[OffTheHook]

On this day in 1937, Hollywood is shocked to learn of the sudden and tragic death of the actress Jean Harlow, who succumbs to uremic poisioning (now better known as acute renal failure, or acute kidney failure) at the age of 26.
Born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles as a child after her parents separated. Harlean was an amalgam of her mother’s maiden name, Jean Harlow, which the actress later took as her stage name. At the age of 16, she eloped with Charles McGrew, a young bond broker. Their marriage ended after she decided to pursue an acting career, against the will of her husband.
After working as a film extra, Harlow signed a contract with the producer Hal Roach, under which she briefly but memorably bared her soon-to-be-famous legs in Double Whoopee (1929), a Laurel and Hardy comedy. She made her sound debut in The Saturday Night Kid (1929), starring Clara Bow. Harlow got her big break soon after that, when Howard Hughes cast her in the sound update of his silent World War I-era epic Hell’s Angels (1930). In that film, Harlow made an impression on audiences with her glowing white-blond hair and the suggestive line “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?”
Harlow appeared in a string of films in 1931, including The Secret Six, The Public Enemy, Goldie and Platinum Blonde. Her roles in these movies, as in Hell’s Angels, relied less on her acting and more on her alluring appearance. After Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought Harlow’s contract from Hughes in 1932, she made her breakout appearance in Red-Headed Woman (1932), for which screenwriter Anita Loos created a part especially for Harlow. The film was the first to showcase her comedic talent as well as her bombshell looks. Harlow’s popularity with fans and film critics alike continued to grow throughout the next several years, thanks to smash hits like Red Dust (1932)--one of her numerous movies with Clark Gable--Dinner at Eight (1933), Hold Your Man (1933) and Bombshell (1933).
Aside from her meteoric rise to fame in her professional life, Harlow’s private life was marked by grief and tragedy. Her second husband, Paul Bern, an executive at MGM, died by an apparent suicide in 1932, during the making of Red Dust. Harlow’s third marriage, to the cinematographer Harold Rosson, lasted less than a year. Harlow was engaged to marry the actor William Powell, her co-star in Reckless (1935) and Libeled Lady (1936), when she suddenly became seriously ill in late May 1937. According to her obituary in the New York Times, the actress had suffered from poor health for a year, including “an acute case of sunburn,” a throat infection and influenza. She also contracted scarlet fever and meningitis as a teenager, which permanently weakened her health. After doctors diagnosed uremic poisoning the weekend before, according to the Times, “Miss Harlow soon responded favorably to treatment and was thought well on the road to recovery when she lapsed into a coma last night.” She died the next day, June 7, 1937, at a hospital in Hollywood, California. Powell was at Harlow’s bedside when she died, along with her mother, stepfather and cousin.
Harlow’s final film, Saratoga (1937), was released posthumously; another actress served as her stand-in for several scenes so that the movie could be completed.


http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo...arlow-dies

[OffTheHook]

Disco as a musical style predated the movie Saturday Night Fever by perhaps as many as five years, but disco as an all-consuming cultural phenomenon might never have happened without the 1977 film and its multi-platinum soundtrack featuring such era-defining hits as the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" and Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You." What is absolutely certain is that Saturday Night Fever would never have been made were it not for a magazine article detailing the struggles and dreams of a talented, young, Italian-American disco dancer and his scruffy entourage in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That article—"The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," by journalist Nik Cohn—was published on this day in 1976 in the June 7 issue of New York magazine.
In the blockbuster film that was based on the article, a young John Travolta turned the role of Tony Manero into a career-maker thanks to his own considerable talents, but the character Travolta played was brilliantly drawn by Nik Cohn before a frame of film was ever shot. From his style of dress and his job in the paint store, to his god-like status at the local disco and his vague dreams of escaping to something bigger, the young man named "Vincent" whose experiences Cohn reported on practically leaps off the page with his undirected ambition and otherworldly charisma. You can practically hear the Bee Gees singing "More Than A Woman" and picture "Vinnie" pointing to the sky in his platform shoes and white three-piece suit as you read Cohn's profile, and you can certainly see why it caught the attention of Hollywood. There was just one problem, though, with the story that served as the source material for one of the biggest pop-cultural phenomena of the modern era: "The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" was almost entirely fabricated.
Yes, there really was an Odyssey 2000 discotheque in Brooklyn, and yes, its habitués were of the general age, ethnicity and social class as depicted in Cohn's supposedly nonfiction piece, but the truth is that Cohn never immersed himself in the life of young "Vinnie" and his cohorts, because young "Vinnie" and his cohorts were the product of Cohn's imagination. Cohn's admission of his fabrication came in 1994, in a piece for the UK's Guardian newspaper. "My story was a fraud," he confessed. "I'd only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story's hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd's Bush mod whom I'd known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road."


http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo...ight-fever

[OffTheHook]

A former actor named Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California on this day in 1966. Reagan's tenure as the Golden State's governor gave him credibility as a political leader, paving the way for his victory in the 1980 presidential election. Reagan was born in Illinois and worked as a construction worker, lifeguard and radio announcer before becoming an actor. His first stint at political leadership was as president of the Screen Actors' Guild from 1947 to 1952. Originally a Democrat, Reagan had grown dissatisfied with New Deal policies and in 1960 switched to the Republican Party. Reagan then started putting his Hollywood fame to work campaigning for Republican candidates. Eventually, Reagan's charisma and popularity as an actor and a rousing speech he delivered in support of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 convinced the California Republican Party to back him for governor in 1966.
Reagan served two terms as governor of California from 1966 to 1975, presiding over the tumultuous Vietnam War protest era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, he called out National Guard troops to quell a protest on the University of California at Berkeley campus saying, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with, no more appeasement." His first two presidential campaigns, in 1968 and 1976, failed, but his stature as a national player in politics rose with both attempts. In 1980, he successfully challenged embattled Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter for the presidency, and ushered in an era of New Conservatism in American politics.
Reagan was the first actor to be elected president after two centuries dominated by lawyers and soldiers and the only California governor to hold the office. He served as the 40th president for two terms between 1981 and 1989.


http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo...california

[OffTheHook]

On June 7, 1986, the Kansas City Royals draft football star Bo Jackson, the 1985 Heisman Trophy winner out of Auburn University, in the fourth round of the Major League Baseball amateur draft. Jackson’s decision to pursue baseball instead of football shocked the NFL and football fans across the country.

