18 Allegations Against Old Hollywood Men Posted by Hannah Marder Last Updated: November 2, 2023 18 Allegations Against Old Hollywood Men 1. Cary Grant has been accused of abusing two of his wives. He allegedly “threw” his first wife Virginia Cherrill “to the floor so that she fell on the iron fender in front of the fireplace. Her face was cut, and again blood drenched her dress. He walked out and drove to the party alone.” And his fourth wife, Dylan Cannon, claimed that he ”beat me with his fists” and would ”laugh when I cringed in fear” in her divorce case. 2. Loretta Young admitted in her posthumous memoirs that longstanding rumors that her daughter had been conceived with Clark Gable were true. Young’s pregnancy had been followed by an elaborate cover-up that would make it seem as if she’d adopted the child, and Gable never had any role in her daughter Judy’s life. Young refused to tell Judy the truth, and according to Judy’s memoir, when Judy confronted her about the rumors, Young ran into the house and vomited. While Young never spoke publicly about the circumstances of Judy’s conception, according to her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, in the ’90s, Young had asked her what date rape meant after hearing the term on Larry King Live. After Lewis explained, Young replied, “That’s what happened between me and Clark.” On the train ride back from shooting Call of the Wild on location, Gable had allegedly snuck into Young’s compartment. According to Lewis, Young didn’t want Judy to know, so Lewis kept quiet until both Young and Judy were dead. 3. Steve McQueen’s first wife, Neile Adams, wrote in her memoir that he physically abused her. After Adams had an affair (of which McQueen had also had many), McQueen allegedly pushed her into doing coke, pointed a gun at her and “exacted the story of the transgression between slaps.” 4. When Kim Novak was shooting Vertigo, she went to an afterparty at Tony Curtis’ home. She says he brought her a drink, and then that’s the last thing she remembers. “I only had, I think, one drink there. But that’s the last thing I knew. I do not know anything afterward, cross my heart, hope to die. Don’t know what happened after that or how my car got back in front of my apartment.” She told the Hollywood Reporter that she believes someone spiked her drink. “I didn’t think of it then because people didn’t talk about things like that, but I could never figure it out…I’ve never blacked out in my entire life.” She said she believed Curtis did it, and that when she woke up the next morning, she was naked. 5. Debbie Reynolds claimed that Gene Kelly essentially “shoved his tongue down [her] throat” while shooting a scene on the set of Singin’ In The Rain. She said, “It was the early 1950s, and I was an innocent kid who had never been French-kissed. It felt like an assault. I was stunned that this 39-year-old man would do this to me. Gene had stepped back, not amused. After a few minutes, I calmed down enough to face his now-icy stare and we redid the scene as you see it in the film.” Reynolds was 19 at the time. 6. Lita Grey was only eight when she met Charlie Chaplin, and the two later reconnected during the casting process for his film Gold Rush when Lita was 15 and Chaplin was in his mid-30s. They began “dating,” and Grey got pregnant…so Chaplin secretly married her to avoid criminal charges, according to Vice. 7. Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock was also super creepy towards the stars of his films, especially Tippi Hedren. She later recounted how Hitchcock tried to kiss her and made inappropriate remarks on the set of Marnie. When she refused his sexual advances, he allegedly promised to ruin her career. He then kept her under contract so she couldn’t work with another studio and refused to offer her large projects. And then, on the set of The Birds, Hedren says that in the scene where Melanie is viciously attacked by birds in a bedroom, mechanical birds were apparently not working, so Hitchcock elected to use live birds. Hedren endured five days of live birds being thrown at her, and even birds being tied to her that were trained to peck her. 8. Sean Connery’s first wife, Diane Cilento, claimed Connery had mentally and physically abused her while they were together. Connery denied the allegations. However, he had once said it was “justified” to hit women. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman, although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man,” he told Playboy in 1965. He thought an “openhanded slap” was fine “if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning,” or, “If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.” 