Shirley Temple; Marilyn
Monroe - Imagno/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Darryl F. Zanuck - Getty Images
Zanuck worked his way through actresses on the sofa in
his office faster than the credits rolled on his flicks, according to the tome
“The Zanucks of
Hollywood: The Dark Legacy of a American Dynasty’’ by Marlys Harris.
His daily bedding of budding starlets operated like
clockwork. At 4 p.m. every day, his Fox Century City studio would shut down
while Zanuck shuttled a young woman through a subterranean passage to his
green-paneled office, according to Harris and Deadline Hollywood.
“Anyone at the studio knew of the afternoon trysts,”
Harris wrote. “He was not serious about any of the women. To him they were merely
pleasurable breaks in the day — like polo, lunch and practical jokes.”
In 1937, Zanuck won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences’ first prestigious Thalberg award for producing.
It was the same decade that Variety first used the
now-ubiquitous term for the abuse of power that Zanuck and other Hollywood
execs were perpetuating behind the scenes — “the casting couch,” according to Slate.
Years later, in 1975, Newsweek would do a story titled
“The Casting Couch” in which it quoted the words on a plaque above the couch in
the office of a Tinseltown producer in the 1950s: “Don’t forget, darling,
tomorrow you’re going to be a star.”
The mag wrote, “Contemporary starlets no longer take
sex-on-demand lying down.”
Joan Crawford - Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
But things didn’t change then, and they haven’t changed
now.
In the past two weeks alone, more than 30 women have come
forward with stories of being propositioned, harassed or worse over the past
three decades by powerhouse producer Harvey Weinstein. And he’s only the latest
Hollywood horndog.
Marilyn Monroe once famously wrote in a memoir about the
sexual predators in her industry. “I met them all,” she said. “Phoniness and
failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as
near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their
lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes — an overcrowded
brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”
Movie moguls have preyed on the ambition of young
hopefuls seemingly since the beginning of celluloid.
Actress Joan Crawford, who got her start in the 1920s by
dancing naked in arcade peep shows, only advanced her career by sleeping “with
every male star at MGM — except Lassie,” quipped fierce rival Bette Davis.
According to ReelRundown.com, “Even at the peak of
[Crawford’s] career, rumors continued to surface about how her loathed mother
forced Crawford to work as a prostitute, make blue movies and sleep her way to
the top.”
As with Zanuck — the longtime head of 20th Century Fox —
the preferred perverted method of doing business at MGM allegedly came straight
from the top.
Louis B. Mayer - Getty Images
Studio head Louis B. Mayer “terrorized Hollywood’s women
long before Harvey Weinstein,” according to a recent headline in the UK’s
Telegraph.
Mayer would direct a 16-year-old Judy Garland to sit on
his lap, whereupon he’d palm her left breast while telling her, “You sing from
the heart” — a creepy anecdote Garland recalled in a memoir.
And an 11-year-old Shirley Temple got her first — and,
she thought, hilarious — peek at the male anatomy courtesy of MGM producer
Arthur Freed, who once dropped his pants during a meeting. Temple burst into
laughter at the sight and was promptly ordered out of the room.
Monroe was among those who allegedly suffered sexual
abuse at the hands of her MGM handlers.
In the 1950s, there was a valiant attempt to bring
casting-couch incidents out of the shadows and expose them for what they were —
sex abuse.
Two writers with a British fan magazine called
Picturegoer tried to expose the industry’s seedy underbelly in a four-part series
called “The Perils of Show Business.” Their stories were filled with the same
type of on-the-record accounts of power-grabbing sexual harassment that
Weinstein would be accused of 60 years later.
“This is the most depressing story we have ever written,”
the reporters wrote. “For weeks, we have made our investigations — over the
lunch table, in studios, and from the depths of cozy armchairs. Gradually, we
have built up a dossier of information, which, we believe, is an ugly scar on
the glamorous face of show business.”
But while actresses Joy Webster, Dorinda Stevens, Anne
Heywood and Marigold Russell allowed their names to be published, the dastardly
bad guys remained anonymous.
Actress Marigold Russell - Getty Images
Russell, who appeared in bit roles in movies such as
1954’s “The Bells of St. Trinians,” said girls trying to break into the
business would pass around a set of rules in the hopes of preventing unwanted
sexual attacks.
“One: When you have to talk business, stick to offices —
and office hours. Two: Refer invitations and offers to your agent. Three: Don’t
give your home phone number, give your agent’s,” she said.
But the casting couch is not just a distant memory
involving long-gone stars and their abusers.
Oscar-winner Dame Helen Mirren, who commands respect and
awe wherever she goes today, has said that back in 1964, at the tender age of
19, she was just another plaything to director Michael Winner.
Mirren, now 72, said she will never forget how, during an
audition, Winner made her flaunt her body as he leered.
“I was mortified and incredibly angry,” she told Richard
Madeley and Judy Finnigan in a 2007 television interview. “I thought it was
insulting and sexist, and I don’t think any actress should be treated like that
— like a piece of meat — at all.”
As Weinstein has downplayed his sexual aggressions, so
did Winner, telling The
Guardian he didn’t remember ordering Mirren to turn around — but “if
I did, I wasn’t being serious.”
Joan Collins - Ullstein Bild via Getty
Images
Actress Joan Collins, warned by Monroe about the “wolves”
in Hollywood, also wrote in her memoir that she missed out on the title role in
1963’s “Cleopatra,” which went to Elizabeth Taylor, because she wouldn’t sleep
with Buddy Adler, the head of 20th Century Fox.
“I had tested for ‘Cleopatra’ twice and was the front-runner,”
she said. “He took me into his office and said, ‘You really want this part?’
And I said, ‘Yes. I really do.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then all you have to do is be
nice to me.’ It was a wonderful euphemism in the ’60s for you know what.
“But I couldn’t do that. In fact, I was rather wimpish,
burst into tears and rushed out of his office.”
Other stories are even darker.
“Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski initially had
sympathy when pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered in 1969.
But then details emerged of how he gave a 13-year-old
aspiring actress champagne and Quaaludes before having sex with her during a
photo shoot in 1977, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office stepped in.
Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski - Gamma-Keystone
via Getty Images
“I didn’t want to have sex,” Samantha Geimer wrote in her
memoir, “The Girl.”
The Polish director fled the United States before final
sentencing and still has an
outstanding warrant on that charge.
Eighties child stars Corey Feldman and Corey Haim also
have said they were given drugs and “passed around” by male higher-ups when
younger.
Feldman told The Hollywood
Reporter that Haim, who died in 2010 at age 38, “had more direct
abuse than I did.
“With me, there were some molestations, and it did come
from several hands, so to speak, but with Corey, his was direct rape, whereas
mine was not actual rape,” he said. “And his also occurred when he was 11. My
son is 11 now, and I can’t even begin to fathom the idea of something like that
happening to him.”
It can take years for such abuse to come to light,
leaving victims silently suffering.
Disgraced star Bill Cosby has been allegedly drugging and
assaulting and raping countless women since the 1960s, but the accusations
against him didn’t surface for years.
