Accidental Deaths
Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California
© 2001 by Albert L. Ortega
[Nicholas Aloysius Adamshock]
July 10, 1931–February 7, 1968
Compact, blond Nick Adams was the quintessential movie fan, with a burning desire to become a movie star—no matter what. The restless son of immigrant parents from the Ukraine, he grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey. Later in life he would admit, “Movies were my life, you had to have an escape when you were living in a basement. I saw all the Cagney, Bogart, and Garfield pictures—the ones where a guy finally got a break. Odds against the world—that was my meat.”
Not yet in his 20s, Nick hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he initially had no luck in breaking into the film industry. Discouraged, he joined the Coast Guard in 1952. On weekend leaves he would return to Hollywood, where he finally talked his way into a role as a sailor in Mister Roberts (1955), engineering a 90-day leave to complete the part. For a brief assignment in the Western Strange Lady in Town (1955, with Greer Garson), he arranged a three-day pass.
Nick Adams in Mission Mars (1968). Courtesy of JC Archives
After his release from the service, the determined Nick gained a role in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which starred his pal James Dean and Natalie Wood (who was his lover briefly). Nick’s big break occurred when he was cast as Andy Griffith’s bespectacled sidekick in the military comedy No Time for Sergeants (1958). Adams reached his show-business pinnacle as the star of the TV series The Rebel (1959–61), playing a crusading ex-Confederate officer in the old West. His next effort, Saints and Sinners, came and went in the 1962–63 TV season.
Returning to movies, the determined Adams had a splashy role as an accused killer in Richard Chamberlain’s Twilight of Honor (1963). He then spent eight thousand dollars campaigning to receive an Academy Award for the showcase part. He was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category that year, but lost the coveted prize. Nick’s career began to slide dramatically, and he was reduced to appearing in such trashy low-budget features as Frankenstein Meets the Giant Devil Fish (1967) and Mission Mars (1968).
Offscreen, the overachieving Nick (noted for being a genuinely nice guy) became increasingly nervous about his wobbly career and his faltering marriage (he and his wife had separated after having two children). On the night of February 7, 1968, Nick was found dead in his West Los Angeles home—braced against the bedroom wall with his eyes wide open—by his lawyer, Evin Roder. The cause of death was given as an “accidental” overdose of paraldehyde, a sedative that Nick’s doctor had prescribed to calm his overactive nerves. He was buried in Berwick, Pennsylvania, not far from Nanticoke, the town where he was born. Nick Adams might well have been another victim of the curse that brought an early death to all the stars (including James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo) of Rebel Without a Cause.
[Salvatore Phillip Bono]
February 16, 1935–January 5, 1998
It was comedian Rodney Dangerfield who made famous the expression, “I don’t get no respect.” But in many ways, this was the story of Sonny Bono’s life. People tended to laugh at him, and he had to laugh too at the bizarre twists and turns of his life. Yet the shrewd Sonny had four different careers (pop musician, TV personality, restaurateur, politician) and he was successful at each of them. Behind those trademark bangs and diminutive figure, he just refused to fail, and was creative enough to reinvent himself constantly.
He was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1935, the youngest child of Sicilian immigrants Santo and Jean Bono. The impoverished Bono clan moved to Los Angeles when Salvatore was seven. His mother operated a small dress shop, and his dad earned the minimum wage as a trucker. Eventually, his parents divorced, and this devastated the boy.
At Inglewood High School, Sonny was not much for studies. He was far more interested in writing songs, even though he never learned to read music and only knew four chords on the piano. After dropping out of school, Sonny worked as a butcher’s boy, a waiter, and a delivery boy, all the while writing songs. He sent R & B artist Johnny Otis his song “Ecstasy,” and was thrilled to hear it played on the radio. He married waitress Donna Rankin in 1954; they would have one daughter, Christine. Determined to break into the music industry, Sonny forced himself to write a song a day. He eventually got a job at Specialty Records, the home of Sam Cooke and Little Richard. He even started his own record company, and when that flopped, he bounced back and became a record promoter.
By the early 1960s, Sonny was divorced and working for Phil Spector at Philles Records. He was also singing background music for such groups as the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers and, as always, writing a flow of songs. Everything changed in 1962 when he met the sloe-eyed, exotic Cherilyn LaPiere, who physically towered over him. At first they were platonic friends who decided to work together, sometimes performing as “Cesar & Cleo.” But eventually, a romance blossomed, and they were wed in Tijuana, Mexico, in October 1964. (That same year, a relationship with another woman led to the birth of Sonny’s illegitimate son, Sean.) Now billed as Sonny & Cher, the duo made a big breakthrough in 1965 with “I Got You, Babe,” which Bono had written for his wife.
By the end of 1967, with such hits as “What Now, My Love” and “The Beat Goes On,” Sonny & Cher had sold more than 40 million records around the globe. For many fans, the duo’s modest hipness, along with their ever-changing mod wardrobes, made them a big fascination. Sonny and Cher were the undisputed king and queen of soft rock.
Sonny, 11 years older than Cher, was publicized as the brains of the duo, and he wanted to be the mentor of his young wife. But mammoth success (along with their fantastic array of material possessions and living quarters) overwhelmed both of them. By 1967, when they made their film debut in the quickly dismissed Good Times, their careers were on the downswing. Wanting to have a showcase for Cher on camera, they helped finance Chastity (1969), which Sonny directed. It was a costly flop. The embarrassing movie shared the same name as their daughter, Chastity Bono, born on March 4, 1969.
Nearly broke, Sonny and Cher took to the road, playing nightclubs across the country. The change of venue allowed them to develop their show-business act, which would become a hit on TV in the near future. The gimmick was having the sassy, savvy Cher put down her game but lame spouse—about anything from his height to his Italian accent to his singing capabilities. When he would retort, the barbs would bounce off the blasé acting Cher. Audiences loved it! The duo got their first TV series, The Sonny 
Cher Comedy Hour, in the summer of 1971, which led profitably to the show reappearing in late 1971 and lasting through 1974. Once again, they were back on top—and spending money as if there was an infinite supply of it.
Sonny Bono on the town.
© 1991 by Albert L. Ortega
By 1974, the novelty of their TV show was wearing off—for both the couple and the public. That spring, the Bonos announced that they were separating and ending their TV series. The next year, Cher wed rock singer Gregg Allman. (That union would be short-lived, although it produced their son, Elijah Blue, born in September 1976.) Sonny and Cher buried the hatchet after their solo TV shows failed, reteaming for a last-hurrah series in 1976. But viewers were no longer charmed, and the program went off the air in 1977.
On his own, Sonny stayed afloat by making appearances on other TV series and in schlocky TV movies. In 1982, he married Susie Coelho, but the union fell apart by 1984. In the mid-1980s, he had his own restaurant, Bono, located in West Hollywood. There Sonny, age 50, met the 22-year-old Mary Whitaker, a recent University of Southern California graduate whom he wed in 1986. The couple moved to Palm Springs, California, where Sonny opened a new Italian restaurant.
In 1987, Sonny registered as a Republican so he could vote for the first time, a sign of things to come. In 1988, the year John Waters hired him for a solid role in the fun movie Hairspray, Sonny and Cher reunited on David Letterman’s late-night talk show. They wowed viewers when they sang their trademark number, “I Got You, Babe.” Also that year, to the bewilderment of pundits everywhere, Sonny ran for mayor of Palm Springs—and won. He took the job seriously, garnering a great deal of publicity for both himself and the city along the way. His political career did have a setback in 1989, when angry constituents tried for a recall vote, upset about their mayor doing beer commercials. His autobiography, And the Beat Goes On, was published in 1991.
Excited by the world of politics, Sonny ran for the Senate on the Republican ticket, but he lost the race. Undaunted, he made a bid for Congress in 1994 and won this time. When he began his congressional job, it was estimated that this millionaire was 1 of the 50 richest members of the 104th Congress. Sonny purchased a $684,000 house in Georgetown for himself, Mary, and their children, Cesare (age seven) and Chianna (age four). All he had to do now was earn the respect of his peers in Congress—and the approval of Cher—for once again, she was making cracks to the media about Sonny’s new career. One of his first tasks as a congressman was to serve as chairman of the House’s Entertainment Industry Task Force.
During the Christmas holiday in 1997, Sonny was at home in Palm Springs with his family. In early January 1998, Sonny and Mary took their two children to Lake Tahoe for a vacation at the Heavenly Resort. On January 5, they were out on the slopes of South Lake Tahoe on the Upper Orion ski run. About 1:30 P.M., the family was skiing on an intermediate slope. Chianna took a slight tumble, and Mary and Cesare stopped to assist her. Sonny told Mary he was going to go down in another direction, and then skied off the path and in among the trees—which adept skiers often do.
Thereafter, no one heard anything from Sonny. But six hours later, news came that a body had been found on the mountain. Mary demanded to be taken to the site, and her worst fears proved to be true when she saw Sonny’s frozen face. He had died of massive head injuries from skiing head-on into a 40-foot-high pine tree.
At the time, it was a mystery why Sonny would have done what he did on the slopes. There was speculation that he might have been high, but there was no official evidence of drug or alcohol abuse. But, as his wife would tell TV Guide magazine in November 1998, “When he died, his blood level was in the therapeutic range for Vicodin and Valium. He had taken what had been prescribed legitimately by a doctor. But you know these drugs come with a warning, DO NOT OPERATE MACHINERY or whatever.”
A private service for family and friends was held on Wednesday, January 7, in Palm Springs at Sonny’s home. The public funeral was that Friday at St. Theresa Roman Catholic Church. A large color portrait of a grinning Sonny was positioned near his flagdraped, $10,000 mahogany casket. There were 1,400 mourners. (Another 2,500 stood in the rain outside, listening to the service on a loudspeaker.) Attendees from the political world included former Vice President Dan Quayle, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former President Gerald Ford, and California Governor Pete Wilson. Entertainers Suzanne Somers, Tony Orlando, Jerry Vale, Jack Scalia, and Morton Downey Jr. were on hand.
Cher provided a teary eulogy in which she said, “Some people were under the misconception that Sonny was a short man, but he was heads and tails taller than anyone else.” She also noted: “What people don’t realize is that he created Sonny and Cher.... He had the confidence to be the butt of the joke because he created the joke.” After the Mass, a procession of hundreds of cars drove to the cemetery at Desert Memorial Park. There, Sonny was given a 21-gun salute by a military honor guard because he had been a member of Congress. Mary Bono and their children then released dozens of doves into the sky; finally, each member of Sonny’s family placed a red rose on the coffin. Cher, among others, did the same. The deceased was then interred at the cemetery in section B-35.
During the week of mourning after Sonny’s death, Cher spent much time at Sonny’s Spanish-style villa in the hills above Palm Springs. She and Mary comforted one another and their children. The media jumped on Sonny’s passing, and it became a prolonged three-ring circus, with everyone vying to say who cared for the late entertainer more, and in what way. (Mary Bono admitted to the press that her marriage to Sonny “was a very difficult 12 years of my life.” In contrast, Cher, who had been in London at the time her ex-husband died, said, “He was the love of my life. . . . There has never been another man in my life like him.”)
To the surprise of many, Mary chose to run for the special election (which was held on April 7, 1998) to serve the rest of her husband’s term in Congress. She won and became a highly visible participant on Capitol Hill. Then there was the question of Sonny’s new will, which he had drawn up weeks before his death, but never signed. It would have named Mary sole executor of the large estate. Instead, she was appointed administrator.
There seemed to be a rush of Sonny & Cher creative projects after his death. Cher hosted a very sentimental one-hour TV special, Sonny & Me, which aired in May 1998. Her own autobiography, The First Time, was published that fall. In February 1999 came the television movie, And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story, based on Sonny’s earlier book. It featured Jay Underwood and Renee Faia as the famous couple. Sonny’s widow was a producer and consultant on the film, but oddly enough, Cher was not. There was also the documentary The Life and Times of Sonny Bono (1999), a profile of the prolific songwriter, entrepreneur, and politician.
Despite the tremendous worldwide hoopla when he passed away, Sonny Bono was astute enough to know that eminence is relatively fleeting. A few years before he died, he had this to say about clinging to fame: “You’re just borrowing it. It’s like money. You’re going to die, and somebody else is going to get it.”
[Ira Grossel]
December 15, 1918–June 17, 1961
Ruggedly handsome, six-foot, four-inch Jeff Chandler was only 42 years old when he died. The square-jawed hunk, with prematurely gray, curly hair and chiseled features, was the picture of health until he suffered a slipped disk while making Merrill’s Marauders (1961), a World War II combat movie. Simple corrective surgery was performed at a Culver City, California, hospital. The strapping patient should have been up and about in no time. Due to medical misadventure, however, he died.
