70 Fun Facts About Old Hollywood

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1934–1968 is popularly named after which industry president?

Will H. Hays was hired in 1922 to polish Hollywood's scandal-hit image; his 1930 code had no teeth until 1934, when Catholic pressure and the threat of federal censorship forced real enforcement.

What replaced the Production Code in 1968?

The MPAA film rating system classified films by audience instead of censoring them, and within two years the X-rated Midnight Cowboy had won Best Picture.

Which administrator enforced Hollywood's Production Code from 1934 to 1954?

Joseph Breen's office could demand script changes on any film, and releasing one without its seal of approval meant a $25,000 fine.

What was Marilyn Monroe's birth name?

Norma Jeane Mortenson took the screen name in 1946 for her first Twentieth Century-Fox contract: 'Marilyn' came from Broadway star Marilyn Miller and 'Monroe' was her mother's maiden name.

Marilyn Monroe was on the cover of which magazine's first issue, published in December 1953?

Playboy never photographed her: Hugh Hefner bought a nude shot from an old calendar session, taken before her career took off, and ran it inside the issue.

Which gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper's arch-rival, is credited as America's first movie columnist?

Louella Parsons won her job with William Randolph Hearst by tirelessly praising his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, in her column.

Which actor, often called the 'King of Hollywood', won his only Oscar for It Happened One Night (1934)?

Clark Gable struggled to land Hollywood roles at first because his ears were thought too big for a leading man; once MGM signed him, his popularity soared.

Which screwball star, wife of the 'King of Hollywood', died in a 1942 plane crash after a war bond tour?

Carole Lombard had just raised some $2 million in war bonds in her home state of Indiana and, impatient to get home, took a plane rather than the train.

Which 1930 film, Greta Garbo's first talkie, did MGM sell with the tagline 'Garbo talks!'?

Anna Christie keeps Garbo off screen for about a quarter of an hour, and her first spoken line turns out to be an order for whiskey.

Which silent-screen 'Latin Lover' died in 1926 aged 31, drawing 100,000 to his Manhattan funeral?

Rudolph Valentino's funeral set off a day of rioting by fans, and the Fascist honour guard said to have been sent by Mussolini had in fact been hired by the funeral home.

Which star, born Frances Ethel Gumm, died of an accidental barbiturate overdose in 1969 at 47?

Judy Garland said MGM kept its young actors on pep pills to get through long shoots and sleeping pills at night, a dependence that followed her for the rest of her life.

In 1964 Elizabeth Taylor married which co-star from Cleopatra, one of their 11 films together?

Richard Burton and Taylor began their affair on the Cleopatra set while both were married to others; they divorced in 1974, remarried the next year and divorced again in 1976.

Which future star reached America at 16 with an English acrobatic troupe, then walked on stilts at Coney Island?

Cary Grant, then Archie Leach of Bristol, stayed behind in New York when the Pender Troupe's 1920 tour ended and spent years in vaudeville before Hollywood called.

Which 19-year-old ex-model debuted opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) and married him a year later?

Lauren Bacall got her screen test after the director's wife spotted her on a Harper's Bazaar cover, and her chin-down stare, 'The Look', began as a way to stop herself shaking with nerves.

Grace Kelly won her Best Actress Oscar for which 1954 film, playing Bing Crosby's long-suffering wife?

The Country Girl put the famously glamorous Kelly in plain cardigans as the dowdy, neglected wife of an alcoholic singer, and two years later she left films to become Princess of Monaco.

Which fashion house made the 'Kelly bag' Princess Grace used in 1956 to shield her pregnancy?

Hermès had sold the style since the 1930s under another name; photographs of the princess carrying it made it so famous that it became known as the Kelly, and the house adopted the name.

Which 1940s 'Love Goddess', star of Gilda, was born Margarita Carmen Cansino?

Rita Hayworth danced professionally in her father's act from the age of 12, and took the new surname and auburn hair on the advice of her first husband, who was also her manager.

Which Vienna-born film star co-invented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system with George Antheil?

