The NYPD has seen its share of misbehaving celebrities over the years, but a murder committed by Academy Award–winning actor Gig Young is one of the most nefarious and perplexing incidents of all. On October 19, 1978, nine years after winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Rocky, a sleazy dance marathon promoter in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Young shot his fifth wife to death in their residence at the Osborne Apartment House on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Then he turned the gun on himself. Young was sixty-four, while his spouse, a German art gallery owner named Kim Schmidt, was just half his age.
Why would a man who appeared to have so much success literally blow it all away?
Hours before his death, Young had taped an episode of The Joe Franklin Show. To respect Young’s memory, Franklin, a New York radio and television mainstay for seven decades, never aired that program. While Young left no suicide note, he did leave his Oscar beside his body. In his estate, which was worth a total of $200,000, he bestowed the Academy Award to his agent, Martin Baum, calling it “the Oscar that I won because of Martin’s help.”
Young also had a daughter, born in 1964, whom he vehemently denied was his biological offspring throughout a five-year court battle. Although there was no DNA testing in those days, and despite Young’s protestations, the court decided that he was, in fact, the girl’s father. Young bequeathed her just ten dollars.
It was later learned that Young was being treated by the controversial psychotherapist Eugene Landy, whose list of troubled celebrity clients included musicians Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Alice Cooper, as well as actors Richard Harris, Rod Steiger, and Maureen McCormick, who behind the cheery façade of her role as Marcia Brady on the iconic 1970s television show The Brady Bunch was suffering from depression, paranoia, and drug abuse. Landy’s unorthodox treatment consisted of him, as well as his designees, micromanaging all aspects of the lives of his clients.
The roguishly handsome Young was born Byron Elsworth Barr in 1913 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and raised in Washington, D.C. He developed a passion for theater in high school, which led to him receiving a scholarship to the lauded Pasadena Community Playhouse in California. He took his acting name from a character he played in a small part in the 1942 film The Gay Sisters, which starred Barbara Stanwyck.
Young’s looks and raffish charm enabled him to usually garner roles as good-natured “guy next door” types in scores of films. Prior to winning his Oscar in 1969, he had been nominated twice before. In the first film, he showed significant depth playing against type as an alcoholic in the 1951 film Come Fill the Cup with James Cagney. He was also nominated in 1958 for his role as a charming cad in the lighthearted romp Teacher’s Pet with Clark Gable and Doris Day.
What many viewers found most memorable, however, was his role in a classic 1959 episode of the television show The Twilight Zone. Young portrayed a beleaguered thirty-six-year-old advertising executive named Martin Sloan who stops near his boyhood home to have his car serviced and experiences a hauntingly eerie trip back in time.
Young receiving his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role as Rocky, a slimy emcee in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
While adept at lightweight cinematic fluff, the dramatic roles in which Young shined were as troubled or emotionally damaged people, which was probably testament to his own turbulent life. Besides being married five times, it was well known in Hollywood circles that he had a drinking problem so severe it caused him to be fired from the 1974 film Blazing Saddles after he collapsed on the set from alcohol withdrawal. The memorable role of the Waco Kid went to Gene Wilder.
Writer and director Mel Brooks recalled the scene where the Young character, an alcoholic, had to be hung upside down, at which time he would begin shaking. Brooks said the shaking did not stop and Young was soon “spewing green stuff” from his mouth and nose. Brooks immediately closed down the set as Young was whisked off to the hospital in an ambulance.
Young’s addictions and predilections provided tremendous investigative fodder for homicide detectives.
“That’s the last time I’ll ever cast anybody who really is that person,” said Brooks. “If you want an alcoholic, don’t cast an alcoholic.”
According to one of Young’s spouses, he was an incredibly insecure man who, despite being nominated for three Oscars and winning one, yearned to be recognized for a film that would forever be associated with him as the star, not a supporting player.
“What he was aching for, as he walked up to collect his Oscar, was a role in his own movie—one they could finally call a Gig Young movie,” said fourth wife, Elaine Young. “For Gig, [winning] the Oscar was literally the kiss of death, the end of the line.”
Young’s immense insecurities were spawned by adverse childhood experiences associated with his stern and grim Scottish father always referring to him as “a little dumbbell” and both parents telling him that his birth was the result of “a leak in the safe,” meaning a condom. Those neuroses would haunt Young throughout his life, destroying his acting career and rendering him physically and emotionally impotent at the time of his death.
“As an investigator, it is your job to develop a theory and a motive in all homicides, including suicides [such as Young’s],” said Tom Nerney, a first-grade detective who served the NYPD from 1966 to 2002 and retired from the Major Case Squad. “Homicide investigators are a dogged bunch, and many of them, including me, often look back years later at what they might have missed, which can be very frustrating. But you work with what you have, and go where the evidence takes you. That’s all you can do.”
Young’s addictions and predilections provided tremendous investigative fodder for homicide detectives, who considered many possible motives for his actions before deciding the most likely was that he and Schmidt had a mutually agreed upon suicide pact. The basis for that theory was the unconventional clinical relationship Young had with Landy, many of whose clients later sued him for promulgating far-out therapeutic techniques that left them in worse shape after treatment than when they started.