1927 IS 2018

91 YEARS AGO THE FUTURE WAS TOLD

BILLY HAINES: WISCRACKER

June is Gay History Month.

 Actor William 'Billy' Haines (Charles William Haines

)

 was born in Staunton, Virginia on January 2, 1900. His father was a cigar maker, and Billy had four younger siblings. He sang in the choir of the Trinity Episcopal Church, became interested in performing and obsessed over watching movies. At 14 years old, he ran away from home with a young boyfriend to Hopewell where they worked at the DuPont factory and opened a dance hall that catered to gays. His parents sent the police for him, but he refused to return home. In 1915, he moved to New York City. 

His father suffered a mental breakdown, and Billy returned home to help the family until his dad recovered.

 In 1919, Billy moved back to New York City and settled into gay friendly Greenwich Village. He took odd jobs, worked as a "model" and was kept by a rich older woman for a time. A talent scout found him in Samuel Goldwyn Company's "New Faces of 1922." He was offered a studio contract and moved to Hollywood in 1922. He worked at several studios before ending up at MGM. The first of his 51 films was Brothers Under the Skin, in 1922. His early silent films include Souls for Sale, Three Wise Fools, The Desert Outlaw, The Gaiety Girl, A Fool and His Money, Little Annie Rooney, Sally Irene and Mary, Show People, and Mike. Brown of Harvard (1926) made him a star. He played the handsome, arrogant, wise-cracking young man - which became the character he would play for most of his career. Billy became one of the biggest and most popular leading men in films. Hits continued with Tell It to the Marines, Spring Fever, and West Point. He successfully transitioned to talking pictures in Alias Jimmy Valentine and Navy Blues in 1928/29.

 Billy was "openly" gay. On a trip to NYC in 1926, he met a young man named James "Jimmy" Shields. He brought Jimmy back with him to Hollywood and the two shared Billy's house. In 1933, Billy was arrested for having sex in the Los Angeles YMCA with a sailor he had picked up on the street. MGM covered up the scandal, but studio boss Louis Mayer demanded Billy enter into an arrange "lavender marriage" or give up his lover, Jimmy Shields. Billy refused, and was fired. He made several more films for small, "poverty row" studies before retiring from acting in 1934. His final films included Young and Beautiful, and The Marines Are Coming. 

Billy and Jimmy began a successful interior design and antique business. Billy was a popular figure in Hollywood, and many Hollywood stars engaged his services to redecorate their homes. The business prospered (Billy served during WWII), and the couple moved to Brentwood. The men were favorites within the rich social circles of Los Angeles and Hollywood, and lived in comfort. 

On December 26, 1973, Billy died in Los Angeles after a short battle with lung cancer. Billy Haines was 73 years old. A short time later, his lifelong partner, Jimmy, committed suicide. His suicide note famously read, "Goodbye to all of you who have tried so hard to comfort me in my loss of William Haines, whom I have been with since 1926. I now find it impossible to go it alone, I am much too lonely." Billy and Jimmy are buried side by side at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. 

Joan Crawford, Billy's close friend and decorating client, said Billy and Jimmy were "the happiest married couple in Hollywood."

repost courtesy- Michael Michaud 

KKKLAND

On April 27, 1926, the Cañon City Daily Record ran a surprising bulletin on its front page. Right under a notice that the local junior high school was putting together a variety show, the local newspaper of the small central Colorado town printed the headline “Klansmen pose for picture on merry-go-round,” along with a brief, staid description of a parade of hooded locals that went from the Klan headquarters on Main Street to the travelling amusement park that had been set up a couple blocks away.

The photo itself, though, wasn’t printed, as the photographer didn’t share it with the paper. In fact, it didn’t show up until more than 65 years later. And when it did, of course, it went viral. The story of how this photo got to the internet touches on topics as diverse as Colorado demographics and the history of the Ferris wheel—but it also reveals the blind spots in our historical memory. As grotesque as is the image of the hooded men enjoying an amusement park ride, the spectacle was not nearly as unusual as many Westerners might hope. 

