Suicides
Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California © 2001 by Albert l,. Ortega
[Anna Maria Pierangeli]
June 19, 1932–September 10, 1971
In the early 1950s, it seemed that Sardinian-born Pier Angeli had an extremely promising show-business future. After making two well-received Italian movies, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to play the sensitive Italian bride of a G.I. in Teresa (1951). The five-foot, one-hundred-pound, raven-haired Anna Maria and her twin sister Marisa Luisa (who became screen actress Marisa Pavan) were brought to Hollywood, where Pier (her new screen name) was elected a Star of Tomorrow by the Motion Picture Herald trade magazine. However, her film assignments at the still-lustrous MGM studio were unspectacular, and she began dating (with much fanfare) an array of Hollywood notables, including Kirk Douglas, James Dean, and Vic Damone. It was Damone, the Brooklyn-born Italian singer also under MGM contract, whom she wed in 1954. Their son Perry was born in 1955. The next year—during which she suffered a miscarriage—Pier enjoyed her best screen assignment, as the soulful wife of boxing champ Rocky Graziano (played by Paul Newman) in the popular Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).
By 1957, Pier and Vic—always a combative couple—had separated. The following year, Pier, who had never been comfortable with screen stardom, made her final MGM picture, Danny Kaye’s costume comedy Merry Andrew (1958). Her divorce from Damone became final in 1959; he blamed her domineering, widowed mother for most of their troubles. The next several years were spent in court, as Pier and Vic battled ferociously for custody of their son.
In 1962, Pier, whose screen career had dimmed badly, married the much older Italian bandleader Armando Travajoli. Soon after their son was born in 1963, however, the couple separated. The distraught Pier now admitted publicly, “I am still in love, deeply and eternally, with Jimmy Dean.” (Dean’s business manager, Pier’s mother, and MGM had all disapproved strongly of the couple’s relationship. Dean died in a car crash in 1955.)
By 1971 the near-manic Angeli, who had already attempted suicide four times, was reportedly broke. Her sister Marisa (and Marisa’s French movie-star husband Jean-Pierre Aumont) came to her rescue. Pier confessed, “It would be better if I was already dead. I can’t go on anymore.” In midyear, she returned to Hollywood, where Debbie Reynolds—her pal from their MGM studio years—tried to help her find work.
On September 10, 1971, the 39-year-old Pier died from an overdose of barbiturates in the Beverly Hills apartment that she was sharing with drama coach Helena Correll. Unbeknownst to the actress, she had just been approved for a guest role on the Western TV series Bonanza. Debbie Reynolds offered to adopt Angeli’s younger son, who was then attending private school in London. Pier’s mother, however, announced angrily, “The boy is mine.”
In the end, the volatile Pier had two great regrets. One was not being given the major screen roles she most coveted: the carnival girl’s role in Lili (made in 1953 and starring Leslie Caron) and that of Rima, the “Bird Girl,” in Green Mansions (made in 1959 with Audrey Hepburn). Her other regret was the loss of her beloved, James Dean.
May 9, 1912–June 18, 1963
Eccentric producer Howard Hughes’s movie The Conqueror (1956) proved to be a bomb, in so many senses of that word. The costume epic—featuring John Wayne as the twelfth-century Mongol emperor Genghis Khan—was a ludicrous historical saga filled with atrocious dialogue; it was severely panned by critics. But the movie wreaked much more lasting devastation on nearly half of its cast and crew. It had been shot in St. George, Utah, close to the Nevada border and even closer to the location where the U.S. government was then conducting A-bomb testing. One blast (nicknamed “Dirty Harry”) that registered 32.4 kilotons exploded directly over St. George, contaminating the entire locale. Since then, nearly half of the 220 people who worked on The Conqueror have developed some form of cancer; among the ones who died are John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick Powell.
Their Conqueror costar Pedro Armendariz had become a major stage and film celebrity in his native Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s, appreciated for his strong presence on camera. The swarthy, versatile actor came to Hollywood in the mid-1940s, where he appeared in pictures such as John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947). Failing to break out of his ethnic stereotype, the mustachioed Armendariz returned to his homeland, occasionally traveling to Europe or back to Hollywood for screen assignments. He made several movies with his pal John Wayne: Fort Apache (1948), Three Godfathers (1948), and lastly, The Conqueror.
In early 1963 Armendariz was diagnosed as having lymph cancer. His scenes as Karim Bey in the new James Bond thriller, From Russia with Love (1964), were rushed to completion. That June, he was admitted to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles with an advanced case of neck cancer. On June 18, 1963, Armendariz shot himself with a gun he had snuck into his hospital room. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, and son, Pedro Armendariz Jr., who would also become an actor.
[Donald Barry de Acosta]
January 11, 1911–July 17, 1980
Don Barry may have been a compact actor, but he packed a lot of living into his tumultuous 69 years. Born in Houston, Texas, he was a high school athlete and was selected for the Texas All-Stars in 1929, having already attended the Texas School of Mines. He migrated to Los Angeles, where he worked briefly for an ad agency until a fling at summer stock led him into an acting career. Barry played a high school student in Cecil B. DeMille’s drama This Day and Age (1933). After touring the hinterlands in Tobacco Road, Barry made his official movie debut in Night Waitress (1936). His breakthrough performances occurred in 1939—he appeared in Only Angels Have Wings and played a fugitive in Wyoming Outlaw, a part of The Three Mesquiteers series.
In 1940, the feisty Don—who bore a striking facial resemblance to James Cagney—nabbed the title role in The Adventures of Red Ryder. (Although Barry did not have red hair, his gig as the comic-strip hero earned him the professional nickname of “Red.”) The 12-chapter Western serial was so popular that he starred in several more entries. By 1942 Barry had his own Western series at Republic Pictures, often appearing as the “Tulsa Kid” or the “Cyclone Kid.” For the next three years, he was voted one of the top 10 Western stars in the Motion Picture Herald’s annual poll.
Don “Red” Barry pondering trinkets in Red Desert (1949).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Wanting more demanding assignments, Barry joined Robert L. Lippert’s budget moviemaking company in 1949; he frequently produced and occasionally scripted his own pictures. In 1951 he moved over to TV work. It was not until three years later that Barry returned to filmmaking, with the privately financed but unsuccessful Jesse James’ Women. Don continued to play supporting roles in pictures and joined the cast of the TV series Sugarfoot in the late 1950s. He played a police detective on television’s Surfside Six (1960–61) and was Mr. Gallo on the series Mr. Novak (1963–64). He made three Westerns for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1965, one of which—Convict Stage—he also scripted. Thereafter, Barry continued in supporting roles in film and on TV. He made guest appearances, too, at Western-movie-buff conventions.
The feisty, short-statured Barry was notorious for being one of Hollywood’s principal ladies’ men. Despite being married three times (once to actress Peggy Stewart), he dated some of Hollywood’s reigning beauties, including Joan Crawford, Linda Darnell, and Ann Sheridan. In 1956, Barry made headlines when he and his I’ll Cry Tomorrow costar, Susan Hayward, were caught together one early morning at his home by his then-girlfriend, starlet Jill Jarmyn.
By 1980 Barry was separated from his latest wife, Peggy Stewart, the mother of his two children. Late on the evening of July 17, 1980, the police were summoned to his modest North Hollywood, California, home, where he and Peggy were having a domestic scuffle. Once they thought the situation was under control, the police started to return to their squad car, when Barry rushed out of the house wielding a .38-caliber revolver. He shot himself in the head before the officers could stop him. He was declared dead at 10:00 P.M. that night at nearby Riverside Hospital. His final film, Back Roads (starring Sally Field), was released in March 1981.
October 4, 1929–May 10, 1968
Professional success can be difficult at any age; but it is really rough on child actors—especially when they cannot duplicate their former popularity as adults. Becoming a has-been at age 50 is bad enough; to do so in one’s 20s is a far worse fate.
Scotty was born in Oakland, California, and moved to Los Angeles with his parents when he was three. He made his screen debut at age four in Gallant Lady (1933), and the next year, producer Hal Roach signed him to costar in the ongoing Our Gang series of movie shorts. Undeniably cute, Beckett projected a wistful look in his trademark oversized turtleneck sweater and askew baseball cap. He left the Our Gang frolics in late 1935 when his parents and manager decided he should pursue more dramatic movie roles. In his film assignments, Scotty often played the movie’s hero as a youth or the leading man’s son. He eventually attended Los Angeles High School and then did some stage work, was heard on radio in The Life of Riley, and had an on-screen role in The Jolson Story (1946). Scotty also costarred in A Date with Judy (1948)—in tandem with Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Powell—and the stark World War II drama Battleground (1949).
Although he appeared on-screen in The Happy Years (1950), his off-camera life had become anything but happy. In 1948, Scotty was arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. The next year he married tennis star Beverly Baker, but their marriage fell apart within months. (A longer-lasting second marriage resulted in a son, Scott Jr.) In 1954 Beckett was in the news again, first for carrying a concealed weapon and then for passing a bad check. That same year he was cast as the sidekick in the syndicated sci-fi TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, although he was out of the cast before the series wrapped in 1955.
Piper Laurie and Scotty Beckett embrace for the cameras in a publicity pose for Louisa (1950).
Courtesy of JC Archives
The final decade of Scotty’s life was the chronicle of an increasingly desperate man involved with drugs, divorces, violence, and arrests. In 1962 he slit his wrists, but recovered. He failed in his efforts to start up a new career selling cars or real estate, or to complete his school studies and become a physician. On May 10, 1968, Scotty admitted himself to a Hollywood rest home to receive treatment for a severe beating he had endured. Just two days later he was dead. Although a bottle of barbiturates and a farewell note were found nearby, the coroner refused to state a specific cause of death.
Oddly enough, Scotty’s last TV work had been on an episode of The George Sanders Mystery Theatre entitled “The Night I Died.”
June 4, 1880–April 15, 1962
To movie-lovers everywhere, she will always remain the wise, kindly Auntie Em of The Wizard of Oz (1939). In film history, however, Clara Blandick has earned another special footnote—for committing suicide.
Born aboard a U.S. ship harbored in Hong Kong, Clara grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She made her acting debut there with E. H. Sothern in a stage production of Richard Lovelace. On Broadway, she appeared in the 1903 production of The Christian. Beginning in 1908, Clara made a few forays into silent feature films, but on the whole, the petite, dainty performer much preferred playing ingenues on the stage.
When talkies came into vogue, Clara returned to moviemaking. She proved to be a very reliable character performer, useful for her sturdy, Midwestern looks. She played Aunt Polly in both Tom Sawyer (1930) and Huckleberry Finn (1931), and a score of other no-nonsense women throughout the 1930s. Clara won out over several others for the plum assignment of Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz and continued her profitable career into the next decade with roles in One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Stolen Life (1946), and Life with Father (1947). Her final films were Love That Brute (1950), with Paul Douglas, and Keys to the City (1950), with Clark Gable and Loretta Young. Clara retired from the acting profession in 1952.
Robert Homans, Broderick O’Farrell, and Hale Hamilton try to restore order for Clara Blandick in The Drums of Jeopardy (1931).
Courtesy of JC Archives
By 1962, the 81-year-old Clara was suffering from failing eyesight and increasingly crippling, painful arthritis. To avoid further agony, she decided to terminate her life. On April 15, 1962, she went to the beauty parlor to have her hair done and then returned to her modest Hollywood hotel apartment. She wrote the following note:
Dressed in a royal blue bathrobe for the “occasion,” and surrounded by memorabilia from her lengthy career, Clara swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. To ensure that she would expire, she fastened a plastic bag over her head, and then lay down to wait for death.
What a pathetic end for the sturdy, no-nonsense Auntie Em.
December 25, 1899–November 17, 1936
Although it was never officially conceded, it has long been accepted in Hollywood lore that the drowning death of the character Norman Maine in the classic movie A Star Is Born (1937) was based on the heartbreaking end of handsome actor John Bowers.
John was born in Garrett, Indiana, and began in films in 1914 as a teenager. By the early 1920s he was an established (if not famous) leading man, playing opposite some of Hollywood’s loveliest actresses in silent pictures such as Roads of Destiny (1921), Lorna Doone (1922), and Divorce (1923). He costarred with the gorgeous brunette Marguerite de la Motte in Richard, the Lion-Hearted (1923) and What a Wife Learned (1923)—they got married in real life.
Although Bowers made seven features in 1927, Hollywood’s transition to talkies nearly halted his career. In 1929, John had supporting roles in Skin Deep and Say It with Songs, then nothing for two years. In 1931, he reemerged on-screen for the budget Western Mounted Fury.
By 1932, Bowers was a has-been who was quickly slipping into alcoholism. Now divorced, he ended his troubled life after attending a party one evening in November 1936 by walking into the Pacific Ocean and deliberately letting himself drown. His finish was said to have been witnessed by the famed journalist and scriptwriter Adela Rogers St. John, paving the way for its use in the plotline of A Star Is Born.
August 28, 1897–August 26, 1978
Despite film lore, as Pepe Le Moko in Algiers (1938), he never said in the movie, “Come with me to ze Casbah.” But for years thereafter, female filmgoers would have followed the polished, gentlemanly Charles Boyer anywhere. But his sizzling, sophisticated screen personification of the “great lover” was based more on illusion than reality: he was not tall (five feet, six inches), he was somewhat bald (he always wore a toupee in his movies), and his stomach generally protruded. Despite his physical limitations, Boyer was indelible on camera as the Gallic lover with deep-set, brooding eyes and an engaging French accent.
