Puzzling Deaths
Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California 2001 By Albert L. Ortega
[Ruggerio Eugenio di Rodolpho Colombo]
January 14, 1908–September 2, 1934
Sometimes the factors leading to a particular death are so unbelievable that it is difficult to accept it as an accident—even years afterward. Such was the case in the shooting death of singer Russ Columbo, who rivaled Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee as America’s most popular crooner in the early 1930s.
Columbo was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1908, the youngest of 12 children. When he was five, his parents, Nicola and Giulia, moved their family to Philadelphia. Some three years later they transferred to California, first living in the San Francisco area and then moving down to Los Angeles. By then, the precocious Russ (as he was now called) had learned to play the violin and had begun studying opera. During his years at Belmont High School in Los Angeles, he earned money as a violinist, often playing the background music that would appear in various “silent” pictures. He caught the attention of exotic screen star Pola Negri, who was attracted by his resemblance to Rudolph Valentino. She found more work for the young musician, both musical jobs and bit parts in movies. After graduating from high school, Russ joined George Eckhart and His Orchestra and then moved on to other performing groups, occasionally getting to vocalize.
His big break came in 1928 when he was signed to join Gus Arnheim and His Orchestra at L.A.’s swank Cocoanut Grove Club. He played violin and was the backup singer for Bing Crosby; sometimes he and Crosby did duets. These appearances gave Russ great visibility, and he began to win small roles in talkies, starting with Street Girl (1929). He had a nonmusical acting part in Wolf Song (1929), which starred Latin bombshell Lupe Velez—she took a romantic interest in Russ as well as in her costar Gary Cooper. In Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite (1929), Russ was a Mexican prisoner who sang the soon-to-be-popular song “How Am I to Know?” In 1930 he made his recording debut and toured the East Coast with Arnheim’s group. More screen roles followed.
Always anxious to improve himself, Columbo formed his own band and opened a nightclub in Los Angeles for them to play at, the Club Pyramid on Santa Monica Boulevard. This exposure led to an RCA recording contract, and Russ shortly landed his own NBC network radio program. Soon the popular performer was dubbed “The Romeo of Radio.” His recordings, including his theme song, “You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love),” became bestsellers, and his personal-appearance tours sold out their venues. The rumor mill had him dating Greta Garbo; his management concocted a romance with actress Dorothy Dell (who would die in a car crash in 1934), then another with Sally Blane, and later one with Carole Lombard. His supposed romance with Carole blossomed (he dedicated another popular song to her, “Save the Last Dance for Me”), and by now he was frequently earning $7,500 a week. For his first major feature-film role, Broadway Thru a Keyhole (1933), Russ received very positive notices (more for his vocals and pleasing personality than for his dramatic abilities).
Columbo formed a music-publishing company, appeared in his own Sunday night NBC radio program, and signed a long-term deal with Universal Pictures to make a string of musicals (including a remake of Show Boat). As fate would have it, though, he made only one—Wake Up and Dream (1934). By the time it was released, Russ Columbo was dead.
Russ Columbo in a relaxed pose in 1934. At the time, he rivaled Bing Crosby as America’s top crooner.
Courtesy of JC Archives
As the most accepted version of the event has it, on Friday night, August 31, 1934, he and pal Carole Lombard dressed in disguise to attend a sneak preview of Wake Up and Dream. During the weekend, he and Carole supposedly argued. On Sunday, September 2, Columbo went to 584 Lillian Way in West Hollywood to visit a close friend, Hollywood portrait photographer Lansing V. Brown Jr. About 1:45 P.M., the two were chatting and examining Brown’s prized collection of Civil War dueling pistols. (Brown’s parents, who were visiting that day, were in the kitchen at the time.) Brown supposedly struck a match on one of the firearms, which (unknown to him) had been loaded many years before. A bullet exploded from the pistol. It ricocheted off a nearby desk and bounced back to hit Columbo in the left eye. Russ collapsed, screaming, as the corroded pellet lodged in his brain. When the police arrived, they initially assumed that he was dead, but the singer was still alive. He was first rushed by ambulance to Hollywood Receiving Hospital and later transferred to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, where he underwent emergency surgery. Meanwhile, Carole Lombard, who was vacationing in Lake Arrowhead, was notified; she immediately drove down to Los Angeles. By the time she arrived, Russ was dead, never having regained consciousness. Another girlfriend, Sally Blane, was at the hospital when he passed away at 7:30 P.M. He was 26.
After a well-attended requiem mass at Hollywood’s Blessed Sacrament Church on September 6, 1934, his casket was taken to a temporary vault at Hollywood Cemetery. Finally, on October 18, Columbo was buried in the Sanctuary of the Vespers, near his brother Fiore, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Among the pallbearers at Russ’s funeral were actors Bing Crosby and Gilbert Roland, agent Zeppo Marx, and Carole Lombard’s brother Stuart. Carole had not intended to attend the funeral, but she did, and broke down during the services. Bing Crosby consoled her. Later, Carole tried to comfort Lansing Brown, who was suffering tremendous guilt over causing his pal’s death.
Bizarre as Columbo’s death was, the aftermath proved even stranger; Russ’s mother never learned of his demise. A few days before he died, the nearly blind woman had suffered a severe heart attack. The family feared that the news of Russ’s tragedy would finish her. They concocted a story—supposedly at Carole Lombard’s suggestion—that he had married Carole, and sailed on a lengthy tour abroad with his new bride. The family made up letters to read to her weekly, supposedly sent by her loving son and Carole. Monthly checks were given to her from his insurance policies. This deception went on for a decade, until she died in August 1944. (Her final words were, “Tell Russ how happy and proud he has made me.”) In her will, Russ’s mother left part of her estate to him.
Over the years, rumors persisted as to the “real story” behind Columbo’s bizarre ending. Nothing, however, was proven one way or the other. When Russ’s cousin Alberto, a music director at RKO Radio Pictures, was found murdered—gangland style—in March 1954, there was fresh speculation that perhaps Russ’s strange end had not been as accidental as it had seemed back in 1934. If anyone who knows the “real” story is still alive, he or she is definitely not talking.
July 13, 1928–June 29, 1978
If it weren’t for the constant, worldwide reruns of his hit television sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes, and the appalling way in which he died, Bob Crane would be much less famous today. But his brutal, still-unsolved murder and the 168 episodes that detail the zany times of Colonel Robert Hogan in a Nazi POW camp combine to keep Crane’s memory very much alive.
Bob was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the younger son of Alfred and Rosemary Crane. When Mr. Crane prospered as a floor-covering and furniture salesman, he moved his family to nearby, more upscale Stamford. Early on, Bob developed a love of playing the drums. His musical talent eventually led him to become a percussionist with the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra from 1944 to 1946, and he later toured the northeast with various bands. In 1950, Crane became a disc jockey and radio host on local radio stations—first in Hornell, New York, then in Bristol, Connecticut, and for six years, at WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Meanwhile, he married his childhood sweetheart, Anne Terzian, in 1949. Before they divorced in 1970, they would have three children: Robert David, Deborah Ann, and Karen Leslie.
Crane eventually took his ingratiating radio personality and easygoing, clowning manner to Los Angeles. There, on KNX radio, he hosted a celebrity-interview show, displaying a sharp wit and an entertaining brashness. Before long, he was earning well over $100,000 yearly. But he was not satisfied; his ambition was to be an actor. “I want to be the next Jack Lemmon,” Bob told a friend. His radio duties, however, stood in the way. Contacts in the industry found him occasional TV guest spots, movie roles in Mantrap (1961) and Return to Peyton Place (1961), and an occasional gig as substitute host for Johnny Carson on the daytime quiz show Who Do You Trust? Crane also turned to stage work, performed in stock shows, and volunteered for benefit telethons.
After a successful appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1963, Bob was offered the role of Dr. Dave Kelsey, the married next-door neighbor on The Donna Reed Show from 1963 to 1965. This role, in turn, prompted producers to cast him as the resourceful American colonel in Hogan’s Heroes (1965–71). In that sitcom, Colonel Hogan and his fellow Allied prisoners make monkeys out of their German captors, especially Colonel Wilhelm Klink (played by Werner Klemperer). The hit series lasted for six profitable seasons.
In October 1970, four months after his divorce from his first wife became final, Bob married actress Patricia Olsen on the set of Hogan’s Heroes. Under her stage name of Sigrid Valdis, Patricia had a recurring role on the show as Hilda, the fetching German fraulein. The next year, the couple had a son, Robert Scott. When Crane’s series left the air in 1971, Bob was confident that his successful track record would lead to a prompt follow-up vehicle. He was a guest star on many other TV series and made-for-TV movies, and felt able to reject several sitcom pilots he didn’t care for.
In 1974, Crane vetoed a $300,000-a-year offer to host a Los Angeles radio show for four hours per weekday. Finally, he settled on doing The Bob Crane Show, a sitcom that lasted two months on the air in 1975. Its failure left him extremely bitter, and by the late 1970s, he was reduced to guest appearances on TV’s Love Boat (a sure sign of career problems), and one supporting role, in the Disney comedy Gus (1976).
By 1978, Crane’s second wife had filed for divorce. Bob was still hoping for a TV series comeback; meanwhile, he was earning a lucrative salary performing in light comedies at dinner theaters throughout the United States. In June of that year, the glib actor was starring in a sex farce called Beginner’s Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bob was lodged at the Winfield Apartment-Hotel in ground-floor rooms leased by the stage company for visiting stars. A few weeks after the engagement began, Bob’s ex-wife Patricia and their son made a surprise visit to Scottsdale. It ended in a noisy argument, and she and the boy flew back to the West Coast.
On Wednesday, June 28, 1978, after completing the evening performance and signing autographs for fans in the lobby, Crane returned briefly to his apartment with a longtime friend, Los Angeles video-equipment salesclerk John Carpenter. Before they left again, Patricia called Bob, and according to Carpenter, the estranged couple argued loudly on the phone. Thereafter, Crane and Carpenter adjourned to a local bar, where they had drinks with two women whom they had arranged to meet. At about 2:00 A.M., the quartet went to the Safari coffee shop on Scottsdale Road. About half an hour later, John Carpenter left to pack for his return trip to Los Angeles the next morning. Back at his hotel room, he called Crane one final time. Crane was allegedly considering ending his lifestyle of heavy partying, and was therefore tired of hangers-on like Carpenter. During this last phone call, Bob reportedly told Carpenter that their friendship was over.
