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Monday, August 17, 2009

Shannon Elizabeth Was Born in 1973, Not 1976

Our bad. We've discovered that Shannon Elizabeth was born on 1973. We've had 1976 listed on her profile for quite some time.

A little backstory: Some other sources say September 7, 1976 as well. The confusion may stem from a January 2000 interview in Maxim, where she stated (or let it be stated) that she was 23 years old.
Of Syrian, Irish, English, German, and Cherokee heritage and raised in Waco, Texas (home of both David Koresh and Dr. Pepper!), 23-year-old Shannon is both enticingly exotic and the fresh-faced girl next door (for instance, she can say several dirty phrases in Syrian, though doing so makes her blush).
That was right after the release of American Pie, where she played a high school exchange student, so 23 seemed believable enough. Possibly it was even more believable than 26, which is a stretch for playing a high schooler even in Hollywood.

Here she is (left) at a Maxim party in 1999 -- judge for yourself. (Larger version.)

At the time, Elizabeth's own website played it coy, saying only "I was born on September 7th in Houston, Texas." (Thanks, archive.org!)

But at some point the tide turned for 1973. We can't find an exact moment when it happened, but it could be a result of Elizabeth's divorce filing in 2005 and a subsequent palimony-type civil suit by her husband, both of which presumably generated various public documents with her actual birthdate attached.

Other stories started noting that Elizabeth graduated from Waco High School in 1991, which would be the usual match for a 1973 birth. (If she was a genius 15-year-old graduate, we'd hear about it from her publicist.) Hometown station KHOU, for instance, says 1991 and interviews her middle school principal -- seems like they ought to know.

The clincher: now even Elizabeth herself proudly embraces 1973 on her official site. Which seals it for us. And that still makes her just a lass of 35, after all.

We regret the error. Thanks to our friends at Answers.com for asking us to double-check this.

(Photo credit: Marcus Hoffman / WENN)

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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Book Review: Duchess of Death

2 billion copies sold worldwide.

Affairs, betrayal, and heartbreak.

Novels translated into 105 languages.

A bizarre 11-day disappearance in 1926 that has never been explained.
So reads the back cover of Duchess of Death, Richard Hack's nifty new unauthorized biography of mystery novelist Agatha Christie.

It's the "bizarre 11-day disappearance" which interests us most. It's the event which made Christie an anchor of one of our oldest loops: Disappearing Acts.

The basic facts have always been known: Christie drove off from her home late one December night in 1926, shortly after her husband Archie announced that he wanted a divorce. (He had fallen in love with a family friend named Nancy Neele.) The next morning Christie's car was found by country folk, next to a bog, abandoned, her driver's license on the front seat, all of it looking very much like misadventure if not foul play. Christie herself was nowhere to be found.

The tabloids got wind of the story -- famous mystery author is missing! -- and soon the vanished Mrs. Christie was the talk of the British Isles as police dragged the lake, brought in dogs, and generally behaved like characters in an Agatha Christie novel.

Christie was finally spotted, 11 days later, in the Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel, registered under the name of Teresa (ba-da-bing!) Neele. Her husband arrived and, chased by paparazzi, they retreated to their home at Abney Hall and closed the gates.

From that point on, Christie wouldn't talk and neither would her husband, beyond a few vague statements about Christie suffering from memory loss. Everyone was left to wonder what had just happened and speculate about mental distress, amnesia, or whatever else seemed to fit the facts.

Christie refused to talk about her disappearance, at least publicly, for the rest of her life. Even in her autobiography, Hack notes, Christie ignored the whole year; she "waved it away like one would a pesky mosquito: 'The next year of my life is one I hate recalling... There is no need to dwell on it,' she wrote."

Thus was born the Eternal Mystery of Agatha Christie. It's hard to know whether Christie kept it a secret all those years out of geniuine pain, a desire to jab her ex-husband, or an inbred sense of drama. The old storyteller knew a good hook when she saw one.

Eternal the mystery it may be, but Hack has a pretty good explanation for it. He tracks Christie pretty much step by step from the time she left her house in the car to the time she was spotted by employees of the Harrogate spa.

It turns out that Christie actually tried to alert her husband to her whereabouts at the start. The night she disappeared she seems to have ditched her car, caught a train to London, and then mailed a letter to her brother-in-law there, asking him to tell Archie he could find her in Harrogate. As Hack tells it, Christie thought that Archie would see the error of his ways and come rushing to find her.

