Word: rasputin
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...Prince Felix Youssoupov, a delicate young man who had inherited a fortune estimated at $300,000,000, invited Rasputin to his palace after dinner to meet some women. Rasputin went. Three days later his body, badly battered about the head and bearing eleven bullet wounds, was found under the ice of the Neva...
What happened in that interval has been written about and told many times, with many variations. Two years ago M-G-M decided that a story based on Rasputin and the Russian court would be ideal material to exhibit the varied talents of the Barrymore family. Ethel could be regal and throaty as the Tsarina. Lionel could leer and spit as Rasputin. John could push his delicate profile through a series of love scenes as a Prince Chegodiev. There was also a Princess Natasha with whom Chegodiev was in love. When Rasputin seduces Princess Natasha, Chegodiev proceeds to murder...
Film executives forgot that Prince Youssoupov, widely known as the killer of Rasputin, is very much alive and no stranger to the courts. Spurred by a shrewd woman lawyer in Manhattan, named Fanny Holtzman, Princess Youssoupov brought suit against M-G-M claiming that the character of Princess Natasha was supposedly patterned after her own and that she had suffered grievous wrong at the suggestion that she had been seduced or raped by Rasputin...
What everyone waited for was Prince Youssoupov's sworn story of the killing of Rasputin. MGM's counsel, ponderous Sir William Jowitt, pieced it together by leading questions and quotations from Prince Youssoupov's book, Rasputin...
...plot to murder Rasputin originated in a Guards regiment in which Prince Youssoupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri were serving. They enlisted the aid of Vladimir Purishkevitch, a member of the Duma. When lecherous Rasputin reached the Youssoupov palace on the night of Dec. 16, servants were kept at the head of the stairs, talking, playing the phonograph, acting as if a party were still in progress. Downstairs used plates and half-filled glasses were scattered about as if a formal supper had just ended. Some little cakes and a few glasses of wine were packed with enough potassium cyanide...