by Belinda
They made sure they arrived at the club after him. He was sitting at the table when they walked in together, dressed to the nines and both looking fantastic. Each picked up a different dish from the buffet, emptied it on his head, and calmly walked out again.
Photographie Evidence
'Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.'
Phyllis Diller
Photographie Evidence
In Italy, a hot-blooded lover was so distraught when his girlfriend said she was going back to her husband, that he had giant photographs printed of her in the nude. Then he plastered them over the entrance hall of her flat -and on the roof of her husband's car.
A furious Frenchman took his revenge on his ex-girlfriend by advertising her in kinky contacts magazines. The adverts, some with photographs, claimed that a 21-year-old girl was 'seeking a virile man'. She received 946 replies, and it was over a year before the replies stopped arriving.
A well-known photographer was having trouble getting a photograph of Bob Monkhouse which was needed for a television campaign for his new show. He had kept waiting for a week when, finally, he was invited to come and take the photograph just before one of the recordings. During the warm-up to the show, the photographer became the butt of Monkhouse's jokes about polaroids and haemorrhoids, and he did not take too kindly to it. To get his own back, he took all the photographs slightly out of the key light, which accentuated all the shadows and gave Mr Monkhouse double chins and a large nose that he did not deserve. To the photographer's delight, the photographs were duly displayed as part of the television campaign.
Julia overheard her husband ordering flowers for his girlfriend. She immediately took polaroid photographs of his grubby underwear and their children and had them delivered with the husband's bouquet. He returned home that night with a black eye. They are now divorced.
Tricia Morris took satisfying revenge on her cheating boyfriend, hockey player Graham Cook.
'I was humiliated and when we had a passionate weekend together an idea came into my head. I took a picture of him naked with his bottom in the air while he was getting dressed.' She then had a T-shirt printed with a giant photograph of his bare bum and wore it to his next match.
Cook was forced to flee ignominiously from the pitch as his fellow players collapsed with laughter when they saw their team-mate's blown-up botty and the caption 'Captain Cook's Tour Tart' emblazoned across Tricia's back.
Pierette Le Pen, former wife of the French National Front party leader, carried out a most sophisticated sexual revenge. When she left her husband, the furious Jean-Marie refused to give her any money whatsoever and suggested that she might find a cleaning job to earn herself some extra francs. She took his advice and arranged a photographic shoot with Playboy magazine in which she cleaned, polished and swept wearing little more than a duster.
Travellers' Tales
'Never complain, never explain - get even!'
Robert Kennedy
Travellers' Tales
The King of Morocco's brother, the late Prince Moulay Abdullah, took a chalet in Gstaad and it is alleged an unpopular member of the party needed quieting down. One evening he had too much to drink so the rest of the party took their revenge by putting one of his legs in plaster while he was unconscious.
In the morning he woke up, horrified to discover his leg immobilised from thigh to toe. The rest of the party made up a story about how he had had a terrible and dramatic fall and for the next week he complained how painful his leg was and how much he was suffering. Finally, when they could bear his martyrdom no more, they attacked his leg with a hammer to smash the plaster and he was hideously embarrassed when he discovered it was all a hoax.
Some years ago Hugh and Judy Corbett were the happy owners of the sixteenth-century Dormy House Hotel set among trees on the Hereford/Worcester borders. Only once did they find guests so aggravating that they had to do something about it.
The particular guests were a couple of keen young Americans who stayed for five days, and drove Hugh mad, constantly asking what to do, where to go and then, on their return each day, giving him a full debrief each night about it all. Enough, Hugh thought.
Their final morning they were to set off to Devon and wondered what they could do en route. 'Birmingham!' he announced proudly. 'The Venice of the north, with its beautiful waterways and parks, architecture not unlike Florence. I'll make you a picnic. Try to find your way to the Bull Ring to eat it. Marvellous place!' Complete with picnic the Americans set off with a merry wave of gratitude.
Anyone who knows Birmingham will appreciate that it is in quite the opposite direction from Devon and that the Bull Ring is a horrendously busy three-lane inner circular road surrounding office blocks.
A woman discovered that her husband was going to take his mistress on a dirty weekend in Venice, which was particularly galling as that was where they had spent their honeymoon. He told her, however, that he was going on a business conference in Yorkshire.
His day of departure came and she had enormous fun following him round the house as he became more and more frantic in his search for his passport. He couldn't tell his wife what he was looking for and she was being overly helpful, secure in the knowledge that he would never look in the box of Tampax where she had hidden it.
An Englishman was travelling through France some years ago. He knew he would be in Reims that night but would arrive late, so he telephoned a hotel to make the appropriate arrangements. He would like, he insisted, a room with a bathroom en suite. When he arrived at the hotel at around midnight, he was shown to his room and
- no bathroom. He asked for a different room but no room with bathroom was available. Not having a choice he reluctantly moved in.
In the wee hours of the morning he felt the call of nature. The little handbasin would suit one purpose but there were other pressing matters. Spying a plant, he checked out the pot. Sure enough, it had not been watered for some time and the whole plant, earth and all, came out quite easily when lifted. He squatted over the pot and relieved himself, after which he squished the plant back in.
