“Go ahead and scratch”
James Stewart didn’t think he would win an Oscar for his performance in The Philadelphia Story. However the studio called him and told him to attend the Academy Awards Ceremony just an hour before it began….MGM knew beforehand that he was going to win …. this was before Price Waterhouse Accounting kept the results secret.
Humphrey Bogart & Katherine Hepburn at a press reception at Claridges (London 1951, via popperfoto)
Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
(via movieoftheday)
![oldhollywood:
Jane Fonda, 1957 (photo by Mark Shaw)
Interview as 1960s time capsule (also, why one should have always thought twice before accepting a gift from Dennis Hopper):
“Two hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Jane Fonda was coiled like Cleopatra’s asp on the living room sofa of her father’s lush townhouse. That afternoon she learned she had won the NY Film Critics Award for best actress of 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Optimism was high. So was Jane. “You don’t mind if I turn on, do you?” she asked impishly. Then her long fingernails carefully rolled the tobacco out of a Winston cigarette and replaced the ordinary old stuff that only causes cancer with fine gray pot she had just brought back from India? Morocco? She couldn’t remember; all she knew was it wasn’t that tacky stuff they mix with hay in Tijuana, this was the real thing. Then she lay back on the sofa, inhaled a lung full of dreams. “I’m very optimistic about the world tonight. I wonder if, at 10pm on New Year’s Eve in 1959, people looked back on the 50’s and thought their decade was as productive as ours has been. I don’t think so. It was the end of a time when people had been fed sleeping pills by Eisenhower. Things are more exciting now. We’ve stepped on the moon! People are more alive in every walk of life. Take a simple thing like turning on – doctors, lawyers, politicians – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t turn on.” There was a noise on the stairs. It was her father Henry Fonda, looking straight and spruce enough to be the conductor of the Yale Glee Club and his pretty wife Shirlee, the fifth Mrs. Fonda. Jane leaped up and waved her arms frantically to blow the pot smoke out of the room. “This reminds me of the times I used to clean this place on my hands & knees after my parties before my father came home. If only he knew how many bodies have passed out on this floor.” The Fondas toasted the New Year with champagne & Jane decided to call Peter [Fonda] in New York. They all sang “Happy Decade” to Peter and after they hung up, Jane rolled her eyes. “Boy, was he stoned!” Henry Fonda saw it all clear and made a mental association. “Have you seen Dennis Hopper lately?” “I was at his ex-wife’s house just before Christmas,” said Jane, “and you know what he gave his daughter? A Polaroid camera box filled with hair. He had cut his hair off and wanted his child to have it as a Christmas gift! It wasn’t even clean – just dirty, matted hair. So I don’t know what kind of scene he’s into now.” The subject turned to 1970. Biafra. Slum housing. Strikes. Corruption in Congress. “We’ll always be pouring money into military wars,” said Jane glumly. “I’m not happy about the political situation either.” “Where are we all headed?” asked Mrs. Fonda. “The Far, Far Right,” answered her husband. Jane looked dour. “Come to think about it,” she said, a few minutes into the beginning of her brand new decade, “I take back what I said earlier about the world getting better. The only thing I’m optimistic about is me.”
-excerpted from Rex Reed’s New York Times Fonda profile, December 1969](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l79nwyL33x1qzdvhio1_250.jpg)
Jane Fonda, 1957 (photo by Mark Shaw)
Interview as 1960s time capsule (also, why one should have always thought twice before accepting a gift from Dennis Hopper):
“Two hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Jane Fonda was coiled like Cleopatra’s asp on the living room sofa of her father’s lush townhouse. That afternoon she learned she had won the NY Film Critics Award for best actress of 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Optimism was high. So was Jane. “You don’t mind if I turn on, do you?” she asked impishly. Then her long fingernails carefully rolled the tobacco out of a Winston cigarette and replaced the ordinary old stuff that only causes cancer with fine gray pot she had just brought back from India? Morocco? She couldn’t remember; all she knew was it wasn’t that tacky stuff they mix with hay in Tijuana, this was the real thing.
Then she lay back on the sofa, inhaled a lung full of dreams. “I’m very optimistic about the world tonight. I wonder if, at 10pm on New Year’s Eve in 1959, people looked back on the 50’s and thought their decade was as productive as ours has been. I don’t think so. It was the end of a time when people had been fed sleeping pills by Eisenhower. Things are more exciting now. We’ve stepped on the moon! People are more alive in every walk of life. Take a simple thing like turning on – doctors, lawyers, politicians – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t turn on.”
There was a noise on the stairs. It was her father Henry Fonda, looking straight and spruce enough to be the conductor of the Yale Glee Club and his pretty wife Shirlee, the fifth Mrs. Fonda.