Boyer was born in Figeac in southwest France, the son of a farm machinery dealer. He began his acting career in school productions. Charles also used his dad’s granary as a theater to perform his own plays. Later, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and drama at the Paris Conservatory. Charles made his stage debut in Paris in Les Jardins des Marcie (1920); his motion picture debut, L’Homme du Large, was released the same year. Not considered especially photogenic by French moviemakers, he accepted a bid from MGM to relocate to Hollywood and make French versions of English-language screen hits to be shown in Europe. (This was the era before dubbing was used.) In 1932, Boyer made his first major film in English, playing opposite Claudette Colbert in The Man from Yesterday. After a disappointingly small role in Jean Harlow’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), he returned to France, convinced he had no Hollywood future.
After doing more plays and pictures in his homeland, Boyer was brought back to the States by Fox Films to be the “new Valentino.” He soon gravitated to other studios, and eventually signed a new contract with producer Walter Wanger. Charles made a name for himself opposite Claudette Colbert as the intense physician in Private Worlds (1935). Thereafter, he alternated between making movies in Europe and in America. In Hollywood, he gained acclaim—and Oscar nominations—for Conquest (1937, with Greta Garbo), Algiers (1938, with Hedy Lamarr), and Gaslight (1944, with Ingrid Bergman). Charles won a special Oscar in 1942 for his “progressive cultural achievement in establishing the French Research Foundation in Los Angeles as a source of reference for the Hollywood motion picture industry.”
In the late 1940s, the freelancing Boyer reteamed with Ingrid Bergman for Arch of Triumph (1948). After it flopped, he abandoned Hollywood. When he returned again to the screen a few years later, it was as a character star (after all, he was now in his 50s), playing people of various nationalities and professions. Boyer united with Dick Powell, David Niven, and Ida Lupino to form TV’s Four Star Playhouse in the early 1950s. He received his fourth and final Oscar nomination for Fanny (1961). During this period, Charles appeared on Broadway in Kind Sir (1953, with Mary Martin), The Marriage-Go-Round (1958, with Claudette Colbert), and Lord Pengo (1963).
Boyer made his London stage debut in Man and Boy (1964), and continued to accept character leads—often as the roué—in movie productions everywhere. He revisited Hollywood for the gloomy musical version of Lost Horizon (1973), playing a religious leader—the high lama—with great dignity. Back in Europe, he appeared in Stavisky (1974), and costarred with Liza Minnelli in A Matter of Time (1976), his final picture.
Charles Boyer, the veteran continental charmer, in the 1950s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Charles had married the British-born actress Patricia Paterson on February 14, 1934. They had an extremely happy marriage, and their son Michael Charles was born on December 10, 1943. Unfortunately, in September 1965 at the age of 21, Michael committed suicide by shooting himself. His death was a grief the parents could never overcome.
In the late 1970s, the Boyers were living mostly in Europe. When Pat developed cancer, the couple relocated to a ranch in Paradise Valley (a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona), where she could undergo special medical treatment. She died on August 24, 1978, at the age of 67. Boyer was highly distraught at her death; two days later, he was found unconscious in his home, having taken an overdose of Seconal. He died at a Phoenix hospital that day. On what would have been his 81st birthday, Boyer was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. His grave (in the St. Ann section) is next to his wife’s and that of their son.
[Germaine Lefebvre]
January 6, 1931–March 17, 1990
For the longest time there were two intriguing questions about this chic, enigmatic French model turned actress. First, was she really a transsexual, as the international rumor mill long insisted? (The answer appears to be no, although she was probably bisexual.) And second, how could her professional connections be strong enough to overcome her wooden performances and keep getting her cast in films? (There would seem to be no accounting for the power of physical attraction.) Then, at age 59, the five-foot, seven-inch, long-limbed Capucine added a brand-new wrinkle to her strange career. She plunged to her death from her eighth-floor apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland, leaving her admirers with a third question: Why?
Capucine was born into an ordinary family in Toulon, France, in 1931 (not 1933 as some sources state). As a teenager, she escaped an unpleasant home life by fleeing to Paris. There, the 19-year-old newcomer soon found work as a model, quickly graduating to modeling jobs with Parisian haute couture houses. (She became a favorite of the important couturier Hubert de Givenchy.) Next, she made her screen debut in Jacques Becker’s Les Rendez-Vous de Juillet (1949), a study of postwar youth. Capucine made a few additional French feature films, and by her mid-20s, was married to French actor Pierre Trabaud. However, when producer Charles K. Feldman “discovered” her, she was single again. The entranced Feldman declared himself her Svengali and imported her to the United States.
As a fresh face with a powerful benefactor, the self-christened Capucine (pronounced kap-u-SEEN)—which is French for the nasturtium flower—was touted as the latest successor to the legendary Greta Garbo. She learned English and studied acting with director and actor Gregory Ratoff. Capucine was cast as Princess Carolyne in Song Without End (1960), which featured a reserved Dirk Bogarde attempting to be the great composer Franz Liszt. For many, this ponderous costume biography was indeed a “film without end.” The brave Capucine admitted that in the long process of making this cinematic bore she had honed her newfound craft, adding, “As the scenes warmed up, so did I.”
Thereafter, she jetted back and forth between America and Europe, making movies on both continents. Among her efforts was a role as the love interest of a bordello madam (Barbara Stanwyck) in the bizarre A Walk on the Wild Side (1961). Megastar William Holden became besotted with her and left his wife, Brenda Marshall, to be with his new love. Holden and Capucine made two films together, neither of which was successful. Although eventually their romance ended and he returned to Marshall, Holden left Capucine $50,000 in his will when he died in 1981. Other loyal friends of “Cap” included superstar Audrey Hepburn and fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy.
By the mid-1960s, Capucine was acting mostly in Europe, turning up in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). Blake Edwards, who had used her patrician image and her surprising sense of comedic timing to satisfactory advantage in The Pink Panther (1963), brought her back to American screens in Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1984). Occasionally, the international actress returned to the United States for TV work. In 1985, Capucine was among the parade of once-famous names who popped up in a segment of TV’s Murder, She Wrote. Her final work was in 1989’s My First 40 Years.
A few years before the end, Capucine sighed to a reporter, “I’m weary, always weary, these days. I’d like to work, but the enthusiasm is gone. But then, so are the opportunities.” In the following months she grew even more depressed. On March 17, 1990, broke and despairing, she jumped from the window of her apartment. Her only known survivors were her three cats. The American press took relatively scant notice of Capucine’s sad finale, but the European press was more caring in their media coverage. Capucine’s body was cremated and her ashes were scattered in the woods by her former employer, de Givenchy.
One year after the actress’s tragic end, her last lover—a younger man with whom she had lived happily in Paris until she forced him to leave her and find a younger amour- committed suicide himself. And reinforcing the alluring power Capucine had over men, her ex-husband, Pierre Trabaud, stated in an American TV documentary in 1999 that he loved her more at that point than when they had been wed.
November 9, 1922–September 8, 1965
During the first half of the twentieth century in North America, show business was one of the few areas in which African Americans were allowed to excel. But even in the show-business arena, it was difficult for a black star to find leading roles, especially in mainstream motion pictures. One of the many determined entertainers who fought to break through this bias was the sultry, light-skinned Dorothy Dandridge. The professional heartbreaks she sustained while trying to crash the color line would haunt her to the end of her relatively short existence. (A graphic depiction of Dorothy’s tormented but groundbreaking life would earn an Emmy Award for Halle Berry in the 1999 made-for-cable movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.)
By the time Dorothy was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922, her father had vanished. She was raised by her mother, actress Ruby Dandridge. At a very early age, she and her older sister Vivian—billed as “The Wonderful Children”—performed before local church and school groups; they soon were touring. In the early 1930s, Mrs. Dandridge took her children to Los Angeles. Dorothy dropped out of high school when she began getting screen roles, although they were mostly background parts.
With Etta Jones added to their act, Dorothy and Vivian performed as the Dandridge Sisters Trio. By now, Ruby Dandridge herself was gaining a foothold in movies (playing domestics) and asked her lover, a talented musician named Geneva “Neva” Williams, to chaperone her girls when they toured. Always idealistic and shy, Dorothy was traumatized one night when she returned home from a date and the hostile, domineering Neva accused her of sexual promiscuity. To determine if the girl was still a virgin, she tore off Dorothy’s dress and probed inside the horrified girl with her finger. The nightmarish situation left Dandridge frigid for years thereafter.
In the late 1930s, while performing with Jimmy Lunceford’s band at the Cotton Club in New York City’s Harlem, Dorothy met Harold Nicholas, part of the very popular Nicholas Brothers dance act and quite a ladies’ man. Dorothy and Nicholas began to date, and their romance continued when they both were cast in Sun Valley Serenade (1941) back in Hollywood. They married in 1942 and their daughter, Harolyn, was born the next year. (The infant was braindamaged, a malady for which Dandridge felt responsible and never forgave herself.) Meanwhile, Dorothy continued to gain small parts in movies.
Dandridge and Nicholas divorced in the late 1940s. She took acting lessons, and through the guidance of musician Phil Moore (who became a romantic interest as well), she emerged a confident, sexy chanteuse. Still anxious to make a breakthrough in major studio movies, she accepted the role of an erotic jungle princess in Tarzan’s Peril (1951) and played a sports player’s wife in The Harlem Globetrotters (1951). With singing engagements at increasingly posh East and West Coast nightclubs, Dorothy’s popularity grew; she was soon earning $3,500 a week for her nightclub work. MGM cast her as a dedicated schoolteacher in Bright Road (1953), and she was finally able to reveal dramatic talent. While on a singing engagement in Cleveland, she met her father, Cyril Dandridge, for the first and only time. From this meeting, she learned she was one-quarter white.
A young Dorothy Dandridge (second from right) with the Dandridge Sisters Trio and John Howard in Easy to Take (1936). Courtesy of JC Archives
Dorothy campaigned hard to earn the seductive title role in Carmen Jones (1954), opposite her Bright Road costar, Harry Belafonte. But once she had won the battle, she was overwhelmed by self-doubt. A constant perfectionist who always strove to please others, Dorothy still had little faith in herself. Her fears were reinforced when the film’s autocratic director (Otto Preminger) hired a young opera student, Marilyn Horne, to dub Dandridge’s voice for the difficult score. Nevertheless, Dorothy was Oscar-nominated in the Best Actress category (a first for an African-American) for her fiery performance, and Twentieth Century-Fox signed her to a nonexclusive contract. She seemed on the verge of satisfying all her professional ambitions.
On-screen, Dorothy embarked on an interracial romance in Island in the Sun (1957) and portrayed a mixed-race woman in Tamango (1959). Offscreen, she won a lawsuit against Confidential magazine for an article it published about her “scandalous” sex life. Dorothy returned to screen musicals with Porgy and Bess (1959), directed by her mentor, tormentor, and former lover, Otto Preminger. That year, in another marital error, she wed white restaurateur Jack Denison.
By the early 1960s Dorothy’s screen career had stalled because of the lack of available roles for a black leading woman. Her miserable, costly marriage ended in divorce in 1962. Unable to cope with her growing frustrations, she began drinking heavily. When she could no longer afford to keep her mentally disabled daughter in a private hospital, Dorothy had to commit her to the Camarillo State Hospital.
Dorothy tried to revive her career, but her emotional and physical health had been depleted by her ongoing reliance on liquor and sleeping pills. In April 1963 she declared bankruptcy, making public just how bad her life had become. With the assistance of her one-time manager, Earl Mills, she straightened out and made a few singing engagements. One was as Julie in a summer-stock edition of Show Boat with Kathryn Grayson.
In mid-September 1965, Dorothy was slated to appear at Manhattan’s Basin Street East. “I’m going to set New York on their ears,” she insisted of her comeback nightclub engagement. Meanwhile, she had been offered two new film projects in Mexico. The day before she went south of the border to discuss the contracts, Dorothy twisted her ankle on the steps of a local gym, causing herself considerable pain. As soon as she returned from Mexico on September 7, she consulted a Los Angeles physician, who found that she had a minor fracture. He arranged for her to return the following day to have a small plaster cast applied to the ankle.
That evening, Dorothy packed for the flight to the East Coast and chatted with her mother on the phone. The next morning, at 7:15 A.M., she called Earl Mills, asking him to have the hospital appointment postponed for a few hours. “I’ll sleep for a while and I’ll be fine.” With those words, she hung up.
Later that morning, Mills could not reach Dorothy by phone. He drove to her West Hollywood apartment, but there was no answer when he rang her doorbell. He left, but returned at 2:00 P.M. Now worried, he forced his way into her place, where he found Dorothy lying on the bathroom floor. She was naked except for a scarf wrapped around her head. When the ambulance arrived, the medics confirmed that she had been dead for approximately two hours.
In searching the apartment, Mills found a note addressed to “whomever discovers me.” The paper read:
The L.A. coroner’s office concluded initially that Dorothy had died of an embolism, which had occurred when fatty bits dislodged from the bone marrow in her fractured right foot had traveled through her bloodstream and cut off the blood flow to her lungs and brain. A few weeks later, a new medical finding was released. Further study of tissue samples revealed that Dorothy had overdosed on Tofranil, an antidepressant that a doctor had prescribed for her. Because of the career upswing Dorothy was enjoying at the time of her death, a psychiatric team refused to conclude definitely that she was a suicide victim. The case remains unresolved.
A funeral service was held at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. (Among those in attendance was actor Peter Lawford, a one-time lover.) Dorothy’s cremated body was interred at Forest Lawn in the Freedom Mausoleum’s Heritage Hall, in the Columbarium of Victory.