At around 2:20 P.M. on June 29, 1978, Victoria Berry, a shapely blond Australian actress who was in the touring cast of Beginner’s Luck, and who had become very friendly with the star, arrived at the Winfield Apartments. Bob had failed to appear for a cast lunch that noon, and he hadn’t kept a later appointment to advise Victoria on her audition tapes. She found the front door of his two-bedroom apartment unlocked. (Crane always double-locked the door.) When she entered, the curtains were drawn and there were two bottles, one half-empty, on a table. (Crane, however, was not that heavy a drinker.) When Berry went into the master bedroom she found Crane dead, hunched up in a blood-soaked bed, wearing only underwear. His face was so battered that at first she didn’t recognize him. But when she saw his wristwatch, she knew the corpse was that of Bob Crane. Her scream brought others running, and someone called the police.
The investigators’ working theory was that the killer was someone that Crane knew, a person who before the homicide had left the apartment, but then returned through the front door or a window that he or she had left unlocked earlier. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner was able to provide a partial chronology. Somewhere in the early hours of Thursday, June 29, while Bob slept on his right side, his assailant struck a heavy blow on the left side of his head with a blunt object. A second, lighter blow crushed Crane’s skull. The killer tied a video-camera electrical cord tightly around the actor’s neck, but by that time, Crane was already dead. Before fleeing, the killer wiped the blood off the murder weapon onto the bed-sheets and then pulled the sheet up around the victim’s head. Cash was found in Crane’s wallet, which eliminated any robbery motive.
Investigation of the crime brought to light Bob Crane’s secret sex life, which he pursued in Scottsdale, just as he had for several years earlier. He had a longstanding compulsion to videotape himself and his female sex partner (of which there were many over the years) in various sexual acts. (It was rumors of this activity, as well as other penchants like playing drums at various topless bars in Los Angeles, that purportedly cost Crane many TV and movie acting jobs; the producers were fearful of having their screen product associated with this two-sided man.)
Approximately 50 pornographic videotapes were found at the Winfield apartment, as well as professional photography equipment in the bathroom for developing and enlarging still shots. A negative strip was found in the enlarger, revealing a woman in both clothed and nude poses. A hefty album of similar pornographic pictures was missing from the death scene. Several items that the police declined to identify were missing from Crane’s “Little Black Bag,” a small, multi-zippered carrier that he always carted around with him. (Victoria Berry had seen it when she first discovered the body, but it later disappeared and was never accounted for.) Because of Crane’s unusual tastes, the police insisted, there could be a lot of potential suspects, including disgruntled husbands or jealous female partners. At one point, John Carpenter was considered a prime suspect in the case, but no official charges were filed because of a lack of sufficient evidence.
On July 5, 1978, eight days before his 50th birthday, a funeral service was held for Bob Crane at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood, California. Both of his ex-wives, their children, and two hundred mourners (including celebrity attendees Carroll O’Connor, John Astin, and Patty Duke Astin) attended the services. The pallbearers were several Hogan’s Heroes alumni: Leon Askin, Eric Braeden, Robert Clary, and Larry Hovis. Crane was buried at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California.
Because of Bob Crane’s fame, his murder was news everywhere for a long time. When the local police could not conclusively name or arrest a suspect in the case, many professionals and amateurs from around the country tried their hand at solving the complex, mysterious case. A lot of theories have been put forth, and a great deal of discussion has focused on the quality of the police investigation and the jurisdictional and political controversy the case caused. A few years later, when a new state’s attorney took office in Arizona, he reopened the investigation, citing new evidence in the case. However, it took until May 1992 for the case to be filed with the court system. John Carpenter was the defendant, but because he was being held in California on allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor, it took until September 1994 for the case to go to trial. On October 30, 1994, at the end of the highly publicized proceedings (which were long on sex but short on evidence), Carpenter was acquitted of the charges.
The grisly details of Crane’s murder continue to be trotted out whenever someone decides to do a survey of bizarre Hollywood murder cases, focusing the public’s attention once again on the lurid Jekyll-and-Hyde existence of the actor’s later years. On September 4, 1998, John Carpenter died, maintaining his innocence to the end. The full truth of the unsolved murder will probably never be known.
Albert Dekker with Peggy Wynne in The Pretender (1947).
Courtesy of JC Archives
[Albert Van Dekker]
December 20, 1904–May 5, 1968
Within the annals of Hollywood, there have been many grotesque deaths and murders. Few, however, have been as weird as the mysterious death of Albert Dekker, the distinguished, mustachioed actor who specialized in portraying polished, shifty-eyed scoundrels.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Albert graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine. He originally intended to pursue a career in psychology, but instead he became interested in acting, making his professional debut in 1927 with a stock company in Cincinnati, Ohio. That same year he came to Broadway in Marco’s Millions and quickly nabbed several other stage parts, including roles in Grand Hotel (1930) and Parnell (1935). He married actress Esther Guernini in 1929. They had three children: Jan, John, and Benjamin. Albert made his movie debut in The Great Garrick (1937). The six-foot, three-inch, 240-pound Dekker became a highly respected character lead, usually showcased as a menacing crook or a manic scientist (1940’s Dr. Cyclops was one of his most famous celluloid roles).
Albert won a Democratic seat in the California State Assembly in 1944 and worked as a public servant for two years. When his term was up he decided to return to films, but found himself a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. He retreated to Broadway in 1950 to take over the lead in Death of a Salesman and managed to get some other stage and TV roles. Tragically, on April 18, 1957, Dekker’s teenage son John died of a self-inflicted gun wound at the family home at Hastings-on-Hudson. His death was ruled accidental.
By 1959, Dekker was again making major films such as Suddenly, Last Summer and Middle of the Night. He appeared again on Broadway in The Andersonville Trial (1960) and The Devils (1965). His final screen role was in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, released after Dekker’s death in 1969.
At the time of his passing, Dekker had long been divorced from Esther Guernini and had been dating Geraldine Saunders for quite some time. With his $30,000 salary from The Wild Bunch and an additional $40,000 from his TV work, he and his fiancée planned to buy a house in the Encino Hills area of the San Fernando Valley.
On Saturday, May 4, 1968, Saunders could not reach Dekker by phone. They had last seen each other two days earlier. On Sunday morning, she went over to his apartment at 1731 North Normandie Street in Hollywood, where she found several notes on the door from friends who had been trying to reach the veteran actor. Saunders slipped her own message under the locked door. When she still hadn’t heard from him by that evening, she returned. Saunders found the building manager, and they entered the locked, but unbolted, front door of Dekker’s apartment. When the manager forced open the bathroom door, the sight was so horrifying that Saunders fainted.
The distinguished actor was found kneeling naked in the bathtub. A dirty hypodermic needle was stuck in each arm. A hangman’s noose was tied around his neck; the other end was looped around the shower curtain rod. There was a scarf wrapped around his eyes and a rubber-ball bit in his mouth, its metal chains tied firmly behind his head. His body was trussed in several leather belts that were fastened around his body halter-fashion, with the end of one of them clutched in his hand. His wrists were each handcuffed separately. He was reportedly wearing delicate ladies’ silk lingerie. Obscene symbols written with a vivid red lipstick covered his corpse. On his chest was written “c——ksucker” and “slave,” and on his throat was the phrase “make me suck.”
The police investigation revealed no signs of forced entry or of any struggle, although camera equipment and several thousand dollars in cash were missing. While they admitted this was “quite an unusual case,” the official verdict was accidental death (not a suicide or homicide). Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas T. Noguchi agreed with this opinion. He theorized that the sophisticated Dekker had died through the not-uncommon practice of autoerotic asphyxia, in which heightened orgasm is achieved by cutting off the brain’s oxygen supply through partial strangulation. Friends insisted that they had never known Dekker to be kinky. (Nor did they think him a closeted gay man. For a brief period, the police speculated that Dekker had been killed by a male hustler during a ritual gone bad; the hustler had left the apartment hurriedly, taking the missing cash with him.)
Although the bizarre case has long been officially closed, it still remains a confusing Hollywood mystery.
[Alfred Arnold Cocozza]
January 31, 1921–October 7, 1959
Everything about Mario Lanza was enormous: his talent, his ego, his lifestyle, and often his weight. Lanza made only eight feature films during his relatively short career. But the legacy of his powerful, golden tenor voice is guaranteed by his many recordings, which to date have sold more than 50 million copies. Lanza’s untimely death was brought on by his reckless lifestyle and irresolute efforts to control his ever-ballooning figure.
Lanza was born Alfred Cocozza in South Philadelphia in 1921, the same year the great Italian singer Enrico Caruso died. Alfred’s father, a first-generation Italian-American, had been disabled in World War I, and the family survived on the meager earnings of Mrs. Cocozza, a seamstress. Mr. Cocozza was an avid opera fan who instilled a love of music in his son. Alfred—known as Freddie—listened to Enrico Caruso’s recordings constantly on a neighbor’s phonograph; he grew up idolizing the singer. Although Freddie had scant interest in academics, he enjoyed sports, chasing girls, and taking vocal lessons. His mother had to scrape together the money for the weekly lessons by working two jobs.
A few months before graduation, Freddie was expelled from high school. For the next three years, he worked at his grandfather’s grocery shop. Finally, his voice coach Irene Williams arranged an audition at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. This audition went so well that the young singer won a scholarship to the Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood), based in Lenox, Massachusetts. By now, he had adopted his mother’s maiden name, Lanza, and began to use her first name too, changing it from Maria to Mario.
In the summer of 1942, Mario made his Tanglewood debut in the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor; he then went on concert tour. His promising career, however, was cut short when he was drafted into World War II duty the next January. Because of his singing abilities, he was assigned to the U.S. Army’s Special Services unit and was cast in their productions of On the Beam and Winged Victory. Mario toured with the latter show in California, where actress Irene Manning was so impressed with his talent that she had him audition for Jack Warner. Because Lanza then weighed over 250 pounds, the Warner Bros, mogul dismissed his screen potential. Later, Lanza sang at a party hosted by Frank Sinatra, where he found a talent agent who would negotiate an RCA Victor recording contract for him. In early 1945, Lanza was discharged from the service, and that April, he married Betty Hicks, the sister of an army friend. (They would have four children: Colleen, Elisa, Damon, and Marc.)