Jackson was drafted by the Yankees out of high school in the second round of the 1982 draft, but decided instead to attend Auburn, where he was a football sensation. In his senior year he racked up four straight games with over 200 rushing yards and won the Heisman Trophy, separating himself from the rest of his competitors as the best NFL prospect that year. The lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers made Jackson the first overall pick in the 1986 NFL draft, but Jackson, who had also been a stand-out college baseball player and track star, chose instead to pursue baseball.

Jackson made his major league debut with the Royals in 1986, and the next year decided to reignite his football career. He was selected by the Oakland Raiders in the seventh round of the 1987 NFL draft, and Al Davis, the Raiders’ owner and general manager, promised Jackson that he could complete his baseball season before joining the team. Jackson accepted the offer, which included full-time pay for a half-season of play.

Jackson enjoyed his best year in baseball in 1989, when he made the All-Star team and hit a gargantuan lead-off home run to win the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player Award. At that time, Jackson--who was capable of spectacular catches, throwing runners out from deep in the outfield, running faster than anyone in the sport and hitting deep home runs—was considered one of the best players in baseball. He was also elected to the NFL Pro Bowl that year, making him the first person elected to the All-Star team in two major sports. He made the Pro Bowl again in 1990.

Following the 1990 NFL regular season, Jackson injured his hip in a playoff game while running the ball for the Raiders, and missed that year’s Pro Bowl (held in early 1991) as a result. The injury led to a deterioration of the cartilage around his hip joint, which eventually necessitated a hip replacement and forced Jackson to retire from football after the 1990 season. He was also released by the Royals, but returned to the major leagues to play for the White Sox in 1993 and the California Angels in 1994. In all, he played 160 games in two seasons on an artificial hip.

Still famed for his pioneering athletic feats in two professional sports and a hugely popular "Bo Knows" Nike ad campaign, Jackson finally retired from baseball during the 1994 season.



http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo...ity-royals

[OffTheHook]

On this day in 2002, 41-year-old Michael Skakel is convicted in the 1975 murder of his former Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor, 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, was later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

On October 30, 1975, Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club outside her family’s home in Greenwich, one of America’s most affluent communities. The golf club was later determined to have come from a set belonging to the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Investigators initially focused on one of Michael Skakel’s older brothers, the last person Moxley reportedly was seen alive with, as well as the Skakels’ live-in tutor as possible suspects, but no arrests were made due to lack of evidence, and the case stalled.

In the early 1990s, Connecticut authorities relaunched the investigation, and public interest in the case also was reignited by several new books, including Dominick Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory” (1993), a fictionalized account of the crime, and former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman’s “A Murder in Greenwich” (1998), in which he claimed that Michael Skakel killed Moxley in a jealous rage because she was romantically interested in his older brother. In 2000, based in part on statements made by former classmates of Skakel’s who claimed he admitted to them in the 1970s to killing Moxley, he was charged with her murder.

Skakel, who came from a family of seven children, had a wealthy, privileged upbringing; however, his mother died from cancer in 1973 and he had a troubled relationship with his father. In the late 1970s, Skakel, who began drinking heavily as a teen, was sent to the Elan School, a private boarding school in Poland, Maine, for troubled youth. At Skakel’s 2002 trial, the prosecution presented testimony from several of his former Elan classmates who stated that in the 1970s Skakel had confessed to killing Moxley. One ex-classmate, a drug addict who died shortly before the 2002 trial started, claimed at a previous court hearing that Skakel told him, “I am going to get away with murder because I am a Kennedy.”

At trial, prosecutors, who had no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence directly linking Skakel to the murder, played a 1997 taped conversation between Skakel and the ghostwriter of an autobiography Skakel hoped to sell. Skakel said on tape that on the night of the murder he climbed into a tree in the Moxleys’ yard, while drunk and high on marijuana, and masturbated as he tried to look into Martha Moxley’s bedroom window. He said that when Moxley’s mother came to his house the next morning looking for her daughter, he felt panicked and wondered if someone had seen him the night before. Although Skakel never admitted on the tape to killing Moxley, prosecutors said his words put him at the scene of the crime and were an attempt to cover up the slaying.

After three days of deliberations, jurors found Skakel guilty of murder, and in August 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life behind bars. Skakel’s cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney, later worked to get Skakel a new trial; however, in 2010, the request was denied by the Connecticut Supreme Court.



http://www.history.com/this-day-in-histo...-greenwich

[RunItUpTheGut]

Its hard not to say Bo was the best athlete of all time.
Still holds the record for the fastest 40 time ever at the combine i believe.
Amazing talent.

[Granny Bear]

^^
Agreed!! Didn't know that he was still the record holder though.

[OffTheHook]

Its hard not to say Bo was the best athlete of all time.
Still holds the record for the fastest 40 time ever at the combine i believe.
Amazing talent.

I agree! Hard to believe he will be 50 years old this year!



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