Dandridge had died at age 42 with only a few dollars in her bank account. It was a melancholy finale for a beautiful talent who always strove to open doors for herself and others in the entertainment industry. As she once said of the racial discrimination that had so thwarted her career, “It’s such a waste. It makes you half alive. It gives you nothing. It takes away.” Her tragic life certainly attested to that.
[Peter Deuel]
February 24, 1940–December 31, 1971
Whenever a star—particularly one in the prime of his or her life and career—commits suicide, everyone becomes a Monday-morning quarterback. People who suddenly announce their friendship with the victim insist that there were telltale signs that should have been heeded; this was certainly true of the handsome, six-foot-tall Peter Duel, who was riding high in a successful TV series.
Peter was born in Penfield, New York, in 1940, the oldest of three children born to Dr. and Mrs. Ellsworth Deuel. Always creative, Peter had no interest in becoming a doctor himself. Instead, he gravitated toward the arts. He graduated from the American Theatre Wing in New York City in 1961 and toured with the national company of the comedy Take Her, She’s Mine (starring Tom Ewell). By 1964, Peter was in Hollywood, an occasional guest on TV shows. In the fall of 1965, he became a series regular in Sally Field’s sitcom Gidget, cast as her brother-in-law. He did well in the task and was hired for his second sitcom, Love on a Rooftop (1966-67). Although both the TV show and Peter earned solid reviews, it was canceled in the ratings wars.
With this good professional track record, Peter signed a seven-year contract with Universal Pictures. Peter then appeared in studio-produced TV series, including The Virginian, Ironside, and The Name of the Game. He also began to get good roles in made-for-TV movies, such as Marcus Welby, M.D.: A Matter of Humanity (1969), and feature films like Cannon for Cordoba (1970), all of which were shot on the Universal lot. While making Generation (1969), he had a romance with costar Kim Darby, as well as officially changing his professional name to Peter Duel. Next, he was hired for his third TV series, Alias Smith and Jones, a Western adventure about two affable ex-outlaws (Duel and Ben Murphy) attempting to turn honest in the old West. The comedy/buddy show debuted in January 1971 to good notices. It returned that fall for a second season, with Sally Field now added to give the show additional appeal.
Everything seemed to be going well. Here was someone who had not “gone Hollywood,” a rising star who remained unaffected by success. But the situation was not as it appeared. When Peter first came to the West Coast, he had set a timetable for himself. He wanted to be making feature films full-time within five years. (It never really happened.) A year before he died, he said, “After two or three interviews, talking about pictures and how they’re made and what I do in them and what I’m going to do next, there’s nothing more to say.” Branching out, Peter became very concerned about ecology and environmental pollution. He traveled around the country in 1968 working for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s unsuccessful presidential bid. Duel was in Chicago during the Democratic Convention that year and witnessed firsthand the nasty riots that occurred. He eventually signed with a celebrity speakers’ bureau to lecture on his convictions.
As a perfectionist performer, Duel was not particularly happy about making Alias Smith and Jones, but Universal offered him a salary increase and he accepted reluctantly. For the serious-minded Peter, doing a weekly show was “a big fat drag to any actor with interest in his work. It’s the ultimate trap.” He also insisted that—thanks to the series—his private life had fallen apart, and he was trying to “patch it together.”
In August 1971, the pressures of work finally overcame him. Peter collapsed on the set (partially because of a flu bug) and was sent home by ambulance. In November 1971, the activist actor lost his bid for a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild. (Sources reported that he shot a bullet through the telegram that brought him the defeat notice, though other friends said he immediately began planning for the next election.)
That December, Peter volunteered to work two weekends at out-of-state Toys for Tots telethons. A photo taken of Peter at one of the charity events showed him holding a toy pistol to his head. It was a stunt he pulled occasionally while sitting in the makeup chair at the studio, holding his prop gun to his temple and saying “Click . . . click . . . click.” Also in December 1971, Duel found himself in court regarding an October 1970 traffic accident in which he had injured two people while driving drunk. Since this was his third DWI charge, he lost his driver’s license, was put on probation, and ordered to pay a fine. Duel was very despondent over his drinking problem and other reputed substance abuse.
On Thursday night, December 30, 1971, Peter planned to join some friends to see the movie A Clockwork Orange after finishing work on the Alias Smith and Jones set. But he was called back to re-record some dialogue. When his friends left, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Peter and his friend Harold Rizzell returned to his Hollywood Hills home on Glen Green Drive in time to watch the start of his 8:00 P.M. TV series (that night’s episode of Alias Smith and Jones dissatisfied him). Then he switched channels to a Lakers basketball game. During the evening, Peter drank heavily, leading to an argument with his live-in girlfriend, Diana Ray, an unemployed secretary. After their argument, she retired for the night, while Duel stayed up to watch more television.
About 12:30 A.M., Peter came into the bedroom and removed his revolver from a table drawer. Diana awakened at the sound. He said, “I’ll see you later,” and left the room. A few minutes went by, and then she heard a single shot. When she hurried into the living room, she found Peter dead, nude, beneath the Christmas tree. (Also lying under the tree were wrapped holiday gifts for Duel’s parents, who were due to arrive in Los Angeles that weekend.) The shot had entered Duel’s right temple and exited the left side of his head. It had then traveled through the front window of Duel’s home, leaving a small hole. Police investigation revealed that another spent shot in the gun chamber had been discharged a week or so earlier.
A memorial service was held for Duel in Los Angeles at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, California. Peter was not a member, but his manager was. The nondenominational service was conducted by Brother Dharmandandra, who eulogized that the late actor’s spirit “is now free from the body and has risen and rests in the bosom of God.” Duel’s remains were flown back to Penfield, New York, where after a service at the Baptist Church on January 5, 1972, Peter was buried in the Penfield Cemetery.
Wanting to keep Alias Smith and Jones going, Universal replaced Peter in his role with actor Roger Davis (who had already been doing narration on the program), but the show folded in early 1973. Ironically, the acting work of which Peter was most proud—playing Squire Talbot in The Scarecrow—was telecast on Hollywood TV Theatre on January 10, 1972, several days after Peter’s death.
[Lillian Millicent Entwistle]
July 1, 1908–September 18, 1932
No study of Tinseltown heartbreak would be complete without some reference to the blond, blue-eyed Peg Entwistle, who earned a permanent place in movie trivia the hard way. She was the former Broadway actress who became so depressed when screen success eluded her that she jumped to her death from the five-stories-high “Hollywoodland” sign on Mount Lee. (The “land” portion of the sign was removed in 1945, leaving the now-iconic “Hollywood.”)
Lillian Millicent Entwistle, known as Peg, was born in London, England, in 1908. When she was still a child her mother died, and Mr. Entwistle and his daughter moved to New York City. He soon remarried and had two sons, Robert and Milton. When the father was run over by a truck on Park Avenue, the two boys were sent to Los Angeles to live with their Uncle Harold. Peg remained behind in Manhattan to pursue her acting career. At age 17, she made her stage debut with a Boston repertory company, and soon was working on Broadway in prestigious Theater Guild productions.
Peg married actor Robert Keith (10 years her senior) in 1927, but shortly discovered that he not only had been married previously but also had a six-year-old son, Brian (who later became a film and TV actor). In the process of divorcing Robert, she generously paid his back alimony to keep him out of jail. In need of work, Peg continued in her stage efforts. She costarred with Dorothy Gish in Getting Married (1931) and with Laurette Taylor in Alice-Sit-By-the-Fire (1932). The Depression, however, hit the New York theater scene hard, and the out-of-work Peg decided to try the movies.
She arrived in Los Angeles in April 1932, and after a stay at the Hollywood Studio Club (a rooming hotel for women), moved in with her Uncle Harold to save money. His modest bungalow was at 2428 Beachwood Canyon Drive in Hollywood, not far from the “Hollywoodland” sign, which had been erected in 1923 to promote a new (and ultimately unsuccessful) five-hundred-acre real-estate development. Peg found stage work with Billie Burke in The Mad Hopes, but the play folded after a brief run. Dejected after this latest setback, Peg became elated when RKO signed her for a small picture role in a murder mystery, Thirteen Women (1932), starring Irene Dunne. In August of that year, the movie was previewed. But the critics’ reaction to the thriller was so poor that the studio held back general release so it could re-edit the film (it would not be released officially until after Peg’s death). Meanwhile, Peg’s studio option was dropped, leaving her extremely despondent.
Her uncle later recalled that Peg tried desperately to raise the train fare to return to New York, but could not get a loan. After dinner on September 18, 1932, wearing a dress that stage actress Effie Shannon had lent her, she left the Beachwood Canyon house. She told her uncle that she was going to the local Hollywoodland drugstore. Instead, she walked up the nearby road that led to the big electric-light sign. Reaching the towering letters, she stopped beneath the “H.” Peg removed her coat and placed it neatly next to her purse. Then she slowly climbed up the electrician’s ladder on the 50-foot-high “H.” Partway up, one of her shoes fell off. Finally reaching the top of the giant letter, Peg jumped from it and plunged to her death.
The famous Hollywood sign. In 1932, despondent actress Peg Entwistle ended her life by climbing to the top of the “H” and jumping to her death.
Courtesy of Photofest
Several days later, a female hiker came across her coat and purse and left them at the door of the local police station. A note was found inside the purse; it read:
This evidence led authorities to Peg’s body, but they could not identify the young woman’s corpse. When news of the suicide by “P.E.” made the headlines, Harold Entwistle—distraught about the vanished Peg—read the account and hastened to the morgue. After identifying the victim as Peg, he told the press, “Although she never confided her grief to me, I was somehow aware that she was suffering intense mental anguish. . . . It is a great shock to me that she gave up the fight as she did.” Ironically, a letter posted the day before Peg died soon arrived at Uncle Harold’s. It was from the Beverly Hills Playhouse, offering the actress the lead in their next production—the story of a young woman who commits suicide.
September 1, 1920–October 6, 2000
After over 60 years in films, Richard Farnsworth had been Oscar-nominated twice, first for Comes a Horseman (1978) and then for The Straight Story (1999). For the latter, a tale of an Iowa senior citizen who drives a lawnmower all the way to Wisconsin to see his dying brother, Farnsworth became the oldest performer ever to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actor category. The weathered talent with the wistful blue eyes and bushy moustache was an icon among independent filmmakers, famous for his durability, his honest acting, and his hatred of movie dialogue that utilized curse words. But everything came to an end for Farnsworth in October 2000, when he committed suicide with a gunshot to the head.
Born in Los Angeles, Richard was an uninterested student who quit his schooling during the Great Depression to help support his widowed mother. He had learned to ride when he was 10, and at the age of 15 he went to work as a stable boy at a local polo barn. In 1937, Farnsworth made his screen debut in an uncredited bit part in the Marx Brothers’ comedy A Day at the Races. He also did stunts (as a steeplechase rider) for the movie. A stuntman’s daily pay was more than the five dollars per week that Richard was then earning as a stable boy. The next year, when he was cast as one of the many Mongolian horseback riders who paraded through Gary Cooper’s The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), Farnsworth finally abandoned stable work for the big screen.
When not doing stunt work in movies, the lanky, six-foot-tall Richard could be found on the rodeo circuit. After fighting in the service during World War II, he returned to Hollywood and his stuntman’s career. In 1947, he got married. Farnsworth and his wife, Maggie, would have two children, Melissa in 1949 and Richard Jr. in 1950. Among Farnsworth’s movie contributions in these decades were Red River (1948, doubling for Montgomery Clift), The Wild One (1954, doing some of Marlon Brando’s stunts), Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956, driving chariots), and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960, he was Kirk Douglas’s double). He was also James Garner’s double in Duel at Diablo (1966) and Paul Newman’s in Pocket Money (1972). Richard also participated in several TV series over the years, including Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bonanza, and The Big Valley. In 1961, he was one of the cofounders of the Stuntman’s Association.
In the late 1970s, after he’d retired from stunt work, Farnsworth’s wife Maggie convinced her shy spouse to try some on-camera speaking roles. To the amazement of many, he was Oscar-nominated for one of these early big-screen entries, the Western Comes a Horseman (1978, starring Jane Fonda). After that, Richard, who had now been working in Hollywood for over four decades, was much in demand to play no-nonsense, plain-speaking characters. He might appear in a typical sagebrush tale (1981s The Legend of the Lone Ranger) or as the congenial unmarried elderly brother in the TV miniseries Anne of Green Gables (1985). In 1985, Farnsworth’s wife passed away.
When filmmaker David Lynch offered Richard the script to The Straight Story, the down-home actor was immediately attracted to the role of the plain-spoken old codger. At the time Farnsworth made the physically demanding picture, people knew that he was suffering from a bum hip, but he made no mention that he had actually been fighting very painful prostate cancer (which eventually spread to his bones) for a few years already.
In 2000, the 79-year-old Richard, who now was hobbling and had to use a cane, underwent surgery for the cancer. He recuperated at his 40-acre ranch near Lincoln, New Mexico, which he shared with his fiancée of 11 years, Jewel Van Valin, a 45-year-old flight attendant. Belatedly, it was made public that the operation had left the very private and proud actor partially paralyzed and unable to walk. Despite being wheelchair-bound, he still made it to the local racetrack on occasion, and once went to Santa Fe to accept an award from the governor of New Mexico. The feisty Farnsworth was even considering tackling a role in an upcoming Charlton Heston picture, The Last Man’s Club, about World War II vets.
