My Favorite Wife (of Artie Shaw)

Evelyn Keyes was also beloved enough by directors John Huston and Charles Vidor to get them to marry her, so that gives her additional cred, in my book.

A little analysis of one of his solo compositions:

Lana Turner was 19 and still had her natural hair color when she married Shaw, it only lasted about a year.

They look like a teenager with her pervy uncle here.

R3, According to Lana, they eloped to Nevada on their first date.

Lana's mother had a habit of dropping by unannounced. That ended after Artie answered the front door stark naked.

I’ve read he drove Turner to a nervous breakdown... though perhaps she was overdramatizing. Or not.

He seemed to have a very strong love/hate relationship with women. He pursued extraordinarily beautiful women, then hit them with this demanding [italic]“What Are You Going to do for ME?!” [/italic]dynamic. Which is kind of confusing... as he was hitting on women for their looks then wanting them to be more than that. Which in a certain context is fine... but one doesn’t have to be an asshole about it.

I mean, go off and marry some multi medaled army nurse if what you want is a capable person. Don’t chase starlets!

R1, Evelyn's autobiography was dishy. She wrote of how much she enjoyed Kirk Douglas eating her pussy.

You wouldn't argue with him, would you?

Given how accurate he was with a gun.

Keyes also wrote how disorienting it was, given their height difference, to have sex with Anthony Quinn when she was young. There was just too much of him... everywhere.

R8, My favorite Anthony Quinn anecdote was one he included in his autobiography.

When he was a young lad and came home very late at night, his grandmother would make him stand on a chair, pull his pants down and she'd sniff his cock to see if he had been having sex.

Weird

[quote]R9 When he was a young lad and came home very late at night, his grandmother would make him stand on a chair, pull his pants down and she'd sniff his cock to see if he had been having sex.

Outrageous.

Couldn’t the family have hired one of US for that job??

Disgusting. What a family to grow up in.

Artie Shaw ahs a HUGE cock. Even Judy Garland wanted it.

If that's true, who did he screw in addition to the wives? Any guys?

He was engaged to Betty Grable when he eloped with Lana Turner.

This I know.

He's a whore, darling.

Judy dodged a bullet. Of course, she had her own share of problems. It wouldn't have lasted, obviously. But neither did any of the marriages of either party.

Still a guy marrying eight times is....unusual.

After his last divorce he lived as an unmarried man for nearly twenty years, dying in his mid 90s. I suspect he enjoyed it.

How is it that he and Liz Taylor never married? Sure, he was too old for her, but that never stopped her.

He was married to Ava for one year. Dumped her a week after their first anniversary. He was mentally cruel and abusive, constantly putting her down and making her feel like a worthless idiot. She took a year off from Hollywood and took literature and economics courses at UCLA because of him. He also drove her to drink and seek analysis. Not a pleasant man.

Ava wrote that Shaw was always needling her to “improve herself.” (She did give him credit for giving her faith in her singing. He wanted her to be a Big Band singer with him.)

But the delicious part is he got her a chess set and made her learn, so they could play together. She studied on her own and one night quite swiftly put him into checkmate.

He never played with her again.