God - and Gilette- know all!

ROSEMARY: Anyone who's ever seen the movie A Place in the Sun knows that it's a compelling story of of a poor but handsome boy, Montgomery Clift, who falls for the wealthy and breathtaking Elizabeth Taylor - at the height of her ...everything - all the while trying to extricate himself from the needy, clinging, whiny (was she ever anything but needy, clinging and whiny in films) Shelley Winters. It doesn't go well.


I knew that the movie had been loosely based on An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, but I didn't know that that book had been based on the true story of a murder in the Adirondacks in 1906.

I suppose one of the most compelling facts in the story was that the Clift character - the real man's name was Chester Gillette - was the son of Salvation Army missionaries and his fall from Grace - also odd because the murdered girl's name was Grace - came at the hands of a rich, beeautiful woman against woman the weak-willed and sheltered Chester had no defenses.

History questions whether there was a real or only an imagined romance between Chester and Harriet (the character later portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor) - the woman denied it, but that would not have been unusual for the time. They were also distant relatives. But the tale is so well-known in the Adirondacks that there is even a old folk song about it..

"Away from the sight of people

where nobody heard her last call,

or no one could tell how it happened

But God - and Gillette - know all. "

So how many movie and books that we think ar just fiction ar really based on actual events?

Stop by tomorrow for a visit from prolific author Sue Ann Jaffarian - one of my new best buddies!