WEIRD...BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY'RE DEAD

"Beyond The Pale has a death theme going, doesn't it?" That was what a friend said to me shortly after reading my last post. And on close examination of what I've written here so far, I have to agree with that friend's assessment. It's not that I'm in love with the idea of writing about death, it's just that death, and especially suicides, happen to be such a great source of material. Weird, fascinating, poignant, and otherwise. Still, I don't want to this blog to become known only for its posts about death. So, to offset things...here's something completely different...three bizarre facts about celebrities that have nothing to do with death...well, two of them don't anyway. So, then, from the less shadowy section beyond the pale...

MAYBE "THE BIRDS" ATE IT

For years, it has been rumored that Alfred Hitchcock, the director of "The Birds", "Vertigo," and a host of other classic and highly-regarded horror films, had no belly button. Is this even possible? Apparently, it is. While, like all warm-blooded creatures (i.e. mammals), Hitchcock was born with a bellybutton, following a series of operations in his stomach area, doctors stitched it up. According to actress Karen Black, who worked with Hitchcock in Family Plot, his final film, she was visiting the famed director at his cabin one day when "he lifted up his little, white shirt, and sure enough, they had sewn it over, horizontally." Black doesn't mention what she said in response to the impromptu peep show. But if showing an attractive young actress his lack of a navel was Hitchcock's version of a pick up line...well...Psycho suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense.

MARK HIS WORDS

American author and humorist Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835) was known for his biting wit and forward thinking, but was he a psychic as well? It seems possible. On the night that he was born, Haley's Comet was visible in the sky. As an adult, Twain predicted that he would die when the comet returned to the night sky. On April 21, 1910, 75 years after Twain's birth, one night after the orbit of Haley's Comet had brought it closest to earth, the great writer died. Many years earlier, after encouraging his younger brother, Henry to sign on as a steamboat pilot (a job which Twain had held as well), Twain dreamed that his brother had been killed in an explosion on board a steamboat. Several weeks later, his dream came true when Henry was killed in a boiler explosion on board the boat on which he was employed. With premonitions like those, it is no wonder that Twain was a close friend of renegade scientist Nikola Tesla. It's just too bad that he couldn't have stuck around for the Philidelphia Experiment in the late 1940s. Maybe, then, we'd know what really happened.

WHAT A (SMOKY) WORLD!

Margaret Hamilton, the former kindergarten teacher who played The Wicked Witch of The West in 1939's The Wizard of Oz, cut a formidable figure both as a witch and as Miss Alvira Gulch, the less fantastical role she played in the first part of the film. But after recieving second and third degree burns during the filming of the scene in which she first meets Dorothy and then disappears in a cloud of smoke, she became a little...well...smoke shy. On returning to the film set following six weeks of recovery, she was informed that she would be shooting a scene in which she would be riding a broom spewing smoke. Hamilton flatly refused to do the scene, and her stand-in, Betty Danko was recruited instead...and was seriously injured during the shot. Considering her bad luck with special effects, it's no wonder Hamilton turned down the role of the grandmother in the 1960s Addams Family TV series. There was a lot of smoke billowing up out of that cauldron the old lady was always stirring.

That's it for now...from beyond the pale.