In 1947 Lanza performed a breathtaking concert at the Hollywood Bowl. After enjoying the performance, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer signed Lanza to a seven-year film contract, with salary starting at $750 a week. Mario’s screen debut was in That Midnight Kiss (1949), followed by The Toast of New Orleans (1950), both opposite Kathryn Grayson. His ego inflated by the tremendous progress of his multimedia career, Mario demanded that his next vehicle be the story of the legendary Caruso. (Lanza proclaimed frequently that he was the reincarnation of the Great Voice.)
At this point, what Lanza wanted, he usually got. The Great Caruso (1951) grossed $4.5 million at the box office, a very tidy sum at that time. By now, however, Lanza was becoming increasingly volatile and so crude at times that actresses shuddered at the thought of working with him on the soundstages.
The studio announced that Lanza would next be showcased in the Sigmund Romberg operetta The Student Prince (1954). But after prerecording his songs, Mario got into an argument with MGM and walked away from the project. Metro sued him, but a new studio regime came onto the lot, a compromise was reached, and Lanza returned. Filming began, only to be plagued by more disputes over Mario’s growing obesity, and the star soon quit again. Eventually, Mario agreed to permit his singing voice to be used on the sound track while handsome, trim Edmund Purdon mouthed the words on-screen. Lanza’s studio contract was terminated, and the hot-tempered star pouted, “I rebelled because of my sincerity to the public and my career.”
In October 1954, Lanza made his dramatic debut on TV in Lend an Ear. His attempts to lose weight (through a diet of grapefruit and booze) had caused his voice to grow weak, and the producers decided to dub him using his own recordings. When news of this dubbing circulated around the industry, Lanza lost out on the starring role in The Vagabond King (1956) and suffered the humility of being replaced by Oreste, a relative unknown. Mario’s reputation was not helped when he suddenly canceled a Las Vegas club engagement in the mid-1950s because his unhealthy habit of mixing champagne and tranquilizers had gotten the best of him and he needed to recuperate.
Needing a fresh supply of cash to support his luxurious lifestyle, the now-“reformed” Lanza convinced Warner Bros, to hire him at $150,000 a picture. After Serenade (1956) was only moderately successful, the studio felt it could do without Lanza and canceled plans for the remaining pictures. Mario went on concert tours, but they weren’t sufficient to support both him and his family.
Even though the Hollywood studios had washed their hands of him, Lanza’s name was still magic in Europe. He signed a two-picture deal with an Italian company and rented a sumptuous Rome villa, reasoning, “I’m a movie star and I think I should live like one.” Seven Hills of Rome (1958) had gorgeous, colorful scenery plus Mario singing “Come Prima” and “Arrivederci Roma.” Ironically, Lanza’s next picture, For the First Time (1959), was handled for U.S. distribution by his old studio, MGM.
Mario had learned very little from the highs and lows of his flashy career and self-indulgent personal life. He was certain he could continue his eating and drinking binges and then compensate by going on crash diets, aided by appetite-suppressant drugs. But the cumulative strain on his heart was becoming serious. (In addition, he suffered from phlebitis and gout.)
In 1959, he became acquainted with the exiled gangster kingpin Lucky Luciano, who “suggested” that Mario should sing at an upcoming charity gala in Naples. When Lanza failed to attend a scheduled rehearsal, two menacing thugs visited him to convince him not to back out. Angry at this pressure and now determined not to perform, Mario checked into a clinic in Rome, ostensibly to try a new weight-loss regimen.
Doctors at the clinic stated to the press that Lanza was having heart trouble, while his wife was informed that he was suffering from the combined effects of pneumonia and the troublesome phlebitis. Some days later, when Lanza’s driver came to visit on October 7, 1959, he found the singer comatose, an empty intravenous tube pumping air into his veins. Lanza died later that day. The official cause was listed as a heart attack, but no one was certain (and if they did know for sure, they weren’t saying) if that was the true cause of death. No official autopsy was performed. Lanza was only 38 years old.
An open-casket funeral service was held on Saturday, October 10, at the Immaculate Heart of Mary church in Rome. For the procession to the church, the president of Italy lent the carriage—drawn by four horses—that was normally used only for presidential funerals. Father Paul Maloney of Santa Susanna Church officiated at the high mass. The pallbearers for the occasion included actors Robert Alda and Rossano Brazzi.
Rome, Italy—September 10, 1959: the open casket of singer and movie star Mario Lanza.
Courtesy of Photofest
On March 11, 1960, Betty Lanza died of asphyxiation brought on by a self-destructive regimen of alcohol and pills. She had been suffering from depression ever since Lanza’s death. She was buried at Los Angeles’ Holy Cross Cemetery together with Mario, whose body had previously rested at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.
After their parents’ deaths, the four Lanza children were cared for temporarily by Kathryn Grayson, who had sung duets with Mario and costarred with him in several movies, and then were made wards of Lanza’s parents. As it turned out, they were actually raised by Lanza’s personal manager, Terry Robinson. Lanza’s daughter Colleen was the only one of Mario’s children to become a singer. The Lanzas’ youngest child, Marc, died in Los Angeles of an undisclosed cause on June 27, 1991 at the age of 37.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the tormented tenor. In June 1998 a huge crowd turned out in Grant Park in Chicago for a tribute to the legendary singer. (Fifty years earlier—a few weeks before Hollywood discovered him—Lanza had given an open-air concert in Grant Park with his recently formed Bel Canto Trio.) Also in the late 1990s, writer and performer Charles GaVoian began presenting his one-man tribute to the late artist, The Mario Lanza Story. Various compilations of Lanza’s recordings remain popular with the still-intrigued public.
[Lee Jun Fan]
November 27, 1940–July 20, 1973
Becoming a master of the martial arts requires tremendous dedication, focus, and discipline. The handsome Bruce Lee (promoted as the Asian Clint Eastwood) displayed all these qualities during his meteoric television and movie career. Besides his good looks, his athletic acumen, and his intensity, he also had a charismatic way of conversing, using direct language to express his passionate feelings.
Lee always had a premonition that his life would be short; it drove him to push for his goals all the faster and to live each day as if it was his last. As he predicted, his international success was cut short by his untimely death. But, as with other twentieth-century icons such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, the cloudy circumstances of Bruce’s passing only fueled his mystique. A hero in his lifetime, the magnetic martial-arts expert became a legend in death.
He was born Lee Jun Fan in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1940, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar. He was the fourth child of Li Hoi-chuen and his Shanghai-born wife, Grace Li. His father was a veteran of the Cantonese Opera (which specialized in vaudeville). At the time of Bruce’s birth, Li was touring the West Coast as a singer and comedian. When the boy—soon nicknamed Li Siu-lung (Little Dragon)—was three, the family relocated to Hong Kong. Having already made his movie debut (playing a baby) in the San Francisco-filmed Golden Gate Girl (1941), it wasn’t long before the precocious, already ambitious Li Siu-lung was acting in Hong Kong feature films. He was usually cast as a short-fused, scowling ruffian. Offscreen, the teen actor had a reputation as a tough guy perpetually in search of the next street fight. But later, while attending Saint Francis Xavier College, he studied martial arts. The peace of mind he found within the ancient discipline helped to end his years as a troublemaking punk.
In 1958, the slight but muscular young man returned alone to San Francisco. Bruce attended the Edison Vocational School in Seattle and then the University of Washington, where he studied philosophy for three years before dropping out. To support himself, Bruce taught dance and martial arts, and soon he was able to open his own martial-arts academy. One of his pupils, Linda Emery, became his wife in 1964. Their son, Brandon, was born in February 1965, and their daughter, Shannon, in 1969.
Hoping to break into films in Hollywood, Bruce competed in several martial-arts tournaments. He was spotted by TV producers at a competition in Long Beach, California, and won a role in the action series The Green Hornet (1966-67). Now known professionally as Bruce Lee, he played Kato, the faithful manservant who employed martial arts and Nunchaku (fighting sticks) to subdue villains.
When The Green Hornet was canceled, Bruce opened another kung fu school; his celebrity clientele included James Coburn, James Garner, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lee Marvin, and Steve McQueen. It was Garner who got him a small role in Marlowe (1969). Another student, scriptwriter Sterling Silliphant, wrote Lee into a new TV show, Longstreet (1971-72), starring James Franciscus. Bruce campaigned hard for the role of Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu (1972-75), but a Caucasian actor, David Carradine, won the part—it was felt at the time that an Asian-American would not draw a large enough audience.
Frustrated by the racial discrimination he was facing in Hollywood, Bruce’s ambition became even greater. Determined to prove to the industry that he could be a box-office commodity, Lee accepted an offer from Hong Kong filmmaker Raymond Chow to star in the low-budget The Big Boss (1971). The slam-bang action picture did very well in its U.S. release. Always eager to improve himself physically, Lee began to study other forms of self-defense, which he would use in his future movies. Seeing the increased worldwide profits of each new Lee picture, Warner Bros, signed Bruce (who was billed as “the fastest fists in the East”) to star in the American-produced Enter the Dragon (1973) with John Saxon and Jim Kelly. Years earlier Lee had said, “Hollywood is like a magic kingdom. It’s beyond everyone’s reach.” Now, with his fourth consecutive starring role, he was fulfilling his dream.
By this point, Bruce, Linda, and their two children were living in a luxurious Hong Kong mansion. Lee traveled to India with James Coburn and Sterling Silliphant to work on the concept of their upcoming film Silent Flute (which eventually would be made in 1979 as Circle of Iron, with David Carradine). Back in Hong Kong, in May 1973, Bruce collapsed on the set of Game of Death. Physicians determined that he had suffered a mild seizure as the result of an epilepsy-like disorder.
The tombstones in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington, of martial-arts star Bruce Lee and his son, actor Brandon Lee.
Courtesy of Lee Mattson
Several weeks later, on July 20, 1973, Bruce experienced a severe migraine headache while visiting actress Betty Ting Pei to discuss her role in Game of Death. The actress offered him Equagesic, a prescription painkiller containing aspirin and meprobamate that she often took herself. He took it and lay down to rest. Later, Betty tried to awaken Lee—when she couldn’t, she phoned Raymond Chow. He rushed over and, in turn, summoned a physician. Bruce was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he died that night. He was only 32 years old.
