Innholdsfortegnelse for 2401 i The Australian Women's Weekly Icons

She was Hollywood’s most formidable gossip columnist, her words able to make or break the biggest star. In 1963, Hedda Hopper wrote an exclusive series of articles for The Australian Women’s Weekly, talking about her relationship with the biggest names of the Golden Age. We republish a classic that was titled “Her passion is diamonds”. Joan Crawford has hit the big time since she was a hoofer named Lucille LeSueur. She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. She labours 24 hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye. She’ll time her arrival at a theatre seconds before the curtain goes up and makes such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one, scene one. The actors on stage may hate…

The young woman enters the motel bathroom, discreetly disrobes and steps into the shower. She pulls across the shower curtain, turns on the taps and sighs as warm water cascades over her face and down her body. She smiles while lathering her arms, oblivious as the bathroom door opens and a figure silently approaches the shower. The translucent curtain is suddenly pulled aside, accompanied by piercing violin chords, like a shrieking animal. A dark, knife-wielding figure wildly swings the weapon as his victim desperately tries to protect herself. The music builds to a crescendo during the savage attack, the screaming violins competing with her terrified cries. As the killer flees the bathroom, the music becomes sombre as we watch the dying woman slowly slide to the shower floor, her blood…

IN HER OWN WORDS“I look on my profession as a business and I give it my best efforts, but I don’t want to give it my entire life.” Constance Bennett held tightly onto the tiny hand of her three-year-old son Peter as she walked up the drive and knocked on the front door of her younger sister Barbara’s house. The 28-year-old actress was returning to the US in 1932 after several years in France with her boy, who she’d adopted while living overseas. After greeting her sister, Barbara kissed her little nephew on the cheek and ruffled his light hair. “Gosh, Connie, he looks so much like you,” she exclaimed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he had mum’s eyes.” Constance breathed a sigh of relief. In the coming…

Boxing rings to city stages Dino Corcetti was born in Ohio in 1917, and spent his early years in a variety of jobs – bootleg liquor salesman, Black Jack card dealer, and even as a boxer, Kid Crochet. After breaking his nose, Dino realised it was time to step away from the boxing ring. He later underwent rhinoplasty and discovered a natural talent for singing, reinventing himself as Dean Martin, a crooner in the style of Bing Crosby. A chance meeting During World War II, Dean served in the army for 12 months. The war had created plenty of opportunities for performers on the US East Coast, which Dean grabbed with both hands. While his refined profile after that nose job gave him an appeal, it would be several years…

As the press pack jostled for space a voice called out, “What will you do now, Miss Kelly?”. The aristocratic blonde raised her baby blues, and the flashbulbs popped. It wasn’t the first time MGM had suspended its top star’s contract. “Why,” Grace Kelly demurred in her cultured, English-accented voice, “I’ll have to stop decorating my new apartment for the present.” Infuriated, MGM had come down hard when Grace had declined yet another role she considered inferior to her talent. The studio, however, had underestimated her reaction. Unrepentant, Grace called a press conference to reveal MGM’s harsh treatment of her. Then the star of 1952’s High Noon, and 1954’s Dial M for Murder and Rear Window turned on her kitten heels and left for a vacation in Jamaica with her…

It was the last race of the season in November of 1920. Famed French race car driver Gaston Chevrolet – co-founder of the car company of the same name – turned into lap 146 at the Beverly Hills Speedway. The crowd’s roars turned to screams when his car connected with that of fellow racer Eddie O’Donnell’s vehicle. Gaston was killed instantly while Eddie and his mechanic would lose their lives in the hours afterwards. The site had only opened that year, just outside what today is called Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle”. And while it continued to attract crowds in the aftermath of the tragedy, four years later booming real estate prices meant it was an uneconomical proposition. And so the Speedway was torn down for a new glittering proposition –…

Could Tony Bennett’s career really be stalling so soon? He was charismatic, sure, and some said he had a preternatural talent but, on April 4, 1951, standing at the microphone of his label’s fabled 30th Street Studios with Percy Faith and his orchestra gathered, tuning up and waiting, the singer could be forgiven for thinking he was already washed up. Was this really the last-chance saloon? At 24? The 10-year-old song itself was a chance selection, plucked from a pile of sheet music on the day by orchestra leader Percy, known as “the father of easy listening and mood music”. But it wasn’t working, the singer too overwrought in his delivery – until he did his bel canto scales and cleared his throat for another take, reverting back to his…