Only one problem: the brother-in-law promptly lost the letter. And Archie, had he received the message, was in no mood to chase after a wife he was planning to divorce.

By the time this all dawned on Christie, she was at the center of an national missing persons case. So, shifting tactics, she used her sudden notoriety to make sure all England got the point that her husband had been fooling around ("Teresa Neele" indeed) while at the same time smartly keeping a mysterious silence. (She and Archie were quietly divorced the next year.)

The incident is really only one modest part of Duchess of Death. The book is full of good meaty detail on Christie's life and works -- and on her younger second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she met at a dig in Iraq.

Christie robbed the cradle:
On the marriage license, Agatha gave her age as thirty-seven, instead of forty; Max gave his age as thirty-one, rather than twenty-six. The age on Agatha's passport was aso changed to agree with the document, and remained incorrect for the rest of her life.
Hack is also full of hearty respect for Christie's amazing ability to crank out the books -- the "sausage machine," she called it with some exasperation when pressed by publishers to keep 'em coming.

Hack has the final tally:
Thirty-three years after her death, all of her books remain in print -- eighty-four novels and compilations of short stories, six additional novels written as Mary Westmacott, her two autobiographies, and three books of poetry. She wrote 157 short stories and had her name over the title of nineteen plays.
And, of course, those two billion copies sold.

Despite all that, Christie herself seems to have slipped out of the public consciousness, having become a reliable old brand name more than anything else. Duchess of Death does a nice job of bringing her back.

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Friday, April 03, 2009

Sorry, Ms. Flack

According to her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., singer Roberta Flack was born in 1940, not 1939. Several sources give her birth year as 1939 -- and that's what we had. Sorry for making you out to be older than you really are, Roberta.

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Sunday, February 08, 2009

Which Came First: The Darwin or the Abe?

"As Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached -- hmmm, so far, so good."
It's true: Scientist Charles Darwin and President Abraham Lincoln were born on the exact same day: 12 February 1809.

If you're wondering which one was actually born first: we don't know. We came up empty after a rather extensive search for the exact birth times of both men.

On the Lincoln side, we have Carl Sandburg's word for it that Lincoln was born in the morning:
One morning in February 1809, Tom Lincoln came out of his cabin to the road, stopped a neighbor and asked him to tell "the granny woman," Aunt Peggy Walters, that Nancy would need help soon. On the morning of February 12, a Sunday, the granny woman was at the cabin. And she and Tom Lincoln and the moaning Nancy Hanks welcomed into a world of battle and blood, of whispering dreams and wistful dust, a new child, a boy.

A little later that morning Tom Lincoln threw extra wood on the fire, an extra bearskin over the mother, and walked two miles up the road to where the Sparrows, Tom and Betsy, lived.
This from a condensed version of Sandburg's famous six-volume biography of Lincoln. Sandburg admits that the scene was reported years later by a local boy, Dennis Hanks, "whose nimble mind sometimes invented more than he saw or heard." So: don't bank on it.

On the Darwin side, it's a pretty sure bet that nobody was throwing an extra bearskin over the mother. Darwin's father was Dr. Robert Darwin, a successful physician in Shrewsbury, Shropshire; his mother Susannah was the son of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter. A few days after his birth, Darwin was baptized by the parish clergyman in the local Unitarian chapel.

But we find no mention of the exact time of his birth, even in Darwin's own autobiography. (We did find a wonderful family-edited version of that book from the Stanford Library, courtesy of Google Books.)

One source does offer exact birth times for both men: the astrology site Astrotheme.com. Astrologers obsess over exact birth times in preparing their charts, and Astrotheme makes the unlikely claim that Lincoln was born at exactly 6:54 am, with Darwin coming in at 3:00 am. (Speaking of the inventions of nimble minds...) Among other things, it's doubtful that Tom Lincoln's "granny woman" checked her Timex at the moment of birth and noted that the minute hand was just passing 6:54.

Those speculations aside, one thing is in Darwin's favor: England is five time zones ahead of Kentucky. (Though formal world time zones weren't formally installed until years later.)

So Darwin, at least, had a five-hour head start.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Telly Savalas Was Born in 1922, Not 1924

We had 1924 as the birth year for Telly Savalas, but our friends at Answers.com asked us to double-check the date.