Many people thought it seemed odd—to say the least—that the world’s fittest man had just died. Some sources theorized that Lee’s strict “health diet” (including eggs, raw beef, and cattle blood) had finally shocked his system into giving up. Other rumors exploded when initial newspaper accounts of Bruce’s final hours (which claimed he was found at home or at the studio, instead of at Betty Ting Pei’s apartment) were discovered to be a cover-up. An autopsy revealed that for some unknown reason, Lee’s brain had swollen abnormally, although a brain hemorrhage was ruled out. When traces of cannabis were detected in his stomach, the media hyped the drug-abuse theory. (Actually, Bruce took a form of steroids to compensate for a debilitating back injury he had suffered once.) Some insisted that he had been poisoned (with an untraceable drug) or had been the victim of the Vibrating Hand, a legendary martial-arts “touch of death.” The murder hypothesis was based on the rationale that Bruce had angered martial-arts lords by revealing too many trade secrets of the ancient fighting arts to Westerners.
On July 25, 1973, Bruce was given a royal funeral in Hong Kong where hysterical fans (some twelve thousand) massed the streets in the hope of getting into the funeral parlor to see the star in his open coffin. Six days later, Lee’s body was flown to Seattle, where he was buried at the Lake View Cemetery. Pallbearers at the Washington funeral included James Coburn and Steve McQueen. At the by-invitation-only service, Coburn said, “As a friend and teacher you brought my physical, spiritual, and psychological being together. Thank you and peace be with you.”
When several parcels containing messages pointing to Betty Ting Pei as the holder of vital information came to the attention of the Hong Kong police, they conducted an inquest, which began on September 3, 1973. The actress admitted that Bruce had been in her apartment on the fatal day. When she explained that she’d given him Equagesic, the coroner brought in a verdict of “death by misadventure,” concluding that Lee had died from a severe allergic reaction to some ingredient in the medication, which caused the sudden brain swelling. Many fans—then and now—have refused to acknowledge the coroner’s verdict as the truth and hold firmly to their speculations.
Bruce’s untimely death only increased his box-office appeal, and the entertainment industry was happy to use it to turn a profit. His earlier movies were reissued, TV appearances were edited into feature films, and the general merchandising of memorabilia was enormous. Specious documentaries were hastily assembled about Lee’s amazing life. Several imitation kung fu stars (including Bruce Li) appeared out of thin air to star in rip-off kung fu entries, with promotional campaigns that trumpeted, “Bruce Lee Lives!” Lee’s footage from the interrupted Game of Death, which supposedly totaled more than 100 minutes, was used in the 1978 release of that name. But in the revamped plotline, Bruce was only seen in a few minutes of fight footage, with obvious-looking stand-ins padding out his long-delayed “last appearance.” There had been only about 20 minutes of footage.
In the years following Bruce’s death, his fame as a mythical icon grew stronger and more entrenched in global culture. When his son Brandon died accidentally from a gunshot while making a film in 1993, the Lee clan—father and son—was seemingly forever enmeshed into a legend of tragic greatness that continues to intrigue and fascinate.
[Norma Jeane Mortensen Baker]
June 1, 1926–August 5, 1962
Few personalities from the twentieth century—or from any era—have inspired as much enthusiasm, analysis, and worship as Marilyn Monroe. She is an icon among icons; the facts, legends, and rumors about her life and death have been memorized by generations of fans.
Marilyn was a vulnerable little girl who became a legendary screen star, blessed with a startling figure, a captivating walk, and—on camera—a whispery, childish voice that spoke volumes. Her hectic life was full of contradictions. Marilyn was a fabulous sex symbol who had grave misgivings about the extent of both her sex appeal and abilities, and would rather have been a mother than just another screen siren. Some of the sharpest commentary on this confusing blond bombshell came from fellow artists and from Monroe herself:
For what you finally got on the screen she was worth every hour you had to wait for her. I wish she was around today. How often do you have a face like hers that lights up a screen?
—BILLY WILDER [DIRECTOR]
What she wanted most was not to judge but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it.
—ARTHUR MILLER [PLAYWRIGHT AND EX-HUSBAND]
I always felt insecure and in the way—but most of all I felt scared. I guess I wanted love more than anything else in the world.
—MARILYN MONROE
Certainly a portion of Marilyn Monroe’s enduring fame stems from her sudden death at age 36. At first, most people agreed with the official verdict that her passing was most likely a suicide. It was simpler to accept that this love goddess was a victim of career and personal insecurities, and, thus, label her a casualty of her profession.
But, as the years passed and the persistent questions about Marilyn’s clouded passing refused to disappear, an increasing number of individuals have come to believe that her romantic relationships with Kennedy clan members (first with then-Senator John F. Kennedy and later with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy) might well have been the cause of her “self-induced” death from a drug overdose. Many people who believe Marilyn Monroe was murdered also think that a conspiracy existed to cover up the secret homicide.
The future screen goddess was born Norma Jeane Baker in Los Angeles, in 1926. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe Mortensen, was a 25-year-old photo lab technician who would spend much of Marilyn’s childhood in mental institutions. The girl’s father, Martin Edward Mortensen, had deserted Gladys during her pregnancy and filed for divorce, but it hadn’t become official. (He would die in a motorcycle crash in 1929.) Norma Jeane’s gloomy childhood was played out in a succession of foster homes and orphanages. At the age of eight, in one of these temporary setups, she was raped. One of the side effects of the emotional scarring that resulted was a tendency to stutter.
In June of 1942, to avoid being sent to yet another foster home, the 16-year-old Norma Jeane wed 21-year-old James Dougherty, an aircraft factory worker. While Dougherty was serving away from home in the merchant marines, Norma Jeane was employed in a San Fernando Valley defense plant. She began posing for local photographers, typically in eye-catching, form-fitting sweaters. Further modeling work led to photo spreads in national-circulation girlie magazines, which, in turn, brought her to the attention of Twentieth Century-Fox. Outfitted with a new name, Marilyn Monroe, she was signed by the movie studio, and soon divorced Dougherty.
At Fox, Marilyn appeared in Dangerous Years (1947) but then was let go. She moved over to Columbia Pictures and made Ladies of the Chorus (1948). Meanwhile, she dated vocal coach Fred Karger; when he dropped her, she attempted suicide. Johnny Hyde, her agent and new boyfriend, got her small but showy screen roles in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All About Eve (1950). Next, Hyde (who would die in late 1950) engineered her return to Twentieth Century-Fox.
Monroe developed a talent for ingratiating herself with the correct people. She soon made the formerly indifferent Fox studio interested in promoting her career, and renegotiated her salary to five hundred dollars per week. Also, her 1949 nude calendar photo surfaced, giving her career a surprise boost. Marilyn proved she was more than a bustline with her dramatic work in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) and Niagara (1953). By How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Monroe had become the queen of the Fox lot. Her insecurities still led her to displays of temper and tardiness, however. At this stage, she was controlled professionally by her acting coach, Natasha Lytess.
In 1954, Marilyn married Joe DiMaggio, the celebrated 38-year-old baseball player. He had hoped she would abandon her career to become a housewife; instead, he grew frustrated and jealous in his role as “Mr. Monroe.” The celebrity couple soon divorced. Now single, Monroe resisted her studio and, despite a seven-year contract, departed for New York. Amidst much public ridicule, the “dumb blond” studied at the Actors Studio, becoming a disciple of Lee Strasberg’s method acting. Soon, Strasberg’s wife, Paula, took over as her acting coach.
The “new” Marilyn made her debut in Bus Stop (1956) to terrific reviews. Now more in demand than ever, she became increasingly unmanageable and rejected a rash of movie projects, despite a newly revised Fox contract. Meanwhile, her dependency on pills and drink (especially Dom Perignon champagne) was growing acute. In June 1956, in White Plains, New York, Marilyn married the much older playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman. For her own production company, she transferred to England to costar with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl (1958). The finished film, however, proved to be a dud with both the critics and the public. The next year, Monroe bounced back with the classic comedy Some Like It Hot.
Unfortunately, her next offering was Let’s Make Love (1960), in which Marilyn and her French costar, Yves Montand, exhibited far more chemistry offscreen than on. The movie flopped. Meanwhile, Arthur Miller was writing a screenplay, The Misfits (1961), as a vehicle for Marilyn. By now, the combined effects of sleeping pills, alcohol, miscarriages, and emotional breakdowns had weighed the actress down. She seemed quite forlorn, much like her Misfits costar Montgomery Clift (who would die of a drug overdose in 1966).
The making of The Misfits (an artsy movie and a commercial disappointment) was a saga in itself. Not long after its completion in November 1960, Clark Gable died of a heart attack. Many people blamed this partially on the effects of Monroe’s “artistic” temperament (although the hot desert filming location and his three-decade smoking habit couldn’t have helped, either). In January 1961, Monroe and Miller divorced. A distraught Marilyn underwent treatment at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan.
By 1962, Marilyn had settled into a modest one-story stucco ranch-style bungalow at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. It was the first home she had ever owned. She lived there alone except for her housekeeper, Mrs. Eunice Murray (who usually went back to her own home each night), and a little white dog named Maf.
Monroe was starting Somethings Got to Give with Dean Martin at Fox. Although physically she was in peak condition, emotionally it was the same sad story as always. Marilyn was frequently absent from the set, claiming illness. During one of these “illnesses,” she turned up in New York to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. The studio was livid. They were appeased, however, when Marilyn returned to the lot and was more cooperative than usual.
On June 1, Marilyn celebrated her 36th birthday with an on-the-set party. The following Thursday (June 7), she was fired from the picture for “unprofessional antics.” Fox filed a $750,000 lawsuit against her. Later, however, they agreed quietly to have her complete the project once costar Dean Martin had finished his other screen commitments. Meanwhile, Marilyn was contemplating movie and stage offers (including some in Las Vegas), as well as the possibility of a Playboy magazine layout. After short visits to New York City and Mexico City, the actress returned home. (During this period, she supposedly also had an illegal abortion.)
