“I hate people who are not natural, I hate people who are stuck up, and I hate hypocrites. Aside from that I get along with everybody,” so said outspoken Thelma Todd at the tender age of just nineteen. A rebel in the days when it was pretty much unheard of, Thelma Todd was nobody’s fool and definitely no dumb blonde.
“I think I must have a brunette personality,” she once said, before declaring that she always believed blondes to be soft and pliable, ready to cling to the nearest male for support and protection. “They’re just waiting to be taken care of and very sweet and easy to live with because they are so amiable,” she said, before admitting that none of those qualities could possibly belong to her. She believed herself to be a fighter who had made her way in the world alone; she knew how to stand up for herself and woe betide anyone who said otherwise.
“You see, I’m not a real blonde inside or I’d be steadfast under any circumstances. No brunette was ever a doormat,” she admitted.
A doormat she most certainly was not, as attested by her on-off boyfriend Roland West during the inquest into her death: “You could not keep Miss Todd out of any place if she wanted to get in,” he said. And yet in the early hours of 15 December 1935, Thelma was kept out of her apartment after West dead-bolted the door from the inside, rendering her Yale key useless. This action was just the beginning of a series of events that led to Thelma Todd being found dead in her car approximately thirty hours later.
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on 29 July 1906, Thelma Alice Todd was the daughter of John Shaw Todd and his wife Alice Elizabeth Todd. John was Irish, while Alice came from Canada, and together they raised their two children at 502 Andover Street in Lawrence. When Thelma’s older brother was killed in a freak farming accident, John Todd was devastated and Thelma decided to make up to him for the absence of a son. She played with boys, was boisterous and daring, and planned to be an engineer when she grew up. One neighbour later remembered that the seven-year-old girl could often be seen riding a boy’s bicycle through the streets, and never wore frills or lace, even though it seemed that every other female did so at the time. Little Thelma Todd was very definitely a tomboy, and while other girls were playing dolls and houses, she instead preferred to play on the boy’s baseball team, hike, swim and climb trees.
Exceptionally pretty and always willing to go along with whatever the boys were playing at the time, it was no surprise that, as she grew up, Thelma became one of the most popular girls in town. However, while others were obsessing on how beautiful she had become, Thelma herself was completely unconcerned with her looks and freely admitted that she would “kill a man who started to ‘neck’ with me”.
Thelma trained to be a school teacher in Lawrence, and for a laugh decided to enter a beauty pageant to find “Miss Massachusetts”. She won and was invited to tour the East Coast Paramount Studios, where she was introduced to producer Jesse L. Lasky. He dazzled her with his plans to start a Paramount Pictures School on the East Coast and promised that if the school went ahead, he would contact her.
Shortly after the contest, sure enough, Jesse Lasky was back in touch to say that his Paramount Pictures School was now in operation and Thelma was immediately enrolled. While there she learnt her craft, took part in a photo story for an East Coast newspaper and encountered her first “scandal” when a fellow student, Robert Andrews, fell madly in love with her and printed the news of their “engagement” all over a New York newspaper. Since Andrews had forgotten to tell Thelma that they were engaged, she gave him a stern talking-to and he quickly dropped out of the actress’s affections.
Although the reason she was initially invited to the studio was because of the beauty pageant, Thelma was always adamant that it was not as a result of the contest that she was later signed by the studio. In a 1931 interview, Thelma told reporter Alice L. Tildesley that the beauty pageant had nothing to do with her eventual rise to fame: “I never heard of a beauty-contest winner getting very far in any other line. I didn’t crash the movie gate by way of a contest, because I was already under contract when I won my title. The fact that I was Miss Massachusetts had nothing to do with it.”
Thelma’s career quickly started to hot up, but just as she was enjoying success, her father suddenly passed away. He was buried on her birthday, and just two days later Thelma was rushed to hospital where her appendix was removed. It was another two months before she was strong enough to resume her film career, and she found herself travelling to Hollywood for the first time, working for Paramount Pictures, home of Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow.
Returning to good health, Thelma continued her journey into film and carved out a successful career playing in comedies at the Hal Roach Studios and Paramount, working with the likes of Charley Chase, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. She was a huge success, but as with many comedic players, she harboured dreams of becoming a serious actress too, so after making the transition from silent movies to talkies easily, she decided to try her hand at drama, starring alongside Chester Morris in Roland West’s movie Corsair.