Hedy Lamarr had picked up her knowledge of weapons from her first husband, an Austrian munitions maker, and neither she nor the composer ever earned anything from the patent.

Which silent comedian was acquitted after three trials over the 1921 death of Virginia Rappe?

Fatty Arbuckle was cleared within minutes by a third jury that added a written apology, yet a week later the industry barred him from the screen and he turned to directing under a false name.

Which blacklisted Hollywood Ten member did Kirk Douglas publicly credit as Spartacus's screenwriter in 1960?

Dalton Trumbo had spent the blacklist years writing under fronts and false names, and two of those scripts, Roman Holiday and The Brave One, won Oscars he could not collect.

The 1947 Hollywood blacklist began after ten writers and directors refused to answer which body?

The House Un-American Activities Committee had all ten cited for contempt of Congress and they went to prison, while the studio heads suspended them and pledged to hire no known Communists.

The first Academy Awards were presented in May 1929 at which Los Angeles hotel?

The Hollywood Roosevelt dinner cost guests $5 a ticket, and nobody was in suspense: the winners had been announced three months earlier.

Which swashbuckling silent star, the first screen Zorro, hosted the first Academy Awards?

He and his wife Mary Pickford ruled Hollywood society from their Pickfair estate.

Which salad was reportedly improvised from leftovers at the Hollywood Brown Derby for Sid Grauman?

Cobb salad is named for Robert Cobb, the Hollywood Brown Derby's owner, though tellings differ on whether he or his chef first made it, and for whom.

In which Sunset Boulevard hotel, built in 1929, did John Belushi die in Bungalow 3?

Chateau Marmont was modelled on the Château d'Amboise, where Leonardo da Vinci is buried, and began as an apartment house before the Depression turned it into a hotel.

The stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are made of brass and which coral-pink material?

Terrazzo in coral and charcoal won out after a brown-and-blue scheme was vetoed, reportedly for clashing with a developer's new building; Stanley Kramer's star was the first laid, in 1960.

Which film first paired Astaire and Rogers?

Flying Down to Rio starred Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond, but the dancing pair stole the picture and RKO rushed them into starring vehicles of their own.

Child star Shirley Temple later served as United States ambassador to Ghana and to which other country?

Czechoslovakia was where she had been caught in Prague by the Soviet-led invasion of 1968; she returned as ambassador in 1989, in time to see its Communist government fall.

Allied aircrews in World War II named their inflatable life jackets after which curvaceous star?

Mae West was sentenced to ten days in jail in 1927 over her Broadway play 'Sex', served eight, and came out a national figure.

Besides Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, which was James Dean's third major film?

Giant was his final film: he died in a car crash at 24 shortly after finishing it, and it reached cinemas the following year.

Which studio boss, paid over a million dollars a year, was America's highest-paid man in the late 1930s?

Louis B. Mayer ran MGM from its founding in 1924 and helped set up the Academy three years later, but he was out by 1951 as the studio's profits declined.

Which MGM producer, 'The Boy Wonder', died at 37 in 1936 and gave his name to an Academy award?

Irving Thalberg was told as a child that a weak heart would kill him before 30, worked at a furious pace anyway, and never let his name appear on the films he produced.

Which aviation tycoon produced Hell's Angels and Scarface and bought the RKO studio in 1948?

Howard Hughes spent years battling the censors over how his western The Outlaw displayed its star Jane Russell, and the row proved to be the publicity that made the film a hit.

Which 'Platinum Blonde' star of the 1930s died at 26 of kidney failure while filming Saratoga?

Jean Harlow left Saratoga unfinished, so MGM completed it with a stand-in in several scenes and released it within two months of her death.

Errol Flynn, star of Captain Blood and Robin Hood, was born on which island?

Tasmania expelled him from one school after another, and he tried gold mining in New Guinea before an Australian producer cast him as mutineer Fletcher Christian in 1933.

Canine superstar Rin Tin Tin was rescued as a puppy from a World War I battlefield in which country?