As the weeks went on, however, Richard’s pain from the spreading cancer gradually became unbearable. He told an old pal, “It’s been a nice ride, but this old world’s gotten too heavy for me.” Finally, on October 6, 2000, the stoic Farnsworth took out his .38 revolver and ended his misery by shooting himself in the head. His fiancée, Jewel, was in the next room at the time. She immediately knew what had happened. Unable to go into the bedroom, she went to her neighbors for help, and they called the police.
Farnsworth is survived by his two children (his son Richard—better known as Diamond —is also a stuntman) and three grandchildren.
[Charles Hall Locher]
February 23, 1913–December 13, 1979
Throughout their shared history, Hollywood and moviegoers have always been fond of cinema love teams from Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and more recently, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Along the way, people flocked to see Maria Montez and Jon Hall. Together, the exotic, beautiful Maria and the handsome, muscular Jon paraded through several magnificently absurd and vivid celluloid romps, including Arabian Nights (1942), Cobra Woman (1944), and Sudan (1945). These escapist pictures were the high point of both stars’ careers. Montez would die of a heart attack in her bathtub in 1951; Hall would take his own life in 1979.
Charles Hall Locher’s father was a Swissborn skating champ turned character actor, Felix Locher; his mother was Tahitian. Charles was born in 1913 in Fresno, California, because his mother’s train happened to be stopped there when she went into labor. He spent part of his childhood in Tahiti and then was educated in England and Switzerland. By 1935, Charles, now six feet, two inches tall, had appeared onstage and made his screen debut in Hollywood. Later, changing his name to Lloyd Crane, he performed in Mind Your Own Business (1936) and The Girl from Scotland Yard (1937). Samuel Goldwyn cast him in The Hurricane (1937), a spectacle that featured him as a Polynesian in love with native beauty Dorothy Lamour. A proficient swimmer, the athletic newcomer did his own aquatic stunts in the tropical epic. His new screen name, Jon Hall, came from his middle name, which reflected the surname of a relative (Norman Hall) who had coauthored the novel on which the epic was based. Jon was promoted as “Goldwyn’s Gift to Women.”
After The Hurricane, Hall was away from the screen for three years and off on his own adventures. He returned in Kit Carson (1940). He signed a contract with Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, and made his mark there in six Technicolor fantasies with the beguiling Maria Montez. Off camera, he was married to vocalist and actress Frances Langford from 1939 to 1955.
In the early 1950s, Jon moved to television, starring in the very popular adventure series Ramar of the Jungle (1952–54). Then, since his waist had thickened, he abandoned acting, becoming involved in firms that sold lucrative underwater photography equipment. Jon also married and divorced ex-actress Raquel Torres—twice. Finally, he both directed and starred in The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965). It would prove to be his final film. Looking back on his movie career, Hall said, “I never liked acting. I don’t like to be told what to do and what to say and how to say it. . . as a profession, it’s a bore.”
Former film star Jon Hall poses in the 1970s with a publicity shot of himself from Ramar of the Jungle, a TV series made two decades earlier.
Courtesy of JC Archives
For the final decade of his life, Hall kept a low profile. When Dino De Laurentiis produced an elaborate (but vapid) remake of The Hurricane (1979), Jon was among the celebrities persuaded to attend the Los Angeles premiere. The once-robust movie star appeared extremely gaunt and unhealthy—he was suffering from bladder cancer.
On December 13, 1979, Hall’s married sister returned to her North Hollywood home, where Jon was staying. She found that Hall had shot himself in the head with a single bullet that morning (later estimated at 7:00 A.M.). He had been bedridden for several months, in agony from his terminal disease, and had tired of being a burden to himself and others.
[Russell Craig Hamer]
February 15, 1947–January 18, 1990
There is always a price to pay for fame and success, especially when it happens too early in life. This is especially true of child stars in the cutthroat entertainment field.
The relatively short, unhappy life of Russell Craig Hamer began in 1947 in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was the third son of parents who were involved in local theater. His father, a salesman with the Manhattan Shirt Company, was transferred to the West Coast in 1951. Once the family was settled in Los Angeles, Rusty’s acting career began when he was cast in a stage production of On Borrowed Time. Then his parents escorted him to an open audition call for a youngster to play Danny Thomas’s son in a forthcoming TV comedy series. Thomas was impressed with the boy and hired him from among five hundred applicants. After seeing the curly-haired Rusty perform in the stage play, the comic told the young actor, “I picked you because you were so cute. And now I find out you’re a great little actor, too.”
Make Room for Daddy (a.k.a. The Danny Thomas Show) debuted in September 1953 and became a hit series, lasting through 1964. On the surface, it appeared that Rusty was enjoying a marvelous life. Actually, it was far from that. Rusty’s dad died when the boy was six, and as a TV-series regular, he now became the family’s financial mainstay. All of this weighed heavily on the child. His education was a mixture of on-the-set tutoring and brief stays at a Roman Catholic school, where his classmates refused to accept the small celebrity as one of their peers.
After The Danny Thomas Show ended, Hamer found it difficult to obtain other acting assignments, especially since he had gained a lot of weight after puberty. When Rusty turned 21, he learned that much of his trust fund had evaporated after being invested in risky stocks. In the late 1960s he got married, but the union ended in divorce after a year.
In 1970, Danny Thomas, who had been Rusty’s surrogate dad and regarded him as “the best boy actor I ever saw in my life,” came to Rusty’s career rescue. Thomas was in the process of reassembling several of the cast members from the original series for a new spinoff, Make Room for Granddaddy, whose plotline had Hamer’s character now 23 years old and married. Unfortunately, that show lasted just one season. Thereafter, Rusty never earned more than $10,000 a year, working in Los Angeles for a messenger service and filling other temporary jobs.
Unable to deal with living in the town that had rejected him, the disillusioned and soured Hamer moved to DeRidder, Louisiana, 40 miles north of Lake Charles. He occasionally helped out at his brother John’s restaurant; at other times he worked offshore for Exxon, and sometimes he found employment delivering newspapers. It was a sad existence for the former child star, and there was no respite in sight.
On January 18, 1990, John came to Rusty’s trailer and found him dead. The ex-actor had shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. Rusty’s brother told the media, “He hasn’t really been happy since his early 20s. But he didn’t show any signs of this happening. It was just all of a sudden.”
November 5, 1957–October 18, 1984
In the entertainment industry, it is not only actresses who must contend with being “just another pretty face.” A lot of male actors are locked into a rigid mold by their outstanding good looks; they begin to lose their identities because no one will look beyond their marketable exteriors. Jon-Erik Hexum was one such victim.
Jon-Erik was born in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1957, the second son of Norwegian immigrants. When he was seven, his parents divorced. His father left the state—and their lives—two years later. His mother, Greta, worked as a secretary by day and as a waitress at night to support her children. Even as a youngster, Jon-Erik was stagestruck and commuted to New York for dance and music lessons. He could play the piano, organ, and violin; in his church band, he was the drum major.
After attending Case Western Reserve University in Ohio for a few semesters, he transferred to Michigan State University. There, Hexum majored in biomedical engineering, worked as an off-campus disc jockey, and played an assortment of sports, including football. This led to an unwanted reunion with his dad. Jon-Erik had not seen his father, Thor, since he was nine, but then Thor saw his son on a televised gridiron game and got in touch. Jon-Erik told him, “You blew it, guy. Go to hell.”
After graduation, Jon-Erik returned to the East Coast, determined to have a career in show business. He worked nights in various restaurants so he could audition during the days. The only acting role he could obtain was in a stock version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown in Auburn, New York.
One of Hexum’s day jobs was cleaning Venetian blinds. One day, a client of his turned out to be a pal of John Travolta’s manager. The manager, in turn, thought handsome six-foot, one-inch, 190-pound Jon-Erik had show-business potential and helped to launch his acting career. Soon the tall hunk was modeling for two beefcake calendars. With his earnings, he settled in Los Angeles. He had to work for a time as a busboy in a Venice restaurant, sharing a fleabag apartment with two coworkers. But not long thereafter, Jon-Erik was spotted by a casting director and hired for Voyagers (1982-83), a science-fiction adventure TV series.
Although he was making headway in show business, Hexum maintained a frugal lifestyle, living modestly in an unfurnished house in a nonexclusive section of Burbank and driving a funky old 1954 Chevy. His romance with businesswoman Debbie Davis ended, and he later dated TV actress Emma Samms. In between, he was momentarily taken up by star Joan Collins, who cast him as her leading man in the made-for-TV movie The Making of a Male Model (1983). Next, Jon-Erik was hired for the role of Pat Trammel, the cancer-ridden friend of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant in the theatrical feature Bear (1984). Hexum was happy to be cast against type.
But it was back to beefcake form in Cover Up, a detective-spy series that premiered on September 22, 1984, on the CBS network. Jon-Erik played fashion photographer Mac Harper, a weapons expert and former Green Beret. On Friday, October 12, Hexum was on the set, playing around between takes with a prop .44 Magnum pistol that he had just loaded with a blank. At about 5:15 P.M. he put the gun to his right temple. Just before he pulled the trigger, he smiled and reportedly said, “Let’s see if I get myself with this one.” Jon-Erik was apparently unaware that at close range, a blank (in reality, a minimal charge packed with cotton) can cause great damage. The force of the discharge drove a quarter-sized piece of his skull far into his brain. Rather than wait for the paramedics, the unconscious actor was rushed by studio station wagon to Beverly Hills Medical Center, where he lay in critical condition.
Still in a coma six days later, on the evening of October 18, he was declared brain-dead. The next morning, with his mother’s approval, Jon-Erik was flown to San Francisco—still on a life-support system—where his heart was implanted into the body of a dying 36-year-old Las Vegas businessman. The actor’s kidneys and corneas were also removed and placed in organ transplant banks. Later, Hexum’s body was flown back to Los Angeles for the coroner’s official postmortem.
Hexum’s funeral was private, and the days that followed were anticlimactic. The highly publicized stunt that caused Hexum’s death was ruled accidental, although several people who knew the actor said he had become more distant, brooding, and reckless in the weeks before the tragedy. The last episode of Cover Up to feature Hexum aired on November 3, 1984. The studio conducted a highly publicized search for his replacement, who proved to be another muscular hunk, Australian Antony Hamilton. Nevertheless, Cover Up faded from the air within a few months.
A few years after the tragedy, Jon-Erik’s mother, Greta, won an undisclosed amount in an out-of-court settlement with Twentieth Century-Fox Television and Glenn Larson Productions. Hexum’s death led to an industry-wide investigation and the eventual establishment of new guidelines regarding the use of firearms on a film set. Nevertheless, actor Brandon Lee (the son of martial-arts legend Bruce Lee) would die in 1993 when he was shot with a live bullet while filming a scene for a movie in which, seemingly, the proper precautions had not been taken. At least, however, as an organ donor, Jon-Erik had not died in vain.
[Frances Lillian Mary Ridste]
January 1, 1919–July 5, 1948
Having written this deeply touching farewell note, the pretty, 29-year-old actress Carole Landis, who had attempted suicide several times before, finally got her death wish through an overdose of sleeping pills.
She was born in Fairchild, Wisconsin, the youngest daughter of Polish-Norwegian parents. Soon after Frances’s birth, her father abandoned the family, and her mother, Clara, took the three children to live in California. Frances was starstruck as a child; Kay Francis was one of her favorite film stars. At age 15, Frances eloped with 19-year-old Irving Wheeler to Yuma, Arizona. After a few weeks, they separated, and she returned to her classes at San Bernardino High School. The ill-matched couple reconciled later in the year, but by 1935 the union had again fallen apart.
The body of movie star Carole Landis at her home, as Detective Captain Emmett E. Jones of the West Los Angeles Police Station views the suicide scene in July 1948.
Courtesy of Photofest
She took a bus to San Francisco, where rumor later had it that she enjoyed a very fast life. Now known as Carole Landis, she worked first at the Royal Hawaiian Club (where her shapely figure and hula dance caught the attention of many patrons) and then sang with Carl Ravazza and His Orchestra at an exclusive Santa Cruz country club.
Eager to break into motion pictures, the appealing Carole moved to Hollywood, where both her mother and Wheeler (wanting to partake of her career potential) soon joined her. The determined actress can be spotted in several 1937 features, including A Day at the Races and A Star Is Born. Carole was showcased far more prominently in the Busby Berkeley musical Varsity Show (1937). Thanks to Berkeley, she obtained a Warner Bros, contract (at $50 per week) and had more minor assignments in studio pictures.
There were no headlines when Warner Bros, let her option lapse in 1938. But there were several items published a few weeks later when possessive Irving Wheeler brought action against Busby Berkeley for $250,000, claiming that the screen director had alienated Carole’s affections from him. The suit was dismissed and Landis divorced Irving. After a failed pre-Broadway tour with Ken Murray in Once Upon a Night, she returned to moviemaking in 1939.
It was the pioneering film director D. W. Griffith who rediscovered Carole. When he was engaged to help on One Million B.C. (1940), he selected her to be the prehistoric heroine. By the time filming began, she’d had her nose reshaped surgically, had become a blond, and had embarked on a strict diet. The movie surprised everyone by being a hit and her new boss, producer Hal Roach, promoted Carole as “The Ping Girl.” (She was also known for having “the best legs in town.”) Another of her endeavors in 1940 was getting married again, this time to wealthy yacht broker Willis Hunt Jr. When they parted that November, Carole commented, “We should have just remained good friends.”