9. And when John Wayne spoke to Playboy in 1971, he said, “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” He also called Midnight Cowboy “perverse,” saying, “Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two f***, qualifies [as perverse]?” He also said of Native Americans, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. … There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” 10. “Great Balls of Fire” singer Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin once removed (so the daughter of his cousin) Myra Gale Brown in 1957, when he was 22. A year later, at 14, Brown had already given birth to their first child (who died when Brown was only 17). After 13 years of marriage, the cousins divorced in 1970. Brown, then 26, accused Lewis of “every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable.” 11. Two 17-year-olds, Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen, accused actor Errol Flynn of statutory rape in 1943. He denied the accusations, saying of Hansen, “I hardly touched the girl,” and was acquitted: Satterlee said she “knew those women would acquit him” because “They just sat and looked adoringly at him as if he was their son or something.” He also reportedly pursued Beverly Aadland when she was 17 and he was 50 (just before his death) — he had known her since she was 15, and was open about preferring younger women. 12. Mickey Rooney reportedly had an “affair” with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of National Velvet. He was 24 at the time, and she was 14. He also reportedly made use of the “casting couch,” repeatedly calling in young women for roles that didn’t exist. 13. Bing Crosby has been accused of abuse by multiple of his children. His son Gary Crosby wrote in his memoir that his father would hit him with a belt dotted with metal studs, and that he otherwise beat him almost daily and constantly verbally abused him and his brothers, two of whom confirmed that this was accurate (however, a third called the accusations “overblown” and said Bing had been “a great father”). 14. Classic rock ‘n’ roll singer Chuck Berry was 33 years old when he was arrested for transporting 14-year-old Janice Escalanti for “immoral purposes” in 1959 — she alleged that he had raped her 14 times while she traveled with him over two weeks. While his initial trial suffered from racism, causing a retrial (where he was again convicted), Berry himself admitted to transporting the teenager over state lines (though he said he thought she was in her 20s) and of taking photos of Escalanti and sharing hotel rooms with her, but denied any sexual interactions happened. 15. Elvis Presley met his wife Priscilla in Germany when she was 14 and he was 24. They began a relationship that involved lying in bed with their arms around each other nightly — although Priscilla maintains they did not sleep together until they were married. They stayed in touch after he went back to the US, and Priscilla says he eventually convinced her parents to let her move to the US and live with his family (but not him) when she was 17. However, she soon moved in with Elvis instead. She was still in high school. 16. Funk music icon James Brown was the subject of several civil lawsuits in the ’90s, which saw him accused of holding a woman captive and demanding oral sex (Brown’s lawyer said she’d been free to leave and she later withdrew the suit), demanding sexual favors from one of his dancers and retaliating when she refused (also later withdrawn), and firing another dancer for refusing his advances (Brown was only found liable for wrongful termination). Brown was also accused of domestic violence towards two of his wives — in one instance, he pled guilty and received a fine, but in possibly the most famous instance, he was charged with assault with intent to murder after his wife, Adrienne Brown, accused him of beating her with a metal pipe, among other things. Those charges were later dropped.* He was also accused of rape by a woman named Jacquelyn Hollander (but only after his death). 17. Natalie Wood’s younger sister Lana has claimed that Natalie was raped by Kirk Douglas when she was 16. The year was 1955, and Lana and Natalie’s mother had allegedly arranged a meeting between Natalie and Kirk because she believed it would open doors for Natalie. Lana wrote in her memoir, “it seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut. … She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.” Lana was only eight at the time, and she says she didn’t talk about the incident with Natalie until they were both adults. “He hurt me, Lana,” Natalie allegedly told her sister. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified, I was confused.” But Lana said Natalie told her their mother had worried about the effect on Natalie’s career if she were to speak up. 18. And finally, Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider accused director Bernardo Bertolucci and costar Marlon Brando of adding a scene where Brando’s character anally rapes her character using a stick of butter as a lubricant. Schneider, who was 19 at the time, said Brando had come up with the idea and only told her just before the scene. She described feeling humiliated and “a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.” Bertolucci later admitted to keeping the butter detail from Schneider because he wanted Schneider’s humiliation to appear real. Following outrage over the actions of both Bertolucci and Brando, Brando’s son stated that the accusation wasn’t true and “That’s not my father, he wasn’t that man at all. He was for human rights. civil rights. He marched with Martin Luther King. He was for the people, not against the people.” Source link
