I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Yes, I absolutely adore all things LuPone, from the voice to the face to the talent to the mouth that  just loves telling people off with F-bombs.

Patti LuPone once famously went on a tear about performing in a show and having an audience member haul out her phone for a text or Tweet or some nonsense. LuPone stopped the show cold and berated the woman for her rudeness; then, for good measure, Patti had her tossed from the theatre. Do not fuck with LuPone. And now someone else has.

Back story: Patti LuPone played Joanne in a West End revival of Company in 2018 and won an Olivier Award for it. When that revival moved to Broadway in 2020, Patti went with it, but after just a handful of performances, COVID-19 hit and Broadway was closed for nearly a year. The show re-opened when Broadway came back late last year, but last February Patti came down with COVID and had to bow out of a few shows, only to return to this nonsense.

Patti LuPone is not getting COVID again, no matter what, and so one night during a post-show Q&A with the cast of Company, LuPone noticed an indiscretion so vile, so contemptable, so below the character of a real theatergoer that she went off.

The rule of post-COVID theaters is fairly simple: audience members must cover their noses and mouths at all times except when they’re eating or drinking in designated areas. And yet someone dared to drop mask and show nose and La LuPone was not having it:

LuPone: Put your mask over your nose. That is why you’re in the theater. That is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, GET THE FUCK OUT! Who do you think you are if you do not respect the people that are sitting around you!

Asshatted Theatergoer: We pay your salary!

LuPone: You pay my salary? Bullshit. [Producer] Chris Harper pays my salary. Just put your mask over your nose.

And, as Patti does when Patti goes off, the offending maskless trolls were herded from the theater, and hopefully banned from live performances for the rest of their lives.

Here’s to the divas who rant!

SIDENOTE: In 1993 Andrew Llyod Weber hired Patti LuPone to play Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. when it opened in London, with the caveat that Patti take the role to Broadway. Well, ALW decided he wanted Glenn Close to be his Broadway Norma, and unceremoniously kicked Patti to the curb. Patti sued for breach of contract and was awarded well over a million dollars which she used to build a pool at her Connecticut farm that she called the Andrew Lloyd Weber Pool.

Goddess, I adore her.

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Frank Langella is on the Whine Tour after being fired from the Netflix series Fall of the House of Usher after being accused by one of his co-stars of touching her inappropriately during a love scene, telling off-color jokes, calling women ‘baby’ and ‘honey,’ and touching without permission.

But Langella :::foot stomp head snap:::: says he is a victim of “the increasing madness that currently pervades our industry” because Frank thinks it’s still the 1960s and racist jokes and pawing women and acting like a pig are still okay. Unlike Bill Murray, who, after getting fired from a different film for similar offenses, realized “the world is different than it was when I was a little kid” and learned a lesson, the only lesson Langella learned was, well, nothing:

“I have been canceled. Just like that.

In the increasing madness that currently pervades our industry, I could not have imagined that the words ‘collateral damage’ would fall upon my shoulders. They have brought with them a weight I had not expected to bear in the closing decades of my career. And along with it has come an unanticipated sense of grave danger.

On April 14 of this year, I was fired by Netflix for what they determined to be unacceptable behavior on set. My first instinct was to blame. To lash out and seek vengeance. I interviewed crisis managers, tough connected lawyers, the professionally sympathetic at $800 per hour. Free advice was proffered as well:

‘Don’t play the victim.’

‘Don’t sue. They’ll dig into your past.’

‘Sign the NDA, take the money and run.’

‘Do the talk shows, show contrition, feign humility. Say you’ve learned a lot.’

Apologize. Apologize. Apologize.”

And yet he chooses to play the victim, declaring that Netflix has robbed him of the opportunity to play the one last great role of his career, that of Roderick Usher. And he digs in his heels and says he was being 100% professional and correct, and that his female co-star and the intimacy coordinator they’d worked with were being “absurd” about him running his hands up the actress’s leg after the director called “Cut!”

Cut it, Frank. Stop talking or all you’ll be remembered for is a handsy old man.

