Word: chaplinitis
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...virtually invented movie stardom. It was Pickford who first kindled the wildfire of film-fan ardor; Charlie Chaplin, no doubt greater, was also later. And it was the 5-ft. pixie, known for playing cute or pathetic little girls, who first made the moguls pay huge sums for talent. "No--I really can not afford to work for only $10,000 a week," she coyly told Adolph Zukor of Famous Players in 1915, when that was real money...
...screen, Pickford was the prototype star. She had a stage mother who was her closest and only adviser (Mary faced the moneymen without an agent or manager). Though she never took director's credit, she supervised every aspect of production. When she founded United Artists with Fairbanks, Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Pickford was the one with the canniest business sense. Later she had plastic surgery, three fraught marriages, a substance-abuse problem (alcohol) and two show-biz siblings, Jack and Lottie, with a talent for scandal. Instead of ensuring iconic immortality by dying young, Mary outlived her fame, ending...
...Louis Armstrong, jazz musician --Lucille Ball, TV star --The Beatles, rock musicians --Marlon Brando, actor --Coco Chanel, designer --Charlie Chaplin, comic genius --Le Corbusier, architect --Bob Dylan, folk musician --T.S. Eliot, poet --Aretha Franklin, soul musician --Martha Graham, dancer and choreographer --Jim Henson, puppeteer and creator of TV's Muppets --James Joyce, novelist --Pablo Picasso, artist --Rodgers & Hammerstein, Broadway showmen --Bart Simpson, cartoon character --Frank Sinatra, singer --Steven Spielberg, moviemaker --Igor Stravinsky, classical musician --Oprah Winfrey, TV talk-show host...
...think God made woman foolish so that she might be a suitable companion to man." She had such left-leaning opinions that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her. And who were her choices for the most important people of the century? Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin and Lenin. Furthermore, she did not think appearing on the vaudeville circuit, showing off her skills, was beneath her, even as her friends were shocked that she would venture onto the vulgar stage. She was complex. Her main message was and is, "We're like everybody else. We're here...
...been living together for many years. Where you go, I go." Then there was actress Marion Davies. When her lover, publisher William Randolph Hearst, fell on hard times, she sold off her real estate, stocks and jewelry to keep his creditors at bay. There was the scandal of Charlie Chaplin, who married the very young Oona O'Neill and actually got to live happily ever after with her. And of course Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, battling and drinking in their epic '50s melodrama. Ernest Hemingway said all great love affairs end in tragedy: either disillusion sets in and people...