YOU KNOW HOW PEOPLE like to say that celebrities are just like us? Those people are wrong. Celebs aren’t like us. I know it’s nice to think you could bond with someone like Angelina Jolie or George Clooney or Pitbull over a beer at T.G.I. Friday’s, but you can’t. I’ve worked with plenty of famous folk over the years, and while some of them are lovely people, even the nice ones aren’t like you and me. I don’t know if it’s the adoration or the money or the opportunity to dance competitively on TV, but celebrities are, well, weird. So when they do weird things like shower eighteen times a day or buy property on the moon or eat their roommates, it shouldn’t surprise you.

It certainly doesn’t surprise me.

FACT 1 Billionaire Howard Hughes stored his own urine in bottles.

FACT 2 Hughes also wore empty tissue boxes as shoes. And blew his nose in his socks.

FACT 3 Appearing in a tampon commercial at age nineteen, actress Courteney Cox became the first person to say the word “period” in that context on American television.

FACT 4 In 2006, William Shatner was paid $25,000 by an online casino for a kidney stone he had recently passed.

FACT 5 Charlie Chaplin once placed third in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

FACT 6 Actor Charlie Sheen says he used steroids to prepare for his role as a pitcher in the movie Major League. Of course he did. He’s Charlie Sheen.

FACT 7 George Washington has two books from the New York Society Library still checked out in his name. Loaned in 1789, the books are more than 222 years overdue, and have accumulated a fine of more than $300,000 in today’s dollars.

FACT 8 Oprah Winfrey is chilephobic: she fears gum chewing. Her phobia began as a child when she found her grandmother’s stash of ABC gum (Already Been Chewed) in a kitchen cabinet.

FACT 9 Alfred Nobel, namesake of the Nobel Peace Prize, invented dynamite.

FACT 10 The Gloucestershire, England, airport once used tapes of Tina Turner’s music to drive off birds from its runways.

FACT 11 Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats, but he wasn’t alone: other ailurophobics include Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Julius Caesar.

FACT 12 Early in his career, Grey’s Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey wanted to attend clown college and become a juggler.

FACT 13 Martha Stewart dated actor Anthony Hopkins, but dumped him because she couldn’t separate him from Hannibal Lecter, the character he portrayed in The Silence of the Lambs.

FACT 14 Italian philosopher and scientist Galileo Galilei’s middle finger can be found on display at Italy’s Museo di Storia della Scienza.

FACT 15 Actor Billy Bob Thornton fears flying, bright colors, clowns and antique furniture.

FACT 16 Halley’s Comet appeared on the day Mark Twain was born in 1835, and again on the day Twain died in 1910.

FACT 17 Rapper Lil Wayne lost his virginity at age eleven—to a thirteen-year-old girl.

FACT 18 Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in part because he was afraid of the dark.

FACT 19 Mobster Al Capone died in 1947 of complications from syphilis.

FACT 20 Richard Nixon feared hospitals; he thought if he ever went into a hospital, he would not come out alive.

FACT 21 Actress Charlize Theron was discovered in a bank when an agent witnessed her throwing a “little tantrum” at a bank teller who refused to cash her check.

THE KING OF WEIRD: ELVIS

Normal has left the building.

FACT 22 Elvis was nominated fourteen times for a Grammy award, but won only three, all for gospel recordings. In 1971, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

FACT 23 Elvis got a C in music in eighth grade and was told by the teacher than that he had no singing talent.

FACT 24 When Elvis’s 1953 song “That’s All Right” became popular on Memphis radio, listeners thought he was black.

FACT 25 His trademark leg-shaking was due in part to nervousness.

FACT 26 Elvis made his one and only appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in 1954 and tanked, as the conservative crowd found his music and suggestive dancing unsuitable. He never performed there again.

FACT 27 At early concerts, Presley required police protection from gangs of teenage boys who resented the singer’s popularity with young women and wanted to beat him up.

