For the old Anglo-Saxon nobility, it was a near genocidal catastrophe. Almost all of the Anglo-Saxon nobles saw their lands and property seized by their conquerors. Within a few short years most of the greatest lords were dead, if they hadn’t already been slaughtered at Hastings.
Some of their lesser kind tried to sustain rebellion and resistance, the most famous of these being Hereward the Wake, who would become a particularly beloved English folk hero subject to revivals of interest in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But customary brutal efficiency of the Normans proved more obdurate than Saxon resentment as the years rolled on, and eventually all of these rebellions petered out.
Others from the previously ruling Anglo-Saxon nobility fled into foreign exile, as they had done more briefly in the power struggles between themselves or in the years of Canute and his sons, with some even becoming exotic members of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire. There’s a fascinating little known quirk of history that saw a significant exodus of the English flee to the patronage of the Byzantine Empire. Some have asserted that for many generations a kind of New England existed under Byzantine patronage in what is now the Russian controlled Crimea, with four separate chroniclers between the 11th and 14th centuries claiming that between 235-350 ships fled from England to this distant region after the Conquest. All of these chroniclers claim that the refugees founded towns and villages that the Byzantine Emperors allowed them to create and govern, so long as men from these areas served in his military forces and personal bodyguard. Subsequent history and stages of Byzantine collapse swept these English links away, perhaps becoming just a buried DNA trace shared by small numbers of Ukrainians and Russians utterly unaware of their ultimate origin.
Back in England, the Conqueror was coldly determined to break all resistance, and chose overwhelming force of response as the means of doing so. When the remaining northern Anglo-Saxon Earls rebelled, William had ample excuse to remove the last truly significant Anglo-Saxon noble families from positions of influence. His savage response was an orgy of destruction known as the Harrowing of the North, which laid waste to towns, villages and settlements across the entire northern regions of the newly conquered kingdom.
Many historians have argued that the North never fully recovered, and that the modern North-South divide was essentially set by these events almost a thousand years ago. William was so brutal in suppressing revolt that effectively some of the richest regions of his realm became, seemingly permanently, significantly reduced in wealth, population and influence.
What was unique about the Norman Conquest was not the fact that the English had been subdued, or even how close the English came to extinction, but the permanence and the totality of their defeat. Two centuries earlier the English faced eradication and replacement by the Vikings (genetic and cultural forefathers of the Normans, who were merely Gallicised Vikings settled at the mouth of the Seine by treaty between Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, and a French king desperately seeking to buy off persistent raiders). Before Alfred the Great’s miraculous turnaround, it might be accurately said that the English had been reduced to a handful of outlaws in a pestilential marsh. There, perhaps, they had come closer to complete eradication than they did following 1066.
But that was not a permanent reduction, that was not a reduction that would define the difference between the working class and the upper class in England for the next thousand years. The Vikings were a cruel storm, whereas the Normans were a permanent change of climate. It’s estimated that 70% of the private land in England is still owned by families descended from the 20,000 Normans who landed in 1066. While some Normans (and the Bretons who formed part of their number) married Saxon women, it was Norman blood, primarily, that would from that point on flow in the veins of the English upper classes. It’s only amongst the top 1% of our society that Norman DNA had a significant impact, whilst the rest of us (save for some other minor Viking influence) remained solely a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Briton.
One of the things which is therefore odd about the history of the English and of English genetics is that despite numerous conquests most of us were ethnically very homogenous, with part of our heritage stretching back thousands of years before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and part of it coming from the Anglo-Saxons exclusively. For almost a thousand years no further conquests came to complicate either our blood or our ways. Immigration was minuscule, statistically irrelevant. Modish modern recasting of our past is that English identity is one of the most mixed on the planet and always has been, a view which exists solely to suppress the uniqueness of England and its people and to deny them any priority in their own land. But it’s a false narrative, shaped solely by modern race hypocrisies and modern ideological impositions.
It’s far more historically accurate to say that the English had the kind of homogeneity you would expect of an island nation with some martial prowess to its name, and certainly far more internal cultural unity than we now possess.
Even the Saxon and Norman division was eventually healed. The Normans were an unusual people, both unusually ruthless in imposing themselves on others, and unusually adaptive to any environment they found themselves in. They tended to quickly conquer, but then relatively quickly assimilate. In France they learned French ways. In England, despite brutally suppressing the people they had conquered, they eventually learned English ways.
