Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (30 page)

Hair from the tail of an elephant is good luck.

Nut:
The daily cost of operating a show. Legend has it that local authorities would remove a nut from the wagon wheel of the circus office and keep it to ensure that the circus didn’t leave town before its local taxes were paid.

Rats can't vomit, which is why they are so susceptible to poison.

Actors won’t even call it by its name
—
they refer to it as “the Scottish play.” Why? Because they say it’s cursed. You may not be superstitious, but after reading this, you’ll never think of this play the same way.

In a scene from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth,
three witches stand around a bubbling cauldron, brewing up a stew which includes ingredients such as eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog—“double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble”—we all know the scene. But there’s a story behind that scene… and a curse on the play.

In 1606 King James I commissioned Shakespeare to write a play in honor of the visit of his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark. The play Shakespeare wrote was
Macbeth.

James was no stranger to tragedy. He was taken from his mother shortly after birth and never knew her. His father was murdered soon after that. His mother was forced from the throne of Scotland, imprisoned for 19 years in England, and beheaded by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. James began his rule of Scotland at age 19, married Anne of Denmark, had nine children, and survived a number of assassination attempts. When Queen Elizabeth died, he ascended her throne.

Moving to England from Scotland was like turning on a light in a dark room for James. He was particularly taken with Shakespeare’s plays. He gave Shakespeare and his company royal protection in a time when actors were considered scoundrels. Shakespeare now had the security, popularity, respect, and money that he needed. He produced six new plays in the next five years.

King James was fascinated by witchcraft and obsessed by death and demons. He wrote a book about demonology and was considered the foremost authority on the subject. With this in mind, Shakespeare sat down to write a play that looked seriously at the king’s favorite subject, and he did his homework. The plot was a thinly disguised accounting of the death of James’s father; the witchcraft scene was crafted with care and filled with authentic details.

In the 1700s, trappers could get a dollar for a buckskin. Hence the term
buck.

Some say the play’s witchcraft spells and incantations were too faithfully reproduced, that they created a curse and that the curse is renewed every time the words are uttered. Others claim that local witches were so incensed at having their secrets revealed that they placed a perpetual curse upon the play. Whatever the case, for 400 years,
Macbeth
has been uncannily surrounded by death and disaster. So malevolent is the spell that it is said that bad luck will befall any actor who merely quotes from the play.

The curse manifested itself immediately. The young actor scheduled to play Lady Macbeth for King James came down with a fever right before the performance. Some accounts say he died. King James, who had a phobia about knives and gore, was horrified by the death scenes, which were realistically portrayed with guts and blood secured from a butcher. He immediately banned performances of
Macbeth
for five years.

After the ban ended, the play was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. A few days later, the theater burned to the ground and with it all of the company’s scenery, props, costumes, and manuscripts.

Skeptical? Here is just a sampling of the disasters that have surrounded
Macbeth
in the 20th century:

• In the early 1900s, the Moscow Arts Company was doing a dress rehearsal when actor Constantin Stanislavski forgot his lines in the middle of the murder scene. He whispered for a prompt but the prompter was silent. He
yelled
for a prompt, but the prompter remained silent. Investigating, he found the prompter slumped over the script, dead. The show never opened.

• During a 1937 production at the Old Vic Theatre in England, the theater’s founder, Lilian Baylis, suddenly died of a heart attack just before the play opened. Laurence Olivier, who was starring in the lead role, missed death by seconds when a sandbag accidentally fell from the rafters.

• In 1948, during a production at Stratford, Connecticut, Diana Wynyard as Lady Macbeth loudly announced she thought the curse was ridiculous. She also decided it was silly to play her sleepwalking scene with her eyes open, and tried it with her eyes closed. She walked off the edge of the stage during the next performance and fell 15 feet down.

• A version of the play directed by John Gielgud in 1942 was plagued by death. First, Beatrice Fielden-Kaye, in the role of one of the witches, died of a heart attack. Next, Marcus Barron, in the role of Duncan, died of angina pectoris. Another of the witches, Annie Esmond, died on stage one night while she was vigorously dancing around the cauldron. Finally, set designer John Minton committed suicide in his studio, surrounded by his designs for the
Macbeth
sets and costumes. The repainted sets were later sent on tour with matinee idol Owen Nares, who died on the tour.