FACT 28 A Catholic diocese in Wisconsin complained to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that “Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States” and warned that his music would “rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth.” Said the church, “That’s our job.”

FACT 29 The singer’s first appearance in Vegas in 1956 was a bust. Conservative, middle-aged audiences didn’t like his music, nor did critics; Newsweek wrote that Presley’s songs were “like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party.”

FACT 30 An early TV appearance on The Milton Berle Show in 1956 caused controversy among viewers and critics. One writer proclaimed that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley.”

FACT 31 Other TV personalities were similarly unimpressed. Ed Sullivan declared Elvis “unfit for family viewing” and Steve Allen considered him “talentless and absurd.” Good thing both of them are dead, because that describes about 90 percent of what’s on TV now.

FACT 32 Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers—a record 82.6 percent of the television audience.

FACT 33 After Presley’s October 1956 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned him in effigy.

FACT 34 In his first full year under contract with RCA, Presley accounted for more than half of the label’s singles sales.

FACT 35 After completing his military service, Presley returned to television for the first time as a guest on The Frank Sinatra Timex Special: Welcome Home Elvis, even though Sinatra had previously derided rock and roll as “brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious…sung, played and written…by cretinous goons.”

FACT 36 Elvis was introduced to drugs during his army service in Germany; a sergeant gave him amphetamines to help keep Presley awake during lengthy maneuvers.

FACT 37 Though critically derided, Elvis Presley’s films were profitable. Hal Wallis, who produced nine of them, said, “A Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood.”

FACT 38 Actress Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson met Presley in the 1950s in Las Vegas, where she was working as showgirl. She recalls that Elvis “was so anti-drug when I met him. I mentioned to him that I smoked marijuana, and he was just appalled. He said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’”

FACT 39 A constant target of death threats since the 1950s, Elvis was known to perform shows with a pistol in his waistband and another in his boot.

FACT 40 During one 1973 concert, four men rushed Elvis’s stage in an apparent attack. The singer used a karate move to fight one off; security stopped the others. The men turned out to be excited fans, not attackers.

FACT 41 Presley overdosed on barbiturates twice in 1973, once spending three days in a coma.

FACT 42 Presley’s years of drug abuse were first exposed in the 1977 book Elvis: What Happened? written by three of his former bodyguards. The singer tried to block the book’s release but was unsuccessful.

FACT 43 By the mid-1970s, Elvis Presley suffered from multiple ailments, including glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon.

FACT 44 After Elvis’s death, his cousin Billy Mann was paid $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse. The picture appeared on the cover of the September 6, 1977, edition of the National Enquirer, which remains the tabloid’s top-selling issue of all time.

FACT 45 Graceland was opened to the public in 1982. After the White House, it is the second most-visited home in the United States, attracting more than half a million visitors every year.

FACT 46 During one Elvis appearance on his show, TV host Ed Sullivan noticed a bulge in the singer’s crotch and wondered aloud if Presley had stuffed his pants with a soda bottle. No, Ed, he was just glad to be there.

FACT 47 In a bizarre 1970 meeting at the White House, Presley told President Richard Nixon that bands like the Beatles were undermining the country, and offered his services as an undercover drug agent.

FACT 48 Some of Elvis’s bejeweled jumpsuits weighed thirty pounds. Seems like that would make it hard to jump.

FACT 49 When Elvis discovered that his wife Priscilla was having an affair with friend Mike Stone, the enraged singer said, “Mike Stone must die.” But when bodyguard Red West came back to Presley with a price for Stone’s contract killing, Presley had calmed. “Let’s just leave it for now,” he said. “Maybe it’s a bit heavy.”

FACT 50 One year, Elvis Presley paid 91 percent of his annual income to the IRS.

FACT 51 Actress Cybill Shepherd dated Elvis in the early 1970s and hinted on The Oprah Winfrey Show that she had to teach the singer how to perform cunnilingus.

