Eartha Kitt & James Dean, early 1950s (via PBS/American Masters). Dean studied dance with Kitt and said he learned more about acting from her lessons than he had in any acting class.

“[James Dean] said to me, ‘I want to move like you, can you teach me how to move my body like you do on stage?’ And I told him where to meet me, here in New York and that’s where we met for dance classes. And that’s where Jamie and I always met downstairs from that studio to have coffee, to have our little tete-a-tete conversations.”

“He was like my brother. He had something in him that he didn’t understand. He wanted to learn from me how to move on the stage the way I do, so I taught him how to control his body and how to let the words physically carry you from this point to that point. I was in a play and he’d just done his first film so we were both becoming known at that time. It was a good time.”

-Eartha Kitt

Claudette Colbert & Carole Lombard (via zuma)

“When Dietrich, Lombard, and I were all working for Paramount… I was the girl next door- but a chic girl next door. Marlene was sexy; and Carole Lombard was the girl next door but crazy.”

-Claudette Colbert

Cary Grant & Amelia Earhart (via corbis).The two met when Grant starred in Wings in the Dark (1935) with Myrna Loy, whose character was based on Earhart.

Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., & the rest of the Rat Pack live at the Sands (1963)

“I’d like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy.”

-Dean Martin

Ella Fitzgerald & Marilyn Monroe listening to jazz at Hollywood’s Tiffany Club (1955) 

“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt. It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo [ed. note: who had refused to book Fitzgerald because she was black], and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night.

She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard… After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”

Oh, to be a fly: Tallulah Bankhead & Groucho Marx (1931)

Jeanne Moreau & Miles Davis during the recording of Davis’s classic soundtrack for Elevator to the Gallows (1958, dir. Louis Malle) (via)

Edith Piaf & Alain Delon, 1959 

Fred Astaire, Harpo Marx, Lucille Ball, & Jose Iturbi rehearse the routine they will put on for troops during the WWII USO tour (via)

Orson Welles performs the “Broomstick Suspension” magic trick with Lucille Ball (1956, photo taken during the filming of the I Love Lucy episode, “Lucy Meets Orson Welles”) (scene online here)

“I’ve never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick, you know. I don’t know anybody who wants to see a magic trick. So I do it professionally; it’s the only way I get to perform.

I went once to a birthday party for [MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat. On came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me, you know. And the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said goodnight to Louis B. Mayer and nobody’d asked me to do a magic trick. So the rabbit and I went home.”

-Orson Welles, in 1982 documentary The Orson Welles Story

Salvador Dalí sketching Harpo Marx (1937, via).

Dalí, a huge Marx Brothers fan with a particular admiration for Harpo, whom he viewed as “the most surrealist figure in Hollywood”, sent him a harp with barbed wire for strings and forks & spoons for tuning knobs as a Christmas present in 1936. Delighted, Harpo wrote Dalí that he would be “happy to be smeared by you” if the artist ever found himself in Hollywood. The next month Dalí arrived, brushes and easel in hand. The resultant painting is lost, but a monochrome pencil-and-ink study has survived (here).

Dalí wrote an entertaining, if rather implausible, account of this meeting in a 1937 Harper’s Bazaar article:

“I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest. In Harpo’s pupils glows the same spectral light to be observed in Picasso’s.”

Dalí later wrote a script for a Marx Brothers movie, Giraffes on Horseback Salad, which included, among other things, burning giraffes wearing gas masks & Harpo catching dwarves with a butterfly net. The film was never made. Groucho Marx, that killjoy, claimed to have scuttled the project: “It wouldn’t play.”

Humphrey Bogart & Katharine Hepburn at a press reception at Claridges (London 1951, via popperfoto)

“That woman is sensational. I’ll tell you frankly, she used to irritate the bejeepers out of me with all that ‘mahvelous’ talk. But when I got to know her I found out she’s one helluva dame.”

-Bogart on Hepburn