Carole Lombard, the exquisite screwball, died 70 years ago yesterday when the Transcontinental DC-3 in which she and her mother and 15 Army servicemen and five others were traveling from a bond rally, crashed into Double Up Peak near Las Vegas. She was just 33, and the wife of the King of Hollywood, Clark Gable.
Lucille Ball, a close friend, claimed that after Carole’s death, she would visit Lucy and advise on important decisions. Wild!
She also advised me to make her today’s Turban Tuesday, and to add this clip…
You just never know who’s going to be the Friday Face, and neither do I. Today, it’s Jean Nidetch, nee Slutsky, formerly fat founder of Weight Watchers in 1963, after she’d lost 72 pounds on a similar program. By 1968 it was a worldwide phenomenon and the IPO sold out.
In the late ’70s, it was sold to Heinz for a reported $78 million. Nidetch, born in Brooklyn in 1923, now lives in Florida, following her retirement as a spokesperson in 1984. Weight Watchers continues to help people lose weight around the world, and I do mean AROUND the world.
Jean, daughter of a cab driver and a manicurist, was interviewed a few years ago… listen to her tell the story of how it all happened.
Jean Nidetch, entrepreneur, weight loss magnate and bouffant superstar, is today’s Friday Face.
Today marks what would have been the 99th birthday of Loretta Young, who began her career in silent films in 1917 at the age of 3, winning an Oscar in 1947 for “Farmer’s Daughter,” and making a highly successful transition to TV with an 8-year run of “The Loretta Young Show.”
Young had a child with the then-married Clark Gable in 1935. She hid the birth and later “adopted” the child, naming her Judy Lewis.
Loretta Young was a lifelong Republican and very active in the church, earning her the nicknames “Attila the Nun” and “Saint Loretta.” She married three times, with one annulment and one divorce.
In 1993, she married 83-year-old fashion designer Jean Louis, who died four years later. (Louis designed the gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” which sold at auction in 1999 for $1.26 million.)
In 1973, her son Christopher Lewis, then 29, was charged with child molestation and filming and distributing child porn. He plead “no contest” and faced life in prison, but got probation and a $500 fine. Another son, Peter Lewis, was in the rock group Moby Grape.
Barbara LaMarr (formerly Reatha Watson) was known as “The Girl Who is Too Beautiful,” and you can see why right here with her in this glittery turban.
She wrote at least seven screenplays for UA and Fox, starred with Douglas Fairbanks in 1921′s “The Nut” (that name!), and danced in musical comedies on Broadway, making numerous dance shorts with various partners in NYC, CHI and L.A. She was making $5,000 a week — which would be like making $63,000 a week today.
LaMarr married 5 times and had one child, Marvin Carville LaMarr… all before she was 29, when she died of TB and nephritis (reportedly brought on by drugs and alcohol — possibly the first drug-related death in filmdom).
Her son was adopted by her friends, character actress ZaSu Pitts and her husband, Tom Gallery. Little Marvin became Don Gallery (link is a PDF), an actor who occasionally dated Elizabeth Taylor.
LaMarr’s lovely beach house was blown up for a scene in “Inside Daisy Clover,” starring Natalie Wood. You can see LaMarr’s Hollywood house here.
Her famous quote: “I like my men like I like my roses… by the dozen.”
