Later, Fox, who had kept in touch with Monetta, brought Pearl and Monetta to Hollywood and signed the girl to a $750 per week contract, renaming the starlet Linda Darnell. Linda radiated fresh beauty in Elsa Maxwell’s Hotel for Women (1939) and was soon promoted by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck into star parts. As Hollywood’s new “Cinderella Girl,” she was teamed with matinee idol Tyrone Power in several features, including The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941). To get away from her manipulative mother, Linda moved into her own apartment, but her independence was fleeting. Having long depended on the advice and kindness of veteran cinematographer Peverell Marley, she married him in April 1942 in Las Vegas. He was 41, already twice-married, and a heavy drinker; she was only 19 but soon developed a similar taste for alcohol.
Because Linda had played too many virginal heroines on-screen, she was in a career rut. Thus Fox devised a fresh approach for the “new” Linda Darnell. As the smoldering vixen of Summer Storm (1944) and the temptress in Hangover Square (1945) she made audiences take note anew. Soon she won the role of her career. When the studio shut down filming of Forever Amber— based on Kathleen Windsor’s racy bestseller about Restoration England—Peggy Cummins was dropped from the lead and Linda became her replacement. Even in the diluted screen adaptation, the blond-dyed Linda was tantalizing as the sexy hussy. A scene in this spectacle called for Linda to be involved in the great London fire. The frightened actress—trembling at the all-too-real flames—had to be yanked onto the soundstage to perform.
When Forever Amber proved not to be a huge hit, Darnell’s movie career stalled. Meanwhile, she and Marley adopted a daughter nicknamed Lola. Linda’s career took an upturn when she was cast opposite Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and then as the mercenary gal in A Letter to Three Wives (1948). Along the way she had a tempestuous affair with the married filmmaker Joseph P. Mankiewicz. In 1951 she and Marley divorced, and the next year her Fox contract expired. She went to Italy for two pictures and then was married briefly (1954–55) to brewery president Philip Liebman. Linda, who was becoming a heavy drinker, tried picture-making again, but was forced to accept a Western (Dakota Incident, 1956), which made no box-office impact. She also made a failed bid for Broadway stardom with a role in Harbor Lights (1956), which closed after only four performances. In March 1957, at loose ends, she wed airline pilot Merle Robertson.
Starlet Linda Darnell in a publicity pose from the early 1940s.
Courtesy of JC Archives
Her drinking problem made Linda—now approaching 40 and no longer svelte—somewhat problematic on film sets. After making Zero Hour! (1957), she didn’t get another film offer until Black Spurs (1965), and that was a low-budget Western full of has-beens. In desperation, she did stage work, a nightclub act, and some TV. On November 23, 1963, she and Robertson divorced.
In March 1965, after touring in the comedy Janus, she visited her friend and former secretary, Jeanne Curtis, in Glenview, Illinois, near Chicago. Early in the morning of April 9, Linda suggested to Jeanne and her 16-year-old daughter, Patricia, that they stay up and watch one of Darnell’s old pictures, Star Dust (1940). After the movie ended, about 2:30 A.M., the three went upstairs to bed.
About 3:30 A.M. a still-smoldering cigarette ignited on the downstairs sofa, and soon the living room was ablaze. The smoke and heat awoke the three women upstairs. Jeanne and Patricia managed to escape. But Linda, afraid of jumping from a window, tried to make it down the stairs and out the front door. She was caught in the inferno in the living room. A neighbor tried to smash through a downstairs window to rescue the screaming woman, but the flames were too intense. When the volunteer fire brigade broke in, they found Darnell unconscious behind the sofa. She had second- and third-degree burns over 80 percent of her upper body.
Darnell was taken to Skokie Valley Community Hospital where she underwent four hours of surgery. The prognosis was bad, and later that day she was moved to Cook County Hospital’s burn treatment center. A tracheotomy was performed to help her breathe. Darnell’s 16-year-old daughter flew in from California to be at her dying mother’s bedside. Linda was barely conscious during their half hour together. However, in her distorted voice (from the tracheotomy), she kept insisting, “Who says I’m going to die? I’m not going to!” She then whispered, “I love you, baby. I love you.” At 3:25 P.M., Darnell mercifully died.
