Disgraced Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein asked a court Wednesday to bring forward his retrial for sex offenses arguing that his “hellhole” prison conditions were unbearable, US media reported.
The post Harvey Weinstein Fails to Secure Earlier Rape Retrial Date, Claiming He ‘Can’t Hold on Much Longer’ appeared first on Breitbart.
America is entering a new golden age that extends far beyond politics. For the first time in at least a generation, conservatives are winning the culture wars too.
The post Vibe Check: Four Iconic Inauguration Performances Proving Trump Is Winning the Culture War appeared first on Breitbart.
Marilyn Monroe was introduced to husband number two by an unlikely matchmaker – an "I Love Lucy" star.
The 25-year-old was dining out with her agent, Norman Brokaw, when William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz in the sitcom, approached them. He had an offer that the actress couldn’t refuse.
"[My father] took her to a television program called ‘Lights, Camera, Action,’ which was a showcase for up-and-coming talent," Norman's son Joel Brokaw told Fox News Digital. "[It was] a live show in Hollywood that all the casting agents would tune in to watch. They went and did this television show, and then he said, 'Let’s go down the street and go to The Hollywood Brown Derby and have a meal.’ It was the place to be seen."
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"It didn’t take long before they were noticed," Joel shared. "William Frawley … came over to the table and he said … ‘I’m having dinner with Joe D. He would like to meet the young lady. We’ll stop by your table after we’re done.’
"Marilyn turned to my dad and said, ‘Who’s Joe D?’ She had no idea who Joe DiMaggio was. She obviously wasn’t a baseball fan. So, he had to give her a quick history of the importance of Joe DiMaggio."
Brokaw, who represented Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood and many other top stars, died in 2016 at age 89. Joel has written a new memoir about the late patriarch, "Driving Marilyn," which details how he went from working in the mailroom of William Morris Agency to becoming its CEO.
DiMaggio, who was 12 years Monroe’s senior, had just retired from the New York Yankees. He was out dining with his close pal when he found himself captivated by the blonde beauty.
And Brokaw didn’t miss his chance to help bring the two together.
"[My father and Marilyn] finished their meal first," said Joel. "They went over to the table, and the rest is history."
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Joel said his father met Monroe through his uncle, Hollywood talent agent Johnny Hyde. In her book "My Story," Monroe said that Hyde was in love with her and had asked her to marry him.
"If you look at all the stories that have been written about Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Hyde is a prominent chapter," Joel explained. "He was the big-shot superagent who believed in Marilyn. He was also living with her as well. He staked his entire reputation on advancing her career."
"At the time, a lot of the attitudes of his peers were, ‘That’s his lover, and she’s this year's blonde,’" Joel shared. "A lot of people didn’t see anything really special in her. But finally, towards the end of his life, he got her a contract with 20th Century Fox. At that point, my father had just been promoted to be a junior agent."
Joel said that Hyde had "a very bad heart condition," which prevented him from taking his dream client to functions. That’s when Brokaw stepped in.
"He had to take her to her auditions, which were for $55 a job, SAG minimum," Joel explained. "He took her to acting lessons, went to premieres and television shows that she was doing. He got to spend a lot of time with her.
WATCH: ‘I LOVE LUCY’ STAR PLAYED MATCHMAKER BETWEEN MARILYN MONROE, JOE DIMAGGIO: AUTHOR
"From what he told me about her, they really hit it off very well. He really liked her. He thought that she was incredibly intelligent. They just had a great relationship."
Hyde passed away in 1950. He was 55.
It was in 1952 when Brokaw and Monroe walked over to DiMaggio’s table to say hello. DiMaggio and Monroe went on to date for nearly two years before getting hitched at San Francisco City Hall in 1954.
Several months after the couple said, "I do," Brokaw received a phone call. It was from DiMaggio. According to the book, Monroe was no longer his client at the time.
"Joe DiMaggio got a piece of advice from my dad that came at a very crucial time in their marriage," said Joel. "Joe really wanted Marilyn to be a stay-at-home housewife. He was getting more and more upset about Marilyn’s higher profile and being out in public.
"And so, my father said to him, ‘I don’t know of a woman who could convince you not to go up to bat to hit for the 56th straight game. And I don’t know of a man who could convince a young actress not to star in a movie with Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy.'"
"That made [a] lightbulb go on in Joe DiMaggio’s mind," said Joel. "He credited that advice for keeping the marriage alive a bit longer. . . . It also cemented a lifelong friendship that my father had with Joe DiMaggio."