To shed her screwball comedy image, director West suggested that she change her name to Alison Lloyd, which she did, though only on a temporary basis, much to her director’s disappointment. Strangely, it would seem that Roland West was so obsessed with her being called Alison that when she died he even put his flowers in that name, instead of her real name of Thelma, which she had gone back to long before she passed away. Sadly, the actress’s venture into drama was not successful and Corsair was not the box-office favourite she hoped it would be. She went back to comedies, though remained a friend, business partner and sometime lover of Roland West until the end of her life.
Thelma was loved by everyone at the studio, and while she never reached the dizzy heights of Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard or Clara Bow, she certainly held her own. Thelma was a pioneer and an organizer; while filming in Lake Placid, New York, she decided that rather than sit and twiddle her thumbs between takes, she would organize skiing parties, bobsled trips and other adventures, forcing the cast to go along with her ideas just for something to do. She loved to laugh and joke, so much so in fact that when her co-star Patsy Kelly found out she had died, she did not believe it. “I thought it was one of her jokes”, she said.
Thelma became linked to various men including the English actor Ronald Colman and Academy Award nominee Richard Dix. However, it was a man by the name of Pat DiCicco (originally Pasquale DeCicco) who captured her heart, and the two eloped in 1932 before settling in Hollywood together. However, the marriage was not a happy one, and was said to be filled with violence and emotional abuse. DiCicco was frequently described as everything from a sportsman to a theatrical agent, but in truth he was a lackey for gangsters such as Lucky Luciano, and her relationship with DiCicco became Thelma’s first introduction to the seedier side of Hollywood.
Several years before her marriage, Thelma gave her views on matrimony, saying that she felt when people married too young, they were so intent on being in love that they often refused to look at each other in a truthful way, expecting far too much from one another. “They won’t take account of her quick temper or his extravagance, his indolence or her excitability,” she said, before going on to describe how men and women seem to be so in awe of a great and thrilling romance that the awakening from such rose-tinted slumber was inevitably not such a great experience.
This was almost a foretelling of how her marriage would work out, and it was not long before it came to an abrupt end after a particularly abusive episode at a party. Thelma filed for divorce from DiCicco and shortly after entered into a business (and rumoured personal) partnership with old friend Roland West. He was in a troubled marriage to movie star Jewel Carmen, and some say that it was rumours of his relationship with Thelma that led to the couple becoming estranged. In truth, however, the marriage had been on the rocks for some time, though Roland seemed to be keener to end it than his wife. Jewel did not give up on her husband easily, and stayed off and on in their home, just minutes from where West decided to open a beach-side establishment called the Sidewalk Café, with Thelma Todd.
The café was a big success and Thelma enjoyed working there herself, serving customers and occasionally cooking food. She had always enjoyed entertaining and she took to the job like a duck to water, greeting friends and making sure that everyone had a fantastic time. However, one thing that did not go down well with the actress was when gangsters showed an interest in the restaurant. Members of the Mafia had long since ruled many of the establishments in Hollywood and it was not long before they were in the Sidewalk Café, planning to open a gambling establishment in the rooms upstairs. “Over my dead body,” Thelma is rumoured to have told them.
In 1935 – the last year of her life – Thelma began receiving threatening notes from someone calling himself “The Ace”. The letters demanded money and threatened death and destruction of the café, but even after the accused note-writers had been arrested, the letters still kept coming. Thelma was concerned for her own life and when she was told that a mysterious man had walked into the restaurant, demanding her address, she was even more terrified.
A break-in at her Hollywood home followed, prompting Thelma to move into an apartment above the Sidewalk Café, where her neighbour and sometime room-mate was business partner Roland West. The arrangement of living and working at the café worked for a time, until the discovery that prowlers had been spotted on the terrace outside her bedroom did little to quell Thelma’s fears. As a result of the episode, bars were placed on the windows and she no longer answered her telephone.
On 14 December 1935, twenty-nine-year-old Thelma Todd was guest at a nightclub party given by actress Ida Lupino, though she went on her own as Roland West decided to remain at the café in order to entertain guests. He had warned Thelma that the door would be locked if she was not home by 2 a.m., but not being one to comply with demands, the actress carried on partying until past her curfew. Guests commented later that she seemed very happy and in good spirits despite an encounter with her ex-husband Pat DiCicco, who turned up at the nightclub with another woman.