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Kim Kardastrophe’s determination to wear a dead woman’s clothes, which don’t even fit is never-ending; because after ALLEGEDLY losing 16 pounds in a matter of days to squeeze her ass in Marilyn Monroe’s gown for the Met Gala, Kimmy says she wore a second dress that she also borrowed from Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum that night.

It must be a Dead Woman’s Clothes thing this year, after last year’s Hooded Head Nonsense and the Grandma’s Couch look from a few years back.

Oh, and it’s also a lie that she dropped some pounds to wear the gown because the dress didn’t cover her ass so Kim draped a fur over her butt to cover the gap … in fashion and taste and basic good sense, and her ass.

Now, I’m not saying Kimmy didn’t wear Marilyn’s dress, and I’m not saying she did, but I will say that the dress looked far better on Marilyn, and quite different on Kim, who says it was because she wore the straps differently.

Kimmy? You’ll never be a Marilyn Monroe Icon. She’s been gone sixty years and people still talk of her, write books of her, make films of her. When you’re gone six minutes the world will say, “Who?”

Marilyn's Dress   Kim's Krappy Knockoff   It Doesn't Fit

Well, it looks like Fred Savage is Frank Langella 2.0.

The former Wonder Years star, and current director and executive producer of the Wonder Years reboot, has been canned from a project for ALLEGEDLY ass-holiness and “inappropriate behavior.”

Fred starred as Kevin Arnold in the original Wonder Years which ran from 1988 to 1993 and came in as producer for the 2021 reboot that focused on a Black middle-class family in the 1960s, and now all of his wonder years are over because Disney has cut ties with Savage following multiple complaints of misconduct:

“Recently, we were made aware of allegations of inappropriate conduct by Fred Savage, and as is policy, an investigation was launched. Upon its completion, the decision was made to terminate his employment as an executive producer and director of The Wonder Years.”

Details about the nature of the allegations are unclear, but it seems as if Savage hasn’t really changed because back in 2018 Savage’s Wonder Years TV mom Alley Mills revealed that the original show ended because Savage and Jason Hervey, the actor that played Kevin’s older brother, were slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit.

And then Savage ALLEGEDLY brought his “inappropriate” behavior to the set of The Grinder, starring Rob Lowe, the guy who slept with a 16-year-old in the 80s, and Savage was accused of physically and verbally abusing a crew member on that show. He denied the allegations and settled the associated lawsuit out of court but, you know, once, twice, three strikes and you’re kind of an asshole, Fred.

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Remember way back in 2019 when Jennifer Lopez was in the movie Hustlers where she played JLo as a stripper? If you don’t. stay tuned for the JLo documentary Halftime which tells the tale of her halftime performance with Shakira from conception through performance, but also details the subsequent Oscar snub for Hustlers that sent her into a tailspin; picture it, an image of JLo crying in bed as she remembers that horrific snub, and her own voice-over saying:

“It was hard. I just had a very low self-esteem. I had to really figure out who I was and believe in that, and not believe in anything else.”

Seriously, Jennifer Lopez thought she should have been nominated for an Oscar and filmed herself crying about it?

Maybe she’s going for an Emmy for her performance of a woman who didn’t get an Academy Award nod.

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I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Is there still some fallout in Hollywood from The Slap? Perhaps so because, rumor has it, a disagreement, a rather volatile disagreement, about The Slap has caused actor Thandiwe Newton –who was costarring in Magic Mike’s Last Dance as the romantic lead opposite Channing Tatum … lucky bitch—has left the film after getting into it with Tatum about, yes, again, The Slap.

Variety says Thandiwe “stepped down,” with Salma Hayek taking her place, while The Sun claims Thandiwe was fired by Tatum, a producer, after they battled over The Slap which made their working relationship untenable. The Independent reports that Thandiwe denies The Sun’s report, and says she left to “deal with family matters.”

For the record, we know that Thandiwe is Team Slap Deserved while Tatum’s new girlfriend, actor Zoë Kravitz, is clearly Team Slap Wrong, so maybe there’s some truth to the story that Will Smith’s antics are to blame.