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The power couple’s marriage lasted only nine months. Monroe filed for divorce from DiMaggio, citing "mental cruelty."
Brokaw and Monroe crossed paths in a unique way once more in 1962.
At the time, Joel’s mother was hospitalized with schizophrenia. Brokaw needed someone to help watch over his sons. Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had also worked with Joel’s mother, suggested housekeeper Eunice Murray.
"She was a person whom he placed with a lot of his patients to help them handle their day-to-day responsibilities and to have a watchful eye over them," Joel explained. "A few weeks earlier, Eunice Murray had walked in and found Marilyn Monroe dead. That was a really strange episode in my life."
"I really liked Mrs. Murray," said Joel. "But I also felt like the energy was strange about her. . . . That was part of growing up in Hollywood – a lot of strange stuff."
Monroe passed away from a barbiturate overdose in 1962. She was 36. It was DiMaggio, who had reentered her life in 1961, who planned her funeral.
"It was an undying love that he had for her for the rest of his life," Joel remarked.
DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to Monroe's grave twice a week for 20 years. He outlived his ex-wife by almost four decades. He passed away in 1999 at age 84.
DiMaggio’s attorney later said that his reported last words were, "I’ll finally get to see Marilyn."
Just days before James Dean’s first movie premiered, the actor reportedly paid off a disgruntled male lover who threatened to expose their relationship.
The agreement, which remained a secret for seven decades, is unveiled in a new book, "Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean." The star died in a car accident at age 24 in 1955.
"James Dean had been blackmailed by a former lover," author Jason Colavito claimed to Fox News Digital about the "Rebel Without a Cause" icon.
"He had met a man named Rogers Brackett who was an advertising executive and radio show producer way back when he was just starting his career," Colavito explained.
"The two of them had a relationship, according to Rogers Brackett. It was a loving relationship, and they were partners. They lived together. He provided Dean with a great amount of help and assistance in getting his career started. [But] their relationship fell apart."
According to Colavito, the two men met in 1951. At the time, Dean, an Indiana native, was working as a parking valet. Colavito claimed that Brackett introduced Dean to several prominent people in the film industry, kicking off his Hollywood career.
Dean, struggling financially, reportedly took a smitten Brackett’s offer to move in with him. The relationship became tumultuous with Brackett saying of Dean years later that he was "like a child" who "behaved badly just to get attention." Meanwhile, Dean saw Brackett as "increasingly desperate" and "manipulative," Colavito wrote.
The relationship, which was on and off, lasted until about 1953, Colavito claimed.
"There were many reasons that the relationship between James Dean and Rogers Brackett soured," said Colavito. "One of the reasons was that James Dean simply wasn’t comfortable being in a relationship with a man.
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"This was the first time that he had been in such a relationship, and it moved very fast. They went from meeting each other to living together in a matter of weeks. And according to the stories that Dean’s friends later told, James Dean felt overwhelmed by it."
"It was simply too much," Colavito continued. "He felt like Rogers Brackett was trying to control him, that he was acting more like a father to him than an equal." As for Dean, he felt "used," said the author.
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After the couple parted ways, Brackett seemingly disappeared from Dean’s life – at least until Dean was about to make his screen debut in 1955’s "East of Eden."
"Rogers returned, and he started sending letters and making telephone calls to James Dean’s agent demanding money," Colavito claimed. "He wanted James Dean to repay him all the money that he had spent on him during their relationship, supporting him. Things like paying for his rent, paying for his clothes, for meals, for travel. He wanted reimbursement for all of that."
Colavito claimed that at the time, Brackett had lost his job and was looking to finance an opera he wanted to produce.
"He was trying to hit up Dean for that money," said Colavito. "He knew that James Dean was about to become a huge movie star in ‘East of Eden.’ So, he timed this strategically. There are letters between James Dean’s agent, his attorney and Rogers’ attorney that show the development of this incident. It eventually rose to the level that Rogers said that he was going to sue Dean."
At the time, a homosexual relationship would have destroyed Dean’s career before it even started – and he knew it.
Dean, feeling sexually exploited, but wanting to avoid a public scandal, reluctantly agreed to pay Brackett $800, which, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is about $10,000 today, to "make him go away." The average salary for men at the time was about $3,400, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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Colavito claimed that Warner Bros. Studio also paid Brackett a "finder’s fee."
"It was saying, ‘OK, we’ll give you credit for finding Dean and delivering his career to us if you won’t talk about him anymore,’" said Colavito. "We find that while James Dean was… filming ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ there were a couple of days when he’s absent from the set… without explanation.
