When she wanted a fancy car to drive, Vivian charmed local auto dealers into loaning her their best vehicles to “transport war heroes.” When the dealers demanded their cars back, Vivian just ignored them, smiling as she drove around town, secure in the knowledge she couldn’t be arrested; after all, she had permission to drive the cars.
And in yet another dodge, Lingle sold raffle tickets for a non-existent Cadillac, with all proceeds allegedly going to worthy veterans. No war hero ever saw the money, but Vivian did, investing just a few hundred dollars to print the tickets, then reaping a quick six-thousand-dollar profit.
Vivian lived a lavish lifestyle, all while constantly working her carefully honed list of rich-and-famous friends who just handed over money without asking questions. But eventually, Vivian’s devious deeds caught up with her. Singer Bing Crosby’s business manager, furious when he heard rumors of the scam, gave police checks she had forged on behalf of the fake Emergency Corps.
The fifty-five-year-old society maven was finally arrested for selling illegal raffle tickets. While trying to keep her chin up as she was walking out of court, she was stopped and charged with forging checks in the Bing Crosby case. She would now be moving to a new place paid for by others: the state penitentiary. But Vivian Lingle failed to show up for her final court sentencing appearance. When police searched her apartment, they found her dead—she had committed suicide.
Vivian Lingle, the sweet faced scam artist, told her arresting officers, “I don’t know what to say.”
1951
Jealous Producer Shoots Wife’s Agent • Real Life Drama
Distinguished movie producer Walter Wanger had a hot wife, hit movies like Cleopatra (1963), and a near-deadly jealous streak. Add a gun to that equation, and you have the makings of a melodrama even more dramatic than his blockbuster films.
The fifty-seven-year-old Wanger (who told everyone to pronounce his name so it rhymed with “danger”) was married to actress Joan Bennett. There was only one marital issue: her agent, Jennings Lang. Lang was married, with kids, but why did he pay so much attention to Mrs. Wanger?
“I’ll shoot anyone who breaks up my home,” Wanger said randomly and cryptically to the agent one day. To back it up, the producer bought himself a gun. He also hired a private detective, who reported seeing the forty-year-old Joan and her thirty-nine-year-old agent rendezvous often, at a parking lot located across from the police station. There was no sign of physical contact, but the information was enough to send Wanger into a rage.
On December 13, 1951, Wanger drove over to the parking lot himself and waited. It was dusk, the “golden time of day,” in movie parlance. He watched in disbelief as he saw two cars pull up. The agent got out of his vehicle and sauntered over to Joan’s car; she rolled down the window. He leaned over for a cozy chat.
Wanger’s eyes zoomed into his beautiful wife’s face for a close-up; she was smiling. He had seen enough. Wanger raced over to the oblivious couple, pulled out his gun and without a word aimed at the agent’s crotch and shot him twice. Lang screamed in agony as his bloody body crumpled to the ground. Joan was stunned to see that the shooter was her husband; he looked like a madman. “Get away and leave us alone!” she cried, cradling the bleeding agent as tears streamed down her face. Wanger retreated slowly to his car in a daze.
A nearby gas station manager rushed over and whisked the agent and actress to a hospital. Police arrived almost instantly; they heard the shots from inside the station and wondered what was going on in the nearby parking lot. Wanger immediately confessed, “I shot him because I thought he was breaking up my home.”
Lang survived the shooting, and eventually forgave Wanger. “Aren’t you sore at him?” queried an incredulous reporter. “No,” Lang replied. “Life is too short to be sore at anyone.”
Wanger pled temporary insanity and spent four months in prison for his crime of passion. Upon his release, he produced an anti-capital punishment film called I Want to Live (1958). It was, he said, his favorite film of all. He got the girl back, too. Joan forgave him and finally convinced Wanger he was indeed the only man she loved. The couple stayed together for twenty-five years before they divorced.
The last film Wanger produced before he went to prison was called The Reckless Moment (1949)
Powder burns on Lang’s suit indicate the gun barrel was about twenty-four inches away.
