ANGELINA JOLIE & KATE HEPBURN: HONESTY & LESBIAN FLINGS ARE SEXY

It’s high time we admit to our guilty pleasure: We absolutely LOVE Angelina. What’s more sexy than telling it like it is ALL the time? Maybe taxes and death are inevitable, but when we can rely on a goth girl, now disguised as a movie star, to ALWAYS tell the truth, it’s nirvana, divine and simple.

Yes, she once loved a woman so passionately that she would never dishonor that bond by denying it.

Yes, Jolie admits to pushing the boundaries with her lovers, “both emotional and sexual. That’s when I’ve felt the sexiest. I’ve been in both submissive and dominant roles because I want more.” And who hasn’t wanted more?”

Yes, she kissed her brother James before the Academy Awards ceremony, and cooed to the world as she accepted her Oscar: “I’m so in love with my brother right now!” Immediately tabloid headlines screamed incest. Sadly, she observed: “The world is a lot sicker than I thought,” recalling how children of traumatic divorce lean on each other for emotional support.

Yes, she’s never forgiven her father for cheating on his mother and breaking up the family. Jolie remembers seeing him at the Oscars with his girlfriend as she, her mother and brother sat in front of the TV with little to eat. She doesn’t talk to her dad because she feels “families are earned.” Now that’s revolutionary!

The Lara Croft actress steadfastly maintains that she refused to be intimate with Brad Pitt until his divorce because she vowed she would NEVER sleep with a married man. “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife,” she told NBC’s Ann Curry in 2005.

The Aniston-Pitt divorce was signed on August 19, 2005. Baby Shiloh Jolie-Pitt was born nine months later in Namibia

Now let’s look at the iconic Katherine Hepburn, revered for her strong-willed independence and for ALWAYS telling the truth, no matter what the consequence.
Well, that might have been the case early in her career when she lived openly in a lesbian liaison with Laura Harding, a Philadelphia Main Line socialite.

According to director George Cukor’s friend, the noted Hollywood historian Gavin Lambert: “George knew they were lovers. It was very clear to me that when he mentioned Laura he was talking about Hepburn’s lover, and that meant sexually.”

“She was still at that point, too different, too proud, and too uncompromising to sacrifice her freedom to the games of stardom,” observes William J. Mann in his new Hepburn biography. By 1930’s standards, Katherine Hepburn lived unconventionally for a movie star, avoiding makeup, wearing men’s trousers and daring to look androgynous.

But as stories of her arrogance and self-absorption found their way into the hearts and minds of moviegoers, they stayed away from her films in droves. She was declared box office poison.

Amid scandal and innuendo, Kate fled with Laura to Europe convinced her career was over. She made a momentous decision during this sojourn of the soul. She would sublimate her real essence in service to her Hollywood image. Like Marlene Dietrich, she spent the rest of her life securing a place for herself in the Hollywood pantheon of immortal legends, forever obliterating her true self.

Hepburn at the time had a marriage in name only to another socialite from New England. She divorced him. He was strictly a rebound after the actress’ affair with a male poet 13 years older, who was married, bisexual and an alcoholic. A decade later she would replace the bard with yet another married, bisexual alcoholic: Spencer Tracy!

Marriage, a rose covered cottage and wiping kids’ noses just wasn’t a goal for this daughter of a radical doctor who specialized in treating venereal diseases and whose mother was an early suffragette and crusader for birth control.

Her lady love got banished back to the stodgy Main Line. Laura kept a stiff upper lip as she blended back into the upper crust. Somehow the now parted lovers stayed lifelong friends!

Unlike Angelina’s indiscreet former lesbian lover, Jenny Shimizu, who continues to tell many intimate Sapphic tales out of school, Kate’s ex-girlfriend helped perpetuate the myth of the racy, romantic affair between Hepburn and Tracy. Laura Harding told folks that while the screen couple stayed at her New York apartment, they made passionate love, leaving behind broken figurines. Now that’s a REAL classy friend!

Kate Hepburn’s Hollywood agent arranged for her to be seen on the arm of that most macho man of letters, Ernest Hemingway, when she arrived back from Europe. The agent then began a calculated and contrived romance with the aristocratic actress, leaking news of an impending marriage to the press.

It was just the right saccharine to neutralize the epithet of “box office poison”.
“Honest” Kate went along with it for the sake of her future iconic screen career, despite her true feelings about the institution of marriage.

“I don’t believe in marriage, it’s bloody impractical. Perhaps men and women should live next door and just visit now and then,” the Connecticut Yankee often said.

Her mother advised: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.”

