“The first time we ever met, me in awe, I said to her, ‘The other night I saw one of your [early] movies in which your face was more beautiful than anyone’s I’ve ever seen other than Garbo’s.’ ‘Alice Adams,’ she said, and she was right.”

Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life

Brought together by their mutual friend Irene Mayer Selznick, Knopf's Robert Gottlieb edited Katharine Hepburn's memoir, The Making of the African Queen. An excerpt from Avid Reader in which Gottlieb recalls his experiences with not only Hepburn but also Irene Selznick and Lauren Bacall is available at Vanity Fair. 

A copy of The Making of the African Queen signed by Katharine Hepburn is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries kiosk at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood.

“The crowd outside the church screamed … ‘Andy!’ There was the biggest mob I’ve ever seen around a church. We went in and they had folding chairs near the door. Oprah Winfrey gave a speech. … And at the car rental we’d seen all these glamorous names like ‘Clint Eastwood’ and ‘Barbara Walters’ .... And watching this storybook wedding, you just wonder about what it’ll be like when the divorce comes.”

Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, April 26, 1986, Hyannis, Massachusetts, Wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver

Maria Shriver was the second generation of the Kennedy family to marry a professional actor. Her aunt Patricia Kennedy famously wed Peter Lawford (he was JFK's link to Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack). Her daughter Katherine became the third such generation earlier this summer when she wed Chris Pratt. 

The Schwarzenegger/Shriver marriage produced four children and proved more enduring than Andy Warhol himself. He died within a year. Three decades later, Arnold and Maria have separated but remain legally married. How fascinated Warhol would have been by the tabloid scandal that prompted their separation. For that matter, Andy Warhol would love so much about 21st Century popular culture. His prediction that in the future everyone would be famous (infamous?) for fifteen minutes has come to pass. 

Image Credit: Andy Warhol's Exposures

​“Conscience isn’t like a liver, you can get on without it.”

Tallulah Bankhead, Performing This Marriage by Eliot C. Williams

Tallulah Bankhead was reciting a line from a play in which she was performing when she joked that a person could get by without a conscience. Given her outlandish lifestyle (which put tremendous stress on her own liver), the quip might have been something she came up with all on her own. In a less-talented actress, the scandalous behavior would have outshone the career (and eventually it did). 

From her heyday in the twenties through her death in the late sixties, Bankhead's hijinks practically kept the tabloids in business. Yet, no Real Housewife was she. Instead, Tallulah could channel the wit and deadpan delivery of Oscar Wilde. Consider the time she walked into a restaurant and discovered her then-lover, Lord "Naps" Alington, dining with his wife, and he pretended not to know her. Without missing a beat, she walked over to his table and inquired, "What’s the matter dahling, don’t you recognize with my clothes on?”

Image Credit: People on Parade

​“Since we live in an age of corruption, almost like the declining days of ancient Rome, with the ‘interests’ digging in deeper all the time, I ought not to be surprised at a campaign to build another Las Vegas right in the heart of our community. The plan was to incorporate a separate little city made up of the Sunset Strip, with its night clubs like Dino’s and Jerry Lewis’s new place, and stretching from Santa Monica Boulevard up into the hills. Like Beverly Hills, which is a town unto itself, and an extremely well-conducted one, this new Sunset City, or whatever it was to be christened, would have written its own rules and controlled its own life.” 

​Hedda Hopper, The Whole Truth and Nothing But

Hedda Hopper waged an all-out war against proposed cityhood for a densely populated, unincorporated region of Los Angeles now known as West Hollywood (home of Nick Harvill Libraries). During her lifetime, she won. It was not until Los Angeles County abolished rent control in 1984, by which time Hopper had been dead twenty years, that the disparate groups of renters in the city—mostly gays (then reeling from an out-of-control AIDS epidemic) and (then) gay-unfriendly Russian immigrants—set aside their differences and formally incorporated, enabling the new city to pass a municipal rent control law.

“I’ll never forget lunching at a popular restaurant with Ria [Langham]. A writer rushed up to the table and gushed, ‘I just saw you in Possessed. Joan, you were wonderful, inspired, the way you look at Clark [Gable], anyone can tell you’re crazy about him.’ I blanched, turned quickly to the writer and said, “May I present my good friend, Mrs. Clark Gable?”
 
Joan Crawford, The Films of Clark Gable

​Joan Crawford had good reason to be embarrassed. The writer had guessed correctly. Crawford later confessed to biographers that she was indeed having a torrid affair with Gable during the filming of Possessed. Said Crawford, “[W]e had a scene in which he came up behind me and undid a string of pearls I was wearing. The string of pearls dropped to the floor. Fade to black and use your imagination.”
 
The Mrs. Clark Gable to whom Joan Crawford referred was the second Mrs. Gable, a.k.a. Ria Langham, a wealthy Texas socialite. She was nearly two decades older than her husband. It was her guidance (aided by the MGM glamour machine) that transformed Gable from a roughhewn young man into a major movie star. Consider the photographs below. To the right is Clark Gable in 1925. To the left shows him in the early 1930s, still sans the mustache that became his trademark but clearly on his way to becoming a top box office star.

​Crawford later acknowledged that the sexual attraction she and Gable shared was too hot not to cool down. They considered marriage but wisely decided against it—as devoted as she was to Gable, the love of Crawford’s life would always be not a real person but an image of one--her own, Joan Crawford the movie star. Clark Gable remained married to Ria Langham until 1939, by which time he was besotted with Carole Lombard. She became the third Mrs. Gable later that year. It was one of Hollywood's great love matches, but she died tragically in a 1942 airplane crash.  

Image Credit: The Films of Clark Gable