It took multiple generations, but there did come a time when no Norman descended lord spoke French as his first language, and when none would think of themselves as Norman rather than English. They came, they conquered…but then they too were conquered, assimilated into the same identity as those they ruled. The Anglo-Saxons won back by time, rather than by arms, what they had lost on the battlefield. While the same people ruled then, those people thought of themselves differently.
They thought of themselves as English. So who, in the end, conquered who?
That provides the English today with a comforting precedent, but it’s not likely to be one that is repeated. Because today the English are at a greater threat of non-existence than they have been since Alfred hid in a marsh. Today, they face an enemy in Islamic arrivals who have all the brutality of the Normans and none of their adaptability. Islamic arrivals have not and will not assimilate to the point of considering themselves English too, or of adapting to and respecting English ways. Instead, Muslims create Muslim only areas where the English are at risk.
What’s worse, the current political and media elite in Britain is completely happy for these arrivals (or others) to entirely replace the English. Imagine if instead of 20,000 Normans there were millions, and imagine if instead of fighting the invasion, every Anglo-Saxon leader had, from the start and with a calculated dishonesty, preferred the invader to their own people.
The fact is that there has been a long and multi-pronged attempt to eradicate the English, conducted quite often by the English themselves, by their educated and indoctrinated elites, by their comfortable and unaffected middle class who still support open borders and hard left parties from a position of being in the least diverse and most safe parts of the country.
Many years ago Orwell noted that the English intellectual despises his own Englishness and despises even more the poorer working class who do not share that learned and affected self-loathing. But what was a sort of sado-masochistic belief of those most removed from reality has become the operating belief of the society as a whole. It used to be thought that rough Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, a certain realism that disdained abstract approaches contrary to perceivable reality, was a feature that protected the English nation from the excesses that wracked their Continental neighbours.
The English were too sensible to fall to communist revolution. The English were too in touch with reality to go for extreme hard left social positions. For centuries English compromise was not moral compromise, but a sane man’s avoidance of insanity. It gave English governance a stability found nowhere else in Europe, and even when fanaticism did lead to civil war, what is remarkable about the English is that both sides were chastened by it, and learned to compromise better. that’s what the Restoration showed, and it’s what the bloodless Glorious Revolution showed too.
Eventually Saxon common sense had so blunted Norman cold ambition that the English were better at resolving the differences between themselves than other places were, especially the differences between the social classes.
All this survived so long as they were essentially one people….and so long as the intellectuals were not directing the social attitudes of the nation. The strongest defence of English sanity and its often unwritten constitutional settlement, was that not many of us went to university.
Now though, the attitude that Orwell wrote about is totally dominant, and it welcomes invasion and the subjugation of the English with open arms, indeed with active and malign assistance from its police, its judiciary and its media and political class.
For long years the English were quietly but consistently being replaced, abused and betrayed, the demographics of their nation fundamentally altered against their will, whilst at the same time their very existence, their own ethnicity, was denied. They have been told for 70 years that they do not in fact exist, that they are invaders themselves as if a millennia and a half of ownership counts for nothing and as if their blood ties to an even older Briton heritage don’t exist either. Looking at the difference between 19th century and 20th century talk on these topics is remarkable.
English school texts used to talk about the history of the English race, knowing full well there was such a distinct thing and that it was distinct and valuable not just ethnically, but in terms of its culture and achievements too. Today, the race is dropped except when calling them racist. Today, it has become ‘you do not exist…and your existence is the greatest evil there ever was’.
Go into any of those outmoded things called a bookshop and you can find whole walls of texts devoted to this message. Do a Google or an Amazon search on the English or on the British Empire. Post-colonial grievance porn will predominate what you find. For every mild defence of English history and heritage, the kind of still too polite and still too diffident rebuttal offered by a Douglas Murray or a Niall Ferguson, there will be a hundred books spreading the poison of what is essentially Anglophobia (a far, far more real thing, with far, far less justification, than ‘Islamophobia’).
We live in a nation that teaches hatred of our own officially, while pretending that hatred of the Other is the really big problem.
