Not every family has someone famous in it. It's very rare for a family to have two members become famous independently. There is one family though that has three famous cousins. Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the pioneers of rock and roll, a man whose wild life was filled with controversy. His cousin Mickey Gilley achieved stardom in country music without all the scandal. But their other cousin outdid even Jerry Lee in the scandal department, when televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was caught with a prostitute. And then was caught again three years later. Jerry Lee was probably glad to let someone else be the black sheep of the family, but he's still the king of scandal having had his career ruined by marrying his teenage cousin, and years of drinking and domestic abuse and even allegations of having murdered one of his seven wives.
Sax Rohmer is an author who is best known for creating the character Fu Manchu. The character was very popular and has been portrayed in film by horror greats Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee among others. The character has also come under some criticism for being a racist caricature inspired by the Yellow Peril idea that was widespread in the U.S. for a while, and unfortunately seems to have made a comeback. Rohmer also introduced Sumuru, who has been featured in a few films herself. While she hasn't been the focus of the same amount of criticism as Fu Manchu, I think that has more to do with their respective levels of popularity and less with the respective levels of objectionability. So it seems like a bit of karma that when Rohmer passed away in 1958, it was from the Asian flu.
On his popular quiz show You Bet Your Life, Groucho Marx hated to see people go home empty handed. His solution to this was to ask "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?", so that even losers could go home with $50.
Warner Bros once threatened to sue the Marx Bros for copyright
infringement for A Night In Casablanca (they had made Casablanca)
Groucho sent a letter to their legal dept threatening to counter-sue for
the word Brothers stating "Professionally we were brothers before you
were".
Alice Cooper became friends with Groucho Marx in the 70’s. Alice says Groucho would call him late at night if a Marx Brothers movie was on television. Alice would go to Groucho’s house, and they would watch the movie with Groucho telling him all the behind the scenes gossip.
Walt Disney’s first show in 1954 was Disneyland on ABC. Television was still in black and white at the time, but Walt insisted the show be filmed in color. This allowed him to recycle some of the material when NBC later launched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.
In 1958 Walt Disney had a school in Anaheim CA named after him. At the dedication he declared school was out for the day and had all the kids bused to Disneyland.
Ace Frehley rose to stardom as the lead guitarist of the rock band KISS.
These days he spends a lot of his time on-stage, or backstage waiting
to go on-stage. As a teenager Ace Frehley would have to sneak backstage
at concerts. This is how he met John Kay of Steppenwolf, Mitch Mitchell
of the Experience and Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead.
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