Linda’s body was cremated, and a private service was held at the Glenview Community Church on April 11, with another memorial service conducted on May 8 in Burbank, California. Darnell had wanted her ashes to be scattered over the ranch of friends who lived in New Mexico. That never occurred, and her remains were stored in the administration office of a Chicago cemetery for well over a decade. Finally, in September 1975, when Linda’s daughter was married and living with her family in New London, Pennsylvania, she arranged for Darnell’s ashes to be shipped to her husband’s family plot at Union Hill Cemetery in nearby Kennett Square.
Linda Darnell, whose life was a perfect illustration of the shattered American dream, was at rest. . . finally.
James Dean
February 8, 1931–September 30, 1955
Few Hollywood performers have made such a charismatic impact on the universe as did the boyishly handsome nonconformist James Dean. This impact is all the more impressive because he starred in only three movies during his brief, spectacular film career. In both life and death, he became the symbolic rebel of his era, and amazingly, he remains a legend today. Like only a few others—Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe—Dean remains as popular in death as he was in his short life. His icon refuses to fade, as new “revealing” biographies of the star continue to pour forth.
He was born James Byron Dean on February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana, the son of Quaker dental technician Winton Dean and Methodist homemaker Mildred (Wilson) Dean. When he was nine his mother died, and he went to live with his Aunt Hortense Wilson and her husband, Marcus, in nearby Fairmount. In high school (class of 49), his drama teacher, Adeline Nall, coaxed him into entering a public speaking contest, and he ended by winning the state trophy. His father urged him to become a lawyer, and Jimmy enrolled first at Santa Monica City College and then transferred to UCLA, where he majored in drama before dropping out. His roommate, actor William Bast, got him a job as an extra in a television commercial. Next, Dean worked as an NBC network page, and then a movie extra.
At the suggestion of actor James Whitmore, Dean moved to New York in the fall of 1951 to find himself. Always a loner, he became even more so in Manhattan. But he knew instinctively how to seize opportunities and, through friends, auditioned for See the Jaguar (1952), in which he made his Broadway debut. Between that flop and his next Broadway assignment, The Immoralist (1954), he did a great deal of live TV.
While on the East Coast, Dean studied at the Actors Studio, where director Elia Kazan hired him for an upcoming movie, East of Eden (1955). As one of Raymond Massey’s tormented sons, Jimmy struck a chord with teenage moviegoers everywhere and immediately became their new screen hero. While shooting Eden— for which he would be Oscar-nominated—Jimmy fell in love with a young Italian import, Pier Angeli, then a rising MGM star. She was as moody as he was. Her emotional nature and outside pressures led her to break off their intense engagement; in November 1954, when she married singer Vic Damone, Jimmy sat brooding in his car across the street from the church. Thereafter, the reportedly bisexual Dean dated a host of movie starlets and became even more obsessive about acting. He was also an avid gun collector, motorcyclist, and photographer (especially enjoying taking shots of himself).
Nicholas Ray, who directed Dean and Natalie Wood in the juvenile-delinquency study Rebel Without a Cause (1955), said of the fair-haired, brooding Dean: “My feelings were that he could have surpassed any actor alive.” With Rebel, Jimmy became a major Hollywood star and the new spokesperson for a teenage generation, which had earlier worshipped Marlon Brando. Director George Stevens hired Dean for his big-budget, Texas e
pic Giant (1956), in which Jimmy’s character, Jett Rink, goes from young, impoverished farmhand to megamillionaire, middle-aged oilman.
Always a daredevil, Dean’s pride and joy was his silver Porsche Spyder (which he nicknamed “Little Bastard”). On September 30, 1955, a week after completing Giant, he was out for a spin—driving at 86 miles per hour—when at 5:59 P.M. his car collided with another vehicle at the intersection of Routes 41 and 466 near Paso Robles, California. His passenger, Porsche factory mechanic Rolf Weutherich, suffered a broken leg and head injuries; the driver of the other car, David Turnupseed, was only injured slightly. In the crash, Dean’s head was nearly severed from his body.
A few hours earlier, in Bakersfield, a police officer had issued a speeding ticket to the reckless Dean and cautioned him to slow down. Dean had been heading to a sports car rally in Salinas. Reportedly, Jimmy Dean’s final words to Rolf Weutherich before the fatal car smashup were regarding the oncoming car: “He’s got to see us.”
Dean was buried on October 8, 1955, at Park Cemetery in Fairmount, Indiana. (The original tombstone, as well as a bust of Dean on a nearby pillar, were stolen and the grave marker had to be replaced.) His death touched off a wave of sorrow from fans, unequaled since Rudolph Valentino’s death decades earlier. Both Rebel Without a Cause and Giant were released posthumously. For the latter picture, Dean was again Oscar-nominated.
For years, rumors circulated that Dean actually had not died in the crash but had been so badly disfigured that he remained in hiding. He became a cult figure with many fan clubs worldwide. Admirers and tourists make pilgrimages to his hometown on the anniversary of his death for the three-day annual celebration sponsored by Fairmount, and the Internet boasts numerous James Dean websites. There is a finely crafted bust of Dean at the north side of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, where part of Rebel was shot. At Princeton University there is a life mask of the late actor in a collection that features likenesses of Beethoven, Keats, and other creative giants.
Ann Doran, who had played Dean’s mother in Rebel Without a Cause, observed about the late star, “He was kind of in limbo. He had great doubts about himself and where he was going. He was that lost.” It was this telltale vulnerability, plus his extraordinary ability to communicate with his audience, that has made Dean such an enduring pop figure.
Eric Fleming
July 4, 1925–September 28, 1966
At times an actor, like a gambler, has to know when to stop. Eric Fleming didn’t, and by tempting fate, he lost his life.
Eric was born in Santa Paula, California. Before he was 10, he ran away from home—to escape his abusive dad—and hitched a ride by freight train to Chicago. Before long, he got beaten up in a gang fight and was hospitalized. Returning to the West Coast, he lived with his mother. Later he went to work at Paramount Pictures as a laborer. During World War II, he was first in the Merchant Marines and later a master carpenter in the Navy Seabees.
Eric Fleming (center) holds a lethal trump card over Doris Day and Dom DeLuise in The Glass Bottom Boat (1966).
Courtesy of JC Archives
After the war, the rugged, sharp-featured Fleming turned to acting, first in Chicago and then in New York. He appeared in several Broadway productions, including Stalag 17 and No Time for Sergeants. He first made his mark by starring in the title role of Major Dell Conway of the Flying Tigers, a low-budget adventure television series aired live by the Dumont Network in the spring of 1951. The show disappeared for two months, and when it returned, Ed Peck had been chosen to replace Fleming. Besides other acting chores on TV, Eric reappeared as a series star in the network soap opera Golden Windows (1954–55).
Next, Eric moved back to the West Coast, where he found screen work in Conquest of Space (1955) and in several trashy features, such as Queen of Outer Space (1958).
As an answer to the highly successful rival network series Wagon Train, CBS developed Rawhide. Eric starred as cattle-trail boss Gil Favor, with Clint Eastwood as his right-hand man, Rowdy Yates. The hour-long show premiered on January 9, 1959, and became a huge hit. After seven years on the program, Fleming tired of the role and chose to retire to a ranch in Hawaii that he had purchased with his earnings. He quit the program after the 1964–65 season, with Eastwood taking over as trail boss.
Instead of following through right away with his relocation plans, Eric remained in Los Angeles for a movie role (The Glass Bottom Boat with Doris Day, 1966). Then he was a guest on two episodes of Bonanza. Next, ABC persuaded him to tackle the lead in a projected adventure series, High Jungle. He joined the cast members on location in Peru where they were filming scenes in the headwaters of the Amazon River. On September 28, 1966, the cast and crew were in a remote jungle region three hundred miles northeast of Lima. Fleming and the Peruvian actor Nico Minardos were being filmed in a canoe on the Haullaga River when the craft suddenly overturned. Minardos managed to swim to safety, but Fleming was swept away by the strong current. His remains—there were piranha fish in the area—were not found until October 3.
If only Eric Fleming had gone to Hawaii as he originally intended.
Janet Gaynor
[Laura Gainor]
October 6, 1906–September 14, 1984
At one time or another, many of us have had misgivings about riding in a taxi. For Janet Gaynor, the winner of Hollywood’s first Best Actress Academy Award, being a passenger in a San Francisco cab on September 5, 1982, was a fatal decision.