1951
“World’s Most Beautiful Stripper” in Court • Angry Wives Want Her Gone
Stripper Lili St. Cyr was in hot water, literally. The ultra-sexy blonde, famous on the burlesque circuit, was onstage at the Sunset Strip hotspot, Ciro’s. She smiled seductively at the audience. She knew exactly what those men wanted.
Slowly, she unzipped her dress and began to slide it off, revealing barely there lingerie. Nearly naked, she slipped into a giant plastic see-through tub filled with soapy bubbles. St. Cyr giggled. Her hands dipped underwater and, voila, off came her bra, next the panties, her “private bits” strategically concealed by the white frothy suds.
An assistant came onstage and held a towel to strategically cover the vamp as she bent and strode suggestively, then stepped out of the tub, dripping wet. Wait, had the audience just caught a glimpse of her totally naked? That was exactly what two undercover cops were there to find out. They’d been tipped off by some angry Beverly Hills housewives who wanted “that bubble girl” gone and out of their husbands’ sights.
The officers had seen enough. Lili was charged with staging a “lewd and lascivious performance.” She hired the best defense attorney in town, Jerry Geisler, who told the jury in his opening statement that St. Cyr was not a bawdy stripper. “The lovely and talented Miss St. Cyr is an artist!”
The Beverly Hills courtroom became quite the scene inside and out as bystanders and fans crowded around to get a glimpse of the exotic dancer. Geisler explained Lili’s performance as nothing less than a work of art. With a dramatic flourish, he waved the white terry cloth towel she used in the act. It was clearly not see-through. He also displayed her barely-there, mesh underwear that covered her private parts.
After a six-day trial, the jury deliberated for just over an hour (including a lunch break) and declared Miss St. Cyr not guilty of giving an indecent performance.
All the publicity from the trial got the stripper noticed by Hollywood producers, but her film career, unlike her clothes, never took off. Low-budget movies like The Naked and the Dead (1958) and Teaserama (1955) didn’t connect with the movie-going public.
Although St. Cyr was once the highest-paid burlesque dancer in the country, earning around seven thousand dollars a week, she ran out of money and husbands after six childless marriages. She started a mail-order lingerie business and sold her signature “Scanti-Panties,” but that business didn’t take off either. She lived out the rest of her life in virtual seclusion, several cats by her side, when she died alone in her Hollywood apartment at the age of eighty in 1999. In one of her last interviews, Lili raised eyebrows one more time, telling newsman Mike Wallace, “People need some loosening up. Most of the people in this country are too hypocritical. Underneath, we’re all the same.”
Lili St.Cyr in character for photo shoots.
Lili St.Cyr with attorney Jerry Geisler.
1955
The Ax-Murdering Maid • Deadly Row Over Roast
As soon as Peggy King pulled the crispy browned roast from the oven, she sighed with relief. Her boss, the frail seventy-one-year-old Mrs. Katie Hayden, would most surely be impressed. King had only been on the job for three days; she’d been hired to cook and clean for the Haydens, a couple with a reputation for swiftly firing staff members who didn’t perform well. In fact, one employee, Leon Bennett had just been let go two weeks before King started, because the Haydens didn’t like his cooking.
Tonight’s dinner had to be really good. King needed this job; the guy she had lived with for the last two years had just up and left her. She made a promise
to herself to stay strong and never cry again, especially not over that creep.
The attractive twenty-four-year-old housekeeper carefully placed the hot slab of meat on a cutting board, the smell of garlic and caramelized onions mingling with the fragrant seasonings. She leaned in to take a deep whiff and allowed herself a small smile, savoring the moment. This job was a lifesaver; she was making good money working in a Beverly Hills mansion for one of the richest families around. Sam Hayden was a big-time developer; the newspapers said he’d built over three hundred million dollars worth of real estate. His wife seemed real nice, too; she was a bit sickly, but said she was feeling better these days, especially since the couple had just moved into this new house a few weeks ago.
