresses such as Eva Mendez find themselves cast as a middle ground between black and white opposite black male leads, like Will Smith in Hitch (2005). When there are black male–white female stories, they are often actually confronting the race issue, as was the case in Far From Heaven (2002), starring Dennis Haysbert and Julianne Moore.

  Despite the end of the Production Code, today’s Hollywood studios self-censor the inter-racial relationships in their movies.

  Since Billy Bob Thornton’s on-screen relationship with Halle Berry in 2001’s Monster’s Ball, it has become more acceptable for there to be riskier sex scenes between white men and black women, but there aren’t major Hollywood movies that show such intimate portrayals of inter-racial relationships.

  Sex Today

  The taboo of stars having a child when not married has gone, but others remain, with Hollywood cinema still rather conservative in its attitude towards sex. But that’s the movies, where only a tantalizing glimpse is shown on-screen, while the really naughty stuff is still taking place in Tinseltown itself.

  One of Hollywood’s most famous faces, James Dean became a star in 1955 with the release of his first film East of Eden. He died in a car crash months later, before his two subsequent films had been released.

  VII

  HOLLYWOOD

  STARS

  Movie stars might be adored by millions, but some of them can struggle to love or be loved for themselves. By playing heroes on screen and treated like monarchs off screen, their view of the world can sometimes become warped. And success doesn’t necessarily calm their fears; it can magnify them, too.

  ‘Stars don’t have friends, they have people who work for them.’

  What is it that creates the world’s most desired sex symbol? Who knows? Marilyn Monroe’s grandfather died when syphilis infected his brain. Her grandmother, Della, who may also have had syphilis, suffered from depression. Monroe’s mother, Gladys, also suffered from depression after her violent, alcoholic husband took their two children and left. Her third child, Marilyn, or Norma Jeane as she was then known, didn’t know who her father was. Gladys said Charles Stanley Gifford Sr, with whom she worked at a film lab, was Monroe’s father, but he denied it. Suffering from de
pression after Monroe’s birth, Gladys was persuaded to allow a neighbour to foster the girl.

  What followed was a childhood where Monroe was bounced between the neighbour, who had her until she was seven, and Glady’s friend Grace McKee. Then came foster parents, orphanages, and, when she was well enough, Gladys herself. At 15, Monroe was a budding beauty, but with her foster parents leaving California and moving back East, it appeared that she was destined for the orphanage again. Instead, the mother of James Dougherty, a young man five years Monroe’s senior, was approached. Dougherty had been on a few dates with Monroe and it was suggested that if Dougherty married Marilyn, she’d be saved from going back to the orphanage. So Dougherty married her not out of love or passion for the future sex symbol, but almost, it seems, as a favour; while Monroe married to escape being a child. Marilyn Monroe, the 16-year-old housewife, was barely desired at all. And mentally she was already unwell. Like her mother, Monroe heard voices throughout her life and imagined sinister figures lurking outside her house.

  In marrying when she was 16, Marilyn Monroe avoided being sent back to an orphanage. Then, while working in a munitions factory during World War II, she was discovered by a photographer and began her modelling career.

  Left alone while her husband was away during World War II, she began working in a munitions factory, where a photographer who was taking some publicity shots suggested she pursue modelling work. Quickly, her modelling career took off and she changed her hair from her natural brunette to a golden blonde.

  Returning from the war, Dougherty didn’t like his wife’s new career path and told Monroe she had to decide between it and him. She chose her career. Modelling brought her to the attention of Hollywood and she was signed on a short contract to Twentieth Century Fox.

  Like her mother, Monroe heard voices throughout her life and imagined sinister figures lurking outside her house.

  Joseph Schenck, the studio executive who’d earlier been imprisoned for a pay-off scandal with the unions, was then the 69-year-old president of the studio. Throwing a party, he asked for some Fox girls to act as window-dressing and among the crowd Monroe caught his eye. Soon they began an affair, but her six-month contract with Fox wasn’t renewed and nor was a subsequent one with Columbia.

  Older, powerful Hollywood men would continue to feature in her life, and she began an affair with Johnny Hyde, a 53-year-old agent, who left his wife for her, and negotiated a seven-year contract with Fox. Still hearing voices, however, she took barbiturates to calm her anxieties, and when Hyde died of a heart attack, made her first suicide attempt, overdosing on pills.

  As her career developed, her appeal emerged as a mix of sexuality and innocence, ‘a kind of elegant vulgarity’ as director Billy Wilder called it. She didn’t have great range as an actress, but that is a part of star quality – stars don’t disappear into new roles but mainly play variations on the same role. By the mid-1950s, both Hollywood and Monroe herself had discovered her star quality.

  Marilyn Monroe, with her lawyer Jerry Giesler, announces her divorce from baseball star Joe DiMaggio in October 1954, citing ‘conflicting careers’. The marriage had lasted less than a year.

  Her two later marriages were fraught. She married Joe DiMaggio at the beginning of 1954, but he wanted her to retire from acting to be his wife, and by the end of the year they’d separated. It’s believed he was violent towards her, too. Following that, she had a relationship with Frank Sinatra, before marrying Arthur Miller. But soon both Monroe and Miller, who, it’s said, nagged her with criticisms, began having doubts about the person they’d married. After her divorce from Miller in 1961, she slipped further into depression, considered suicide and was persuaded to check herself into hospital.

