GARLAND. Moppet or puppet?
If there’s “reflected glory” when it comes to relatives and other people associated with popular luminaries, can there also be “reflected infamy” when stars’ hangers-on engage in reprehensible actions that tarnish the names of the celebrities they’re related to? You bet! The Hollywood grapevine is full of juicy anecdotes about parents, children and siblings of stars who have brought pain rather than gain to stars’ stellar reputations.
Way back when, the “stage” mothers (known as “momagers” these days) of luminaries like Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Cher and Sally Field nursed unfulfilled ambitions of becoming superstars themselves, and they threw their weight around the world of show business. Specifically, Sylvester Stallone’s mom, Jacqueline, capitalized on his success by becoming a “celebrity astrologer.” She also drove people around her nuts with her loopy remarks, like her spaced-out recollections about her forebears’ origins: “My family is half-French and half-Martian!”
Hand signals
Notoriously manipulative parents shaped the young lives of stars like Judy Garland, Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor. Liz’s mom would stand behind the movie cinema and cue her daughter in the scene being shot, like a pet being put through its paces, with hand signals. For her part, Marilyn Monroe relied, not on a manipulative relative, but on her acting coaches, to similarly “guide” her through a scene with signals—to her directors’ disgust!
And Shirley Temple’s mother was sure that all of her precociously gifted daughter’s success was due to her ministrations. She went as far as to boast, “Long before my lovely daughter was even born, I influenced her future life by steeping myself in the world of music, art and natural beauty. This prenatal preparation made Shirley what she is today!”
Sex kitten
Also infamous for her pushy ways was the mother of Brooke Shields, who prematurely agreed to transform her adolescent daughter into a precocious sex kitten, by way of a winking Playboy pictorial at only age 10, and au naturel teen romps like “Blue Lagoon,” etc.
Macaulay Culkin didn’t have a better time of it, either, as his dad threatened to pull his son out of the sequel to the blockbuster hit, “Home Alone,” if his studio didn’t agree to his onerous terms, which cost the production company additional millions of dollars to accommodate.
To make things worse, the Culkin couple’s marital woes became tabloid fodder, shocking Hollywood with mutual accusations of verbal and physical violence that negatively affected Macaulay’s sunny-side-up image—and led to his eventual downfall.
What about the local show biz scene? Similar horror stories abound, proving that our “momagers” can be “world-class” players, too, when it comes to living lives of “reflected infamy”!