The future actor was born Ira Grossel in Brooklyn. He was raised by his mother after his parents separated. He attended local Erasmus Hall High School (where the future screen star Susan Hayward was a classmate). Certain he wanted a career in the creative arts, he took art courses and then enrolled briefly at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York City. He negotiated a job with a Long Island stock company, first as a stagehand and then as an actor. In 1941, Grossel and a pal began a little theater company (the Shady Lane Playhouse) in Elgin, Illinois. However, after Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, he joined the army, where he was stationed mostly in the Aleutian Islands.
By the end of 1945, he was a civilian living in Los Angeles. While doing a radio job, he was discovered by Dick Powell and given a small role in Powell’s Johnny O’Clock (1947). By now he was known as Jeff Chandler and spent much of the next two years on radio in shows like Mr. Dana; Michael Shayne, Detective; and as Eve Arden’s love interest in Our Miss Brooks. Universal Pictures cast him as an Israeli leader in Sword in the Desert (1949), where his masculine looks registered strongly with moviegoers. He joined the studio’s roster of young leading men, which included Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson.
In 1950 Chandler was cast in the first of several Native American roles (as Cochise) in Broken Arrow, starring Jimmy Stewart. Chandler was Oscar-nominated for his three-dimensional performance. As a Universal contract player, he plowed through several action pictures. Along the way, he developed a real screen magnetism and played opposite several smoldering leading ladies: Jane Russell (Foxfire, 1955), Jeanne Crain (The Tattered Dress, 1958), and Susan Hayward (Thunder in the Sun, 1959).
Jeff Chandler showing his serious side in a publicity pose from the late 1950s. Courtesy of JC Archives
Always ambitious, Jeff was constantly proving himself. Having shown he could play a range of roles on camera, he broke into the recording industry and signed a contract in 1954 with Decca Records, completing several singles and an album. In May 1957, he appeared at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas as a vocalist. In addition, Chandler, who played the violin and wrote music, started his own music publishing company. Likewise, as many stars in the 1950s did, he formed his own movie production company to produce films such as Drango (1957).
Jeff had married actress Marjorie Hoshelle in 1946, and they had two daughters (Jamie and Dana). The couple separated in 1954 but then reconciled. In late 1957, Jeff and aquatic movie star Esther Williams (herself recently divorced) costarred together in Raw Wind in Eden (1958) and became very good friends. They saved most of their passion for off camera and, in 1959, Hoshelle sued Chandler for divorce. Ironically, by 1960 when the decree became final, Jeff and Esther had drifted apart.
Chandler continued to turn out movies and went on location to the Philippines for Merrill’s Marauders in early 1961. When he returned to Los Angeles, he underwent surgery on May 13 for the slipped disk. Following the relatively uncomplicated operation, he suffered internal hemorrhages and infection. During an emergency seven-hour follow-up operation to repair a ruptured artery, he was given 55 pints of blood. He survived that and further surgery, but another hemorrhage and subsequent additional infections weakened him. He took a turn for the worse on Friday, June 16, and died the next afternoon of a generalized blood infection further complicated by pneumonia. This needless tragedy was the talk of Hollywood.
After funeral services on June 19, 1961, at Temple Isiah in Los Angeles, Chandler’s body was taken to Hillside Memorial Park for private interment. Among the pallbearers were Jeff’s baseball pals Hoby Landrith and Bill Rigney, as well as actor Tony Curtis. On behalf of their children, his ex-wife brought legal action against the hospital where Jeff had been treated. Eventually, an out-of-court settlement was reached.
With Chandler’s passing, Hollywood had lost three major leading men in the course of a few short months: Clark Gable (November 16, 1960), Gary Cooper (May 13, 1961), and Jeff.
Decades passed, and thanks to television and video rentals, Jeff Chandler’s many movies continued to entertain new generations of fans. Then in September 1999 came Esther Williams’s 416-page autobiography, The Million Dollar Mermaid. It was filled with dish about her former MGM bosses and costars, as well as anecdotes about her welcomed (Fernando Lamas, Victor Mature) and unwanted (Johnny Weissmuller) amours. Esther’s hefty tome caused the most sensation with its revelation that she ended her long-ago romance with Jeff Chandler when she discovered that he was a crossdresser. (According to her, she cracked to the bewildered actor, “Jeff, you’re too big for polka dots.”) Whatever the truth of her recollections, this published “exposure” infuriated the old guard of Hollywood—as well as many young enthusiasts of the late star—who felt this outing should have been left in the closet.
[Samuel Laird Cregar]
July 28, 1916–December 9, 1944
Maybe if there had been a Jennie Craig Weight Reduction Clinic or a Richard Simmons video in the 1940s, six-foot, three-inch, three-hundred-pound Laird Cregar would have lived to a ripe old age. He was a talented screen performer who became obsessed with his obesity and embarked on a crash diet. His Gandhi-like starvation routine was too much for his system to take.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1916, the youngest of six sons of Edward M. Cregar. Like his father had, Samuel Laird attended school at Winchester Academy in England where, during summer vacations, he worked as a page for the Stratford-upon-Avon Players, sometimes allowed to be a walk-on in their productions. These experiences whetted the boy’s appetite for acting as a career. After further schooling, he took up full-time acting in local stock companies. He won a scholarship to the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1936 where he spent two years honing his craft. He recalled later, “Whenever I went to a place for a job they seemed scared of my size.”
Discouraged, he went east in 1938 to work at the Federal Theatre, but later returned to California to appear at the Pasadena Playhouse in The American Family. Despite decent reviews, no film company took notice of this massive actor. Realizing he must wangle his own showcase, Cregar found backing for a Hollywood production of Oscar Wilde and starred in it. The drama was a hit in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Finally, the movie studios wanted him.
Laird Cregar, the star of Hangover Square (1944).
Courtesy of JC Archives
After a few screen bits, he accepted Twentieth Century-Fox’s offer of a contract. Cregar was a brawling fur trapper in Hudson’s Bay (1940). In Jack Benny’s farce Charley’s Aunt (1941), Laird displayed an excellent flair for comedy. Fox cast him next as the jealous, sinister detective pathetically in love with a murdered girl in I Wake Up Screaming (1941). His performance was so effective that it sealed his fate as an actor—he would play screen villains forever after.
Cregar played a conniving nightclub owner dealing with pint-sized Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (1942). Commenting on this splashy assignment, Laird confessed (tongue-in-cheek), “I didn’t like it because it’s a mammoth man who is afraid of violence. You’ve no idea how much physical work it requires of a large man to quake like jelly.” In Rings on Her Fingers (1942), the studio wardrobe department had the challenge of constructing a bathing suit for the hulking Cregar to use as he dove into a swimming pool on camera. Never slowing down (and compensating for his lack of a conventional social life), the homosexual Cregar found time to work at the Hollywood Canteen as a busboy and to play Sheridan Whiteside in an L.A. stage edition of The Man Who Came to Dinner. His greatest movie success came in the Gothic thriller The Lodger (1944) as a wily Jack the Ripper. The movie was so popular that Fox immediately repeated the formula with Hangover Square (1945). This time, the corpulent star was a schizophrenic composer who commits murder and obsesses over the beautiful Linda Darnell.
Having completed Hangover Square in late 1944, Laird zealously pursued his dieting. He dreamed of becoming a more traditional leading man. After losing one hundred pounds, his system rebelled, leading to abdominal surgery. A few days later, on the morning of December 9, 1944, the 28-year-old Cregar suffered a fatal heart attack. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in the Court of Freedom. The film industry had lost a major talent to a diet mania.
[Monetta Eloyse Darnell]
October 16, 1923–April 10, 1965
If any celebrity ever had a strange premonition of her disastrous future, it was the gorgeous Linda Darnell, star of Forever Amber (1947). She had a lifelong fear of fire. In Anna and the King of Siam (1946), her screen role required her to be burned at the stake. The sequence terrified her, but it was necessary to the plotline. While shooting it, she was injured slightly, and she later told reporters, “Never again. Next time I prefer being stabbed or shot. At least that kind of dying is painless.” Nineteen years later—in real life—this great natural beauty was burned to death in a horrible inferno.
Linda’s mother, Maggie Pearl Brown, had grown up in Clifton, Tennessee, always dreaming of becoming an actress. Those plans were discarded for the practicality of marriage. She had two children with her first husband before they divorced. In 1915, 20-year-old Pearl married Roy Darnell, a postal worker from Dallas, Texas. In the next 14 years, the couple had four children. Their second, Monetta Eloyse, was born on October 16, 1923 (studio press releases would state that her birth year was 1921 to make the teenager seem older). The frustrated Pearl—the name she preferred—soon settled her show-business aspirations on Monetta. By age 11, the pretty teen had physically matured enough to pass for much older and thus was able to obtain department-store modeling jobs, including work at Neiman Marcus.
When her daughter was 14, a Twentieth Century-Fox talent scout passed through Dallas and Pearl badgered him with photos of Monetta. He brushed the woman off, but she followed him to Hollywood with Monetta in tow. The studio felt Monetta was too young and sent mother and daughter packing. At home in Texas, Pearl engineered Monetta’s entry into a talent contest and soon they were in Los Angeles again. But the RKO studio let the young girl sit out the option period without any work, and it was back to Texas once more.
Later, Fox, who had kept in touch with Monetta, brought Pearl and Monetta to Hollywood and signed the girl to a $750 per week contract, renaming the starlet Linda Darnell. Linda radiated fresh beauty in Elsa Maxwell’s Hotel for Women (1939) and was soon promoted by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck into star parts. As Hollywood’s new “Cinderella Girl,” she was teamed with matinee idol Tyrone Power in several features, including The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941). To get away from her manipulative mother, Linda moved into her own apartment, but her independence was fleeting. Having long depended on the advice and kindness of veteran cinematographer Peverell Marley, she married him in April 1942 in Las Vegas. He was 41, already twice-married, and a heavy drinker; she was only 19 but soon developed a similar taste for alcohol.
Because Linda had played too many virginal heroines on-screen, she was in a career rut. Thus Fox devised a fresh approach for the “new” Linda Darnell. As the smoldering vixen of Summer Storm (1944) and the temptress in Hangover Square (1945) she made audiences take note anew. Soon she won the role of her career. When the studio shut down filming of Forever Amber— based on Kathleen Windsor’s racy bestseller about Restoration England—Peggy Cummins was dropped from the lead and Linda became her replacement. Even in the diluted screen adaptation, the blond-dyed Linda was tantalizing as the sexy hussy. A scene in this spectacle called for Linda to be involved in the great London fire. The frightened actress—trembling at the all-too-real flames—had to be yanked onto the soundstage to perform.
When Forever Amber proved not to be a huge hit, Darnell’s movie career stalled. Meanwhile, she and Marley adopted a daughter nicknamed Lola. Linda’s career took an upturn when she was cast opposite Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and then as the mercenary gal in A Letter to Three Wives (1948). Along the way she had a tempestuous affair with the married filmmaker Joseph P. Mankiewicz. In 1951 she and Marley divorced, and the next year her Fox contract expired. She went to Italy for two pictures and then was married briefly (1954–55) to brewery president Philip Liebman. Linda, who was becoming a heavy drinker, tried picture-making again, but was forced to accept a Western (Dakota Incident, 1956), which made no box-office impact. She also made a failed bid for Broadway stardom with a role in Harbor Lights (1956), which closed after only four performances. In March 1957, at loose ends, she wed airline pilot Merle Robertson.
Starlet Linda Darnell in a publicity pose from the early 1940s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Her drinking problem made Linda—now approaching 40 and no longer svelte—somewhat problematic on film sets. After making Zero Hour! (1957), she didn’t get another film offer until Black Spurs (1965), and that was a low-budget Western full of has-beens. In desperation, she did stage work, a nightclub act, and some TV. On November 23, 1963, she and Robertson divorced.
In March 1965, after touring in the comedy Janus, she visited her friend and former secretary, Jeanne Curtis, in Glenview, Illinois, near Chicago. Early in the morning of April 9, Linda suggested to Jeanne and her 16-year-old daughter, Patricia, that they stay up and watch one of Darnell’s old pictures, Star Dust (1940). After the movie ended, about 2:30 A.M., the three went upstairs to bed.
