Sweet Revenge: 200 Delicious Ways to Get Your Own Back

East extensively. He is renowned in the business as a perfectionist and one night, during a performance in Hong Kong, things were not up to his exacting standards. He felt that the stage manager was not doing her job properly: various tea cups were out of place, a prop was missing and a doorbell came in late. Every time Mr Nimmo left the stage he would rage at the stage manager, who felt he was being unreasonable - had he never heard of mistakes?
    The end of the performance arrived and, to tumultuous applause, he prepared to take a bow. As he started walking on to the stage the stage manager (who just happened to be his wife) brought the curtain down; right on top of him.
     

     
    Locked out in Anger. Playwright John Osborne could bear a grudge like no one else - and even managed to take revenge from beyond the grave. Those attending his memorial service in St Giles-in-the-Fields church in London, who included Lord Snowdon, Edward Fox, Sir Robin Day and Sir Dirk Bogarde, were surprised to see a notice outside which read: 'Memorial Service for John Osborne. The undermentioned will NOT be admitted. Their names are hereby posted on the gate: Fu Manchu, Nicholas de Jongh, Albert Finney, The Bard of Hay on Wye.' Anyone familiar with the playwright's spite will know that Fu Manchu is producer/director Sir Peter Hall and The Bard is playwright Arnold Wesker. Osborne, best known for his 1956 drama Look Back in Anger, was displeased by comments made by drama critic de Jongh and speculation was rife about the transgressions committed by the others singled out for non-admittance. To ensure that his wishes were carried out his wife, too, carried a copy of his request.
     

     
    When John Gilbert, a star among stars and Greta Garbo's most famous partner, died of heart failure at his Beverly Hill mansion, he was only thirty-eight years old.
    After the funeral in 1936 plenty of cynics sneered that his career had died long before him - rakishly handsome 'Jack' Gilbert, once Hollywood's highest-paid leading man, was a victim of the talkies. The most notorious victim, really, for when movie audiences packed into His Glorious Night in 1929 and heard the romantic idol announce: 'I love you,' his squeaky tones reduced them to shocked laughter. Film buffs repeat the story to this day. But the odds are that they have bought a myth. It is far more likely that Gilbert was destroyed in the sort of vendetta possible only when moguls walked the earth and studios reigned supreme, because Gilbert, rash and outspoken as any hero he played in a hundred or so films, had made a bitter enemy of Louis B Mayer, boss of MGM.
    Mayer was a monster, of course, but even monsters have soft spots. With Mayer it was Motherhood - a man owed everything to his mother, the mogul insisted, and men failing to respect and adore their mothers were beyond the pale. Gilbert scorned and detested Mayer, was well aware of his prejudices and set out to strike his raw nerve.
    The chance came in the twenties, when Louis B Mayer was holding forth to his minions. He would have no truck with screen versions of Anna Christie or Camille, he spluttered, because the central characters were immoral women.
    'What's wrong with that?' John Gilbert inquired innocently. 'My own mother was a whore.' According to one onlooker's version, Mayer had to be physically restrained from hitting the actor. Certainly he loathed the man ever afterwards, and there are persuasive clues that the head of MGM set out to sabotage one of his top box-office draws. Crazy? Not by Hollywood standards.
    The fact is that MGM sound technician Douglas Shearer testified: 'We never turned up the bass when Gilbert spoke - all you heard was the treble.' And Shearer wasn't just any old sound man; his sister was the actress Norma Shearer, who also happened to be Mrs Irving Thalberg, wife of the studio's brilliant young production chief. Thanks to Hollywood nepotism, Douglas was close to the kingdom's heart. Could Louis B Mayer have been vengeful and irresponsible enough to spike his own firm's guns and pollute its product by ordering that a $250,000-per-picture performer be made to sound ridiculous? In a word - easily! For the story of Jack Gilbert's squeaky 'I love you' has Byzantine complications.
    Mayer ran MGM in Hollywood but the ultimate shots were called by Nick Schenck, New York-based president of the parent company, Loew's Inc. Resenting Schenck's power, Mayer constantly denigrated him and Mayer was furious when,