France was where American serviceman Lee Duncan found the newborn pup in the ruins of a German army kennel in 1918; his films later helped save a struggling Warner Bros. from bankruptcy.

Which choreographer arranged chorus girls into kaleidoscopic overhead patterns in 1930s musicals?

Busby Berkeley learned his formations as an army officer in the First World War, drilling troops in close-order routines long before he put chorus girls under an overhead camera.

The lion mascot that MGM inherited from Goldwyn Pictures was chosen as a tribute to the mascot of which university?

Columbia's teams are the Lions, and publicist Howard Dietz, who had studied there, borrowed the animal for Goldwyn's trademark; it passed to MGM in the 1924 merger.

What does MGM's Latin motto 'Ars Gratia Artis', displayed above the lion, mean?

Art for art's sake began as a 19th-century French slogan, l'art pour l'art, and studio publicist Howard Dietz put it into rough Latin for the trademark he devised.

Which Toronto-born silent star, among the best-paid performers of her day, was known as 'America's Sweetheart'?

Mary Pickford, born Gladys Smith, went on the stage as a child after her father's death left the family short of money; she later won an Oscar for her first talkie, Coquette.

Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith helped found which company in 1919 so that filmmakers could control their own films?

United Artists made no films of its own at first: it distributed the pictures its founders produced independently, leaving them in charge of their budgets, content and profits.

After an FBI investigation, Charlie Chaplin left the United States in 1952 and settled in which country?

Switzerland became home after the US attorney general barred his return while he was sailing to Britain; he came back only in 1972, to collect an honorary Oscar.

Which 1940 film was Charlie Chaplin's first true talking picture?

The Great Dictator ended a long holdout: Chaplin made two features without dialogue in the 1930s, years after sound arrived, and when he finally talked on screen it was in a satire of Hitler.

Which silent comedian's deadpan expression earned him the nickname 'The Great Stone Face'?

Buster Keaton found as a child in his family's knockabout vaudeville act that the more serious he looked, the bigger the laugh, and the deadpan became his trademark.

What did troops need to enter the wartime Hollywood Canteen?

A uniform was the only ticket: inside the Hollywood Canteen, which ran from October 1942 until Thanksgiving 1945, everything was free, and film stars served the food and cleared the tables.

Lana Turner said she was discovered not at Schwab's drugstore, as legend has it, but at which Sunset Boulevard spot?

The Top Hat malt shop stood across the street from Hollywood High, where she was skipping a typing class, and the man who spotted her was the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

In 1958, Lana Turner's gangster lover Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in her home by whom?

Her teenage daughter Cheryl Crane, then 14, said she was protecting her mother from his threats, and the killing was ruled justifiable homicide.

Vivien Leigh, twice a Best Actress winner, was born in which country?

India was home until she was six: born in the hill town of Darjeeling to a British broker and his wife, she was then sent to a convent school in England.

What was Joan Crawford's birth name, before a fan-magazine contest picked her stage name?

Lucille LeSueur of San Antonio was dancing in a Broadway chorus line when MGM signed her in 1925, and the studio itself set up the contest that renamed her.

After marrying its boss, Alfred Steele, in 1955, Joan Crawford became the glamorous public face of which company?

Pepsi-Cola put her on its board of directors after Steele's sudden death in 1959, and she carried on making promotional appearances for the company.

Frank Sinatra's career revival began with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for which 1953 film?

From Here to Eternity cast him as Private Maggio a year after his record label had dropped him, and that same year he began recording for Capitol with arranger Nelson Riddle.

Which real silent-era star played faded silent star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

Gloria Swanson's butler in the film is played by Erich von Stroheim, who had really directed her two decades earlier in the unfinished Queen Kelly, the old picture her character screens at home.

Which fan magazine, launched in 1911, gave out a gold medal for the year's best film before the Oscars existed?

Photoplay's Medal of Honor let filmgoers, not the industry, pick the winner: readers voted, and the producer of the winning film received a solid-gold medallion made by Tiffany.