About 3:30 A.M. a still-smoldering cigarette ignited on the downstairs sofa, and soon the living room was ablaze. The smoke and heat awoke the three women upstairs. Jeanne and Patricia managed to escape. But Linda, afraid of jumping from a window, tried to make it down the stairs and out the front door. She was caught in the inferno in the living room. A neighbor tried to smash through a downstairs window to rescue the screaming woman, but the flames were too intense. When the volunteer fire brigade broke in, they found Darnell unconscious behind the sofa. She had second- and third-degree burns over 80 percent of her upper body.
Darnell was taken to Skokie Valley Community Hospital where she underwent four hours of surgery. The prognosis was bad, and later that day she was moved to Cook County Hospital’s burn treatment center. A tracheotomy was performed to help her breathe. Darnell’s 16-year-old daughter flew in from California to be at her dying mother’s bedside. Linda was barely conscious during their half hour together. However, in her distorted voice (from the tracheotomy), she kept insisting, “Who says I’m going to die? I’m not going to!” She then whispered, “I love you, baby. I love you.” At 3:25 P.M., Darnell mercifully died.
Linda’s body was cremated, and a private service was held at the Glenview Community Church on April 11, with another memorial service conducted on May 8 in Burbank, California. Darnell had wanted her ashes to be scattered over the ranch of friends who lived in New Mexico. That never occurred, and her remains were stored in the administration office of a Chicago cemetery for well over a decade. Finally, in September 1975, when Linda’s daughter was married and living with her family in New London, Pennsylvania, she arranged for Darnell’s ashes to be shipped to her husband’s family plot at Union Hill Cemetery in nearby Kennett Square.
Linda Darnell, whose life was a perfect illustration of the shattered American dream, was at rest. . . finally.
February 8, 1931–September 30, 1955
Few Hollywood performers have made such a charismatic impact on the universe as did the boyishly handsome nonconformist James Dean. This impact is all the more impressive because he starred in only three movies during his brief, spectacular film career. In both life and death, he became the symbolic rebel of his era, and amazingly, he remains a legend today. Like only a few others—Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe—Dean remains as popular in death as he was in his short life. His icon refuses to fade, as new “revealing” biographies of the star continue to pour forth.
He was born James Byron Dean on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana, the son of Quaker dental technician Winton Dean and Methodist homemaker Mildred (Wilson) Dean. When he was nine his mother died, and he went to live with his Aunt Hortense Wilson and her husband, Marcus, in nearby Fairmount. In high school (class of 49), his drama teacher, Adeline Nall, coaxed him into entering a public speaking contest, and he ended by winning the state trophy. His father urged him to become a lawyer, and Jimmy enrolled first at Santa Monica City College and then transferred to UCLA, where he majored in drama before dropping out. His roommate, actor William Bast, got him a job as an extra in a television commercial. Next, Dean worked as an NBC network page, and then a movie extra.
At the suggestion of actor James Whitmore, Dean moved to New York in the fall of 1951 to find himself. Always a loner, he became even more so in Manhattan. But he knew instinctively how to seize opportunities and, through friends, auditioned for See the Jaguar (1952), in which he made his Broadway debut. Between that flop and his next Broadway assignment, The Immoralist (1954), he did a great deal of live TV.
While on the East Coast, Dean studied at the Actors Studio, where director Elia Kazan hired him for an upcoming movie, East of Eden (1955). As one of Raymond Massey’s tormented sons, Jimmy struck a chord with teenage moviegoers everywhere and immediately became their new screen hero. While shooting Eden— for which he would be Oscar-nominated—Jimmy fell in love with a young Italian import, Pier Angeli, then a rising MGM star. She was as moody as he was. Her emotional nature and outside pressures led her to break off their intense engagement; in November 1954, when she married singer Vic Damone, Jimmy sat brooding in his car across the street from the church. Thereafter, the reportedly bisexual Dean dated a host of movie starlets and became even more obsessive about acting. He was also an avid gun collector, motorcyclist, and photographer (especially enjoying taking shots of himself).
Nicholas Ray, who directed Dean and Natalie Wood in the juvenile-delinquency study Rebel Without a Cause (1955), said of the fair-haired, brooding Dean: “My feelings were that he could have surpassed any actor alive.” With Rebel, Jimmy became a major Hollywood star and the new spokesperson for a teenage generation, which had earlier worshipped Marlon Brando. Director George Stevens hired Dean for his big-budget, Texas epic Giant (1956), in which Jimmy’s character, Jett Rink, goes from young, impoverished farmhand to megamillionaire, middle-aged oilman.
Always a daredevil, Dean’s pride and joy was his silver Porsche Spyder (which he nicknamed “Little Bastard”). On September 30, 1955, a week after completing Giant, he was out for a spin—driving at 86 miles per hour—when at 5:59 P.M. his car collided with another vehicle at the intersection of Routes 41 and 466 near Paso Robles, California. His passenger, Porsche factory mechanic Rolf Weutherich, suffered a broken leg and head injuries; the driver of the other car, David Turnupseed, was only injured slightly. In the crash, Dean’s head was nearly severed from his body.
A few hours earlier, in Bakersfield, a police officer had issued a speeding ticket to the reckless Dean and cautioned him to slow down. Dean had been heading to a sports car rally in Salinas. Reportedly, Jimmy Dean’s final words to Rolf Weutherich before the fatal car smashup were regarding the oncoming car: “He’s got to see us.”
Dean was buried on October 8, 1955, at Park Cemetery in Fairmount, Indiana. (The original tombstone, as well as a bust of Dean on a nearby pillar, were stolen and the grave marker had to be replaced.) His death touched off a wave of sorrow from fans, unequaled since Rudolph Valentino’s death decades earlier. Both Rebel Without a Cause and Giant were released posthumously. For the latter picture, Dean was again Oscar-nominated.
For years, rumors circulated that Dean actually had not died in the crash but had been so badly disfigured that he remained in hiding. He became a cult figure with many fan clubs worldwide. Admirers and tourists make pilgrimages to his hometown on the anniversary of his death for the three-day annual celebration sponsored by Fairmount, and the Internet boasts numerous James Dean websites. There is a finely crafted bust of Dean at the north side of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, where part of Rebel was shot. At Princeton University there is a life mask of the late actor in a collection that features likenesses of Beethoven, Keats, and other creative giants.
Ann Doran, who had played Dean’s mother in Rebel Without a Cause, observed about the late star, “He was kind of in limbo. He had great doubts about himself and where he was going. He was that lost.” It was this telltale vulnerability, plus his extraordinary ability to communicate with his audience, that has made Dean such an enduring pop figure.
July 4, 1925–September 28, 1966
At times an actor, like a gambler, has to know when to stop. Eric Fleming didn’t, and by tempting fate, he lost his life.
Eric was born in Santa Paula, California. Before he was 10, he ran away from home—to escape his abusive dad—and hitched a ride by freight train to Chicago. Before long, he got beaten up in a gang fight and was hospitalized. Returning to the West Coast, he lived with his mother. Later he went to work at Paramount Pictures as a laborer. During World War II, he was first in the Merchant Marines and later a master carpenter in the Navy Seabees.
Eric Fleming (center) holds a lethal trump card over Doris Day and Dom DeLuise in The Glass Bottom Boat (1966).
Courtesy of JC Archives
After the war, the rugged, sharp-featured Fleming turned to acting, first in Chicago and then in New York. He appeared in several Broadway productions, including Stalag 17 and No Time for Sergeants. He first made his mark by starring in the title role of Major Dell Conway of the Flying Tigers, a low-budget adventure television series aired live by the Dumont Network in the spring of 1951. The show disappeared for two months, and when it returned, Ed Peck had been chosen to replace Fleming. Besides other acting chores on TV, Eric reappeared as a series star in the network soap opera Golden Windows (1954–55).
Next, Eric moved back to the West Coast, where he found screen work in Conquest of Space (1955) and in several trashy features, such as Queen of Outer Space (1958).
As an answer to the highly successful rival network series Wagon Train, CBS developed Rawhide. Eric starred as cattle-trail boss Gil Favor, with Clint Eastwood as his right-hand man, Rowdy Yates. The hour-long show premiered on January 9, 1959, and became a huge hit. After seven years on the program, Fleming tired of the role and chose to retire to a ranch in Hawaii that he had purchased with his earnings. He quit the program after the 1964–65 season, with Eastwood taking over as trail boss.
Instead of following through right away with his relocation plans, Eric remained in Los Angeles for a movie role (The Glass Bottom Boat with Doris Day, 1966). Then he was a guest on two episodes of Bonanza. Next, ABC persuaded him to tackle the lead in a projected adventure series, High Jungle. He joined the cast members on location in Peru where they were filming scenes in the headwaters of the Amazon River. On September 28, 1966, the cast and crew were in a remote jungle region three hundred miles northeast of Lima. Fleming and the Peruvian actor Nico Minardos were being filmed in a canoe on the Haullaga River when the craft suddenly overturned. Minardos managed to swim to safety, but Fleming was swept away by the strong current. His remains—there were piranha fish in the area—were not found until October 3.
If only Eric Fleming had gone to Hawaii as he originally intended.
[Laura Gainor]
October 6, 1906–September 14, 1984
At one time or another, many of us have had misgivings about riding in a taxi. For Janet Gaynor, the winner of Hollywood’s first Best Actress Academy Award, being a passenger in a San Francisco cab on September 5, 1982, was a fatal decision.
She was born Laura Gainor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When she was eight, her mother and father were divorced. Laura, and her slightly older sister, Helen, moved with their mother to Chicago. When Mrs. Gainor remarried, the family relocated yet again—first to Florida and then to San Francisco. There, in 1923, Laura graduated from high school. The following year, the family visited Los Angeles, where the Gainor sisters found work as movie extras in comedy shorts at Hal Roach Studios and elsewhere.
Sweet-faced Laura—now known as Janet Gaynor—got her first important motion picture assignment when she was cast in The Johnstown Flood (1926) at Fox Studios. Production chief Winfield R. Sheehan took a great liking to Janet and hired her at $100 a week. It was in Sunrise (1927), with George O’Brien, that the elfin Janet (she was five feet tall and weighed 96 pounds) gained important recognition. She was rewarded with a studio raise to $300 weekly and was cast opposite Charles Farrell for the first time as the Parisian waif in Seventh Heaven (1927). It was for a combination of Sunrise, Seventh Heaven, and Street Angel (1928, also with Farrell) that she was named best actress at the first Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929.
Janet Gaynor in all her frills for Paddy, the Next Best Thing (1933).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Despite a limited vocal range and a bit of a twang to her voice, Janet was a success in her first all-talkie movie, Sunny Side Up (1929). That same year she married San Francisco attorney Lydell Peck. Years later, she would claim that she and costar Farrell were offscreen lovers and that “Charlie pressed me to marry him, but we had too many differences.” In 1930 she went on strike against the bland, sentimental parts she was getting and, in a pique, sailed with her mother for Hawaii. When she returned to the lot, she continued to make more insipid pictures with Charles Farrell, but also remained a box-office success. In 1934, she and Farrell made their 12th and final movie together, Change of Heart. Also that year, her disastrous marriage to Peck ended. When Fox Films merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in the mid-1930s, Darryl F. Zanuck became head of the combined studio. He pushed Janet aside in favor of such younger actresses as Loretta Young and the studio’s new breadwinner, the tyke star Shirley Temple.
Gaynor thought of retiring but instead signed a contract with David O. Selznick, who cast her as the movie-struck farm girl Esther Blodgett in A Star Is Born (1937). The picture was a major hit and Gaynor was Oscar-nominated again. After making The Young in Heart (1938), she retired to marry the famed movie costume designer Gilbert Adrian on August 14, 1939. Their son Robin was born in 1940. Janet made a few returns to acting on radio and TV in the early 1950s; then she and Adrian moved to a two-hundred-acre ranch in Brazil. (Janet quipped, “It doesn’t have a modern kitchen. But we do have our own little jungle.”) Her neighbor in Brazil was her longtime “friend” Mary Martin (and Martin’s husband). In 1957, with much hoopla, Janet returned to her old studio (Darryl F. Zanuck was away in Europe) to play Pat Boone’s mother in Bernardine. By now, she and Adrian had relocated back to the States, where he died of a stroke in September 1959. At the time, she was rehearsing a Broadway-bound play, The Midnight Sun (which never reached New York). In December 1964, 58-year-old Janet married 43-year-old stage producer Paul Gregory and retired to Palm Springs. In 1980, fidgety for the limelight again, she tried Broadway in Harold and Maude, but the show flopped.