READ MORE- 

THE LEGEND OF VIOLETTE MORRIS

Violette Morris was a cross-dressing lesbian who went from celebrity athlete to

 “Hyena of the Gestapo.”

PARIS CIRCA 1920

DOLLY WILDE

I am Oscar Wilde's niece Dolly Wilde. 

I was born to his elder brother Willie and his wife Lily Lees on July 11, 1895. My parents were so destitute that Oscar in prison had t arrange payment  of my laying out fee.
I am a darting trout , shifting , glancing and flashing my iridescent tail in a hundred pleasant ponds. I am Dolly Wilde. I listen to and tell stories. The only one I tell of my childhood is that when I was very young I would take lumps of sugar dip them in my pretty mother Lily's perfume and eat them! I believe life should be one delightful sensation after another- I really do!

I resemble Oscar in appearance and temperament . I think it was Henry James on meeting me who exclaimed how wonderful it was to meet a really feminine Wilde. My physical resemblance to Oscar was just the beginning . We both liked to engage in brilliant conversation and we both had our addictions.  In fact I am more Oscar-like than he was himself so call me Oscaria!
I first met Natalie Barney in 1927 at one of her Friday salons at her home at 20 rue Jacob ironically just around the corner from the hotel where Oscar died. I fell in love with Natalie , the pale unarmed enchantress. I wrote to her:You compel my imagination, make a turmoil of my thoughts and every night I miss your lover's attentions--what else is love?

The two things I want to be remembered  for are being a great lover and a lover of nature. I was born in poverty but to appreciate the finer things in life like champagne, cocaine and the company of women.   I impulsively left home at the start of  The Great War to serve with a group of Anglo-American female ambulance drivers at the front in France.  Many of them were rich and lovers of women. I was drawn to and intrigued by Paris where modern experiments in sexual styles were the specialite de la maison . Living in wartime Paris which had turned into a city of women was my first attempt to turn the the life around me into the literature that I loved. Books were my first stimulants.

My friend novelist Rosamund Harcourt-Smith says I am like a panther, softness, grace , purrs and of course claws. She says my huge eyes are like grapes in a greenhouse before the blue bloom gets rubbed. When pleased they have a velvety luster . When angry the pupils retract with the fascinating speed of parrots and the blue grapes become splintered glass. 

I seemed to know everyone in the arts in London and Paris-- Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, aAlice B Toklas, Cecil Beaton and the Sitwells.  I enjoyed the friendship of many men and had any number of marriage proposals.However my relationship with my cousin Vyvyan Holland once we met as adults was not close. I always thought he resented my status as a member of the Wilde family , a name he had had to give up. He did tell me that one of my great faults regarding men was  I was always taking my horse to water and then refusing to let him drink.

Around 1925 I started and ended an affair with the great actress Alla Nazimova . She had bankrupted herself producing and starring in a film version of Oscar's Salome.  Nazimova was delighted to meet the niece of the man whose play she had sacrificed so much to film.  I was fascinated by this wonderful actress and many other women I became involved with but the love 
Was always Natalie Barney.  For sixty years her salon had brought together the best literary and artistic expression people in Paris. She had actually first met Oscar as a small child when he saved her from some bullying boys at a Long Island resort where he was speaking on his 1881 American tour. He also encouraged Natalie's mother to become an artist which she did.
Surprising as a young woman in Washington DC somehow became engaged for a very short time to Alfred Douglas who was shopping unsuccessfully for a rich American wife.
Since I never became a writer myself I admired Natalie's writings--her pensees evoke Oscar's epigrams such as Fame - To Be Known By Those Whom One Does Not Wish To Know 
Always - Too Long   ; Married - To Be Neither Alone Nor Together.

continued.....

