The words "Old Hollywood" conjure up images of glamour, gowns, and women with red lipstick making romantic pronouncements in careful Transatlantic accents. Likely, what features most prominently in your mind are the actresses themselves, who, decades later remain almost titanic in their legend.
Beneath this glimmering facade is a harrowing truth: All of these legendary starlets were subject to the abuses inherent in the restrictive contract system that existed until 1943. Many were sexually harassed by studio executives like MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who was known to chase women around the same wooden desk upon which he put pictures of his family. Even after the contract system ended in 1943, the practice of the casting couch, or the exchange of sexual favours for professional roles, was still rampant.
Historian Cari Beauchamp mourns the loss of all the women who couldn't endure such abuse, and the dearth of talent that may have resulted. "What you can say, which was true now and was true then: We will never know how many careers were cut short. How many women folded up their tents and went home. How much talent was ignored because of these men’s momentary decisions,” she told Refinery29.
Here are the women who were brave enough to speak about their abuses, pre-Weinstein Effect, back in the days when statements about sexual harassment were overlooked and ignored — and when survivors could face both personal and professional consequences for telling their stories. Now, women's accounts of harassment are taken far more seriously, and are followed by swift professional ramifications for their assailants. As this list clearly shows, women have been speaking about sexual harassment in Hollywood for decades — it's only now, though, that they're being believed.
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Patricia Douglas
Patricia Douglas was the first person to take on the Hollywood machine for sexual misconduct. At the age of 20, Patricia Douglas, an aspiring star, was raped by an MGM salesman at a raucous studio party. The year was 1937. Following the incident, Douglas refused the studios's bribes to remain silent, including a coveted seven-year contract and cash. Instead, she went public about the party — which cost the equivalent of $440,000 (£330,000) — and the events which took place there involving teenage girls.
"You knew you’d be blackballed. Me, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be vindicated, to hear someone say, ‘You can’t do that to a woman,'" she told Vanity Fair in 2007.
Douglas sued MGM and went to trial, but jury did not indict her assailant, David Ross. Still, Douglas wasn't cowed. Following the decision, Douglas and her mother filed a suit asking for $500,000 (£375,000) in damages against the party organisers: David Ross, Eddie Mannix, Hal Roach, and Vincent Conniff, for conspiracy to seduce her and the party's other dancers "for the immoral and sensual gratification of male guests. "Unfortunately, Douglas' lawyer abandoned her, perhaps because of collusion with MGM — he failed to show up at trial three times, and the case was dismissed.
Douglas remained silent until she was contacted for a Vanity Fair interview at the age of 86. She said the incident "absolutely ruined [her] life." She left Hollywood, and struggled with the burden of her story. MGM was fine, though — this was the last rape case on record for them.
Judy Garland
When researching a biography on Judy Garland, Gerald Clarke came across a suppressed piece of literature from the Random House archives at Columbia University: Garland's own memoir, which detailed her abuse at the hands of Hollywood executives. “I’d like to expose a lot of people who deserve it,” she wrote in the unpublished memoir.
Starting from when she was cast in The Wizard of Oz(1939) at 16, Garland wrote she was approached for sex by many executives, including Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. Apparently, when Mayer would listen to her sing, he'd lay his hand on her left breast and say she sung from the heart. "I often thought I was lucky that I didn't sing with another part of my anatomy," she wrote.
Garland also revealed that she'd be given "pep pills" to endure her gruelling schedule of working six days a week, for 18 hours each. If the studio felt she was gaining too much weight, they would starve her.
Bettmann / Contributor
Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple became famous as a child star. In 1940, when Temple was 12 years old, she attended a meeting with MGM producer Arthur Freed. He exposed himself to the young Temple, and then, when she started to laugh nervously, made her leave the office. She wrote of the incident in her 1988 memoir Child Star.
CBS Photo Archive / Contributor
Maureen O'Hara
In a recently unearthed newspaper interview from 1945, Irish actress Maureen O'Hara griped against the system that allowed sexual misconduct to go unpunished.
"I am so upset with it that I am ready to quit Hollywood. It's got so bad I hate to come to work in the morning," she said. "I'm a helpless victim of a Hollywood whispering campaign. Because I don't let the producer and director kiss me every morning or let them paw me they have spread word around town that I am not a woman — that I am a cold piece of marble statuary."