On September 5, 1982, Janet, her husband Paul, Mary Martin, and agent Ben Washer were riding in a San Francisco taxi, bound for a Chinese restaurant. A van ran through a red light and crashed into their cab. Washer was killed and Martin was critically injured (but left the hospital after 10 days), while Gregory sustained far less serious injuries. As for Janet, she suffered a broken pelvis and collarbone, 11 broken ribs, and assorted internal injuries. She underwent two major operations at San Francisco General Hospital before being released in January 1983. She convalesced at her Palm Springs home and even managed a few public appearances, but she was hospitalized again in August 1984. Then on September 14, 1984, she died at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia, although her private physician stated that the actress had “never fully recovered from the terrible automobile accident of approximately two years ago. There were repeated complications which compounded her chronic illness.” Janet was buried at Hollywood Memorial Park (now called Hollywood Forever), a few rows from the more elaborate resting spot of director Cecil B. DeMille. Janet’s black-and-white marker reads simply “Janet Gaynor Gregory.”
[Charles Frederick Gebhardt]
December 4, 1889–November 30, 1942
His tragic exit from life read like a Hollywood screenplay. Buck Jones, veteran cowboy star, perished in Boston’s Cocoanut Grove Club fire of 1942, which killed 491 people. He had gone back into the conflagration three times to save trapped victims before he himself succumbed.
Charles Gebhardt was born in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1889 and was educated in Indianapolis public schools. His first gig after schooling was as a cowhand in Montana. Always seeking new adventures, he joined the U.S. Cavalry and served in the Philippines. Thereafter, he was hired by the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show and made his debut film with the outfit in 1913. Two years later, he married show rider Odelle Osborne—in the center ring during a circus performance. They would have a daughter, Maxine. During World War I, Gebhardt served with the U.S. Army’s First Air Squadron in France.
After the Armistice, Charles remained in Europe performing as a trick rider with various traveling shows. One of his performances brought him to the attention of movie mogul William Fox, who signed Charles to appear in Hollywood films. The new recruit—now known as Buck Jones—became the backup to the studio’s top cowboy star, Tom Mix, for whom he once had doubled. Rivalry between Jones and Mix led to a longtime feud. In his Fox entries, Buck sometimes also appeared in non-Westerns, usually as a good-natured bumpkin.
When his Fox contract expired in 1928, Buck produced his own feature, The Big Hop, which flopped, as did a personal appearance tour at about the same time. He made no movies in 1929—the year talkies blossomed in Hollywood. By 1930, Jones was working at Columbia Pictures at a reduced salary. Surprising everyone, his new batch of Westerns proved a hit, and by 1934, he was again a major star. He moved over to Universal that year, where he produced and starred in cowboy features as well as serials. He returned to Columbia in late 1937.
That same year Buck moved into his new Spanish-style estate at Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. He had spent $110,000 to build the elaborate house with its accompanying stables and corral. At the time, the actor was driving a $21,000 Duesenberg roadster, complete with gold-plated door handles and dashboard.
By the end of the 1930s, Buck was freelancing again. He played a boxer in Paramount’s quickie Unmarried (1939) and was a dishonest sheriff in Republic’s Wagons Westward (1940). By now, Jones and Tom Mix had buried their professional feud. In fact, Mix was a guest at Jones’s home a day before he was killed in an auto crash on October 12, 1940.
Peggy Campbell restrains a very determined Buck Jones in When A Man Sees Red (1934).
Courtesy of JC Archives
In 1941, veteran producer Scott Dunlap teamed Buck with Tim McCoy and Raymond Hatton for the Rough Riders cowboy series at Monogram Pictures. When McCoy went on active duty in World War II, Jones and Hatton were teamed with Rex Bell for Dawn on the Great Divide (1942). Buck was proud of the fact that he remained “an old-time cowboy, the sort the kids used to want to grow up to be like.” (He disliked the new breed of movie singing cowboys.)
Having completed his Rough Rider pictures, Buck embarked on a World War II-bond selling trip to promote navy recruitment. His stopover in Boston was the end of his 10-city tour. On the night of November 28, 1942, he was the guest of honor at a testimonial dinner given by area theater owners at the Cocoanut Grove Club. A fire broke out and due to inflammable decorations, overcrowding, jammed revolving doors at the front exit, and general panic, the scene became a horrible disaster. Jones proved himself a hero with his several return trips into the fire, rescuing several panicked patrons. On his third rush inside, he became trapped. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where the doctors concluded that he could not survive because of severe third- and second-degree burns on his face and neck, as well as the medical repercussions from burned lungs and smoke inhalation. Two days later, Buck passed away. At the time of his death, his wife was en route to his bedside.
Buck Jones died like the cowboy hero he played on-screen: quietly and bravely.
November 12, 1929–September 14, 1982
The world still adores fairy-tale stories of a beautiful commoner (even a wealthy one) who weds a sophisticated prince and lives happily ever after. Princess Grace of Monaco—better known as film star Grace Kelly—did marry the prince, but she later made a sudden, tragic exit from her lofty lifestyle as a member of European royalty. Only later on would the world learn through assorted film and book biographies, supermarket tabloids, et cetera, not only that Grace’s regal existence was imperfect, but also that her Hollywood years were anything but mundane. Film director Alfred Hitchcock once described Kelly, his favorite cinema leading lady, as a snow-capped volcano—full of “fire under the ice.”
Grace Kelly, the coolest of the cool blonds of 1950s Hollywood.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Grace was the third of four children of self-made, wealthy construction contractor John Brendan Kelly (a past Olympic champ) and his wife, Margaret, a former model. Grace’s relatives included the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright George Kelly and Walter C. Kelly, a famous vaudevillian. As a child, Grace was rather shy and was forced to compete with her siblings, Margaret, John Jr., and Lizanne, for their dad’s attention. Seemingly, nothing Grace could do then (or even later in her event-crammed life) ever really impressed him. As for Grace’s mother, Mrs. Kelly was the daughter of German immigrants and was very disciplined and strong-willed. She treated her children according to strict Teutonic guidelines.
Grace went to a nearby convent school run by the Sisters of Assumption until age 14 and then moved on to Stevens Academy in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. One of her instructors would remember: “She really wasn’t interested in scholastic achievement—she gave priority to drama and boys.”
Instead of attending college, the self-willed Grace, who had often lived in her own dream world as a child, chose a trip to Europe and then enrollment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Her judgmental parents agreed to pay only for one year’s tuition. To cover her tuition for the next year, she became a fashion model, sometimes being selected as a cover girl. She also had an affair with a 27-year-old Academy instructor. Her parents disapproved of the relationship more because the man was Jewish than because he was married (although separated from his wife).
With her patrician good looks and her relatives’ show-business connections, Grace had an edge over her peers. She did summer stock at Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania, made her Broadway debut as Raymond Massey’s daughter in The Father (1949), and became an active player in the blossoming television industry then based in New York City.
Director Henry Hathaway chose Grace to join the ensemble cast of Fourteen Hours (1951), mostly shot in Manhattan. The studio (Twentieth Century-Fox) was pleased with her work and offered her a contract, but she rejected it. Instead, she played the Quaker wife of ex-marshal Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952). The Western movie, with its popular theme song, became a hit. Off camera, Grace and Cooper (her senior by 28 years) began an affair. While their connection was short-lived, it established the pattern for subsequent liaisons with her older movie costars. She returned to Broadway briefly and then joined Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in John Ford’s Mogambo (1953). During the African location filming, Kelly and Gable relaxed on an offscreen safari together. By now, Grace was an MGM contract star being loaned out profitably to other studios.
During the shooting of Dial M for Murder (1954), it was not her rotund director (Alfred Hitchcock, who had a penchant for beautiful, icy blonds) with whom she tangled romantically, but her 49-year-old costar, Ray Milland. The actor left his wife to show he meant to marry Grace, but later reconsidered. Hitchcock borrowed Grace again for the thriller Rear Window (1954). Meanwhile, the fast-rising actress had switched her affections from Milland to fashion designer Oleg Cassini and then to French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. Grace’s outspoken father was horrorstruck. During the making of The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), Grace and William Holden became more than good friends. Next, cast in The Country Girl (1954), Kelly’s attention wavered from Holden to their costar, Bing Crosby. But she wasn’t in love with the crooner and refused his marriage offer. For her on-camera dramatics in The Country Girl, Grace won an Academy Award.
Having teamed with Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief (1955) and while waiting to make MGM’s The Swan (1956), Grace attended the Cannes Film Festival in May 1955. Screen star Olivia de Havilland’s husband, Pierre Galante, a Paris-Match magazine editor, engineered the meeting between Kelly and the 31-year-old Prince Rainier III of Monaco. After being introduced to the lustrous movie queen, the royal and very eligible—if pudgy—bachelor informed his palace chaplain, “I’ve met somebody. I think she is the one.” That December, Rainier went to Philadelphia to ask for her hand in marriage. The engagement was announced on January 5, 1956. (Not publicized at the time were conditions to the marriage: Grace had to pass a fertility test to prove she could bear future heirs to the throne and the Kellys were required to pay a $2 million dowry.) Four months later, on April 18, 1956, Grace and Prince Rainier were married in a civil service. The next day, they were united in a Catholic ceremony covered by 1,600 reporters as “the social event of the decade.”
Grace’s royal marriage marked the official end of her Hollywood years. It also began her motherhood period: Princess Caroline was born in 1957, Prince Albert in 1958, and Princess Stephanie in 1965. During her reign, Grace always missed moviemaking. In 1962 she accepted the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mamie, but when the picture was made in 1964, it was Tippi Hedren who played the heroine. (The subjects of Monaco had objected vehemently to their Princess Grace making a film.) In 1974, Kelly appeared at a New York City tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, and in 1976, she joined the board of directors of Twentieth Century-Fox. She almost accepted a lead in that studio’s film The Turning Point (1977), but Rainier said no. The same year, she provided the narration for The Children of Theatre Street, a documentary about the Kirov School of Ballet in Russia.
When not coping with her spirited family—especially Princess Caroline—Grace worried about growing old, gaining weight (which she did—partially from excessive drinking), rumors of Rainier’s affairs, and her aborted film career. She did poetry readings around the world and starred in a documentary called Rearranged (1979). By 1982, she had hopes that she would finally be permitted to make a real feature film once again.
On the morning of September 13, 1982, Grace was leaving Roc Agcl, the alternate family home located a few miles from the royal palace. She had an appointment with her Monaco couturier before going on to Paris that evening with Stephanie. After loading her Rover 3500 with luggage and dresses to be altered, she informed her chauffeur there was now no room for him in the car, and that she would drive instead.
With Stephanie in the passenger seat, Grace set out at 9:30 A.M., driving the same route as she had decades earlier while filming scenes for To Catch a Thief. Half an hour later, as the brown car reached a dangerous curve on the snaking Moyenne Corniche, it accelerated, crashed through the barrier, and careened down the 120-foot hillside. When local residents reached the accident scene, a conscious but injured Stephanie had managed to get out of the car already and was screaming, “Help my mother! My mother is in there! Get her out!” The unconscious Princess Grace was removed by smashing the car’s rear window. She and Stephanie were taken by ambulance to Princess Grace Hospital. After immediate surgery to clear Grace’s lungs and halt internal bleeding, a CAT scan revealed that Grace had suffered a stroke prior to the accident. (Her other injuries included multiple fractures of the collarbone, thigh, and ribs.) It was concluded that even if she should recover, she would be a helpless invalid. The royal palace did its best to downplay the seriousness of Grace’s injuries (which later led to speculation that the official explanation for the accident might have been fabricated).
About 10:30 P.M. on September 14, 1982, Grace was taken off her life-support equipment and died. She lay in state in her open coffin until September 18, when an elaborate funeral service was conducted at the same cathedral where she had married 26 years before. On September 21, the Princess was buried in the Grimaldi family vault in the church. The white marble slab is inscribed: “Grace Patricia, wife of Prince Rainier III, died the year of our Lord, 1982.” Only after her death did everyone realize how much Grace Kelly had been the center of her household and principality. With Grace gone, it was up to Caroline to take over such duties for her father (who has never remarried).
All in all, it was certainly not the “happily ever after” life that everyone had expected for shrewd, self-sufficient Grace Kelly.
January 23, 1919–January 12, 1962
Talented, way-out Ernie Kovacs—whose range of comedy characters included lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils—once said, “I like to be onstage because nobody can bother me there. Lawyers, process servers, insurance salesmen—anyone.” While he would make several movies, it was on TV that the burly Kovacs best demonstrated his rich and inventive comedy, most of which he wrote himself. One associate described the star’s cocky TV sketches: “Ernie was the master of the switch. He set up a picture that you felt totally comfortable with, and he took care in setting it up with great authenticity. . . . And then he’d switch it.”