Mrs. Hayden had told King during her interview that this was the couple’s dream home, even though it was right across the street from the big mansion where Bugsy Siegel was murdered in cold blood. King glanced across the street; strange how the cops never found out who did it. She took a small, but sharp kitchen knife and gently sliced into the roast: perfection. It was tender and moist; pink and medium rare, just the way Mrs. Hayden liked it. That’s right, King told herself; keep this up and soon you’ll be getting that bonus pay for the big parties, like the Hayden’s upcoming fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Mrs. Hayden stepped into the kitchen. King looked up with anticipation, expecting praise; but instead, she heard disappointment in her boss’s voice. “Oh no, dear,” said Mrs. Hayden, “that knife won’t do the job. Go get something bigger to cut out the bone.”
King walked to the broom closet and pulled out a small hand ax. She returned to the kitchen and gave the roast a firm whack. Hot liquid spurted out and flew across the room. “No, no,” exclaimed Mrs. Hayden, wiping some greasy drops off her face and grabbing the little hatchet from King’s hand. “Like this.”
And with that, pretty Peggy King inexplicably snapped. She reached for that ax and began struggling with the old woman for control. A morbid dance of death had begun. “She continued arguing with me, and then I just took the ax from her,” King would later explain in courtroom testimony, “I struck her in the head. She didn’t fall after I struck her once, and then I struck her again and again. I don’t know how many times…”
Mrs. Katie Hayden, a multimillionaire’s wife, mother of three and grandmother of two, lay dying on her new kitchen floor, brutally hacked. Bright red blood was streaming out onto the tiles King had just polished so carefully that morning; the crimson liquid now pooling up by the sink where that roast sat, cooling off, bone intact.
The coroner’s report would state that Mrs. Hayden suffered at least thirty deep gashes to the head and neck area from a cleaver-like instrument, gaping wounds that looked like raw meat in the autopsy photos.
King stood and stared at the scene for a moment, then calmly wiped her bloody hands on a nearby dust rag. She took off her blood-splattered apron and along with the rag, threw them in the back of a closet. She turned, went upstairs, and ransacked Mrs. Hayden’s room, “I opened all the drawers in the dressers and scattered clothes to make it appear someone had broken into the house.”
The maid returned to the kitchen, took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let out a piercing scream so loud that six men installing a new sprinkler system outside came running. While waiting for police to arrive, King began dusting the house as if in a bizarre trance
At first, King thought she could get away with it. She suggested to investigators that the killer might be Leon Bennett, the cook recently fired by the Haydens. Police arrested Bennett, who vehemently denied the charge. Lie detector tests were given to all employees. Bennett passed. King failed, miserably. She buckled under pressure, finally admitting she had, indeed, killed her lady boss with an ax.
A jail psychiatrist pronounced King mentally and emotionally stable; she was ordered to stand trial. The case was heard without a jury. Her attorney suggested a plea of self-defense, and King testified she was afraid Mrs. Hayden was going to hit her with the ax. When the judge questioned how a little grandmother could have frightened her so, King was cornered. She broke her promise to herself and began crying, and then sobbing as she choked out the words, “I just can’t understand what happened. She was so nice to me.” King was sent to prison, her sentence: five years to life.
But that’s not the end of this story. Mr. Hayden would make the headlines one more time for another incident that occurred three years later in a new home that he had built—this one for his new wife, Ann. The couple had only been living in the house for six days when two masked gunmen entered the home, walked into the couple’s bedroom and ordered them to be quiet while they ransacked the house, stealing a hundred thousand dollars in jewels.
The culprits were quickly arrested; front-page photos showed the couple in their silk pajamas and slippers holding up a phone cord cut by the bandits. A reporter wrote the perfect one-liner for the family saga: “New homes appear to be a jinx for Samuel Hayden.”
The murder took place at the Hayden Home at 817 North Whittier Drive
Samuel Hayden and his new wife Ann were victims of a burglary in their new home; perpetrators had cut the phone cord.
Investigators were able to lift fresh fingerprints off kitchen counters because the maid had cleaned on the morning of the murder.
