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From happy campers to Hollywood stars
By Paul Bannister • Bankrate.com
Bob's rabbi wasn't impressed. He once caught the aspiring vocalist serenading a crowd from a cabin roof, ordered him down and told him to shut up.
Cindy Crawford's summer camp was intended to
exercise her brain -- she went to the U.S. Air Force Academy camp
in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the cadets quickly recognized her
potential and called her "Legs."
Gwyneth Paltrow
Photo credit:
Nancy Kaszerman |
Another all-star beauty, Gwyneth Paltrow, attended
Camp Muriel Flagg in Williamstown, Mass., for several years, while
her actress mom, Blythe Danner, worked at the local theater festival.
It wasn't always a happy time for Gwynnie.
Her counselor, Jane Swift, whose mom ran the camp, went on to become lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. She recalled: "I remember Gwyneth as being a mama's girl. Kind of clingy."
Blythe, by comparison had few airs. She even car-pooled
campers back and forth like any other mom.
Gwyneth seems to have had no bad memories, however clingy she was. She has returned to Williamstown to perform, celebrating her acting debut there in "Huckleberry Finn."
Jane Fonda had a tumultuous relationship with
her mother, and it manifested itself when Jane was at summer camp.
Jane, say her biographers, had nightmares about Frances
Fonda and became so hysterical it took the entire summer camp staff
to calm her. The tragedy of their relationship -- Frances eventually
killed herself -- drove Jane into self-hatred and bulimia, add the
biographers.
Howard Hughes' mom, Allene, fretted about his
"super sensitiveness" and inability to make friends when he went
off to camp at age 10.
She demanded that the camp protect him from the "violent germs" of polio and eventually took him back home.
The next year, Allene again wrote to camp administrators asking them to help her son accept teasing without feeling hurt and resentful. He stuck it out and finished camp, but on his return home to Houston he complained of bad dreams and tiredness, and never went to camp again.
"Dumb and Dumber" star Jeff Daniels
began his summer camping at Bruin Lake Boy Scout Camp in Michigan.
His bunkmates, he says, were in a misery of homesickness.
"It was the first time away from home for a lot of them," he remembers. "About half of them sat in the tent and cried."
Late-night talker Conan O'Brien had his own
way of dealing with homesickness when he was at Cragged Mountain
Farm, in Freedom, N.H.
"I would think of fantasy situations, like a cholera outbreak," he confesses. "My father, who's a doctor, would rush up and save everyone and I got to go home."
"60 Minutes" anchor Mike Wallace,
cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, songbird Norah Jones and
"Amadeus" star Tom Hulce are among the 85,000 campers
who have attended Michigan's Interlochen Arts Camp, though not in
the same one of its 75 years.
Two teenage kids who did attend camp together formed a partnership that gave us some of the world's best rock 'n' roll songs.
If composer Mike Stoller and lyricist Jerry
Lieber had not attended an interracial summer camp, they would
not have fallen for boogie-woogie piano, not teamed up to write
songs, and Elvis Presley would never have sung many of their numbers,
such as "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock." Stoller and Lieber, by
the way, also composed hits such as "Yakkety Yak," "Poison Ivy,"
"Stand By Me" and "There Goes My Baby."
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