Chapter 35

The Gold Coast Princess

Karyn Kupcinet—West Hollywood

Roberta Lynn Kupcinet was born on March 6, 1941, to Chicago royalty. Her father, pioneer multimedia personality Irv Kupcinet, was the man that all celebrities visiting Chicago had to call upon. Besides his longtime Sun-Times gossip column, “Kup’s Column,” Kupcinet also had a syndicated television late night talk show that ran from 1959 to 1986. It was not unusual for Roberta to come home from school to find Don Rickles, Phyllis Diller, Sammy Davis, Jr., or Milton Berle cracking jokes with Irv and his brash and foulmouthed wife, Essee.

Growing up in luxury on Chicago’s Gold Coast and attending private schools, Roberta, who was known as Cookie when she was a girl, had all the opportunities that a rich, well-connected girl would expect. Essee, an arrogant snob and failed dancer, groomed Cookie for show business. At thirteen, Cookie took up acting and, despite her lack of vocal range, found plenty of work in Chicago theaters.

After high school, Cookie moved to New York to take lessons at the prestigious Actor’s Studio. She became obsessed about her weight and appearance. Essee had introduced Cookie to amphetamines, which in 1960 were sold as diet pills and were as easy to get as aspirins. Cookie received extensive plastic surgery to smooth out the little flaws that she and Essee imagined would hold back her acting career.

In 1960, her parents’ good friend, comedian Jerry Lewis, offered Cookie a small role in his film, The Ladies Man. After moving to Los Angeles and changing her name to Karyn, Kupcinet had little trouble finding parts in television and films. She was the fresh new face in Hollywood and, with her father’s connections, she obtained guest roles on The Donna Reed Show, The Red Skelton Show, and Hawaiian Eye.

It was not long before casting directors realized Kupcinet’s lack of talent and the acting offers reduced to a trickle by 1962. It was no secret in Hollywood that the starlet had a raging amphetamine addiction that stoked her insecurities and caused irrational behavior. Unlike most young actors in Hollywood, Karyn was supported by a generous allowance provided by her parents. There was nothing that Karyn went without, and she lived in fashionable the Monterey Village apartments at 1227½ Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood. Despite her parental safety-net, she was allegedly arrested for shoplifting. Her father’s connections made the charges go away.

In 1962, Karyn acted in an episode of the Earl Holliman drama, The Wide Country. The short-lived series co-starred Andrew Prine, who had made a splash as Helen Keller’s brother in the Academy Award–winning film, The Miracle Worker. Karyn and Prine began dating.

Prine had his mind focused on his career and saw Karyn as a casual girlfriend, but Karyn was obsessed with the young actor. Prine quickly tired of Kupcinet’s drama queen antics and insecurities and stopped seeing the Gold Coast princess. Karyn responded by cutting random letters out of magazines, like a ransom note, and sending threatening letters to Prine and his estranged wife, actress Sharon Farrell. Kupcinet was also pregnant by Prine, but family friend, actor Mark Goddard, best known as U.S. Space Corps Major Donald West on the television program Lost In Space, drove her to Tijuana for an abortion. The overweight, spoiled, whining, clingy, high-maintenance actress was on a trajectory that could only lead to tragedy.

On November 27, 1963, Kupcinet arrived late for dinner at Goddard’s home. She was drugged out to the point of drooling, and she told the Goddards that she had found a baby on her doorstep. She went back to her apartment where she watched The Danny Kaye Show with actor Robert Hathaway and writer Edwin Stephen Rubin.

Higher than a kite on speed, the restless Kupcinet left the pair to go for a quick walk around the block. After she came back, she served coffee and cake to her guests, and she then excused herself and went to bed. It was not unusual for Karyn to let her guests stay over after she went to bed. Kupcinet had a state-of-the-art television set that her daddy had bought for her, and she was known for her TV parties. Besides, it was Thanksgiving Eve.

Hathaway and Rubin left the apartment around eleven, carefully making sure that the door was locked on their way out. The men went to actor William Mamches’ apartment, where they continued to watch television. Andrew Prine showed up, too, and together the four men watched television until three in the morning. Prine told his friends that Kupcinet had called him around midnight and told him about the baby that she claimed to have found on her doorstep, adding that the police had taken the baby away.

On November 30, after not hearing from Karyn since Wednesday evening, Goddard and his wife Marcia drove to the Monterey Village apartments and found the door to her second story apartment unlocked. Walking in, they were immediately hit by the odor of decay. They found the television on, cigarette butts scattered on the floor, along with an empty coffee pot. Karyn was lying facedown and naked on the couch. Body fluids had leaked out of her orifices and maggot eggs were in her hair. She was too decomposed to determine immediately what had caused her death, but the autopsy report listed the cause of death as “murder by manual strangulation.” Karyn had a compression fracture on the left side of her hyoid bone, along with deep tissue hemorrhage of the neck. Her thyroid gland, tongue, and larynx were crushed.

The Los Angeles Police Department found Karyn’s diary full of insane rantings about her weight, lack of acting work, and Prine. Detectives found threatening notes that were forged by Karyn to make it seem that Prine had sent them. Over ten prescription bottles were found inside her medicine cabinet—mostly uppers and downers.

Prine, Mamches, Hathaway, Rubin, and the Goddards were thoroughly questioned by the police and released. Karyn’s downstairs neighbor, David Lange, brother of actress Hope Lange, was also questioned at length. Lange was a known as a chronic alcoholic who often walked into strangers’ apartments in a drunken stupor. Lange claimed that he had been out drinking with Natalie Wood and Glenn Ford that night, and he had passed out when he got back to his apartment. A few days later, Lange allegedly joked to friends that he had killed Kupcinet. After that, Lange quit cooperating with the investigators.

The LAPD, pressured by Kupcinet’s connections, rushed the investigation by focusing on her entertainment industry friends and not on good, old-fashioned detective work. Despite the best efforts of the LAPD, the murder of Karyn Kupcinet was never solved. Irv Kupcinet went to his grave believing that he knew who murdered his daughter, but the police never had enough evidence to charge anyone.

Six weeks after her murder, Kupcinet appeared on the popular courtroom drama Perry Mason. “The Case of the Capering Camera” was Kupcinet’s final on-screen appearance.