Jane leaped up and waved her arms frantically to blow the pot smoke out of the room. “This reminds me of the times I used to clean this place on my hands & knees after my parties before my father came home. If only he knew how many bodies have passed out on this floor.”
The Fondas toasted the New Year with champagne & Jane decided to call Peter [Fonda] in New York. They all sang “Happy Decade” to Peter and after they hung up, Jane rolled her eyes. “Boy, was he stoned!”
Henry Fonda saw it all clear and made a mental association. “Have you seen Dennis Hopper lately?”
“I was at his ex-wife’s house just before Christmas,” said Jane, “and you know what he gave his daughter? A Polaroid camera box filled with hair. He had cut his hair off and wanted his child to have it as a Christmas gift! It wasn’t even clean – just dirty, matted hair. So I don’t know what kind of scene he’s into now.”
The subject turned to 1970. Biafra. Slum housing. Strikes. Corruption in Congress. “We’ll always be pouring money into military wars,” said Jane glumly. “I’m not happy about the political situation either.”
“Where are we all headed?” asked Mrs. Fonda. “The Far, Far Right,” answered her husband. Jane looked dour. “Come to think about it,” she said, a few minutes into the beginning of her brand new decade, “I take back what I said earlier about the world getting better. The only thing I’m optimistic about is me.”-excerpted from Rex Reed’s New York Times Fonda profile, December 1969
Big Love Transylvania: Dracula’s Brides in production still from Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)
“Directors at that time didn’t want actors to act, especially actresses. They were expected to be pretty. So they told me to stick to the theater. They said, ‘Your nose is too thin.’ My whole family went away to America to live. They couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t go with them. “Maria Luisa,” they said, ‘How can you stay alone in Italy?’ But I used their absence to become an actress. That’s how I became Monica Vitti. When they came back, my parents had to call me Monica. They had to acknowledge what had happened.”
-Monica Vitti née Maria Luisa Ceciarelli, 1986, Interview magazine
Bette Davis (with cigarette drooping from her mouth, naturally) with her maid Marie on the Warner Brothers lot (1943)
“It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies. No one has ever understood the sweetness of my joy at the end of a good day’s work. I guess I threw everything else down the drain. I will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my make-up box.”
![oldhollywood:
“Why, she was pressed, does she think she provoked such strong feelings of empathy from her audiences? After all, she was not a sex symbol (‘I sure wasn’t’), so what was it - her beauty, her vulnerability, her sense of humor, her sensitivity? - that gave her that special aura?
‘It’s impossible for me to know,’ [Audrey Hepburn] said with hesitation, ‘but if you asked me what I would like it to be, though it may sound presumptuous to say so, it’s an experience I’ve had with other performers who somehow make you open up to them. For me, it always has to do with some kind of affection, love, a warmth.’
‘I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it,’ she went on. ‘That’s what I’d like to think maybe has been the appeal. People have recognized something in me they have themselves — the need to receive affection and the need to give it. Does that sound soppy?’”
-excerpted from New York Times interview, April 1991](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5xt8sa0lH1qzdvhio1_r1_250.jpg)
“Why, she was pressed, does she think she provoked such strong feelings of empathy from her audiences? After all, she was not a sex symbol (‘I sure wasn’t’), so what was it - her beauty, her vulnerability, her sense of humor, her sensitivity? - that gave her that special aura?
‘It’s impossible for me to know,’ [Audrey Hepburn] said with hesitation, ‘but if you asked me what I would like it to be, though it may sound presumptuous to say so, it’s an experience I’ve had with other performers who somehow make you open up to them. For me, it always has to do with some kind of affection, love, a warmth.’
‘I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it,’ she went on. ‘That’s what I’d like to think maybe has been the appeal. People have recognized something in me they have themselves — the need to receive affection and the need to give it. Does that sound soppy?’”
-excerpted from New York Times interview, April 1991
“My great problem is that I’ve always felt -and especially since I’ve become a so-called personality, a celebrity, & so forth -that it was all a very exposable myth that I was somebody. I’ve felt that this was an absurd dishonesty and that if I were close to people, it would be instantly evident & they would say, ‘Well, gee, he’s nothing at all. What do we want to see him for?’ If I can talk to someone for just five minutes, five vital minutes, I feel I can carry on the myth of being a full person, but any longer and I would be shown up as an empty, worthless nothing… all colorless and shrinking, invisible.
Ironically, I spent a couple of years playing parts in which I was supposed to be a decisive person, but all the while I was in a torment over this feeling of being a total cipher. It just about paralyzed me.”
-Anthony Perkins, in 1960 Sat. Evening Post interview (quoted in Charles Winecoff’s Split Image) (photo by Sam Levin, 1963)