I called Natalie's inner circle The Knights of Natalie's Round Table and treated her like a reigning queen in public. In private I thought of her as something of an accountant in love, always figuring just how much emotion she had to dispense to get the desired amount back.
My best friend in England was Honey Harris. The Harris Family had been friends with the Wildes for a long time.  Honey's uncle Walter was an explorer and my cousin Cyril's  godfather.I stayed with the Harrises in the country Honey helped me through many crises--emotionally and financially.  Like Oscar I liked to live well and extravagantly.

In Natalie's court I had the responsibility not only of Master Of Revels but the Dignified Sufferer of Sexual Jealousy . The women of Natalie's salon and her Academie Des Femmes formed an alliance that helped each other economically, sexually and in friendship. The extent of the salon is illustrated in Natalie's book, Pensees D'une Amazone which shows the names of hundreds of important salon guests both men and women.

I had a mythological parenting with Lord Byron but of course even more so with Oscar. When I went about London in the '20s  many people considered me the incarnation of Oscar except my cousin Vyvyan and also Ada Leverson The Sphinx who loyally to Oscar said "Dolly perhaps inheritedOscar's mantle but none of her own."  It is not true I dressed a lot as Oscar that really was only really one time for a fancy dress ball in Paris in 1930.

I longed to write but could never put down on paper anything that remotely conveyed what I meant. I sometimes think that Oscar must have seized my pen to prevent his works from being rivaled after his death.   My writing was for an audience of one through writing letters. 
Like Oscar, I liked going to plays but I loved being around actresses and in my case sleeping with them. Besides being aware of my Wildean appearance I also knew I had a similar trait of self -destruction. I felt sometimes like a clever man balancing a billiard cue on his nose--one false slip and the cue will topple. I mean my whole life seems just like that - no reality and yet this lack f reality passing unnoticed because the trick is so amusing and clever. It's terrifying at times and I think absurdity can only stand one more day and that one day the cue will fall and I'll fall to pieces on the pavement.

I am obsessed with hands and handwriting. I've written over 200 hundred letters to my Natalie alone such as : Darling, Did you know there was a law in France forbidding people to put flower vases on the window ledge? The femme de chambre has just told me so. My room is full of flowers, all anonymous so I prefer to think of them as coming from you ( as they ought to be!)
and I must die of your fragrant attentions. Come fold my shrouds tomorrow.
Oscar once said that one of the world's great tragedies is that one usually ends up getting what one wants.  This is the only tragedy that I look forward to with pleasure. It was almost the only tragedy I didn't experience.  Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life.

My passion for Natalie caused me to make numerous suicide attempts when she pursued other romances. My zeal for life caused me to shoot up even during dinner parties but I truly experienced life until cancer ended it in 1941. But you know after my death a friend remarked that half an hour with Dolly was worth six months with anyone else. I hope that was true.
Ten years after my death Natalie published a small volume : In Memory Of Dorothy Ierne Wilde:Oscaria. In the book Natalie reminded everyone she had been the object of my deepest affections and that she was entirely blameless in my tragic early death.

Victor Cunard in my obituary in The Times wrote: Epigram and Paradox are the weapons of the Wilde family and none of its members have used them more humanely if not more effectively than Dorothy.

written by bill kaiser for oscar wilde's 162nd birthday salon @ antebellum hollywood.

PRESENTED @ ANTEBELLUM HOLLYWOOD

 ON THE 162ND BIRTHDAY OF OSCAR WILDE.

for info about oscar wilde death day salon on november 30th~
 please contact~

antebellum@earthlink.net

RUDOLPH VALENTINO DEATH DAY TEA SALON- AUGUST 24TH

PRESENTS

RUDOLPH VALENTINO

 DEATH DAY TEA SALON

SILENT SCREEN LEGEND

 RUDOLPH VALENTINO HAS BEEN DEAD FOR 90 YEARS

JOIN US IN A TOAST  @

 ANTEBELLUM HOLLYWOOD

WEDNESDAY

AUGUST 24TH

5PM

$5 COVER

tea & sweeties will be served

 ENJOY HAND-BLENDED TEA 

RELAX &  HAVE A NICE CUPPA

VIEW ROMANTIC/SEXY ART

CHAT WITH FELLOW ART PATRONS

RAISE YOUR TEA CUP TO VALENTINO 

TAKE A LOAD OFF YOUR SLING-BACKS

 Rudolph Valentino

 (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926) 

 Italian-born American actor who starred in silent films~

 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, 

and The Son of the Sheik

Perhaps the 1st pop icon & first male sex symbol of the 1920s,

 he was known as the "Latin lover" or simply as "Valentino." 