Angelina and Brad say they won’t marry until everyone (gays) in America can. So these two are conventional after all. They DO believe in marriage.

Jolie’s devotion to helping the helpless around the globe remains unassailed. The sensuous thespian gives one-third of her megamillion dollar salary to promote humanitarian causes and works tirelessly on behalf of the world’s refugees through the United Nations. She’s adopted Cambodian and Ethiopian children from bleak Third World orphanages. Even before Jolie & Brad Pitt biologically shared a child, they shared the same passion for traveling the world and offering succor to those suffering from poverty, famine and genocide.

On the other hand, Hepburn’s charitable cause was the alcoholic Spencer Tracy, a married Catholic tormented by the chasm between his church’s teachings and his concupiscent sex acts with men. The actress didn’t go on missions of mercy to Africa, but solely to film the Oscar winning film, The African Queen.

To the end of his days, Tracy believed he would be condemned to hell for his drinking, infidelity and homosexual liaisons. Movie mogul Jack Warner’s aide, the sartorial Brit
Richard Gully, told Vanity Fair in 2001 that Tracy was a “bisexual” who was “never sober”.

Today, the gold standard of screen legends, Katherine Hepburn, would be labeled “co-dependent”. She even did a mushy, revisionist PBS documentary designed to reinforce the public perception of Tracy & Hepburn as legendary lovers. One of her friends exclaimed: “She painted this romantic vision that wasn’t the way it happened.” Many friends firmly believe the couple NEVER even made love.

Honestly, the more we think about it: ANGELINA FOR PRESIDENT!!


© 2006, Sistarrs International

JOHNNY DEPP & F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: AMERICANS DOIN' IT THE FRENCH WAY

Americans love to hate the French. And the French savor a little anti-American venom sprinkled in their vichyssoise. And Americans respond by renaming french fries, freedom fries. Hey, let's all take the pacifiers outta our mouths and french kiss and make up, okay!

Moving to France proved to be a great career move for Johnny Depp. He found love and incredible happiness with French pop singer Vanessa Paradis. The former Hollywood bad boy became besotted by fatherhood with the birth of his first child. He swooned: "I was born that day. Its like the fog was lifted. I met my reason to live." He was no less baby struck when his second tot came along.

Parenthood seems to work miracles for Hollywood's Lost Generation, while drug rehab often does not. Johnny Depp, like Angelina Jolie, did a lot of drugs starting in his teens, has scars from cutting himself due to numbing stress AND from altered tattoos due to the vicissitudes of his love life. "Winona forever" is now "Wino forever". (Winona Ryder and Kate Moss are but two in his bevy of ex-girlfriends.)

Before Vanessa, the kids & France, Johnny got into a heap of trouble all the time. Arrests for bad behavior in hotel suites and lobbies. Allegations that he sold drugs in his Viper Room nightclub on the Sunset Strip. After River Phoenix's drug overdose death on the club's front sidewalk in 1993, the probe intensified. His last arrest was in 1999 in London after a fight with the paparazzi outside a restaurant.

Because of his kids, Johnny ventured into PG fare with movie roles like Willy Wonka and Capt. Jack Sparrow. And last week, the pirate plunderer led Johnny Depp into movie history. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest had the largest opening weekend take in Hollywood history, $132 million! Johnny's PG choice catapulted him into the stratosphere of bona fide superstars.

F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Paris in 1924 for fame and fortune with his talented, gorgeous flapper wife Zelda. In the first year, he wrote The Great American Novel: The Great Gatsby. The Fitzgeralds worshipped at the altar of the superficial and the ephemeral. For them, France did not foster the same fabulous family life that Johnny Depp found there. Scott & Zelda were self-centered, lackadaisical parents to their only child Scottie. The kid knew only nannies, boarding schools and surrogate parents not related by blood.

The always broke writer's alcoholism became full blown. Zelda kept up with his drinking, and began a slide into the abyss of mental illness. Fitzgerald lived a dissolute Jazz Age lifestyle of endless booze soaked parties and being overshadowed by famous ex-patriate egos like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

Zelda and Scott often clashed over his friendship with Hemingway, whose macho posturing she characterized as "bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshitting." History has proven Zelda 100 right on.

There is some speculation that after Zelda mocked the size of her husband's manhood: "You can never satisfy any woman. It's a matter of measurements," he ran to Hemingway for reassurance. Hemingway tried to convince the shamed novelist that his phallus was normal sized. "Papa" even took Scott to the Louvre for a peek at the Greek statues' privates. Hemingway's exaggerated macho swaggering in bed, in bars and on the plains of Africa is attributed to HIS manhood being the size of a woman's pinky, so who better for Scott to go to for an impartial opinion?