Peggy King tearfully embraces her brother, crying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
1955
The “Fur King” Al Teitelbaum Case • Tenor in Trouble
In an era when furs were elegant to wear, the most coveted coats were the slinky minks from the Teitelbaum Furs store at 414 North Rodeo Drive. Owner Al Teitelbaum was a genius at marketing. The press dubbed him “Furrier to the Stars,” noting with glee that his store walls were lined not with wallpaper, but with mink. And that furry lingerie on display? Genuine ermine and real chinchilla.
Movie studios loved Teitelbaum too; his luxury fur-rental program was novel and budget friendly. Starlets were grateful as well. They couldn’t afford to buy a signature ten-thousand-dollar “Black Mist” mink, but they could afford to rent one for a night, looking like fur-wrapped Cinderellas at their movie premieres. They all wanted to look as exquisite as Marilyn Monroe did when she covered up her famous cleavage with one of Teitelbaum’s snow-white mink stoles, lined with triple-pleated ivory silk.
About the only thing Teitelbaum enjoyed more than draping an icon in one of his sixty-five-thousand-dollar black Russian sables, was socializing with the celebs. When the once-famous superstar singer Mario Lanza was down on his luck and in a career slump, he came to his friend Teitelbaum for help; would the furrier consider buying back the furs Lanza had bought for his wife? The operatic tenor was in serious financial trouble—he’d squandered his fortune and had failed miserably at an attempt to become a pop-singing movie star—and now the IRS was after him for back taxes.
Teitelbaum sensed an opportunity. Maybe he could make some money by resurrecting the singer’s career; after all, Lanza had been RCA’s best-selling artist at one time. A 1951 Time magazine cover called him “The Voice of the Century.” He made the singer a deal: not only would he buy back the furs, but he would also loan Lanza some money to pay his bills. In exchange, Teitelbaum would become Lanza’s personal manager and do for him what he’d done for the fur business: market him to success.
Lanza happily accepted the offer. His career was cold as ice; maybe the furrier could warm it up. Unfortunately, Lanza wasn’t the cash cow Teitelbaum had hoped for. The singer was a wreck, struggling with extreme weight gains and losses, showing up drunk at the big comeback event that Teitelbaum set up in Las Vegas. There would be no prosperous payday.
The fur business wasn’t what it used to be, either. Demand was down, and soon Teitelbaum found himself in need of money. While he never would have sold fake furs, it apparently did occur to him to engineer a fake robbery and collect hundreds of thousands in insurance money. Teitelbaum hired a few con men to help pull off the phony h
eist. They broke into the store and loosely tied up Teitelbaum but didn’t even bother to take any furs; instead, they hid the coats by wedging them between others in a storage room.
Ironically, it was Lanza who inadvertently helped put Teitelbaum behind bars. The night of that alleged robbery, the singer had stopped by to see his pal. “Al, you in there?” he shouted, knocking on the front and back doors. “It’s me, Mario!” At Teitelbaum’s trial, Mario testified that he saw no sign of any getaway trucks or bandits who were supposedly robbing the shop of some 230 furs worth around three hundred thousand dollars.
At his trial, Teitelbaum refused to testify on grounds of self-incrimination. Nevertheless, the furrier was found guilty and sentenced to one year in jail. He told anyone who would listen that he’d been framed and was totally innocent. “The charges are bunk,” he exclaimed. “Hokum!”
Teitelbaum eventually closed down his store and moved to Oregon, where, by all accounts he lived an exemplary life. But his shady past reared its ugly head again in 1999, when writer James Ellroy wrote a salacious story about a fur salesman and bogus burglaries. Teitelbaum slapped Ellroy with a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit for invasion of privacy. It was dismissed.
But Teitelbaum’s darkest moment didn’t come until the following year, when his son, the most successful Teitelbaum of all, passed away. Ronn Teitelbaum was the founder of the famous and very successful Johnny Rockets hamburger restaurant chain. He was sixty-one when he died of brain cancer.
Beverly Hills Confidential : A Century of Stars, Scandals and Murders Page 8