• A Russian version of the play scheduled to be filmed in Georgia was canceled when nine members of the crew died of food poisoning on location.

• During a 1971 production at the Mercer O’Casey Theatre, no less than seven burglaries and one fire marred the three-month run.

The average American makes 3.4 supermarket trips per week. Most popular day: Friday.

To avoid the curse, veteran actors give this advice: Walk out of the dressing room, turn around three times, spit or swear, knock on the door three times, and then humbly ask for readmittance. If that doesn’t work, try quoting this line from one of Shakespeare’s “lucky” plays,
The Merchant of Venice:
“Fair thoughts and happy hours attend you.”

Final note:
Abraham Lincoln was quoting passages from
Macbeth
to his friends the evening before he was assassinated.

Random fact: The Cairo Opera House was destroyed by fire in 1970.… the Cairo fire station was located in the same building.

A typical American child sees 80,000 TV commercials by the age of 16.

You’d be surprised by how many films in Hollywood are started… without ever being finished. Here’s a look at a few that will probably never make it onto the big screen.

Starring:
An entirely new cast of young actors playing James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the other original
Star Trek
characters

Making the Movie:
Starfleet Academy
was intended as an “Episode 1” prequel to the original
Star Trek
TV series: the story of how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy met at Starfleet Academy. The film was the brainchild of Harve Bennett, producer of Paramount’s
Star Trek
feature films.

Kiss of Doom:
Bennett was also the archrival of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original TV series. Roddenberry had his own ideas for a
Star Trek
prequel; when he learned of Bennett’s plans for
Starfleet Academy,
he set out to destroy the film by spreading rumors that Bennett wanted to model it after the
Police Academy
series.

Actor George Takei (Sulu) did his part by appearing at Star Trek conventions, urging fans to protest if he and his co-stars were replaced with new actors. “This pressure from all sides… doomed the academy idea for the time being,” Chris Gore writes in
The 50 Greatest
Movies
Never Made. “Starfleet Academy
as envisioned by Harve Bennett now resides amid the dust of the unproduced story pile over at Paramount.”

Starring:
Jaws

Making the Movie:
Disappointed with how poorly
Jaws 2
did at the box office, Universal Studios gave serious thought to handing their killer-shark franchise over to the folks at
National Lampoon
to see if they could do anything with it. Screenwriters John Hughes and Tod Carroll came up with story for Jaws
3, People 0,
a comedy about the making of a
Jaws
sequel.

Kiss of Doom:
In the end, Universal dumped the idea and made
Jaws
3-D instead. It bombed even worse than
Jaws 2.

Director John Ford hired an American Indian rainmaker to get the right, weather for the filming of
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
in 1949. It worked.

Starring:
Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin
Making the Movie:
By 1962 Monroe’s emotional and substance abuse problems had caught up with her. She was in no condition to work on a film, but she had to complete her four-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox. So she signed on to make
Something’s Got to Give
under George Cukor, one of the few directors she was still willing to work with.

Sure enough, when filming started in May, Monroe proved impossible to work with: on the days when she bothered to show up at all, she was usually hours late and often unable to do her scenes.

Kiss of Doom:
True to the film’s title, something did give: Monroe. Her erratic behavior helped to push the film more than $1 million over budget in just a few weeks of filming. 20th Century-Fox was also in deep financial trouble with
Cleopatra,
already well on its way to becoming the most expensive film ever made. They couldn’t afford another loser, so they fired Monroe, then rehired her when Dean Martin threatened to walk off the set. By then it was too late: Monroe died of a drug overdose in August 1962, before production could resume.

Starring:
The Marx Brothers

Making the Movie:
Director Billy Wilder
(Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend, Some Like It Hot)
got the idea while filming
The Apartment
near the United Nations building in New York. It occurred to him that the Cold War seriousness of the U.N. would make a great backdrop for a Marx Brothers film, even though the brothers had not worked together since their 1950 film
Love Happy.
He pitched the idea to Groucho Marx; he liked it and told Wilder to work out a deal with his brother (and agent) Gummo Marx.

Kiss of Doom:
A
Day at the U.N.
came late in the Marx Brothers’ careers… too late: Harpo had a heart attack while the script was being written, and although he got better, insurance companies refused to cover the Marx Brothers for the time that it would take to make the film. Sadly, the insurance companies were right: Chico died in 1961, ending the hope of one last Marx Brothers film.