On Saturday, August 4, 1962, Marilyn was home all day. Her only guest was her publicist, Pat Newcomb. (Later reports hinted that Robert F. Kennedy might also have visited her during the afternoon.) About 5:00 P.M. her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph R. Greenson, came for their usual therapy session. He suggested that she go for a drive to relax. Instead, Marilyn remained at home and retired to her bedroom around 8:00 P.M., taking the phone from the hall into the room with her.
She made several phone calls that evening. One was to Joe DiMaggio’s son, Joe Jr., in San Francisco to discuss his recent breakup with another girlfriend. She also talked with actor Peter Lawford, who in past years had introduced her to his brothers-in-law, John F. and Robert Kennedy. That call supposedly happened about 6:00 P.M.; its purpose was to cancel a dinner invitation. Marilyn allegedly said to Lawford, “Peter, I don’t think I’m going to make it tonight because I just don’t feel well. . . . Will you say goodbye to Pat [Lawford’s wife] and to Jack and to yourself, because you’re a nice guy?” Supposedly, Lawford became concerned about the “goodbye” portion of her message and wanted to rush over there, but he was advised not to. Since he was the president’s brother-in-law, it could generate adverse publicity for everyone if something really was amiss. Lawford later claimed that he contacted Monroe’s agent and had the person call Monroe’s house. Mrs. Murray answered the 9:30 P.M. call and said that the telephone cord was still in Marilyn’s room, so she must be OK. (Because Monroe had difficulty sleeping—even with sleeping pills—she typically placed the phone outside her room once she went to bed for the night, so she wouldn’t be disturbed by its ringing.) If Marilyn made any other calls on this crucial night, they are unknown; telephone records for the evening of August 4 at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive mysteriously disappeared after being gathered up by authorities from the phone company.
According to the “official” story of Marilyn’s death, just after midnight (later said to be at 3:25 A.M.) on August 6, 1962, Mrs. Murray noticed a light shining from under Marilyn’s bedroom door. When Marilyn didn’t answer her knocking, Murray went outside and peered through the closed window. When she saw Monroe on her bed, looking “peculiar,” she phoned Dr. Greenson. When he arrived, he broke a pane in the French window and opened the door, finding Monroe on her bed unconscious. Greenson called Marilyn’s personal physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who pronounced Monroe dead. Thereafter, the police were summoned to the home.
When Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Jack Clemmons arrived, he found several people there, including the two doctors and Mrs. Murray. In Clemmons’s words, “it looked like a convention” and something “wasn’t kosher.”
Clemmons affirmed that he found the movie star lying naked—facedown and cater-cornered—on her bed in the sparsely furnished master bedroom, her outstretched arm apparently reaching for the nearby phone. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was found next to her bed. There were 10 to 14 other bottles on the nightstand, including 1 containing 10 capsules of chloral hydrate (used as a hypnotic). Marilyn’s body was taken to Westwood Village Mortuary and the house itself was sealed and placed under guard. Later, the corpse was transferred to the county morgue, where Los Angeles County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi conducted the high-profile autopsy. (In his 1983 book, Coroner, Noguchi pleaded naiveté in the case owing to his youth and inexperience; at another time he claimed to have been pressured by his superiors into signing his original autopsy report on Monroe’s death.)
The official investigation attributed Monroe’s death to a lethal overdose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. It was determined a probable suicide. Joe DiMaggio, who had stayed in touch with Marilyn after their divorce, flew down from San Francisco to supervise the funeral arrangements. At the service, Lee Strasberg delivered the eulogy. Marilyn was buried at Westwood (Village) Memorial Park, where for the next 20 years, red roses were placed in a vase attached to the crypt (courtesy of DiMaggio).
Westwood (Village) Memorial Park
© 2001 by Albert L. Ortega
In her will, Marilyn left a trust fund of $100,000 for her mother, who was institutionalized at the time of her daughter’s death. (Gladys would die at age 83 in March 1984.) Monroe bequeathed another trust fund and a quarter of the residuary estate to her then-psychotherapist, Dr. Marianne Kris. (Dr. Kris would die in 1980, leaving her share of the estate to what became the Anna Freud Center for the Psychoanalytic Study and Treatment of Children, in London.) A large portion of Monroe’s estate went to her acting mentor, Lee Strasberg. When he passed away in 1982, his estate portion went to his then widow, Anna. Because of taxes and other debts that were outstanding at the time of her demise, it was not until seven years after Monroe was gone that her estate was straightened out. Now, through proceeds from her motion pictures and the multimedia merchandising of her image, the Monroe estate earns over $1 million annually, with most of the proceeds going to Anna Strasberg.
A year after her death, Monroe’s studio issued a documentary called Marilyn (1963). It contained footage of her aborted final movie, which Fox later revamped into a Doris Day vehicle, Move Over, Darling (1963).
Despite the wealth of contradictory facts and testimony at the time of Monroe’s death, no charges were ever pressed in the highly controversial matter. During the intervening years, many of the knowledgeable parties have died (Peter Lawford, Los Angeles Police Department Chief William H. Parker, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover) or been assassinated (John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy), and much evidence has simply vanished. In 1985, under pressure from allegations in new books and TV documentaries, a Los Angeles County grand jury was asked to reexamine Marilyn’s death. The jury’s criminal justice committee, however, recommended against reopening the still-controversial case.
In March 1999, Joe DiMaggio died at the age of 85. In the wake of his death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ben Cramer published Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. The 560-page tome recounts in great detail the relationship between the baseball great and the movie star, and how Joe, still obsessed with Marilyn, hoped to remarry her. When her untimely death ended that dream, he pursued a bevy of Monroe look-alikes. Reportedly, not long before he passed away, Joe told his longtime attorney and friend, Morris Engelberg, “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”
And so the Monroe myth continues onward.
January 8, 1935–August 16, 1977
Even today, decades after Elvis Presley’s well-documented death, there are many fans who refuse to accept that “the King” is truly gone. The phenomenon of “Elvis sightings” is cause more for astonishment than for ridicule. It is just one of many manifestations of global Elvis mania, along with the enshrinement of his Graceland estate, the bestselling status (even now) of his albums and movies, and the mass merchandising of Presley memorabilia. Clearly, the public still deeply misses this beloved singer; no other twentieth-century icon has been revered by so many.
Elvis Aron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, the son of Vernon Elvis Presley, a farm laborer, and Gladys (Smith) Presley, a sewing-machine operator. (A twin brother died at birth.) The exceedingly polite boy was drawn more to singing than to school studies. He first began vocalizing at church, in the Assembly of God camp meetings that his family attended.
For his 12th birthday, Elvis wanted a bicycle. His doting mother couldn’t afford one, however, so she scraped together enough money to buy him a $12.95 guitar. He taught himself to strum it, and soon became fascinated with the blues and country music he heard on the radio. In 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Vernon was employed at a paint factory and Elvis attended Humes High School. After graduation, Elvis held down a wide range of jobs, including factory worker and truck driver (at $35 a week). At one time, he thought of becoming an electrician.
In 1953, Elvis paid four dollars to record two songs for his mother at the Memphis Recording Service, one of the many stops on his truck route. One of their employees took a shine to the handsome, shy teenager and remarked on his singing ability to her boss, Sam Phillips (who also owned Sun Records). When Phillips finally listened to Elvis, he was very impressed by his innovative mix of African-American blues and Caucasian hillbilly sounds. Phillips persuaded Elvis to do a recording session, and the resulting cuts were popular with teenagers, if not with puzzled disc jockeys. Presley was soon able to quit truck-driving to focus on personal appearances, as well as performing on radio shows like the Grand Ole Opry. Before long, Colonel Tom Parker—a skilled showman and career organizer—took over management of the gyrating young Presley, and soon negotiated an RCA recording contract for his client. Elvis’s first new single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” was an instant hit, leading to his TV debut on a variety show and to Las Vegas nightclub appearances. Allegedly, Elvis first became addicted to drugs during this early-period, especially amphetamines and Benzedrine to provide energy boosts.
Love Me Tender (1956) was Elvis’s first movie; teenagers flocked to see “Elvis the Pelvis.” By the time of King Creole (1958), he was among the top 10 box-office stars in America, earning $250,000 plus 50 percent of Creole’s profits. With a fragment of his earnings, he purchased Graceland, his soon-to-be-extravagant Memphis mansion, and lined its driveways with his assorted Cadillacs. His many publicized romances (including one with movie star Natalie Wood) only added to his growing legend.
In the spring of 1958, Elvis was drafted into the U.S. Army; his salary dropped from more than $100,000 a month to $78. He served most of his two-year enlistment with an armored unit in West Germany. (During this period, his beloved mother died of a heart attack.) To celebrate his release from the service in 1960, Sergeant Presley returned to Hollywood for G. I. Blues (1960). Two of his new recordings, including “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” quickly became gold records.
During the 1960s, Elvis’s movie excursions became assembly-line efforts with simple plots and interchangeable songs. But they continued to earn profits, even as his first fans grew into middle age and new singers (especially the Beatles and other bands of the British Invasion) grabbed for audience attention. Well-known for his extravagant lifestyle and numerous dalliances, Elvis finally married on May 1, 1967. He’d first met 21-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu when he was based in West Germany; she was the teenage daughter of a U.S. Army major stationed in Frankfurt. Their well-publicized Las Vegas wedding did nothing to diminish his popularity with female fans. On February 1, 1968, their daughter Lisa Marie was born.
By the late 1960s, Elvis’s career had begun to falter badly and his movies’ budgets had been sliced to maintain the profit margin—this ploy only served to reduce audience interest. A comeback TV special (Singer Presents Elvis) in December 1968 managed to spark his professional standing, as did his return to performing in the summer of 1969, in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. By 1970, Elvis had stopped making feature films (except for occasional career documentaries) and begun a heavy concert-tour schedule. Back in touch with his adoring public, Elvis’s album sales increased and he had several more gold records. In October 1973, he and Priscilla divorced. She said later, “I realized I couldn’t give him the kind of adulation he got from his fans, and he needed that adulation desperately. Without it he was nothing.”