We did, by writing to CMG Worldwide, the management company that runs the official Telly Savalas website and manages his image for his estate. Their reply:
Hello, thank you for your inquiry on Telly Savalas. I have confirmed his birthdate was Jan. 21, 1922.

Thank you for you time and concern.

Regards,
Matt Graves
CMG Worldwide, Inc.
Telly may have fudged the date a bit during his career, as so many other actors have done. His NY Times obituary, for instance, says 1924. And various sources note that he died in 1994 just one day after his "70th" birthday.

But we're comfortable with that confirmation from CMG Worldwide, and have changed our official word to 1922.

(Heh! Nice coincidence: Doris Day made the exact same fudge -- from 1924 to 1922.)

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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Steven Spielberg, That Sly Dog, Was Born in 1946

Our friends at Answers.com asked us to take a closer look at the birth year of director Steven Spielberg.

Who2 says 1946, but many sources online say 1947. Spielberg himself often led people to believe he was born in 1947. (Even the great Roger Ebert wrote a 50th birthday tribute to the director in 1997.)

So which year is correct?

Fortunately, a ton of legwork on this was done by Professor Joseph McBride for his 1997 book Steven Spielberg: A Biography.

McBride did some digging in Cincinnati, Spielberg's home town, and found that his birth certificate reads 1946. He found a December 1946 birth announcement from a Cincinnati paper, The American Israelite. He also looked into high school and college records, all of which had Spielberg born in 1946. So that pretty much seals it.

(Seems like Cincinnatians have a thing for lying about their age. We just cleared up the age of actress Doris Day -- born in Cincy in 1922, not 1924 as she claimed for years.)

McBride notes that a Los Angeles Times writer sniffed Spielberg out in 1981 by looking at his college records, but that Spielberg refused comment.

The assumption made by McBride (and others) is that Spielberg shaved a year off his age to seem like even more of a wunderkind than he already was. That fits a pattern of other tales Spielberg told about his early years in the business. He was young by any standard when he signed a directing contract with Universal Studios in 1969, but apparently felt age 21 sounded even better.

Bottom line: We stand by 1946 for Spielberg's year of birth, with a salute to Prof. McBride for all his work.

Snopes.com has probably the best take on the issue of phony biographies, quoting George Burns: "Most of what I say is true. The rest is show business."

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Saturday, November 08, 2008

Doris and Dorothy Day: Sisters in Confusion

Actress Doris Day and activist Dorothy Day have little in common besides similar names -- and the challenges they pose to anyone trying to document the details of their early lives.

The trouble spots are Doris's name and age, and Dorothy's daughter's birthdate.

Doris first. A.E. Hotchner's Doris Day: Her Own Story (William and Morrow, 1975), written with Doris' cooperation, offers this testimony: "I was born Doris Kappelhoff" (p. 18). But Garry McGee's Doris Day -- Sentimental Journey (McFarland & Co., 2006) says she was named Doris Mary Anne von Kappelhoff: "The 'von' was eliminated...shortly after Doris's birth" (p. 6).

Philip Kaufman's giant 626-page biography, Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door (Virgin Books, 2008), gives her father's name as William Kappelhoff (no "von") and her name as simply Doris Kappelhoff. Kaufman also firmly states her birth year as 1922 -- two years before the more commonly-accepted year of 1924.

(As longtime Who2 readers know, when someone in the entertainment business has two possible birth years, we tend to give more weight to the older year. Actors and actresses in particular have plenty of incentive to make themselves seem younger than they are, and little incentive to seem older.)

Now on to Dorothy. Biographers, sainthood advocates and most Internet sites seem settled on 3 March 1927, as the birthdate of her daughter, Tamar. Until, that is, you consult the curator of the extensive Dorothy Day archives at Marquette University.

"There are numerous documents supporting 1926 as the year of Tamar's birth," archivist Phillip Runkel tells Who2. "Also, we know that Dorothy asked her to wait until she turned 18 before she got married, and that marriage occurred in April 1944. Dorothy refers many times in her diaries and appointment books to the 4th of March as Tamar's birthday." Dorothy's autobiography, The Long Loneliness (Harper & Row, 1952) isn't much help. She's vague on the year, the only clue being her mention of the 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti happening after Tamar's birth, but it's hard to tell how long.

So for Dorothy Day we'll buck the Tamar tide, trust the guy with the primary sources at his fingertips, and cast our lot with 4 March 1926 as Tamar's birthdate.