UPDATE: New rumors are that Thandiwe Newton is headed to rehab to deal with some issues resulting from the end of her twenty-four-year marriage.

The “Westworld” star had been in London filming the third installment of the series, and was ALLEGEDLY acting bizarrely on set, and production became worried about her health. Her agent flew in from LA to try to smooth things over, but Thandiwe left the set and flew back to the States to hopefully check into a facility.

Hopefully, she gets the help she needs.

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But … speaking of actors walking off films, it appears that actor Frank Langella has also left a production midway through filming, leaving behind a role that needs to be recast. But this is different; no snit about a slap unless it was an inappropriate slap on the ass by Langella.

Apparently there were reports that Langella was being investigated for ALLEGED sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct on set and was subsequently fired from the production.

He was starring in a new horror limited series for Netflix, The Fall of the House Usher, portraying the Usher family patriarch, Roderick. The production was midway through filming the series, and Langella was canned and now all his scenes must be reshot with a new, as yet unnamed actor … preferably one without wandering hands?

It’s been said that Langella had a fondness for lewd jokes and unwanted touching of a female member of the cast, but Netflix is not playing around and as soon as complaints were lodged and investigated, Langella was out.

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Khloé Kardastrophe is a really great mother … no, really … but sometimes she’s just too busy to actually spend time with her kids. See, it seems the “reality star” was caught photoshopping her daughter True into several pictures that she wasn’t originally in, all for the sake of Khloé pretending that her child took a trip with her cousins to Disneyland.

Huh, a reality show star faking reality. Is that a thing now?

Last December, Kim Kardastrophe posted two pictures of her daughter Chicago and Khloé’s daughter True at Disneyland, but True’s likeness seemed more suited to the animatronics at the Hall of Presidents, and people speculated that Kim had faked the photos.

A very savvy TikTok user saw something suspicious and noted that a generic picture of True’s face was Photoshopped onto a body that actually belonged to her other cousin, Stormi Webster, the daughter of Kylie Jenner. Now, the Disneyland pictures are legitimate, though they were taken two months earlier than Kim said.

Wait, a reality show star lied about reality? That’s a thing now, too?

A lot of people jumped onto the comments for the social media pics, and asked why True looked like a sticker, or why Stormi looked like True, and then Khloé “accidentally” admitted to that work of Photoshop:

“Welllppp I fucked this one up. Anyways….. let’s focus on something else Our show airs in a few days.”

Nope. Let’s focus on why you feel the need to Photoshop your child onto the body of your niece so it looks like she was at Disneyland with the family when  she wasn’t. Let’s focus on your need to be in the spotlight badly that you need to lie.

But I guess Khloé has literally Photoshopped  so many faces onto her own melon in real life that no one would notice she Photoshopped a picture of her daughter having fun with her cousins when she was nowhere to be seen.

That’s a thing with reality show stars.

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Ireland Baldwin is on the mend after getting a cosmetic procedure called a “FaceTite.” a minimally invasive form of liposuction where a plastic surgeon makes a few incisions on the lower half of the face and uses radiofrequency waves and lipo to suck out fatty tissue and pull in the skin.

She’s twenty-six.

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Speaking of faces, Simon Cowell has announced that he’s officially done with Botox and fillers. He shared this vital information in an interview with The Sun where the sixty-two-year-old claims his face is filler free, and that his latest look is due to healthy eating, drinking lots of water, and losing weight.

Simon says he realized that his fillers made him “look like something out of a horror film.” Wait, I thought it was his personality that made him seem like a monster.

You be the judge. His face looks lopsided and like it’s slipping off his skull. But that’s just me …

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I Didn't Say It ...

President Obama, on Orlando:

"In the face of hate and violence, we will love another. We will not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead, we will stand united, as Americans, to protect our people, and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us."

And that’s why he’s our President.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda, accepting a Tony award last Sunday, talking history and Orlando:

“When senseless acts of tragedy reminds us that nothing here is promised. Not one day, This show is proof that history remembers, we live through times when hate and fear seem stronger, we rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer....Love is love is love is love is love is love is love, and love cannot be killed or swept aside. Fill the world with music, love and pride.”

