Ed Sullivan revealed the seven guests with the worst bad hygiene in old Hollywood history. Ed Sullivan stood next to every major performer in America for 23 years, shaking their hands backstage, introducing them under hot studio lights, and spending hours in close quarters with the biggest names in entertainment, which meant he smelled what the cameras could never show.
Among them was the most iconic sex symbol in American history, whose co-star described her as flatulent, dirty, and someone who rarely ever bathed. There was the leading man audiences considered the most handsome face in cinema, whose dentures gave him breath so foul that his most famous co-star dreaded every kissing scene.
And there was the rock legend who appeared on Sullivan’s stage wearing the same unwashed leather pants he had been living in for weeks. These are the seven guests with the worst bad hygiene in old Hollywood history. Number seven, Tallulah Bankhead. The woman who shocked everyone and didn’t care. Tallulah Bankhead ranked among the most outrageous personalities in the history of American theater and film.
A Tony Award-winning actress, whose performance in The Little Foxes cemented her as one of the greatest stage performers of her generation, and she was loud, profane, fearless, and completely indifferent to what anyone thought of her personal habits. Fellow performers described an actress who could deliver a flawless performance on stage and then walk off stage into a dressing room that looked like it had been hit by a tornado, with clothes piled on the floor, makeup scattered across every surface, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette
butts, because the woman who commanded audiences with her presence lived in physical chaos that startled everyone who saw it up close. Broadway and Hollywood crew members developed an unspoken understanding that working with Bankhead meant dealing with a level of personal disorder that no other performer of her era would have considered acceptable, and wardrobe assistants dreaded her costume changes because of the condition she left everything in, while dressing room attendants knew that cleaning up after a
Bankhead appearance required preparation and a strong stomach. Her general indifference toward conventional cleanliness extended into every area of her life, and she famously refused to wear undergarments throughout her career, regardless of the setting, whether she was at a formal dinner, on a film set, or appearing on live television, showing no embarrassment whatsoever and treating the subject as beneath her concern.
Sullivan encountered Bankhead through the overlapping world of New York theater and television, and according to those who worked on his show, the stories about her personal habits were legendary among backstage staff. A crew member recalled that you always knew when Bankhead had been in a dressing room because it looked and smelled like she had been living there for a week, even if she had only been there for an hour.
Number six, Jean Harlow. The original blonde bombshell’s hidden habits. Jean Harlow defined platinum blonde glamour in the 1930s and became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood before her tragic death at the age of 26, and studios marketed her as the ultimate fantasy, a vision of feminine perfection that existed solely for the pleasure of the camera.
Behind that manufactured image, Harlow’s personal spaces told a very different story, because those who knew her described her living areas as cluttered and unkempt in ways that shocked visitors who expected her private life to match her public image. Crew members who worked on her films described an actress who could look flawless for the camera and then return to a dressing room that revealed how she actually lived when nobody was watching, and the gap between the immaculate woman on screen and the conditions she lived in off camera ranked among the
worst-kept secrets on every lot she worked on. Her personal grooming habits extended beyond her living spaces, and like Tallulah Bankhead, she famously refused to wear undergarments, a habit documented by multiple people who worked alongside her. Harlow also bleached all of her body hair to match the platinum blonde image the studio had created, a painful and time-consuming chemical process that was part of maintaining an illusion that had nothing to do with natural beauty.
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What makes Harlow’s story particularly tragic is that her death at 26 from kidney failure may have been connected to the extreme beauty treatments she endured to maintain the image the studios demanded because the chemicals she used, the bleaching processes, and the constant manipulation of her body to fit an ideal nobody could naturally achieve took a physical toll that contributed to the health problems that ended her life far too young.
Number five, the Rolling Stones, the band that brought their own atmosphere. When the Rolling Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in the mid-1960s, they brought more than just their music because according to crew members who worked those broadcasts, the Stones and their entourage arrived backstage carrying an atmosphere that announced their presence before anyone saw them.
A crew member who worked the Stones Sullivan appearances described the scene as two different worlds colliding with Sullivan’s crew and their pressed shirts timing everything to the second on one side and the Stones and their entourage on the other looking like they had just walked out of a very long party.
And the smell alone told you everything you needed to know about what had been happening before the show. Cultivating an image deliberately opposed to the clean-cut Beatles was part of the Stones rebellion and personal grooming played a role in that because where the Beatles wore matching suits and maintained polished appearances for television, the Stones looked like they had slept in their clothes.
And in many cases they had with unwashed hair, wrinkled and stained clothing, and a general presentation so far removed from what Sullivan’s stage normally hosted that the contrast became part of the show itself. Sullivan reportedly told his producer after one particularly intense appearance that he was not sure what exactly those boys were on, but whatever it was, he did not want it anywhere near his studio again.