FACT 52 In 1973, Elvis gave Muhammad Ali a boxing robe that read “People’s Champion,” which Ali wore to fight Ken Norton. When Norton defeated him, Ali refused to wear the robe ever again.

FACT 53 At one point before his death, Elvis consumed an estimated ninety-four thousand calories a day—almost twice as much as an elephant.

FACT 54 Sigmund Freud suffered from pteridophobia, a morbid fear of ferns.

FACT 55 Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath to cover the onset of baldness. Back then they called it a leaf-over.

FACT 56 President Calvin Coolidge rarely worked more than four hours a day. He slept ten hours a night and napped two hours every afternoon.

FACT 57 During a performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, tenor Richard Versalle suffered a fatal heart attack and fell ten feet from a ladder to the stage just after singing the line “You can only live so long.”

FACT 58 Rapper Big Lurch was convicted in 2003 of the murder and partial consumption of his roommate while under the influence of PCP. What, you never heard of roommate and waffles?

FACT 59 TV’s Kelly Osbourne expressed interest in posing nude for Playboy, but said that her breasts “would need some airbrushing.” Playboy founder Hugh Hefner replied, “We don’t airbrush to that extent.”

FACT 60 Andy Warhol was at one time addicted to the diet pill Obetrol, an amphetamine similar to Adderall.

FACT 61 French novelist Honoré de Balzac drank so much caffeine that it enlarged his left heart ventricle, which may have contributed to his death.

FACT 62 Writer Lewis Carroll became addicted to laudanum, an opium-based drug that he took for frequent migranes.

FACT 63 After a number of automobile accidents, singer Edith Piaf became addicted to pain pills and alcohol.

FACT 64 In 1939, alarmed by the rise of Nazi Germany, onetime pacifist Albert Einstein urged President Franklin Roosevelt to begin development of an atomic bomb.

FACT 65 After his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was removed and kept in a jar by Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who conducted Einstein’s autopsy. Harvey was later fired from his job at Princeton Hospital for refusing to relinquish the organ.

FACT 66 When Greek opera star Maria Callas lost eighty pounds in the early 1950s, one rumor claimed she did so by purposely ingesting a tapeworm.

FACT 67 Actor Tim Allen was arrested in 1978 for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine. He pled guilty to drug trafficking charges and served two years in prison.

FACT 68 Mickey Mouse creator Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

FACT 69 Former singer and American Idol judge Paula Abdul had several public meltdowns, including one in 2008 in which she was reportedly overheard yelling at someone at LAX in a “poltergeist voice.”

FACT 70 When she was fifteen, actress Charlize Theron’s abusive alcoholic father was shot to death by her mother after he attacked them. Police ruled the act self-defense.

FACT 71 Actress Leighton Meester was born in a prison hospital while her mother was serving time on federal drug smuggling charges.

FACT 72 As a child, actress Teri Hatcher was raped by her uncle.

FACT 73 Actor Tobey Maguire’s father served time in prison for bank robbery.

FACT 74 Oprah Winfrey had a baby at age fourteen. The infant died in the hospital several weeks later.

FACT 75 Singer Nicki Minaj grew up with an abusive father who was an alcoholic and drug addict. Minaj says she spent her childhood worried that her dad would kill her mother.

FACT 76 Actress Drew Barrymore began drinking at age nine, smoking pot at ten and snorting cocaine at twelve. Barrymore entered rehab at age thirteen, the youngest star ever to do so.

FACT 77 Obsessed with cleanliness, Clark Gable showered several times a day and never took a bath because he was disgusted by the thought of sitting in dirty water. He also had his sheets changed every single day.

PREMATURE EXTERMINATION: EXAGGERATED REPORTS OF CELEBRITY DEATHS

Chalk it up to wishful thinking.

FACT 78 After Abe Vigoda was declared dead by People in 1982, the not-dead actor posed for a retraction photo in the magazine, where he was shown sitting in a coffin, reading the erroneous report.