Don’t let evil win; don’t let hatred rule the day.

Love is love is love is love …

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Anderson Cooper, interviewing anti-LGBT Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi about Orlando:

 “Do you really think you’re a champion of the gay community? You used language accusing gay people of seeking to do harm to the people of Florida. You argued that in court. The hotline that you’ve been talking about on television, which allows family members and spouses of the dead to get information…had there been no gay marriage, you do realize that there would be no spouses. Isn’t there a sick irony in that? Isn’t there a sick irony that you, for years, were fighting that very idea?”

Andy, my Husband-In-My-Head, taking no prisoners and holding Pam Bondi accountable for her hate.

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Frank Langella, accepting a Tony award last Sunday, on Orlando:

"When something bad happens, we have three choices: we let it define us, we let it destroy us, or we let it strengthen us. Today in Orlando we had a hideous dose of reality. "I urge you Orlando to be strong because I'm standing in a room of the most generous humans on Earth and we will be with you every step of the way." 

We all stand together against hate.

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Jim Himes, Democratic Congressman from Connecticut, on "thoughts and prayers" for the dead:

"I will not attend one more 'Moment of Silence' on the Floor. Our silence does not honor the victims, it mocks them. The 'Moments of Silence' in the House have become an abomination. God will ask, 'How did you keep my children safe?' Silence."

Finally, someone who realizes that a quick ‘Amen’ will not solve anything.

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Robert Lynch, the Catholic bishop of St. Petersburg, Florida, on Orlando:

“Our founding parents had no knowledge of assault rifles, which are intended to be weapons of mass destruction. In crafting the Second Amendment … which I affirm, they thought only of the most awkward of pistols and heavy shotguns. I suspect they are turning in their graves if they can but glimpse what their words now protect. It is long past time to ban the sale of all assault weapons … If one is truly pro-life, then embrace this issue also and work for the elimination of sales to those who would turn the weapons on innocents. Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, that targets, mostly verbally, and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence. Those women and men who were mowed down Sunday were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that. … Third, responding by barring people of Muslim faith from entering the country solely because of their stated religion until they can be checked out is un-American, even in these most challenging of times and situations. There are as many good, peace-loving and God-fearing Muslims to be found as Catholics or Methodists or Mormons or Seventh-day Adventists. The Devil and Devilish intent escape no religious iteration. Will we ever learn?”

What a breath of fresh air to  hear a Catholic bishop lay some of the blame for this kind of hate at his religion's own feet.

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MORE! I Ain't One To Gossip, But..... Frank Langella Gossips.....About Dead People

I love a good celebrity dishing memoir. I'm shallow like that. But, I do get annoyed when some celebrity writes a book--and i kid, because most of them have people write the books for them--and trash other people who aren't here to defend themselves; as in, they're dead.

The newest dead celeb basher is Frank Langella, whose new book, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them, trashes countless dead famous people.

Let's see what he has to say about:

Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth was 20 years older than Langella, almost permanently drunk, and suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease when they co-starred together. She was unable to remember her lines unless they were written in huge block letters and placed on cards beside the camera.

But to 34-year-old Frank Langella she was a goddess, a flame-haired siren, and they began a passionate affair on the set of the 1972 Western, The Wrath Of God.

The couple played mother and son in the film, yet spent every evening together in her rooms, working their way through endless bottles of bourbon and wine as she reminisced mournfully about the good old days.

Langella remembers Hayworth saying: ‘Don’t stare at me, baby. You can see me in the movies.’ And when he finally left her--I'm assuming the filming was over--he says Hayworth ran out to the car and pleaded: ‘Don’t leave me. I gotta have a man with me.’

Richard Burton

According to Langella, Richard Burton was less than impressive when he visited Langella’s dressing room while he was starring in Dracula on Broadway in 1977.

Langella claims that, after single-handedly polishing off a bottle of Scotch which he had offered nobody else, a slurring Burton launched into a series of reminiscences about Britain’s great theatre actors and recited lengthy sections of Dylan Thomas’s poetry.

