It always starts with a face. Not the face you have when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, or the one you wear when you’re stuck in traffic behind someone who thinks a turn signal is optional — I mean the face. The one that can stop a room cold. The one that can make a producer forget his wife’s name. The one that makes people in the cheap seats lean forward without knowing why. Hollywood has a long history of finding those faces, polishing them like jewels, and then using them like poker chips. A beautiful woman is never just herself in this town — she’s a commodity, an export, a walking stock option. You’re either “rising” or “slipping,” and there’s no comfortable middle ground. The trick is to stay luminous long enough to outlast the men who think they own you. Very few do. For every woman who figured out how to play the game without losing her shirt — or her soul — there are a dozen who were eaten alive by it. The ones who smiled too much, or not enough. Who believed the f...

  Here at the Manor, we light a candle for every fallen blonde. Not just any blonde—mind you—but the ones who danced too close to the spotlight, who mistook the flashbulbs for sunlight, and burned through the velvet ropes of old Hollywood with a smile and a scandal. Let’s raise a glass to two platinum tragedies — women whose lives unraveled across soundstages, gossip columns, and courtroom steps: Lana Turner and Barbara Payton. One was the icy goddess who dined with Sinatra and woke up to blood on the bathroom tiles. The other? A wild-eyed tornado in a fur coat, chain-smoking her way through motel rooms and bad decisions. Blondes weren’t just a look in mid-century America — they were prophecy. And these two? They were Jonah in heels.      Let’s start with Lana.   Lana Turner never auditioned for stardom. It just showed up, tapped her on the shoulder while she was sipping a soda at Schwab’s Pharmacy. A talent scout spotted her and said, “Kid, you’ve got somethin...

  "Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses."