Some Hollywood scandals involve full-time actors and actresses, while others involve those who have become famous in another area, only to find Hollywood stardom later in their lives. This is the case with our next scandal, focusing on Norman Selby, the boxer who had almost as many wives as boxing championships.
Norman Selby was born in Moscow, Indiana, on 13 October 1872, and went on to become an American world champion boxer. Winning no less than eighty-one times with fifty-five knockouts, he became a legendary middleweight fighter before turning his attention to acting, appearing in a variety of films during the early days of Hollywood.
However, his life out of the ring was far more colourful than the one he had in it, and Selby became something of a joke in the newspapers with his serial marriages. By 1920 he had been married seven times to five different women and was about to marry Carmen Browder (aka Dagmar Dahlgren), which would make it eight times. The newspapers tagged him the “Undisputed marrying champion of America”, although he himself was adamant that his latest adventure would be the last time down the aisle. “I’ve been at it since 1895,” he told reporters. “I feel entitled to retire from active marrying, although of course, I shall always retain an interest in the game.” His reason for divorcing was, he joked, because he kept forgetting his wedding anniversary.
He married Browder on 19 April 1920 and by 5 September that year she had filed for divorce. According to the twenty-year-old dancer, her forty-seven-year-old husband had treated her with extreme cruelty; was abusive and violent; and had stayed out all night just three days after the wedding. During divorce proceedings, Browder’s friend Frances Le Berthon said she had seen scars on the dancer’s body; a result, she said, of spurning Selby’s “excessive love-making”. The disturbing story was that the two had lived as man and wife for just two weeks before Browder woke one night to find Selby forcing himself on to her. When she refused he threw his wife out of bed and hit her.
When Browder told the court that she believed Selby when he told her he wanted a “real girl he could love”, Judge Jackson could not believe his ears. After seven previous marriages, did she not suspect there must be something wrong with him? “No I did not,” replied Browder.
“Do you still believe he wanted a real girl to love?” he asked, to which Browder – not surprisingly – shook her head and said a simple, “No.” The judge then granted the decree, but not before expressing his doubts about the serial marriage habit of Selby: “This man will get another wife if I grant the decree. This girl might as well act as a buffer for the rest of the community,” he told the court.
He was almost right. In September 1922 Selby announced his intention to marry twenty-four-year-old Jacqueline MacDowell, who travelled to Los Angeles specifically to marry the “undisputed male vamp” as the newspapers were now calling him. After much hilarity while being turned down for a marriage licence due to the absence of the bride-to-be, the two were eventually granted permission to marry and posed happily for cameramen. Fortunately for MacDowell, however, she discovered Selby had been seeing another woman just days before the wedding, freeing her from a union almost certain to fail.
He spent the next few years in and out of the newspapers, filing for bankruptcy and having several brushes with the law, including being investigated by police for firing a gun in the bathroom of his apartment on South Carondelet Street, Los Angeles. However, in August 1924 his scandalous life came to a head when he became the prime suspect in the murder of his married girlfriend, Teresa Mors.
Living as Mr and Mrs Shields, Norman and Teresa stayed together in an apartment at 2819 Leeward Avenue, where Selby told friends that he loved his girlfriend more than he had ever loved any woman before. However, the affair was not a quiet one, and although Mors was in the process of divorcing her husband, there were numerous fights about an antique shop they both shared.
The relationship between Mors and Selby was volatile. Mors’ friend Ann Schapp, who owned the shop next door to the antique store, tried to persuade Teresa to leave the violent boxer on more than one occasion. However, this did not prove to be a sensible thing to do, as on one particular evening Selby approached Schapp and insulted her. It became clear to both Schapp and her husband that Selby somehow knew all about their talks with Mors about leaving the relationship, and they opted to be on their guard from that point on.
On 12 August, things took a disastrous turn when Teresa Mors was found shot dead in her and Selby’s apartment. Determined not to be blamed for the death, Selby insisted that he had wanted to marry the woman and that he would never be happy without her. He told police that they had been for a drive and then returned home, where Mors became downhearted over trouble with the antique shop. According to Selby, she suddenly declared she was going to end it all, grabbed a knife and tried stabbing herself with it. When that did not work she took out a revolver, and despite his attempts to stop her, she committed suicide right there in front of him. Quite bizarrely, Selby then said he covered her with a blanket, washed up the dishes and headed out to kill Albert Mors, Teresa’s estranged husband.
In a violent rage, Selby reached Mr Mors’ home, where he was told by the maid that he was not in residence that evening. He left, travelled around hotels in a vain attempt at finding him, and then in the early morning went to the antiques shop to confront his rival. But Mr Mors was not present at the store, and instead Selby encountered a shop full of customers and staff; robbed them all and forced some of the men to remove their trousers so that they could not escape. One gentleman who tried to leave was shot by Shelby, before he turned his attention to Mr and Mrs Schapp, the couple who owned the shop next door.
Police questioned why he would do such a thing as hold up a shop full of customers and then shoot the neighbours, while Selby tried to convince them that it was all done to avenge his girlfriend’s death. “My lights went out when I saw Teresa dead at my feet,” he said. Police descended on his apartment, where they found the place in utter disarray; a copy of his will was on the table, along with liquor bottles. It did not take them long to decide that Selby had been the one to kill his girlfriend. They also believed he had left the will on the table as he intended to kill himself after he had shot Teresa’s estranged husband, Mr Mors. “If I had caught him at home I would have killed him and then killed myself,” he admitted to officers.
“There is no doubt in our minds that McCoy killed [Teresa] Mors,” stated police. There were some doubts in the jury’s minds, however, and after seeing Selby demonstrate a dramatic re-enactment of his girlfriend’s last moments, as well as a surprise appearance by ex-wife Dagmar Dahlgren, they remained split between first degree murder and acquittal.
Finally, Selby was convicted of manslaughter and stayed in prison until 1932. When he left, he spoke to reporters. “I’m through with the prize ring, the matrimonial ring, and the ring of ice in glasses,” he told them, before leaving for Michigan and a job with the Ford Motor Company.
He was not quite finished with women, however, as he married Sue Cobb Cowley in 1937. Unfortunately the new start he had hoped for in Michigan was never a peaceful one and eventually, on 18 April 1940, he decided to end his life in the Hotel Tuller in Detroit. Before taking a fatal overdose, he sat down to write a short note: “To all my dear friends, I wish you the best of luck. I’m sorry I could not endure this world’s madness.” He then signed it with the simple words, “My very best to you all, Norman Selby.”