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Hi, welcome to Metal Floss Video. Today we're going to be talking about the women working in classic Hollywood, mostly between the 1920s and 1960s. Let's get started
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Clara Bow was one of the biggest Hollywood stars in the 1920s. She was contracted to Paramount, the 1927 movie It is largely considered her breakthrough performance
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she mostly starred in flapper movies. Clara's personal life was fascinating to people
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She had some high-profile relationships, like with actor Gary Cooper and director Victor Fleming
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And it was fairly well known that she enjoyed drinking and gambling. Her nickname was Crisis a Day Clara
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but her biggest crisis came in the form of blackmail. Daisy DeVoe had previously been Clara's hairdresser at Paramount
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She eventually became her personal assistant. In 1930, Daisy took off with some of Clara's money
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business documents, and personal letters. She demanded $125,000 in exchange for the items, or else she would take them to the newspapers
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Not a great option for someone who was constantly in the tabloids. So Claire called the police, and the case went to trial in January of 1931
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The stakes were high. Daisy had an indictment for 37 counts of grand theft and was tried for 35 of those
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She was looking at a prison sentence of 35 to 375 years
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Don't steal celebrities' belongings. What ended up happening was a dramatic court case revealing tons of Beau's secrets
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DeVoe confirmed to the world that her former boss was a gambling drunk. Although while cross-examined, Daisy did say that Clara had a 15-cent limit for poker and typically won the game
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So that's not so bad. Good job, Clara. Daisy presented telegrams from boyfriends that revealed Clara had dated at least two men at once
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She listed the extravagant presents that had been bought for those boyfriends, like a $2,000 watch and chain and a $900 sapphire ring
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She even implied that Clara had once tried to kill her. DeVoe was sentenced to 18 months of jail time
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The jury found her guilty of just one count. Two years later, Clara retired from Hollywood at just 28 years old
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There are just too many awesome actresses to talk about, so let's do some quick facts
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Audrey Hepburn almost starred as Peter Pan in a live-action film. Director George Cukor wanted to make it in the 1960s
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He was in negotiations with Hepburn before Disney stepped in, claiming they had the rights to the story
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A British court eventually ruled against Disney, saying that Disney had fallen far below the
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generally accepted standard of commercial propriety. But the project fizzled by then
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Another story rights fact, Barbara Stanwyck convinced a Warner Bros. executive to buy
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the rights to the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Apparently, Rand told Stanwyck that she'd written the part of Dominique for Greta Garbo
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Speaking of Garbo, she was famously reclusive after retiring in 1941. She lived in Manhattan and apparently the elevator staff in her building once went on strike and she operated the elevators for a day Talk about a working woman Marlene Dietrich didn love her performance in the film Judgment at Nuremberg Apparently she had cosmetic surgery soon before filming it so her facial expressions
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were restricted. Mae West wrote a play called Sex, which she performed in New York
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It was immensely popular for a year. Then in 1927, the deputy police commissioner arrested her for lewdness
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She was in jail for 10 days and fined $500. Elizabeth Taylor hated being called Liz
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In her words, the nickname can sound like such a hiss. Natalie Wood didn't love her famous name either
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Her actual name was Natalia Nikolevna Zacharenko. A studio executive gave her the name Natalie Wood
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And she once said, I didn't mind Natalie, but I hated Wood. It didn't suggest a nice image to me
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While filming Gilda, Rita Hayworth was asked to slap Glenn Ford four times
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He told her to go all out, which she did. She knocked two of his teeth out
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That's my girl. Movie making was a dangerous business back then. Like for the film Follow the Fleet, Ginger Rogers wore a dress that weighed 25 pounds
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Her dance partner, Fred Astaire, got hit in the face by the sleeves on the first take
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which came close to knocking him out. Judy Garland and John F. Kennedy were friends for years
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When he was president, he used to call her and ask her to sing Over the Rainbow for him
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Another interesting friendship, Ingrid Bergman and Ernest Hemingway. In fact, he helped to get Bergman the lead in the adaptation of his novel For Whom the
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Bell Tolls. Paramount had decided they wanted an in-house actress, but Bergman was under contract to
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David O. Selznick. Hemingway had earlier told Life magazine that as he was writing the book, he decided that
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Bergman would be perfect for the character of Maria, even saying, if you don't act in
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the picture, Ingrid, I won't work on it. Speaking of studio control, Lauren Bacall was under contract with Warner Bros. for six
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years between 1944 and 1950. She got suspended six times for refusing to play a part that they wanted her to take
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But back to unlikely friendships. In 1938, Shirley Temple went to visit the Roosevelts, the first family, in Hyde Park, New York
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Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to go swimming, but Shirley said no because she couldn't
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mess up her infamous curls. And Eartha Kitt went to a White House luncheon in 1968, where she met Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson
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Kitt made some remarks and defended young people who were protesting the war
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Lady Bird cried. The CIA was asked to put together a dossier on Eartha Kitt, and her career really suffered
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because of it. Josephine Baker was a spy during World War II
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She would bring sheet music to Europe containing messages in invisible ink
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She went on to become a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force. They should make an escape room out of this