By the mid-1970s, the bloated and physically sagging Elvis had changed considerably from the slim man he’d been two decades ago. His self-indulgent lifestyle and bad temper were legendary, as was the “Memphis Mafia,” the coterie of bodyguards and helpers who surrounded him constantly (and had since 1960). Elvis had an array of health problems, and his acute dependency on prescription drugs would have been more than enough to kill the average person. Several times he nearly overdosed. After each episode, he would attempt to kick the substance habit, but always failed. By now, he weighed nearly 250 pounds and was dying his gray hair black. Nevertheless, his devout fans remained supportive; a one-night engagement in Detroit in late 1975 earned him $816,000. At one point, Presley was considered for the lead (opposite Barbra Streisand) in A Star Is Born (1976), but Kris Kristofferson won the part. Several of his associates in this period reported Presley’s fascination with death, and his ambiguous remarks about not having much longer to live.
In June 1977, Elvis returned to Graceland after a tour of the Midwest. That year, one live-in girlfriend (Linda Thompson, a former Miss Tennessee) departed and another, 23-year-old Ginger Alden, became her replacement. Elvis’s young daughter, Lisa Marie, had flown out from Los Angeles for a lengthy stay at Graceland.
On Monday, August 15, Presley was preparing to leave Graceland the next day for Portland, Maine, to kick off another tour. (Colonel Parker was already in Maine organizing the opening show.) Because of his hectic performing schedule, his days were the reverse of most people’s: sleeping in the days, up at night. He had become increasingly sedentary and reclusive lately, more often than not in a drug-induced stupor.
At 4:00 P.M. that Monday, Elvis awoke, had breakfast, and played with his daughter as she raced about the grounds in her blue electric cart. (She was to return the next day to California and her mother, Priscilla.) Elvis’s original idea for the evening was to rent the local movie theater for a special showing of Mac Arthur, but that plan fell through. About 10:30 P.M., Presley, with his entourage in tow, visited his dentist and had two cavities filled.
The group returned home about 2:00 A.M. on Tuesday, August 16. Two hours later, Elvis summoned a few associates to join him and Ginger for racquetball at the estate’s indoor court. About 6:00 A.M., Presley retired with Ginger, and she soon fell asleep. Meanwhile, Elvis took another bunch of pills to help him get to sleep as well. About 9:00 A.M., clad in his gold pajamas, he grabbed a book about psychic energy (some sources insist it was a raunchy astrology study) to read in his extravagant bathroom on his cushiony “throne.” Around 2:00 P.M., Ginger awoke, and after searching for Elvis, found him lying in a fetal position on the bathroom floor. While having a seizure, he had thrown the book in a spasm and then lurched forward a few steps before collapsing four feet from the toilet. In the process he had bit down on his tongue.
All attempts by Ginger, Vernon Presley, the bodyguards, and others to revive Elvis—including mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—proved useless. An ambulance was then summoned; it arrived at 2:33 P.M. The paramedics, after placing a life-support mask on the singer’s face, examined the comatose Presley for any signs of life. None were apparent, but they prepared to take him to the hospital. Just as the vehicle was about to leave Graceland’s gates, Dr. George Nichopolous, Elvis’s personal physician, made his appearance and jumped into the waiting ambulance. En route, the doctor pounded Presley’s chest, yelling, “Breathe, Presley! Come on! Breathe for me!” The ambulance reached Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis at 2:56 P.M. The medical trauma team there worked on Elvis, attempting to revive him. (After performing a thoracotomy so they could begin open-heart massage, they forced breathing tubes down his throat, in the process having to knock out his front teeth.) The emergency efforts failed to revive the patient. At 3:30 P.M., Dr. Nichopolous pronounced Elvis dead.
The initial autopsy indicated that Elvis had expired of an erratic heartbeat; it was hurriedly announced to the press that Elvis had suffered “cardiac arrhythmia due to undetermined causes.” (This is what Presley’s handlers wanted the public to believe. As part of the “cover-up,” by the time the medical examiner could examine Elvis’s bedroom and bathroom at Graceland to reconstruct events leading up to his death, the rooms had been tidied up and rearranged.) Later, more complete tests determined there were at least 10 drugs in Elvis’s bloodstream when he died, including quaaludes, codeine, and morphine. Dr. Nichopolous was later tried, but acquitted, of writing illegal and unnecessary prescriptions for the star. (Reportedly, on August 15 alone, he had written eight prescriptions for Presley, including two for the strong narcotic Dilaudid. In the last seven months of Elvis’s life, the doctor had prescribed nearly 5,000 pills, and an estimated 19,000 in the last two and a half years.) Later theories about Presley’s demise would attribute it to everything from suicide to murder, and the persistent, wishful belief sprang up that Elvis was not dead at all, but merely in hiding.
There was worldwide grief in the wake of Elvis’s death. President Jimmy Carter stated that his passing “deprives our country of a part of itself. His music and his personality changed the face of American popular culture. His following was immense and he was a symbol to the people the world over of the vitality, rebelliousness, and good humor of this country.” Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton ordered all flags on state buildings to fly at half-mast; the same was done at the county and city level. RCA Records shut down all of its offices to commemorate the death of its leading star.
Thousands of fans and media representatives from around the world scurried to Memphis for Elvis’s funeral on Thursday, August 18, prompting the National Guard to be called out. During the several hours of public viewing at Graceland, it was estimated that 100,000 people passed by the open coffin where Elvis lay. He was dressed in a white suit and tie and a blue shirt. Thousands of others were jammed up along Elvis Presley Boulevard as the hearse brought Elvis back from the Memphis Funeral Home in his copper-lined, nine-hundred-pound coffin.
The funeral service was conducted at 2:00 P.M. that Thursday in the music room at Graceland by Reverend C. W. Bradley, pastor of the local Whitehaven Church of Christ. The Stamps and the Statesmen, two quartets who had often performed in concert with Presley, sang songs including “How Great Thou Art.” Final remarks were offered by comedian Jackie Kahane, and the eulogy was delivered by television evangelist Rex Humbard. Among the celebrity attendees were Sammy Davis Jr., Ann-Margret and her husband Roger Smith, George Hamilton, Burt Reynolds, and Caroline Kennedy (whose account of the event was later published in Rolling Stone).
After the service, Elvis’s coffin, covered with hundreds of red rosebuds, was transported by hearse in a 50-car procession down Elvis Presley Boulevard to the Forest Hills Cemetery four miles away. The motorcade contained, as Presley had requested in his will, 16 white Cadillacs and one white hound dog. At the cemetery, his coffin was placed in a six-crypt white marble mausoleum next to his mother’s resting place. (Coincidentally, Elvis’s mother had also been 42 when she died—19 years and two days before her famous son.)
Elvis was survived by his father, his grandmother (Minnie Mae Presley), and his nine-year-old daughter, Lisa Marie. His will, signed in March 1977, left the bulk of his multimillion-dollar estate to these three relatives, with Vernon appointed as estate trustee. In 1989, 10 years after Vernon Presley’s death, disposal of the estate was concluded, with all property being held in trust for Lisa Marie until she reached the age of 25.
Lisa Marie, who was married to musician Danny Keough, became a mother in 1989 when she gave birth to daughter Danielle. She later divorced Keough and then—to everyone’s bewilderment—married and divorced Michael Jackson, the self-appointed King of Pop. Lisa Marie’s life after her famous father’s death has been as interesting as that of her mother, Priscilla, who became a TV and movie actress.
Remarkably, after Elvis’s death, his career continued just as if he had been alive. Albums, movies, merchandising tie-ins, impersonators, books, and documentaries continue to trade on the nonextinguishable Elvis legend. Obviously, for many, Elvis the Great still lives on in numerous ways.
[George Keefer Brewer]
January 5, 1914–June 16, 1959
It is not just idle speculation when fans insist that George Reeves—best known for playing TV’s caped crusader Superman— did not commit suicide. The Beverly Hills police ruled that his death on June 16, 1959, “indicated suicide.” But Reeves’s mother insisted, “I had just spoken to him, he was in a splendid frame of mind.” She could not believe the official theory that he had shot himself while in a drunken, depressed stupor. George’s pal, the actor Gig Young, protested, “He was a clean guy, in no way capable of bumping himself off.” Movie star Alan Ladd contended, “He was never happier.” (Ironically, Young would murder his wife before commiting suicide in 1978, and Ladd’s death from a combination of pills and alcohol was believed to be more suicidal than accidental.)
In his pre-Superman days, Sergeant George Reeves appeared in the U.S. Army/Air Force–produced feature film Winged Victory (1944).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Decades later, Reeves’s agent Arthur Weissman would argue that George Reeves’s death was caused by the malicious intent of someone who knew him well. Weissman speculated that someone—most likely at the direction of MGM studio executive Eddie Mannix or his wife Toni (who had had a long affair with George)—somehow had replaced the blank in George’s favorite gun with a real bullet, knowing that sooner or later he would play his usual exhibitionist game of simulated Russian roulette. Despite full-length books and TV documentaries on the subject, the true facts in the case may never be known publicly.
Reeves was born George Keefer Brewer in 1914 in Woolstock, Iowa, five months after his mother, Helen Lescher, wed Don C. Brewer, a small-town druggist. (Later, his mother would alter the birth certificate to make it appear that her son had been conceived in wedlock.) Months after George’s birth, the battling Brewers divorced. Helen took George to live first in Ashland, Kentucky (near her parents), and then to Pasadena, California, where her sister resided. In Pasadena, she met Frank Bessolo, a second-generation Italian-American whose family owned a lucrative vineyard in northern California. The couple married in 1917, and a few years later he adopted George. Helen would later tell George that his real father was dead, having committed suicide by gun when George was very young.
George was athletic as a youngster and thought that he’d like to be a physician, but his grades at school were not good enough to achieve that ambition. When he graduated from high school, he was a strapping six feet, two inches and thought he might become a professional boxer. His overly possessive mother, however, feared such activity would be dangerous and talked him out of it. Instead, George went to Pasadena Junior College, where he became involved in music, guitar playing, and acting in school plays.
In 1935, by which time his mother had divorced Frank Bessolo, George took acting classes at the famed Pasadena Playhouse, and began to appear in productions there. After four years at the Playhouse, George, now using the surname Reeves, was spotted by a movie talent scout. He had several bit parts in movies before he was launched in 1939’s most prestigious feature film, Gone with the Wind, as one of the frisky Tarleton twins. In 1940 he married Eleanora Needles, another fledgling actor, whom he met while they were both at the Pasadena Playhouse. (They would divorce in 1949.)