She was born Laura Gainor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When she was eight, her mother and father were divorced. Laura, and her slightly older sister, Helen, moved with their mother to Chicago. When Mrs. Gainor remarried, the family relocated yet again—first to Florida and then to San Francisco. There, in 1923, Laura graduated from high school. The following year, the family visited Los Angeles, where the Gainor sisters found work as movie extras in comedy shorts at Hal Roach Studios and elsewhere.
Sweet-faced Laura—now known as Janet Gaynor—got her first important motion picture assignment when she was cast in The Johnstown Flood (1926) at Fox Studios. Production chief Winfield R. Sheehan took a great liking to Janet and hired her at $100 a week. It was in Sunrise (1927), with George O’Brien, that the elfin Janet (she was five feet tall and weighed 96 pounds) gained important recognition. She was rewarded with a studio raise to $300 weekly and was cast opposite Charles Farrell for the first time as the Parisian waif in Seventh Heaven (1927). It was for a combination of Sunrise, Seventh Heaven, and Street Angel (1928, also with Farrell) that she was named best actress at the first Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929.
Janet Gaynor in all her frills for Paddy, the Next Best Thing (1933).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Despite a limited vocal range and a bit of a twang to her voice, Janet was a success in her first all-talkie movie, Sunny Side Up (1929). That same year she married San Francisco attorney Lydell Peck. Years later, she would claim that she and costar Farrell were offscreen lovers and that “Charlie pressed me to marry him, but we had too many differences.” In 1930 she went on strike against the bland, sentimental parts she was getting and, in a pique, sailed with her mother for Hawaii. When she returned to the lot, she continued to make more insipid pictures with Charles Farrell, but also remained a box-office success. In 1934, she and Farrell made their 12th and final movie together, Change of Heart. Also that year, her disastrous marriage to Peck ended. When Fox Films merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in the mid-1930s, Darryl F. Zanuck became head of the combined studio. He pushed Janet aside in favor of such younger actresses as Loretta Young and the studio’s new breadwinner, the tyke star Shirley Temple.
Gaynor thought of retiring but instead signed a contract with David O. Selznick, who cast her as the movie-struck farm girl Esther Blodgett in A Star Is Born (1937). The picture was a major hit and Gaynor was Oscar-nominated again. After making The Young in Heart (1938), she retired to marry the famed movie costume designer Gilbert Adrian on August 14, 1939. Their s
on Robin was born in 1940. Janet made a few returns to acting on radio and TV in the early 1950s; then she and Adrian moved to a two-hundred-acre ranch in Brazil. (Janet quipped, “It doesn’t have a modern kitchen. But we do have our own little jungle.”) Her neighbor in Brazil was her longtime “friend” Mary Martin (and Martin’s husband). In 1957, with much hoopla, Janet returned to her old studio (Darryl F. Zanuck was away in Europe) to play Pat Boone’s mother in Bernardine. By now, she and Adrian had relocated back to the States, where he died of a stroke in September 1959. At the time, she was rehearsing a Broadway-bound play, The Midnight Sun (which never reached New York). In December 1964, 58-year-old Janet married 43-year-old stage producer Paul Gregory and retired to Palm Springs. In 1980, fidgety for the limelight again, she tried Broadway in Harold and Maude, but the show flopped.
On September 5, 1982, Janet, her husband Paul, Mary Martin, and agent Ben Washer were riding in a San Francisco taxi, bound for a Chinese restaurant. A van ran through a red light and crashed into their cab. Washer was killed and Martin was critically injured (but left the hospital after 10 days), while Gregory sustained far less serious injuries. As for Janet, she suffered a broken pelvis and collarbone, 11 broken ribs, and assorted internal injuries. She underwent two major operations at San Francisco General Hospital before being released in January 1983. She convalesced at her Palm Springs home and even managed a few public appearances, but she was hospitalized again in August 1984. Then on September 14, 1984, she died at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia, although her private physician stated that the actress had “never fully recovered from the terrible automobile accident of approximately two years ago. There were repeated complications which compounded her chronic illness.” Janet was buried at Hollywood Memorial Park (now called Hollywood Forever), a few rows from the more elaborate resting spot of director Cecil B. DeMille. Janet’s black-and-white marker reads simply “Janet Gaynor Gregory.”
The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols Page 3