A couple of weeks later, when he was back in England, he received a letter from the hotel which went: 'Dear Sir, Since your stay with us in May we have been unable to rent out the room because of the smell. We know what it is, we would just be grateful if you could tell us where it is.'
A group of bright young things in Lausanne took a chalet in the Alps for the whole winter for holidays and weekends. A young lady who was a regular member of the houseparty started to get on everyone's nerves: she was always complaining, being the party pooper and generally making herself unpopular. They decided one night that enough was enough - action was needed. They took her lovely Alpha Romeo and, with a lot of spadework, buried it under a man-made snowdrift. She only found it in the Spring when the snows melted.
Everybody on the holiday loathed the muscle-bound oaf (MBO) who strutted around the pool each day, flexing his pectorals and preening himself. He would lean against a surf-board or stand legs-apart-hands-on-hips like some ghastly parody of Baywatch, always in a prominent position so that the maximum number of people could admire him.
Everyone groaned as each morning, when enough people were occupying the easy chairs on the sun deck, the MBO would start his morning exercise ritual - one hundred press-ups, sit-ups, lean-and-stretch, with the morning sun glinting off his well-oiled, firm body.
Then, the body-building completed, he would strut to the end of the high diving-board, bounce rather beautifully and perform an irritatingly perfect somersault flip into the water with minimum splash and maximum grace.
Tired of having the metaphorical sand kicked in their eyes the other lads plotted his downfall.
The following morning the MBO appeared again, bronzed and beautiful. The routine began: the flexing, the pumping. Glistening, he walked to the diving-board and started his bounce. When he landed he slipped dramatically and undecorously, landed on the board on his bottom and fell int
o the water with an enormous and undignified splash, arms and legs flailing.
In unison the lads roared with laughter. They had coated the board with sun oil and the slick had made his performance anything but.
An Englishman was standing behind an American in a queue checking in for a flight. The American was giving the poor check-in girl the full works - 'How can it be late? I need to be in Denver today, not tomorrow! Do you call this service? Whaddaya mean you won't upgrade me? Call yourself an airline?'
The Englishman was dazzled by her calm and sweet, sweet smile throughout the tirade. When it came to his turn, he asked her how she had remained so relaxed
throughout his heated monologue. 'Don't worry,' she replied, 'I decided very early on that his luggage was going to Stuttgart.'
A man was to spend a weekend abroad with someone he did not like and he was taking with him a visitor. To liven things up he told the visitor that his host was very deaf. He also told the host that his guest was deaf.
They spent the weekend shouting at each other.
Acting Up
'No one delights more in vengeance than a woman.'
Juvenal, A.D. C.60-C.130
Acting Up
Derek Nimmo tours the Middle and Far East extensively. He is renowned in the business as a perfectionist and one night, during a performance in Hong Kong, things were not up to his exacting standards. He felt that the stage manager was not doing her job properly: various tea cups were out of place, a prop was missing and a doorbell came in late. Every time Mr Nimmo left the stage he would rage at the stage manager, who felt he was being unreasonable - had he never heard of mistakes?
The end of the performance arrived and, to tumultuous applause, he prepared to take a bow. As he started walking on to the stage the stage manager (who just happened to be his wife) brought the curtain down; right on top of him.
Locked out in Anger. Playwright John Osborne could bear a grudge like no one else - and even managed to take revenge from beyond the grave. Those attending his memorial service in St Giles-in-the-Fields church in London, who included Lord Snowdon, Edward Fox, Sir Robin Day and Sir Dirk Bogarde, were surprised to see a notice outside which read: 'Memorial Service for John Osborne. The undermentioned will NOT be admitted. Their names are hereby posted on the gate: Fu Manchu, Nicholas de Jongh, Albert Finney, The Bard of Hay on Wye.' Anyone familiar with the playwright's spite will know that Fu Manchu is producer/director Sir Peter Hall and The Bard is playwright Arnold Wesker. Osborne, best known for his 1956 drama Look Back in Anger, was displeased by comments made by drama critic de Jongh and speculation was rife about the transgressions committed by the others singled out for non-admittance. To ensure that his wishes were carried out his wife, too, carried a copy of his request.
When John Gilbert, a star among stars and Greta Garbo's most famous partner, died of heart failure at his Beverly Hill mansion, he was only thirty-eight years old.
After the funeral in 1936 plenty of cynics sneered that his career had died long before him - rakishly handsome 'Jack' Gilbert, once Hollywood's highest-paid leading man, was a victim of the talkies. The most notorious victim, really, for when movie audiences packed into His Glorious Night in 1929 and heard the romantic idol announce: 'I love you,' his squeaky tones reduced them to shocked laughter. Film buffs repeat the story to this day. But the odds are that they have bought a myth. It is far more likely that Gilbert was destroyed in the sort of vendetta possible only when moguls walked the earth and studios reigned supreme, because Gilbert, rash and outspoken as any hero he played in a hundred or so films, had made a bitter enemy of Louis B Mayer, boss of MGM.