After a few more pictures for Roach, half of Carole’s contract was purchased by Twentieth Century-Fox—reportedly, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck was infatuated with her. In both Moon over Miami (1941) and I Wake Up Screaming (1941) she received much attention. But thereafter, as Zanuck’s enthusiasm for Landis waned, her status on the lot diminished and she was reduced to making smaller and smaller pictures. In the fall of 1942, she joined Kay Francis, Martha Rave, and Mitzi Mayfair for a Hollywood Victory Committee tour to Northern Ireland and England. On January 5, 1943, in an impulsive mood, Carole wed naval flier Captain Thomas Wallace, whom she met on the tour. Upon returning to the States, she costarred with Francis, Raye, and Mayfair in Four Jills in a Jeep (1944), a fictionalized version of their USO trek. Carole then went on another USO tour, but on this one she contracted dysentery and malaria. By the fall of 1944, Carole and Wallace had separated; they divorced in Reno in mid-1945.
In early 1945, Carole finally reached Broadway in the short-lived musical A Lady Says Yes. Later that year, she wed wealthy Broadway producer W. Horace Schmidlapp, whom she had met through a new actress pal of hers, Jacqueline Susann (the future bestselling author of Valley of the Dolls). Still under Fox contract, Carole made two minor pictures there in 1946 and was loaned to United Artists for A Scandal in Paris (1946). The next year, she met British actor Rex Harrison, who was married to actress Lilli Palmer and under Fox contract. “Sexy Rexy” quickly became enamored with the spunky American performer. Meanwhile, since she wasn’t getting any work in Hollywood, Carole transferred to England to make two pictures and be with Harrison, who was making a movie in his homeland.
Harrison was back in Hollywood by early 1948, starring in the ironically titled Unfaithfully Yours (1948). He told the press that he and Carole were “great friends and that is all.” Landis also returned to California in 1948, where she initiated divorce proceedings against Schmidlapp. In the interim, Carole and Rex continued their steamy affair.
On July 3, 1948, Rex joined Carole for dinner at her new home in the 1400 block of Capri Drive in Pacific Palisades. Carole commented that she had severe financial problems, but Harrison was too excited about returning to Broadway in Anne of the Thousand Days to pay much attention to her plight. Rex left about 9:00 P.M. to visit actor Roland Culver and his wife. Once he had gone, Landis phoned New York to speak with longtime friend Marguerite Haymes (the mother of crooner and actor Dick Haymes), but she was not there. Carole made several other calls to friends, but they went unheeded because of the July 4th holiday.
The next afternoon, Harrison phoned Carole’s place, but the maid told him that there was no answer when she knocked on the bedroom door. The actor rushed to Carole’s home, where at about 3:00 P.M. he found Landis dead on the bathroom floor. The actress was curled on her side with her cheek resting on a jewel box. She had taken an overdose of Seconal, a powerful barbiturate. The autopsy revealed that there was also a high alcohol content in her bloodstream and that, just before she had passed out, she had been trying to raise herself off the floor (perhaps in an attempt to get help). That night, when a distraught Rex went to the Culvers’ to spend the night, they handed him a small suitcase, which Carole must have left outside their home the prior evening. It contained Rex’s love letters to her.
Carole’s funeral was held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. She was buried in an evening gown with an orchid pinned to each shoulder strap. Among the attendees were Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer (who had flown back from New York). The pallbearers included Dick Haymes, Pat O’Brien, and Cesar Romero. When Carole’s estate was tallied, her debts far outweighed the $150,000 worth of assets. Her memorabilia was auctioned off to reduce the deficit.
As for Harrison, he claimed at the time to feel no guilt over the tragic situation, but later admitted that he spent several months in therapy. Branded the villain in the situation, his Twentieth Century-Fox contract was torn up, and he retreated to Broadway to be—appropriately enough—the philandering Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days (1948).
After the fact, it was recalled that when Mexican-born movie star Lupe Velez took her own life in 1944, Carole Landis had said, “I know how she felt. You fight just so long and then you begin to worry about being washed up. You fear there’s one way to go, and that’s down.”
November 1, 1963–May 8, 1999
To many Hollywood observers, it was no surprise when 35-year-old Dana Plato died of a drug overdose in the fall of 1999. Her life had been going badly for years, long before she ingested a fatal mix of painkillers and Valium. Formerly the bright young costar of the hit TV comedy Diffrent Strokes (1978–84), Plato had endured a tough childhood and an even harder time once stardom drifted away.
Although most sources list her date of birth as November 7, 1964, Dana’s death certificate gives her birthdate as November 1, 1963. She was born in southern California to a teenaged single mother named Linda Strain, who gave her up for adoption. (Dana and her birth mother would eventually be reunited in the early 1990s.) Her new parents, Dean and Kay Plato, operated a trucking firm. A few years after adopting Dana, the Platos separated, and thereafter it was Kay who nurtured and supervised the little girl. The youngster with the effervescent personality was soon taking tap, ballet, and figure-skating lessons. By 1970, she was doing TV commercials, already part of the show-business rat race.
Dana later invented, exaggerated, or outright contradicted facts about her early professional life, which makes the truth difficult to perceive. Supposedly, her mother made her reject the young lead role in The Exorcist (1973), the part that made Linda Blair a star. (Later, Dana would insist that she had also won the key role of a very young prostitute in Pretty Baby, a 1978 film that “instead” ended up featuring Brooke Shields—all because Dana’s mother once again made her turn down the part.) Plato did appear, however, in the telefilm Beyond the Bermuda Triangle (1975) and the benign Return to Boggy Creek (1977), and had an unbilled bit part in The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). According to Dana, it was while she was auditioning for The Gong Show that producer Al Burton spotted her, hiring Plato for an upcoming series, Diffrent Strokes, at Tandem Productions.
The new show’s premise was based on contrasts. A very wealthy Park Avenue widower (Conrad Bain) with a 13-year-old daughter (Dana) adopts the two orphaned children (Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges) of his late housekeeper, and everyone lives happily after. The network sitcom debuted in November 1978 and went on to be a big hit. Gary Coleman, who suffered from a kidney problem that stunted his growth, quickly emerged as the sitcom’s major attraction (and promptly demanded to be treated accordingly). Plato and Bridges became well-known too, but their fame was always tied to the public’s ongoing fascination with the diminutive, wisecracking Coleman.
During the show’s peak years, in the early 1980s, Dana had a reputation on the set for being rebellious and wild. As she and Todd Bridges physically matured beyond the ages of their characters—while Gary couldn’t because of his medical problems—the sitcom plotlines focused even more on Coleman and even less on the two satellite leads. It caused further dissension on the already trouble-plagued set.
Then Dana, who was always “surprising” the producers of Diffrent Strokes, gave them really shocking news. She was pregnant (and unmarried). The startling announcement led to her dismissal from the family-oriented sitcom. In March 1984, Plato married her 21-year-old musician boyfriend, Lanny Lambert, in Las Vegas, Nevada. A few months later their son Tyler was born. A year later, however, Dana and Lanny divorced. Dana went to stay with her mother in the San Fernando Valley, just outside of Hollywood, while custody of young Tyler was given to his father. With no show-business jobs being offered, and her life in turmoil, Plato began drinking heavily.
In 1988, Dana’s adoptive mother died after a long struggle with cancer. Soon Plato was broke. To earn money and to give her dormant career a possible jump-start, she did a nude spread for the June 1989 issue of Playboy magazine. But by the next year she was back in Las Vegas, working at $5.75 an hour for a dry-cleaning establishment. In February 1991, increasingly desperate and acting more irrational, Dana held up a local video store and took $164 from the register. She was arrested shortly. When the press got word, Dana claimed that her arrest happened when she went to return the stolen money. The abortive caper made headlines everywhere.
At this low ebb, Plato was rescued by the kindness of entertainer Wayne Newton, who had never met her. He posted her $13,000 bail. The court sentenced the teary defendant to six years in prison, but that was commuted to five years of probation and four hundred hours of community service. Dana was instructed to get counseling for her mental health and substance-abuse problems.
Dana would later maintain that her court-ordered therapist prescribed high doses of Valium, leading her to become addicted to the tranquilizer. Soon, Plato was charged with forging prescriptions to get more of the powerful drug; she entered a guilty plea to this charge before the court. As part of her plea bargain, she was put on five years of probation, given a $2,000 fine, and required to complete a substance-abuse treatment program. The prescription-forging charge was dropped, and in January 1995, Dana was released early from her probation.
Having overcome her legal hurdles—all duly reported by the media and dredged up by Dana for sympathy on various talk shows—Plato traded on her notoriety to do a few summer-stock productions in both Canada and the United States. She also made an X-rated lesbian porno picture in 1997 (Different Strokes, the Story of Jack and Jill . . . and Jill).
In 1998, Dana returned to Hollywood, where she fell back into her substance-abuse habit. She was nearly out of money and claimed she was shooting a new movie. Wayne Newton tried to intervene and get her back on the right path, but to no avail. Dana turned to the media in yet another bid for sympathy.
By May 1999, Dana was engaged to 28-year-old Robert Menchaca, whom she had met a few months earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while she was visiting her son Tyler (who lived there with his father and paternal grandmother). That May, Dana and Robert were living in a 37-foot-long motor home in Moore, Oklahoma, while he visited his parents. They had also recently gone to New York City, where Dana had appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show to refute claims that she was taking drugs again.
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 8, 1999—the day before Mother’s Day—Dana said she wasn’t feeling well and went into the bedroom to take a nap. Her fiancé, Robert Menchaca, lay down next to her. When he awoke a few hours later, he found Plato still next to him, but her lifeless body was cold. At about 8:45 P.M., after Menchaca’s mother (a nurse) and others tried to revive her, the paramedics arrived. By then Dana was dead. Later, the chief medical examiner of the state of Oklahoma would rule the death a suicide (brought on by an overdose of painkillers and Valium), stating that the deceased had “a past history of suicidal gestures.”
On May 11, 1999, a viewing for Plato’s family was held in Oklahoma City. (Her relatives would later allege that Robert Menchaca, who said he had become Dana’s manager, showed up at the funeral parlor with a camera to take pictures of his dead girlfriend and sell them to the media.) At another memorial service conducted on May 23, 1999, at an amphitheater in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, there were 120 attendees, including Diffrent Strokes costars Todd Bridges and Gary Coleman. Dana’s ex-husband, Lanny Lambert, told the assembled mourners, “She is in a better place. She suffered, and I’m happy she’s not suffering.”
In the days after the memorial service, Lambert and Tyler took a boat out to scatter Dana’s ashes on the Pacific Ocean, as she had requested. It was a fitting end for the unhappy actress, once an ambitious young girl who had loved butterflies, rainbows, and sunsets.
[Freddie Preutzel]
June 22, 1954–January 29, 1977
Today, mention the name Freddie Prinze and most people will think of the six-foot, one-inch, twentysomething hottie who has starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), She’s All That (1999), and Head over Heels (2001). Wrong! That is Freddie Jr., the son of the original and unique Freddie Prinze, whose career flame burned brightly in the 1970s.
Freddie Prinze, the young star of Chico and the Man, in the mid-1970s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
For two and a half years, Freddie Sr. was the enormously popular star of TV’s hit comedy Chico and the Man. At age 22, he had risen above the New York slums and a crummy childhood to become a show-business phenomenon. Beneath the surface, however, he was under tremendous pressure. Freddie was always insecure, and his meteoric rise to fame only intensified his vulnerability. His 15-month-old marriage had fallen apart. He had a substance-abuse problem and a recurring death wish. Finally, unable to take it any longer, the sparkling performer shot himself. It was the end of the short-lived star who, according to Entertainment Weekly, embodied “the cheeky ebullience of youth.”
Freddie was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish—Hungarian father. (He would later joke that his mixed parentage made him a “Hungar-ican.”) He grew up in the tough Spanish ghetto area of Washington Heights. Because he was fat as a child, his mother sent him to dance school, which certainly did not endear him to the neighborhood kids. After being mugged, Freddie switched from dance school to karate.
Like his hybrid heritage, much of Freddie’s childhood was a pull in different directions. He attended a Lutheran elementary school, but went to Catholic mass on Sundays. As a youngster he was fantasy-prone; as a teenager he became addicted to drugs. (He often sold marijuana to earn extra cash.) With his gift for imitations and comic scoffing, he was naturally drawn to attend New York’s famous High School for the Performing Arts. After leaving there in 1973, he performed with the New York City Street Theatre, singing and dancing in Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story.
But it was comedy in which Freddie truly excelled. He haunted Manhattan’s Improv Club, eager to be part of their new-talent nights. Eventually, he was seen performing there and was booked on Jack Paar’s television talk show. That success led Johnny Carson to sign him for several appearances on The Tonight Show.
Producer Jimmie Komack noticed Freddie on Carson’s program and signed him to costar with veteran Jack Albertson in Chico and the Man. The new TV sitcom was set in the East Los Angeles barrio, its plotline exploring the theme of two people from contrasting backgrounds coming to respect one another. The network series debuted in September 1974 and was well-received. Perhaps only Prinze saw the bitter ironies of a Hungarian-Puerto Rican playing a Chicano, and that a year earlier he had been nearly broke but was now a well-paid star.
After his first TV season, Prinze (who wrote his own material) took his comedy act on the road and made his debut stand-up album, Lookin’ Good. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he fell in love with travel agent Katherine Cochran. They were married in Las Vegas in October 1975; their child, Freddie Jr., was born on March 8, 1976. Besides his Chico duties in 1976, Freddie Sr. appeared on several TV specials and made a dramatic appearance in a made-for-TV movie, The Million Dollar Rip-Off.
