Psycho Belly
Monday, January 30th, 2012
You might think that some of the celebrities that I ‘encounter’ are obscure, but this one teeters on being a bit laughable. Unless, of course, you are a fan of the Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock. Then you will know that the shower scene from Psycho is perhaps the most memorable sequence ever committed to film. For nearly as long as that scene has been legendary, there have been rumors about who was there and who wasn’t. Was it really Anthony Perkins? Was it really Janet Leigh? Was Hitchcock even present? Now that all three of the principles are dead and buried, there aren’t really many people left who can still answer that question. Read the rest of this entry »
Diane Baker’s career stretches back more than 50 years, beginning with her role as Margot Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank. She was present at the Hollywood Celebrities & Memorabilia Show in Chicago on October 1, 2011, as part of a mini-reunion with her film-sister Millie Perkins, who had portrayed Anne. Over the years Diane Baker has appeared in a wide variety of roles and films. Among them have been Mission: Impossible, The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, The Silence of the Lambs, The Cable Guy, and A Mighty Wind. 
I’m not sure what it was about the cast members of the early 1970’s TV show Room 222, but they all had a mutual handler who insisted on charging $40 for the ‘show special’ of getting a signature and photo op with the cast members who were present at the Hollywood Show on April 2, 2011. I had never even seen the show (although I purchased the DVD set in advance of meeting them), so I really didn’t know the cast. Still, I probably would have picked up all of them had the prices been reasonable. Present at the show were Michael Constantine (Mr. Kaufman), Karen Valentine (Miss Johnson), Judy Strangis (Helen Loomis), and David Jolliffe (Bernie). Denise Nicholas, who played Miss Loomis, had been scheduled to attend, but canceled. 
The big fans of Happy Days might recognize Ellen Travolta as Chachi Arcola’s mother Louisa in five episodes of the series. She’d continue to portray his Mom in the spin-off series Joanie Loves Chachi in seventeen episodes. And since she did such a great job playing the mother of Scott Baio in those two series, she was recruited to play the same actor’s mother for 70 episodes of his follow-up series Charles in Charge. That’s a lot of mothering Scott Baio. 
I guess you could say that Chuck McCann and I go way back. All the way back to July 29, 1980, when he asked me – an eight-year old at the time – to borrow my pen so that he could sign something as he registered for the Sons of the Desert “