"No one really knew what happened… That is the exact period when James Dean signs the settlement agreement and provides payment to Rogers Brackett to buy his silence."
Colavito said he made the discovery last year. At the time, the family of Jane Deacy, Dean’s New York agent with whom he shared a close bond, had sold off her archives at auction. Deacy died in 2008.
"These papers had been hidden for seven decades," said Colavito. "No one had seen them before. And they contained a huge number of revelations of things that had only been hinted at or rumored about in the past… when these papers were put up for auction… I went through all the more than 400 pages of documents."
"I was the first scholar who was able to use these materials to fully develop James Deans’s story," Colavito shared. "I purchased that settlement agreement so that it wouldn’t disappear into the ether, and it would be available for inspection and for the historical record."
For decades, Dean’s sexuality had been debated, with some claiming he was bisexual. In 2006, William Bast wrote a memoir, "Surviving James Dean," in which he claimed they had a secret relationship while Dean dated women in Hollywood. Bast died in 2015 at age 84.
According to Colavito, Brackett was dying of cancer when Ronald Martinetti interviewed him in 1974 for his book, "The James Dean Story." The stipulation was that the interview could not be published before Brackett’s death. The first edition of Martinetti’s biography was published in 1975, followed by his updated version in 1995.
Following the near-scandal, Dean moved on.
According to reports, Dean met Italian starlet Pier Angeli on the Warner Bros. lot in 1954. Colavito said that the relationship was "complicated."
"It looked like the kind of ideal young love that would be celebrated in every magazine and newspaper in America, and it was celebrated… but behind the scenes, the relationship was rather fraught," Colavito claimed.
"Pier said that at the time, she didn’t know whether she was really in love with Dean and certainly wasn’t ready to get married to anyone… We know that, at least, the first part of that was true, because she ran off with [singer] Vic Damone a few months into their relationship. They got married.
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"Being ready for marriage was probably something she was ready for, but not with Dean," Colavito added.
Colavito claimed that Dean "felt strongly" about the possibility of marrying Angeli before she said "I do" to Damone. Still, those who knew Dean claimed that his feelings for Angeli weren’t "romantic or sexual love." It was said to be more of an "emotional connection" and "a deep friendship."
One pal even claimed that they never had "a physical relationship" and instead, the pair were often heard "arguing with one another very loudly."
Six months into their courtship, Dean asked Angeli to marry him in 1954, Vogue reported. She said yes. But two days later she turned him down after her mother reportedly forbade the union. Damone was Italian American and a Catholic.
Dean was "devastated," according to the outlet.
Angeli and Damone parted ways in 1958. She remarried to orchestra conductor Armando Trovajoli in 1962. That marriage ended in 1969.
Angeli died in 1971 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. She was 39. According to the outlet, Angeli wrote to a friend two months before her death, "I don’t think any man can save me now. I think it may be too late. I think I was meant to live and die alone. Love is far away, somewhere deep inside of me. My love died at the wheel of a Porsche."
Colavito said it’s "very difficult" to say for certain what Dean and Angeli’s relationship was really like.
"Stories change wildly over time," he pointed out. "Pier herself would eventually [say] that she felt that James Dean was her true love and that there had never been a more perfect union than the two of them.
"Now, she didn’t say anything like that at the time. There’s no evidence from anyone who spoke with them that there was anything like that going on during the few months that they were together."
"But over time… memories fade and people become more and more romantic about their pasts," he shared. "And because of the hardships that she had experienced in life, she came to idealize that time as her perfect lost love."
When Rod Taylor passed away, his obituary described him as "a Hollywood hellion, a hard drinking, womanizing, combative man who enjoyed giving outspoken interviews punctuated with four-letter words."
The Australian actor’s biographer, Stephen Vagg, said it was all true.
"Rod Taylor was a hard-living, womanizing man," the Australian writer, who penned the book "Rod Taylor: An Aussie in Hollywood," told Fox News Digital.
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"The obituaries were correct," said Vagg. "He was a typical Australian of his generation. He liked to drink. He started on the radio and a lot of the actors would meet at the local bar while they were in between jobs… He was a very social person, and alcohol was a big part of that."
"He had a drinking problem," Vagg claimed. "A lot of actors of his generation did. It was… socially acceptable at the time.
"He made a film called ‘The V.I.P.s’ with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the height of their paparazzi mania. And apparently, everyone was throwing back whiskeys at 9 a.m.… It was a different time."
Taylor’s brawny good looks made him a leading man for films ranging from Westerns to romantic comedies. While his breakthrough came in 1960 with "The Time Machine," he would later star in the 1963 horror classic "The Birds."