Southern belle Zelda's husband denied her truths, plagiarized from her writings and gave her no credit. Like many seers, she went mad. Zelda died a diagnosed schizophrenic in a mental institution fire at age 48.

As Fitzgerald wrote: "Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy." His was a Lost Generation that found death before redemption.

In life, Fitzgerald relentlessly pursued fame, fortune and beauty. He had no peace, and few sober days. He suffered from a huge inferiority complex. "Let me tell you about the very rich," he wrote. "They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are..."

He died in Hollywood at 44 in the arms of his gossip columnist mistress. The famed writer Dorothy Parker murmured by his open coffin: "The poor son of a bitch." Zelda would have smiled at the fact that his pal Parker plagiarized THAT line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby!

Unlike Fitzgerald, Johnny Depp went to France to escape the Hollywood culture of fame and fortune. "I like keeping a distance from Hollywood because I don't have the pressure or responsibility of knowing who's the top dog this week and who's out from last week. I don't know who anybody is and I like it," the No. 1 Box Office Star in the World confides.

"Even before I met Vanessa, I always loved Europe. It's a very agreeable culture, the quality of life. Not so uptight." After he met her, he swooned: "She made me feel like a human being instead of someone Hollywood manufactured. Very quickly I realized I couldn't live without her."

Now that he has two kids, he's happy that, "They're growing up in a very simple and calm environment, where everything is not about the next movie or the next success."
Johnny Depp and his family live in a tiny, remote village on the French Riviera. He enjoys the snail's pace (or is it escargot race?). Unlike America, there's very little technology in the village. French families here spend their balmy evenings in their gardens with friends, serenading each other over red wine and barbeque. There are no paparazzi ("buzzing insects") to annoy and to deploy one's pugilistic instincts. Life is serene.

Not that Johnny doesn't miss American culture a tad. He occasionally rides his Harley up to the local McDonald's drive-thru, ordering a Big Mac and fries in impeccable French.

He likes riding his honey on the back of his bike to a little local bar. He has coffee "with my girl... France has given me the opportunity to live a basic and simple life with my kiddies, a life of normalcy."

While his fellow Kentuckian George Clooney found the good life at his villa on Italy's Lake Como, Johnny's found his bliss in a small farmhouse in a rural French town.

L'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour, y'all!

(c) 2006 Sistarrs International

BRAD PITT AND RUDOLPH VALENTINO: PUSSY WHIPPED IN HOLLYWOOD

For his last year, the press questioned the manhood of this wet dream of millions of sex-starved female moviegoers. They felt his bisexual second wife wore the pants in the family, and that her total domination in every area of his life compromised his virility. The sexy hunk they knew and loved had vanished, replaced by a pussy-whipped puppet. The public consensus: his career as a screen heartthrob was as viable as the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.

Brad and Angelina? NOT.

They were talking about the silent film star RUDOLPH VALENTINO, whose celluloid seductions in the early 1900’s had unleashed the forbidden, erotic passions in millions of repressed women around the world through his “Sheik” movies.

Valentino’s status as The World’s Greatest Screen Lover wasn’t helped by the fact that his two wives were both lesbians.

Giving his best buddy, screen sex symbol Ramon Novarro, a lead Art Deco dildo for his birthday raised a few eyebrows, too. Forty-five years later, two gay hustlers rammed the dildo down the aged Novarro’s throat, killing him.

Rudy’s actress first wife, on the rebound after a spat with her longtime live-in girlfriend, married him in haste. The spur-of-the-moment union never got consummated. Seems the new bride chained their hotel honeymoon suite shut, as the matinee idol pleaded in vain for his conjugal rights.

Natasha Rambova, a former lover of Nazimova, Hollywood’s most notorious lesbian den mother, became his second wife.

Nazimova introduced Rudy to both his show biz wives, an indictment of sorts. That Nazimova is Nancy Reagan’s godmother is just one of those fabulous oxymorons!

The drop-dead gorgeous Natasha, an iron butterfly born Winifred Shaunessy, proceeded to grab his gonads and hold on for dear life. She immediately slapped a platinum slave bracelet on Valentino and took over all negotiations with the studio.

Eighty years after Valentino’s burial at age 31 in a Hollywood crypt, the slave bracelet still on his wrist, Tinseltown is again abuzz with doubts about the cojones of its current “Sexiest Man Alive”, Brad Pitt. Obviously the advent of the 21st century has done little to alter the traditional perceptions of what makes a man a man.

Brad’s total submersion into the bisexual Angelina Jolie’s baby besotted, globetrotting lifestyle seems to have turned him “from the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ into a pussy-whipped male nanny in less than a year’s time,” writes one disenchanted fan.

