I thought I told this story many years ago, but apparently I never did.
It was one told to me by that long time unofficial mayor of Hollywood.
It wasn’t a very long story, but I always thought it interesting because of how the two people are inexorably tied, and how one probably wouldn’t have had as much success without the other.
One was this alliterate permanent A list actress everyone in the world knows.
She was always very close to my old Mayor friend and was often her plus one when she needed a night just with a friend and not someone who wanted to sleep with her.
There were many times in her career when she felt obligated to sleep with someone, whether it was because she owed them or it would make her career better or sometimes just because she was scared.
She often said she had far more s.e.x. she didn’t want, than s.e.x she did want.
One of those unwanted times was with another alliterate A lister.
Someone who owed more to our actress than she to him.
He couldn’t really help her.
She knew that.
His friends were not her friends.
They of course knew the same people, but they just didn’t run in the same crowd.
For the longest time, he had been pursuing her.
He wanted to sleep with her, just to say he did.
He was obsessed with her.
She always turned him down and would generally ignore him whenever she saw him.
He finally made a deal with this permanent A+ list singer to book him at triple his rate for some shows, if the singer would get the actress to agree to s.e.x.
So, the actress met with the guy who had been pursuing her and he treated her like crap and made her feel every ounce of his rage that she had decided to turn him down.
In her life she had been raped multiple times, but said this was even worse than those.
Johnny Grant
Johnny Grant was an American radio personality and television producer who also served as the honorary mayor of Hollywood, in which capacity he was often present at Hollywood community functions, including the unveiling of new stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Marilyn Monroe
Alliterate A lister: Howard Hughes
Permanent A+ list singer: Frank Sinatra
‘Seduction’: New book looks at Howard Hughes’ Hollywood through a #MeToo lens
By now, our perception of Hollywood’s “golden” age, when stars were born in the studio era of the 1920s through the ‘50s, has been thoroughly tarnished by the awakenings of the #MeToo era. The sordid, sexually abusive history of powerful men, their casting couches and exploitation of female talent is being writ large – if all too belatedly.
None of it is described more compellingly than in Karina Longworth’s new book, “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood”
“The female body had always been a key building block of cinema,” Longworth writes, “a raw material fed into the machine of the movies, as integral to the final product as celluloid itself.” Most of the studio czars who manned the machine, such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, were robust immigrant overachievers.
But Hughes came to the film world as inheritor of the Hughes Tool Co., its fortune built on an innovative oil drill bit. Hughes had been traumatized in his teens by the early deaths of his parents, but as a nephew of Rupert Hughes, a successful film producer/director, he took to the Hollywood of the 1920s with brash energy and appetites.
Aviator, playboy and instinctive promoter, Hughes made his own rules, dallying with and famously influencing the careers of legends such as Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Jean Harlow. Then there were Hughes discoveries such as Jane Russell, renowned for the cleavage Hughes fought the censors to reveal.
But dozens of lesser-known actresses suffered under the thumb of the increasingly paranoid mogul, his private eyes, security men and the informers who helped him control them. – Source