As the hours wore on, Langella just wanted to get home. 

‘Could anyone, I wondered, be so unaware of what a crashing bore he had become? There sat a man approximately 52 years of age, looking ten years older, dressed in black mink, with heavily applied pancake [make-up], under a tortured, balding helmet of jet black hair, grandly reciting tiresome poetry.’

Anne Bancroft

Langella  reserves particular ire for Anne Bancroft--an ‘elegant’ stage name, he says, which was ‘about as suited to her as Cuddles would have been to Adolf Hitler’. 

He first met Bancroft, wife of comic actor Mel Brooks, in 1966 when they co-starred in a play. And though they remained close friends for twenty years, Langella soon realized she was ‘consumed by a galloping narcissism that often undermined her talents’.

She once told him how she had been in a New York department store when she saw a woman smiling at her. Bancroft felt ‘inexplicably’ attracted to the woman and wanted to go over and ‘embrace and kiss her passionately’--until she realised she was looking into a mirror.

Yul Brynner

Speaking of narcissism, self-love surely was never more intense than in the case of Yul Brynner. No actor ever talked about himself so much, Langella recalls, and yet had so little time for his fans.

The baldheaded star--‘never far from a full-length mirror’--once gave Langella and his former wife, Ruth, a lift in his 20ft-long white limo. On the drive, Brynner explained how he’d had a special elevator--big enough to fit a car--installed in the Broadway theatre where he was starring in The King And I.

His chauffeur could drive straight in and spare the star from having to ‘deal with the public’. Brynner even showed off a pair of blinding flash lights which he kept handy ‘in case blacks attack my car’.

Paul Newman

According to Langella, Paul Newman--long regarded as one of Hollywood’s Mr Nice Guys--was a frightful bore, too. 

‘After dirty-sexy jokes, shop talk, cars or politics were exhausted, Paul was a pretty dull companion,’ he recalls. ‘Never rude or unkind, just dull.’ 

In awe of his good looks, companions would instinctively think it their fault when he suddenly went quiet, but, Langella says, in reality Newman had simply run out of anything to say. Like the statue of David, Newman was ‘physically perfect but emotionally vacant’.

Sidenote: Paul Newman was the hottest man ever. That's from me, not Langella.

Bette Davis

Bette Davis was well into her 60s when, having seen Langella’s films, she ordered their mutual agent to put them in touch. Though--as with his affair with Rita Hayworth--Davis was 20 years older, they had ‘a number of racy conversations, not quite phone sex but certainly rife with foreplay,’ he says.

But nothing more ever happened as Davis always cancelled their dinner dates. Years later, however, he says he ran into her at a hotel and--enraged, he believes, that her privacy had somehow been invaded--she froze him out when he identified himself.

Liz Taylor

Apparently he had better luck with with Elizabeth Taylor. 

Put in touch in 2001 by a mutual friend who said the Hollywood icon was desperately lonely, Langella reveals that their second date culminated in a 69-year-old Taylor urging him to: ‘Come on, baby, and put me to sleep.’ 

After helping her upstairs rather indecorously by pushing on her backside, he was taken aback by the clutter in her bedroom. he says it was filled with pictures of her dead ex-husbands, ‘dozens and dozens’ of bottles of witch hazel which she used to remove her make-up and a giant open box of chocolates on the bed.

Despite knowing that a relationship with her was ‘quicksand’, he began a brief affair and now says she was: ‘A small, sweet woman who wanted a man to be with her, protect her and fill a void as deep as the deepest ocean.’ 

At one stage, she told him she wanted to leave Los Angeles and move with him to the East Coast to ‘find a place that’s normal’, but Langella told her a relationship would never work because she would ‘have him for lunch’.

Isn't it odd how, with the exception of Bancroft, who apparently only loved herself, all these women wanted to be with Frank Langella, and all these men were morons, narcissists and bores?

And yet he waited until they had all died before he told their "stories".

Methinks someone needs a payday.