As for Dorothy's name: We'll stick with her own testimony of Doris Kappelhoff for her name, but side with biographer Kaufman for her birth year of 1922.

(Thanks to Hollywood and Religion Desk editor Hans Holznagel for this post.)

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Sunday, March 16, 2008

Saint Patrick +1623

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Nothing about Patrick's life is particularly clear, but he seems to have been born a mere 1623 years ago, in 385. (Not on March 17th, though, as far as we know.) That would have made Patrick a contemporary of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Theodosius the Great, the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire.

It's pretty well known now that Patrick didn't chase the snakes from Ireland. The glaciers did.

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

How Old is Fidel Castro Really?

Fidel Castro, like America's own founding father Alexander Hamilton, has always been coy about his age.

The official line from the Cuban government is clear: Castro was born on 13 August 1926.

But some scholars believe that Castro was really born in 1927. Peter G. Bourne suggests in his 1986 book Fidel, for instance, that Castro's birth certificate was changed by Fidel's parents when he was a child, so that the boy could be enrolled in school a year early.

Cuba scholar Dr. Brian Latell is also convinced Castro was born in 1927. He discusses his reasons at length in this 2007 edition of his newsletter The Latell Report. Latell is swayed by comments made by Castro's family ("On different occasions in the late 1950's Fidel's mother Lina Ruz and three of his sisters publicly confirmed the 1927 date") and by Castro himself ("I am the age that the documents indicate. If they say I am fifty, I am fifty.")

However, Castro gives the year as 1926 in his 1998 autobiography Fidel: My Early Years. He adds: "I was 26 when I began the armed struggle, and I was born on the 13th, which is half of 26... Now that I think of it, there may be something mystical about the number 26."

That sounds like it might almost be a wink at the truth. But because Castro himself gives the date as 1926, and because it is the date on his birth certificate, we're sticking with that date in our own profile of Castro. (We gave Hamilton the benefit of the doubt, too.)

But yes, the date has its critics.

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Sunday, February 25, 2007

S.E. Hinton, Staying Gold (Plus Two Years)

We've been sweating the birth date of S.E. Hinton, the celebrated author of the 1967 novel The Outsiders and other books for what used to be called "young adults" and now are often called "tweens."

Hinton is not a public person by any means, but she's particularly coy about her birthdate. Many sources say 1950 or 1948; others say 1949 or even 1951. A letter from reader Sebastian Collins (a 1948 proponent) prompted us to dig into the matter somewhat deeper.

Editor Paul Hehn, at the Tween Desk, went on the case. His first take: "She's so cagey about her birthdate that even the New York Times has her age in their profile awhile back as 'either 56 or 58,' meaning a birth year of 1948 or 1950."

Mr. Hehn especially spent time looking into the 1960s years when Hinton was first being published. A large part of the mythology of The Outsiders has to do with Hinton writing the book while she was still in high school. That story is true, but just when that happened isn't already clear.

As he notes, "She says in the audio interview we link that she got the contracts for The Outsiders on the day she graduated high school, and she's a 1966 grad of Will Rogers High School. If she was born in 1948 that would make her 17 at her high school graduation, turning 18 in the summer."

"But to complicate matters, in a piece she wrote about herself she said (paraphrasing), 'I began the first draft of The Outsiders when I was fifteen. Nobody believes that, so I usually say sixteen.' Likewise, she sort-of says the publishers liked the idea of her being younger, so when her press says the book was published when she was 17, it could mean she was 17 when she got the contracts, but some other age when the book actually came out in the spring of 1967."

In the end, Mr. Hehn came down firmly for 1948, not 1950. Shortly afterward, we discovered a book titled Presenting S.E. Hinton by Jay Daly, who formerly was the children's librarian at the Boston Public Library. On page two of his book (right up front!) he says, "Hinton was born in 1948, although the myth that grew up around her has obscured most of the simple facts of her life, and she has done very little to help clear up any of the confusion that has resulted from it." He notes, "Hinton has been known to begin question and answer sessions, by the way, with a comment like 'There are three questions I will not answer: How old am I now, how much money do I make, and how's my love life.'"

Daly also offers a very useful chronology which lists her being born on 22 July 1948, entering Will Rogers High School in Tulsa in 1963, and enrolling at the University of Tulsa in 1966.