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It's time to answer a big question tangentially related to the topic of classic Hollywood actresses
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Certainly it's one that affected them. How did paparazzi become a job Crime photographers were the predecessors to paparazzi like Arthur Felig who became famous during the 1930s and 40s in New York City His technique was paparazzi He was just taking crime scene photos rather than celebrity ones
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Another paparazzi predecessor was a group of photographers in Rome during the 1950s who
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would take pictures of tourists and American soldiers without asking permission, and then
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they would try to sell the photos to those people as souvenirs. Disney World still does that, but in the late 1950s a new group of Roman photographers popped
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up, they were interested in celebrity photos. One of the most famous was Tazio Secchiaroli
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He busted Eva Gardner and Tony Franciosa having an affair, and in 1958 he set up another photo
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of Gardner screaming after he set off his camera flash right in her face. He later explained
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in situations like this one, we discovered that by creating little incidents, we could
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produce great features that earned us a lot of money. Well, at least he was honest, and
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that's very similar to the strategies used by today's paparazzi. Later in life, by the
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way, he was Sophia Loren's personal photographer. I want to have a personal photographer
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Wait, no, I definitely don't. Federico Fellini shadowed photographers including Tazio leading up to the creation of Fellini's
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famous 1960 film La Dolce Vita. There's a character in the movie based on Tazio named Paparazzo, which is where we got
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the term we know today. Marilyn Monroe might be the Hollywood legend who has the most misconceptions associated
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with her. So let's correct some of those. It's not true that Tinkerbell in the Disney film Peter Pan was based on Marilyn Monroe
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The Disney animators hired a model to base Tinkerbell on. Her name was Margaret Carey, and it took her over six months of work to pose for the film
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She acted out all of the characters' actions. There's a weirdly specific myth that Marilyn Monroe had an IQ of 168
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You can find this one all over the internet. Although many of her friends would later comment on how intelligent she was
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there's no evidence that Marilyn ever even took an IQ test, let alone evidence of the results
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Another myth that circulates the internet comes in picture form. It's taken through a window
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supposedly of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, but these are lookalike models. The photo was
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taken by artist Allison Jackson. There's only one genuine known photo of JFK and Monroe together
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It was taken at a party and they're in a group. There's a popular theory that Marilyn was murdered
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Some conspiracy theorists blame John or Robert Kennedy. Marilyn died of a barbiturate overdose in 1962 at the age of 36
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And in the 1980s, the LA County District Attorney's Office reviewed the evidence surrounding her death and released a report
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According to that report, there was no credible evidence supporting a murder theory
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There are also many quotations that are attributed to Marilyn Monroe that she never really said
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These include, If you can't handle me at my worst, then you don't deserve me at my best
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Give a girl the right shoes and she will conquer the world, and I rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not In 1940 Hattie McDaniel became the first African person to win an Academy Award
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She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind
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at the 12th Academy Awards. The ceremony took place in the Ambassador Hotel, which was segregated at the time
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The film's producer, David Oselznick, had to plead to get her in, and even then, she
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couldn't sit with him or her co-stars. Little over a decade later, McDaniel was diagnosed
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with breast cancer. In her will, she left her Oscar to Howard University
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in Washington, DC. It didn't look quite like the Oscar you'd recognize today
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Early supporting actor Oscars were plaques, not statuettes. As for why Howard University, there are some theories
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The school's drama club threw a luncheon in her honor in 1940
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Plus, Howard was a majority black college. and black colleges were some of the few institutions concerned
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with conserving black history in America at the time. But this is where things get weird
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The Oscar went missing in the 1970s. Allegedly, it was kept at the university's Fine Arts Complex
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although there's no official record of it being received. It also can't be found in any old yearbooks or newspapers
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but The Washington Post once published an article with quotes from former students claiming they saw it
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So then, where did it go? Well, there are some theories. One is that students took it, perhaps to throw it
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into the Potomac River. Hattie McDaniel received no shortage of criticism for her archetypal role in Gone with the Wind
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Another theory comes from Denise Randall, who is in charge of tracking Howard's artifact inventory
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around the time the Oscar went missing. Her theory is that someone put it in a safe place
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and then forgot to tell anyone before they retired. Others believe that people didn't realize it was even an Oscar
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because it wasn't the classic little gold man. In 2012, Professor W. Burlett-Carter published over 60 pages of research on this particular Academy Award
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According to her, it is unlikely that students took it or threw it into the Potomac
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She confirmed its last appearance in 1972, but was unable to say where it is now
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The mystery continues. And if you're wondering why Howard University can't get a replacement, that's a good question
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They have asked. The Academy doesn't make replacements for heirs of winners
