Claroscureaux Deux: October 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Saturday, October 13, 2012

L'Affaire Zadora

So, I finally watched that installment of Celebrity Ghost Stories (thanks for the reminder, Page!) to see the Pia Zadora Story. She's the wretch once famous for vile films, now infamous for destroying what was arguably Los Angeles' most famous landmark home, Pickfair, claiming it was riddled with termites.

But, wait! That wasn't the true reason, she says in ominous tones with lots of flash-cutting to a black and white feathered ghost lady haw-hawing maniacally.

It was because, she informs us somewhat disingenuously, Pickfair was haunted.

Oooohhhhh. Cue THUNDER and LIGHTNING.

Her airhead account reveals the original house was built by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, JR.

It was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., but we can let her slide on that one because she isn't generally known as being the sharpest tool in the shed. And it wasn't built by them, it was a pre-existing hunting lodge that they remodeled. The producers didn't even have the decency to show photos of the original home during Pia's wobbly historic spiel, treating us instead to the tacky grandiose interiors that went up in its place.

After both she and her children saw this hee-hawing flapper in a white dress, Pia "researched," and discovered that Fairbanks had a mistress who'd died at Pickfair. I'd sure like to know what book or bong she picked that tidbit out of, because nobody else ever heard of such a thing happening.

If the mistress's ghost had to haunt anybody it would have been Mary, I'm sure, who lived on at the house until her death at 87. Even somebody hitting the sauce as hard as America's Sweetheart did would have noticed a thing like that. Just saying....

Still, if you're bored it's worth watching for the cheese factor and the unintentional comic relief when you hear Pia say, "I was besides myself" because of the haunting.

It smacks of a lame attempt to vindicate herself using the single platform that would have her, because decades after the fact, she's still known to anybody who gives a damn about historic preservation as
that cretin who demolished Pickfair.