If you’re a movie lover, you can probably picture the scene from The Wizard of Oz where a blanket
of snow falls over Dorothy lying in a poppy field. But did you know that the fake snow
dumped on the actors was actually asbestos? The carcinogenic mineral was a common substitute
for snowflakes in filmmaking until shortly after World War II. A staggering 1000 pounds of the
toxic material brought the snowy landscapes of Quebec to life in 1936’s The Country Doctor.
It was also used in the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com, and welcome to The List
Show. Cancer-causing faux snow is the first of many fascinating and sometimes
scandalous facts about Old Hollywood that I’m going to share with you today,
from the time the Vatican’s newspaper investigated Shirley Temple to the time
John Barrymore’s friends *allegedly* smuggled his corpse from the morgue.
Let’s get started. d
Southern California’s clement weather and wide open spaces made it an ideal location
for the film industry to set up shop in the early 20th century. It was also about as far
as you could get from Thomas Edison. After building the world’s first film
production studio in New Jersey in the early 1890s, Edison churned out patented inventions
related to making and showing movies. Then, in 1908, he spearheaded the creation of the
Motion Picture Patents Company, an East Coast association where all the major patent-holders
in the film industry pooled their resources. It was essentially a monopoly, and aspiring
filmmakers could hardly lift a finger without fearing a lawsuit for patent infringement.
It was harder to enforce patent laws over such a great distance, and West Coast judges were
also less amenable to Edison and his cohort. Sure enough, fiilmmakers started migrating to SoCal.
In 1923, the Hollywood sign was erected on Mount Lee—but not to promote Hollywood. That year, Los
Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler had built a luxury housing development called Hollywoodland.
To publicize it, he fashioned a 43-foot-tall sign that spelled out its name,
illuminated with some 4000 light bulbs. The sign had fallen into disrepair by the 1940s;
the H wasn’t even upright anymore. But instead of tearing it down, the Hollywood Chamber of
Commerce saw an opportunity. Making a deal with the city of Los Angeles, it did away with the last
four letters, patched up the HOLLYWOOD part, and gave it a new life as a welcome sign of sorts—for
the city itself, and the glamorous world of entertainment it had come to represent.
By that time, labor unions had already popped up to protect stage workers’ rights. And in 1934,
an official “studio zone” was established. If studios filmed inside that circle, it was
considered a local shoot, and workers (in those days, for these purposes, mostly extras) were on
their own for basics like food and transportation. If workers had to show up for a shoot outside the
zone, on the other hand, the studio had to provide those things. In 1970, the circle’s
radius was expanded from 6 to 30 miles, generating a new nickname: the thirty-mile zone. That’s where
the internet tabloid TMZ got its name. And if TMZ had existed in the 1930s,
there’s a good chance it would’ve covered this next story. As Shirley Temple gained
fame for films like Baby Take a Bow and Wee Willie Winkie (still waiting for that gritty reboot),
some people grew skeptical that such a mature and talented child could even exist.
They also found it suspicious that she was never seen on screen with missing baby teeth.
A rumor spread across Europe that Temple was actually an adult with dwarfism. For some reason,
the Vatican’s newspaper saw fit to investigate the matter itself, and sent Father Silvio
Massante to pay Temple a visit. After a thorough quizzing—which included going through a book
of Old Master paintings for some reason—he was satisfied that she was actually a child. As for
the case of the missing baby teeth, filmmakers had filled the holes with any number of items deemed
camera-ready, including temporary dentures. Shirley Temple also experienced a method of
keeping child actors in line that would definitely be illegal today: the black box. In the early
1930s, she and a couple dozen other kids starred in Baby Burlesks, in which the child actors would
parody scenes from adult movies. I’d love to know how many adults signed off on that pitch. Temple’s
roles in the film were originally played by Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, and Dolores del Río.
If Temple or any of the other pint-sized stars misbehaved, they’d get shut into a cramped sound
box cooled by a big ice block—which also happened to be the only place to sit. As Temple later wrote
in her memoir Child Star, “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche.
Its lesson of life, however, was profound and unforgettable. Time is money. Wasted
time means wasted money means trouble.” The adults on film sets also adopted
unconventional methods of making child actors cry in emotional scenes.
For Margaret O’Brien, who played the little sister of Judy Garland’s character
in Meet Me in St. Louis, competition was key. As O’Brien recounted in 2014, “June Allyson and
I were in competition as the best criers on the MGM lot. We were called the town criers of MGM.
So when I was having trouble crying, my mother came over to me and she said, ‘I’ll have the
makeup man put the false tears down your face, but [June] is such a great, great actress, she always
cries real tears.’ And then I started crying.” That motherly manipulation was positively kind
compared to what Jackie Cooper endured while filming 1931’s Skippy. To elicit tears from his
8-year-old actor, director Norman Taurog told Cooper his dog would be taken to the pound,
and then had someone fire a gun in the distance so Cooper would think his dog got shot.
Cooper later recalled the incident in his autobiography Please Don’t Shoot My Dog:
“I began sobbing, so hysterically that it was almost too much for the scene. Norman had to quiet
me down by saying that perhaps my dog had survived the shot, that if I hurried and calmed down a
little and did the scene the way he wanted, we would go see if my dog was still alive.” … Woof.