Which scandal magazine, launched by Robert Harrison in 1952, terrorised the studios with exposés of stars' private lives?

Confidential survived a 1957 criminal libel trial that ended in a hung jury, but to avoid a retrial Harrison promised to drop the Hollywood gossip, and sales collapsed.

Which Los Angeles landmark was built in 1923 to sell hillside homes?

The Hollywood sign began as a $21,000 billboard reading Hollywoodland, the housing development below it, and was meant to stand for only about 18 months.

In 1932, 24-year-old actress Peg Entwistle died by jumping from which letter of the Hollywoodland sign?

The H stood 50 feet tall and she climbed to the top of it; a Broadway actress who had come west for film work, she had been living with her uncle in the hills below the sign.

'Straight out of Central Casting' refers to a company founded in Los Angeles in 1925 to supply what?

Extras once found work by waiting at the studio gates, where many were exploited, so the industry set up the company to give them one regulated place to be hired.

The unsolved 1922 murder of which director helped trigger the era's Hollywood moral panic?

William Desmond Taylor was found shot the morning after a visit from his close friend Mabel Normand; the comedy star was innocent, but the sensational coverage tarnished her reputation.

Which silent star, 'the screen's most perfect lover', died in a sanatorium in 1923 while fighting drug addiction?

Wallace Reid's widow, Dorothy Davenport, answered the scandal within months: billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid, she starred in the anti-narcotics film Human Wreckage and promoted it in person.

Ingrid Bergman's affair with which Italian director, revealed around Stromboli (1950), kept her in Europe for years?

Roberto Rossellini and Bergman had a son before her divorce came through; a US senator called her 'a powerful influence for evil', yet she returned to win a second Oscar for Anastasia.

James Stewart retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968 holding which rank?

Brigadier general came in 1959, capping a climb that began when he was inducted as a private in 1941; by 1945 he was a full colonel who had led bombing raids over Germany.

Sidney Poitier became the first Black performer to win the Best Actor Oscar for which 1963 film?

Lilies of the Field stood alone for decades: no other Black actor won the award until Denzel Washington, on the very night the Academy gave Poitier an honorary Oscar.

Which of these studios was one of the 'Little Three' rather than the Big Five of the studio system?

Columbia Pictures made and distributed films but, unlike the Big Five, had no cinema chain of its own; it had begun by turning out cheap shorts and climbed on the comedies of director Frank Capra.

Which comedienne, nicknamed the 'Ice Cream Blonde', died mysteriously in 1935?

Thelma Todd, the Marx Brothers' foil in Horse Feathers, was found in a garage, slumped in her car, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning; whether it was accident, suicide or murder is still argued over.

Why was Hattie McDaniel unable to attend the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind?

The theatre was whites-only under Georgia's segregation laws, and the film's other Black actors were kept away too; weeks later she won an Oscar, and was seated at a separate table by the far wall.

Which star, branded 'box office poison' in 1938, bought out her RKO contract?

Katharine Hepburn went back to Broadway in The Philadelphia Story, held its film rights, and sold them to MGM only on condition that she play the lead.

Which silent star is officially credited with starting the Chinese Theatre footprint tradition?

Norma Talmadge is said to have stepped in wet cement by accident in 1927, giving Sid Grauman the idea, though the tellings differ on who made the misstep.

Which Warner Bros. tough guy was really born on Christmas Day 1899, a date long dismissed as studio publicity?

Humphrey Bogart's Christmas birthday was long called a Warner Bros. invention, with January 23, 1900 printed as the real date, until a birth notice in a newspaper of January 10, 1900 ruled that out.

Which film earned Cecil B. DeMille his only Best Director nomination?

The Greatest Show on Earth won Best Picture that night, yet DeMille lost the directing Oscar to John Ford for The Quiet Man.

Which Warner Bros. star lost a 1936 London court fight to escape her studio contract?

Bette Davis lost the case but won the war: back at Warner Bros. her parts improved, and she soon won a second Oscar for Jezebel.