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1.
When the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat dated Madonna in the early ’80s (just as the two were rising to fame), he gifted her many of his paintings. After they broke up, Madonna said Basquiat asked for his artwork back, and when she returned them, he painted over the pieces black.
2.
And Jay-Z, a longtime admirer of Jean-Michel Basquiat, has at least one Basquiat painting hanging in his home shared with Beyoncé. In 2013, Jay-Z bought Basquiat’s painting “Mecca” from 1982 for $4.2 million.
3.
There was a biggggggg pop culture rumor that Mister Rogers was a sniper in the Vietnam War and developed extreme anger issues. Allegedly, his therapist suggested that the best way to diminish his aggression was to get involved in children’s entertainment. But Mister (Fred) Rogers was never a member of the military, nor did he fight in the Vietnam War. He attended Rollins College in 1951 to study music composition, landed a job at a TV station in 1953, and, as you may already know, started Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the late ’60s.
4.
On Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Carol Burnett described her wholesome 60+ year friendship with Julie Andrews. Burnett and Andrews are an iconic celebrity duo who have worked together on hilarious projects like Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, and they show up to support one another as they receive awards in the entertainment world. But the most endearing part of their chummy friendship is how they make each other chuckle. While filming The Sound of Music, Burnett told Poehler that Andrews would “send her dirty limericks.”
5.
Elvis Presley was actually a natural blonde. His personal hair stylist, Larry Geller, dyed his hair dark in the ’50s by mixing shampoo, vitamin capsules, aloe vera, and herbs together. Geller told Yahoo! in 2015, “I used to go to the health food store and get a benign base shampoo and get some vitamin capsules and pour 99 percent pure aloe vera and other herbs into it, and shake it up.”
6.
While filming their makeout scenes in Grease, Jeff Conaway (Kenickie) actually gave Stockard Channing (Rizzo) hickies you see in the malt shop scene. Channing said that Conaway was “was really feeling his oats.”
7.
Tina Turner was the one who taught Mick Jagger how to dance when she toured with the Rolling Stones in the ’60s. “The Rolling Stones requested that Ike [Turner] and Tina do the England tour with them. I didn’t really know Mick, but there was always this guy who stood in the wings,” Turner revealed. “He wasn’t dancing on stage [yet]. We were in the dressing rooms together, having a ball, and Mick says to me, ‘Teach me how to do The Popcorn.’ And I said to him, ‘So that’s what you were doing in the wings all this time, learning some of the dances we do?'”
8.
When Harry Styles experimented with mushrooms during the recording of Fine Line at Shangri-La studios, he accidentally bit the tip of his tongue off. He said, “I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories.”
9.
In Honey Don’t! starring Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley, there’s one particular titillating sex scene that’s actually pretty darn funny, once you learn the behind-the-scenes mechanics of it all.
When Honey (Margaret Qualley) and MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) are at the bar, Qualley revealed the secret trick they used to make the sex act realistic. “There’s someone from the props department on their knees holding a jar of coconut oil,” she said. “Aubrey’s got to lift her finger up and have it be wet. It was playing with different levels of how far you get in that setting and trying to work out the physicality there to make sure that I was saying what we were trying to say, but it was really funny.”
10.
In Carrie Fisher’s home in California, she collected a ton of eccentric items, placing them around every room, nook, and cranny on the property. In the 2016 documentary Bright Lights, she gave an ultimate tour of her fun house (which was downright iconic). She showed off unique items, like a player piano in the bathroom, funny Prozac art in the kitchen, and a traffic light hanging from a tree in front of her house. The only person who could pull off this brilliant type of celebrity home decor was Carrie Fisher, and Carrie Fisher only!
11.
Tallulah Bankhead allegedly sprinkled Marlene Dietrich’s gold wig dust on her pubic hair and showed it off to random people who passed by her dressing room. Bankhead was quoted as saying, “Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw, and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia.”
12.
Barbra Streisand has been known for having long nails ever since she came onto the scene as a singer in 1963. For her 1976 film, A Star Is Born, she set out to learn the guitar and wrote the classic “Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born),” which won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1977. Because she had long nails, she had to cut the nails on her left hand to make learning the guitar easier, and feel more in-tune (pun intended) with the song she was composing.
They ended up cutting a scene from A Star Is Born that showed Barbra Streisand playing the guitar for costar Kris Kristofferson. She released the deleted scene in 2018, where you could see her long nails on her right hand plucking “Evergreen” on the guitar. Streisand revealed in an Instagram video that, “When I had to learn the guitar for A Star Is Born, I only had to cut [my nails] on one hand.”
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And speakinggggggg of winning the Oscar for Best Original Song, Lady Gaga won in 2019 for co-writing “Shallow,” the main theme from the 2018 version of A Star Is Born. Two legends, two stars, two winners for the same legendary story!!!
14.
Jane Fonda and Marilyn Monroe were in the same Method acting class — the Actors Studio — which was run by legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg. “I sat next to Marilyn Monroe in Lee Strasberg’s classes. She and I would sit in the back of the room,” Fonda recalled on Oprah’s Master Class in 2012. “She’d have no makeup on, dark sunglasses, and a scarf around her head. She was too scared to get up and do anything.”
15.