Third generation immigrants comfortably settled in England (and doing very well socially and financially, thank you very much) will tell you how utterly vile all English history was, how the English invented racism and conquest, how the British Empire was worse than Nazi Germany, how Churchill was in favour of gas chambers or Britain invented concentration camps or how India was ruined by the Raj or how Churchill (again) deliberately starved millions in Bengal.
All of these are lies, of course. But they are the common intellectual understanding of the people who rule the English now, and the half-arsed, hypocritically racist truisms with which anyone who gets to an upper level of media and politics has been schooled. They are the ‘I know a tiny fraction of history, but I don’t know enough to know the truth’ version of history that you will encounter in online debates and from both students and professors at English universities.
I don’t think people realise just how fully bizarre it is to have the common assumptions of a people become both that they don’t exist and that their existence explains all evil, at the same time, and for everyone to go around acting as if this is normal. The only other people in the world who have been subjected to this level of hate and gaslighting regarding their identity are the Jews, who have of course suffered this for longer and who also have very many of their own doing it (again, indoctrinated leftists).
Under Conservative governments, we have had people embarrassed to fight back or oppose any of this, or people who support insane levels of demographic replacement for purely selfish economic reasons. Official conservatism has from the 1960s on (and really sooner than that) been terrified of the social stigma of Englishness and of celebrating Englishness. Like others in their social class, alleged conservatives of the Official Blue Party learned at university and at dinner parties that actually liking the English was vulgar and unsophisticated, and that sneering at them was much more nuanced and acceptable.
Attitudes to Englishness divide primarily on class grounds, with the people with the least money and power considering it natural and good to favour your own, and the people with the most money and power considering it natural and good to prioritise and favour anyone else except your own. Once you had that intellectual disdain for the English (based on revisionist and malign history often penned by outright Marxists) percolate through the whole of ‘polite society’ and become the normal lesson of the education system, you ensured that you would eventually get a government that really does want to see the English wiped out.
Not just culturally. But actually extinguished. As a history, as a people, as anything at all except an evil that has been rightly removed from the world.
That is the government and the ruling class that the English have today, even though its membership is primarily white still and many of its chief commissars and apparatchiks are genetically English themselves.
According to now official mantra and even sentencing for crime, the only English that are decent and tolerable are the English who accept, welcome and speed their total demographic replacement and extinction. You can have a place at the top table for one or two more generations if you work assiduously to ensure that your people no longer exist in any meaningful way. If you hate them and despise them, if you base your own idea of self-worth in denying their worth, then you can become a Prime Minister or a Home Secretary or a sitting Judge. But ONLY if you pretend that it does not matter that a million little white children were raped, and that talking about that is far worse than doing it. ONLY if you pretend that footage of huge armed Muslim gangs terrorising white people isn’t real, whilst you imprison people for sharing it.
My American friends and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders too experience something similar, but I think as adjuncts and versions of this Anglophobia in power. When the US is demonised and hated it is specifically the white portion of America that is demonised and hated, and even more specifically the Anglo heritage of this successor nation. The same is true in Canada, or in Australia, and especially true in New Zealand (as an interesting aside on these attitudes, the Māori people designated as especially worthy by being indigenous have been in New Zealand a shorter length of time than the English have been in England. But the English are never recognised as indigenous, nor is any other white population anywhere in the world).
Kamala Harris recently praised Joe Biden as one of the most consequential Presidents in US history. In one sense, if you take consequential as a positive, it is an absurdity. But in another way it’s probably the most honest thing she has ever said. The half-dead zombie that is Biden is not consequential in any positive fashion or as an individual imposing himself on history. But he is extremely consequential in terms of the impact of his administration, from the nature of its illegitimate arrival to the nature of his personal ignominious departure. He is toweringly consequential if you take that to mean negative consequences inflicted by his administration in his alleged period of rule.
Keir Starmer in the UK is already similarly consequential, after only a month in power. What Blair began, he will finish, just as what Obama began, Biden continued. And that’s a war on the English, a racial war on the English and anything they ever built or their descendants ever built (even their rebellious descendants).
