Futility Closet

At the height of her fame in 1943, movie star Gene Tierney contracted German measles during pregnancy and bore a daughter with severe birth defects. The strain ended her marriage to Oleg Cassini and sent her into a breakdown that lasted years. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe Tierney's years of heartbreak and the revelation that compounded them. We'll also visit some Japanese cats and puzzle over a disarranged corpse. Intro: The indexes of two mathematics textbooks contain hidden jokes. In 1973 Stanford statistician Herman Chernoff proposed using cartoon faces to encode information. Sources for our feature on Gene Tierney: Gene Tierney, Self-Portrait, 1979. Oleg Cassini, In My Own Fashion, 1990. Steven Rybin, Gestures of Love: Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema, 2017. Karen Burroughs Hannsberry, Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film, 2013. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side, 1962. Dan Callahan, "Only a Dream," Sight & Sound 22:3 (March 2012)