Ah. So now the impossible has happened. It has been revealed in a new biography of Howard Hughes that he had an affair with Clark Gable.
Yes, with Rhett Butler. So, not content with having sex with Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Jayne Russell, we now know Howard Hughes also frolicked with chaps.
So who conjoined with whom in that mythical Hollywood past? Can it possibly be true that John Wayne had an affair with Stan Laurel? Even though I just made that up, why not? I read recently that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were briefly an item. Did Cary bite Randolph's stetson or his saddle? I cannot say - but I know that the cowboy actor was discovered by Howard Hughes, who, as we now know, seems to have nibbled at both ends of the apple.
Presumably Hughes must have made hay with Tallulah Bankhead, not least because she did with everyone: she supposedly once worked her way through the entire football team of the University of Southern California, plus reserves, and possibly the boy carrying the quartered oranges, and a couple of hot-dog sellers, and maybe a few fans, in a single session. No doubt she was able to fit Rin Tin Tin into her busy schedule - ah, and staggering out of her bedroom comes Roy Rogers, and an even more shagged-looking Trigger.
We know about Warren Beatty. He probably lost his virginity to Queen Elizabeth the queen mother, who it is said, whiled away the more boring bits of the second World War with handsome young sentries at the palace.
Her pelvic career was probably just coming to an end when his was starting around 1960, and no doubt she was able to give the rising young star a few tips on what makes a girl happy. Which is what he proceeded to do for about 40 years for most of the world's women.
You do not believe me? Ah well, perhaps you are right to be sceptical. But if Danny Kaye and Sir Laurence Olivier once disported between the sheets, as they apparently did, what is so inherently implausible - say - about Warren and Golda Meir? It is true that the Israeli prime minister looked like a cross between President Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Durante, but this didn't mean she lacked libido. In fact, the reverse. No young second lieutenant was safe with her.
So why wouldn't a nice Jewish boy like Warren see something in a nice Jewish girl like Golda - though to be sure, when the arrangements were made, he initially thought he was going to be bedding Goldie Hawn. However, he's a clever boy. He probably spotted that Golda was not Goldie, but proceeded to do the gallant thing, as he usually did with women, regardless of their age of appearance. Indeed, if you laid all the women he has bedded ended to end, I wouldn't be in the least surprised.
One can see why women find Warren Beatty attractive. However, the desirability of certain men has long since been a source of despair and wonder amongst the rest of the male sex. There can scarcely have been a more obnoxious, irritating little tyke in the history of cinema than Mickey Rooney, real name Joe Yule, - yet he was fabulously successful with women, perhaps because of his Yule log. Incredibly, he was Ava Gardner's first husband.
Ava Gardner, the most beautiful woman of her generation, was later married to Frank Sinatra - and as we have seen, she had a fling with Howard Hughes, who discovered, and also engaged in some horizontal refreshment with, Jean Harlow. But then Hughes also had sex with Clark Gable, who had an interesting taste in women. Gable's first wife was 14 years older than him, and his second was 17 years older than him. His third, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash. She had earlier been married to William Powell, who was later engaged to Jean Harlow, who. . .no, no, I'm losing track here.
Gable, like James Stewart, both saw active service as aviators in the second World War; so too did Laurence Olivier, and all three had to fight to be accepted - Olivier with the Fleet Air Army of the Royal Navy. Perhaps those years of rum, sodomy and the lash prepared him for his tryst with Danny Kaye. He was also, famously, married to poor, demented Vivien Leigh.
Danny Kaye - real name David Kaminski - meanwhile was married to humble, unknown but very clever Sylvia Fine, who was, alas, a lass of virtue.
So back to Ava Gardner, whose one-time husband Frank Sinatra later had a fling with Mia Farrow, whose grandfather - a Major O'Sullivan - was an officer in the Connaught Rangers, and whose mother Maureen O'Sullivan was the first Jane in the Tarzan series. Maureen married a director, John Farrow, who, like her father a generation before, was seriously injured in the opening days of a world war. Their daughter, Mia Farrow, after a famous affair with Frank Sinatra (who had been married to Ava Gardner, who'd had an affair with Howard Hughes, who'd done it with Carl Gable) married Allen Konigsberg, better known as Woody Allen. Now it is not widely known, but his mother and Howard Hughes had. . .ah, but out of space again. What a shame.