Not since 1066 has a government in my land so hated and despised the people it rules, and been so determined to enslave, reduce, deny, exploit and destroy them. What is happening with mass immigration, with unacknowledged but real Muslim conquest, and with erasure from both the history books and the streets, represents a deliberate attempt to expunge a distinct people from the world, to consign them solely to history. And if you don’t believe that is true, visit the parts of Birmingham or London or Bradford where it has already happened, and find me an Englishman there.
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The presidential campaign of 1800 pitted Adams against the man who was both the sitting vice president and leader of the opposition,Thomas Jefferson. It was almost certainly the most bitterly fought election in American history. The political culture of the young democracy was still evolving, and there was not yet an established boundary between acceptable rhetoric and outright slander. The campaign was one of personal vilification, rumormongering, and mudslinging not quite like anything the American people had ever seen before, or have since.
Arch Federalist and Yale College president Timothy Dwight warned his congregation that if Jefferson won the election, "The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin frenzy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaiire and the dragoons of Marat." A Federalist newspaper in New York predicted that a republican victory would bring a flood of French and Irish revolutionares, "the refuse of Europe," who would launch a Jacobin-style reign of terror against all who love order, peace, virtue and religion.: For the first time rumors surfaced that a slavewoman who lived at Monticello, Sally Hemings, had borne Jefferson's children.*
*Comparisons of Y-chromosome DNA samples taken from Jefferson's male relatives and Sally Heming's sons have established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the rumors were true.
Six Frigates, the Epic History of the United State Navy, p.147
Ian W. Toll
What Ludwig von Mises Meant by “Democracy”
By Ryan McMaken
August 15, 2024
“Democracy” is one of those terms that is essentially useless unless the one using the word first defines his terms. After all, the term “democratic” can mean anything from small-scale direct democracy to the mega-elections we see in today’s huge constitutional states. Among the modern social-democratic Left, the term often just means “something I like.”
The meaning of the term can also vary significantly from time to time and from place to place. During the Jacksonian period, the Democratic party—which at the time was the decentralist, free-market, Jeffersonian party—was called “the Democracy.” By the mid twentieth century, the term meant something else entirely. In Europe, the term came to take on a variety of different meanings from place to place.
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For our purposes here, I want to focus on how one particular European—Ludwig von Mises—used the term.
Although many modern students of Mises are often highly skeptical of democracy of various types, it is clear that Mises himself used the term with approval. But, Mises used the word in a way that was quite different from how most use it today. The Misesian view contrasts with modern conceptions of a “democracy” in which majority rule is forcibly imposed upon the whole population. Because modern democratic states exercise monopolistic power over their populations, there is then no escape from this “will of the majority.”
Misesian democracy is something else altogether.
Mises’s vision of democracy must be understood in light of his support for unlimited secession as a tool against majoritarian rule. For Mises, “democracy” means the free exercise of a right of exit, by which the alleged “will of the majority” is rendered unenforceable against those who seek to leave.
Moreover, we can only understand Mises’s idea of democracy if we note that Mises’s conception of a liberal “state” is not really a state at all; it contradicts the common definition of a state as an organization with a monopoly on the means of coercion. For Mises, membership within a “free” state is ultimately voluntary since secession remains always an option.
Mises’s View of Self-Determination and Secession
Mises supported the idea of a polity he called a “free national state.” However, Mises’s national state is not a monopolistic state because Mises maintained that “[n]o people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”
For Mises, the people of any portion of a national state are free to exercise their right of self-determination and by exiting the state via secession. As Mises put it:
The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. …If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.
Mises contrasts this type of free association with the “princely state” which is essentially the modern state as we have come to know it. The princely state, Mises writes, “strives restlessly for expansion of its territory and for increase in the number of its subjects. …The more land and the more subjects, the more revenues and the more soldiers.” When this type of state is not expanding, it is busy maintaining its borders, and thus, once within the borders of this state, all populations are denied any right of self-determination. After all, to tolerate self-determination—and the right of secession that naturally follows—would be to tolerate the dismemberment of the state.
Mises presents an alternative:
Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations … the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of a state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so.
Only if we consider the context presented by Mises here can we understand Mises when he presents his definition of democracy: “Democracy is self-determination, self-government, self-rule.” Put another way, “democracy” means groups of people—including even very small groups of people—can freely chose either to remain within a certain state, or to leave. Thus, we see that this idea of democracy is incompatible with the very idea of the modern state.