1. Cary Grant has been accused of abusing two of his wives. He allegedly “threw” his first wife Virginia Cherrill “to the floor so that she fell on the iron fender in front of the fireplace. Her face was cut, and again blood drenched her dress. He walked out and drove to the party alone.” And his fourth wife, Dylan Cannon, claimed that he ”beat me with his fists” and would ”laugh when I cringed in fear” in her divorce case. 2. Loretta Young admitted in her posthumous memoirs that longstanding rumors that her daughter had been conceived with Clark Gable were true. Young’s pregnancy had been followed by an elaborate cover-up that would make it seem as if she’d adopted the child, and Gable never had any role in her daughter Judy’s life. Young refused to tell Judy the truth, and according to Judy’s memoir, when Judy confronted her about the rumors, Young ran into the house and vomited. While Young never spoke publicly about the circumstances of Judy’s conception, according to her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, in the ’90s, Young had asked her what date rape meant after hearing the term on Larry King Live. After Lewis explained, Young replied, “That’s what happened between me and Clark.” On the train ride back from shooting Call of the Wild on location, Gable had allegedly snuck into Young’s compartment. According to Lewis, Young didn’t want Judy to know, so Lewis kept quiet until both Young and Judy were dead. 3. Steve McQueen’s first wife, Neile Adams, wrote in her memoir that he physically abused her. After Adams had an affair (of which McQueen had also had many), McQueen allegedly pushed her into doing coke, pointed a gun at her and “exacted the story of the transgression between slaps.” 4. When Kim Novak was shooting Vertigo, she went to an afterparty at Tony Curtis’ home. She says he brought her a drink, and then that’s the last thing she remembers. “I only had, I think, one drink there. But that’s the last thing I knew. I do not know anything afterward, cross my heart, hope to die. Don’t know what happened after that or how my car got back in front of my apartment.” She told the Hollywood Reporter that she believes someone spiked her drink. “I didn’t think of it then because people didn’t talk about things like that, but I could never figure it out…I’ve never blacked out in my entire life.” She said she believed Curtis did it, and that when she woke up the next morning, she was naked. 5. Debbie Reynolds claimed that Gene Kelly essentially “shoved his tongue down [her] throat” while shooting a scene on the set of Singin’ In The Rain. She said, “It was the early 1950s, and I was an innocent kid who had never been French-kissed. It felt like an assault. I was stunned that this 39-year-old man would do this to me. Gene had stepped back, not amused. After a few minutes, I calmed down enough to face his now-icy stare and we redid the scene as you see it in the film.” Reynolds was 19 at the time. 6. Lita Grey was only eight when she met Charlie Chaplin, and the two later reconnected during the casting process for his film Gold Rush when Lita was 15 and Chaplin was in his mid-30s. They began “dating,” and Grey got pregnant…so Chaplin secretly married her to avoid criminal charges, according to Vice. 7. Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock was also super creepy towards the stars of his films, especially Tippi Hedren. She later recounted how Hitchcock tried to kiss her and made inappropriate remarks on the set of Marnie. When she refused his sexual advances, he allegedly promised to ruin her career. He then kept her under contract so she couldn’t work with another studio and refused to offer her large projects. And then, on the set of The Birds, Hedren says that in the scene where Melanie is viciously attacked by birds in a bedroom, mechanical birds were apparently not working, so Hitchcock elected to use live birds. Hedren endured five days of live birds being thrown at her, and even birds being tied to her that were trained to peck her. 8. Sean Connery’s first wife, Diane Cilento, claimed Connery had mentally and physically abused her while they were together. Connery denied the allegations. However, he had once said it was “justified” to hit women. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman, although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man,” he told Playboy in 1965. He thought an “openhanded slap” was fine “if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning,” or, “If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.” 