Finally, Thelma was exhausted and left the party in order to travel home in the care of her chauffeur, Ernest Peters. He dropped the actress at the front of the Sidewalk Café and watched her walk towards the apartment. As it so happens, this turned out to be the last confirmed sighting of Thelma Todd alive.
Although there were many doors through which one could gain access to the sprawling Sidewalk Café, Thelma had a key to only one door, which as luck would have it just happened to be the one Roland West had locked and dead-bolted from the inside. He later said that he just had not realized that Thelma did not have a key to any other door, and that he presumed she would come in by another entrance. According to West he had no idea his girlfriend could not gain access to her home; he told the coroner that he awoke in the middle of the night, heard running water and assumed that Thelma was in the building. He was wrong.
So what happened to Thelma when she couldn’t enter her home? Well, all we know for sure is that on Monday, 16 December, her housekeeper went to the garage located 127 steps away from the café, and found her employer dead in the front seat of her car. This was obviously a grisly discovery for the woman, but what could have possibly happened in order for the vibrant young Thelma Todd to end up in the garage in the first place?
One theory put forward by Roland West is that when Thelma realized she was locked out of her home, she decided to walk up to her garage rather than wake him to let her in. Once there, she turned on the engine of her Lincoln in order to keep warm, not knowing the dangers of inhalation of the car’s fumes, which engulfed the garage causing Thelma to expire quickly afterwards. This seems reasonable, if not a little too straightforward.
Another theory is that Thelma had seen enough of Roland West and his demanding ways, and was scared of the gambling plans for her restaurant. She decided to take her own life in the garage by turning on the engine and slowly waiting for death to come. This theory is a little unbelievable, however, especially since no note was ever found and, aside from a few down moments at the party, she was in relatively good spirits that evening and greatly looking forward to Christmas. She was also an exceptionally strong person who had never shown any suicidal tendencies before that night so the idea of her deciding to commit suicide after partying the night away quite happily seems a little off-the-wall.
Yet another story is that the actress was kidnapped from outside the building by gangsters, furious that she had threatened to pull the plug on the gambling plans for her restaurant. This version of events has several other stories attached to it, however, including one outlandish rumour that the gangsters drove Thelma around Los Angeles for an entire day, before killing her and dumping the body in the front seat of her garaged car, in order for it to look like a suicide . . . This all seems rather far-fetched: if the Mafia did indeed kidnap the actress (which could very well have happened), they would not have had any interest in taking her on a sightseeing tour of the city, and instead would have been more likely to kill her straight away and dispose of the body as quickly as they could.
All we know for sure is that once Thelma’s maid Mae Whitehead discovered the body, she immediately drove to the Sidewalk Café to raise the alarm and awaken Roland West who was sleeping upstairs. She then went to pick up Thelma’s mother, who rushed to the garage in order to see her daughter’s body for herself. She was asked by reporters how she thought Thelma had died, and her response shocked them. “She was murdered,” she exclaimed, though days later she notably retracted her claim and said the whole thing must have been caused by Thelma’s weak heart.
The hunt was on for answers to this questionable death, and everyone dived for cover. In court Roland West swore he had not seen his lover since before she left for the party; Pat DiCicco said he had not seen her since the party; friend Mrs Wallace Ford claimed to have received a call from Thelma the day after the party; while Roland’s wife Jewel Carmen went one better and swore she had actually seen the actress driving round town hours after the approximate time of death.
From all four corners, people were coming out to claim their sightings of the blonde actress, and the only people who remained quiet were the gangsters who were rumoured to have been taking over the café. Of course, the likelihood of them ever being called to testify was zero, since the 1930s Mafia were notorious for having moles and contacts throughout the Los Angeles Police Department. With that in mind, the coroner’s investigation into the death of Thelma Todd was wrapped up quickly and without a firm conclusion. No one ever came forward publicly to announce an involvement with Thelma’s death, and all the characters involved got on with their lives. Roland West stayed at the Sidewalk Café though his directing career was over; Jewel Carmen declared that Thelma Todd had been her best friend, though few believed her; and ex-husband Pat DiCicco went on to have a violent and shortlived marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt.
But what of Thelma? Well, her body was cremated and her ashes taken back to her native Lawrence, though it is said that she does not yet rest in peace. Indeed, it has been rumoured that her ghost has appeared various times on the stairs and hallways of her famed Sidewalk Café, frustrated that even now, nearly eighty years later, her untimely death has never been solved . . .