For Mises, democracy definitely does not mean what it has come to mean in modern usage: that all citizens within a specific state territory are bound to submit themselves to the laws approved by that territory’s ruling majority coalition, no matter what.
The Problem of Majority Rule
Indeed, Mises was thoroughly acquainted with the problem of majoritarian rule and how it is used to strip individuals of their rights. This process is especially dangerous in diverse societies where the overall population contains many cultural groups with incompatible values.
Mises writes that in culturally diverse territories,
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the application of the majority principle leads not to the freedom of all but to the rule of the majority over the minority. … Majority rule signifies something quite different here than in nationally uniform territories; here, for a part of the people, it is not popular rule but foreign rule.
Mises notes that for those on the losing side—that is, those within the out-of-power minority cultural group—majority rule essentially means a permanent loss of any ability to meaningfully affect the policies adopted by the state. Those groups that have little hope of competing with the majority coalition have essentially been conquered and are subject to a type of “foreign rule.”
Mises understood that the only sustainable solution to this problem is to respect the right of self-determination secured by secession.
Without this right of self-determination and unlimited secession every state is, in practice, a monopolistic state that can impose its own values and agenda on the entire population. The presence of elections and “democratic” institutions—democratic in the common, modern sense—does little or nothing to mitigate the state’s power over those who would prefer to leave or govern themselves differently.
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.Today's selection -- from The Fixers by E.J. Flemming. Howard Strickling, Head of MGM Publicity, "fixed" star's problems during Hollywood's golden age.
“In late 1940, Strickling was called in to keep dozens of stars out of the press or jail. One big problem was Lionel Atwill's parties. He was born in England and came to the U.S. in 1932, building a career portraying suave villains in horror films such as Dr. X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). During his loan-outs to MGM, Atwill became friendly with many actors and executives. He lived in a lovely Spanish hacienda in Pacific Palisades at 13515 d'Este Drive and cultivated an image as an erudite country gentleman surrounded by English master paintings and antiques. But his dark side was obsessed with murder trials and his weekly sex parties. The parties were by invitation only, and guests had to bring a doctor's letter certifying a clean bill of health. After a formal dinner, guests retired to the living room and ceremoniously removed everything but jewelry. Atwill assigned partners according to personal preferences and visited different rooms during the weekend-long party.
“Strickling knew dozens of MGM stars visited the parties, including Gable, Crawford, Stanwyck, Dietrich, and allegedly Mannix. Atwill's soirees remained a Hollywood secret until early 1941. His 1940 Christmas party included several underage girls, and one 16-year-old Minnesota runaway named Sylvia claimed she became pregnant there. Atwill was found innocent at trial but subsequent court proceedings led to a conviction for perjury. Strickling prevailed upon the police and the prosecutors not to investigate his parties any further, and Sylvia was sent home from L.A. with a cash settlement.
“In February of 1941, as the Atwill party stories filled front pages, a Hollywood legend was dying in a small bungalow in Beachwood Canyon. For 25 years, Larry Edmunds' cramped Hollywood Boulevard bookstore was a favorite of the movie elite like W.C. Fields, the Barrymores, Basil Rathbone, and every beautiful actress in Hollywood. Edmunds had a voracious sexual appetite and affairs that included Mary Astor, Marlene Dietrich, Paulette Goddard, and dozens of others. He also slept with men. But by February 1941 he had drifted into alcoholism and mental illness and was living in a garage apartment at 2470 Beachwood Drive, consumed with alcoholic delusions. Police found his head wedged into the stove, dead from gas fumes, near a suicide note describing little men he saw crawling through the walls trying to kill him. Of more concern to Strickling, after he received the call from police, was the house full of mementoes from MGM stars, both male and female. His men rushed to the house to remove hundreds of notes and gifts from lovers of both sexes.
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| Hollywood movie studios in 1922 |
“In the early months of 1941, MGM began filming Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, with Spencer Tracy as the crazed doctor. He threatened to walk out unless Ingrid Bergman was given the sexy role of Ivy, the doctor's love interest, rather than Victor Fleming's choice, Lana Turner. The studio bowed and Bergman got the part. She was married to a Swedish doctor and had an infant daughter, but once filming began she slept with Fleming and Tracy, who stole the 26-year-old from his old friend. The fight over Bergman led to frequent arguments between the normally close friends. The fling lasted for several months until her husband heard about it and approached Mayer. Mannix ordered Tracy to end the affair or be fired, while Strickling told writers that Tracy was just ‘mentoring; the young actress and arranged photos of the two at a Beverly Hills ice cream shop sharing milk shakes.