FACT 79 In 1987, Vigoda was again mistakenly reported deceased during a TV newscast on station WWOR in New Jersey.

FACT 80 Rumors of Vigoda’s death follow him to this day, even though the ninety-year-old actor is still alive as of this writing.

FACT 81 Vigoda had a real-life brush with death in 1999 when his American Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing after losing cabin pressure. Several passengers suffered minor injuries, including the actor. Others reported seeing the Grim Reaper on the tarmac, shaking his fist and saying, “You win this round, Vigoda, but we will meet again.”

FACT 82 The website Abe Vigoda Status (abevigoda.com) maintains an up-to-date report on whether or not the actor still lives, as does a Facebook application.

FACT 83 When rumors began to circulate on Facebook and Twitter in October 2009 that actor Zach Braff had died, Braff refuted the rumors in a humorous video on YouTube.

FACT 84 After Elizabeth Taylor died in 2011 at age seventy-nine, NBC’s Today show aired a pre-produced segment on the actress that claimed she had died at age seventy-seven. The segment had obviously been created before her death and never updated.

FACT 85 In 1973, British music magazine Melody Maker ran a spoof obituary for rocker Alice Cooper that sent fans into such a frenzy, Cooper made a public announcement to proclaim, “I’m alive, and drunk as usual.”

FACT 86 Pop starlet Miley Cyrus died in a car crash on September 2008—or so reported a prank story on Digg.com that was picked up by major news outlets and spread quickly across the web.

FACT 87 Two months later, hackers broke into Cyrus’s YouTube account and posted a video that claimed—once again—that the singer had perished.

FACT 88 In March 2006, the website iNewswire was fooled into publishing a phony press release that claimed comedian Will Ferrell had been killed in a paragliding accident.

FACT 89 Bob Hope’s death was erroneously reported twice before his actual death in 2003.

FACT 90 A 1998 rumor of Hope’s death began in—of all places—the U.S. House of Representatives and was broadcast live on C-SPAN.

FACT 91 ABC News falsely declared Sharon Osbourne, wife of rocker Ozzy, dead on its website in 2004. Osbourne had been fighting cancer for two years; her obituary had apparently been prepared in anticipation of her death and accidentally posted.

FACT 92 Web rumors began to circulate in 2005 that TV star Jaleel White (Urkel on Family Matters) had committed suicide and left a note that read, “Did I do that?”—Urkel’s catchphrase.

FACT 93 When actor Larry Hagman (Dallas) was hospitalized for surgery on his transplanted liver in 2004, rumors began to spread that he was dead. Hagman debunked the reports in TV Guide, saying, “I’m not dead. I’m not retired. I’m simply out of work.”

FACT 94 Actor Will Smith was not killed in a fall from a cliff in New Zealand while filming Men in Black III in 2011, as some reports claimed.

FACT 95 Playboy founder Hugh Hefner went on Twitter in July 2011 to deny rumors of his death from a heart attack.

FACT 96 Though he is serving time in prison on federal tax charges, actor Wesley Snipes was not killed in a prison fight in 2011.

FACT 97 In December 2011, rocker Jon Bon Jovi shot down rumors of his death by posting a web photo of himself very much alive and holding a sign that read, “Heaven looks a lot like New Jersey.”

FACT 98 Actor Russell Crowe was erroneously reported dead in 2010 by New York City radio station Z-100; his “death” immediately became a trending topic on Google.

FACT 99 After a gaunt Whitney Houston performed at a Michael Jackson tribute concert in New York in 2001, false rumors of her death from a drug overdose began to circulate. Houston died in February 2012 from a drug-related drowning.

FACT 100 Teen idol Justin Bieber has been repeatedly rumored dead since 2009, of causes ranging from suicide to a drug overdose to gunshot wounds received in a nightclub tiff.

FACT 101 Pablo Picasso was so poor at times that he burned his own paintings for warmth.

FACT 102 Howard Hughes once made half a billion dollars in one day.