He died at the age 31, causing mass hysteria among his fans propelling him into iconic status.

ANTEBELLUM BOOK CLUB- TODAY ! 1PM

IF YOU'D LIKE TO BECOME A MEMBER OF ANTEBELLUM BOOK CLUB, 

PLEASE EMAIL FOR INFO- antebellum@earthlink.net

VIRGINIA RAPPE

Virginia Rappe (July 7, 1895 – September 9, 1921) was an American model and silent film actress. She worked mostly in small bit parts, and is best known for her death after attending a party with actor Roscoe Arbuckle, who was accused of complicity in her death though ultimately exonerated.

Virginia  Rappe was born in Chicago to an unwed mother, Mabel Rapp, who died when Virginia was 11. Virginia was then raised by her grandmother in Chicago. At age 14 she began working as a commercial and art model in Chicago.

In 1916 she relocated to San Francisco to pursue her career as an artist's model, where she met dress designer Robert Moscovitz, to whom she became engaged. Shortly after the engagement Moscovitz was killed in a streetcar accident, whereupon she moved to Los Angeles. In early 1917 she was hired by director Fred Balshofer and given a prominent role in his Paradise Garden opposite popular screen star Harold Lockwood. In 1918 she gave birth to a child, which was put into foster care. Balshofer then hired her again to costar with early drag performer Julian Eltinge and newcomer Rudolph Valentino in Over the Rhine, for which she was awarded the title of "Best Dressed Girl in Pictures". 

This film was not released until 1920 when Balshofer recut it and released it under the title An Adventuress and later in 1922 as The Isle of Love.

In 1919, she began a relationship with director/producer Henry Lehrman; the two eventually became engaged. She appeared in at least four films for Lehrman: His Musical Sneeze, A Twilight Baby, Punch of the Irish and A Game Lady. 

The circumstances of Rappe's death in 1921 became a Hollywood scandal and were covered widely (and sensationalized) by the media of the time. During a party held on Labor Day, September 5, 1921, in Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's suite, number 1219, at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Rappe allegedly suffered a trauma.

She died on September 9, 1921, from a ruptured bladder and secondary peritonitis.

The exact events of that party are still unclear, with witnesses relating numerous versions of what happened. It was alleged that she died as a result of a violent sexual assault by Arbuckle. Arbuckle's accuser, Maude Delmont, had accompanied Rappe to the party; she had first met Rappe only a few days earlier. Delmont was apparently not present at any of the events she described and was not called to testify at any of Arbuckle's three trials because of her own extensive criminal background that included extortion.

Subsequent witnesses testified that Rappe had for some time suffered from cystitis, and that consuming alcohol could aggravate that condition. Witnesses also testified that she had previously suffered from venereal disease, so there were allegations that her death was brought on by her health rather than by an assault.

After three manslaughter trials, Arbuckle was formally acquitted; his acquittal in the third trial was accompanied by an unprecedented statement of apology from the jury stating, in part, that "Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him… there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime."

 Arbuckle's case has been examined by scholars and historians over the years and is still speculated about today, and a number of detailed books about the case have analyzed the incident and subsequent trials.

Never-the-less, the scandal ended Fatty Arbuckle's career. Despite Arbuckle's acquittal, the scandal has mostly overshadowed his legacy as a pioneering comedian. Following the trials, his films were banned and he was publicly ostracized. Although the ban on his films was lifted within a year, Arbuckle only worked sparingly through the 1920s. He later worked as a film director under the alias William Goodrich. He was finally able to return to acting, making short two-reel comedies in 1932 for Warner Bros. He died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1933 at age 46.  