Does Daly know what he's talking about? We think so, even though he doesn't state an exact reference (like a birth certificate) for his firm endorsement of 1948. But he seems as well-informed as anyone. In the notes and references section in the back of the book, Daly says, "The quotations attributed to Hinton in this chapter, and throughout the book, are primarily from three sources: a talk she gave at the Boston Public Library on 20 September 1980; an interview with Linda Plemons, titled "Author Laureate of Adolescent Fiction," in the University of Tulsa Annual, 1983-84; and personal conversations with the author."

Daly also dedicates the book to his daughter Eowyn, a J.R.R. Tolkien reference which shows he's serious enough about young adult lit to go the extra mile in his own family.

Finally, as Mr. Hehn notes, "If you're really born in 1950, wouldn't you want to settle the '1948 or 1950?' question on the side of you being younger?" While that's not proof of anything, it does seem like common sense.

So, thank you for asking, Sebastian Collins! We formally agree with you that S.E. Hinton was born in 1948.

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Thursday, January 26, 2006

Susan Lucci, Class of 1964

An alert reader recently suggested that we had Susan Lucci's birth year wrong.

Lucci, who has played Erica Kane on TV's All My Children for the last three decades, once said in an interview in Cigar Aficionado that she enjoys being mysterious about how old she is, so we knew we'd have our work cut out for us.

To cut to the chase, we haven't been able to pin down whether Lucci was born in 1946 or 1947. We know she graduated from high school in 1964. Her late December birthday suggests she was 18 years old upon graduation, which would make her birth year 1946. On the other hand, she was an honor student, and it's quite possible that she was 17 when she graduated.

It's not polite, but also not unreasonable, to assume that Lucci won't reveal her age because she's older than we think. With that in mind, we're choosing 1946 as her birth year, while adding an official-sounding aside on our profile explaining that we don't know for sure. In the meantime, our knowledge that Lucci has been on TV since the 1970s will not shatter the illusion that she is beautiful and ageless on All My Children.

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Saturday, September 17, 2005

Hamilton's Birth Date

Our friendly partners at Answers.com asked us for a clarification on the birthdate of Alexander Hamilton. We say 1757, some sources say 1755.

There's a controversy over Hamilton's age that goes back at least five decades. We found it discussed at length in volume one of Broadus Mitchell's biography Alexander Hamilton, which was published in 1957; other biographies since then also devote some brainpower to the issue.

Hamilton himself named his year of birth as 1757 consistently throughout his life, and it's the date on his grave in New York City. However, he was an illegitimate child, born in the West Indies, and no birth certificate or christening records exist.

The modern controversy comes from probate court records from 1768, the year that Hamilton's mother died on St. Croix. As part of the probate proceedings, her relative Peter Lytton (Broadus calls him "one of the most responsible men on the island") stated that Alexander and his brother James were 13 and 15, respectively. Thus, counting backwards, one can conclude that the boys were born in 1753 and 1755.

Broadus finds this convincing, but not all scholars do. Presumably Lytton had no reason to lie about it, and presumably he was in a position to know the boys' ages... but on the other hand, maybe he had and wasn't. The circumstances of the boys' birth were pretty convoluted: their mother had walked out on her neer-do-well husband in 1750 but he didn't file for divorce until the end of the decade, by which time she'd had two boys by another neer-do-well, Hamilton's father (who later walked out on *them*). Between the complications, the confusion, and the taint of illegitimacy, it's possible that Lytton didn't have (or didn't give) the right figures. (As a sidelight, Lytton committed suicide the next year -- it was a complicated childhood for poor Hamilton in any case.)

Everyone seems to agree that Alexander Hamilton got a charge out of presenting himself as a prodigy, and those who lean toward 1755 count that as one more reason to doubt him on 1757.

Our view is that long-established dates shouldn't be altered without rock-solid proof to the contrary. Though we find the probate records and the statement of Peter Lytton to be intriguing, we're sticking with 1757 as his year of birth.

Besides the Broadus biography, you can get more information on the topic from Odd Destiny: The Life of Alexander Hamilton (1982, Macmillan, by Marie Hecht) and Alexander Hamilton: A Life (2003, HarperCollins, by Willard Sterne Randall). Hecht leans toward 1757 and Sterne comes out flatly for 1755. Sterne has great detail on the death of Hamilton's mother and the arrival of the probate officers. Curiously, he also apes Broadus's description of Peter Lytton word for word: "One of the most responsible men on the island."

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