FACT 103 Film critic Roger Ebert and TV titan Oprah Winfrey dated in the 1980s. It was Roger who convinced her to syndicate her talk show.

FACT 104 The FBI called Ted Kaczynski “The Unabomber” because his early mail bombs were sent to universities (Un) and airlines (a).

FACT 105 Just before the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, authors H. A. and Margret Rey fled the city on bicycles and took with them the manuscript for Curious George.

FACT 106 In 1835, John Wilkes Booth’s father, Junius, threatened to kill President Andrew Jackson.

FACT 107 A closer look at a photo of Abraham Lincoln giving his second inaugural address in 1865 reveals among the crowd the faces of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and accomplices David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, John Surratt and Edmund Spangler.

FACT 108 Contrary to legend, George Washington’s false teeth were not wooden. Some were gold, ivory or lead; others were horse or donkey teeth.

FACT 109 Inept president Ulysses S. Grant was nicknamed “Useless.”

FACT 110 Ineffective president Dwight D. Eisenhower was nicknamed “Do-Nothing Ike,” “The Golfer,” and “World Mangler.”

FACT 111 President Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868 but kept his job after the measure failed to pass the Senate by one vote.

FACT 112 TV game-show host Bob Barker was taught karate by his friend Chuck Norris.

FACT 113 Nobel Prize–winning biologist Francis Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

FACT 114 Nicolas Cage ate a real cockroach for the film Vampire’s Kiss. Said Cage, “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway.”

FACT 115 Cage also had teeth extracted for his role in Birdy.

FACT 116 Known primarily for his treachery during the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold was a skilled leader who had shown great valor earlier in the war and saved the Revolution at the Battle of Saratoga.

FACT 117 Benedict Arnold was lured into betraying his country in large part by Peggy Shippen, a teenage daughter of a prominent Loyalist family. Arnold and Shippen later married.

FACT 118 In 1978, three weeks after marrying his fourth wife, Oscar-winning actor Gig Young apparently shot her to death in their New York City apartment and then turned the gun on himself.

FACT 119 Boxing promoter Don King killed two people. One murder was ruled justifiable because King was being robbed at the time.

FACT 120 In the other case, King was convicted of second degree murder for stomping a man to death and spent almost four years in prison.

FACT 121 Tony Award–winning actor Paul Kelly spent more than two years in prison after beating another man to death in 1927.

FACT 122 Kelly later married the dead man’s widow.

FACT 123 Punk rocker Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols was charged in 1978 with the stabbing murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before he could be brought to trial.

FACT 124 In 2009, famed record producer Phil Spector was convicted of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Spector is currently serving a prison term of nineteen years to life.

FACT 125 Rapper C-Murder, aka Corey Miller, was found guilty of murder in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison after beating and shooting a sixteen-year-old boy who had allegedly embarrassed Miller during a club’s rap contest.

FACT 126 In 1987, actor Matthew Broderick killed two women in Northern Ireland when his car veered into the oncoming lane. Broderick was convicted of careless driving and paid a $175 fine.

FACT 127 Writer William S. Burroughs shot and killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951. Burroughs initially claimed he was trying to shoot a glass off Vollmer’s head and missed.

FACT 128 Burroughs was found guilty of manslaughter and given a two-year suspended jail sentence, serving only two weeks behind bars.

SHOOTING PISTOLS IN THE AIR:
CELINE DION

Oh, she’s Canadian? That explains it.

FACT 129 Celine Dion is one of the world’s bestselling female singers, with more than 200 million CDs sold.

FACT 130 In 2007, Dion was ranked by Forbes as the fifth richest woman in entertainment, with an estimated net worth of U.S. $250 million.

FACT 131 Celine Dion has released thirty-seven full-length records in French and English, making her one of only a handful of artists to suck in more than one language.

FACT 132 Dion is the bestselling Canadian artist of all time, edging out Crash Test Dummies, Gino Vannelli and Saga.

