#bizarre los angeles

“I think it’s all rather silly myself! They tell you to be yourself, to sell your own personality on the screen, not to be an imitator. Then they’ll turn around and explain that you ought to quit doing this and start doing that. That your coiffure is perfectly ducky, darling, but let’s try it this way. They get in your hair in more ways than one! They’ll even want to change your voice, so help me!” — Alice Faye

Source: Richard English (1935)
Photo: Gene Kornman

(viaAlice Faye - Photos and Quotes - Bizarre Los Angeles)

(viaGinger Rogers - photos and quotes - Bizarre Los Angeles)

“Being a good dancer is a definite social advantage. You can learn to dance. We were all born with a sense of rhythm. On the dance floor, a woman can put all her charm and personality into play.” — Ginger Rogers

Source: 1935

Photo: 1936

(viaGinger Rogers - photos and quotes - Bizarre Los Angeles)

“I was never going to smoke, but my director made me for the movie. I said, ‘but I don’t know how to smoke a cigarettte.’ He said, ‘go and learn.’ I turned green. It’s a good thing the film wasn’t in technicolor.” — Ginger Rogers

Source: Iris Krasnow (1985)

Photo: 1930

(viaGinger Rogers - photos and quotes - Bizarre Los Angeles)

“I like to do something with snap to it. I don’t know why I should prefer more peppy roles, but that’s the way I’m constituted. I’ve tried often enough to get romantic leads in serious productions, but people don’t seem to think of me that way.” – Ginger Rogers in 1932Photo: Elmer Fryer (1933)

Haunted by History: Aztec Hotel EVP Monrovia, CA

The Lady in Red inside the haunted Valentino Suite of the Alexandria Hotel (Los Angeles). Photographer: Craig Owens. Model: Carly Carpenter. MUA: Johanna Serrano. The photo and history of the hotel are both featured in my coffee table book, Haunted by History, available on bizarrela.com, Amazon, and a few bookstores in the Los Angeles area. In fact, I’ve written the most complete history of the famous hotel to date.

“Without security it is difficult for a woman to look or feel beautiful.”—Merle Oberon

“The Hollywood roles I did were boring: I was soon fed up with them. It’s true they gave me a world-wide reputation I could trade on, but they also typed me as a one-dimensional non-serious actor.”—Melvyn Douglas(1901-1981)

“Most children who succeed on screen or stage have to pass through a gawky and uncouth age. I was one of the fortunate ones that nature smiled upon.”—Madge Evans

Source: 1938

“Glamour is what I sell, it’s my stock in trade.”— Marlene Dietrich

Louise Fazenda’s Good Deeds Live After HerTestimonials to Philanthropies of Comic Actress Come to Light After Her Funeral

Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1962 – Louise Fazenda, 67, was a zany screen comic in her day – and that was the way she chose to be remembered in her lifetime.

But Friday, Miss Fazenda, wife of producer Hal Wallis since 1927, was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery. And no longer could she fend off the testimonials to her philanthropy which she shunned as long as she lived.

The stories came to light only after Miss Fazenda’s death.

In 1954, friends said, she read in the Times of a 5-year-old girl hospitalized after the death of her mother in the same auto accident. Miss Fazenda read of it and paid all the expenses.

Aided Law Students

A law student decided he’s have to drop out of school because his wife was expecting a baby. Instead, Miss Fazenda took up the bills.

Money wasn’t the beginning of the comedienne’s philanthropy.

“She used to go out to UCLA Medical Center, where she’d feed the young children, rock them and sing them to sleep,” a friend said. “More than once a doctor left the instruction: ‘Let the child spend some time with Louise Fazenda.’”

One who knew all Miss Fazenda’s charities was Mrs. Irving Asher, known by movie fans of another era as Laura La Plante.

Found Home for Poor

“She helped wherever she could,” said Mrs. Asher, “wherever she was – Hong Kong, London, anywhere – she always found the homes for the poor or for the children.”

“About a year ago,” she said, “there was a little boy who wouldn’t eat. The doctors were really worried about him. But Louise would run back and forth to her home, trying out different dishes, different flavors, and then coax him. He recovered.”

Not all of “her” children recovered. She spent hours with terminal leukemia patients, Mrs. Asher said.

Friday, some of Hollywood’s great names came to the services at Grace Chapel, directed by Groman Mortuary. Among them were Zazu Pitts, Joan Blondell, Hal Roach, William Demarest, Edward G. Robinson, Harry Warner, Harry Brand, and Y. Frank Freeman.

They could testify to her kindliness. But to others – children who were desperately ill or hungered for love – she will be a misty memory of a gentle woman who rocked them and loved them when they needed it.

“You see, I am modern, incurably, unquenchably modern.”— Mary Doran

“I don’t mind going from one picture to another. In fact, I rather like it. I hope one day to become a great comedienne, I’d certainly prefer to make people happy than sad – there’s sadness enough in the world as it is, although it seems to have been singularly successful in having it pass me by, to date at any rate.”—Mary Carlisle

Source: Wood Soans (1937)

“Age has not the sprightliness of steps that youth possesses. It has lost the swagger and sureness of trend. This point can be easily exaggerated, but there’s a happy medium that must be considered in playing the role of a person in the after years of life.”—Mary Alden

Source: 1924

Photo: Witzel

This photo has an unusual story. During Dietrich‘s first years in Hollywood, Josef von Sternberg insisted on directing her photo shoots. This 1931 photo was taken in Dietrich’s home with von Sternberg overseeing the creative arrangement and Eugene Robert Richee taking the picture.

“I came out here to educate the movies and now they’re educating me.” —Mary Doran

Source: Dan Thomas (1929)