Rock Hudson knew he’d reached the end. Outside the Paris hospital he’d been rushed to after collapsing several days earlier, reporters lined the streets, wanting to know if the rumours surrounding the former matinee idol were true. It had been reported his gaunt appearance was down to anorexia, to liver cancer, to exhaustion, to many things. But rumblings were beginning to surface that these were masks for his true condition. With his long-time friend and confidant Mark Miller by his side, he turned and nodded his agreement to release a statement which would, according to Mark, be “the ruination of Rock Hudson’s life.” “God, what a way to end a life,” Rock sighed in despair, knowing the secret he had tried to hide since being diagnosed a year earlier was…

Nearly a decade after Cary Grant retired from the silver screen, Ian Woodward caught up with the 71-year-old for a piece published in The Weekly’s September 10, 1975 issue. And during the course of their conversation, Ian found that while the perpetually suntanned star had lost none of his appeal with the ladies, his daughter, Jennifer, was the most important girl in his life. Cary Grant casually surveyed the women around him. “I like women and I think they like me,” he said. “But I don’t know. I don’t live inside their heads. They’ve always lived inside mine. It’s been one of the pleasanter occupational hazards.” Oh yes, women like Cary Grant! I've seen the extent of it – many times – firsthand. Take the last time he was in…

For the movie studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age, transforming their contract players into stars and then keeping their glamorous top billers looking effortlessly beautiful was big business. All invested heavily in an army of hair and make-up artists, as well as stylists and various assistants, who worked around the clock to keep these departments running smoothly, the stars looked after and productions rolling. It’s said that MGM had 52 members in their make-up department alone to not only make up the faces of their roster of stars, including Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow, but to help mould the looks of the pretty up-and-comers. Overdrawing lips for a fuller shape, gelatin for facial contouring, even porcelain caps on their teeth could help any fresh-faced beauty transform into a star…

Model to movies Born in New York in 1924, Lauren aspired to be a dancer but later switched focus to acting. While studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and working as a theatre usher, Lauren began modelling to supplement her income. Her big break came when the wife of famed director Howard Hawks saw Lauren on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and urged her husband to offer the aspiring actress a screen test for his new film To Have and Have Not (1944). A star is born Despite her nervous first screen test (she later said she had to press her chin to her chest and look up through her eyes to minimise her trembling – a move which later became her signature “look”) Lauren’s debut was a…

“I was an athlete, quite good at tennis, boxing, and ready to fight if picked on.”– Errol Flynn…

It was early in the morning of November 2, 1962, when a noise woke Alan Ladd from his sleep. The room was pitch black. Except for the three dogs who slept by his bed the action movie star was alone on Alsulana, his secluded ranch near Los Angeles … or was he? He cautiously got out of bed, retrieved a .38 pistol from his bedside drawer and went to investigate the noise. “I was plenty groggy, but I grabbed the gun, instinctively lurched across the room, and tripped over one of the dogs in the dark,” he later told a journalist. The actor said he hit his head and passed out, then woke up to discover he’d shot himself in the chest. He called his wife and lapsed once more…

Spencer Tracy hadn’t been seen on set for two weeks. And with the leading man nowhere to be found, production on his film, Marie Galante, had ground to a halt. Of course, he’d done this before. For weeks at a time, Spencer would disappear into a hotel room, load up on cases of whiskey and then settle into the bathtub to drink himself into a stupor. On more than one occasion he’d drink into oblivion, only to wake up, keep drinking, and fall unconscious again – a vicious cycle until the booze ran dry. This time when he was finally found, in June 1934, the hotel room was trashed – furniture overturned, empty bottles littering the floor, a musty smell permeating the room. And there was Spencer – passed out…

It is now more than a quarter of a century since I first started researching the life of Gabrielle Chanel, but her capacity to astonish me remains undiminished. I’m not the only one – last month saw the opening of an important Chanel exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto. The retrospective is the first to be staged in the UK, and such has been the speed of advance ticket sales that it promises to be a blockbuster show. The secrets of Chanel’s complex life are as intriguing as ever – and I have continued to make discoveries in various archives, finding documents relating to her controversial actions during the Second World War, when she had an expedient affair with a German spy in occupied…

It all began with a well-known rivalry. In 1946 Sir Frank Packer, owner of Australian Consolidated Press – and publisher of The Australian Women’s Weekly – was incensed that the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald had a strangle hold on the advertising account for David Jones. He wanted those fashionable dollars for his own title’s pages. So, he’d enlisted his glamorous sister-in-law, Mary Hordern, then fashion editor of The Weekly, to head to Paris to round-up a collection of incredible French couture to bring back and show live to Australian audiences – all of which would take place at David Jones’ flagship Sydney store. It was the post-war years and France had long depended upon quality Australian wool for their fashions. Now that the need for uniforms and other military garb…