Ernie Kovacs, in thoughtful conversation with James Stewart, is interrupted by Pyewacket the cat in Bell, Book and Candle (1958). Courtesy of JC Archives
Kovacs was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1919, the second son of Hungarian immigrants. His father was a tavern-keeper. After high school, when he was 20, Ernie came down with pneumonia. While hospitalized, he was placed in the tuberculosis ward, caught that disease, and almost died. It was during his long recovery period that Kovacs first developed his knack for cracking wise jokes to overcome his unhappiness. He also decided that he was now living on borrowed time and should enjoy each and every day. Kovacs attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and later organized an acting troupe, the Contemporary Players, in Trenton. When that failed, he moved on to WTTM, a local radio station, where he remained for nine years in various capacities, ranging from disc jockey to sportscaster. He married dancer Bette Wilcox in 1945. They became the parents of Bette Lee in 1947 and Kippie in 1949. The marriage ended in 1949 when Bette left him. During subsequent years, the Kovacs battled over custody of their offspring, and the children finally settled in with Ernie after he kidnapped them back in 1953 from Bette, who was then in Florida.
In 1950, Kovacs, needing more money, joined WPTZ-TV in Philadelphia for the first in a long chain of madcap television outings that he would host and/or star in. The next year his show Kovacs on the Corner, in which he teamed with Edie Adams and Peter Boyle, was featured on network television. At different points during the next few seasons, the workaholic Ernie was performing on several programs concurrently. He and Adams married in 1954 and moved into a plush 17-room duplex on Manhattan’s Central Park West. In 1959, their daughter Mia Susan was born. Kovacs reached a career peak when he starred in NBC’s Saturday Color Carnival—The Ernie Kovacs Show. The unique program—done all in pantomime—won the cigar-chomping Kovacs an Emmy.
Columbia Pictures signed Kovacs to a four-year contract at $100,000 a picture. He and his family relocated to California to a stately Los Angeles house in Coldwater Canyon. In his first two pictures, Operation Mad Ball (1957, starring Jack Lemmon) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958, starring Kim Novak and James Stewart), Kovacs had only supporting roles. However, he managed to make an indelible impression in both movies. Not content to be merely a feature-film player, he continued to make guest appearances on TV: sometimes in comedy specials, and on other occasions as a dramatic performer. He often had his own TV series (1958–59, 1961–62) and hosted other shows, including Take a Good Look (1959–60) and Silents Please (1961). As time went on, he began to have fights with the networks over the expanding budgets and unimpressive ratings for his programs.
Always wanting more attention and needing more money for his lavish lifestyle and growing back-tax debts, Kovacs performed in Las Vegas, where his addiction to gambling became costly. In 1960 he appeared on-screen in five features, ranging from Our Man in Havana to Strangers When We Meet. In what proved to be his last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), he was cast as a menacing villain.
In early 1961, Kovacs was acting in a TV pilot (A Pony for Chris with Buster Keaton) and was discussing a feature-film production deal with Alec Guinness. Then came January 12, 1962, the day that ended everything for Kovacs.
The Kovacs were invited to director Billy Wilder’s apartment on Wilshire Boulevard to celebrate the christening of Milton and Ruth Berle’s new son, Michael. Edie drove to the party alone in her Corvair station wagon, since Ernie had been busy working on the TV pilot all day and was to meet her there. He drove to Wilder’s place in his white Rolls Royce. At 1:20 A.M., Ernie and Edie left the get-together. He offered French movie star Yves Montand a ride, but Montand decided to go with the Berles. Slightly drunk, Ernie drove off in the station wagon (which Edie hated to drive), asking his wife to drive the Rolls home. As he roared through the wet night, his vehicle smashed into the concrete triangle at the intersection of Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Boulevard. The impact spun the car around and wrapped it around a pole. Kovacs died instantly of a basal skull fracture. He was found dead with a Cuban cigar a few inches from his hand. Had he not been momentarily distracted while trying to light the stogie, he would have been 43 on January 23, 1962.
Unaware of the tragedy, Edie had driven home. When she heard the bad news, she refused to believe her husband was gone until Jack Lemmon went to the morgue and confirmed that he was indeed dead. Edie asked Lemmon to put several Havana cigars in Ernie’s pocket before the burial.
The funeral was held on January 18, 1962, at the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church, and attended by a host of celebrities. Pallbearers included Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Billy Wilder, and Dean Martin. The comedian was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California, where his marker reads: “Ernie Kovacs 1919–1962. Nothing in Moderation. We all loved him.” The hard-working Edie was saddled with $600,000 in gambling and tax debts that took her years to pay off.
Over the decades since his death, a solid portion of Ernie’s work from TV’s “Golden Age” has been salvaged for TV syndication and home-video distribution, proving to be the lasting tribute to his far-out talents. A less happy legacy occurred on May 22, 1982, when Ernie and Edie’s 22-year-old daughter, Mia Susan, died in a Los Angeles auto crash. She is buried at Forest Lawn to Kovacs’s left. Her marker reads “Daddy’s girl. We all loved her too.”
February 1, 1965–March 31, 1993
Brandon Lee always had a burning desire to act. But during his efforts to break into the entertainment industry, he insisted, “I don’t want to be known only as Bruce Lee’s son. When you have a built-in comma after your name, it makes you sensitive.” Yet in many ironic ways, the phrase “like father, like son” certainly applied to martial-arts screen idol Bruce Lee and his only son, Brandon. There were many coincidental parallels between the two generations of Lees: both were anti-establishment rebels who boasted of their reckless disregard for safety, and each had a near-fanatical determination to succeed in show business on his own terms. Each was a prize example of muscular toughness. Both men had a premonition that their lives would be short.
Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973, at the age of 32, while making an action movie called Game of Death. Although the coroner’s report attributed Bruce’s death to cerebral edema caused by an allergic reaction to a painkiller, wild rumors of how the world’s fittest man “really” expired have endured for decades and new ones continue to develop. In March 1993, almost 20 years after Bruce Lee’s passing, the 28-year-old Brandon Lee would expire in a tragic accident on the North Carolina set of his own starring vehicle, The Crow.
Because of the bizarre facts surrounding Brandon’s freak mishap, there was immediate speculation that he had been a victim of foul play (many people have thought the same thing about his father’s death). Others reasoned that Brandon’s tragic end had been preordained by fate, a fulfillment of the young actor’s premonition that he was “going to die young just like Dad.”
Brandon Bruce Lee was born on February 1, 1965 (the first day of the Chinese New Year), in Oakland, California. He was the son of San Francisco-born Eurasian Bruce Lee and Linda (Emery) Lee, an American of Swedish heritage. (The Lees had married in 1964 and would have a second child, Shannon, in 1969.) The year after Brandon’s birth, Bruce gained a degree of show-business recognition when he played Kato in the Hollywood TV series The Green Hornet (1966–67).
By the time of Bruce’s hit action features—such as The Big Boss (1971) and Enter the Dragon (1973)—the Lees were living in an expensive Hong Kong mansion. (According to Bruce Lee lore, when Bruce, whose Chinese nickname, Li Siu-lung, means Little Dragon, bought a house called Lowloon-Tong, or Pond of the Nine Dragons, in a Hong Kong suburb, he incurred the jealous wrath of the neighborhood’s resident demons. The curse, per the tradition, lasts three generations.)
Meanwhile, at the tender age of five, Brandon appeared in one of his father’s movies, Legacy of Rage (1970). It was a clip of a Hong Kong TV appearance young Brandon had made with his famous father. By the time Brandon was eight, he could speak Cantonese fluently.
Following Bruce’s death in 1973, Linda took Brandon and Shannon back to the United States to live in Los Angeles. The trauma of his dad’s passing had a tremendous effect on Brandon, who became a rebellious loner. He was obsessed by his celebrated parent and intent on following in his father’s footsteps. When Linda enrolled the nine-year-old Brandon in martial-arts lessons, the boy saw a photograph of his famous father on the wall. He ran crying from the training studio.
Brandon proved to be a difficult, self-willed teenager, always challenging authority. In his senior year, during the spring of 1983, he was expelled from the private Chadwick School in Palos Verdes for “misbehaving” and had to settle for a GED diploma. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, a close friend of Brandon during this period, would remember that his pal was “a boiling mass of energy.” Deciding to fulfill his destiny as an actor, Brandon enrolled at Emerson College in Boston as a theater major, but left there in 1985. He took acting classes at the Strasberg Academy in Los Angeles.
On his 21st birthday, Brandon made his professional acting debut in Kung Fu: The Movie. In this made-for-TV movie, David Carradine reprised his role of Kwai Chang Caine from the hit 1972–75 TV series Kung Fu. (Ironically, Bruce Lee had been a contender for this starring role before Carradine won the assignment.) Brandon was cast as an assassin.
In the next few years, acting jobs eluded Brandon. He spent much of his free time racing his motorcycle recklessly around Los Angeles, refusing to wear a helmet. Then his acting career took an upward turn. In the cheaply assembled Laser Mission (1990), shot in South Africa, he appeared as a government agent. Much more mainstream and popular was Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), a violent action picture that featured Brandon as the hip American partner of Dolph Lundgren (as a Los Angeles cop and martial-arts master).
With his movie career finally accelerating, the six-foot, 155-pound Lee was cast by Twentieth Century-Fox (in the first of a three-picture deal with the studio) as the lead in Rapid Fire (1992). He played a pacifistic college student pressured into becoming a killing machine. Critics thought the action movie was schlock, but many noted that wiry, muscular Brandon had an exotic charisma.
Brandon Lee and companion, Lisa Hutton, at a Hollywood premiere.
© 1992 by Albert L. Ortega
By now, Brandon had come to terms with the fact that, unlike his father, he would never be a world-class martial artist. Insistent on establishing his own identity, he vetoed a sizeable role in an upcoming screen biography of his dad—Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). Off camera, Brandon was known to some of his California peers as a lover of practical jokes.
By early 1993, Brandon’s life was in high gear both professionally and romantically. He was sharing a Beverly Hills home with year-older Eliza (Lisa) Hutton, a Hollywood casting assistant. The couple planned to be married in Ensenada, Mexico, on April 17. First, however, he was scheduled to star in The Crow, a movie based on a high-tech action comic book. Lee was cast as a rock star who is murdered by a gang and returns to Earth in the persona of a bird to avenge his and his girlfriend’s deaths. Producer Ed Pressman hoped this entry would be the first in a series of movies starring Lee as The Crow.
The movie was shot at the Carolco Studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. The shoot was jinxed with problems from the beginning. On the first day of filming—February 1, 1993—a carpenter on the crew received a severe electric shock and extensive burns when the crane he was riding struck high-voltage power lines. On March 13, a storm smashed some of the movie sets. Another time, a cast member went to check his prop gun before the cameras began rolling, only to find a live bullet in the firearm. Adding to the production confusion, a disgruntled set sculptor drove his car through the studio’s plaster shop.
On March 31, The Crow was eight days away from the end of the shoot. Everyone was working extremely long hours to complete the movie on time. Shortly after midnight on the morning of the 31st, Brandon reported to soundstage #4 to do a flashback scene depicting how his screen character had died. In the story line, a drug dealer fires a .44 Magnum revolver at Brandon’s character as the latter enters his apartment. The filming procedure called for Lee to open the door, carrying a grocery bag in his arms. The bag hid a trigger mechanism he was to pull that would set off a small dummy explosive charge just as the on-camera villain fired the blank shot.
At 12:30 A.M., the on-camera performer playing the drug dealer was standing approximately 15 feet away from the star. He aimed his firearm at Lee and pulled the trigger. Brandon set off the charge as planned, but then he collapsed on the set, bleeding profusely. It was quickly discerned that he had a hole the size of a quarter in his lower right abdomen. While crew members phoned for help, the emergency medical technician assigned to the set began CPR on the badly injured star.
Lee was rushed by ambulance to the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. Upon arrival, he still had detectable vital signs. After the staff stabilized him, he was taken into emergency surgery. During the five-hour procedure, 60 units of blood were used on the patient. Shortly after 7:00 A.M. he was placed in the hospital’s Trauma Neuro-Intensive Care Unit. His condition deteriorated progressively until finally his heart stopped, and he could not be resuscitated. Brandon was pronounced dead at 1:04 P.M. At the time of his passing, his fiancée was with him, and his mother, Linda, had flown in from Boise, Idaho, where she lived with her businessman husband, Bruce Cadwell.
