Just how do those apparently ageless Hollywood stars, such as Robert Wagner, Kim Basinger and William Shatner, keep their amazingly youthful good looks? Whilst many claim that it is simply down to healthy eating and regular exercise, and some will admit to cosmetic surgery, there is a long history of various celebrities opting for far more bizarre, and often downright sinister, rejuvenation techniques. Rock Hudson, for instance, always kept a jar of his own jism in his fridge, and would regularly smear it all over his body, in the belief that it would keep his skin soft and supple. He would, apparently, sometimes eat it spread on toast as a breakfast snack. His contemporary, popular screen idol Cary Grant swore by regular injections of monkey hormones to preserve his boyish good looks. Unfortunately, this treatment proved to have long-term side-effects, with Grant regularly being seen swinging through the trees in the grounds of his Beverley Hills mansion. Worse was to come. During the making of North By Northwest, he reportedly once climbed the studio lighting rig and urinated on director Alfred Hitchcock’s head. A few years later, in 1963, he was arrested by for public indecency after he was caught publicly masturbating in front of a party of schoolgirls in a Los Angeles park. Two nurses who witnessed the incident claimed that he had been abusing himself for at least three hours before this incident, flicking his jism at passing women. Luckily, studio chiefs were able to secure his release and hush up the incident with a generous donation to the LAPD widows and orphans fund. Finally, in 1966, the debonair leading man’s bizarre behaviour became too much when, at the premiere of Walk Don’t Run, he climbed a lamppost outside of the cinema and defecated over several leading tinsletown dignitaries, including movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. Escaping police, he proceeded to break into the LA Zoo and attempted to make love to two female chimps and an orang-utan. Grant never made another film, instead retiring to his luxury monkey house in Switzerland.

It was long rumoured that distinguished British thespian Sir Rex Harrison relied upon a programme of secret organ transplants and blood transfusions to ensure his longevity. It was claimed that he had shady agreements with several Mexican hospitals to supply him with livers, kidneys and even hearts harvested from patients on their children’s wards. The transplants themselves were allegedly carried out by fugitive Nazi mad scientist Dr Josef Mengele in his secret laboratory hidden deep in the Brazilian rain-forest. Unfortunately, the new organs suffered a high rejection rate, with Harrison visibly ageing as they failed. As his demand for new organs outstripped the Mexican hospitals’ ability to supply them, Harrison apparently took to cruising the streets of Tijuana in his Rolls Royce, posing as an ageing peadophile in order to pick up young boys. The trail of organ-less blood drained bodies baffled Mexican police for decades. It has been claimed that when Sir Rex finally died in 1990, (following the discovery and destruction of Mengele’s lab by Mossad agents in 1988), he was actually 126 years old, rather than 82 years old, as officially claimed. Harrison’s good friend the Queen Mother was also said to rely upon surgery and blood transfusions to maintain her incredible good looks, (as the Daily Mail observed on the occasion if her 101st birthday, she didn’t look a day over 98), but did not resort to murder or organ-snatching. According to veteran royal-watcher Hugh Ropley-Tossington she regularly had her skin surgically removed and ironed to smooth out the wrinkles. She was then stitched back into it, looking at least five years younger. It has also been claimed that she received regular infusions of lizard and crocodile blood, in the belief that reptilian lower metabolic rates would help increase her lifespan. However, serious side-effects were rumoured, with the News of the World recently claiming that, before her death, she had developed hard, scaly skin and had taken to catching flies with her three-foot long tongue and basking in the sunlight on the banks of the Serpentine. Moreover, when supplies of blood from the reptile house at London Zoo were seen being delivered to the private hospital she was treated in during 2001, it fuelled theories that she was, as claimed by David Icke, actually a shape-shifting lizard from another dimension.

At least one film fan believes that some celebrities owe their continuing youth and looks to actual, rather than scientific, vampirism. Willy Grinder, a forty four year old California resident, was recently arrested for attacking Woody Allen with a huge crucifix outside of a Beverly Hills jazz club. “If only I’d remembered to use a Star of David instead of a crucifix, the world would have seen Woody Allen crumble into dust, and I would have been vindicated”, says Grinder, who believes that the celebrated comic director and actor is a blood-sucking beast who preys upon young girls, sucking out their youthful life essence in order to prolong his own existence. Most disagree, believing that he is merely a dirty old man. “I have incontrovertible proof that many of Hollywood’s greatest names are actually vampires”, Grinder asserts. “How else can you explain their eternal youth, health and ever-present sunglasses? Why are they rarely seen in daylight, preferring to attend premieres and parties after dark?” In 1999 he dug up the body of Dracula star Bela Lugosi before staking and decapitating it. He claimed that the body’s amazing state of preservation proved that Lugosi was undead and well, and the fountainhead of the current Hollywood Vampire cult. Horrified Lugosi fans pointed out that the star’s incredibly preserved body was more likely the result of the amount of formaldehyde the hopelessly booze and drug addicted actor had imbibed during his final years. He was in the headlines again the following year, when he claimed to have video footage of Joan Collins bathing in the blood of virgins, and Julie Andrews and Sharon Stone engaging in naked lesbian vampire frolics with nuns – the videotape, however, proved to be blank. “I should have remembered that the undead don’t have video images or reflections”, he explained during the ensuing libel case brought by the actresses. “All their previous movies must have been shot before they were vampirised”. Grinder is currently under psychiatric observation, pending sentencing in the Woody Allen assault case.