In the fall of 1976, Freddie began the third season of Chico. By now, he was an occasional guest host on The Tonight Show and frequently performed in Las Vegas clubs. He was the idol of every kid who wanted to make it big in show business. Freddie moved his parents to a house in North Hollywood, California. He had a brand-new multimillion-dollar contract with NBC and another agreement to perform at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In January 1977, he performed at President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Ball, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
In Freddie’s personal life, however, everything had started to come apart. He was sued successfully by his former manager for breaking a business contract. His wife initiated divorce proceedings, and Freddie began to date a variety of women. Then he was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs. He relied on psychotherapy, liquor, cocaine, and quaaludes, but nothing seemed to put his chaotic existence back into order. He told his pals, “Life isn’t worth living.”
Freddie would shock them by pulling out an unloaded .357 Magnum revolver, pointing it at his temple, and squeezing the trigger. (He had first attempted suicide at 17, when he and a girlfriend split up.)
On Wednesday, January 26, 1977, his secretary, Carol Novak, was with the hyperactive Prinze when he was served with a restraining order from his soon-to-be exspouse. Crazed at the thought of being separated from his 10-month-old son, Freddie phoned his attorneys in a highly erratic frame of mind. He drew out his gun and, after toying with it, charged into a nearby room shouting, “I’m gonna do it!” The gun went off, but the bullet went into a wall.
The next day, Prinze buzzed through an assortment of activities, including a session with his psychiatrist. Early on the morning of January 28, Freddie’s manager, Marvin “Dusty” Snyder, responded to a frantic call from the actor, rushing over at 3:00 A.M. to his extended-stay hotel apartment at 865-75 Comstock Avenue in Westwood. As Snyder walked in, Prinze was standing with the phone in one hand and his gun in the other. Snyder tried to reason with his client, but to no avail. A frantic Freddie called his mother, then his lawyer, and next his estranged wife. When he finally hung up, he sat down on the sofa and then, suddenly, raised the weapon to his head. Before the manager could stop him, Freddie shot himself. A suicide note was found in the suite. It stated:
He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center where, already brain dead, his body lingered on for a few more hours. Prinze died at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, January 29. He was buried in the Court of Remembrance at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, California, after services at the Old North Church there. Among the celebrity pallbearers were his good friends Tony Orlando and Paul Williams. Costar Jack Albertson and producer Jimmie Komack were among those who read eulogies. Freddie’s crypt contains a plaque that reads, “We love you. Psalm 23.”
As for Chico and the Man, it continued through the rest of the 1976-77 season without Freddie. For its final season on the air, (1977-78), a new youngster (Gabriel Melgar) was added to the cast as a foil for veteran entertainer Jack Albertson.
Perhaps it was Albertson who said it best about Freddie: “He was a strange boy. He was a barrel of laughs. A real good kid, but at 22 he may have run into problems he just couldn’t handle.” On the other hand, his bereaved mother told reporters, “If anyone killed him, it was Hollywood and all the things that made him show off. . . . What’s my boy got? Just a grave and people who say he killed himself. He wouldn’t do that to me.” Prinze’s self-made fortune had been blown on drugs and booze, but in 1981 and 1982, Prinze’s widow and son received nearly a million dollars in settlements of various malpractice suits against the late performer’s psychiatrist (for allowing him access to the death weapon) and doctor (for overprescribing quaaludes). In January 1983, a jury agreed with the contention of Prinze’s mother: that Freddie, at the time of his death, was acting under the influence of drugs, and had only been playing a prank with the gun when it went off. As a result of the verdict, the family received the proceeds of a $200,000 life-insurance policy.
Years later, Freddie Jr. would say, “If people would only think of his gift instead of his death, I would love it. I have this album of his stand-up, Lookin’ Good, and no matter how upset I was, anytime, ever, the second I played it he could make me laugh. He was so sharp and spontaneous, so fast!”
July 3, 1906–April 25, 1972
Urbane and cynical in life, Academy Award-winning actor George Sanders wanted his death to be the same way. His suicide note read:
Sanders was born in 1906 to British parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a rope manufacturer and his mother was a famous horticulturist. (George had an older brother, who would eventually become actor Tom Conway, and a sister, Margaret.) During the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the family left Russia for England, where George attended Brighton College and the Manchester Technical School. After that, he sailed for South America, where he worked in the Argentine tobacco industry. He refused, however, to take the business seriously, preferring to develop his reputation as a young rake.
Debonair George Sanders, the star of Death of a Scoundrel (1956).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Back in England, a producer heard George’s impressive singing at a party and hired him for a musical revue called Ballyhoo (1933). This job led to radio dramas, cabaret work, and more stage jobs (typically as an understudy). In 1934, George made his screen debut in Love, Life and Laughter. By 1936, he was under contract to a British film company. When that studio burned to the ground, Twentieth Century-Fox took over its assets, including its contract players. Fox’s chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, brought Sanders to Hollywood for the role of a haughty, cold-hearted lord in Lloyds of London (1936, starring Tyrone Power).
The six-foot, three-inch Sanders soon specialized in playing good-looking, cultured cads. He quipped to the press, “I find it so pleasant to be unpleasant.” Moviegoers enjoyed him as Simon Templar, the debonair sleuth in the ongoing movie series The Saint (1939-41). But for the high-toned Sanders, it was “the nadir of my career.” He wasn’t much happier when RKO Studios switched him in 1941 to the role of a similar detective in The Falcon. After four episodes, he relinquished the series to his brother, Tom, in 1942; it became known as The Falcon’s Brother.
Meanwhile, in October 1940, the sophisticated, iconoclastic actor had married actress Elsie Poole, known professionally as Susan Larson. For his own peculiar reasons, the wedding was not made public until 1942. (Once, when asked why he hadn’t brought Susan to a party, he responded, “Oh, I can’t bring her. She bores people.”) The mismatched couple divorced in 1948.
Sanders was very busy in the 1940s, often playing conquest-hungry Nazis in World War II thrillers or fops in costume pictures. In 1949, he married actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in Las Vegas. Sanders remarked of their years in her Beverly Hills mansion, “I lived there as a sort of paying guest.” After their 1954 divorce, Zsa Zsa said that the trouble with their marriage had been that they both loved the same person—George Sanders.
Sanders’s screen career peaked when he won an Oscar as the dapper, vicious theater critic in All About Eve (1950). He chose not to replace opera star Ezio Pinza on Broadway in South Pacific, but did demonstrate his excellent singing voice opposite Ethel Merman in the screen musical Call Me Madam (1953). In 1959, he married Benita Hume, the widow of actor Ronald Colman; they would remain together until her death in 1967. On TV, Sanders had hosted an anthology series in 1957, although his best role was as a supercilious guest villain, Mr. Freeze, on TV’s Batman show in 1966.
His last major screen role was as an aged drag queen in the spy thriller The Kremlin Letter (1970). After that, Sanders decided that it was time for him to retire. That same year, he wed Zsa Zsa Gabor’s much-married/divorced older sister, Magda. Magda’s mother, Jolie, thought that “he just wanted to get back in the family. He missed me. I always liked George . . .” Several weeks later, George and Magda divorced.
Thereafter, Sanders’s health declined. He began to suffer greatly from depression, something he had been treated for, on and off, for years. Sanders entered into another romantic relationship, most notable because the lady in question made him do foolish things like disposing of his beloved house in Majorca. After visiting his sister Margaret in England in April 1972, George—looking exceedingly ill and apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown—departed for Barcelona. On April 23, he registered at a hotel in the seaside resort of Castelldelfels, 10 miles south of Barcelona. He drank heavily that day and the next. When he retired for bed on the night of April 24, he left a request to be called early the next morning. When the staff could not contact him at the requested time, the manager investigated. He found Sanders dead; the actor had taken an overdose of Nembutal and washed it down with vodka. Among George’s effects, besides his suicide message, was a note to his sister:
Dreading the horror of growing sicker, older, and poorer, the cultured George Sanders had created his own exit scene and played it perfectly.
[Rosemarie Albach-Retty]
September 23, 1938–May 29, 1982
As a teenage actress, she was known as the “Shirley Temple of German movies.” As an adult, she was a talented, beautiful star of the international cinema, making her Hollywood debut opposite Jack Lemmon in Good Neighbor Sam (1964). But in the late 1970s, a series of catastrophes turned everything sour for Romy Schneider. When she died suddenly in 1982, the media initially concluded that she had killed herself. Later reports, however, insisted that it was a heart attack that had ended her life.
Romy was born into a theatrical family in 1938. Her father, Wolf Albach-Retty, was a well-known Austrian actor; her mother was Magda Schneider, the famous German singing star of many films. At 14, Romy (a contraction of Rosemarie) made her screen debut in one of her parents’ pictures. Throughout the 1950s she was particularly popular in a series of saccharine movies that featured her as “Sissi” (Empress Elizabeth of Austria). Romy changed her screen image in 1962 by starring in a segment of Luchino Visconti’s Boccaccio ’70, and in Orson Welles’s The Trial. She played a whore in the American-made The Victors (1963) and showed a comic touch in What’s New, Pussycat (1965), with Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers.
Previously involved with actor Alain Delon, Romy married West German actor and director Harry Meyen-Haubenstock in 1966. The next year their son, David, was born. Most of Romy’s filmmaking in the 1970s was accomplished in France. For 1975’s L’ Important c’est d’aimer (The Most Important Thing Is Love), she won France’s equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received the same award for 1978’s L’histoire simple (Simple Story). By this time, Schneider was divorced from Meyen-Haubenstock. In 1975, she married photographer Daniel Biasini. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1978.
In 1979, Romy’s misfortunes began. She and Biasini divorced, and soon afterward, her ex-husband Harry committed suicide. Only a few weeks later, Romy underwent surgery for the removal of a kidney. In July 1981, her 14-year-old son died when he impaled himself accidentally on a wrought-iron fence. Romy went into a deep despondency, particularly over the death of her boy. However, she continued to make movies; 1982’s La Passante du Sans-Souci (The Passerby) would prove to be her last. Based on Joseph Kessel’s novel of the same name, the movie dealt with a mother who is grieving for her dead son. It had been postponed several times because of the tragedies in Romy’s life. The picture was dedicated to her late son and his father.
By 1982, Romy had contracts to make three new movies. But on May 29, 1982, while La Passante du Sans-Souci was enjoying a popular release, the 43-year-old actress was found dead in her Paris apartment. The Public Prosecutor’s office reported that she had “apparently . . . suffered some kind of cardiac arrest.” Other, less official, sources preferred the more dramatic theory that Romy had killed herself, unable to cope with life’s sadness. (Initial news headlines had it that the actress had died from an overdose of barbiturates.)
On June 2, 1982, Romy was buried in the village of Boissy-Sans-Avoir (outside of Paris), where she had recently purchased a home and a cemetery plot. Among the three hundred people who attended the private service (held at a local fourteenth century church) were film directors Claude Berri and Roman Polanski, actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Michel Piccoli, and Monique Lang, the wife of the French culture minister. To this day, the real truth of Romy’s death has never been revealed.
October 14, 1969–March 22, 1999
There is a famous opera by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, I Pagliaci (written in 1892), that tells the classic story of a clown who is laughing on the outside and crying on the inside. That could well have described the good-looking actor David Strickland who hung himself at age 29 when he decided that life was too much to bear.
David Gordon Strickland Jr. was born in 1969 in Glen Cove, an affluent Long Island town. His parents, Gordon (an executive) and Carolyn (a director of Find the Children, a social welfare group), raised him in Princeton, New Jersey. When David was 16, the family moved to Pacific Palisades, California. The preppy-looking teenager attended the local high school, where he was the resident prankster. In later interviews, he would describe himself during this period as disruptive, the kind of guy who partied way too much. But he also happened to take an acting class during high school. To his surprise, he found that he liked acting—almost as much as alcohol (for which he was developing a real taste).
Strickland graduated from high school in 1987. Instead of following the usual middle-class path to college, the 18-year-old David decided to break into show business. He devoted a great deal of time to writing sketches, both solo and with friends. He joined an improv-comedy group called It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye and often performed with them at the Melrose Theatre in West Hollywood. To hone his skills and make professional connections, the ambitious, impatient young performer took nonpaying acting jobs in various student films. He made almost five dozen of them in a relatively short period of time. David also appeared in several local stage productions ranging from Biloxi Blues to Bye Bye Birdie.
In 1990, Strickland made his first big professional project. He wrote and starred in a sitcom pilot, New Used Cars. It didn’t sell, but he loved the experience. He kept making the rounds of casting calls and finally, in the early 1990s, his efforts paid off. David got bit parts on such TV sitcoms as Dave’s World, Sister, Sister, and Rosearme. In 1995, he almost became a star when he played the lead character in a sitcom pilot from Dream Works called Max. However, it didn’t get picked up by the network. In early 1996, David had a recurring role in a few episodes of the popular sitcom Mad About You.
In the summer of 1996, Strickland’s career finally took off. He had been hired for a new NBC sitcom, Suddenly Susan, starring Brooke Shields. The plot had Brooke working at The Gate, a hip San Francisco-based magazine. Strickland was cast as Todd Stites, the publication’s horny but sweet music editor. The series debuted in September; it was slow to catch on, but eventually became a hit with TV viewers. By the spring of 1997, it was the number-three show on the air. According to cast members, David was a very hard worker, always anxious to do his best and help keep the show on the top of the ratings.
This should have been the best time of David’s life. He was in a successful series, earning a lucrative salary, and getting very good word-of-mouth reviews for his performance. (Granted, he was privately unhappy that his character was not one of the show’s focal points.) Only a few other cast members and close friends knew about the hellish emotional pain that David was enduring. For many years he had been going on heavy drinking binges and, eventually, abusing drugs as well. This was something he tried hard to hide from others.