"The role was originally written for Cary Grant," Vagg explained. "I think whenever Alfred Hitchcock wrote a film, he [went], ‘Let’s just write it for Cary Grant.' However, Cary Grant was expensive to hire, so [the studio] went with the cheaper option… Rod was well-known, but not a big star. They cast him."
"The lead female role was written for Grace Kelly, who by then had retired," said Vagg. "She was married to Prince Rainier of Monaco, [and] she wouldn’t come out of retirement. So, Hitchcock discovered Tippi Hedren."
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For his book, Vagg interviewed the actress, 94, who is the mother of Melanie Griffith and grandmother of Dakota Johnson.
"She paid a lot of tribute to how Rod helped her because she was such a newcomer," said Vagg. "He really helped her out. I think they had marvelous chemistry in the film. It was a difficult shoot for her because she was new, but also because she had to spend a lot of time… being attacked by birds."
"And I think Rod fits into the Alfred Hitchcock world very well… It’s a great shame that he and Hitchcock never worked together again," Vagg added.
As Taylor skyrocketed to fame, his tough guy persona caught the eye of actresses, keeping him busy as a sought-after Hollywood bachelor.
"He was a very good-looking guy," said Vagg. "He took advantage of that in Hollywood. I think it’s fair to say he had a very, very active single life for a long time. It took him a few marriages to find the right one, which sometimes happens."
"Rod Taylor had a number of high-profile romances," Vagg shared. "One of the big ones at the time was with Anita Ekberg, who was best known for dancing in the Trevi Fountain in ‘La Dolce Vita.’
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"They were engaged, and they would do a lot of fighting in public, and the paparazzi would follow them… They were a combustible couple… There was a lot of excitement, but a lot of turbulence. Eventually, they both couldn’t sustain it. But the minute they broke up, both of them got engaged to other people quite quickly."
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"He also had a less publicized affair with Maggie Smith," said Vagg about the actress, who died in September of this year at age 89.
"She’s not the sort of person you associate with that, but he was in awe of her talents, as most people were," said Vagg. "He said he fell in love with her and was willing to marry her, but she didn’t want to do that.
"He also had an affair with Frances Nuyen… and a lot of his other co-stars… He was a good-looking man who was a Hollywood movie star. I think that gives you a lot of opportunities, and he took a lot of them."
Taylor was romantically linked to Inger Stevens, Merle Oberson, Nikki Schenck, Rhonda Fleming, Tura Satana and Nicola Michaels – just to name a few.
Before his third marriage to Carol Kikumura, which lasted from 1980 until he died in 2015, Taylor was described as "commitment-shy" and preferred "casual romances on film sets."
Taylor’s rugged, yet suave persona even made him a candidate to play 007 – at least according to him.
"Rod Taylor always used to say that he was up for the role of James Bond," said Vagg. "I don’t know how seriously he was considered. I think a lot of people were in consideration at the time. He wasn’t one of the frontrunners, that’s for sure.
"He was in a TV show called ‘Hong Kong’ that… only ran for one season, but it was very, very popular… He played this sophisticated journalist in Hong Kong. That’s a very good James Bond trial. You can look at that and go, ‘I can see how he would’ve been considered.’"
He did voice Pongo in Disney’s 1961 film, "101 Dalmatians."
During his reign in Hollywood, Taylor also developed a close bond with John Wayne, his co-star in 1973’s "The Train Robbers."
"They both liked to drink, they both liked to talk and they both loved to play poker," said Vagg. "John Wayne would regularly beat Rod Taylor at poker, but he would forgive the debt. They got along really well. They were both very boisterous types… They liked to have all-night drinking sessions, playing poker and having a good old time… They were friends up until John Wayne died in 1979."
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"These were two men [who] loved life," Vagg added.
As his film career began to wind down, Taylor turned to television. He also began to produce and co-produce his later films and TV shows, carefully investing the earnings in safe securities that ensured a comfortable retirement.
Later in life, Quentin Tarantino convinced Taylor to come out of retirement to play Winston Churchill in "Inglorious Basterds."
"Rod Taylor’s final years were happy ones," said Vagg. "He finally found true love with his wife at the time… He’d done a lot of hard living… A lot of his contemporaries died quite young because they didn’t treat themselves too well. Fortunately, his wife Carol was a dancer who got him into yoga and eating well. I think she prolonged his life."
"He was content in his last few years," he shared. "He also hung onto a lot of his money… he was smart enough to do that. A lot of film stars at the time just didn’t, and he managed to do that."
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