The media had a field day with this freak accident, pointing up the parallels between Brandon’s death and that of his celebrated father. Soon after the mystifying tragedy, Detective Rodney Simmons of the Wilmington Police Department (the first officer at the scene of the accident) examined the final footage. To explain the tragic mishap, he suggested that “One of the lead slugs could have come off its casing and lodged in the gun.” (According to this theory, when the gun was reloaded after the close-up shot, the metal tip had remained behind the gun’s cylinder. When the blank went off, it was speculated, the explosive force propelled the dummy tip through the gun barrel and lodged it in Brandon’s body near his spine.)
An autopsy performed on the actor’s body on Thursday, April 1, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, discredited Detective Simmons’s theory and confirmed its alternative: that Lee had been shot accidentally with a “live” .44-caliber bullet. How such a thing could have happened remained unexplained, as did the fact that protocol had been broken by having the on-set villain point (and fire) the gun directly at Lee, rather than “faking” the shot (which was industry tradition).
On April 3, 1993, Brandon was laid to rest beside his father in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington. Among family members and friends attending the services was Brandon’s 23-year-old sister, Shannon, who was then living in New Orleans and was a singer. Linda Lee Cadwell did her best to keep up everyone’s spirits at the funeral.
On the following day, Sunday, April 4, a memorial service was conducted at actress Polly Bergen’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Among the two hundred who attended were action stars Steven Seagal and David Carradine, actors David Hasselhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips, and Brandon’s close friend Jeff Imada (who had been the stunt coordinator on The Crow). Linda and Shannon led the tribute services.
On Wednesday, April 28, 1993, there was a special ceremony to unveil a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Bruce Lee. That evening, at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story premiered. On hand for the bittersweet occasion, Linda Lee Cadwell told the press that she felt it important for her to attend because the screen biography “is a tribute to our family’s life.... I feel the film is a tribute to Bruce as a father and to Brandon as a son.”
A special end title had been added to Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, dedicating the movie to Brandon Lee. The tribute quote, which applied to both Bruce and his son, read, “The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”
Eventually, The Crow was finished and did well at the box office (partially because of filmgoers’ morbid desire to see the late Brandon Lee in his fatal role). There have been further screen sequels and a weekly TV series.
Years later, for a cable-TV biography of Brandon, his mother observed that Brandon, like Bruce Lee, was an energetic spirit who had made the most of each day of his life. As she quoted from an old saying, “Life, if thou knowest how to use it, is long enough.”
[Jane Alice Peters]
October 6, 1908–January 16, 1942
The same attractive qualities—directness, genuineness, and zest for life—that made Carole Lombard so well-liked in private life shone forth in her movie performances. Seldom has a show-business celebrity been so beloved by all who knew her. She was quite womanly and attracted an array of male admirers. But she was also blessed with a salty, down-to-earth humor and a lack of pretense that made her “one of the boys.” She was good at acting, but loved sports equally as well. She knew how to host or enjoy a rousing party, but was just as content when helping those in need. She was well-respected in the entertainment industry for her business sense, since she could cut a better movie deal than many talent agents.
Lombard was one of the first American luminaries to die in World War II. She had completed a successful war-bond selling tour and was heading back to Los Angeles when her plane crashed into the side of a Nevada mountain. If Carole could have heard the eulogies following her passing, she would have been embarrassed by such extravagant praise. She would have insisted that she was merely doing her job.
She was born in 1908 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the third child of Frederick and Elizabeth (Knight) Peters. When she was six, her parents divorced. The same year, Mrs. Peters and her three children visited the World’s Fair in San Francisco and eventually chose to resettle in Los Angeles. One day in 1921, movie director Allan Dwan was visiting a neighbor of the Peters family and noticed the tomboyish Jane playing street ball. He hired her to play Monte Blue’s sister in A Perfect Crime. It was four years before she made another feature, this time playing a small role in Tom Mix’s Dick Turpin (1925). By then her name had been altered to Carol Lombard.
Carol had just negotiated a five-year Fox Films contract when a near-tragedy occurred. She was coming home from a hockey game one foggy evening with her escort when the car in front of theirs slid backward down a hill, hitting their vehicle. The sudden impact shoved Carol forward against the windshield. Her face was badly cut from the corner of her nose to her left cheekbone. The attending medical intern sewed up the wound with 18 stitches. While recuperating, Carol began studying cinematography. She accepted that she would have a facial scar, but that proper lighting and good camera angles could minimize it.
Once she had recovered from her mishap, Carol signed on at movie director Mack Sennett’s comedy factory as one of his famous “bathing beauties.” During the next 18 months she made more than a dozen two-reeler comedies. But, with the coming of talkies, Carol moved over to Pathé Pictures and then joined the lustrous Paramount studio. In her first movie there she played alongside Charles “Buddy” Rogers; in the credits the studio misspelled Carol, adding an “e” at the end. Carol—now Carole—didn’t care: “Since they’re paying me so well, I don’t care how they spell my name.”
Starlet Carole Lombard in the late 1920s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Carole got great on-the-job training at Paramount, appearing in five releases each in 1931 and 1932. She married one of her leading men, William Powell, in June 1931. He was 39; she was 21. In 1932 she made No Man of Her Own (1932), matched with a rising young star borrowed from MGM, Clark Gable. By August 1933, Lombard and Powell had divorced, and one of her more constant escorts was crooner-bandleader-movie personality Russ Columbo. More friends than romantic partners, they supposedly considered marriage, but he died in a freak shooting accident on September 2, 1934.
By 1934, Carole had become a top-flight screen personality. It was, however, her performance in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century (1934) opposite John Barrymore that made her a legitimate screen star. She was now earning $3,000 weekly. On the recommendation of her ex-husband William Powell, Universal borrowed Carole to join him in the wacky antics of My Man Godfrey (1936). It was a huge success and ensured her major stardom. In 1938 she signed a two-picture deal with David O. Selznick. Then, on March 29, 1939, she married Clark Gable, who had just completed the filming of Gone with the Wind (1939). The couple built a house at the 50-acre San Fernando Valley ranch she bought for them and soon became known as one of Hollywood’s most compatible couples.
Next, Carole signed with RKO at $150,000 per movie plus a percentage of the profits. She was one of the first Tinseltown stars to obtain such a lucrative deal. By 1940 she had a new ambition—to become a producer. She alternated heavy drama (They Knew What They Wanted, 1940) with lighthearted fare (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 1941). In December 1941, she completed a serious comedy, To Be or Not to Be (1942), with Jack Benny.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Hollywood Victory Committee chairman Clark Gable scheduled himself and Carole to lead a bond drive at Indianapolis, near her hometown of Fort Wayne. Her mother and her publicist accompanied Lombard when Gable canceled out of the trek.
On January 15, 1942, Carole sold more than $2.5 million in war bonds in Indianapolis. Her parting words to the crowd were, “Before I say goodbye to you all—come on—join me in a big cheer—V for Victory!” She could not make up her mind between taking a train or a plane back to the West Coast. She flipped a coin and chose the plane, glad to be getting back to Hollywood and Gable. (Her mother, who had never been on an airplane before, was leery of flying and had been warned by her numerologist that January 16 would be an unlucky day.)
Around 4:00 A.M. on January 16, 1942, Carole, her mother, and her publicist Otto Winkler took off on the 17-hour trip to the West Coast. At a stopover in Albuquerque, New Mexico, several passengers were bumped off so that army aviators could take their place. Carole, however, persuaded the pilot to keep her and her party aboard. After refueling in Las Vegas, the craft took off for Los Angeles. At 7:07 P.M. that January 16, the TWA airliner slammed into Table Rock Mountain, 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas. The impact killed Carole, her mother, and 20 other passengers and crew (including 15 military personnel). It was two days before a rescue team could remove the charred bodies from the snowy death site. Carole was just 33 years old.
Among the many who sent condolences to the grieving Clark Gable was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The telegram read, “She brought great joy to all who knew her, and to millions who knew her only as a great artist. . . . She is and always will be a star, one we shall never forget, nor cease to be grateful to.”
A few years before she died, Carole had requested in her will that she be buried in a white outfit and in a “modestly priced crypt.” Following Lombard’s wishes, the famed Hollywood couturiere Irene designed a special white gown for her. A private funeral service was conducted at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, on January 21, 1942. She was buried in a white marble wall crypt in the Sanctuary of Trust there. In a nearby alcove lay Russ Columbo, who Lombard liked to say was the great love of her life.
In July 1942, Governor Henry Schricker of Indiana named the state’s naval air squadron “The Lombardians.” That same year, a liberty ship was christened the Carole Lombard with a tearful Clark Gable attending the ceremony. Although he would marry twice more, the guilt-ridden Gable never stopped grieving for Carole. When he died on November 16, 1960, he was buried in a crypt next to hers at Forest Lawn.
Years later, Wesley Ruggles, Lombard’s director and friend, would say, “When Irving Thalberg and then Jean Harlow both died too young, the whole community experienced a shock of loss, but it was more industrial than personal. . . . But we couldn’t comprehend losing Carole, and we never adjusted to it, either. She was irreplaceable, and we just keep on missing her.”
Perhaps the finest tribute of all is that Carole Lombard’s solid body of film work continues to be appreciated, decade after decade, by admiring audiences.
[Vera Jayne Palmer]
April 19, 1933–June 29, 1967
The inestimable Bette Davis once said of the voluptuous (a 40-inch bust) and supposedly brainy (an alleged I.Q. of 163 that was perhaps a press agent’s gimmick) Jayne Mansfield, “Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater.” Columnist Earl Wilson noted of the buxom platinum blond with the photogenic face and whispery, childlike voice: “Jayne surrendered all her privacy and considerable dignity to the daily job of getting her name and picture in the papers. Her home, whether it was a house, apartment, or hotel suite, was always open to reporters, and photographers were constantly running in and out, stumbling over her dogs and cats. . . . Jayne’s life was a constant quest for greater recognition—ironically, she received the most attention when she died in a grisly car accident. If only she could have been alive to enjoy the sensational publicity.”
She was born Vera Jayne Palmer in 1933 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to an attorney and an elementary-school teacher. When Vera was three, her father died. Mother and daughter were in the car when he suffered a fatal heart attack while driving down a hilly road; it is lucky that they survived the ensuing accident. Thereafter, the child was placed in the charge of one of her mother’s friends so that Mrs. Palmer could return to the classroom. In 1939, Jayne’s mother remarried (to Harry “Tex” Peers) and the family relocated from Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, to Dallas, Texas. While attending Highland Park High there, the future actress fell in love with another high school student, Paul Mansfield, and they wed secretly on January 28, 1950. When Vera became pregnant, her parents hosted a second (public) marriage and on November 8, Jayne Marie was born. By now, Paul was attending the University of Texas in Austin and Jayne was working as a dance-studio receptionist and performing as a member of the Austin Civic Theatre. When Paul Mansfield was called to active military duty during the Korean War, the star-struck Jayne left her infant daughter with her mom and hurried off to California. She enrolled at UCLA and—keeping her marriage and child a secret—entered the Miss California Contest. She was a local finalist, but Paul made her drop out of the contest. Before she returned to Texas, Jayne had one movie bit part (in Prehistoric Women, 1951).
Voluptuous film star Jayne Mansfield at the height of her career in the mid-1950s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
While her husband was serving in Korea, Jayne went to college in Dallas, studied acting, and appeared on local TV programs. When Mansfield became a civilian again in 1954, she made him live up to his promise to take her to Hollywood. Highly focused on becoming a big movie star, Jayne pushed her way into Paramount Pictures’ talent department and was almost signed to a contract on the spot. With her naturally brunette hair now dyed platinum blond and with an agent in tow, Jayne made Female Jungle, not released until 1956. Paul Mansfield was dissatisfied with the “new” Jayne and returned to Texas without her. (Their divorce became final in early January 1958.)
Jayne’s aggressive new press agent, James Byron, did much to make his well-endowed client a well-known commodity—largely through her cleavage. Nothing was too ridiculous or insignificant for the career-hungry Mansfield. She gained tremendous press attention by wearing a much-too-small red bathing suit on a press junket to Silver Springs, Florida. Next, Jayne was a Playboy magazine centerfold, which led to a Warner Bros, term contract. She was cast as a mistress or a moll in her celluloid assignments, including Illegal (1955) and Hell on Frisco Bay (1956).