Big Sean’s house (which used to be owned by Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash) has a custom nightclub in the basement. It was already there when he moved in, and he made some slight changes from Slash’s original setup. He kept the black interior, the stripper pole, and the skull-shaped lights, but redecorated most of the space. He even replaced the couches because he “didn’t know what the fuck [Slash] was doing down here.”
16.
The infamous “Peppa Pig” quote from Season 2 of The White Lotus was actually improvised. Sabrina Impacciatore (who played Valentina) didn’t know her quick-witted joke made it into the final cut. “I’m so glad it’s on the show because Mike [White] said: ‘You can improvise if you want in this scene,'” Impacciatore told Access Hollywood: “It was on my third day of shooting, and I was intimidated by Jennifer [Coolidge] because to me, she’s a goddess. I improvised, I said, ‘Peppa Pig,’ and do you know what happened? She could not stop laughing.”
17.
In Beyoncé’s song “Smoke Hour ★ Willie Nelson” from her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, she pays homage to Black artists who laid the foundation for country/rock music. If you pay attention, you’ll catch onto songs by revolutionary artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, and Roy Hamilton.
18.
In Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker purposefully tripped a lot throughout the series to emulate some of her favorite physical comedians, like Steve Martin and Jennifer Saunders. She believed tripping in designer shoes was true to Carrie’s character because she was “such a wreck of a person so much of the time.” Tripping in shoes captured Carrie’s character to a tee: “Her apartment is such a mess that she should trip over shoe boxes,” Parker said. “They are in the way.”
19.
In the first episode of Stranger Things 5, which premiered on Netflix on November 26, 2025, the show featured Diana Ross’ iconic 1980 hit “Upside Down.” Naturally, this inspired viewers to listen to The Boss on Spotify, resulting in a BIG spike in streams. “Upside Down” streams increased by 510%, which…HOLY MOLY!!
20.
Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” was inspired by the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969. She was originally supposed to perform at the festival, but at the last minute, her manager told her not to go. She was scheduled to appear on The Dick Cavett Show the next day, so instead of performing at Woodstock, she stayed back in New York.
Moved by one of the first huge music festivals in history, Mitchell followed the Woodstock news coverage on TV. It was that weekend she wrote the monumental song “Woodstock,” and unknowingly created the anthem of the late ’60s. “I don’t know if I would have written the song ‘Woodstock’ if I had gone [to the festival],” she told Life in 1994. “I was the fan who couldn’t go, not the performing animal. So, it afforded me a different perspective.”
The next day, Mitchell appeared on The Dick Cavett Show alongside Woodstock performers Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Mitchell listened to their stories about the festival she unfairly missed out on. The song “Woodstock” became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in March 1970, and a month later, appeared on Mitchell’s album Ladies of the Canyon as a dark, piano ballad.
21.
Oprah absolutely loved ’70s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show when she was in her twenties. She wanted to be Mary Tyler Moore’s character, Mary Richards, when she grew up. She even had an “O” hanging in her apartment, just like Mary’s legendary “M.” In 2008, Oprah reunited the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and at one point, they surprised her with a gold “O” signed by everyone.
22.
In a 2021 interview with People, Bowen Yang talked about the legendary Saturday Night Live afterparties and his personal experiences with them. When he first became a cast member in 2019, he said, “Everybody [usually] goes to a steakhouse in Midtown and sits at a table and sips on one martini and leaves — but you’d have to go to the after-afterparty with a password.” He went into detail about his best afterparty experience in 2020. “One of my happiest moments [was when] RuPaul hosted and all of the Season 12 girls [from RuPaul’s Drag Race] came,” Yang said. “The DJ played house music from the ’90s, and everyone got on tables and danced — and it was Cecily [Strong’s] birthday. It was one of the best nights. I feel like that’s the potential an SNL afterparty usually has.”
23.
Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” was partly inspired by the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name. In a 2021 interview with Genius, Lil Nas X revealed it was a magical process writing “Montero (Call Me by Your Name).” He said, “The storyline happens this one night in the summer where I take a break from working on [Montero], and I visit this guy who’s an artist. He’s like, ‘Come visit my house!’ and I was like, ‘Okay.’ I get there, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I like this guy a lot.’ And the next day, I started writing the song.”
Lil Nas X explained that Call Me by Your Name was “one of the first gay films I had watched,” and how deeply the movie influenced his 2021 hit. “The song is called ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ which is themed after the movie Call Me by Your Name,” he said. “The song is my name [Montero], but it’s the person’s name because I’m calling them by my own name — you get it?”
You can listen to “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” here.
24.
Liza Minnelli was actually the first artist to sing “New York, New York” in 1977, before Frank Sinatra made it famous two years later. John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote the song for the 1977 film New York, New York starring Minnelli, but unfortunately, her version didn’t get the popularity it so rightly deserved. They even made a joke about it on Arrested Development, on which Liza was featured as Lucille 2.
25.
And Stevie Nicks revealed on Oprah’s Master Class that she would keep a gram of cocaine in her boot in the ’70s. She took so much cocaine that by 1986, a plastic surgeon told Nicks she had a hole in her nose, and if she took one more “hit of cocaine,” it would be her last ever.
While everyone around her in the ’70s thought she looked beautiful, Stevie Nicks disagrees. The drug addiction was evident in her eyes, that looked like they were “swimming in water.”