In short, things weren’t always great for kids on set. Or for adults. One example:
Tippi Hedren didn’t exactly have to fake her fear during the climactic avian attack in Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds. They were real birds. For five days, bird handlers literally threw
ravens, doves, and pigeons right at Hedren. At one point, they even tied some to her
outfit. The birds pecked at her incessantly, and the experience was so harrowing and exhausting
that a doctor had to coerce Hitchcock into giving her a week off to recover. Cary Grant,
who witnessed part of the shoot, told Hedren she was the bravest woman he’d ever seen.
Hitchcock and Hedren worked together again for the 1964 thriller Marnie, and for Hedren, the
shoot was even more harrowing. In her 2016 memoir, she revealed that Hitchcock had sexually assaulted
her on set and threatened to ruin her career when she resisted. An ugly, but unfortunately
far from isolated, moment in Hollywood history. If Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s top claim to
fame was for acting, their second was for hating each other. Their feud was so legendary that
it inspired a TV show in 2017, starring Jessica Lange as Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Davis.
The beef allegedly began in 1933, when the release of Davis’s movie Ex-Lady was
eclipsed by the news that Crawford was divorcing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. To add insult to injury,
Crawford’s next husband was actor Franchot Tone, whom Davis was in love with. More than
50 years later, Davis said, “I have never forgiven her for that, and never will.”
The two stars continued slighting each other offscreen until the early 1960s,
when they finally got a chance to duke it out on the same set. Both starred in the
1962 thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. While filming a scene where Davis’s character
attacks Crawford’s, Davis clocked her rival in the head with a little too much gusto.
In a later scene, when Davis had to drag Crawford’s limp body around, Crawford
purposely botched takes and may have even weighed her costume down to make it harder on Davis.
When Crawford died in 1977, Davis is said to have spouted this possibly apocryphal sick burn:
“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good.
Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” Long before Joan Crawford became Joan Crawford,
she was Lucille Fay LeSueur. Studios didn’t exactly downplay that they made Hollywood hopefuls
adopt stage names—but in Crawford’s case, MGM literally ran a public contest promising a cash
prize to whoever submitted the winning name. Joan Arden was the first choice, but, as the official
story goes, another actress already went by that name, and MGM settled on Joan Crawford. Though the
name eventually grew on her, Crawford initially hated how much it sounded like crawfish.
Film historian Jeanine Basinger actually pointed to a *different* reason for MGM to
avoid “Joan Arden.” Apparently, two separate people had submitted the name to the studio,
meaning MGM would have been on the hook for two separate $1,000 prizes. Crawford, for her part,
was apparently never disabused of the potentially dishonest story behind her stage name.
Other monikers arose more organically, like “the Rat Pack.” According to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall’s son, Stephen, his mother coined the phrase. Bogart and friends were having
an especially debauched week in Las Vegas, and Bacall said, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.”
These days, the Rat Pack generally refers to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.,
Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. But Sinatra was the only member who’d been there from the
beginning. At its inception, the Rat Pack comprised Sinatra, Bogart, Judy Garland,
and David Niven, along with some other pals. Bogart and Bacall starred in four movies together
during the 1940s, but they never kissed onscreen for longer than a few seconds.
In fact, nobody kissed on screen for longer than a few seconds during that era.
From the ’30s through the mid-’60s, Hollywood followed the Motion Picture Production Code, which
banned, among other things, “excessive and lustful kissing.” Though it didn’t specify a time limit,
three seconds was the unofficial standard. So if you’re ever watching a Golden Age classic
and wondering why the romantic leads keep pausing to walk and/or talk between kisses … that’s why.
For every proven story from Tinseltown’s 20th-century heyday, there’s a plethora
of legends that we’ll probably never know the truth about. Here’s one of the wildest ones.
After John Barrymore died in 1942, his friends supposedly stole his corpse from the morgue
and brought it back to Errol Flynn’s house. According to Flynn’s ghostwritten memoir,
My Wicked, Wicked Ways, he came home to find Barrymore propped up in Flynn’s favorite chair:
“He looked puffed, white, bloodless. They hadn’t embalmed him yet. I let out a delirious scream.”
Director Raoul Walsh, who was behind the prank, largely corroborated Flynn’s account
in his 1974 memoir, Each Man In His Time. John’s granddaughter Drew Barrymore even
confirmed the story during an appearance on Hot Ones in 2020.
But Gene Fowler’s son Will always told a different story. According to Fowler, he and his father
spent the whole night with Barrymore’s corpse in the morgue, and it never left their sight.
Gregory William Mank, author of Hollywood’s Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John
Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys, thinks Flynn probably made it all up,
and Walsh went along with it for fun. As Mank told Mental Floss in 2020, “Flynn worshiped Barrymore,
and he created this wacky corpse-swiping saga to give his idol a resurrection of [sorts],
temporary though it was.” Our next episode is all about
vaccines. If you have a fun fact about the history of vaccination,
drop it in the comments for a chance to be featured in that video. We’ll see you then!