Unfortunately, George’s screen career never really took off. He had small parts in many major features and was cast in several Hopalong Cassidy Westerns in the early 1940s. His most impressive performance was as Claudette Colbert’s romantic interest in So Proudly We Hail (1943). He was in World War II service for a few years, serving in the special theatrical unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps and appearing in several training films while stationed on the East Coast. While he was performing on Broadway in the army’s production of Winged Victory, George’s biological father showed up and introduced himself to his son. This unexpected return from “death” led to a breach between George and his mother, one which never healed.
By the time the 32-year-old George was released from the service, his career momentum was lost. The best role he could get in the ever-changing film business was playing the lead in a low-budget serial entitled The Adventures of Sir Galahad in 1949. That same year, George’s wife left him for another man (show-business attorney Edward Rose).
Reeves turned to TV work in the late 1940s, although he always considered it a lower rung within the profession. In 1951, he appeared in the low-budget movie Superman and the Mole Men, which served as the pilot for a forthcoming TV series. The first batch of 26 segments were shot that year, but did not reach the air until 1952. When they did, though, they were an enormous hit with youngsters (and adults). Between 1953 and 1957, 78 other episodes were filmed. The series made George a well-known personality worldwide, but Reeves was uncomfortable making his living by wearing, as he called it, a “union suit.” He had occasional screen roles during this time, but as he’d predicted, his TV image harmed his chances on the big screen.
Once the series went off the air, George continued with personal appearances as the invincible Superman. But he was typecast by his TV work and frustrated by the stalemate it had created in his movie career. Soon, however, things turned around professionally for him. At the time of his death, Reeves was scheduled to start an Australian personal appearance tour worth $20,000. In addition, he was under contract to begin a new Superman TV series in 1960, and to participate in a televised exhibition boxing match with light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore. Supposedly, he was very upbeat about his future.
At the time of his death, Reeves was living in Los Angeles, at 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive, in a home bought for him by Toni Mannix. She was the wife of Loew’s, Inc., vice president Eddie “The Bulldog” Mannix (a man with an unsavory past and sinister connections, who once had been the number-three man at Louis B. Mayer’s MGM studio). George and Toni, 10 years Reeves’s senior, had enjoyed an on-again, off-again romance for a decade, but it had broken up in the past year. During the last months of his life, George had received many death threats on his unlisted phone. He’d reported the calls to local authorities, only to learn that Toni herself had been receiving such calls. To Reeves, this proved that Toni could not have instigated the death threats (as he’d originally thought). George had also been involved in several recent traffic mishaps, which in retrospect could have been potential murder attempts.
By June of 1959, Reeves was engaged to marry Lenore Lemmon, a New York showgirl who had once been barred from several elite Manhattan clubs for being a “troublemaker,” and who had her own set of unsavory connections. On June 15, three days before he and Lenore were to marry and leave for their honeymoon in Spain, the couple and their houseguest Robert Condon, a writer, were at home celebrating the upcoming marriage after a dinner on the town (during which George and Lenore had argued). About 12:30 A.M. on June 16, the three went to bed. Around 1:00 A.M., two neighborhood pals, Carol Von Ronkel and William Bliss, came by the house for drinks and merriment—both things for which host Reeves (increasingly an alcoholic) was well-known.
Lenore admitted the noisy visitors, only to have Reeves stomp downstairs and yell at them for having shown up at such a late hour. Soon afterward, the sulking Reeves went upstairs. In a joking mood, Lenore quipped, “He’ll probably go up to his room and shoot himself.”
A few minutes later they heard a shot from Reeves’s bedroom. When they reached the room upstairs, they found Reeves lying on his bed. He had been shot in the head with his .30-caliber Luger pistol, but no suicide note was found. (Later police discovered two bullet holes in the bedroom floor, but could draw no conclusions from them.)
The police investigation concluded that the facts of George’s death indicated suicide, insisting that the confusing reports of the intoxicated houseguests made it difficult to draw a cohesive picture of the evening’s events. Besides, police added, Reeves was known for playing with his gun, simulating a game of Russian roulette. Speculation ran high in favor of the “suicide” theory, but no one who might have had the real answers was talking, for example, about what caused the bruises found on George’s body at the time of his death.
Reeves—wearing the gray double-breasted suit he used as Clark Kent on Superman—was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. When his will was read, the public learned that most of his $71,000 worth of assets, including his house, were left not to his fianceée, but to Toni Mannix.
Mrs. Bessolo, convinced that her son had been murdered, hired private detectives to investigate the case. They concluded that the death was not a suicide, based on the position of the body (with the empty cartridge found underneath the corpse), the lack of powder burns on the victim’s body, and the location of the entrance and exit wounds in Reeves’s head. No official charges were ever brought against anyone. George’s mother, who forever after kept a shrine of George’s life and career in her Pasadena home, died in 1964.
After George’s death, the production company that was to make the new Superman series wanted to piece together new episodes by using outtakes from earlier Reeves footage and employing a double. But a very depressed Jack Larson (who had played cub reporter Jimmy Olson on the original TV series) refused to go along with this plan, and the deal fell apart.
Years after Eddie Mannix’s death in 1965, Reeves’s one-time agent, Arthur Weissman, called on Eddie’s reclusive Beverly Hills widow. Weissman recalls that during most of the visit, Toni insisted that they watch reruns of George’s Superman series. She died in 1974. In 1996, Sam Kahsner and Nancy Schoenberger authored Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman, a 312-page treatise on their very plausible theory that Toni had hired a hit man to do in George Reeves, everyone’s favorite Man of Steel.
November 13, 1938–September 8, 1979
In 1974, writer, diplomat, and occasional filmmaker Romain Gary said of his ex-wife, Jean Seberg:
To understand Jean, you have to understand the Midwest. She emerged from it intelligent, talented, and beautiful, but with the naiveté of a child. She has the kind of goodwill that to me is infuriating—persistent, totally unrealistic idealism. It has made her totally defenseless. In the end it came between us.
On September 8, 1979, Seberg was found dead in her car in a Paris suburb, an apparent suicide. On November 2, 1980, the despondent Romain Gary killed himself in his Paris apartment by shooting himself in the mouth with his Smith and Wesson .38-caliber gun. The source of this double tragedy can be traced back to 1956, when filmmaker Otto Preminger conducted a nationwide talent search for his upcoming St. Joan (1957) and cast Iowa-born unknown Jean Seberg in the lead.
Jean Dorothy Seberg was born in 1938 in Marshalltown, Iowa. She was one of five children of pharmacist Edward Seberg Jr. and schoolteacher Dorothy (Benson) Seberg. As an adolescent, seeing Marlon Brando in The Men (1950) convinced her that she wanted to be an actress. As a teenager, Jean was in summer stock in Massachusetts and New Jersey and reluctantly attended the University of Iowa for a semester. She was among the regional candidates tested by Otto Preminger for St. Joan. Jean eventually won the coveted movie role, but her selection proved to be a nightmare for everyone. During production, Preminger tormented Jean for the very qualities that had made him hire her—her inexperience and ingenuousness. When it was finally released, the drama was badly panned, with much criticism leveled at Seberg’s inept performance. Nevertheless, the sadistic Preminger used Jean for his next movie, Bonjour Tristesse (1958).
Actress Jean Seberg in the 1950s, before her career and life turned sour. Courtesy of JC Archives
While making a film in France, Jean met attorney François Moreuil. They were married in September 1957 in her hometown; the union lasted less than two years. It was Moreuil, however, who introduced her to avant-garde moviemaker Jean-Luc Godard. Godard cast Jean in Breathless (1959) with Jean-Paul Belmondo. The New Wave picture was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and Jean received her share of recognition as well. She flew back and forth during the 1960s between Hollywood and European film projects.
In 1963, the 25-year-old Seberg married Romain Gary, who was twice her age. They already had a son, Alexandre (nicknamed “Diego”), born in July 1962. Now that she was an international star, Seberg made one movie after another; one of her best roles was the schizophrenic title character of Lilith (1964), opposite Warren Beatty. Airport (1970) proved to be her last American-made feature.
Years later, Gary would say that the FBI unfairly singled Jean out to be “neutralized” because of her open political support for radical left-wing groups, such as the Black Panthers. When Jean became pregnant in 1970, the FBI leaked a fake rumor to the Hollywood gossip columns that the baby’s father was a prominent Black Panther. Actually, Romain Gary—whom Jean was in the process of divorcing—was the father. Seberg was so traumatized by the reaction to this rumor, and the FBI’s continued harassment of her, that she attempted suicide with pills. This caused her to go into premature labor, and her Caucasian baby girl lived only two days after being born in August 1970. Both Gary and Seberg sued the publications that had picked up the damaging rumor, but they received only minimal damages for their legal efforts. Thereafter, according to Gary, each year on the anniversary of the baby’s birth, the continually depressed actress attempted suicide.
Seberg made increasingly bad films in Europe throughout the first half of the 1970s, none of which added to her laurels. By then, she had developed a severe drinking problem that made her appear bloated at times. She married film director Dennis Berry in 1972, but they separated in 1978. The next year, she wed a young Algerian, Ahmed Hasni, in Paris. But because her divorce from Berry had never been official, the new marriage was not legal.
Less than two weeks before her well-publicized disappearance, Jean attempted suicide at a French train station by throwing herself onto the tracks. Hasni, with whom she had been arguing, managed to rescue her in time. According to Hasni, he last saw Jean on August 30, 1979, when she left their Rue de Longchamps apartment naked under a blanket and carrying a bottle of barbiturates. Public pleas were issued for her to return home, but her many fans feared the worst. On September 8, Jean’s white Renault car was found on a street near her apartment. Her decomposing, naked body was lying on the back seat of the car. The autopsy determined she had overdosed fatally on a mixture of pills and alcohol and that her death had probably occurred on the night she left her apartment. The distraught actress left a farewell note for her son Diego:
Jean was buried on September 14, 1979, at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Her three ex-husbands and Ahmed Hasni were at the services, as was her Breathless costar, Jean-Paul Belmondo.