When the studio terminated her contract, Jayne gratefully grabbed the lead in a Broadway sex comedy called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? that others had rejected. The show was popular and Jayne made the most of every opportunity for publicity. Meanwhile, she met Hungarian-born muscleman Mickey Hargitay, who left Mae West’s act to join Jayne’s entourage. Twentieth Century-Fox had long made a specialty of attractive blond stars (Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe); they signed up Mansfield as another threat to the troublesome Miss Monroe. Jayne’s first movie there, the satirical The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), was one of her best. The screen version of her Broadway hit was next (1957), followed by John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus (1957), which stretched Jayne’s talents, if not her wardrobe, to the very limits. On January 13, 1958, Mansfield and Hargitay married. They would have three children: Miklos Jr., Zoltan, and Mariska.
Eager to keep working, the statuesque Jayne played Las Vegas venues, trading on her dumb-blond comedy appeal. Fox transplanted her to England for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) and she remained there for two more dull quickies. In Italy, she and Mickey costarred in The Loves of Hercules (1960). Obsessed with grabbing attention at any price, Jayne made her pink, Spanish-style Beverly Hills mansion at 10100 Sunset Boulevard a media delight, with its heart-shaped bed and pool. But her exhibitionistic sex life cost Mansfield her studio contract (it ended in 1962) and her marriage (Mickey divorced her in 1964). Meanwhile, she made the sleazy sexploitation movie Promises, Promises (1963) and posed nude again for Playboy. By now, her excessive publicity stunts seemed labored and not much fun. She made several mediocre quickie movies in Europe and then wed director Matt Cimber in 1964. Their son, Anthony, was born in 1965. Depressed over her downsliding career, Jayne turned increasingly to alcohol. In addition, there were many headlines over her tug-of-war contest with Hargitay for custody of their children.
Taking Cimber’s bad advice, Jayne rejected the role of Ginger (later accepted by actress Tina Louise) on the TV series Gilligan’s Island (1964–67). Instead, she made bottom-of-the-barrel movies and had an occasional cameo in a respectable production.
In 1966, Cimber divorced the bloated, heavy-drinking Jayne. Next, she became romantically attached to a San Francisco attorney, Samuel S. Brody. Jayne’s tour of sleazy clubs in Sweden, England, and Ireland was a fiasco. She gained more notice for her drunken brawls with Brody and for being named in a messy divorce suit by Brody’s ailing wife. Returning to California, Jayne (who had become fascinated with the Church of Satan) received additional bad publicity when her sixteen-year-old daughter, Jayne Marie, was placed in protective custody because her mother and Brody were accused of mistreating her.
The car crash that killed actress Jayne Mansfield in June 1967 near New Orleans.
Courtesy of APA/Archive Photos
In early 1967, Jayne toured Vietnam to entertain the troops. In June of that year, she left for a club engagement (as a substitute for her friend Mamie Van Doren) in Biloxi, Mississippi. She was joined by Brody and her three middle children. After performing at Gus Stevens’s Supper Club in Biloxi, she left at about 2:30 A.M. on June 29, 1967, for New Orleans, to be interviewed the next day on a local TV show. The hardtop Buick car was driven by Ron Harrison (a college student who worked for Stevens) and the passengers were Mansfield, Brody, Miklos, Zoltan, Mariska, and four Chihuahua dogs. Some 20 miles before reaching New Orleans on windy U.S. Highway 90, the speeding car careened into the back of a trailer truck. This truck had halted behind a city vehicle, which was spraying the swamps with an anti-mosquito insecticide. The crash was so severe that the impact sheared off the car’s top. Harrison, Jayne, and Brody were killed immediately, their bodies thrown onto the highway. The three bewildered children who were sleeping in the back seat received only minor bruises. In the accident, Jayne’s blond wig was thrown onto the dashboard, giving rise to the lurid rumor that she had been scalped in the collision.
After a Beverly Hills memorial service, Jayne’s body was shipped to Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, for burial in the family plot. At the Fairview Cemetery there, a weeping Hargitay threw himself on her pink-rose-covered coffin. Twenty years after her death, a pink memorial marker for Jayne was installed at the then-Hollywood Memorial Park in Los Angeles by her devoted fan club. It reads “We live to love you more each day.”
Much of Jayne’s reported $500,000 estate evaporated in lawyers’ fees and creditors’ bills, and her five children ended up receiving less than $2,000 each from the will. One of her offspring, Mariska, has gone on to a successful television career, costarring in the series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-present).
June 20, 1924–May 28, 1971
Before he reached the age of 21, Audie Murphy had already become the most decorated American GI of World War II. He returned to the United States in great triumph. His life thereafter—as a cowboy-movie star—was an anticlimax. His career spiraled downward until one day, the small aircraft on which he was a passenger crashed into the side of a Virginia mountain. It was a horrendous finale for the American hero credited with killing 240 enemy soldiers in combat. What price glory!
Audie Murphy was born in 1924 in Farmersville, Texas—the heart of cotton country. He was the third son of 12 children (only 9 of whom survived to adulthood). The family later moved to Celeste, Texas, where Mr. Murphy worked for a time in the Works Progress Administration, but the Murphy clan still had a tough time during the Depression years.
As a child, Audie, who hated schooling and never got beyond the fifth grade, perfected his shooting skills killing jackrabbits for the family’s dinner. When he was a youngster, his father deserted the family, and his beloved mother died when Audie was 16. Years later Murphy reflected, “She died taking something of me with her. It seems I’ve been searching for it ever since.”
With his family scattered and wanting to serve his country, the skinny, baby-faced Audie enlisted in the army (having earlier been rejected by the marines and the paratroopers). After basic training in Texas and Maryland, he was shipped to North Africa, landing at Casablanca in February 1943. Before the European theater of war was played out, the dedicated Audie had been promoted to First Lieutenant and had been part of seven major battle thrusts in North Africa and Europe. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor in January 1945 for his extraordinary heroism and bravery in action earlier in eastern France. Among the more than two dozen medals he won were the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Silver Star with an Oak Leaf Cluster. Of the 235 men in his original army company, Murphy was one of two who survived to the end of the war. (His chief injury during his time in combat was a severe injury to his hip; nine inches of dead flesh eventually had to be removed from the area.) As America’s most decorated soldier, he was featured in a Life magazine cover story (July 16, 1945).
The publicity from this well-circulated article was tremendous. Back in the United States, the freckle-faced Audie was the focus of many parades, banquets, and celebrations. Among those who observed the hoopla was veteran actor James Cagney, who suggested that good-looking Murphy should visit Hollywood and maybe get into the movie business. Audie had been thinking of reenlisting in the service or becoming a veterinarian, but accepted Cagney’s encouragement of a possible Hollywood career.
Audie Murphy ready for gunplay in Ride a Crooked Trail (1958).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Once in Los Angeles, Audie went to acting school, which was helpful for ridding him of some of his strong Texas accent. Usually broke, he sometimes slept in a gym owned by a pal. His first movie was a small role in Alan Ladd’s Beyond Glory (1948); his first lead was in Bad Boy (1949). In February 1949, he married petite Wanda Hendrix, who had made a mark as a teenage movie actress, but whose career was already sliding. The couple costarred in a Western (Sierra, 1950). They divorced in April 1950; she charged him with mental cruelty. (Among Murphy’s postwar psychological symptoms were terrible nightmares and paranoia. He often slept with a loaded gun under his pillow and once, in an argument with Wanda, placed the charged weapon in her mouth. These were all signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.) In 1950, Audie was signed to a Universal-International Pictures contract at $100,000 a year and began his on-the-job training in a string of B-movie Westerns. The studio exploited Murphy’s war record and in 1955 made a screen adaptation of his bestselling (ghostwritten) autobiography, To Hell and Back. Then it was back to “horse operas,” leading a disillusioned Murphy to observe: “Yeah, the face is the same—and so is the dialogue. Only the horses are changed. Some of them get old and have to be retired.” Meanwhile, in April 1951, Audie wed a former flight attendant, Pamela Archer, and they had two sons: Terry, born in 1952, and James, in 1954.
As his movie career faded, Audie, looking strained on camera, tried TV. His 1961 cowboy detective series, Whispering Smith, was off the air in four months. The financial losses from the series forced him to liquidate his San Fernando Valley ranch. Universal kept him on contract, but in much lower-budget movies as the market for Westerns diminished. By 1965, Audie was no longer working for the studio, and he and his wife separated (they never divorced). With increasing financial problems (including back taxes owed to the IRS) the still-naive Audie discovered hard truths about his industry friends: “When word gets around you’re washed up, no one will touch you with a 10-foot pole. They’re afraid you’ll ask them for a job. Or a loan.”
By the late 1960s, the fast-aging Audie had drug and drinking problems and owed a great deal of money because of his gambling habit. He had several brushes with the law, but assault charges against assorted individuals were always dropped. In 1969, he found backers for a new picture, A Time for Dying, in which he had a cameo. It was scheduled for release in the summer of 1971. Because he owed over $360,000 to creditors and to the federal government, Audie, stressed and near-suicidal, accepted a job as spokesperson with Modular Management, a Georgia-based company that built prefabricated homes and motels. Meanwhile, the FBI, knowing of Murphy’s gambling involvement, had used him as a decoy to trap certain Chicago underworld figures. Additionally, Murphy had tics to a New Orleans gangster who was attempting to have ex-Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa paroled from prison. Audie was now a liaison between the underworld and the U.S. government—an uncomfortable position.
On May 28, 1971, Audie, Modular’s president Claude Crosby, and three other company executives left Atlanta on a chartered, bluc-and-white twin-engine Aero Commander plane. Twelve miles north of Roanoke, during a thunderstorm, the pilot lost his way; sometime after 11:40 A.M., the plane smashed into the side of Brushy Mountain. Due to the bad weather, it was not until three days later that the burned plane and the six bodies could be located in the remote, wooded area.
Few Hollywood figures attended the memorial services for Audie Murphy on June 4, 1971, at the Church of the Hills in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California. Among the gathering of six hundred were his ex-wife Wanda Hendrix and several army buddies. After the service, his body was flown to Virginia and buried on June 7 at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Murphy’s grave is located not far from that of the Unknown Soldier.
Ironically, at the time of his death, film director Don Siegel was considering Audie for the role of the psychopathic killer opposite Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971), a key assignment that might have pushed the trouble-prone Murphy into a comeback phase of his languishing movie career.
[Eric Hilliard Nelson]
May 8, 1940–December 31, 1985
Rick (Ricky) Nelson was born into a very well-known show-business clan and spent much of his life as an entertainer. His professional accomplishments ranged from being a rambunctious teenage heartthrob to a hit rock recording star; he ended up a middle-aged family man who performed continually on the concert circuit (including at restaurants and fairs). When he perished in a plane crash in late 1985, he joined a galaxy of other recording notables who had died in air fatalities.
Ricky’s father, Ozzie Nelson (born in 1906), was a perpetual overachiever: America’s youngest Eagle Scout, a Rutgers University honor student, and a star quarterback. Before he graduated from New Jersey Law School, Nelson quit to form and headline his own band, which became very popular across the nation. He and band vocalist/screen starlet Harriet Hilliard (born in 1914) wed in 1935. Their son David was born in 1936. Four years later, Ricky was born in Teaneck, New Jersey. In 1944, the senior Nelsons began a long-running radio sitcom, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, with their real-life sons joining the program in 1949. When the successful series transferred to television in 1952, all four Nelsons appeared in the weekly episodes that revolved around the idealized American family, as well as in a full-length feature, Here Come the Nelsons (1952).
To prove to a girlfriend that he could vocalize enough to make a recording, Ricky—then a student at Hollywood High School—persuaded Ozzie to let him record “I’m Walking” for the April 10, 1957 episode of the TV show. (Young Nelson accompanied himself on guitar, with the backing of the show’s orchestra.) Within a month, the song had scored nationwide, with the flip side, “A Teenager’s Romance,” rising to #2 on the charts. Ricky signed with Imperial Records and his single “Poor Little Fool” became #1 on the charts in August 1958. Wholesome, smart-alecky, cute Ricky became a confident multimedia star and even made a few films, such as Rio Bravo (1959) and The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960).
As Ricky matured into adulthood, his acting became more stilted. But as long as he had the family TV series, his professional standing was secure. On April 20, 1963, the sometime playboy—having dropped the “y” from Ricky—married Kris Harmon, the daughter of gridiron great Tom Harmon and the sister of then-budding actor Mark Harmon. Six months later, Tracy Kristine Nelson was born. (Rick and Kris would become the parents of twins, Matthew and Gunnar, in 1967, and another child, Sam, in 1974.) Rick and Kris costarred in a flop feature film, Love and Kisses (1965). The next year, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet finally went off the air.
