Oh the horror of it all. Demi Moore, who hasn’t eaten since 2011, is now hospitalized after a bad reaction to nitrous oxide. If you’re going to use whip-its at age 49, you really should consider at least a nutritional breakfast. Or a power snack.
Meanwhile, Ashton is caught in a flood while visiting with models in Sao Paulo. That can’t be fun. Having your pick of the most beautiful women while nearly 40% of Brazil lives below the poverty line has to put a crimp in your biscuit.
Today’s Thursday Face (Friday has been cancelled) (and body) belongs to Sterling Hayden.
An actor who would have preferred to just hang out on boats, he traveled the seas of such far-flung places as Tahiti and Iceland.
Legend has it that someone spotted him in a magazine, and he ended up in Hollywood, making his film debut in 1941 with Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll, whom he would later marry and divorce.
Hayden became a staple of Westerns and Film Noir, with a breakthrough performance in 1950′s “Asphalt Jungle.”
He married actress Betty deNoon and had a bunch of kids.
He worked with Bette Davis in the forgettable “The Star” …
He ratted out colleagues to the HUAC.
I just like this pic of him in his pajamas… that’s Gloria Grahame… you may remember her as Violet Bick in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Booze caught up with him. And pot and hash. He was arrested in Canada with hash.
He appeared in “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Godfather,” and kept working, living in Sausalito. He died of cancer in 1986, leaving his third wife and six children.
Here he is in one of my favorites… with Joan Crawford in “Johnny Guitar.” Subtitles are added so you can understand what they’re saying. (?)
Ding dang, Britney Spears is 30 today, and for her sheer wonderfulness as a pop culture star, she’s today’s Friday Face.
Born in Mississippi in 1981, she rose to prominence with the vomit-worthy “Baby One More Time” and the sickening “Oops, I Did It Again.” Little did we know that these would become mottoes for the public meltdown she would undergo as a result of drugs and bipolar disorder.
She has inexplicably sold over 100 million albums. Her net worth was recently estimated at $155 million. She remains under conservatorship.
For her resilience, strength and fabulosity, and in honor of her 30th birthday, Britney Spears is today’s Friday Face, y’all.
(Click the pic to enlarge.)
Illustration in collage: David Gilmore
Photoshopped Britney:
PlanetHiltron
Quack Conrad Murray was found guilty of permanently putting Michael Jackson to sleep by giving the emaciated superstar propofol and then leaving the room to chat with his girlfriends. Now he’ll likely do some bullshit house arrest because of prison overcrowding, no priors, and him not being a “violent offender.”
There’s only one hero in this story… and that’s Nurse Cherilyn Lee.
Nurse Lee declined when Jackson asked her directly to give him propofol, fully aware that it was not something to fool around with… and she refused and warned Jackson that he could wake up dead if he messed with that. She was right.
Four days before his death, Jackson told her his body was half cold and half hot, she told him to go immediately to the hospital. He didn’t. He had been receiving propofol for two months… daily.
Was Lee the ONLY person who could say no to Michael Jackson?
In the coverage since his death, it appears that Janet Jackson tried to hold an intervention regarding Michael’s drug addiction, long before his death, but it never happened.
Look at that adorable face! It’s Speedy Alka-Seltzer, created by ad whiz George Pal, earlier known for creating the Puppetoons.
Speedy first appeared in 1951, under his original name of “Sparky,” but they changed it quickly to coincide with a promotional theme of “Speedy Relief.”
The endearingly bucktoothed and squeaky pitchman appeared in over 200 TV commercials from 1954 to 1964, singing the Alka-Seltzer theme “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,” in a voice provided by actor Dick Beals, whose credits include voicing the annoying Lutheran tot Davey Hansen in the “Davey and Goliath” stop-motion series.
If you didn’t have indigestion before seeing this early commercial, you will after.
Speedy took the world by fizz, appearing on TV and on merchandise and in print ads, including this one, with a Santa who looks like he summered in the Bahamas.
Many will agree that relief is just a swallow away. And who doesn’t like a nice big clock? I said CLOCK.
Note his Spanish name on the clock, “Pron-Tito”!
Speedy later teamed with previous Friday Facer Buster Keaton for a series of ads, capitalizing on the resurgence of interest in silent films in the early ’60s. Here are a few.
Speedy’s popularity waned as Alka-Seltzer launched other highly successful campaigns in the 1960s and ’70s, including the spicy meatball ad, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” and the “Try it, you’ll like it” ads. And who can forget the plop plop theme sung by Sammy Davis Jr.?