FACT 133 In 2003, Dion signed a deal with Coty Inc., to release Celine Dion Parfums.

FACT 134 Since its inception, Celine Dion Parfums has grossed more than $850 million in retail sales.

FACT 135 Dion has won numerous accolades from around the world: Grammy Awards in the United States, Juno and Felix Awards in Canada, and World Music Awards in Europe.

FACT 136 Celine Dion first met future husband René Angélil when she was twelve years old. He was sixty-eight. Just kidding, he was thirty-eight. She was still twelve, though.

FACT 137 Dion released her first album at age thirteen after Angélil mortgaged his home to finance the recording.

FACT 138 Celine Dion and René Angélil began dating in 1988, but kept their relationship a secret because of their twenty-six-year age difference.

FACT 139 Celine and René married in 1994 at a ceremony at Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica that was televised nationwide in Canada.

FACT 140 The wedding cost more than half a million dollars.

FACT 141 During the first run of her 2011 residency at Caesars Palace, Celine played to more than eighty-five thousand fans across twenty sold-out shows and topped the list of highest-grossing concerts in North America.

FACT 142 Author Carl Wilson says that Jamaican gangsters love Celine Dion. “[A Jamaican friend] told me that when he hears Celine Dion playing in a Kingston neighborhood, he speeds his car up to get out of there, because it means it’s a really rough area,” he says.

FACT 143 Says Carl Wilson, “At Jamaican ghetto dances, gangsters scream and fire pistols into the air when a Dion song comes on.” They’re not the only ones.

FACT 144 In July 2011, attorneys for Celine Dion forced the closure of the popular Tumblr blog, Ridiculous Pictures of Celine Dion.

FACT 145 In 1963, future First Lady Laura Welch (Bush) ran a stop sign and accidentally crashed her car into the vehicle of a seventeen-year-old man, killing him. Welch wasn’t found to be drinking or speeding, and wasn’t charged with a crime.

FACT 146 Actress Rebecca Gayheart struck and killed a nine-year-old pedestrian with her car in Los Angeles in 2001. Gayheart pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to three years’ probation and a fine.

FACT 147 Gayheart was using her cell phone at the time of the accident.

FACT 148 Sharon Osbourne, wife of rocker Ozzy Osbourne, admits to sending her own excrement wrapped in Tiffany boxes to several people who criticized her family. When a journalist criticized her teenage children, Jack and Kelly, Ms. Osbourne sent a box of excrement with a note that read, “I heard you’ve got an eating disorder. Eat this.”

FACT 149 In 1936, eccentric billionaire-to-be Howard Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian in Los Angeles. Although Hughes had been drinking earlier that evening, he wasn’t drunk at the time of the incident, and charges were dropped.

FACT 150 Keith Moon, the late drummer of The Who, accidentally ran over and killed his bodyguard in 1970 while fleeing attackers. Moon wasn’t charged.

FACT 151 In 1984, Mötley Crüe lead singer Vince Neil was arrested for drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter after he crashed into an oncoming car. Neil’s passenger was killed, and two occupants of the other car suffered serious injuries.

FACT 152 Though Neil had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit at the time of the crash, he was sentenced to just thirty days in jail, of which he only served fifteen.

FACT 153 At age twelve, future Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson shot and killed a sixteen-year-old girl when his gun went off accidentally.

FACT 154 Benjamin Franklin almost killed himself while trying to electrocute a turkey.

FACT 155 America’s nineteenth president, Rutherford B. Hayes, was nicknamed “His Fraudulency” by some who believed that Republican power brokers had stolen the election.

FACT 156 President Warren Harding (1921–23) was nicknamed “Broom Closet Lover” for the location in which he allegedly liked to rendezvous with his mistress.

FACT 157 John Lennon’s aunt told him repeatedly as a boy that he would never make a living playing the guitar.

FACT 158 The man who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 and sparked World War I, Gavrilo Princip, was only nineteen years old.