Mayer was a monster, of course, but even monsters have soft spots. With Mayer it was Motherhood - a man owed everything to his mother, the mogul insisted, and men failing to respect and adore their mothers were beyond the pale. Gilbert scorned and detested Mayer, was well aware of his prejudices and set out to strike his raw nerve.
The chance came in the twenties, when Louis B Mayer was holding forth to his minions. He would have no truck with screen versions of Anna Christie or Camille, he spluttered, because the central characters were immoral women.
'What's wrong with that?' John Gilbert inquired innocently. 'My own mother was a whore.' According to one onlooker's version, Mayer had to be physically restrained from hitting the actor. Certainly he loathed the man ever afterwards, and there are persuasive clues that the head of MGM set out to sabotage one of his top box-office draws. Crazy? Not by Hollywood standards.
The fact is that MGM sound technician Douglas Shearer testified: 'We never turned up the bass when Gilbert spoke - all you heard was the treble.' And Shearer wasn't just any old sound man; his sister was the actress Norma Shearer, who also happened to be Mrs Irving Thalberg, wife of the studio's brilliant young production chief. Thanks to Hollywood nepotism, Douglas was close to the kingdom's heart. Could Louis B Mayer have been vengeful and irresponsible enough to spike his own firm's guns and pollute its product by ordering that a $250,000-per-picture performer be made to sound ridiculous? In a word - easily! For the story of Jack Gilbert's squeaky 'I love you' has Byzantine complications.
Mayer ran MGM in Hollywood but the ultimate shots were called by Nick Schenck, New York-based president of the parent company, Loew's Inc. Resenting Schenck's power, Mayer constantly denigrated him and Mayer was furious when, just as he determined to break Jack Gilbert, axe him and make him unemployable, Nick Schenck went behind his back and signed the mother-mocking star to a four-picture contract worth $lm. Ensuring that Gilbert's first talkie was a fiasco would have killed two of Mayer's birds with one stone -menaced his victim's career and made Schenck seem foolish for betting a million bucks on the wrong horse.
Facts clash with received wisdom that John Gilbert was ruined by the talkies. After all he appeared in nine more movies after his sound debut, so his voice can't have been all that unacceptable. Vintage sound-tracks and recordings of Thirties radio interviews suggest that Gilbert had a light, not particularly high voice, no better nor worse than scores of actors who made a smooth transfer from silent films. What emerges over the years, as Mayer's death loosened studio tongues, is that tragic Gilbert wasn't killed by the talkies but his heavy drinking - and the revenge of Louis B Mayer.
- an insight into Hollywood by kind courtesy of film writer, Shaun Usher.
'I'm ashamed of this story. I like actors very much and seldom find bitching on the stage, but on one occasion I was sorely tried.
'One of the male stars in the play behaved very badly, and with such arrogance that life became miserable for us all. As far as I was concerned my trouble was that, for some reason, he refused to give me my entrance cue. I asked him very nicely if he would do so, and he looked at me coldly and said "No." I asked why, and he replied, "It doesn't interest me," and when I said, "But how do I know when to come on?" he answered, "Please yourself." So I did.
'It was a breakfast scene, and he had made up a very funny piece of business where he choked over his coffee cup. I decided to teach him a lesson. I arrived on stage earlier than he expected, swooped happily towards him crooning "Good morning, good morning", slapped him hard on his bald head with a rolled up newspaper and, as he was about to pick up the cup, removed it and left the stage, briskly and with no further dialogue. The actor who should have followed me on was unprepared so the rogue star was left entirely alone, and totally speechless with rage. He never behaved badly to me again.'
- with thanks to Dulcie Gray, actress and author.
'It was my first job as an Assistant Stage Manager and I was, unfortunately, working with a monstrous actress. She did everything to make my life hell. Five minutes before going on stage she would pull her pearls off from round her neck so that they scattered all over the floor and demand that the Assistant Stage Manager pick them up immediately and string them together. Her bad behaviour was endless and caused much grief. The time had arrived when I had had enough.
'Her exit at the end of the
play was a dramatic one, she would grab her bag from the sofa and sweep off the stage to tumultuous applause. However, on this particular night, a stage weight had been placed in her bag. As she took her bag the weight was so immense that it forced her to collapse, face first, on to the sofa.'
- with thanks to Roger Redfarn, theatrical director.
'There was an amusing incident in Los Angeles which happened to Jack when he was out there ''pitching” ideas, i.e., selling himself to the youngest, most fresh-faced twelve-year-old moguls he could find. After one exhausting day beating what was left of his brains out to blank faces, he arrived in the office of another tiny tyrant at around 6.30 in the evening. The secretary had already left so he waited patiently in the lobby.
'The mogul's door was slightly open and he heard through the aperture a voice on the phone saying ''No, I can't get away for another hour, honey. I've got to see some shmock from England." More twittery goodbye noises followed, at the end of which Jack strode down the