Silver Screen Collection / Contributor
Marilyn Monroe
In her memoir, My Story, published in 1974, Monroe condemned the agents, producers, and studio executives who helped create her "bombshell" image.
“I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes — an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”
(Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Tippi Hedren
At the age of 87, Hedren come forward with incidents of sexual harassment she endured during her Hollywood career. In her memoir Tippi (2016), Hedren said Alfred Hitchcock harassed her on the set of The Birds(1963). This was nothing new for Hedren. "I dealt with sexual harassment all the time, during my modelling and film career. Hitchcock wasn't the first," she said.
In a November 2016 interview with Variety, almost a full year before Weinstein, Hedren explained why she spoke out. "I did it because this is legion all over the world. There’s nothing unique about it. Women complain all the time about somebody trying to make a pass at them or have a relationship in which they are not interested. I don’t put up with that kind of thing. I wanted to let women, especially young women, know never to allow that kind of approach and to be forceful in telling people you’re not interested in having that kind of a relationship. It’s not a bad thing to say no."
Silver Screen Collection / Contributor
Joy Webster, Dorinda Stevens, Anne Heywood, and Marigold Russell
In 1956, the British magazine Picturegoer published an exposé on the rampant phenomenon of the casting couch, or the exchange of sexual favours for professional advancement, in Hollywood. In the article, Dorinda Stevens recalled an interaction that sounds spookily similar to Weinstein's alleged tactics.
"A producer over here [in England] offered Dorinda Stevens a role. Would she 'dine' with the producer? Miss Stevens refused. Once, twice, three times the assistant rang. Miss Stevens went on refusing. The assistant altered his tactics. Would Miss Stevens read over her lines at the producer’s flat? Only, was her reply, if other people were there. This was agreed. Miss Stevens went—and found herself alone with the insistent producer. She walked off and abandoned the offer."
Pictured: Dorinda Stevens
Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock
Kata O'Mara
In 1994, actress Kate O'Mara went on a British talk show called The Word and detailed an awful experience she had while auditioning for an Elvis Presley movie called Double Trouble(1967).
"The producer [Judd Bernard] disappeared, and reappeared in a robe. We've heard about the casting couch and everything, and I'd always though that was something I would never do," she said. The producer asked her to stand up and turn around, and then pulled her pants down. She ran for the door.
O'Mara described other, similarly disconcerting incidents in her autobiography, Vamp Until Ready: A Life Laid Bare (2003), like with a casting director, and the director of Great Catherine.
ITV/REX/Shutterstock
Joan Collins
Joan Collins first mentioned her brushes with Hollywood's casting couches in her 1978 autobiography Past Imperfect. Since the Weinstein scandal broke, she's been even more vocal. Collins claims that she was passed up to star in the movie Cleopatra(1963) because she declined to "be nice" to a producer.
"It was a wonderful euphemism in the Sixties for you know what. But I couldn't do that. In fact, I was rather wimpish, burst into tears and rushed out of his office," Collins said. Elizabeth Taylor was cast as Cleopatra.
Helen Mirren
It took almost four decades for Mirren to come forward with an uncomfortable casting incident that occurred in 1964. During an interview with Channel4 in 2007, Mirren said that director Michael Winner treated her like "a piece of meat" during an audition, and forced her to show off her body.
“Even if they hadn’t done the kind of work that I’ve done, it was incredibly insulting. I was so angry, I was so angry – I still am," she said.
David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock
Theresa Russell
When Russell was 18, she encountered the powerful producer Sam Spiegel. She said he offered her a four-year production contract and a role in The Last Tycoon(1976), in exchange for sexual favours. "I just thought, 'Oh really? And then I have to, like, go to your yacht? And I gotta do this and that and the other thing in order for me to get to do another picture? Forget that.' I went off and got a lawyer is what happened," Russell told the Independent.
Spiegel said she'd never work in Hollywood again. He was wrong. She got the part in The Last Tycoon.