And the comment was about more than just their behavior because it was about the physical reality of sharing a backstage area with a band whose personal hygiene was as rebellious as their music. Number four, Jim Morrison, the poet in the unwashed leather pants. September 17th of 1967, brought Jim Morrison onto the Ed Sullivan Show stage for what became one of the most famous moments in the show’s history.
When Morrison sang the lyric he had been forbidden from singing, but backstage the crew noticed something else about the Doors front man that had nothing to do with his defiance of Sullivan’s producers. Morrison was wearing leather pants, the same leather pants he had been wearing for what appeared to be weeks without washing them.
Linda Ronstadt, whose band The Stone Ponies toured extensively with The Doors in the late 1960s, later confirmed that Morrison wore the same snakeskin pants every single day on tour without ever washing them. And the smell, according to people who traveled with The Doors, was something you did not forget. Ronstadt described Morrison as quiet and soft-spoken when sober, but said his personal grooming habits were alarming regardless of his state because the man the world saw as a beautiful poetic rock god was up close someone whose physical presence was
defined as much by the smell of unwashed leather and body odor as by the charisma that made him famous. Morrison’s hygiene deteriorated further on tour as his substance use increased with days passing without a change of clothes and his hair going unwashed for extended periods and fellow band members described an escalating pattern of physical neglect that mirrored the emotional and professional deterioration leading to his death in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27.
Ronstadt recalled walking down a street in New York City with Morrison when a complete stranger stopped his car, got out, and punched Morrison in the face for no apparent reason. A moment that captured the volatile and visceral energy Morrison attracted wherever he went. Fans saw a beautiful dangerous poetic figure on stage, while the people who traveled with him saw a man who smelled like unwashed leather and stale alcohol and who could not be convinced to change his clothes regardless of how many days had passed. Sullivan’s crew
dealt with Morrison for only a few hours during the taping but even that brief exposure left an impression and a stage manager recalled that Morrison was one of those performers whose physical presence was as intense as his music and not entirely in a good way. Number three, Buddy Hackett, the comedian who required special handling.
Buddy Hackett appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show numerous times throughout his career and earned a reputation as one of the most reliable comedy bookings the show ever had and he was also by the account of virtually everyone who worked with him a man whose personal grooming was as unpredictable as his comedy. Two things built Hackett’s reputation in Las Vegas nightclub circles, his ability to make any audience in the world laugh until they could not breathe and the fact that you never knew what physical state he would arrive in before a performance
because some nights he showed up looking presentable while other nights he arrived looking and smelling like he had not changed clothes or bathed since his last appearance days earlier. Sullivan’s production team developed protocols for managing Hackett that went beyond his well-documented issues with sobriety and staff members were instructed to assess his overall condition before he went on air including his physical presentation because if Hackett arrived looking too disheveled for live television, the wardrobe staff would scramble to clean
him up before his segment began. A talent coordinator recalled that with most performers the concern before airtime was whether they knew their material and whether they were in the right frame of mind but with Buddy the concern started earlier than that because the first question was whether he looked and smelled like someone you could put on a family television show and there were nights when the answer was barely yes and the wardrobe and makeup teams earned their paychecks getting Hackett camera ready in the few
minutes between his arrival and his segment. What made the situation more complicated was that Hackett’s disheveled appearance was partly what made him funny, because his rumpled look, his looseness, and his sense of being slightly out of control were all part of the comedy persona that audiences loved.
And the line between deliberately unkempt for comedic effect and genuinely unkempt because of personal neglect was never entirely clear. And the production team spent years trying to figure out where one ended and the other began. Number two, Clark Gable, the king of Hollywood whose co-stars dreaded the close-ups. Clark Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for It Happened One Night, and his portrayal of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind made him an immortal figure in American cinema, and he was considered the most handsome and
desirable man in Hollywood. While women across the country fantasized about being kissed by Clark Gable, what those women did not know was that by the age of 32, Clark Gable had almost a full set of dentures, because a severe case of gum disease called pyorrhea in 1933 led to his dentist extracting most of his teeth, and he was hospitalized for several days before retreating to Canada to let his gums recover enough for the dentures to be fitted.
Those dentures gave Gable persistent bad breath that became one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood. And his leading ladies, who had to lean in close and kiss him on camera while millions of Americans watched, knew the truth that the audience never suspected. Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara opposite Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, complained about his breath on more than one occasion during filming, which meant the most famous romantic scenes in cinema history were performed by an actress trying not to recoil from
her leading man’s breath. Joan Crawford, who appeared in multiple films with Gable throughout the 1930s, also reportedly struggled with his halitosis during their on-screen love scenes, and the irony was devastating because the man America considered the ultimate romantic leading man was someone his female co-stars dreaded getting close to.