The modern day equivalent of Valentino’s slave bracelet from Natasha seems to be Brad’s slavish devotion to pleasing Angie on all fronts, AND on his lower back. The superstar actress erased a Japanese kanji for death tattoo a few years back. She immediately replaced it with a large prayer of Buddhist Sanskrit symbols on her left shoulder, a prayer of protection for her little Cambodian son, Maddox.

In April 2006, it was reported that Brad’s devotion to Angelina and her adopted tots (now his, too) was taken a step further when he got an identical tattoo of the Sanskrit blessing for little Maddox inked onto his lower back, five black columns of symbols. To further impress his inamorata with his filial devotion, Hollywood’s reigning hunk went out and got himself a Mohawk to match 4-year old Maddox’s hairdo!?

Oy vey, that can’t be good for his macho leading man image. Many think Brad’s Hollywood siren is calling forth his lovesick little puppy dog. A long way from his high school nickname, “Brad the Pit Bull”.

Allegedly, he’s gotten down on one knee on more than one occasion to propose holy wedlock. Angelina always turns him down, cooing in his ear: “Let’s not ruin something so perfect.”

Jolie’s lover of 10 years, actress/model Jenny Shimizu, has a different take on her ex’s real reason for not getting hitched to Brad.

Jenny and Angelina met as co-stars in the 1993 movie, “Foxfire”. The movie goddess has always acknowledged their romantic and sexual relationship: “I probably would have married Jenny if I hadn’t married my (first) husband. I fell in love with her the second I saw her,” she told a reporter.

“He seems to come from a different place. He wants to have kids and a perfect marriage.
I don’t think there’s anyway of controlling Angelina,” Jenny told a British tabloid, The News of the World. “She’s not going to be a housewife. Angelina loves danger and dabbling in the dark side. That’s where she gets her kicks, not playing happy family with one man.”

Jenny Shimizu continued on with her indiscreet stream of consciousness.

“I even took her to dominatrix joints and she loved them all. The darker the better.”

Brad, you may have just gotten yourself the new millenium Natasha Rambova. Get ready for that platinum slave bracelet!

Jenny concludes her Sapphic paean by waxing rhapsodic about Angelina’s luscious lips.

“She is beautiful. Her mouth is amazing. It’s like two water beds, it’s like this big kind of warm, mushy, beautiful thing. Angelina is an unbelievable lesbian lover. She loves women too much. It’s like a drug and she was hooked. I can’t imagine her just being married and being happy.”

Brad may be on a short leash, but this woman needs a muzzle!!

Meanwhile, back to the lavender fraught saga of Rudolph Valentino. Because Natasha became involved in every facet of Valentino’s professional and personal life, the press accused her of wearing the pants in the family. They sneered at the slave bracelet she gave him. In 1926, the Chicago Tribune attacked him as a pink powder puff and blamed him for the feminization of the American male.

Eventually, the studio gave Valentino a huge contract with the stipulation that Natasha be banned from all movie sets. Rudy tried to save the marriage by financing her cryptic lesbian fantasy film. When it failed, so did the marriage. Once off the gravy train, Natasha wanted out of the connubial bed. The screen god tried to save face by claiming he really wanted a housewife, not a business partner, but the public suspected otherwise.

Today’s screen god waxes rhapsodic about his new role as a parent: “It’s a true joy and a very profound love,” Brad swoons. “You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever done.”

His unhappy fans have a few poignant thoughts on the new Brad Pitt.

“…I still feel he was hog tied and rushed into all of this…after some incredible shags, he was submitted to some stern lecturing by la Jolie…a year ago he was smoking bongs and grooving, now he is trying to ‘mature’ like a piece of old cheese.”

“Brad Pitt was easy. If Angelina Jolie can get Mathew McConaughey to marry her, get her pregnant, then change diapers and bring the kids to day care at the studio, I am ready to submit to her supernatural powers.”

It seems the calendar has moved ahead by almost a century, but the public’s opinion of a liberated man has not.

Oscar winner Angelina voted by the readers of US magazine as, “the actress most straight women would like to have sex with” responded by saying, “That’s okay, because I’m the actress most likely to have sex with them.”

In a supreme irony, it was recently revealed that Angelina and Madonna shared a lover…Jenny Shimizu! How’s that for the sixth degree of separation in the Hollywood maelstrom?

Perhaps Brad Pitt is learning through the 21st century forum of public opinion the painful lesson Rudolph Valentino talked about in the early days of the last century:

“Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.”

It would seem the same thing applies to Angelina in these terminally hip times.

©2006, Sistarrs International