Ken McKay/REX/Shutterstock
Lesley-Anne Down
Down, an English actress who achieved fame in Hollywood in the late '60s, was vocal, fairly early on in her career, about her brushes with lecherous producers. “I was promised lots of lovely big film parts by American producers if I went to bed with them… Believe me, the casting couch is no myth," she said in 1977.
Like Theresa Russell, Down also said she was harassed by producer Sam Spiegel.
ITV/REX/Shutterstock
Samantha Geimer, née Gailey
In 1977, Samantha Geimer became embroiled in one of Hollywood's most enduring scandals. At the age of 13, she was drugged and raped by the director Roman Polanski. After pleading guilty in 1979, Polanski fled the country and has been in exile for more than three decades. In her memoir The Girl: Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, Samantha Geimer explains how this incident affected her life.
Paul Harris/Getty Images)
Thandie Newton
Of course, it's not just Golden Age starlets who came out with accounts of sexual harassment and casting couch practices pre-Weinstein. In a 2013 interview on CNN, Thandie Newton recalled an audition she had at the age of 18 led by a male director and a female casting director.
“The director asked me to sit with my legs apart – the camera was positioned where it could see up my skirt – to put my leg over the arm of the chair and before I started my dialogue, [I was told] to think about the character I was supposed to be having the dialogue with and how it felt to be made love to by this person. It turned out the director used to show that video late at night to interested parties at his house – a video of me touching myself with a camera up my skirt.”
Matt Baron/REX/Shutterstock
Ashley Judd
In October 2015, a full two years before the Times piece on Weinstein broke, Ashley Judd wrote a detailed account of an encounter with an aggressive Hollywood producer who lured her to his hotel room, and asked her to watch him take a shower. Judd later said the producer was Harvey Weinstein.
Picture Perfect/REX/Shutterstock
Anna Camp
In an interview with People in October 2015, Anna Camp talked about the inappropriate encounters she has on set time and time again.
“I’m happily married now, but [I have had moments] on sets where I have been shooting a scene with someone, it’s going very well, but I can tell…‘Oh God, I think he’s going to ask…Oh God, is he going to ask me out?’ But I have to work with him tomorrow! And then I have to work with him for the next month. How do I maintain that balance of not offending him, but getting my point across that I don’t want to go out on a date?” Camp said.
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Chloë Sevigny
During a panel at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, Sevigny revealed that over the course of her decades in Hollywood, three big-time directors have cross the line during auditions.
“I’ve had the ‘what are you doing after this?’ conversation. I’ve also had the ‘do you want to go shopping and try on some clothes and, like, I can buy you something in the dressing room’ [conversation],” she added. “Just like crossing-the-line weirdness.”
Sevigny also said that a director suggested she "show off [her] body more."
John Salangsang/BFA/REX/Shutterstock
Alison Brie
Just months before the Weinstein exposé, Alison Brie recalled an Entourage audition that veered into uncomfortable territory.
“Early in my career, I auditioned for three lines on an episode of Entourage that I had to go on in a bikini!” she said. “Or like shorts and the tiniest shorts. And they were like, ‘Okay, can you take your top off now?’”
Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Zoe Kazan
In a July 2017 Guardian profile, Zoe Kazan detailed the many subtle and unsubtle harassments that actresses endure.
"There’ll be auditions where they’ll say, ‘Wear something body-conscious’ and then you’re aware that they’re checking out your body. You leave the situation feeling not good about what just happened, but you don’t really have the language for why. You feel like, if you said something, it would reflect badly on you," Kazan said. She also described one incident in which a producer asked if she "spat or swallowed" while on set.
Kazan pointed out that her boyfriend, Paul Dano, has never incurred such treatment from producers.
Broadimage/REX/Shutterstock
Amber Tamblyn
In September 2017, Amber Tamblyn got into an altercation with the actor James Woods. In a tweet, Tamblyn recalled that Woods had tried to pick her up when she was only 16. She followed up with a New York Times op-ed that addresses Woods, and also harassment in Hollywood in general.
“I have been afraid of speaking out or asking things of men in positions of power for years. What I have experienced as an actress working in a business whose business is to objectify women is frightening. It is the deep end of a pool where I cannot swim. It is a famous man telling you that you are a liar for what you have remembered. For what you must have misremembered, unless you have proof.”
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