By the late 1960s, Rick’s once-promising career had faded, and efforts such as hosting a musical TV show, Malihu U (1967), didn’t help. He was a guest on several small-screen series with unremarkable results. He did, however, get a boost in the recording field when his single, “Travelin’ Man,” was a top hit in 1971, and the next year he created a stir while performing in a rock ’n’ roll revival show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. During the performance, he tested new material. The disappointed audience, who wanted him to perform only his old hits, booed him. He incorporated the disturbing experience into a hit recording, “Garden Party.” Meanwhile, his marriage to Kris was falling apart.
In 1975, Ozzie Nelson died of cancer, with his sizeable estate placed in trust under Harriet’s supervision. By the early 1980s, Rick, who had never been good at saving his money, had lost his major record-label contracts and was barely making ends meet with low-level concert tours. As for his union to Kris, after several temporary separations, she filed for divorce in late 1980; the divorce became final in 1982. In 1983, Rick played the principal on a TV movie, High School, U.S.A.; Harriet Nelson was cast as his secretary. In early 1985 he made a TV series pilot called Fathers and Sons, starring Merle Olson, that failed to impress the networks.
On December 30, 1985, Rick and his band did a gig at PJ’s Lounge in Guntersville, Alabama. They were scheduled to perform next in Dallas at the Park Suite Hotel for a New Year’s Eve show. (Nelson needed the cash flow to keep up heavy alimony payments.) At 5:15 P.M. on the 31st, the group’s 40-year-old chartered twin-engine DC-3 crashed in a hayfield approximately 135 miles east of Dallas. The faulty engines that had brought the plane down immediately burst into flames, sending up black plumes of oily smoke. (There was a briefly held contention, later refuted by the investigators, that Nelson and several others aboard had been “freebasing,” and that aerosol spray cans used to light the drug pipes had ignited the fire.) Rick, his 27-year-old fiancée Helen Blair, four band members, and one of the road crew were killed in the crash. Some of the bodies were so badly burned that they could be identified only through dental records. The coroner’s report noted that Nelson had been a confirmed cocaine user.
More than one thousand people attempted to fill the 275-seat Church of the Hills at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California. (Nelson’s body had not yet reached the cemetery, as it had been delayed by the complex paperwork required to transport the remains back to California.) Rick’s daughter Tracy eulogized: “I remember his grace, his gentleness. He was the kindest man you ever met. The man had class. He was an artist. He was wise. And he loved ice cream. Pop wouldn’t want you to be sad.” Eleven-year-old Sam delivered a Native American poem dedicated to his dad. The twins sang “Easy to Be Free.” Brother David read a message of condolence from President Ronald Reagan. David concluded by requesting the congregation to join him in reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which the family had sung each night at bedtime when Ozzie was alive and the boys were children.
Although the hard-working Rick Nelson had earned over $700,000 in the last year of his life, debts, alimony, and the pressures of his lifestyle had left a residue of only $43,000. There were about $1 million in debts, including estate claims by Nelson’s ex-wife, Kris. As for Harriet Nelson, Rick’s will stated, “I have specifically failed to provide for my mother . . . as she is well taken care of and comfortable at this time.” Regarding his fiancée, “I specifically fail to provide herein for Helen Blair as that is our wish.” In 1990, the aviation company (who reportedly had repaired the plane’s malfunctioning heater several weeks prior to the crash) settled the long-standing case. Some $4.5 million was split among 10 plaintiffs.
Rick Nelson left a show-business legacy, not only through his own media performances, but also through those of his children. His daughter Tracy became a TV-series star (Square Pegs, Glitter, Father Dowling Mysteries) and the long-haired twins Matthew and Gunnar became rock stars for a time in the 1990s, calling their band “Nelson.”
In 1987, Rick’s brother David directed a special about Rick Nelson, entitled A Brother Remembers, which aired on the Disney cable network. Far more revealing, however, was the 1998 two-hour cable-TV biography Ozzie and Harriet: The Adventures of America’s Favorite Family, which showed in vivid detail that the sitcom image of the Nelsons was far different than the real-life household, in which Ozzie had been a stern, demanding taskmaster. As for Harriet Nelson, she couldn’t comment on the show’s many revelations, having died of congestive heart failure on October 2, 1994, in Laguna Beach, California, at the age of 85.
The legend of the life and times of Ricky Nelson continued. In August 1999 the VH1 cable channel aired Rick Nelson: Original Teen Idol, starring Greg Calpakis in the title role, with Jamey Sheridan and Sara Botsford as his famous parents. It focused heavily on the difficulties of being part of the Nelson family when the cameras weren’t rolling.
A small ceremony for Rick Nelson was held on May 8, 1995, which would have been his 55th birthday. At the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California, Nelson was enshrined in Hollywood’s Rockwalk. The occasion reminded the world that it was gifted young Ricky Nelson, on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, who helped to bring rock ’n’ roll into the U.S. mainstream.
[William Penn Adair Rogers]
November 4, 1879–August 15, 1935
Few, if any, entertainers in the annals of American show business could ever hope to match the qualities of Will Rogers. Not only was Will greatly beloved as a humorist and actor, but his wry commentaries on the contemporary American scene (especially on politics) remain unparalleled today. He was at his career peak when he died in a plane crash on an Alaskan flying expedition with the celebrated pilot Wiley Post. The shocking calamity was front-page news around the globe. The irony of Will’s death was that Rogers would not have been aboard the craft, if he had not abruptly withdrawn from a pending motion-picture commitment to make the aerial trek.
Will was the eighth and final child born to a rancher and his quarter-blood Cherokee wife in 1879, in the Native American territory that became Oklahoma in 1907. Will’s mother died in 1890 and, after the father remarried, the Rogers family moved to Claremont, 12 miles north of the family spread. Will was filled with too much wanderlust to remain in any school for long. He found himself in South Africa in the early 1900s, where he made his show-business debut as a lasso artist and roughrider in a Wild West circus.
In 1905, Rogers was performing in a rodeo show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When an out-of-control steer careened toward the spectator stands, he roped the animal, earning tremendous publicity that could only help his career. Soon he drifted into vaudeville, performing both in the United States and abroad. He had met Betty Blake in 1899, and on November 25, 1908, they wed in Arkansas. Rogers always insisted, “The day I roped Betty, I did the star performance of my life.” They would have four children: Will Jr., Mary, James, and Fred (who died in 1919, one year after his birth).
Will graduated to “real” acting when he appeared onstage with Blanche Ring in The Wall Street Girl (1913). Two years later, he began a profitable association with showman Florenz Ziegfeld by joining the latter’s Midnight Frolic. Rogers’s act typically featured him spinning a rope and spouting observations (such as “All I know is what I read in the papers”) on the absurdities of pompous individuals and high-living politicians. Rogers made his movie debut in Laughing Bill Hyde (1918), and the next year he authored two books of humorous commentary.
Also in 1919, Rogers starred in his first Hollywood movie (Almost a Husband). Throughout the 1920s he alternated between Broadway Follies and making movies, as well as writing a syndicated newspaper column, making recordings of his monologues, and pursuing the lecture circuit. His fame was so great that whenever he traveled abroad, he quickly became a social intimate of government heads, royalty, writers, and those he loved best—the average people.
Will Rogers and his son, Jimmy, costar in Strange Boarder (1920).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Three Cheers (1928) was Rogers’s last Broadway outing. They Had to See Paris (1929) was his first talkie, made at Fox Films (where he would remain for the rest of his screen-acting career). He averaged three to four features per year.
In 1934, Rogers returned to the footlights in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, in the role of the father that George M. Cohan had done on Broadway. It was his first full-fledged stage characterization, and Will received rave reviews when the comedy opened in San Francisco in late April. After three hit weeks, the production moved on to Los Angeles, where the sold-out engagement was extended for three additional weeks. The plan all along had been for MGM to borrow Rogers from Fox to star in the upcoming movie version of Ah, Wilderness! But suddenly, after Will finished his play run in late June 1934, he vetoed doing the screen edition, which had been scheduled to start filming in 1935.
According to Will’s longtime friend Eddie Cantor, during the comedy’s run Will had received a strongly worded letter from a clergyman. It so upset the actor that he wanted nothing more to do with Ah, Wilderness! The note stated that the religious man had taken his 14-year-old daughter to a performance. He had been so offended by the scene in which Will’s character explains to his son about dealing with a “shady lady” that he and his child had left the theater in shame.
Now freed from his stage obligations, Will took a cruise around the world, not returning to the United States until September 1934, when he continued his screen-acting career at Fox. In mid-1935, Rogers, long a plane enthusiast, received an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. Fellow Oklahoman Wiley Post (who had broken several aviation records, including the record for around-the-world flights) offered to take him as a passenger on his next global jaunt if Will would finance the flight, which he agreed to do. There was tremendous media coverage of the preparations and takeoff of this trek, since it featured the world’s most famous pilot (Post) and a very popular passenger (Rogers).
On August 15, 1935, the plane took off from Fairbanks, Alaska, and, after a stopover at Harding Lake to wait until the fog lifted, flew onward toward the North Pole. At 8:18 P.M., Post and Rogers were nearing desolate Point Barrow, Alaska—some three hundred miles inside the border of the Arctic Circle. Suddenly, their shiny red plane faltered in the sky; there was a defect in the 550-horsepower engine. The plane crashed head-down on the earth, slid along the ground for 50 feet, and then plowed into a riverbank. The impact drove the engine back into the fuselage, fatally crushing both Post and Rogers.
The world was stunned by the deaths. In Manhattan, a plane squadron with long, trailing black streamers flew over the metropolis; flags flew at half-mast everywhere and theaters were darkened. Famed singer John McCormack expressed the loss best: “A smile has disappeared from the lips of America and her eyes are suffused with tears.” A week before the crash, the crew and cast of MGM’s Ah, Wilderness! had gone to Massachusetts for location filming, with Lionel Barrymore cast in the role once intended for Will Rogers.
Once the bodies were recovered, they were flown back to California, and Will was initially buried at a Los Angeles cemetery. On May 22, 1944, his body was re-interred in a crypt in the gardens of the Claremont Memorial to Will Rogers in Claremont, Oklahoma. In June 1944, his wife Betty died and was buried in the family crypt in Oklahoma near their baby son Fred. Later that same year, Will’s surviving children donated his three-hundred-acre Santa Monica ranch to California as a state park.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said of Will Rogers, “The American nation, to whose heart he brought gladness, will hold him in everlasting remembrance.”
January 30, 1950–July 31, 1988
On TV’s Hill Street Blues (1981–87), Trinidad Silva Jr. played the recurring role of smart-mouthed Chicano gang leader Jesus Martinez. He was the one who repeatedly taunted police Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) by calling him “Frankie boy.” In the controversial movie Colors (1988), Trinidad played Frog, the older gang leader. But one Sunday evening in July 1988, Silva had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In one brief instant, his life was taken by a drunk driver in Whittier, California.
Mexican-American Trinidad Silva Jr. was born in Mission, Texas, in 1950. Moving to Los Angeles, he gravitated to acting, making a strong impression in the stage play Hijos. He had a bit part in The Master Gunfighter (1975) and was in the movie Alabrista! (1977) with Edward James Olmos, who became a close friend. His other acting credits included Walk Proud (1979) with Robby Benson, the Robert Redford-directed The Milagro Beanfield War (1987), The Night Before (1988) with Keanu Reeves, and UHF (1989) with “Weird Al” Yankovic. Besides his recurring role on Hill Street Blues, Trinidad was in the cable-TV series Maximum Security (1985) with Jean Smart. He formed his own production company and, with Michael Warren (another Hill Street alumnus), costarred in a new TV pilot, Home Free, which aired on July 13, 1988.
On Sunday, July 31, 1988, Trinidad was driving in his small pickup truck with his wife, Sofia, and their two-year-old son, Samuel. As they pulled through an intersection in Whittier, California, at about 6:45 P.M., a sedan car (going about 45 miles per hour) went through a red light and hit their vehicle broadside. The force of the impact spun the truck around. Trinidad and his son were thrown from the vehicle; Trinidad was hurled more than one hundred feet before hitting the pavement. He died instantly. The dazed little boy and Mrs. Silva (who had been pinned in the wreckage) suffered minor injuries; the other driver—inebriated—was not injured at all. He had attempted to flee the crash site, but onlookers held him until police arrived.