Virginia Rappe is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. 

JOAN CRAWFORD: "GOTTA FEELIN FOR YOU"

Joan Crawford at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer loft; singing

 "Gotta A Feelin' For You" 

 Hollywood Revue of 1929.

HOLLYWOODLAND 1923- 1949

HOLLYWOODLAND: 1923-1949

the 30-foot-wide letters stay lighted for a few seconds before going dark so the cycle can began all over again. each bulb is relatively small, but there are 4,000 of them, spaced nine inches apart. a 35-foot-wide flashing dot was installed below on the hillside to help punctuate and draw attention to the monstrous structure, but it was needed- a harbor master 30 miles away in long beach could see the illumination. for 16 years the southern face of hollywood's mt lee will rarely see darkness. 

before  albert kothe, (german immigrant hired exclusively to change the light bulbs)  can climb the sign in order to reach his work, he must first descend the terrain behind it. the steep grade of slope has it's inherent dangers and presents an arduous struggle for the strongest of men on the best of days. the task essentially involves mountain climbing; kothe has to apple with the help of a rope anchored to a pole at the summit 175 feet above the structure. arriving at it's base, he is then able to reach the highest light bulbs with the help of ladders permanently fixed affixed to the back of each letter. anyone at all can reach the top of these structures using the ladders, but albert kothe and his employers had little concern for trespassers; after all, who besides would want to climb the damn thing anyway?

another day becomes night in

HOLLY... WOOD... LAND... HOLLYWOODLAND.... HOLLY... WOOD... LAND... HOLLYWOODLAND... HOLLY... WOOD... LAND... HOLLYWOODLAND... 

TODAY ALLA NAZIMOVA IS A MERE 137 YEARS OLD

COME CELEBRATE MADAME NAZIMOVIA~

WISH SING TO HER HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND HAVE SOME EXOTIC CAKE

@ ANTEBELLUM HOLLYWOOD

4PM TILL 7PM

$ 5 COVER

ALLA NAZIMOVA WILL BE 137 YEARS OLD ON MAY 22ND

TO HONOR  MADAME NAZIMOVA ANTEBELLUM WILL HOST A BIRTHDAY TEA SALON 

PRESENTS

ALLA NAZIMOVA'S 137TH BIRTHDAY TEA SALON

MAY 22ND

4PM TILL 7PM

TEA &  CAKE WILL BE SERVED

$5 COVER

~on display and for sale~ 

3 rare original photos of alla nazimova by 

FLORENCE VANDAMM

Alla Nazimova  was born O.S. May 22, (or June 3. depending on the calendar) 1879.

 Between the years of 1917 and 1922 Nazimova wielded considerable influence and power in Hollywood.

Nazimova helped start the careers of both of Rudolph Valentino's wives, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova.  she was involved in an affair with Acker, and there were rumors that Nazimova and Rambova were involved in a lesbian affair.

Of those Nazimova is confirmed to have been involved with romantically, the list includes actress 's  

Anna May wong,  Eva Le Gallienne, director Dorothy Arzner, writer Mercedes de Acosta, and Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly Wilde. Bridget Bate Tichenor, a Magic Realist artist and Surrealist painter, was also rumored to be one of Nazimova's favored lovers  during the years of 1940 to 1942.

The two had been introduced by the poet and art collector Edward James, and according to Tichenor, their intimate relationship angered Nazimova's longtime companion, Glesca Marshall. 

It is believed that Nazimova coined the phrase "sewing circle" as code to refer to lesbian or bisexual actresses of her day who concealed their true sexuality.

Nazimova lived with Glesca Marshall from 1929 until her death in 1945.

her home eventually became the notorious hotel- THE GARDEN OF ALLA, (1927- 1959)