During the summer hiatus from Suddenly Susan, Strickland signed on for a leading role in the dark comedy Delivered (1998). Again, other cast members would say later that they had rarely seen anyone work as hard or as responsibly as David, especially given the demands and limitations of a low-budget quickie film (in which hours are long and the amenities few).
In the fall of 1997, Suddenly Susan returned for its second season. By October of that year, David had been persuaded to start seeing a psychologist to deal with his substance-abuse problems. He lasted only a month in therapy before returning to his old habits. One evening he disappeared on an all-night binge, and no one knew where to find him. Those who didn’t perceive his escalating problems thought it was unlike the dependable David. It didn’t help matters that by the spring of 1998, Suddenly Susan was experiencing rating declines. This put a lot of pressure on the cast regulars to get the show back into the running.
After the second season ended, David accepted an offer for a supporting role in Forces of Nature (1999), starring Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck. It was a major production and an excellent chance for Strickland to showcase his talent. The romantic comedy was filmed on location in Georgia and North Carolina.
By the time Suddenly Susan began its third season in the fall of 1998, David’s problems were snowballing. On Halloween night he was pulled over and arrested for driving erratically. When the police searched his car, they found a stash of crack cocaine. At his court hearing on December 21, 1998, David pleaded no contest. He was put on a 36-month probation and ordered to enter a drug rehab program. If he didn’t do as the court instructed him, he could go to jail.
To everyone’s surprise, Strickland began attending AA meetings. He also started a relationship with Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (of Beverly Hills 90210 fame). On the surface, he seemed to be making a complete turnaround. But, as events would later prove, the reality was very different. Strickland was just being a good actor, putting on a show for those around him. He let the people who cared about him see the good, responsible David and hid from them his depressed, drug-addled side. As later analyzed, these were all manifestations of someone suffering from manic depression and depressive disphoria.
Unknown to everyone except close friends such as Brooke Shields, David slit his wrists in January 1999. He was rushed to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Doctors prescribed lithium and other treatment. For a time it seemed to work, and David returned to his “normal” self. With the greatest willpower, he continued to keep his problems away from the set.
By the spring of 1999, things were looking up for David. He had already directed a feature, Greenwich Mean Times. He was writing a script for another film, and he had plans to direct a few episodes of Suddenly Susan. With all his various acting jobs, he was earning close to $1 million a year. But then everything fell apart for David Strickland. For some reason, he stopped taking his lithium. He immediately swung out of control.
On Friday, March 19, 1999, Forces of Nature opened to big box-office acclaim. The film was a good showcase for David; it undoubtedly would have led to more big-screen assignments. (However, Strickland’s part in the movie had been cut slightly during the picture’s last edit. This was standard moviemaking practice, done to balance out a picture’s running time, but Strickland took the diminished role very personally.) The next day, David had lunch with Tiffani-Amber Thiessen to discuss going to the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony together. According to tabloid newspaper accounts, he was excited about their future together, but she said that before they could plan anything, he must get his life under control and be clean and sober. David reportedly left their meeting depressed, angry, and very hurt.
That Saturday night, Strickland met friends to go out for a night on the town. The group included comedian Andy Dick and actor Jason Bateman. They went to one of their favorite strip clubs, Fantasy Island, in West Los Angeles. When the club closed at 2:00 A.M., they went to a friend’s house, and then on to an all-night party at the Mondrian Hotel, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The next morning, around 9:30 A.M., Jason Bateman and most of the others went home. David and Andy Dick decided to take the party on to Las Vegas.
They flew to the gaming capital that day and started bouncing around from club to club. The two fast-moving friends stopped in at a lap-dance club called the Glitter Gulch, on Freemont Street downtown. Next, they headed on to Cheetahs, a 24-hour strip club. David was chugging down beers at each of these destinations.
Around 4:00 A.M. on Monday morning, March 22, David and Andy went their separate ways. David headed to the Sin City part of town, well known for its assortment of drug dealers and prostitutes. He found a hooker and gave her money to register (so he would not be caught on the surveillance camera) at one of the sleazy rent-by-the-hour motels on the 1700 block of Las Vegas Boulevard South. They were assigned to room #4. After the hooker left, David went back to the lobby and checked into room #20, paying $55 with a credit card. Next, he went to a nearby convenience store and bought a six-pack of beer.
After returning to his room, David placed his wallet and pager neatly on the bedside table. As he finished each of his beers, he set the cans down in a row on the table. Next, he carefully removed the top sheet from the bed and tied one end over the ceiling rafter. He stood on a chair and tied the other end of the sheet around his neck. Then he kicked the chair out from underneath him.
When David had not checked out by 11:00 A.M., the night clerk’s wife used her master key to get into the room. She found David dead, hanging from the rafters. He was wearing jeans, a khaki shirt, and black high-top running shoes. When the police investigated the scene of the suicide, they found a phone number in David’s pants pocket. They called and reached Andy Dick—the comedian was asked later to identify the body. It was March 22, 1999, ironically the day that David Strickland was supposed to have made a court appearance in Los Angeles to prove that he was dealing with his problems; it was part of his drug rehab program.
A grief-stricken Brooke Shields issued the following statement: “I am devastated by the loss of my best friend, whose talent and humor graced all who knew him. I pray to God David’s pure heart is now at peace.”
On March 26, 1999, a memorial service was held for David in Glendale, California. After cremation, his ashes were given to his family. Suddenly Susan dedicated the May 24, 1999 episode (“A Day in the Life”) to the late David Strickland. In the installment, Susan learns about several positive sides of her coworker’s life that she hadn’t guessed at before. Her closing lines are: “It’s the things you had a chance to say every day and didn’t that you end up regretting.” Suddenly Susan would last one more TV season before going off the air in the spring of 2000.
[Guadalupe Velez de Villalobos]
July 18, 1908–December 14, 1944
Petite screen star Lupe Velez was an exotic fireball with tremendous self-confidence, a knack for self-promotion, and a vulnerability masked by sexual aggressiveness. Variously known as the Hot Tamale, the Mexican Wildcat, and the Queen of the Hot-Cha, the madcap Velez ended her life as turbulently as she had lived it—in a blaze of scandalous headlines.
Lupe was born in 1908 in San Luis de Potosi, a suburb of Mexico City. Her father was an officer in the Mexican Army; her mother had been an opera singer. Lupe had three siblings: Emigdio, Mercedes, and Josefina. Lupe’s parents sent her to a convent school in San Antonio, Texas, because she was “too rambunctious.” When her father died a few years later, Lupe returned home to help support the family. Given her beauty and shapely figure, it was perhaps natural that she soon turned to show business; in 1924 she was cast in the musical revue Ra-Ta-Plan.
Lupe arrived penniless in Hollywood in 1926, but soon found work dancing in the local Music Box Revue, which starred Fanny Brice. This stint led to Broadway offers, but Lupe rejected them, wanting to break into movies instead. Producer Hal Roach put her in a comedy short in 1927, but she did much better as the wild mountain girl in The Gaucho (1928, costarring Douglas Fairbanks). The role had originally been thought of for another Mexican actress, Dolores Del Rio (who would remain Velez’s screen rival for years). Lupe made an accented talkie film debut in the badly received Lady of the Pavements (1929), codirected by former screen great D. W. Griffith.
While filming Wolf Song (1929), the irrepressible Lupe (who was five feet, one-half inch) began a passionate romance with her handsome costar Gary Cooper (who was six feet, two inches). For a time they lived together in a Spanish-style house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills. When Cooper’s studio and his parents broke up their romance, the volatile Velez turned to other stars, including John Gilbert, and then fixated on the muscular swimmer-actor Johnny Weissmuller, whom she married in October 1933. Meanwhile, Lupe played fascinating spitfires of various races on-screen in East Is West (1930), The Squaw Man (1931), and Cuban Love Song (1931).
Velez went to Broadway for two musicals, Hot-Cha! with Bert Lahr (1932) and Strike Me Pink with Jimmy Durante (1933). She then returned to Los Angeles and signed a contract with MGM, the studio where her husband was making Tarzan jungle adventures. Her resultant pictures were tame, but she made wild headlines for her ongoing spats and dramatic separations and reunions with Weissmuller (whom she would divorce in 1938).
Lupe Velez in a delicate moment with Albert Conti in Lady of the Pavements (1929).
Courtesy of JC Archives
RKO rescued Lupe’s career from its slow decline by starring her in the tailor-made Girl from Mexico (1939). With rubber-legged comedian Leon Errol as her costar, the comedy set the tone for seven later episodes in the popular Mexican Spitfire series, which ran until 1943. That year, she met the 27-year-old Harold Ramond, an unemployed French actor. Lupe cooed, “I’ve always been used to controlling men, but I try it with Harold and he tells me where to go.” After the Mexican-made Nana received poor reviews in June 1944, Lupe announced plans to return to the stage that fall, but they fell through.
On November 27, a very excited Lupe announced that she and Harold Ramond would wed. By December 10, however, the temperamental actress had called off the planned nuptials. Unknown to the public at the time, the movie star was already four months pregnant and in a desperate quandary. A devout Catholic, she dreaded the thought of her child being born illegitimate, but she was unconvinced that Harold truly loved her for herself. In desperation, Velez even thought of giving birth to the child and then having one of her sisters (who lived with her) claim the infant as her own. Given her religion and the moral climate of the times, Lupe never considered the option of an unlawful abortion.
On Wednesday, December 13, Lupe attended the Hollywood premiere of Nana. She told her good friend, actress Estelle Taylor, “I am getting to the place where the only thing I am afraid of is life itself. . . . People think that I like to fight. I have to fight for everything. I’m so tired of it all. . . . I’ve never met a man with whom I didn’t have to fight to exist.”
Later that evening, Velez returned alone to her Beverly Hills mansion at 732 North Rodeo Drive. (Her sisters were away at the time.) Putting on her favorite blue silk pajamas, she sat down on her oversized bed and swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. The next morning, when her housekeeper couldn’t awaken her, a physician was summoned; he pronounced Lupe dead.
Two notes were found by the bed. One was addressed to Ramond:
The other letter was to her housekeeper and companion, Mrs. Beulah Kinder:
A postscript begged her pal to take care of her pet dogs, Chips and Chops.
(A much-circulated apocryphal account of Lupe’s final day had her trying to exit in a grand manner. According to this narrative, after having her hair styled and makeup applied, she put on a flamboyant dress and ate a solitary banquet. Later, having dismissed the servants, she went to the master bedroom, where she swallowed several dozen Seconal tablets and lay down to await the end. But the mix of the Seconal and spicy food brought on an upset stomach. As Lupe raced to the bathroom toilet, she slipped on the marble tiles. She fell headfirst into the commode and broke her neck, killing herself in a terribly undignified manner. The unconfirmed report states that she was found later, half submerged in the bowl.)
After a dispute between the Beverly Hills coroner and the city’s district attorney, it was decided that an autopsy would not be performed. A nondenominational church service was provided for Lupe at Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s Church of the Recessional in Glendale, California. Over four thousand friends, fans, and curiosity-seekers passed by her casket. The pallbearers included Johnny Weissmuller, Gilbert Roland, and Arturo de Cordova. Later, Lupe was buried at the Pateon Delores Cemetery in Mexico City.
The worth of Lupe’s estate was estimated at $160,000 to $200,000. She bequeathed approximately one-third of her assets to Mrs. Kinder (the will’s executrix), with the remainder placed in a trust fund for her family. One of Lupe’s sisters unsuccessfully contested the will and at the hearing, proudly told the judge how she had saved the estate more than $20,000 by vetoing her sister’s burial in an expensive bronze casket and not permitting a $16,000 diamond ring nor a $15,000 ermine cape to be interred with the body. In mid-1945, Lupe’s Beverly Hills home was sold at auction. The highly publicized oversized deathbed went for a mere $45.
Such was the end of Lupe Velez, who had said shortly before her needless death, “I just want to have a little fun! I know I’m not worth anything. I can’t sing well. I can’t dance well. I’ve never done anything like that [well] . . .”
April 23, 1943–September 4, 1993
It is Hollywood superstition that celebrity deaths occur in clusters of three, each death hard on the heels of the other. In this instance, the trio of show-business passings were separated by several years. Yet the three dead men shared several distinct similarities: each celebrity died suddenly, each was only three feet, eleven inches tall, and each fought to forge a career as a respected, nonstereo-typical actor in the entertainment industry.
When Oklahoma-born Michael Dunn, whose feature films included Ship of Fools (1965), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), Justine (1969), and The Abdication (1974), died in London in 1973, it was listed as a “possible suicide.” On the other hand, there was no question about the abrupt passing of British-born David Rappaport, who was featured in such movies as Time Bandits (1981) and The Bride (1985). One day in May 1990, he took his Labrador dog, Rickie, for a walk in Laurel Canyon Park (in the San Fernando Valley of southern California). The next day Rappaport’s body was found there. He had shot himself in the chest with a .38-caliber pistol.
But the most famous member of the dead trio was French-born Hervé Villechaize, who played the beloved Tattoo on TV’s Fantasy Island from 1978 to 1983. He was oversized in talent and died in a big way.
Hervé Jean Pierre Villechaize was born in southern France in 1943, at the height of World War II and the Nazi occupation of much of his country. His father, Andre, was a surgeon and a member of the Resistance. Unlike his older brother, Patrick, Hervé was a sickly child; he had been born with an acute thyroid condition. By the time he was three, it was clear that his growth was stunted. After the war ended, the Villechaizes moved to Toulon, in southern France on the Mediterranean coast. Hervé’s father did all he could to help Hervé accept his dwarfism, which would be a foregone conclusion if none of the very painful treatments the boy was undergoing proved successful.