In December 2010, Speedy was brought back from the advertising beyond via CGI, now voiced by a woman named Debi Derryberry, also the voice of Jimmy Neutron.
A window display of Speedy appeared on “Antiques Roadshow” in 2004.
It’s the little pill that keeps giving and giving! Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” is going to get the TV treatment on NBC from Lee Daniels, the director/producer of 2009′s “Precious,” which starred Chexydecimal favorite, Gabourey Sidibe.
Daniels will throw in with 20th Century Fox for the pill-poppin’ rehash. The original novel by Susann has sold over 30 million copies and spawned a 1967 film, a 1981 miniseries and a 1994 soap opera.
Judy Garland was set to play the lead in the film, but got canned for being drunky. She was replaced by the fabulous Susan Hayward, seen above in one of her outfits in the film. Judy tested in a similar one.
Hopefully, they’ll find a cameo for bipolar Social Security spokeswoman Patty Duke, 64, seen below at an event in July, looking like a hot dog makes her lose control.
That’s a face that launched a million peek-a-boo hairdos, belonging to one Veronica Lake, stunning star of one of my favorite films, “Sullivan’s Travels,” perhaps the best film ever made about making films.
When Veronica was 10, her father died in an industrial explosion, in Philadelphia, no less. What a place to blow up.
She was expelled from an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Montreal, not the worst fate that can befall a girl, but she was likely schizophrenic, and you know how reticent those schizos can be about admitting that.
Through her mother’s second marriage, Veronica ended up in Beverly Hills (of all places) and got work at RKO as a teen. She made it big in 1941 by stealing almost every scene in “I Wanted Wings.” She was 19, married an art director who was much older, and had the first of her 4 children.
Lake was frequently paired with Alan Ladd because he was 5’5″ and she was 4’11″. During WWII, Veronica Lake’s sex appeal made her a favorite pinup girl among soldiers, along with Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.
Her drinking and erratic behavior earned her a rotten reputation in Tinseltown, where the sultry blonde began to rust like so much war surplus. Joel McCrea turned down a second film with her, saying, “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake.”
During filming of the Nazi spy drama “The Hour Before the Dawn,” she fell on a cable while pregnant and began hemorrhaging. She recovered, but the child was born prematurely and died a week later of uremic poisoning.
Noir scribe Raymond Chandler began calling her “Moronica Lake.” She married Hungarian horror director Andre de Toth and had two more kids. It was rumored that one of them was Alan Ladd’s. Her mother sued her for support. It was 1944, and Veronica was earning $4,500 a week… the equivalent of $56,684 in today’s dollars.
Here’s a couple of minutes of her magnetism, a few stills and some footage, with a cornball song I love. Oh, and there’s more to this story…
She got a pilot’s license and was able to fly solo coast-to-coast, and turned 24.
By 1951 she was divorced again, and her assets were seized by the IRS for unpaid taxes. How did stars blow all that dough?! She managed to get some work on TV and the stage, and remarried in 1955, this time to a songwriter, divorcing him in ’59. She broke her ankle and was arrested for public drunkenness. The big sink from the drink and red ink stinks.
A reporter discovered her working as a barmaid in a Manhattan hotel, and wrote up the story, and as a result she got some work on TV. For a brief time in 1966 she was a TV hostess in Maryland. Have you been to Maryland? She moved to Hollywood… Florida, where her paranoia kicked in; she believed she was stalked by the FBI.
Her autobiography was published in 1972. She used the money from it to finance her last film, “Flesh Feast,” a low-budget horror flick with some kind of Nazi storyline. She moved to England and was married a fourth time — to a sea captain. That didn’t work out either. She filed for divorce and returned to the US in 1973, age 50.
She was immediately hospitalized with hepatitis and renal failure (alcoholics get that) and died, in Burlington, Vermont on July 7, 1973. Her ashes were scattered off the Virgin Islands, per her request. This is a pic of her near the end…
Below is the original trailer for “Flesh Feast,” in which she plays a mad scientist, uttering the classic line, “What’s the matter, don’t you like my little maggots?!”
And that’s today’s Friday Face, with a peek-a-boo ‘do. Happy Friday, everyone! I love you all!
Miss Tyra Sanchez, winner of Season 2 of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race,” was busted Tuesday near Atlanta on weed charges, reports TMZ.
It seems Miss Thing was riding in a Chevy Impala with too-tinted windows, and cops smelled marijuana when they pulled the car over… and busted Mr. James Ross, 23, better known as the boobalicious Tyra, so they dragged her ass off to Gwinnett County Detention Center, where I’m sure the inmates wigged out.
Couldn’t they give a girl a little time to prep for her mug shot?