“Tracy's next fling would last 30 years. When Katharine Hepburn first came to Hollywood, one of her RKO bosses described her as ‘a cross between a monkey and a horse.’ She wasn't the typical Hollywood ingenue: she was covered with freckles. David O. Selznick found her ‘sexually repellent,’ and described her as a ‘boa constrictor on a fast.’ Writer Dorothy Parker described her acting talent as ‘running a gamut of emotions from A to B.’ But fans loved her. Born into a wealthy Connecticut family, she moved to Hollywood in 1932. She left her husband behind, refusing to let him come along. But she did bring best friend Laura Harding, an heiress to the American Express fortune. The two were inseparable. Even Hepburn's marriage, forced upon her by her family, didn't end the strange relationship. She and Harding lived in a Coldwater Canyon house that had once belonged to Boris Karloff. By the time she met Tracy in early 1941, she was an established star with a resume that included A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940).
“She had relationships with men and women. Her men included Leland Hayward and Charles Boyer (both were married), and she lived with Howard Hughes. She called them her beaus but continued to share the house with Harding. The couple's weird arrangement was often discussed, since they acted as a couple and Harding described herself at RKO as ‘Kate's husband.’ Hepburn described her actual husband as being ‘swell about everything,’ and he stayed in Connecticut until she divorced him in 1936. Harding accompanied her to Mexico for the quickie divorce. In early 1941 Tracy and Hepburn were cast in Woman of the Year. The sexual tension between the two was evident from the first day. It's hard to explain why they got together. Tracy was an absentee married man and Hepburn had an aversion to marriage, whether from her earlier failure, her sexual preferences or, as she told writers, because ‘actors should never marry.; For Tracy's part, perhaps at 41 (to her 34) he wanted to trade affairs for a more permanent—but still illicit—relationship. Hepburn knew that Tracy was an alcoholic; mothering the recalcitrant drunk fulfilled some need for her. Whatever the reason, by the time shooting ceased in October 1941, the two were a couple.
“Strickling had an odd challenge with the Tracy-Hepburn pairing. For the most part, Tracy's indiscretions went unpunished in the press. He was so unfaithful that he appeared faithful. Louise lived in their Encino ranch and Tracy lived in hotels, but they spoke daily, and on most weekends he visited his children. Louise founded the John Tracy Clinic, named for their son (who was born deaf), using a sizeable portion of her own wealth. She raised millions to found research and treatment centers for deaf children. She also served on a variety of charity boards and was a sympathetic figure and a press favorite. Somehow his relationship with Hepburn went uncommented-on.
“At the same time in early October 1941, Strickling received a frantic phone call from Robert Taylor. His arranged marriage to Barbara Stanwyck was bizarre. It wasn't sexual other than experimentally, and he sometimes tested the waters with other women if the mood suited him. Stanwyck bullied Taylor in front of his friends. She once strode into their family room while Taylor had a drink with John Wayne and said, ‘Send your friends home. It's time for bed.’ He meekly complied, shrugging his shoulders.
“During that summer, 1941, Taylor had filmed Johnny Eager with Lana Turner. She made plays for most of her leading men and, Taylor's sexual identity and marital status aside, she went after him. In her memoirs Turner suggested she walked away from the affair because she didn't want to ‘break up a marriage.’ More likely, she walked away when Taylor told Stanwyck of his interest in the younger star. Even though his was a marriage of convenience between friends arranged by their studio, Stanwyck reacted strangely. She tried to kill herself.
“On October 7, 1941, Taylor found her in the bathroom bleeding profusely from gashes in her arms. She had severed arteries in her wrist and forearms and would have bled to death had Taylor not stumbled upon her. Strickling had her quietly taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the favorite for the MGM doctors. The press was told that Stanwyck was trying to open a jammed window and had accidentally cut herself. In an odd coincidence, Strickling would use the same excuse after a 1952 suicide attempt by Lana Turner.”
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| author: E.J. Flemming |