In 1955, Dr. Villechaize learned of a new treatment that might help his afflicted boy; it was being used at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Because of the expense of the trip to the United States, 12-year-old Hervé sailed to America by himself. He underwent the grueling surgery and subsequent treatment procedures alone. When they failed to produce results, the teenager vowed never to undergo such painful treatment again. In many ways, this decision sealed the fate of the young Frenchman.
Upon returning to France, the extremely intelligent Hervé tried to live a “normal” life. (Even at an early age, however, the boy had an obsession with death.) His strong passion for the arts led him to try his hand at painting. More than a hobby, Hervé’s work soon earned him national attention in France, especially when he had his own exhibition in Paris.
In 1960, Hervé moved to Paris with his brother Patrick, who was studying at a prestigious academy for painters and sculptors. To pay his way, Hervé began doing illustrations for book jackets and café menus. Some referred to him as the modern-day Toulouse-Lautrec. When Hervé was 18, he became the youngest artist ever to have a painting hung in the prestigious Museum of Paris. Despite this stunning success, there was still a dark side to Villechaize. One night, after drinking a lot of wine and then ingesting turpentine, Villechaize became enraged and attacked—with a knife—a self-portrait he had just painted.
Finding life very difficult in Paris, Hervé moved to the United States in 1964, when he was 21. Soon he met Anne Sadowsky, a five-foot, four-inch costume designer and artist. In May 1968, Anne and Hervé were married. She was involved with a famed off-off-Broadway acting group, the Café La Mama Experimental Theater Club, and introduced Villechaize to one of its focal figures, Julie Bovasso. Hervé became a member of the cast of Gloria and Esperanza, a show that was so popular it moved up to Broadway in February 1970. Thereafter, Hervé alternated between acting and painting.
Late in 1970, after a short trip to France with Anne, the couple separated and Hervé returned to the United States alone. He relocated to Los Angeles, hoping to break into motion pictures and television. Hervé won a role in the gangster comedy The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971), and had parts in Crazy Joe (1974) and Oliver Stone’s Seizure (1974). In the James Bond spy thriller, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Villechaize was cast as Nick Nack, the tiny villain of the piece.
But then, Hervé’s career went into a sudden slump. He was living hand-to-mouth when—at the perfect moment—he was cast as Tattoo, Ricardo Montalbán’s sidekick on Fantasy Island. The weekly show quickly became a hit, and Villechaize found himself a national phenomenon. His character’s weekly announcement, “De plane! De plane!” became an American catchphrase. When he was out in public (he loved to party), fans were so eager to talk to him that he had to hire a bodyguard. (In typical Hervé fashion, she was a woman.)
Hervé’s newfound fame soon led him to demand a big salary hike, to $25,000 per episode. He wanted every perk that his stardom could possibly entitle him to. On the set, he met 23-year-old Donna Camille Kagan, a stand-in. On September 5, 1980, the couple wed; they settled down at his recently acquired ranch in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley. In his spare time, Hervé worked with troubled teenagers. He said he felt good when helping others.
Hervé’s marriage soured quickly, and in late December 1981, Donna filed for divorce. Friends said this split-up devastated the mercurial Hervé. By the next year, the restless and dissatisfied Villechaize was complaining to the press that he was not getting equal treatment on Fantasy Island—he wanted the same huge salary that costar Montalbán was receiving. The producers responded by dropping him from the show in April 1983. (During Fantasy Island’s final season, 1983-84, the tall, bulky Christopher Hewitt was brought aboard as Montalbán’s new assistant.)
In many ways, leaving Fantasy Island was the beginning of the end for Hervé. He had always been a big spender, and now, short of funds, he had to sell his two-and-a-half-acre ranch and move to a modest North Hollywood rental. His health, always precarious, deteriorated further. With his declining career preying on his mind, Hervé began drinking heavily, often consuming two bottles of wine a night. This was a lot for a man who weighed less than 90 pounds. In the spring of 1984, when he began receiving sinister phone calls that he assumed were from a rival for the affections of his girlfriend, Villechaize started carrying a pistol. One night, in a drunken moment, he pulled his gun and threatened to shoot it. It took several minutes of coaxing to calm him down. By 1986, the former star was earning less than $500 a week. (He once said that bad business and attractive women cost him most of the $3.6 million he earned on Fantasy Island.)
By 1990, the diminutive actor was taking two dozen pills a day. His body (his organs were all normal-sized but squeezed into his small ribcage) began hurting so much that he couldn’t sleep on his back. Trying to get rest, he’d crouch on the floor and lean back against the bed. Hervé’s physical condition declined even further (he was constantly spitting up blood and one of his lungs had ceased to function), and he became very depressed at the loss of independence this caused him. In 1992, he almost died from pneumonia and had to be hospitalized for six weeks.
On April 23, 1993, Villechaize celebrated his 50th birthday. Around this time, he found brief work doing donut and beer commercials and was a guest on a few TV programs, including an episode of The Ben Stiller Show. But his physical condition continued to spiral downward and he lost more weight. On September 3, he attended a screening of The Fugitive at the Directors Guild Theatre in Hollywood with his then companion, five-foot, eight-inch brunette Kathy Self. Afterward, the couple went out to dinner and returned home to 11537 Killion Drive.
Later that night, around 3:00 A.M., Kathy was in bed when she was awakened by a strange, loud cracking sound. When she investigated she found Hervé lying on the back patio. He had shot himself in the heart, using two pillows to muffle the sound of the .38 revolver. Two other shots had shattered a sliding glass door that led to the kitchen. By the time the paramedics arrived, the actor had already expired. He was pronounced dead in the emergency room at the Medical Center of North Hollywood.
Shortly before he committed suicide, Hervé had turned on a tape recorder. In his final moments he said, “Kathy, I can’t live like this anymore. I’ve always been a proud man and always wanted to make you proud of me. You know you made me feel like a giant and that’s how I want you to remember me.” Later in the message, he stated, “I’m doing what I have to do.... I want everything to go to Kathy.... I want everyone to know that I love them.” The recorder also caught Villechaize’s last few words as he nervously cocked the pistol, and then the sound of the shots. As he lay there mortally wounded, he said, “It hurts, it hurts . . . I’m dying, I’m dying.”
Hervé also left a note for Kathy that focused on his despondency over his accelerating medical problems. He asked that physicians specializing in dwarfism at UCLA Medical Center be allowed to study his body; then he wished to be cremated. His ashes were scattered off Point Fermin on the Palos Verdes peninsula opposite Long Beach, California.
[Byron Elsworth Barr]
November 4, 1913–October 19, 1978
In his prime he was handsome, suave, and very charming—at least on camera. Away from the public eye, however, Gig Young suffered from tremendous insecurities and a persistent feeling of being second-rate. (This lifelong situation first developed in childhood, when his father consistently favored his older brother.) Craving escape and finding it through alcohol, drugs, and romances, Gig hid behind a well-practiced smile that masked his real feelings. One friend observed after Young’s death, “I think he probably had his own private hell going on inside him.” Costar Red Buttons observed, “Beneath that lighthearted sophistication, Gig was a big baby needing an arm around him.” And a cynical Young once summed up his professional life with: “30 years and 55 pictures—not more than five that were any good, or any good for me.”
Byron Barr was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1913, the youngest child of Emma, a former schoolteacher, and J. E. Barr, a stern Scotsman who founded a canning company that bore his name. During the Great Depression, the teenaged Byron and his parents relocated to Washington, D.C. When the Barrs moved again to North Carolina, Byron remained in Washington. With the encouragement of his landlady, he fulfilled his childhood desire for attention by acting with the Phil Hayden Players. His efforts to please his dour father by working at a local car dealership ended in failure, and he chose to try Hollywood.
The handsome young man hitchhiked to California, where he worked at a gas station and took other odd jobs while studying at the Pasadena Playhouse. He also auditioned at the movie studios. At the Playhouse, Byron met actress Sheila Stapler; they were married in Las Vegas on August 2, 1940. That same year, he was signed by Warner Bros., where his specialties, according to the actor, were “corpses, unconscious bodies, and people snoring in spectacular epics.” Byron received good notices as the dashing young artist in The Gay Sisters (1942, starring Barbara Stanwyck). He took the name of his character in that movie, Gig Young, as his new professional name.
Gig costarred with Bette Davis in Old Acquaintances (1943). Off camera, Davis and Young—who were both married to other people—had a brief affair. Bette was one of several older women that the mother-fixated Gig romanced over the years. In Air Force (1943), he was a copilot; in real life, he was drafted into the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II. By the fall of 1945, Young was back at Warner Bros., where he continued in supporting roles, earning up to $500 weekly. Frustrated by the studio’s failure to push his career, Gig sought comfort from the studio’s drama teacher, Sophie Rosenstein, another married woman. She bolstered him when the studio dropped his contract in 1947. This relationship added to the growing rift between Gig and Sheila, and they divorced in 1949. The next year he and the now-single Rosenstein, six years his senior, were married.
Young’s screen career was stagnating until he landed a breakthrough dramatic role as a drunken composer in Come Fill the Cup (1951, starring James Cagney). This part earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Meanwhile, however, Sophie developed cancer; she died in November 1952. To mask his grief and the boredom from his generally dull movie roles, Gig turned increasingly to drink. He branched out into other mediums, including TV and sophisticated Broadway comedy. He dated busty stripper Sherry Britton, but their masochistic relationship ended with her refusal to marry him. He had a brief fling with actress Elaine Stritch, but the romantic relationship fizzled (although they remained lifelong pals).
While hosting the TV series Warner Bros. Presents (1955-56), Gig met actress Elizabeth Montgomery, the daughter of veteran movie star Robert Montgomery. Much against her father’s wishes, she and the two-decades-older Gig wed in late 1956. By now, Young was stuck in a decent-paying rut as the screen’s busiest supporting actor—never the lead. For one such chore—1958’s Teacher’s Pet with Doris Day—he was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but again lost the award. Back on Broadway, he headlined the sex comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree (1960). In 1963, Elizabeth divorced Gig, who was now a very heavy drinker. Middle-aged and alone again, Young expanded his substance abuse to drugs and turned to various young women.
In September 1963, Gig married Elaine Whitman, a real-estate agent. Their daughter, Jennifer, was born the next April. To pay for his new family, Gig accepted a leading role in The Rogues (1964-65), a TV series which flopped after one season. He and Elaine divorced in November 1966.
By now, Gig was in his 50s, puffy-faced and flabby. He played the lead in the sex farce There’s a Girl in My Soup (1967) and dated actress Skye Aubrey, 31 years his junior. She wanted to marry him, but he refused. A fortuitous career break occurred when his former agent, Martin Baum (now a film executive), won him the role of the dissolute master of ceremonies in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). This time Gig won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
After this recognition, though, he had only lesser TV and film assignments. When not battling his ex-wife Elaine in court over a property dispute, he was bickering with other cast members during a stage revival of Harvey (1971). For undisciplined behavior, Gig was dropped from Mel Brooks’s Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974); he now had a reputation within the industry for being unreliable.
Bruce Lee had been in the midst of shooting a new film, Game of Death, when he died suddenly in 1973. Wanting to exploit his completed footage, the studio restructured the story line and hired Gig Young, among others, to pad out the new scenario of Game of Death. On the set of this Hong Kong project, Gig met Kim Schmidt, a young German actress. It was the start of an on-and-off romantic relationship that eventually led to their September 27, 1978, nuptials in New York City.
Just a few days later, neighbors at Manhattan’s fashionable Osborne Apartments on West 57th Street (across the street from Carnegie Hall) were reporting that they overheard daily arguments from the newlyweds’ apartment, #1BB. The actor’s friends noticed that he had become increasingly withdrawn. Despite their advice, Young still refused to attend AA meetings.
On Wednesday evening, October 18, 1978, Gig called his longtime friend Harriette Vine Douglas in Los Angeles. (She was a 58-year-old married woman he had known for a decade.) He asked her to fly to New York and accompany him back to Hollywood, explaining that his self-esteem was at a low ebb because of his constant battles with Kim. Harriette tried to show her friend “tough love” by refusing, perhaps hoping this would motivate him to face his problems instead of running away from them.
The next morning, Young called down to the doorman to check on the weather; Kim telephoned a local grocery store with a small order. Sometime around 2:30 P.M., in their bedroom, Gig took a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson gun that he had hidden in the apartment and put a bullet through the base of Kim’s skull. It will never be known whether the act was spontaneous or premeditated. After his spouse was dead, Gig placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The fully clothed bodies were discovered five hours later by the building manager, who had wondered why the Youngs’ grocery order was never collected from the lobby. At the death site, a blood-soaked diary was opened to September 27, 1978, the day the couple had married. The police found three additional revolvers in the posh duplex apartment, as well as 350 rounds of ammunition.
At the request of Gig’s sister, Genevieve, Harriette Vine Douglas flew to New York to claim Gig’s corpse. A service was conducted at Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Beverly Hills on October 26, 1978. As he had requested, Young’s body was cremated. Gig’s estate was valued at approximately $200,000.
Gig Young’s death revealed the Jekyll-and-Hyde existence he had suffered for years. Shocked that an apparently amiable, content man could commit such horrific acts, longtime friend and mentor Martin Baum said, “He seemed like a man who had everything going for him. How little we know.” It appeared that Gig had engineered his life to conceal his overwhelming fears from even his closest associates; his greatest role had been playing the part of himself.
