Degrees of Separation

I went to Wal Mart today and bought a copy of the film "West Side Story" which is a musical about gang violence and young love in the streets of New York City. Most of it was filmed in Los Angeles of course. The Lead actor was a fellow named Richard Beamer. He played Tony. Originally they wanted to cast Elvis Presley but Colonel Parker nixed the deal because he thought Elvis was wrong for the part. On a previous film in Los Angeles Beamer made the acquaintance of Sharon Tate, then a struggling young starlet who was later married to Roman Polanski, the director. They were renting a home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles where Terry Melcher had recently lived with his girlfriend Candace Bergen. Terry Melcher died of Melanoma at the age of 62. He was the son of Doris Day. Melcher was in the music business. One day a friend of his Pete Wilson of the Beach Boys picked up a couple of hippie women who knew this guy named Charles Manson.








Manson wanted to record some records. Manson thus met Melcher who helped him record some songs. Later Melcher decided he didn’t want to deal with Manson, but that was after he had invited him over to his house on 10050 Cielo Drive. This upset Manson and so he later paid a visit with his "family" to Melcher’s house, only by this time Polanski and Tate were living there. They murdered Sharon Tate and several of her friends, as Polanski was away on business. As part of this act of murder they painted the words "Pig" on the walls of the house in the blood of their victims. Later one of the musicians of the group Nine Inch Nails bought the house and built a recording studio in it which he named "Pig Studios". This offended one of Sharon Tate’s sisters who mentioned this to him to his face. Later he decided in the mid 1990s to move out of the house because as he said there was "too much history" in that house. Someone else bought the house and had it demolished and built a new home there with a different street address.


Natalie Wood played the role of Maria opposite Beamer. She was born Natalya Zacharenko, who got her start as a child in "Miracle on 34th Street." She was married to actor Robert Wagner twice. She drowned off Santa Catalina Island in southern California at the age of 43. Wagner went on to play a supporting role in the Austin Powers movies. Early in his career he was Barbara Stanwyck’s boyfriend.


Wagner and Wood met after her divorce from him at a party given by John Houseman. Houseman is best known (by me) as the actor who played the law professor in the movie "The Paper Chase." He is best known to most people
as the spokesman for Smith-Barney the investment firm. (We make money the old fashioned way, we EARN it). Born in Bucharest he was an Irish-Welsh Hungarian Jewish hybrid brought up in the UK and later working mostly in the US. Houseman taught acting at Juilliard and co-founded with Orson Welles the Mercury Theater.


Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, a dreary rust-belt city in southeast Wisconsin. His family was wealthy, but unhealthy, and his father drank too much and died when he was 15. He had just graduated from a residential boy’s school in Woodstock, IL. While at the boy’s school his headmaster had fostered his education in a John Dewey sort of way and like the hero of "Rushmore" was staging plays and theater productions at the tender age of 14 or 15. His mother died of jaundice when he was 9. One wonders if perhaps his mother drank too much too. After being adopted by a Russian emigre and successful Chicago physician, Welles went on a tour of Europe with money he had gotten in an inheritance and talked himself into a theater production in Dublin. His first film was his greatest achievement and one of the most celebrated classic films in cinema history. Unfortunately Hedda Hopper found out about it and the Hearst organization exerted considerable pressure on RKO and the theaters that chose to show the film. It was critically well received but the public didn’t care for it. Everything else he did in his career was bedeviled by studio interference and unauthorized editing. He chose exile to Europe for its artistic freedom. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, a genius of a different sort, he was constantly in trouble with his clients/employers. By the end of his career he was doing TV spots for cheap wine and narrating films for the likes of Hal Lindsey in much the same manner as John Cleese has hosted industrial films after his stint as a python. Welles died two hours after appearing on the Merv Griffin Show in 1985. He was cremated and what was left of him was buried on the Spanish estate of a bullfighter friend.







Yul Brynner died the same day. He was of Swiss-Mongolian-Russian extraction and was born in 1920 in Vladivostok, about as far east as you can go in Russia. His biggest claim to fame was as the King of Siam in Rogers and Hammerstein’s "The King and I" in which he starred in both the stage versions and the film. He may have started the shaved head look, which he began while playing the king and other exotic roles. He died of lung cancer in New York City. A lifelong smoker he made an antismoking spot shortly before he died.

Another thing that can cause cancer is ham, which contains nitrites. These are also found in bacon. Orson Welles liked bacon and eggs for breakfast. So does similarly rotund actor Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith is no relation to Kevin Bacon but they both like bacon for breakfast.

(Most of the research on this was gleaned from Wikipedia.com)