  When it came to her work, she famously had huge stage fright and was a testing collaborator. ‘She was absolutely perfect,’ said Billy Wilder, who directed her in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), ‘when she remembered the lines’. While on some occasions she could complete a three-minute scene perfectly in the first take and immediately understood the humour behind it, at many other times remembering the lines could be a huge problem for her. On Some Like It Hot, she required 50 takes just to say: ‘Where’s that bourbon?’

  After her divorce from Miller, Monroe slipped further into depression, considered suicide and was persuaded to check herself into hospital.

  ‘The most unlikely marriage since the Owl and the Pussycat,’ commented a magazine of the 1956 wedding of Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe. He was a politically minded playwright; she’d been Playboy’s first Playmate. Within weeks, both were having doubts.

  Not only was she difficult, she was often absent, sometimes not arriving until the afternoon. When she became pregnant during the shooting of Some Like It Hot, Arthur Miller told Wilder he shouldn’t give Monroe a call-time before 11 in the morning. Exasperated, Wilder glared at him: ‘She’s never on set before 11 o’clock.’

  KNICKERS

  IN HER MOST famous movie scene in The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe walks along a New York street one summer night and cools herself by standing over a subway grating, holding her skirt down as the wind blows it up. Her then husband, Joe DiMaggio, was watching the filming and didn’t approve – ‘every time her dress blew up, he looked away,’ said the movie’s director Billy Wilder. DiMaggio left in a huff, but Monroe loved the attention she was receiving from the crowd that had gathered.

  Almost 40 years later, Sharon Stone went further, agreeing to be filmed knickerless in a scene where she uncrosses and recrosses her legs in Basic Instinct (1992). As with Monroe, it turned out to be the most famous scene of the movie, but for Stone it became the only really famous moment of her career. After she saw the finished film, she claimed that she’d been misled and that she was shocked at how closeup the shots were.

  From a movie where Monroe showed her knickers to a movie with a knicker-free Sharon Stone, what next? A knicker-free reality. In 2012, photographs of Anne Hathaway climbing out of a car at the New York première of the Les Misérables movie revealed that she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all. Similarly, Eva Longoria, in hitching up her dress out of the puddles at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, shared with the public that she was without knickers. Lifting their skirts is always going to win girls some attention, at least for a while.

  Were Hathaway and Longoria not wearing any underwear because it would have ruined the lines of their dresses? Or had they both just been forgetful on those busy days and not put any on? The wardrobe malfunctions certainly made headline news, but not everyone believes that they were accidental.

  Much has been made of her relationship with the Kennedys, especially by Monroe. It seems that Monroe spent the weekend with President John F. Kennedy in Palm Springs in March 1962 – the weekend he couldn’t stay with Frank Sinatra because of Sinatra’s Mob connections. While witnesses said it was obvious the two were intimate, that weekend was the extent of their relationship – two nights at most.

  After their weekend, Monroe repeatedly rang the White House, but the calls weren’t returned, with the President distancing himself from her. According to Kennedy’s friend, Senator George Smathers, Jackie Kennedy was ‘disgusted’ that her husband had had a relationship with the troubled movie star and asked him to ‘have some pity’ on the girl. The following month, Monroe took an overdose of pills.

  She later had dinner with Bobby Kennedy, among others, which, just as she’d created sob stories as a teenager to win sympathy, she talked up as ‘a date with Bobby Kennedy’. Despite her claims, most insiders don’t believe that Monroe and Bobby Kennedy had an affair.

  In June that year she was fired from her final film, Something’s Got to Give, having missed so many days’ shooting due to illness that the film was now well behind schedule. ‘The girl was neurotic beyond description,’ said one of the film’s screenwriters, Nunnally Johnson. ‘She kept retreating further and further from reality.’

  Two months later, in t
he early hours of 5 August 1962, Monroe was found dead from a barbiturates overdose. She was 36. Despite the conspiracy theories that the FBI bumped her off because she had information on the Kennedys, the only suspicious element to her death was that after her doctor found her body, the authorities weren’t called for two hours. She’d overdosed twice before in the previous month (once at Frank Sinatra’s club at Cal Neva) and had been revived by friends. This was just the final step on a downward spiral.

  Marilyn Monroe on the set of her final, uncompleted film, Something’s Got to Give, in 1962. Repeatedly absent from the production because of health problems, she was eventually fired. Two months later she died of a barbiturates overdose.

  Apart from Some Like It Hot, which, 50 years after her death, is considered a classic, none of her films is screened much or even rated that highly. Film historian David Thomson has suggested that Monroe was the first modern celebrity, as opposed to star, in that she’s more famous for herself than for her film roles.

  After she died, Whitey Snyder, her make-up designer, and his wife, Marjorie Lecher, a wardrobe mistress, fulfilled an old agreement with Monroe to make her up for the open casket. To their surprise, they found that her breasts had dropped. ‘Marilyn without a bust,’ said Snyder. ‘She’d have freaked.’ With padding and make-up, they recreated her famous look for her final appearance.

  Marlon Brando

  Although Marilyn Monroe hired Paula Strasberg from the New York Actors’ Studio as her coach, she never became part of that world. Others stars from the Actors’ Studio – Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift – changed screen-acting for good. Their movie careers, however, free from the paternalistic constraints of the studio system, were marred by their own recklessness and addictions.