9. And when John Wayne spoke to Playboy in 1971, he said, “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” He also called Midnight Cowboy “perverse,” saying, “Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two f***, qualifies [as perverse]?” He also said of Native Americans, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. … There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” 10. “Great Balls of Fire” singer Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin once removed (so the daughter of his cousin) Myra Gale Brown in 1957, when he was 22. A year later, at 14, Brown had already given birth to their first child (who died when Brown was only 17). After 13 years of marriage, the cousins divorced in 1970. Brown, then 26, accused Lewis of “every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable.” 11. Two 17-year-olds, Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen, accused actor Errol Flynn of statutory rape in 1943. He denied the accusations, saying of Hansen, “I hardly touched the girl,” and was acquitted: Satterlee said she “knew those women would acquit him” because “They just sat and looked adoringly at him as if he was their son or something.” He also reportedly pursued Beverly Aadland when she was 17 and he was 50 (just before his death) — he had known her since she was 15, and was open about preferring younger women. 12. Mickey Rooney reportedly had an “affair” with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of National Velvet. He was 24 at the time, and she was 14. He also reportedly made use of the “casting couch,” repeatedly calling in young women for roles that didn’t exist. 13. Bing Crosby has been accused of abuse by multiple of his children. His son Gary Crosby wrote in his memoir that his father would hit him with a belt dotted with metal studs, and that he otherwise beat him almost daily and constantly verbally abused him and his brothers, two of whom confirmed that this was accurate (however, a third called the accusations “overblown” and said Bing had been “a great father”). 14. Classic rock ‘n’ roll singer Chuck Berry was 33 years old when he was arrested for transporting 14-year-old Janice Escalanti for “immoral purposes” in 1959 — she alleged that he had raped her 14 times while she traveled with him over two weeks. While his initial trial suffered from racism, causing a retrial (where he was again convicted), Berry himself admitted to transporting the teenager over state lines (though he said he thought she was in her 20s) and of taking photos of Escalanti and sharing hotel rooms with her, but denied any sexual interactions happened. 15. Elvis Presley met his wife Priscilla in Germany when she was 14 and he was 24. They began a relationship that involved lying in bed with their arms around each other nightly — although Priscilla maintains they did not sleep together until they were married. They stayed in touch after he went back to the US, and Priscilla says he eventually convinced her parents to let her move to the US and live with his family (but not him) when she was 17. However, she soon moved in with Elvis instead. She was still in high school. 16. Funk music icon James Brown was the subject of several civil lawsuits in the ’90s, which saw him accused of holding a woman captive and demanding oral sex (Brown’s lawyer said she’d been free to leave and she later withdrew the suit), demanding sexual favors from one of his dancers and retaliating when she refused (also later withdrawn), and firing another dancer for refusing his advances (Brown was only found liable for wrongful termination). Brown was also accused of domestic violence towards two of his wives — in one instance, he pled guilty and received a fine, but in possibly the most famous instance, he was charged with assault with intent to murder after his wife, Adrienne Brown, accused him of beating her with a metal pipe, among other things. Those charges were later dropped.* He was also accused of rape by a woman named Jacquelyn Hollander (but only after his death). 17. Natalie Wood’s younger sister Lana has claimed that Natalie was raped by Kirk Douglas when she was 16. The year was 1955, and Lana and Natalie’s mother had allegedly arranged a meeting between Natalie and Kirk because she believed it would open doors for Natalie. Lana wrote in her memoir, “it seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut. … She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.” Lana was only eight at the time, and she says she didn’t talk about the incident with Natalie until they were both adults. “He hurt me, Lana,” Natalie allegedly told her sister. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified, I was confused.” But Lana said Natalie told her their mother had worried about the effect on Natalie’s career if she were to speak up. 18. And finally, Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider accused director Bernardo Bertolucci and costar Marlon Brando of adding a scene where Brando’s character anally rapes her character using a stick of butter as a lubricant. Schneider, who was 19 at the time, said Brando had come up with the idea and only told her just before the scene. She described feeling humiliated and “a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.” Bertolucci later admitted to keeping the butter detail from Schneider because he wanted Schneider’s humiliation to appear real. Following outrage over the actions of both Bertolucci and Brando, Brando’s son stated that the accusation wasn’t true and “That’s not my father, he wasn’t that man at all. He was for human rights. civil rights. He marched with Martin Luther King. He was for the people, not against the people.”