Grace Kelly, who starred alongside Gable in Mogambo, was reportedly warned by other actresses before filming began about what to expect when the cameras moved in for a kissing scene, and the advice she received was to hold her breath and get through it as quickly as possible. Gable was apparently aware of the problem and carried mints with him constantly while excusing himself before romantic scenes to rinse his mouth, but crew members confirmed that the efforts were never enough to fully mask what years of dental problems had created because the dentures made the condition
essentially permanent. Sullivan, who worked in the entertainment industry during the same era as Gable, was aware of the reputation, and a colleague recalled Sullivan noting that Gable was proof Hollywood could sell any illusion to the public because the most kissable man in America was the last person his co-stars actually wanted to kiss.
Number one, Marilyn Monroe, America’s sex symbol and Hollywood’s most shocking secret. Marilyn Monroe was the most famous woman in the world, the definition of glamour, beauty, and sensuality, photographed more than any celebrity of her era while men fell over themselves to be near her, and women studied her every move, and she was the ultimate fantasy, the woman every man wanted and every woman envied.
According to the people who actually lived and worked alongside her, the fantasy and the reality had almost nothing in common. Author David Brett described Monroe’s personal habits in blunt, unsparing terms in his book Clark Gable, Tormented Star, calling her flatulent, dirty, and someone who ate in bed constantly, and according to his research, she rarely bathed and slept without clothes, not as an act of glamour, but because she simply could not be bothered with the basic routines of personal care. Her bedroom habits
were particularly alarming to those who witnessed them because Monroe would eat full meals in bed and then shove the dirty plates and leftover food under the sheets rather than getting up to clean them, sleeping in the same bed with the remnants of her dinner beneath her night after night until someone else cleaned it up or the smell forced a change of sheets.
Clark Gable, who co-starred with Monroe in The Misfits in 1961 as the final completed film for both of them, was apparently a neat and fastidious person himself despite his dental issues, and he was reportedly disgusted by Monroe’s lack of basic hygiene on set because the contrast between America’s fantasy of Marilyn Monroe and the reality of being in close physical proximity to her was something her co-stars found genuinely difficult to reconcile.
Makeup artists would arrive in the morning to find Monroe in a state that required hours of work before she could appear on camera, and costume designers had to work around stains and odors that had nothing to do with the physical demands of filming. And hair stylists described a woman whose natural state bore so little resemblance to the finished product that the transformation ranked among the most dramatic in Hollywood history, not because she was unattractive, but because the gap between how she cared for herself and how she appeared on screen was enormous.
Her legendary lateness on set, which cost studios hundreds of thousands of dollars in delays over her career, was partly connected to the massive amount of preparation required to bridge the gap between private Marilyn and public Marilyn because the woman who arrived at the studio in the morning and the woman who walked in front of the cameras were so different that the daily transformation amounted to its own kind of performance, one that took longer than most people in the industry had ever seen with any other star. No
celebrity in the history of entertainment has been more closely associated with physical perfection than Marilyn Monroe because she was beauty itself manufactured and marketed and sold to the entire world as the ultimate standard of feminine desirability. And according to the people who actually stood next to her, the dream and the reality were as far apart as any two things could possibly be.
Sullivan worked in the same entertainment world as Monroe throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and the stories about her personal habits circulated widely among industry professionals. A colleague recalled Sullivan shaking his head when Monroe’s name came up in the context of her hygiene, saying the audience would never believe it if they knew and that Hollywood’s greatest achievement was not any single film, but the ability to convince 50 million people that the most glamorous woman in the world was something she absolutely was not.
What Ed Sullivan smelled behind the curtain. 23 years Ed Sullivan spent standing next to the biggest stars in America, shaking their hands, standing beside them under hot lights, and sharing backstage spaces in the cramped quarters of Studio 50 on Broadway, and he learned something the cameras could never convey to the audience at home.
Tallulah Bankhead lived in physical chaos that matched her theatrical personality. Jean Harlow endured painful chemical treatments to maintain an image that was slowly destroying her health. The Rolling Stones brought an atmosphere backstage that Sullivan wanted nowhere near his studio.
Jim Morrison wore the same unwashed leather pants until the smell became part of his identity. Buddy Hackett arrived in conditions that required special handling before he could appear on live television. Clark Gable, the most kissable man in America, carried breath that made his leading ladies dread every close-up. And Marilyn Monroe, the most beautiful woman in the world, was described by her own co-star as flatulent, dirty, and someone who rarely bathed.
The cameras showed America one version of these stars, and Sullivan, standing close enough to smell the truth, saw something very different. Which revelation shocked you most? Did you know about these hygiene secrets before today? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and if you found this valuable, do not forget to like and subscribe for more untold stories from entertainment’s hidden past.