To his dying day, Romain Gary insisted that the facts surrounding Seberg’s death suggested foul play. He cited as evidence the police’s discovery of a suitcase at Jean’s apartment containing her driver’s license (reported stolen months before), money, and her eyeglasses (which she needed for driving). He also noted that the alcohol level in her bloodstream had been medically determined to be higher than the point at which a person of her weight would become comatose. (Because no liquor bottles were found in her car, the police had ruled out the possibility that Jean had started drinking after she parked the car.) Years have passed and no satisfactory solution to the case has ever been reached.
Since then, the mystique of Jean Seberg has continued to reverberate in public consciousness through published biographies and two offbeat 1995 films: Mark Rappaport’s thought-provoking biopic From the Journals of Jean Seberg, in which Mary Beth Hurt played Seberg, and the documentary Jean Seberg: American Actress, directed by Donatello Dubini and Fosco Dubin.
[Natasha Nikolaevna Zacharenko Gurdin]
July 20, 1938–November 29, 1981
When the doe-eyed beauty Natalie Wood died tragically in November 1981, it was a shocking coda to a most erratic life. Highly emotional both on and off camera, Natalie had undergone periods of great professional popularity and then stretches of relative career inactivity. Even her love life was highly charged; she married the same man, actor Robert Wagner, twice.
There were also great ambiguities and contradictions concerning Natalie’s sudden death, which was officially designated an “accidental” drowning. To this day, the case remains puzzling, further clouded by the contradictory statements of the three men who were present on the night she died, especially the later theories of the boat’s captain.
Natalie was born in San Francisco in 1938, the middle daughter of Russian immigrants Nikolai and Maria Kuleff (Zacharenko), who changed their surname to Gurdin when Nikolai became an American citizen. When Natalie was four, she and her mother were extras in Happy Land (1943), which filmed on location in northern California. Convinced her daughter had a potential screen career, the ambitious Maria moved the household to Los Angeles and changed Natasha’s name to Natalie Wood. Irving Pichel, who had directed Happy Land, remembered the expressive, bright youngster when he was casting Tomorrow Is Forever (1945) and gave her a key assignment. By the time she was nine, Natalie had costarred with Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and was sometimes able to earn a thousand dollars a week. For the rigidly controlled Natalie, it was not a happy period. “I spent practically all of my time in the company of adults. I was very withdrawn, very shy, I did what I was told and I tried not to disappoint anybody. I knew I had a duty to perform, and I was trained to follow orders.”
One of Natalie’s more terrifying (and prophetic) moviemaking moments occurred during the making of The Star (1952), when the script called for the teenager to dive into the water. She was very apprehensive about deep water. (“I can swim a little,” she would say later in life, “but I’m afraid of water that is dark.”) The director informed the frightened Natalie that he would use a double, but at the last minute, he changed his mind and told Natalie to do the stunt herself. She went into hysterics, and thanks to the kind intervention of the movie’s star, Bette Davis, a double was employed for the shot.
In the mid-1950s, the former child star went through an awkward adolescence with few screen prospects. But then, as the result of playing a mixed-up teenager in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) opposite James Dean, she was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress. Suddenly, Natalie was a hot box-office property whose hectic romantic life included dating Elvis Presley and (rumor had it) stocky actor Raymond Burr. Her studio tried to manufacture an on- and offscreen romance between Natalie and Tab Hunter, her costar in The Burning Hills (1956) and The Girl He Left Behind (1956). In real life, however, she had fallen for the young actor and playboy Robert Wagner. They were married in Arizona at the Scottsdale Methodist Church on December 28, 1957
Meanwhile, Natalie was shoved into big—but unsuccessful—movies like Marjorie Morningstar (1958). She and her husband teamed up for All the Fine Young Cannibals (1961), but by then, the couple’s highly promoted “dream marriage” had fallen apart. Their union was not strengthened by Natalie’s affair with Warren Beatty while the two of them were making a picture together. Natalie and Robert divorced in 1962; she was soon involved in another series of well-chronicled romances.
In the early 1960s, Natalie blossomed into a major star. She was Oscar-nominated for both Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1962), and played the leads (although her singing was dubbed) in the musicals West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962). But by the middle of the decade her career had slipped again, and she made no movies between 1966 and 1969. In May 1969, she wed British scriptwriter and agent Richard Gregson; their daughter, Natasha, was born in September 1970.
Three faces of Natalie Wood, the star of Penelope (1966).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Her career rose briefly when she played one of the spouse-swapping characters in Bob 
Carol Ted Alice (1969). Then she announced her retirement, insisting, “Let’s face it, acting is not really important.” In the summer of 1971, she and Gregson filed for divorce, and a year later, she and Robert Wagner reunited aboard his yacht Rambling Rose, anchored off Catalina Island. (Between marriages to Natalie, Wagner had also married again and now had a child from that union.) Natalie and Robert had their own child, Courtney Brooke, in 1974.
From the mid-1970s onward, Natalie’s best acting was done for TV. She and Wagner costarred in the TV movie The Affair (1973), and she was a guest on the 1979 pilot of his popular series Hart to Hart. When queried about her diminished screen career, Wood reasoned, “I am a woman, a wife, a mother, and a working actress, in that order.”
In November 1981, Wood was costarring in Brainstorm and was scheduled to make her stage debut in a Los Angeles production of Anastasia, while Robert was launching his third season of Hart to Hart. But when William Holden, the one-time intimate of Wagner’s costar Stefanie Powers, died in a drunken fall on November 16, 1981, production on the TV show closed down while Powers coped with the tragedy. Robert spent several days comforting his costar, which did nothing to soothe the highly jealous Natalie.
On Thanksgiving day, November 26, 1981, the Wagners hosted an informal party. One of the guests was Christopher Walken, Natalie’s Brainstorm costar, and (as some insisted) her new romantic interest. (For some reason, Walken’s wife had returned alone to her family in Connecticut.) Natalie invited Walken to enjoy Thanksgiving weekend with her and Wagner aboard their 55-foot cabin cruiser, the Splendour.
On November 27, the trio boarded the yacht at Marina del Rey, skippered by a oneman crew, Dennis Davern; they headed for Catalina Island. That evening, after anchoring, the quartet came ashore to Avalon in the yacht’s dinghy, the Valiant. After dinner, because of rough waters, Wagner moved the yacht to a safer mooring. The others remained ashore at a hotel. The next day, November 28, they returned to the Splendour, now anchored at Isthmus Cove. At about 4:00 P.M., they went ashore in the dinghy for dinner. They remained at the restaurant, drinking several bottles of wine. Reportedly, Natalie was intoxicated and flirting with Walken.
Back aboard the boat that evening, the skipper retired, while Natalie, Robert, and Christopher apparently continued the festivities in the main cabin. About midnight, Natalie left to change clothes. A few minutes later, at 12:20 A.M., Davern made his last rounds and noted that the dinghy, the Valiant, was gone. He assumed that Natalie must have taken the boat, as was her occasional custom, to view the evening stars. When she didn’t return in the next several minutes, a concerned Wagner began a search for her, using another dinghy. By 1:00 A.M. on November 29, Robert had requested the harbor patrol to scout for Natalie; at 3:26 A.M., the Coast Guard was added to the search party. Helicopters joined in the task. At 7:44 A.M. her body was found—floating facedown beneath the water’s surface some two hundred yards from the isolated Blue Cavern Point. The Valiant, with four life jackets aboard, was two hundred yards away. From the evidence, it appeared that she had never gone aboard the small craft that night. Because of scratches on her hands and wrists, it was concluded she had attempted to cling to the cove rocks before drowning.
Police concluded that after changing clothes (at the time of her death, she was wearing a nightgown, knee-length socks, and a down jacket), Natalie had chosen to go out in the inflatable dinghy, perhaps to go to the hotel ashore. While untying it, however, she slipped, striking her cheek in the process, and then fell into the extremely cold water. She soon drowned, most likely dragged down by her water-soaked jacket.
The Los Angeles County Coroner, Thomas T. Noguchi, was in charge of the well-publicized case. His investigation of the freak accident brought forth the speculation—refuted by some—that Wagner and Walken had argued that night, and Natalie had attempted to leave the boat to get away from the two antagonistic men. As Noguchi wrote in Coroner (1983), “There’s a lot of room left for further investigation.”
There was one witness to Natalie’s heartrending death. A Los Angeles businesswoman whose own boat was anchored three hundred feet from the Splendour testified that around midnight, she heard a woman’s voice—sounding quite sober—shouting for help. Then she soon heard another voice respond, “Take it easy. We’ll be over to get you.” Thereafter, silence, and she assumed the matter had been resolved satisfactorily.
Because of the events surrounding Natalie’s death, and the condition of her body upon recovery, it required a great deal of cosmetic work to make her presentable for viewing by family members and for the funeral. Natasha, Wood’s 11-year-old daughter, requested that diamond earrings be placed on her mother’s ears. A fox fur coat, a present Wagner hadn’t yet given his spouse, was also wrapped around Natalie’s body.
Her gardenia-draped coffin was buried in Los Angeles at Westwood (Village) Memorial Park on December 2, 1981. A bronze plate on her simple marker reads “Natalie Wood Wagner.” Among the celebrities attending her funeral were Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Christopher Walken and Stefanie Powers. Three of Natalie’s best friends—Hope Lange, Roddy McDowall, and author/screenwriter Tommy Thompson—delivered eulogies. Father Stephen Fitzgerald (of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Virgin Mary) officiated.
In her will, Natalie requested Wagner be appointed guardian of Natasha, her daughter with Richard Gregson, so her three children would be raised together. She left $15,000 to her stepsister, Olga Viripaeff; and all her clothing and furs to her sister, Lana Wood. Much of her jewelry, works of art, and household furnishings were bequeathed to Wagner, as well as a portion of her residual estate. The balance of the estate was to be held in trust for her parents and her children.
After being shelved for several months, Brainstorm finally was completed, working around Natalie’s unfinished scenes. When released in 1983, it was a sad anticlimax to her lengthy acting career. And 11 years after the drowning, Christopher Walken would finally speak about the tragic event. He told the New York Times, “It all sounds so mysterious, but it wasn’t. She was small. . . [the dinghy] was slippery. She fell. She hit her head. She went into the water. That’s what happened.”
A few years before her death, Natalie Wood was asked what she thought she would be like when she grew old. She replied, “I don’t really think that far ahead.”
